Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 183 - Digby Tatham-Warter

Episode Date: November 22, 2021

The most British man ever went into battle against tanks armed with an umbrella and wearing a bowler hat. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys sources: https://www.history.co.uk/article/ww2-heroes-the-story-of-major-digby-tatham-warter https://www.warhistoryonline.com/instant-articles/digby-tatham-warter-disabled-a-german-tank-with-an-umbrella.html https://www.saxonlodge.net/getperson.php?personID=I0973&tree=Tatham#cite1

The clubman in the Netherlands, normally also playing on the field, but slightly injured, but not injured enough to give this beautiful club. Hello and welcome to yet another episode of Lines of the Baked Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe and with me today is long-suffering producer of the show, host of five other shows at this point, and noted scholar of Britnology, Nate Bethea. Hello. Yeah, actually, I'm only the host of two other shows, but I do produce a significant number of others. I'm not going to say that I'm 100% on board with the concept of there being a me extended universe. What I do find funny is that if you enter my name into Google, the suggested results include Nate Bethea extended universe, Nate Bethea net worth, Nate Bethea wife.

And it's sort of like, who the fuck is searching for this shit? All right, you want to ask me a question, just at me, Christ. You know I'll get back to you eventually. I wonder how many people were looking up your net worth for that to pop up. Yeah. It's weird though because I mean like, yeah, for one, for one, I mean, an intrepid person if they wanted to could just take a look at the Patreon accounts of various shows. Now, that number would be inaccurate because it wouldn't represent how much I actually

get paid, but it doesn't matter. I mean, people want to... Most people, when they do that, they do that because they want to get mad. And it's just like, all right, whatever. I'm not going to flex. But if you want to knock yourself out... We've been... It's crazy to think that we've been working together for almost 40 years now. Yeah. It's been a while. And this is your first time on the show. Well, no, because I cut myself in a couple of times to complain about your appreciation

of French words. But yeah, this is my first time appearing. I mean, if you want to be weirder, Francis and I have been podcasting for over five years now. We've never met in person. That's true. That's true. I mean, I've met Shox in real life. He came to Washington when we... I think that's actually before we started working together. And obviously, the first three years of this podcast was all me and Nick recording in person. Yeah. In my case, obviously, I was in New York, Francis in St. Louis, and then I moved here to the UK. And I mean, I haven't... I'm now over two years since I've even been back to America at all, just because of some events that have happened in the world.

So I don't know if I could call myself an expert on Britanology, but I am definitely immersed in Britain on a regular basis since I haven't been able to escape this fucking island. I have not left Britain since we got back from that trip. I've only left London like three times uh since that easy also so um yeah if you want to ask britain questions or you want to talk about britain content i guess i'm your guy yeah i would say you you have a major in in podcasting minor in britannology uh fair enough and the reason why i brought you on here is other than the fact that i finally got you on the

podcast is because we're going to talk about a guy who's quite honestly uniquely British. All right. And he's a certain kind of guy. He's the swashbuckling adventurer soldier that everybody likes to talk about. He's long since dead, though people keep trying to bring him back. These people just don't exist anymore. Yeah, Rory Stewart, the Tory MP, and the candidate for leader of the Tory party

who did not win, he also was a candidate for London mayor, tried to reinvent himself or rather portray himself as one of these people to revive this trope or this figure. But he's a pale imitation of it. I can't remember the names, but I'm telling you, anywhere you go, you will find these bizarre, just sort of... How do you put this? Creatures of empire, if you will. The guy who went to Afghanistan in the 1840s and then fell in love with Pashtun culture so much, he decided to just become Pashtun. He learned Pashto. He fake converted to Islam. He made Hajj pretending to be Afghan. Guys like that, invariably, you look at the Indian subcontinent, you'll find people in similar situations who did this for...

Pick a culture, they've done it. Pick a regional language of India, they've done it. Similarly, you'll find guys like... Oh, I mean, I had this idea that is very, very funny. It's not out of the realm of possibilities that you might find some English guy who fought in the war. He was like, oh, I don't want people, the censors or my comrades to read my private journal, so I'll just write it in Cantonese because I speak it fluently for some reason. Those kinds of guys did exist. I'm not saying they were good. Of course not. They were almost always functionaries of empire. I'm not going to say that there was a one-to-one correlation with some weird sex proclivities, but that was often

the case. However, Rory Stewart, like I said, is a watery imitation. He's like drinking a glass of milk when what you want is ice cream. He tried to be that by being the guy who learned Farsi and I think speaks some Arabic. He was like an administrator in southern Iraq. the immediate aftermath of the British part of the invasion in 2003. But in 2002, if I remember correctly, he walked across Afghanistan.

