Infinite Wisdom

"Soldiers eat; peasants provide."

La Triviata

• Japan’s Admiral of the Fleet Isoruku Yamamoto (1884-1943), stood just 5’3” tall.
• During the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714), an estimated 1,250,000 soldiers and sailors died from all powers taken together, along with an unknown number of civilians, mostly from disease or privation.
• Reportedly, during the 1920s officers assigned to the Washington Navy Yard would sometimes find relief from summer’s heat by taking nocturnal dips in the 18-foot deep ship model basin on the base.
• The French invasion of Algeria in 1830 was planned partially on the basis of intelligence gathered in 1808, when Napoleon had briefly considered undertaking the operation.
• Upon the announcement that Spain would send what became “The Blue Division” to fight alongside Germany in Russia in June of 1941, some 40,000 men in Madrid flocked to the recruiting stations to enlist, though the local quota was only 4,000.
• Upon bringing Sardinia-Piedmont into the Crimean War in 1855, King Vittorio Emmanuelle II offered to take the field in personal command of the Allied armies, but to his surprise both the British and French politely turned him down.
• Between them, the German battleships Bismarck and Tirpitz required a total of about 16,000 tons of armor plate, sufficient to provide protection for the tanks of two panzer divisions, not to mention what might have been done with the other 65,000-some tons of metals built into the two ships.
• During the 1860s, Lt. Col. Athanase de Charette, deputy commander of the Papal Zouaves, regularly invited junior officers, NCOs, and enlisted men to dine with him each evening.  

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