Al Nofi's CIC
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Issue #32, April 26, 2001 |
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This Issue...
- Infinite Wisdom
- la Triviata
- Short Rounds
- Some Late Starters
- Space Battleships?
- Briefing - Fijians in World War II
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Infinite Wisdom
"We shall attack and attack until we are exhausted, and then we shall attack again."
--George S. Patton
La Triviata
- Give or take a few, by one count there are 261,418 bomb shelters in Switzerland.
- Pay in the Royal Prussian Army during the early nineteenth century was so poor that the young Helmuth von Moltke, who would go on to conquer France in 1871, translated Edward Gibbon's enormous The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire into German in order to raise cash.
- The name of President Yoweri Museveni, of Uganda means "Son of a Man of the Seventh," his father having soldiered in the 7th King's African Rifles during World War II.
- One of the many secret projects undertaken by the United States during World War II was a proposal to strike a blow at Japanese morale by painting sacred Mount Fuji red, which was only abandoned after someone calculated how much paint and how many aircraft would be required for the project.
- Supposedly, after fierce fighting half way up the Italian Peninsula, shortly after the Allies liberated Rome, on June 4, 1944, an American general stood amid the ruins of the Forum and exclaimed, "Did we do this?"
- Frieda Lawrence, wife of the famed British novelist D. H Lawrence. Author of Lady Chatterley's Lover, was the sister of the equally famous Manfred von Richthofen, "The Red Baron".
- During the War of 1812 the U.S. Navy, which never had more than about two dozen ships at sea at any time, captured 165 enemy vessels, while 526 privateers wearing the American flag took 1,334 more.
- In order to conduct a lottery to allocate additional flights to New York's LaGuardia Airport, in late 2000 the Federal Aviation Administration borrowed from the Smithsonian Institution a large fish bowl and a set of numbered balls that were first used in 1917 and again in 1940 for a very different kind of lottery.
More...
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