Infinite Wisdom

"The state of the armed forces has been neglected for a long time and has fallen so completely into oblivion, so to speak, that those who assume the command of troops do not understand even the most obvious matters and run into all sorts of difficulties."

--	Flavius Mauricius Tiberius Augustus, The Emperor Maurice (582-602), Soldier and scholar, The Strategikon

La Triviata

• When the U.S. entered World War I, in April of 1917, the Army had fewer than 700 pieces of field artillery, plus about 200 more on order, in eight calibers ranging from 2.95-inch mountain guns to 6-inch howitzers, for which there were fewer than 850,000 rounds, primarily for the 3-inch field gun, which, although a very fine piece, never saw action at the front.
• Formed in 1922, by the outbreak of World War II in 1939 the South African Naval Force numbered five officers and men, while the newly formed Ceylon Volunteer Naval Defence Force numbered 150.
•  By 1911 France was conscripting 83-percent of the men who became eligible for military service each year, while Germany, with a larger population, was taking only 53-percent.
•  During World War II the standard American infantry division possessed some 400,000 horsepower in its organic transport.
•  Although in Flavian times (A.D. 69-96), the imperial naval squadron at Misenum, near Naples, had some 10,000 men on its rolls, apparently more of them were stationed in Rome and Ostia than at their base, assigned to maintaining the great awnings of the Coliseum and various theatres, or serving as couriers, coastguardsmen, harbor and river police, and other duties for which their maritime skills made them useful.
•  Nearly 30 percent of the tanks produced in the U.S. during World War II were supplied to British Commonwealth forces.
•  Since the king was always supposed to lead his people in wartime, when Swaziland dispatched men to join the British Army during World War II, Sobhuza II gave his son Prince Dabede, who was to lead the contingent, a special baton symbolizing the royal military authority.
• Until the construction of the Erie Canal (1818-1825), which involved 25,000 workers, the largest single organized concentration of manpower in the history of the United States had been the army that George Washington commanded in New York City and on Long Island in the summer of 1776, some 15,000-20,000 men.

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