Infinite Wisdom

"The military today must not only understand technology, but also the cultural environment in which the technology will be employed."

La Triviata

• About eight million American mothers had at least one child in uniform during World War II.
• Established in 1915 to evaluate proposals for weapons and technologies, by 1919 Britain’s Munitions Inventions Department had received 48,000 suggestions from troops and the public, some 4,000 of which were considered worthy of study, and about 200 approved for field testing, though only a handful were actually adopted.
• The famous “pup tent” in which generations of American soldiers have often spent their nights was first issued during the Civil War.
• According to Cicero, Marcus Licinius Crassus, the Roman multi-billionaire and general (the principal villain of the film Spartacus), who ended up dying in Parthia in 53 BC, “laughed only once in all his life.”
• Peter Hagendorf, who spent 23 years soldiering for the Hapsburgs during the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), kept a diary which suggests that during his military career, he marched about 22,500 kilometers back and forth across Germany and Central Europe.
• During NATO operations in Bosnia, the troops of the Royal Welch Fusiliers sometimes resorted to their native language for emergency communications, since it is virtually unknown outside of their country.
• Although it was not until March of 1865 that the Confederate Congress authorized the recruiting of black troops, and at most only a few hundred men were actually enrolled, a staff study by a Union officer at the time estimated that the South might have been be able to arm as many as 200,000 African-Americans. 
• Of some 518,000 horses supplied to the British Army during the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), 347,000 died, though only about 2 percent were battle casualties, the rest succumbing to malnutrition, disease, overwork, or accidents, at a rate of about 336 a day.
• During World War I, French paleontologist Georges Painvin played a key role in “breaking” about 20 German codes.

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