Infinite Wisdom

"A political problem thought of in military terms eventually becomes a military problem."

La Triviata

• Some two million veterans of the Second World War and the Korean War went to college under the G.I. Bill, of whom about 22,000 became dentists, 45,000 engineers, 67,000 doctors, 91,000 scientists, and 238,000 teachers.
• The Dardanelles/Gallipoli Campaign of 1915-1916 cost the Royal Navy five pre-dreadnought battleships and several smaller warships sunk, plus three pre-dreadnoughts, a battlecruiser, and some other ships damaged, the heaviest losses in any British naval campaign since the great age of fighting sail.
• At the height of the Empire in the Second Century, a Roman legion required more than a thousand pack animals to haul its gear, about half assigned to support the common soldiers, at one for every eight men, and the rest to haul construction equipment, artillery, officers’ gear, and other impedimenta.
• During the Second World War, the lower two floors of the New-York Historical Society, the nation’s oldest museum, were turned over to the American Red Cross, which used the space to pack medical supplies.
• One of the many clauses of the Treaty of Versailles of 1919 required Germany to deliver to France 500 stallions aged three to seven years, and 30,000 fillies and mares, the later all of “heavy” breeds, to replace stock confiscated during the recent war.
• Although the senior medical officers in the Royal Navy during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries bore the title “Physician of the Fleet,” their rank was essentially that of warrant officer.
• Meeting in Debrecen on April 14, 1849, the Hungarian National Assembly passed a “Declaration of Independence” from the Hapsburg Monarchy, and promptly dispatched a copy to President Zachary Taylor, who received it in late May.
• During World War I British troops discovered that their issue wire cutters, which worked quite nicely on their own barbed wire, was unsuited to cutting the higher quality German variety.