Infinite Wisdom

"Nothing makes greater demands on loyalty and morale than a plea for patience, a promise of a long war, and a failure to strike back while a foreign army occupies territory of your friends and threatens your own."

La Triviata

• Despite its themes of peace, equality, and tolerance, when Jean Renoir’s The Grand Illusion premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 1937, it became an immediate favorite with Benito Mussolini, who kept a copy in his private collection, though his partner in crime Adolf Hitler despised the picture.
• In the years before the Civil War, the training of West Point cadets included instruction in the making of rockets, priming tubes, canister shot, quick and slow match, and various types of cartridges, including blanks, ball, buckshot, and buck-and-ball.
• During the Vichy regime, one Resistance courier hit upon a novel method of protecting the documents he was smuggling out of France by putting pornographic pictures in his baggage, which successfully diverted the attention of customs inspectors and Gestapo agents.
• Between 1811 and 1813, the Royal Navy “pressed” 29,405 men, but lost 27,300 through desertion.
• Several times during the protracted Battle of Leningrad in World War II, Finnish ski troops investing the place from the north and west clashed with ski-equipped Soviet sailors from ships stranded in the besieged city.
• During the Summer of 1935, the 18^th Infantry, stationed on Governor’s Island in New York, acquired 210 recruits by inviting eligible young men to a series of beer parties.
• Although several relics of the age of fighting sail were destroyed by aerial bombardment during World War II, the last wooden ship-of-the-line to be lost during actual combat appears to have been the Danish 84-gun Christian VII, which engaged Prussian field artillery on Apr. 4, 1849 during the First Schleswig-Holstein War, and rather suddenly blew up and went down with over a thousand men.
• Albert James Myer, is not only the “Father” of the Signal Corps, effectively formed in 1861, but is also the “Father” of what is today the National Weather Service, created as a section in the Signal Corps in 1870.

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