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Show 9 I It's the Same Old War! I By Cpt. Mchsri J. Konritdy- It's the same old war! The basic principles never change only the methods change . . . The game battle bat-tle order with which Hannibal won the battle of Cannae won the second battle of the Marne for Marshal Foch . . . Vegetius, Roman columnist colum-nist of his day, after a careful study of all the great battles up to and including in-cluding the 4th century, decided that there were but seven systems of battle bat-tle ... A study of Vegetius' selections shows that four of them were innovations of the other three, therefore there were and are but three basic orders of battle, as follows: fol-lows: (1) The parallel order; (2) The oblique order; (3) The enveloping en-veloping order . . . However, 900 years before Vegetius was doing his stuff on the Roman Daily Mirror, Sun Tzu, famous Chinese generalissimo, generalis-simo, had prescribed the basic rules of warfare . . . These basic rules are the same as prescribed for our armed forces today and will probably proba-bly win the Tunisian .affair for General Gen-eral Eisenhower. Mechanized cavalry isn't new, by a long shot . . . Rameses II introduced intro-duced it in Egypt when he Invented the chariot . . . And tanks China used armored carts as far back as 1200 B. C. . . . The pnclent Persians Per-sians introduced the elephant tank, elephants protected by armor with large scythe-like weapons attached to their trunks for mowing down enemy en-emy troops, equipped with turrets on their backs, from which archers could fire . . . And the large scaling towers of the Romans were built on wheels and rolled, like tanks, to their objectives . . . Chemical warfare war-fare was practiced by the Greeks in 360 B. C. . . . They mixed Incense, sulphur, pitch and faggots in a pot, ignited same and threw them into the ranks of the enemy. These were the first known incendiary bombs . . . History shows that Genghis Khan used smoke screens extensively extensive-ly to cover his maneuvers. WALTER WINCIIELL , . tout of duty oufnid Continental U. S. During bit absence, eoatributort will substitute. Hand Grenades were used by the Egyptians as far back as 490 B. C. . They consisted of boxes in which vipers were secreted. These were thrown into the enemy lines And the Romans invented the grand-daddy grand-daddy of the Molotov cocktail, consisting con-sisting of crude oil in a bottle. The Roman doughboys would ignite the oil, then heave the grenade against the enemy's weak point. The smashing smash-ing of the bottle would scatter liquid fire in all directions ... We hear a great deal about war decorations these days. The first known record of a public presentation of a decora- tion for bravery occurred in the first century, when the emperor of China decorated one of his subjects "for bravery above and beyond the call of duty." "Hash-marks" came into vogue in the Continental army in the form of a strip of white cloth sewn to the shoulder of the uniform. Each strip of cloth represented three years of ' service ... We get the word chev ron from the French "phevre," meaning a goat probably because the inverted chevron of the French troops resembled goats' horns . . . Our word "colonel" is derived from the Latin "colonna," meaning a column col-umn and indicating the colonel was commander of a column . . . The corporal's ' chevrons date back to the Middle ages when the artisans who worked on the construction of a castle were permitted to wear two inverted Vs (representing the castle roof) as a distinction. Rifle Grenades were used at the liege of Stettin in 1677 and the men kssigned to firing the grenades were known as grenadiers . , . Caminelli VitellL an Italian, was experimenting experiment-ing with pistols 'way back in 1540 and the first bomb was invented by mother Italian named Bondo in 1588 ... A form of shrapnel was used by the British at the battle of Crecy and the forerunner of our present tifle sight was a part of each cross-sow. cross-sow. Chaplains are not new in the army , . . Each Christian knight during !he Crusades brought along his own private chaplain . . . Oliver Cromwell Crom-well recruited a regiment of cavalry known as the "Old Ironsides," most . members of which were clergymen . . . Bishop Leonidas Polk, an out-itanding out-itanding Southern clergyman, rose to the rank of general in the Confederate Con-federate army. As regards the Signal Corps . . . Zaesar sent back to Rome via carrier car-rier pigeon the reports of all his Gallic Gal-lic campaigns . . . And we all know ihe story of the runner who reported the battle of Marathon in 400 B. C, then dropped dead . . . True, there rere no planes before the 20th cen-. cen-. wry, but the ancient Persians had in air "blitz" all their own. They aad trained falcons which would iwoop down and scratch out the eyes t the enemy troops . . . The Sreeks, Persians, Egyptians and Chaldeans a'l used military maps. s |