Infinite Wisdom

"You will proceed at your own expense and . . . in the event of your being killed or wounded . . . no charge of any kind will fall on British Army funds."

La Triviata

• The 23-day battle to capture Berlin in the Spring of 1945 cost the Soviets 352,475 casualties, including 78,291 dead.
• When the Austrian Chancellery proposed conscripting Jewish men to help resolve a manpower shortage during the Austro-Turkish War of 1788-1792, the Supreme War Council acquiesced with great reluctance, declaring that the army already had too many problems on its hands.
• Although American merchant ships and privateers were often taken by French warships and privateers, during the Quasi War (1798-1800) the U.S. Navy took 86 privateers and the frigate l’Insugent without losing a single vessel.
• Between June of 1943 and September of 1944, Walter Kruger’s Sixth Army conducted 16 major amphibious landings, beginning at Salamauna, New Guinea, and ending at Morotai, and the following month commenced the liberation of the Philippines.
• In 1792, the women of the famed “Les Halles” market, in the Faubourg St. Antoine, in Paris, armed themselves with pikes, and proceeded to drill in case they were called upon to defend the Revolution, calling themselves the “Brigade de Amazonie – Amazon Brigade”.
• In 1917 the “War Shipping Board” ordered nearly a thousand wooden or wood-and-iron hulled merchant ships, at about $75,000 each, requiring between 1.5 and 1.7 million board feet of timber per vessel, of which 296 were completed, many of which, along with numerous incomplete ones, were abandoned in backwaters along the nation’s coasts at war’s end, where they can still be seen, such as at Mallows Bay, Maryland, with over 150 rotting hulks.
• The earliest surviving French plan for an invasion of Britain dates to 1666, during the Second Anglo-Dutch War.
• British military operations in the Caribbean during the War of the French Revolution (1792-1801), caused the deaths of some 20,000 troops as well as the discharge for debility of about 40,000 more, due overwhelmingly to disease.

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