Infinite Wisdom

"The Navy doesn't need airplanes. Aviation is just a lot of noise."

--	Admiral William S. Benson, Chief of Naval Operations, 1921

La Triviata

• On the eve of World War I the aristocracy and landed gentry were still supplying, 41-percent of the officers in the British Army


• The Battle of Cerro Gordo (April 18, 1847), at which American forces under Winfield Scott defeated the forces blocking his advance on Mexico City, was fought on land owned by Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, who commanded the defending troops.


• Visiting the Big Apple during his 1895 tour of the United States, the notorious German anti-Semite Hermann Ahlwardt found that New York City Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt., Jr., had thoughtfully provided him with a security detail, of 40 Jewish officers.


• In 1472 the Lord of Cordes brought two cannon to besiege Beauvais, in northern France, which might have done for the town but for the fact that he also brought only two cannon balls, which, although they did excellent work, proved insufficient to breach the walls.


• Cole Porter, who wrote “Begin the Beguine,” “Night and Day,” and many another American standard, appears to have served in the French Foreign Legion during World War I.


• Prussian Lieutenant Bronsart von Schellendorf, later a prominent German military thinker, spent much of the Battle of Wissembourg (August 4, 1870) looking for his horse, which had been “borrowed” by some Bavarian troops.


• Fully a third of the men who presented themselves to fight the Boers in 1899 were rejected by the British Army for medical reasons.


• Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens served in the Navy’s communications intelligence center at Pearl Harbor during World War II, doing traffic analysis and decryption.

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