THE POTSDAM GRENADIERS
______One of the more eccentric of Europe's rulers was King Frederick William I of Prussia. Among his habits was the dressing of condemned criminals in French clothes, eating a hundred oysters at a sitting and often taking a dozen bathes a day. But Fred also had a hobby: he liked to collect soldiers. And not just any soldiers... he collected the tallest soldiers he could get his hands on.
______It started innocently enough when King Frederick "gave" Prince Fred a regiment when he reached manhood. Hey, I would have been satisfied with a car. Enamored with all things military, he threw himself into the task of drilling and equipping the regiment to become one of the finest units in the world. Then Fred became king in 1713 and he got an idea to improve his regiment (officially known as the Potsdam Grenadiers) into an even more elite unit by populating it entirely with exceptionally tall soldiers. Thus the "Potsdam Giants" were born.
______Originally, the minimum height requirement for the soldiers was five feet, 11 inches, with some soldiers reportedly as tall as nine feet! Prussia was a small country with a limited population base and had a hard time finding enough soldiers fitting the height criteria for the Postdam Grenadiers. Fortunately for Fred, some of his fellow rulers liked to stay in his good graces by "giving" him tall soldiers to serve in the unit, but even this did not keep them at full strength. Drastic measures were needed to keep the Potsdam Grenadiers from having to report themselves as a "4."
______If he couldn't recruit "giants" for his unit, Frederick would resort to kidnapping. He had agents all over Europe who would find tall men and grab them for service in the Grenadiers. Priests, innkeepers, monks, peasants, craftsmen... they all suddenly found themselves transported from their home countries and sent to Prussia.
______Other than the harsh discipline and the fact that you couldn't leave, service in the Grenadiers wasn't that bad. The pay was good. The uniform was snazzy, composed as it was of a blue jacket with gold trim, scarlet trousers, white stockings, black shoes and topped off with a pointy red hat that made the soldiers look even taller. And most important of all, the unit never saw combat.
______This didn't keep homesick grenadiers from committing suicide or deserting, however, making the problem of keeping the unit up to strength a constant headache. Fred's attempts to get around this only caused morale to plummet: in one case he tried to encourage his tall soldiers to marry tall women for the sole purpose of breeding future privates. In another he tried to stretch ordinary soldiers using racks to make them tall enough to serve. In any case, the extraordinary measures required to find and kidnap members were expensive.
______When Frederick William died in 1740 and was succeeded by his son, who would become known as Frederick the Great, one of the first things the new king did was disband the Postdam Grenadiers as an unnecessary expense and because their military usefulness was questionable at best. Kidnapped from all over Europe, the grenadiers' loyalty was questionable and morale was very low.
WHAT MILITARY FORCE CAME ABOUT AS THE RESULT OF AN AGREEMENT BETWEEN ISRAEL AND EGYPT?
