"The time for counsel is over, the time for fighting is upon us."
|--Don Juan of Austria,|
October 6, 1571
the eve the Battle of Lepanto
- Of nearly 16,000 New York National Guardsmen commited to operations on the Mexican border between July 19 and November 25, 1916, only 19 failed to return home; 16 men died of disease and three from accidents – two by gunshot wounds and one from the kick of a horse.
- During the Gulf War, the 1st Battalion, 158th Field Artillery, Oklahoma National Guard, attained the highest rate of fire of any artillery battalion in Third Army.
- In 1879 the Bolivian Army, which totaled 2,175 officers and men, included 16 generals, 21 colonels, 215 majors, 100 captains, and 256 lieutenants.
- The first person known to have used a parachute was a M. Blanchard, who jumped from a balloon in August 1785.
- In 1911 Lt. Cdr. George Ritter von Trapp, k-u-k Kriegsmarine, who durng World War I would become one of Austria’s most notable submarine commanders, married Miss Agatha Whitehead, granddaughter of the designer of the automobile torpedo, who together founded the famous Trapp family of singers, memorialized in the film, The Sound of Music.
- During their protracted siege of the Turkish fortress of Plevna, in Bulgaria, in 1877-1878, the Russian Army lost about 22,000 draft horses, roughly two-thirds of the number available to haul supplies and equipment.
- The first woman to be awarded the Purple Heart was 1st Lt. Ann Lee Fox, an Army Nurse wounded at Pearl Harbor.
- During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the fortification of Cartagena de las Indias, in Colombia, cost the Spanish Crown some 59 million ounces of gold, easily about $17.3 billion today, without adjusting for the relatively higher value of gold a quarter of a millenium ago.