Infinite Wisdom

"To declaim against war in verse and prose is to beat the air in vain."

La Triviata

• Of the scores of battleships, cruisers, and destroyers that helped escort American fast carrier task forces during World War II, only four destroyers were sunk, all in 1942, though six battleships or large cruisers, two heavy and five light cruisers, and 19 destroyers were damaged.
• The "Uva Rebellion" -- or Third Anglo-Kandyan War -- in Ceylon in 1817-1818, resulted in the death of about 10 percent of the Kandyans.
• Upon the mobilization of the French Army in 1914, of all the millions of reservists and territorials ordered to return to the colors, it was found that only about 1,600 men had deliberately failed to report for duty.
• On D-Day, George S. Patton’s “First U.S. Army Group” (FUSAG) had under its command three notional airborne divisions (one of which was supposedly British), plus two notional armored divisions (one British), and six infantry divisions (two British), in addition to two-and-a-half real divisions, one of them the British Guards Armored Division, as well as the headquarters of the genuine United States Ninth Army.
• During one of the French campaigns in Germany in the Seven Years' War, a detachment of hussars under a Col. J. C. Fischer was sent out on reconnaissance, and promptly disappeared, only to be located some days later, feasting and drinking, commander and all, at the chateau of a local nobleman.
• In 1914, after several years of recruiting, the entire U.S. Army Reserve consisted of 16 men.
• Introduced by the Royal Navy in 1778, the coppering of ships' bottoms to reduce fouling and damage from sea worm was considered so important it had precedence over reequipping warships with new model cannon.
• By the end of World War I the Army’s “United States Guard,” composed of draftees with disabilities that disqualified them for front line service, numbered some 28,000 men, who, organized into 48 battalions, served as internal security troops in the approximately two dozen states that had not formed a state defense force. 

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