Infinite Wisdom

"You feed it at one end and nothing comes out the other but crap."

La Triviata

• Reportedly, as part of the preparations for his spectacular three day triumph in 61 BC, Pompey the Great decided to fatten up the haul of prisoners marching in the procession by "stealing" some captured pirate chiefs from Quintus Caecillius Metellus, who had taken them while conquering Crete and was waiting to parade them in his triumph.
• During World War II the American heavy bomber program yielded 3,760 B-29s, 18,188 B-24s, and 12,677 B-17s, as well as 118 B-32s.
• In 1795 the British fleet had 512,000 tons of ships, the French 284,000, the Spanish 264,000, and the Russian 182,000, mostly in the Baltic but with 42,000 in the Black Sea, while the rest of the European powers together had about 383,000.
• During the construction of the infamous "Bridge on the River Kwai" in Thailand, the Japanese employed 270,000 Asian prisoners of war and impressed civilians plus some 61,000 Allied prisoners, mostly British and Australian, of whom 87,500 of the Asians and 12,568 of the Allied personnel, died from malnutrition, disease, beatings, accidents, and executions.
• Apparently, John J. Pershing was the first senior military officer to concluded that a combination of heavy and light tanks would be the most effective in combat, after watching the famous British armored assault at Cambrai on Nov. 20, 1917.
• Despite severe opposition from local governments – in Prussia recruiters were actually thrown in jail – Britain managed to enlist about 10,000 mercenaries in Germany during the Crimean War, most of whom made it only as far as Constantinople before the war ended and they were sent home.
• During World War II, 44 states (omitting Arizona, Montana, Nevada, and Oklahoma), as well as Hawaii, Alaska, and Puerto Rico, formed home guard forces – usually termed “State Guard” or “Territorial Guard” – for a total of about 110,000 men, the largest being New York’s, with 17,327 enlisted troops and 117 officers, mostly downstate and in New York City, which also had the paramilitary “City Guard Force” of over 12,000 volunteers.
• The first air force to formally issue parachutes was the Imperial German Luftstreiekrafte in 1918.

More...