Infinite Wisdom

"To fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence exists in breaking your enemy’s resistance without fighting."

La Triviata

• From 1937 to 1943 the British Army issued an anti-tank rifle designed by Capt. H.C. Boys, a 35 pound, 5’2” long bolt action weapon which, firing a .55 caliber round that could penetrate less than 20mm of armor at 100 yards, was effective against many tanks when it was designed, but was obsolete during its last years in service. 
• About 10 percent of the 20,000 horses in the U.S. Army in 1938 were polo ponies, and the sport cost the service about $1,000,000 a year.
• When Egyptian King Ptolemy VII (r. 170-116 BC) (nicknamed “Physcon – The Sausage” because of his great girth) greeted a Roman delegation at dockside in 139 BC on foot, rather than in his customary litter carried by eight or ten overworked bearers, one of his guests remarked that the Royal subjects will “have derived some amusement from our visit, for thanks to us they have finally seen their king walking.”
•  Both Winston Churchill and Jawaharlal Nehru were graduates of Harrow, a matter that reportedly eased relations between Britain and India when both were in power as prime minister of their respective countries during the early 1950s.  
• Although most were very understrength and many seem to have existed largely on paper, on December 1, 1943 the Red Army technically had 603 divisions on active duty, a figure that greatly influenced Western military planners in the early stages of the Cold War.
• When Queen Elizabeth II knighted Francis Chichester for completing the first non-stop solo circumnavigation of the earth, in July of 1967, she used the sword wielded by Elizabeth I to knight Francis Drake in April of 1581 for leading the first English circumnavigation.
• The Hotel Balmoral, at Spa, in the Belgian Ardennes, housed Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and German imperial headquarters for most of 1918, and later that of U.S. First Army commander Gen. Courtney Hodges from September of 1944 through April of 1945 (except for a brief relocation during the Battle of the Bulge).
• Though foreign-born persons comprised only 14.5 percent of the U.S. population at the time, during World War I immigrant men comprised fully 18 percent of the personnel in the Armed Forces.

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