Infinite Wisdom

"To enjoy war is surely degenerate."

Fridolin von Senger und Etterlin,
Defender of Cassino, 1943-1944

La Triviata

• The last German troops to surrender in World War II were a group of Luftwaffe weathermen who were so isolated in a remote corner of the arctic island of Spitzbergen that it was not until November 1945 that a Norwegian ship picked them up, six months after VE-Day.
  
• During the French and Indian War about a third of all men aged 16-29 in Massachusetts Bay Colony joined one or another of several expeditionary forces, 88-percent of them as volunteers, 10-percent more as substitutes, and only 2- percent as draftees.
  
• By one calculation, since the invention of airborne forces there have been over 760 combat jumps by troops from 39 different countries, for a total of 214,865 "man-drops."
  
• The Dupont de Nemours Company of Delaware supplied about 40% of all the explosives used by the Allied forces in World War I., despite the fact that the U.S. did not enter the war until the spring of 1917.
  
• In 1793 an Austrian Army was forced to surrender to the French at Mainz because it lacked the cash to pay ferry fees across the Rhine.
  
• The average death rate for military personnel, mostly young men in their 20s, deployed to the Gulf in 1990-1991 was 69 per one hundred thousand, while that for men aged 20 to 30 years living in the United States was 104 per hundred thousand.
  
• Brevet Major General Thomas Sidney Jesup (1788-1860) not only had a distinguished career in the field against the British, the Creeks, and the Seminoles between 1808 and 1838, but is also considered the "Father of the Quartermaster Corps", which he ably headed from May of 1818 to his death on 10 June 1860, thereby setting a record for the longest tenure as head of a staff department in the United States Army.
  
• In 1617 the Italian nobleman Diomede Caraffa raised a company of cavalry to support a Habsburg army in Lombardy, but was unable to accompany the troops because his mother refused to let him go, he being at the time only 15.

Short Rounds

Battlefield Expertise

On day in September of 1944, while they were in Quebec for the Octagon Conference, the Allied Combined Chiefs of Staff one day decided to tour the historic Plains of Abraham, where, 185 years earlier, the British under Sir John Wolfe had wrested control of Canada from the French, in the culminating victory of "the year of miracles" that decided the Seven Years War.

Unfortunately, the guide provided was more accustomed to civilian tourists than the pomposity of generals and admirals with whom he had to cope on this occasion. He soon proved unable to respond to their many technical questions. Nor were any of the officers present sufficiently knowledgeable about the battle to lend a hand. So the brass wandered the field keeping their questions to themselves.

Then, by chance, the party encountered a traditionally cassocked Quebecois priest. Falling into conversation with him, they quickly discovered that the elderly clergyman was an expert on the battle and on the conduct of war in the mid-eighteenth century. And soon he was steering the combined military brains of Britain and America on a detailed tour of the historic battlefield, responding cogently to their many questions about tactics and personalities.

"Where There's Fighting, There'll Always Be Irish."

The 80th New York was composed of Irish volunteers from Ulster County, New York. It had a distinguished record during the Civil War, fighting in the Army of the Potomac. But it was never brigaded with the other Irish regiments in the famed "Irish Brigade, which included the 63rd, 69th, and 88th New York, plus some miscellaneous Irishmen from Massachusetts and Pennsylvania.
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