Military Power

Corcoran jump boots (Army jump boots) have 82 stitches on the inside of the sole and 101 stitches on the outside of the sole in honor of the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions' actions during World War II.

Charles de Gaulle's final words were "It hurts."

At age 90, Peter Mustafic of Botovo, Yugoslavia, suddenly began speaking again after silence of forty years. The Yugoslavian news agency quoted him as saying, "I just didn't want to do military service, so I stopped speaking in 1920; then I got used to it."

It took the United States only four days to build a ship during World War II.

World champion chess player Reuben Fine helped the United States calculate where enemy submarines might surface based on positional probability.

"John has a long mustache" was the coded signal used by the French Resistance in World War II to mobilize their forces after the Allies had landed on the Normandy beaches.

Playing cards were issued to British pilots in World War II. If captured, the cards could be soaked in water and unfolded to reveal a map for escape.

The American Civil War was the first war in which news from the front was published within hours of its occurrence.

Robert E. Lee, of the Confederate Army, remains the only person, to date, to have graduated from the West Point military academy without a single demerit.

When Saigon fell, the signal for all Americans to evacuate was Bing Crosby's "White Christmas" being played on the radio.

Welsh mercenary bowmen in the medieval period only wore one shoe at a time.

Czar Paul I banished soldiers to Siberia for marching out of step.

I've got a couple to go here, but they may be considered distasteful to some people so I was going to put them in a spoiler box, but I don't see how to do that any more.

Adolf Hitler was Time's Man of the Year in 1938.

During World War II, the Navajo language was used successfully as a code by the United States. (The movie Windtalkers is about that)

Kotex was first manufactured as bandages in World War II.

King Frederick of Prussia once received a force of 2,000 Cossacks from his new Russian allies. Eager to try them out he organized a raid on an enemy cavalry outpost. Unfortunately in writing the orders for the raid his Staff Officer wrote that the objective was to attack the enemy ‘Horse’. The Cossacks took this quite literally, and having surprised the enemy they let the captured troopers go and returned to their master only with the mounts.

A similar misinterpretation of orders also caught out a certain Austrian General in 1742. Ordering a detachment of Croat auxillaries to search a captured Spanish-Neopolitan Headquarters for documents, the Croats returned later bearing only blank sheets of paper (thinking that anything with writing on would be of no interest).

In January 1758 the French army possessed sixteen marshals of France, 172 lieutenant-generals and 176 major-generals. A total of 364 general officers to command an army of less than 300,000 men.

In 1940, the night before their first mass jump, U.S. paratroopers at Fort Benning watched the film Geronimo (1939), in which the actor playing Geronimo yells his name as he leapt from a high cliff into a river. Private Aubrey Eberhardt announced he would shout the name when he jumped from the aeroplane to prove he was not scared. This yell soon became popular with other Paratroopers elsewhere.

J. Edgar Hoover, the powerful head of the FBI always insisted that any reports that landed on his desk should have wide margins so that he could enter as notes his opinions on the subject therein. One day a memo arrived on his desk without the customary wide margin. Having read the document he scribbled on the page "OK-But watch the Borders". Sometime later someone had the courage to ask why extra FBI agents had been sent to patrol the Mexican and Canadian Borders.

The following might be found "offensive" to some. If you are easily offended, do not open.


Now for some "cleaner" ones...

Napoleon conducted his battle plans in a sandbox.

Hitler's great-great-grandmother was a Jewish maid.