Infinite Wisdom

"For no one is so insane as to prefer war to peace, for in the latter sons bury father but in the former fathers bury sons."

--	Herodotos, I, 87, 4

La Triviata

• Although American troops who went into action at Guadalcanal and in North Africa in the summer and autumn of 1942 were issued the new M1 helmet that would endure until the late-1980s, some troops in odd corners of the world, such as the Aleutians, continued to wear the old World War I M1917A1 helmet well into 1943.


• Early in November of 2007, the government of Chile returned to Peru 3,778 books, rare items dating back to as early as the sixteenth century, that Chilean troops had looted from the Peruvian National Library in Lima, when they captured the city in January of 1881.


• During the French and Indian War, Massachusetts maintained a third of its military aged manpower under arms, a higher percentage than any European country could manage at the time.


• In 1914, Rafe Vaughn Williams, already an established composer, and at 40 overage for compulsory military service, joined the British Army, becoming a captain in the Royal Garrison Artillery in command of a heavy battery on the Western Front, which damaged his hearing and ultimately led to deafness in his old age.


• During World War II, approximately 1.5 million troops and 23 million tons of cargo shipped out from San Francisco, constituting the bulk of U.S. forces and equipment committed to the Pacific Theater.


• Of 22,445,132 men registered for the draft in the Vietnam era (1960-1973), only 2,160,551 (9.63%) were actually drafted, of whom only 555,214, less than 25%, served in the combat zone, while the other 1.6 million served in the US, Germany, Korea, or other places..


• In the 1870s and 1880s, about a third of the troops stationed in the British Isles were infected with venereal disease.


• During the Trident Conference, held at Washington in May 1943, Army Chief-of-Staff General George C. Marshall took some senior British officers on a tour of the old battlefield at Yorktown, only to discover that none of them seemed to know – or were willing to admit to knowing – the name of their fellow countryman who’d lost the big one there in 1781.

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