Infinite Wisdom

"Gentlemen, you haven’t been in Italy, you don’t know what war is."

La Triviata

• Captured by the British when they overthrew the Sinhalese Kingdom of Kandy in 1815, the royal throne was taken to Windsor Castle, where it was used during investitures of the Order of the Garter until it was returned to Ceylon along with other regalia in 1934.
• Joshua Humphreys, who designed the famed frigate Constitution and other notable early American warships, was a practicing Quaker.
• In the early 1930s, the Communist Party of the United States censured a comrade whom they had assigned to infiltrate the National Guard, because he refused to distribute materials demanding the abolition of corporal punishment of the troops on the grounds that it had already been abolished, nearly a century earlier.
• The youngest Indian soldier to earn a VC in World War II was 19-year old Sepoy Kamal Ram (3rd Battalion, 8th Punjabis), who did so on May 13, 1944, during the Allied breakout from the Cassino line in Italy, on his first day in combat.
• When the Emperor Trajan captured Sarmizgethusa, the Dacian capital, in AD 106, he carted off loot worth an estimated 700 tons of silver.
• A confirmed pacifist, in 1915 Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels prohibited the creation of a War Plans Division within the newly established Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, so that while there was a Director of Plans, not until a new secretary came along did he have any staff, space, or funds.
• In Byzantine warships with two banks of oars, the lower tier of oars each had one rower, while those of the upper tier each had two, one of whom was trained and equipped to fight as a marine.
• Despite energetic efforts by politicians and diplomats – not to mention King Edward VII, who much preferred carousing in Paris to being bored in London – that would result in the Entente Cordiale of 1904 between the two powers, in 1902 the French general staff developed a secret plan to invade Britain in a surprise attack involving 65,000 troops.

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