Infinite Wisdom

La Triviata

• On October 23, 1918, the opening night of the Battle of Vittorio Veneto, elements of the Anglo-Italian Tenth Army captured the Papadopoli Islands, in the River Piave, using boats crewed by Venetian gondoliers.
• Around AD 92 Lucius Julius Maximus, commanding the legio XII Fulminata, had his name and that of the Emperor Domitian carved on a rock face near what is now the village of Ramana (near Baku, Azerbaijan), marking the furthest east that a Roman inscription has ever been found, and confirming that the Roman troops had reached the Caspian, which is only about eight miles further east.
• Living in Cuba from mid-1942 through the end of 1943, author and journalist Ernest Hemingway sometimes took his Brooklyn-built 38-foot yacht Pilar on patrol for enemy U-boats, equipping her with hand grenades and satchel charges, since German submarine commanders would sometimes stop fishing boats and yachts to collect intelligence or just steal booze.
• Shortly after Romania entered World War I on the side of the Entente powers, in August of 1916, the French delivered one million hand grenades to their new ally, a welcome addition to the ammunition supply, though the troops received no training in their use until 1917.
• Although the proportion of Catholics – particularly Irishmen – in the ranks had for decades often exceeded a third, it was not until 1859 that the British Army approved the regular appointment of Catholic chaplains.
• By the end of World War I, about a third of all the officers in the Imperial German Navy were involved in some fashion with submarine operations, including those actually serving afloat and those in supporting administrative, logistical, training, and service establishments.
• As a young boy, Andrew Jackson III, the son of “Old Hickory’s” adopted son, expressed a desire for a military career, and as a result the former president gave his sword to the young man, telling him to “always use it in defense of our glorious Union”; Alas, when the opportunity came, the young man, an 1858 West Point graduate, resigned from the Regular Army to enter the Confederate Army, eventually rising to colonel
• Between 1915 and 1917 the Fox Movie Studio in New York, employed an electrician named Lev Bronstein, better know in later years as Leon Trotsky.

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