Useless Facts on War and Weapons
At the outbreak of World War I, the American air force consisted of only fifty men.
One out of every three English males between the ages of seventeen and thirty-five were killed in World War I.
Only eight men were killed in the Battle of Lexington.
Before World War II blacks were not allowed to enlist in the United States Navy.
During World War I the punishment for homosexuality in the French army was execution. If the offender was an officer he was allowed a final charge against the enemy on the understanding that he would get himself shot.
George Custer was the youngest American officer ever to become a general in the United States Army. He made his rank at age twenty-three.
Alexander the Great ordered his entire army to shave their faces and heads. He believed that bears and long hair were too easy for an enemy to grab preparatory to cutting off his head.
Only 16 percent of the able-bodied males in the American colonies participated in the Revolutionary War.
During the Civil War, Robert E. Lee was offered command of the Union Army before he accepted his post with the Confederacy.
In 1221, Genghis Khan killed 1,748,000 people at Nishapur in one hour.
The Hessian soldiers hired by the British to fight the colonists during the Revolutionary War were paid about 25 cents a day.
In feudal Japan, the Imperial Army had special soldiers whose only duty was to count the number of severed enemy heads after each battle.
Conquering Arab armies in the tenth century used a primitive form of flame thrower and hand grenade. The flame thrower spurted flames of niter and sulphur through copper tubes. Grenades were made of terra cotta shaped to fit the contours of the hand, filled with inflammable naphtha, and covered with relief designs to prevent them from slipping when thrown.
During the American revolution soldiers in General John Burgoyne's regiment who misbehaved were not flogged or imprisoned. They were simply made to wear their coats inside-out. Yet so much respect did Burgoyne's men have for their general that his troops had the lowest disobedience record of any soldiers in the war.
The Marine Crops were originally a branch of the British army in the American colonies. The corps was organized in 1740 in New York and was incorporated into the United States military after the revolution.
In Japan there is a deadly martial art, called tessenjutsu, based solely on the use of a fan.
The Yo-Yo originated as a weapon in the Philippine Islands in the sixteenth century. It weighed 4 pounds and had a 20-foot card. Louis Marx, the toymaker, introduced it to America in 1929.
Soldiers in Genghis Khan's army were made into executioners after every battle. The inhabitants of a defeated town were ordered to assemble outside the walls of the town, and each Mongol soldier, armed with a battle axe, was assigned to kill as many as fifty of the captives. As proof that they had carried out their orders, the soldiers were obligated to cut an ear off every victim, collected the ears in sacks, and bring them to their officers to be counted.
Karate, generally considered a Japanese martial art, did not come to Japan until 1916. Prior to this time it was practiced solely by the Okinawa islanders, who had developed it centuries earlier as a means of weaponless defense against the Japanese.
The 1905 peace treaty ending the Russo-Japanese War was signed in Portsmouth, new Hampshire. Though the United States had nothing to do with the war, the treaty was arranged and negotiated by the United States President Theodore Roosevelt.