Infinite Wisdom

"Planning for certitude is the most grievous of all military mistakes."

La Triviata

• In the wee hours of June 6, 1944, as the attack transport Barnett (APA-11) steamed toward Utah Beach, men of the 4th Infantry Division assembled on deck to sing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and other patriotic songs, in which they were joined by Brig. Gen. Theodore Roosevelt, Jr.


• During the Franco-Prussian War, the German forces fielded one doctor for every 290 men, while the French Army, despite an official ratio of one for every 580 men, actually could only manage about one for every 740.


• Some 3˝ million members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union died fighting against Germany during World War II.


• Charles R. Forbes, the first head of the Veterans’ Bureau (later the Veterans’ Administration), a crony of President Warren G. Harding, was so crooked that the agency habitually paid as much as 20 times the normal price for commonplace goods such as floor polish or towels, which it had to purchase from Forbes’ buddies..


• On the night of October 22, 1707, Admiral Sir Clowdisley Shovell made a navigational error that led to the loss of four British warships and over 1,300 lives, including his own, on the rocks off the Scilly Isles, just a few hours after he had hanged a seaman as a mutineer for telling him the squadron was off course.


• Plutarch tells us that once, as he was about to deliver the coup de grace to an enemy, a Spartan warrior heard the “Recall,” and promptly desisted, because it was “more excellent to obey the commander than to slay the foe.”


• Of about 250,000 American soldiers killed or wounded in action during World War I, fully a third were cut down by gas, about half by artillery, ten percent by rifle or machine gun fire, and the balance by all other causes, including mines, bayonets, grenades, and hand-to-hand combat.


• Uncle Sam's impressive fleet of helicopters had its beginnings on Feb 16, 1939, when F.D.R. requested that Congress appropriate $1,125,000 to acquire "autogiros and other rotary wing aircraft."

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