What? His book is incredible. Why? Because he wanted to. Is he like the guy who tried to kill Osama bin Laden with a broadsword? Yeah. He wanted to visit the Minaret of Jam. He wanted to visit

these famous sites that he'd read about and he spoke Farsi. So he got some local, you know, fixers and he walked overland from, yeah, from the Iranian border

to, I believe, to Jalalabad. Oh, shit. Oh, too, though. So obviously, it was a different time. True, true. His book's amazing

because you can read it and learn nothing about Afghanistan. He sounds interesting, but he's actually just like a total dyed-in-the-wool Tory who just affects that sort of the demeanor of what you might call the sort of trying-to-seem open-minded imperial administrator who is actually just, at his core, a Tory and very, very British. And for American listeners or people not familiar with the United Kingdom,

Tory means something very different in American history. It means loyalist in the Revolutionary War. But in Britain, Tory is shorthand for someone who either supports or in Stuart's case, is literally a member of parliament for the Conservative and Unionist Party of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. It's a long title to say, so they are called the Conservatives or the Tories for short. I don't know what the provenance of that term is, but it's just the one they use to describe them. So that's who Rory Stewart is. That's pretty much who all imperial administrators are slash were as well, because in Britain, the Tories are basically the politics party,

and corruption is legal here, and it's a big joke. But that's a topic for another day. It's like, yeah, these guys all get their jobs like, oh, yeah, my cousin worked for the British East India Company or something. Yeah. Yeah. And nowadays, it's like, oh, he went to the same privately funded school as me, or what the British call public schools, or he went to the same college at Oxford or Cambridge as me, so on and so forth. Yeah. I mean, that hasn't really changed. That's pretty much this guy too. Now, like we said, universally, all these guys pop out of the British Imperial era, pre-India independence,

I'll say. Now, granted, there are some that pop up during the Falklands War, and trust me, we'll talk about that eventually. Oh, yeah. Some of that pop up during the Falklands War, and trust me, we'll talk about that eventually. Oh, yeah. And it's an era known for well-dressed psychopaths with very stupid names. And we will be talking about one that is no different. And his full name is Allison Digby Tatham Water. There you have it. Now, generally, he goes by Digby, which I don't know if I'd pick that of his four names, but we'll go with that.

But Digby was born to an incredibly wealthy family in May of 1917. And when I say wealthy, I mean not just like old money, but ancient old money. I found records online that date his family to an incredibly, incredibly rich Saxon royalty family. Um, and this has made very easy for me because his family keeps a website up to this day that charts the entire family history of the Tathams of County Durham, uh,

that maps 120 different pages of people dating back to the 1300s. Um, and, uh, this website looks like it was just freshly transferred over from like an angel fire server or something. It's been around a while. Yeah, fair enough. Yeah. Something that's very interesting about that is because you're from County Durham. Durham is in the far north of England. It's near the Scottish border. And so it's funny because

when you encounter people like that... I've had these conversations with people who are from different regions of the United Kingdom, different parts of England. And one of the points they make is that it's very interesting to encounter Northern aristocrats, because like you're describing this person, I presume if you were to be able to visit him while he was still alive, or if he lived long enough to have his voice recorded would probably sound just like wealthy Southerners, Pashos from the South who sound like they learned English from a parrot that lived 300 years ago. But the thing is, his accent would not mark him as someone from the North.

Interesting. These people lived in completely sequestered sort of their lives, their social lives, their upbringings, et cetera, were all in keeping with the tendencies of the incredibly upper class strata of society in the United Kingdom. And so Durham, to your average person from the United Kingdom, someone from Durham is going to sound like someone from Durham. It's a very distinct accent. Northern accents are very, very strong compared to Southern accents. I mean, obviously, what Americans are used to is a kind of like received pronunciation, broadcast British English, but that's a Southern English accent. That's a kind of Southern English accent. And Northern accents are very, very distinct.

These guys wouldn't have them because they're raised in these sort of hermetically sealed fiefdoms where they are taught the right accents and all the different manners and so on and so forth. And oftentimes, yes, like you just described, they have family lineages and holdings, ancestral lands, et cetera, that go back hundreds, if not thousands of years, or at least a thousand years. And oftentimes, sometimes they're broke. they finally doesn't have any income, but they still have the, you know, the manor house and the, the lands and so on and so forth and the townhouse in the city and whatnot. But oftentimes, and I think before the war, before World War II, it was more common to have, you know, people who would, they'd still have, um, I mean, like, like a Wuthering Heights style situation in which like, you know, there's the owner and and then there's the people who just live and work on the land with their families. That is a real thing. It's changed a bit in terms of the surf adjacent people on the land. But in terms of the titles, the holdings, etc., that's all still there. tried to see what his family did but literally the only thing that's noted about his dad he'll talk a little bit about is like he owned vast amounts of land in the north like yeah uh-huh but how did he get that like nobody nobody kept track of that it's just been in the family for so

