Infinite Wisdom

""Why, soldiers why?
Why should we be melancholy boys,
Why soldiers why?
Whose bus'ness is to die?"

La Triviata

• During World War II the U.S. Coast Guard accounted for an even dozen German submarines, eleven sunk by surface cutters and one by air attack.


• The noted naval authority and wargamer Fred T. Jane, who founded Jane’s Fighting Ships, also wrote what would today be termed science fiction, cranking out such epics as The Incubated Girl, To Venus in Five Seconds, and An Account of the Strange Disappearance of Thomas Plummer.


• In 1904 a very junior Harris Lanning (years later President of the Naval War College), commanding an 8-inch turret on the famous battleship Oregon (BB-3), decided to experiment with the innovative aiming techniques advocated by Lt. Cdr. William Sims, only to be told by his captain to desist at once, because he had "spoiled the day's firing by ruining the target."


• In addition to his father, both of Horatio Nelson's grandfathers, plus two of his great-uncles, and eight of his cousins, were Anglican clergymen, as were two of his brothers, one of whom inherited his British title.


• When ”roughing it” on maneuvers in the years before World War I, Kaiser Wilhelm II often resided in a tent that, in concession to his Imperial dignity, had several rooms, including a wine cellar, and was made entirely of asbestos.


• François Darlan, the Vichyite French admiral, was so short he regularly wore “elevator shoes,” with special inserts to make himself appear taller, a habit he shared with Field Marshal Sir Bernard Law Montgomery and the Roman Emperor Augustus.


• The first two women to enlist in the Coast Guard Reserve during World War I, were the 19-year old twins Genevieve and Lucille Baker, who transferred from serving as yeomanettes in the Navy in 1917.


• Of some 227 ships-of-the-line commissioned in the Spanish Navy during the eighteenth century, fully 74, including the great 136 gun Santissima Trinidad, the only four decker ever built, were constructed in Havana, nearly as many as in any other two shipyards.

More...