Infinite Wisdom

Why study an army that has lost two world wars?

Michael A. Palmer, Captain, U.S. Army, on the attention paid to German military prowess,Military Review, January 1989

La Triviata

• During World War II the average officer slot in the German Army had to be refilled 9.2 times.
• As a result of an "administrative oversight" the famed ironclad U.S.S. Monitor, which had been commissioned on March 25, 1862, and which foundered in Force 7 winds off Cape Hatteras on December 31, 1862, was not officially declared "out of commission" until nearly 91 years later, on September 30, 1951.
• One of the territories which Napoleon ruled during his brief tenure as "Emperor of Elba" (May 3, 1814, -February 26, 1815), was one wholly useless island which later attained some fame, Monte Cristo.
• In July of 1942 Gen. Douglas MacArthur awarded the Silver Star Medal to Lt. Cdr. Lyndon B. Johnson, U.S.N.R., an aviation observer, for "gallant action" which "enabled him to obtain and return with valuable information" from a reconnaissance flight that involved no aerial combat, and for which no other member of the aircrew was decorated, a matter perhaps having to do less with "gallant action" than with the fact that Johnson was actually a Member of Congress doing a who MacArthur suspected was chckingup on him for President Roosevelt.
• The famed "Taxis of the Marne," which so gallantly convey thousands of reinforcements from Paris to the front in the critical early days of World War I, quite patriotically had their meters running for the entire trip.
• Recently spotted on the streets of New York is a truck belonging to the Panzer Wire Company.
• During the early 1860s fears that France's new ironclad fleet would render Britain vulnerable to invasion led to numerous plans for the fortification of London, including one that would have provided the city with defenses of over 55 miles in circumference, consisting of 71 forts, fortified bridgeheads, hornworks, batteries, and fortified arsenals mounting a total of 2,192 guns and requiring 22,000 artillerymen, 4,500 cavalrymen, and 160,000 militia cadred by 20,000 volunteers to man in time of war, for a total cost of �4.15 million, including the cost of buying the 14,921 acres of land the works would occupy.
• Early in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), some anarchists formed a militia battalion which they dubbed Centuria King Kong.

Short Rounds

Venereal Disease in the U.S. Army Since 1829.

Venereal disease has been a major cause of personnel non-effectiveness in armies for centuries. The U.S. Army seems to have been keeping statistics on venereal disease since at least the late 1820s. They are rather revealing, particularly those from supposedly uptight Victorian times.