long uh yeah i mean that would imply that his family his family were i mean i my sort of off the cuff guess here is that his family were barons in the time prior to the consolidation of England. Probably. And so, because England wasn't one country until relatively recently or more recently, you had individual kingdoms, and I couldn't name all of them. But prior to the annexation or sort of amalgamation of england and wales and i believe the 13th or 14th century um it was even more broken up but even you know prior to the 1600s or i believe the either 15 or 1600s you still had these disparate kingdoms and that's why you'd have you know the the the you know the troops loyal to the duke of york attacking london and sacking it or laying siege or stuff like that.

The War of the Roses, stuff like that. England wasn't much like... There was a time when Japan was basically just warring fiefdoms and then it was consolidated. The same thing happened in England. And so England is like this coherent whole, wasn't a thing. And when someone's got ancestral lands, et cetera, that date back that far, chances are really good that those were baronial lands and that their their family were you know sort of the the the the local heavies to use an american term yeah and they're they seem to continue to be that um all the way up until shit world war ii really um also a really weird side note about this website it has a

username and password login system that leads me to believe there's some kind of forum function involved. And I tried to register for an account to see if I could hang out with the County Durham folks, and unfortunately, I couldn't. Yeah, well, I suppose when you registered under nonchunter42069, they probably got some ideas. Yeah, unfortunately unfortunately that means i can't hang out the digby family reunion now uh like most british kids born in 1917 digby's dad

henry degray tatham warder uh had been a veteran of world war one uh and like a lot of very rich fancy boys uh in in england at the time he purchased a commission in the hilariously named artist rifles um and i wanted to kind of figure out how the hell a unit that we would both probably end up in ended up being formed um and it ended up being formed in the mid-1800s for a reason about as stupid as its name back in the the day, there's an Italian revolutionary named Felice Orsini who had fled to Britain from France and became convinced that the French emperor and sometimes President Napoleon III was the only thing standing in the way between Italian unification and independence. So he decided to blow him up. So he shopped around England for a while to find a guy who could build a bomb

that was also filled with mercury for some reason because it's the 1800s and things have to be as terrible as possible. He found a gun maker named Joseph Taylor who was a local British guy that built six different versions of the bomb. So Felice then went back to France to try to blow up the royal family while

they were on their way to a play. Fucked it up, got arrested and got his head cut off. But France figured, because, you know, France and England have hated each other forever at this point, that since he came from England, because he actually kept his ticket from the boat that he took in his pocket when he was captured. Not a very good criminal. As well as like the bill of sales from the bombs which is incredible like if you're a gunsmith i mean i'm sure this has to be illegal in some capacity just building bombs in your garage in london in the 1800s but like no it was a tax receipt because i can claim it as an expense for my limited company

my local revolutionary group will reimburse me if I bring back receipts. Yeah, fair enough. But I like to think of the gun maker like, I have to write you a receipt. I have no choice, even if I'm making you a mercury-filled bomb. But, of course, this led him right back to England, and the French made the somewhat logical conclusion that he was a British agent sent to kill the emperor

uh so this of course led to a bit of a diplomatic issue because they wanted joseph taylor the guy who built the bombs because they already got felice and you know guillotined him uh so but british law of the day conspiracy which is what you know he was charged with was only a misdemeanor and a misdemeanor did not come with extradition uh despite the fact he is a conspiracist to murder the emperor of france um because the charge of conspiracy to murder simply hadn't been invented yet yeah fair enough so the french were pretty pissed about this entire thing but and then it ended up with the fall of lord palmerston's government and the fear that the french might actually just invade england over the whole thing, which spurred the creation of the volunteer movement, which led to the

creation of the artist rifles and other units like it. There's quite a few units like this that ended up all choking on their own lung fluid in the trenches of World War One after they got gassed. The unit actually was started by an art student and was populated mostly by other art students for quite a while. At one point, it was commanded by famous British painters like Henry Wyndham Phillips and Frederick Leighton, who were pretty popular, I guess. I'm not an art historian. I have no idea who these people are. I'm just imagining Henry Scott Toot commanding the regiment and all the privates being like, why do we have to be naked all the time? Another small side note here this this unit survived until after world war ii at which point it was disbanded uh but then it was reformed as the 21st sas regiment for some reason uh which is

which is still around that they're the 21st sas uh regiment in parentheses artists i don't know why they decided to keep that part. That's the regiment that they created for Jimmy Savile. Oh, fuck. Anyway, Digby's dad survived World War I, but was horribly wounded by a gas attack,

which caused him lifelong health problems, as poison gases want to do. He eventually died when Digby was 11 years old. Now, there's not a lot of known about Digby's inter years here. He just kind of falls off the map. Otherwise, we can assume that using his great wealth and privilege and family connections, he probably went to a lot of private schools, some of the best in the area.

