Al Nofi's CIC
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Issue #87, August 7, 2002 |
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This Issue...
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Infinite Wisdom
"The man whose profession is arms should calm his mind and look into the depths of others."
| -- | Shiba Yoshimasa (1350-1410) |
La Triviata
- Although Sweden was not at war with Britain during the American Revolution, there were nearly a dozen Swedish naval officers in the French fleet that defeated the Royal Navy in the Battle of the Capes (1787), which sealed the fate of the British Army besieged by Washington at Yorktown.
- The first documented air attack in history occurred at 1400 hours on July 2, 1849, when an Austrian hot air balloon dropped a 50 pound bomb on the island of Murano, near Venice.
- A first class battleship of about 1800 had a broadside of about a 1,000 pounds, which by 1900 had risen to about 4,200 pounds, and by 2000 (well, really 1944) to about 32,000 pounds.
- Canadians comprised approximately a quarter of all pilots in the Royal Air Force during World War I.
- In 500 B.C., a Chinese army of 100,000 men, with a thousand heavy and a thousand light chariots, cost a thousand ounces of silver a day to keep in the field, a sum in metal which today would hardly suffice to sustain a squad in action.
- In 1790 the net pay of a private in the U.S. Army amounted to about 6.6 cents a day, little more than a twelfth what a common laborer could earn.
- The first documented "kill" by a self-propelled torpedo occurred on April 22, 1891, during the Chilean Civil War, when a Balmecidista torpedo boat put a Whitehead torpedo into the Congressionalista ironclad Blanco Encalada.
- In 275 B.C., the Roman Consul Manius Curius sold a citizen into slavery for refusing to enroll in the Army.
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