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Al Nofi's CIC
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Issue #332, February 6th, 2011 |
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This Issue...
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Infinite Wisdom
"The Lord God is my armor"
-- | King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden,
preparing to lead a cavalry charge,
The Battle of Lutzen,
November 6, 1632,
in which he was killed.
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La Triviata
- Following World War II, Franz Halder, who had been
Chief of the General Staff of Hitler's Army from 1938 until September of 1942,
worked for many years as an advisor to the U.S. Army's Historical Division, and
upon retirement in 1961 was awarded the Meritorious Civilian Service Medal.
- The earliest known purpose-built Christian
church, dating from around A.D. 235, was discovered in the Roman
fortress of Dura-Europos, which was overrun by the Persians in 256.
- During the First World War, one American nickname for
the French “40 & 8” railroad car, so-called because they were rated as
being able to carry either 40 men or eight horses, was “Side Door Pullman.”
- By carefully parlaying all his perquisites, plus taking
a little off the top now and again, Lt. Col. Sir Mark Wood, the Chief Engineer
of the Bengal Army in the late 1780s, managed to salt away some £200,000, an
impressive piece of change in any era.
- In his efforts to secure a triumph following his
beating up on some Cilician hill tribes in 50 B.C., the Roman politician Marcus
Tullius Cicero reportedly wrote at least once to each of the 600 members of the
Senate, omitting only a couple of men who were his sworn political enemies.
- During the Nine Year’s War (1689-1698), volunteers in the
service of the Duke of Savoy earned 5 soldi
a day, and artillerymen 10, of which one was withheld by the duke to pay for
uniforms and one by the captain to pay for rations, at a time when about 30 soldi a day would have been pretty good
income for a peasant family of five to seven members
- Upon reaching the security of Dutch soil on November 9, 1918, the recently
deposed German Kaiser Wilhelm II was asked if there was anything he wanted, and
replied, "a cup of good English tea."
- Until the Spanish-American War, the peak peacetime strength
of the Regular Army was 56,815, attained in August of 1867, more than two years
after the end of the Civil War, and shortly before it was reduced by half.
- From 1823 to 1922 St. Helena, the tiny speck in the
South Atlantic that had served as Napoleon's final place of exile, was
officially a commissioned sloop-of-war in the Royal Navy, referred to as HMS St. Helena.
More...
Portions
of "Al Nofi's CIC" have appeared previously in Military Chronicles,
Copyright
© 2005-2010 Military Chronicles (www.militarychronicles.com), used with permission, all rights reserved.
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