Infinite Wisdom

"To maintain in peace a needlessly elaborate military establishment entails economic waste."

La Triviata

• Although in American and British submarines the navigator was an officer, in a German U-Boot this critical duty was usually performed by the Obersteuermann (“Upper Steersman”), the equivalent of a chief petty officer or warrant officer.
• One day in 45 or 44 BC, Cicero found that his friend the Laodicean philosopher and diplomat Andron had come to Rome to ask Caesar, then in his Dictatorship, to grant freedom to his city, whereupon the great orator said “If you are successful, put in a word for us too.”
• An early eighteenth century Norwegian artillery manual provides guidance for incendiary shells designed to generate poison gas by adding certain ingredients, including sulfur and mercury.
• In June of 1861, the Pillow Guards of Memphis, a unit organized to protect Maj. Gen. Gideon Pillow (who commanded Tennessee state troops) offered to have it out “at any time, at any place, in any number” with the Prentiss Guards, which had been formed to provide security for the Union’s Maj. Gen. Benjamin Prentiss at Cairo, Illinois; but the latter were not amused, and replied, “If we ever meet, you shall suffer the fate of traitors,”
• During the Second World War, during almost exactly 72 months of hostilities, Britain’s Royal Navy lost 50,788 men killed, 14,633 wounded, 7,401 captured, and 820 missing in action.
• At the peak of his career, the great military entrepreneur and mercenary Albrecht von Wallenstein (1583-1634) had entire villages on his vast estates in Germany and Bohemia populated with weavers, tailors, cobblers, blacksmiths, and other artisans, to produce the uniforms, weapons, and other equipment needed for his troops, who at one point numbered some 100,000 men.
• Although the producers ultimately settled on George C. Scott for the lead in the 1970 film Patton, early candidates for the role included Burt Lancaster, William Holden, Robert Mitchum, Gregory Peck, and even John Wayne.
• Between 1912 and 1928, there were more than 1,300 warlords in China, each dominating a particular region with an army, ranging from local toughs with a few hundred square miles and a few thousand men to Chang Tso-lin (Zhang Zuolin), “The Old Marshal”, who controlled Manchuria, nearly half a million square miles, with over 300,000 troops, until assassinated by Japanese agents.

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