Infinite Wisdom

"Fortunately, their bombing in comparison with the Japanese formation minutes earlier, was disgraceful."

La Triviata

• September 1, 1939, was notable for several events, including Hitler’s invasion of Poland, which initiated World War II, as well as the appointment of Isoruku Yamamoto as Commander-in-Chief of the Japanese Combined fleet and George C. Marshall as Chief-of-Staff of the U.S. Army.
• Founded in the mid-1750s to help orphaned, destitute, or abandoned boys find a career at sea, by 1905 London’s Marine Society had sent 33,181 youngsters into the Royal Navy, 3,760 into the Indian Navy, and 27,436 into the British merchant marine.
• During the “Golden Age” of Athens in the Fifth Century BC, the cost of building a trireme warship was about one talent (26 kilos/57 pounds) of silver, plus another for its fittings and equipment, and another each month she was in service to pay her crew of about 180 officers, sailors, rowers, and marines, at a time when a talent constituted a good day’s wage for about 6,000 citizen-workmen.
• The Masai of East Africa justified their cattle raids against neighboring peoples on the grounds that, when God created the bovine race, He gave it to them.
• The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has for several decades occupied a building in Rome near the Circus Maximus that was originally erected following Mussolini’s conquest of Ethiopia to house the Italian Colonial Ministry.
• By the time five British regiments arrived in New York in June of 1763 to reinforce British forces in North America during the final stages of the French-and-Indian War, malaria and other fevers contracted in the West Indies had reduced their combined effective strength to only 982 men.
• The “Winter War” with Finland in 1939-1940 cost the Red Army about 2,400 armored vehicles, or roughly 23 a day, against an enemy who possessed no armor whatsoever and only primitive anti-tank weapons.
• During the final 14 months of the Pacific War, B-29s made 1,528 sorties to lay more than 12,000 maritime mines in Japanese and Korean waters, which by some estimates accounted for 670 Japanese vessels (mostly small coastal freighters), with a loss of only nine aircraft to enemy action and seven more to other causes.

More...