Infinite Wisdom

"Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives…

You are now living in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours….

You, the mothers, who sent their sons from faraway countries wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace, after having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well."

La Triviata

• During their protracted duel with the “pocket battleship” Graf Spee off the Rio de la Plata on December 13, 1939, the light cruisers HMS Ajax and HMNZS Achilles, fired some 2,500 6-inch rounds, to which the heavy cruiser HMS Exeter contributed an uncertain number of 8-inchers, together scoring only 57 hits, and not killing a single man aboard the German vessel, though inflicting sufficient damage to seal her fate.
• Rudolph von Hapsburg, a fourteenth century German mercenary captain active in Italy, was nicknamed “Senzabarba – The Beardless” for his lack of facial hair in an otherwise heaviliy bearded profession. 
• Napoleon's decorations were captured by the Prussians in 1815, who put them on display in Berlin, from which they were taken by the Russians in 1945, so that they currently reside in Moscow.
• During World War II, American submarines carried out 1,682 war patrols, all but 112 of which were in the Pacific Theater.
• As a young man Pompey the Great proved so ferocious an adherent of the Roman Dictator Sulla that he was nicknamed “Adulescentulus carnifex – the Juvenile Butcher”
• Tradition has it that Genghis Khan, certainly the greatest conqueror in history, was afraid of only three things, his mother, his wife, and dogs.
• Upon his enlistment in November of 1914, Eric von Zelewski, later the notorious Nazi thug Eric von dem Bach-Zelewski, was reportedly the youngest soldier in the Imperial German Army, at 16.
• The actress Swoosie Kurtz was named after the B-17 her father, the former Major Frank Kurtz, had commanded in the South Pacific, on which future president Lyndon B. Johnson once flew while on a fact finding mission.

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