"To win battles you do not beat weapons, you beat the soul of every man."
- The last wartime performance of the Berlin Philharmonic took place on April 12, 1945 – less than a month before the surrender of Hitler’s Reich – opened appropriately with Brunhilde’s aria and the finale from Die Gotterdammerung.
- Although 1,500 Regular Army personnel, officers and enlisted men alike, died during the Second Seminole War (1835-1842), only about a quarter did so as a result of combat.
- When adjusted for inflation the cost per ton of tanks has not increased significantly since 1918.
- The first military aeronautical service was formed on April 2, 1794, when the French Committee of Public Safety authorized the activation of the “1ere Compagnie d’Aérostiers,” a balloon unit.
- On August 9, 2001, the Commandant of the USMC formally promoted Pfc Gomer Pyle to lance corporal.
- On September 2, 1777, at the Battle of Cooch’s Bridge, over Christiana Creek, New Jersey, a brigade of New Jersey troops under Brig. Gen. William Maxwell, had the honor of being the first troops to fight under the Stars and Stripes, as they ambushed a British force of about equal size.
- The “National Industrial Recovery Act” of 1933 – still being denounced by anti-New Dealers as a “socialist measure” – provided money to build 32 new warships, the largest increase in the Navy’s construction budget since 1916.
- The loot from Tamerlane's sack of Delhi in 1398 was so great that the Mongol Army, normally capable of an easy 40 miles a day, could make no more than four miles a day on its march home.
- On June 30, 1942, the merchant ship, City of Birmingham was torpedoed in the North Atlantic, going down with heavy loss of life, include Mary Cullom Kimbro, the first American woman merchant mariner to die in World War II.
- By one calculation, in the 100 years between 1701 and 1800, there were only two in which there was no war anywhere in Europe.
- During World War II Resistance Fighters in Occupied France occasionally hid fugitive Allied airmen in Napoleon’s Tomb, at Les Invalides, in Paris.