Infinite Wisdom

"There is more need to get rid of the causes of war than the implements of war."

La Triviata

• Caught in France when the Germans occupied much of the country in June of 1940, the avant-garde Irish author, playwright, and poet Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) fled to the Vichy sector, where he joined the Resistance and served as a courier and safe house operator, for which he was later awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille de la Résistance.
• On the eve of World War I, the Imperial German Navy had some 80,000 officers and enlisted men, plus enough reservists to raise it above 100,000, sufficient personnel to have formed three new army corps, but who spent most of the next four years in port, though some 20,000-25,000 ended up serving as ground troops in Belgium in the improvised Marinekorps Flandern.
• Jean-Jacques Audubon (1785-1851) served as an officer cadet in Napoleon’s Imperial Navy, but finding maritime life not to his liking due to chronic sea sickness, deserted in 1806 and fled to the United States, where he became history’s most famous painter of birds.
• In the immediate aftermath of Germany’s surrender in May of 1945, the RAF lent 10 modified heavy bombers to a Quaker organization which used them to bring hundreds of Jewish children to Britain from the concentration camp at Theresiensadt.
• In AD 280, one Proculus, scion of an Alpine family that had done well at banditry, initiated an ultimately unsuccessful bid to make himself Emperor of Rome by arming some 2,000 of his own slaves who were of military age.
• During the Second World War, the paramilitary Royal Navy Patrol Service operated some 500 small vessels and cleared about 160,000 German marine mines.
• In late fourteenth century England, the homicide rate seems to have been about 175-200 per 100,000 persons per year, roughly 100 times what it is today.
• Dismounted and converted to a kind of “lite” infantry formation in 1943, the 1^st Cavalry Division nonetheless proved quite effective in combat in the South Pacific, in part because it was the only pre-war division (Regular Army or National Guard) that was not heavily drained of experienced personnel to provide cadres for the raising of new divisions.

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