Infinite Wisdom

"By nightfall tomorrow we shall know whether it is Rome or Carthage that shall give laws to the world!"

La Triviata

• During the 1820s, Swedish naval regulations appear to have required officers to wear spurs when in full dress.
• Although by October of 1914 the Japanese Imperial Navy had occupied most of the German-owned Marshall, Caroline, and Palauan Islands in the Central Pacific, they left Saipan alone, it being the only place that was actually garrisoned.
• Having captured Athens after a long siege (autumn 87 BC-summer 86 BC), Sulla, the future Roman dictator, refrained from sacking the place, but did send home Aristotle’s personal library, which, years later, his son, having wasting Papa’s fortune, sold to the great orator and politician Cicero.
• On March 24, 1941, Donald Duck enlisted in the Army, for the first of six cartoons.
• During the early 1930s, the Soviet “Red Banner Fleet” experimented with mounting large caliber recoilless rifles on small warships, even fitting the old 730 ton destroyer Engels with a 305mm (12.064”) piece, which did not prove a good idea, as the weight of the piece and its ammunition made the ship, and the recoil, as modest as it was relatively, made the vessel unstable.
• The walls of Adolph Hitler’s elaborate – and seldom used – office in the Reichskanzlei held portraits of Otto von Bismarck, who had engineered the unification of Germany in 1870, and Arminius, the first century Teutonic chieftain who had engineered the annihilation of three Roman legions in the Teutoburg Forest in AD 9.
• Some 2,400 years before Theodore Roosevelt quoted an old West African proverb to refer to the navy as “a big stick”, the Fourth Century BC Athenian politician Peitholaus had already referred to the fleet flagship Paralos as “the people’s Big Stick.”
• Katharina Schratt (1853-1940), the actress who was the mistress of Emperor-King Franz Josef of Austria-Hungary (1830-1916) from 1882 until his death, was personally approved for the post by his wife the Empress Elisabeth Amalie Eugenie (1854-1898).
• As a result of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, 15 men were awarded the Medal of Honor (all from the Navy, ten posthumously), 51 received the Navy Cross, one received the Army’s Distinguished Service Cross, four sailors and 65 soldiers received the Silver Star, and three men the Navy-Marine Corps Medal.

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