Infinite Wisdom

"They don't pay me to think, they pay me to be an Admiral."

La Triviata

• Early in the twentieth century, drunkenness among officers in the Royal Navy was so common that after liberty ashore, enlisted men would often mark the dock in chalk with the names of various ships, in order to facilitate sorting out the unconscious gentlemen for distribution to their appropriate commands after an evening of hard drinking.
• Crossing from Sicily to Africa with G. Julius Caesar’s army in January of 47. B.C., the legate Gaius Avienus required an entire ship for his servants and baggage, to the great annoyance of his notoriously frugal commander.
• On January 24, 1991, Capt. Ayed Salah Al-Shamrani of the Royal Saudi Air Force downed two Iraqi Mirage F.1s while flying an F-15C, thus becoming the only Coalition pilot in the Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm to score more than one enemy fixed wing aircraft
• It was not until 1888 that the U.S. began regularly assigning officers to serve as military attaches in major foreign capitals
• During the Second World War the average number of Germans killed per day per division during the short campaign in Poland was 13.7, which was higher than for any campaign prior to Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, when it rose to 17.
• The U.S. supplied more than half of the propellant powder used by the Allies during World War I, most of it by commercial sale before America entered the war.
• During the "Combined Bomber Offensive" against German-occupied Europe in 1942-1945, some 9,950 U.S.A.A.F. bombers were lost, with 49,000 airmen killed while another 30,000 became prisoners, making it the costliest American campaign of the war.
• In 1810 a Congressional committee seeking to cut costs proposed reducing the army from about 8,000 men to about 3,000 and the navy from six ships to three, at a time when tensions with Britain were rising.

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