Infinite Wisdom

La Triviata

• The ships of the Royal Netherlands Navy that joined with American, British, and Australian vessels to fight superior Japanese forces in the multiple Battles of the Java Sea (Feb. 27-Mar. 1, 1942), were the first Dutch warships to engage in a fleet action since the Battle of Camperdown on October 11, 1797, against the British.
• According to the Roman historian Ammianus Marcelinus, the Emperor Valentinian I (r., AD 364-375) had two she bears, “Innocence” and “Goldflake”, which he always kept nearby, to help dispose of annoying persons.
• Shortly after Hitler came to power in 1933, 19-year old Willy Brandt (later the famous Cold War mayor of Berlin), an active member of Socialist Youth and already a veteran anti-Nazi, fled Germany by boat to Denmark, bribing a fisherman with a copy of Mein Kampf.
• In 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, the U.S. War Department staff totaled only about 90, to oversee an army that was rather less than 17,000 strong.
• Encountering a tumultuous reception on his arrival in London on June 7, 1814, Field Marshal Gebhard Leberecht von Blucher cried out “Was für plunder! – What rubbish!” which was taken by some to mean “What a place to plunder!,” further cementing the old Prussian’s reputation as a hardened campaigner.
• Tradition has it that when the Persian King of Kings Cambyses II (r. 530-523 BC) invaded Egypt in 525 BC, he equipped his troops with sacks full of cats, which they hurled at the defending troops, who promptly fled, fearing to harm the sacred animals.
• During the Second World War, the Abwher, Germany’s “joint” intelligence service, developed an invisible ink made by dissolving a tablet of an over-the-counter headache remedy named Pyramidion in gin, two wholly innocent ingredients likely to be found in any traveler’s luggage.
• Built between 1066 and 1078 by William the Conqueror, the famed Tower of London rises from foundations erected during the mid-First Century for the Arx palatina, the citadel of Roman Londinium.
• During the Second World War, Steinway & Sons, who’d been carefully hand-crafting pianos in New York since 1856, turned their skills to shaping wood for glider wings.

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