Infinite Wisdom

"When God had made Hell, He found it was not bad enough, so He created Iraq and added flies."

La Triviata

• The threat of a French invasion during the “Great Anglo-French Ironclad Race” of the late 1850s and early 1860s resulted in a tremendous outpouring of support for preparedness in Britain, so that even the Christian Socialist Movement formed a volunteer military company.
• Arguably the first American officer to see combat during World War II was Capt. William G. Wyman, who was present as an observer with the Chinese 19^th Route Army during the defense of Shanghai against the Japanese in the “China Incident” of January 28-March 3, 1932, and later went on to command the 71^st Infantry Division in 1944-1945.
• Oktoberfest, the fortnight of beer and food held annually in Munich, began as part of the festivities surrounding the nuptials of Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria (“Mad King Ludwig”) and Princess Therese of Saxony-Hildburghausenor, on October 12, 1810.
• For several years during World War II, Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, an enthusiastic supporter of the “Final Solution”, received an annual subsidy of 50,000 reichsmarks from Adolph Hitler, about twice what Der Führer paid his field marshals.
• Chartered by Maria Theresa of Austria in 1741, the Theresian Military Academy, the oldest in the world, was also the first to admit commoners, accepting 100 noblemen and 100 commoners a year to be turned into “hard working officers and honest men”.
• Although by 1914 the two nations had been allied for some 35 years, Germany’s high command had never informed their Austro-Hungarian counterparts of their plans to violate Belgian and Dutch neutrality on the outbreak of war with France, and thus probably also involve hostilities with Britain.
• At the Navy’s Pensacola flight school during the 1920s and 1930s, student aviators training to fly seaplanes and flying boats who struck buoys or other aids to navigation would be crowned with a chamber pot on which their name was prominently painted, which would then be displayed at headquarters.
• Pressured by the Vichy regime to give recitals in Germany, famed singer Edith Piaf agreed only if the performances were limited to camps housing French prisoners-of-war, and brought along with her a stash of false identity papers which she secretly supplied to some of the internees, in the hope of facilitating their escape.

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