Infinite Wisdom

"It is generally accepted that the members of an alliance do not necessarily have to be friends, and that cooperation between allies may involve a certain degree of competition."

--	Marco Cesa, Allies yet Rivals: International Politics in 18th Century Europe

La Triviata

• Between 1700 and 1815 a little over 1 percent of young men and boys aged 19 or younger who were convicted in London’s famous Old Bailey were permitted to enlist in the British Army or Royal Navy rather than serve their sentences, which most often were hanging, transportation, whipping, or branding.
• Russia’s “Winter War” with Finland in 1939-1940 cost the Red Air Force nearly 3,000 aircraft, with about 40 percent of their aircrew, for an average of six airplanes a day for 105 days.
• In 1887 a German explorer reported that a spear-armed Masai army of no more than 5,000 had “cut down, to the last man, an Arab caravan numbering two thousand guns, laid all the corpses in ranks and rows side by side, and in scorn put each man’s gun across his shoulder.”
• During the Battle of Britain, the all-Polish 303 Squadron shot down three times more German aircraft than the RAF squadron average, and suffered only about a third as many casualties as other squadrons.
• At the Battle of Bunker Hill on June 17, 1775, some 2,400 New England militiamen inflicted casualties of between 30 and 40 percent on the 3,000 or so attacking British regulars, at a cost to themselves of fewer than 20 percent.
• In 1914, the Bavarian 16^th Reserve Infantry, recruited on the outbreak of the Great War from deferred men, reservists, and volunteers (including Adolf Hitler), performed its basic training on the Lechfeld, near Augsburg, where on August 10, 955, the Holy Roman Emperor Otto the Great had inflicted a decisive defeat on the Magyars, ending decades of Hungarian raids into Germany.
• Of all the Macedonian generals who, at the urging of Alexander the Great, wed Persian brides in 324 BC, only Seleucus -- later known as Seleucus I Nicator -- retained his after the king’s death the following year, and with the Sogdian Princess Apama went on to found a bloodthirsty dynasty that ruled over much of the Middle East for more than two centuries.
• The first officer assigned to the U.S. Army Tank Corps was Col. George S. Patton, who was ordered to establish a tank training program as part of the AEF school system on November 10, 1917, the day before his 32^nd birthday. 

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