Infinite Wisdom

"For no one ever proves himself a good man in war unless he can face the blood and slaughter, meet the enemy close up and fight hand-to-hand."

--	Tyrtaeus of Sparta, c. 640 B.C.

La Triviata

• Trapped in Nazi-occupied Warsaw in late 1939, Joseph Isaak Schneersohn, later famous Lubavitcher Rabbi, escaped to the United States through the cooperation of the Abwehr, Hitler’s CIA, headed by Adm. Wilhelm Canaris, various Jewish organizations, and the State Department.


• As a result of the defeat of the Stuart cause in the English Civil Wars (1642-1651), so many Scots fled abroad to take service as mercenaries that over the next few decades, that the Swedish Army alone could count three Scottish field marshals, as well as four generals, one lieutenant general, nine major generals, and 42 colonels, plus lots of junior officers.


• By the end of World War II, the Army held title to over 95,000 square miles of real estate in the U.S., an area roughly equal to the entire state of Michigan.


• Wounded during the Battle of the Somme in 1916, Capt. Harold Macmillan of the Grenadier Guards, later Prime Minister of Great Britain, spent nearly a day lying in a shell hole awaiting rescue, while passing the time by reading the plays of Aeschylus, in the original Greek.


• Of every 1,000 Americans who served in World War II, 8.6 were killed in combat, 3.0 died of non-combat related causes, and 17.7 were wounded non-fatally in combat.


• During their forced relocation from the Southeast to what is now Oklahoma, in 1838-1839, approximately 2,000 of 16,000 Creek Indian migrants died, about double the estimated average death rate of pioneers moving westwards at the time.


• When someone remarked on the stunning fearlessness with which Spartan warriors faced death, the Athenian general Alcibiades said that they weren’t really doing anything strange, since death was relief from the miseries imposed on them by their military laws.


• In fiscal year 1939 the Army’s investment in research and development amounted to only about 1.1-percent of the War Department budget.


• Lt. Gen. Herbert Lumsden, CB, DSO, MC, a veteran of the Campaign in France in 1940, and the battles of Gazala and Alamein, was one of the highest ranking British officers killed during World War II, succumbing at 47 on January 6, 1945, when a kamikaze struck the bridge of the USS New Mexico (BB-40), while he was observing the pre-invasion bombardment of Japanese installations at Lingayen Gulf

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