Infinite Wisdom

"Battle is an orgy of disorder."

La Triviata

• Once, when Jefferson F. Davis began to give him overly detailed instructions, Robert E. Lee is alleged to have unbuckled his sword and handed it to over, whereupon the Confederate President took the hint, and ended his attempt to micromanage military operations, on that occasion.
• Following Italy’s surrender to the Allies in September of 1943, some SS men were given a very special mission by their leader Heinrich Himmler: to capture the oldest extant manuscript of the Roman historian Tacitus’ Germania which, though written some 1800 years earlier, had played a major role in shaping German nationalism; but fortunately its owner (the anti-fascist Count Aurelio Baldeschi-Balleani) had it carefully hidden.
• The last brevet granted by the United States was the honorary promotion to full general granted Major General Trasker Bliss in May of 1918 so that he would have equal rank with the other Allied representatives on the Supreme War Council.
• In a curious coincidence, during the administration of George W. Bush, James Roche, Secretary of the Air Force in 2001-2005, was a retired US Navy captain, while Hanford T. Johnson, Assistant Secretary of the Navy for the same period (and Acting Secretary for a time in 2003), was a retired full general in the Air Force.
• In 1840 the Royal Navy had 77 ships-of-the-line, in contrast to France’s 23, Russia’s 33 (divided between the Baltic and the Black Sea), America’s seven, and smaller numbers held by other navies.
• Following the surrender of Japan, USMC Capt. Edmund S. Carpenter  (1922-2011), finding himself responsible for several hundred prisoners of war awaiting repatriation on Guam, decided to keep them occupied by putting them to work on an archaeological dig at Tumin Bay; he later earned a doctorate and became one of the nation’s most noted in anthropologists.
• During the First World War, William Wellman (1896-1975), later the director of such notable war films as Wings (1927), The Story of G.I. Joe (1945) and Battleground (1949), served at the front with the French Foreign Legion and later joined the Lafayette Escadrille.
• In 1912, three U.S. Army trucks conducted an experimental road march from Washington, D.C., to Indianapolis, a distance of 1525 miles, in just 48 days, for an average rate of advance of 31.75 miles per day, a remarkable feat given both the trucks and the roads of the time, setting a record which apparently stood for over a decade.

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