Infinite Wisdom

"A conqueror is always a lover of peace."

La Triviata

• From Thanksgiving of 1943 through Christmas to New Year’s Day of 1944, the Stage Door Canteen in New York served 4,000 full holiday meals and distributed 750,000 sandwiches to service men and women stationed in or passing through the city, while also handing out other things such as 1,000 crates of oranges and 1.5 million packs of cigarettes.
• Experiments in firing grenades from muskets were first made during the 1600s, and examples of “grenade projectors” from the mid-1740s actually exist that are almost identical to models from early in World War I, when their use became common.
• British actor Patrick Troughton (1920-1987) was studying in the United States when World War II broke out, and promptly went home to join the Royal Navy: he rose to lieutenant while commanding motor gunboats in the Channel, and often tangled with German coastal craft, before returning after the war, to eventually become the second Dr. Who (1966-1969).
• At the Battle of Franklin (Nov. 30, 1864), where he was killed, the Confederacy’s Maj. Gen. Patrick Cleburne seems to have gone into action barefoot, having given his boots to a shoeless soldier.
• Campaigning against the Greek cities on the Black Sea around 375 BC, the Persian satrap Datames decided not to attack Sinope after seeing its walls crowded with troops, not realizing that the women of the town had joined their men on the parapets, wearing armor and bearing arms, which were in many cases actually ceremonial pieces, historical relics, improvised fakes, or even theatrical props.
• During the 1840s the cost to Her Majesty’s Government of putting a cadet through the Royal Engineers Academy at Woolwich was $118.40 a year, and one at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst was $89.00, while Uncle Sam spent only $70.70 a year for each of his nephews at West Point.
• Marc Mitscher, who rose to command the “Fast Carrier Task Force” – TF 38/58 – in the Pacific from August 1943 through August 1945, was thrown out of Annapolis at the end of his second year, but was then readmitted as a plebe, to graduate in 1910 after spending six years at the academy.
• Around 14 BC, Corocotta, a “bandit” operating in Cantabria in northern Spain, proved so troublesome that the Emperor Augustus put a reward of one million sestertii on his head (the annual pay for a thousand legionaries), whereupon the man turned himself in, claiming the prize, which the Emperor granted, along with a pardon.

More...