Infinite Wisdom

"Many things which nature makes difficult become easy to the man who uses his brains."

La Triviata

• Some hardtack issued by the U.S. Army during the Spanish-American War was stamped with the words “Remember the Maine!”
• In 1943, the ramshackled transient officers’ quarters at Henderson Field on Guadalcanal were nicknamed “The Hotel de Gink,” after a “famous” flop house in Seattle.
• A special committee of the United Nations was convened on October 8, 1956 to define “aggression,” but failed to come up with a satisfactory definition before it was dissolved on November 9th, perhaps because during its deliberations Security Council member Russia invaded Hungary (Oct. 23-Nov. 10), while Security Council members Britain and France invaded Egypt (Oct. 29-Nov. 7).
• · After attempting to reform his military forces on a more modern European model, Ottoman Sultan Selim III (r. 1789-1807) was assassinated by reactionaries in the army who branded him an “infidel”.
• On January 15, 1961, the U.S. Air Force radar early-warning station TT-4 (“Texas Tower No. 4”), in the Atlantic about 75 miles southeast of Coney Island, was overturned and destroyed in a gale, apparently having been struck by a wave at least 85 feet high, one of the first definitively documented instances of a “monster wave.”
• Of 27 men who commanded divisions during the famous U.S. Army maneuvers in the Carolinas, Kentucky, Tennessee, New York, and Louisiana in 1940-1941, only seven went on to command similar or larger formations in combat during World War II, most being sidelined or retired for poor performance during the exercises.
• When the German Empire was overthrown on November 9, 1918, the safety of the wives and children of Kaiser Wilhelm II and of his son Imperial Crown Prince Wilhelm (who never got to be Wilhelm III) was guaranteed by a detail of mutinous troops commanded by the chairman of the “Potsdam Workers and Soldiers Soviet”.

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