Now, I only assume this because he eventually slid his way right into Sandhurst, which his older brother had also done immediately before him so there's just a pipeline he pretty much followed in his brother's footsteps all the way up until they both commissioned into the army which Digby did in 1937 his brother became a

tank officer and I believe he was in the something dragoons unit not important but Digby was commissioned to the unattached list of the Indian Army. Now, for the people who are unaware, the unattached list means that while Digby was a military officer and technically an infantry officer, he wasn't actually in command of anything. Now, most people in the unattached list did things like clerical work, worked in the local farms department. They did imperial administration. It's known that the longest person that stayed on the unattached list was actually a prison guard, which is terrifying.

And the Indian Army at this point, there's a British Army in India, and then there's the Indian Army. They're separate, even though it makes no fucking sense. The officer corps of the Indian army for quite a while was British people soldiers were Indian uh there were also British non-commissioned officers it was pretty confusing like he got his commission through one and would end up in the other uh and honestly his record around this time is really weird because even though he was attached to a light infantry unit of the British army he was commissioned into the into the indian army which despite them being under the command of british people were two completely separate things so like he drew his

paycheck from the british army but never worked for them at least for a while then he transferred to the british army because he wanted to stay in india uh the indian army was being moved around a bit uh because he found a second side gig because remember, he's unattached. He doesn't actually have a job. His side gig was being a hunting guide for rich people. It's noted he enjoyed fighting tigers, which is

like we talked about. It's very much like a weird adventure British guy thing to do. Like, yes, I learned three languages fluently and learned how to spear fight a tiger. Yeah back in those days you could do that sort of thing nowadays all you can do is flights into international waters and combining ketamine with cocaine and now this this rich fail son has to go to abitha and do crimes they'll never be held accountable for yeah exactly exactly why are these flights are all to the british virgin

islands don't ask there's another second charter boat that goes somewhere else. It's not on the map. Yeah, North Sentinel Island. He's the reason that they rejected modernity. He also picked up a hell of a drinking problem, as most infantry people want to do. A fellow officer said, quote, he is not so gifted when it came to handling alcohol and was well known to getting into wild drunken fistfights in the mess with men whom he regarded as friends at the time, but whose existence he would be utterly oblivious to

in the following morning. Now, to make this seem even funnier, Digby isn't like this jacked lad, right? He is about six foot four and rail skinny. Like, he looks like he's a real Charles de Gaulle looking motherfucker. Yeah, there's a certain kind of British aristocrat that just has bird bones,

whether they're 5'4 or 6'8. Like they're just... Every now and again, whether it's some kind of ministerial appointment or something involving the House of Lords or some sort of cash for favors scandal in Britain, they'll have to post the photo of the malefactor involved and it's his official portrait from the House of Lords or whatever. And you look at that and you're sort

of like, that combination of facial features shouldn't exist. That looks like you took Matt Smith playing Prince Philip in The Crown and zapped him with a gun that shrinks features and also converts him to half troll for some reason. It is a very, very strange thing strange thing and i recognize and i'm saying this as someone who has a bit of you might call an unconventional combination of facial features it's still really really weird i see you've been titled time to hit you with the dna destroying ray that makes your facial bones melt you'll find that uh marrying first cousins for a thousand years has no problem. Anyway, oh god.

After recording an entire episode about Charles II, I have no want to talk about people and breeding ever again. Oh man, I can't wait to edit that one. God, that's such a strange story. The part where he exhumes his wife to look at her corpse and cry about it, he's just he's so weird anyway i'll let you continue now his time seemed even sweeter in india because world war ii started a couple years later and uh he just kind of sat

there in india leading rich people on trips to stab pigs with spears or occasionally shoot tigers he wouldn't leave service in india until 1942 when his brother john was killed during the second battle of l l amain and uh he requested a transfer to the parachute regiment noted psychopaths uh and he fit in great actually um now i don't know a lot about british paras other than uh don't they play a game where they have to box and not dodge being punched in the face yes i would say the paras and i'm not speaking from like super up close and personal experience here but everything that i've read heard etc encountered from speaking to people who are in the paras is that it's probably a closer analog to being in Ranger Regiment, but with the sort of culture of the absolute most intense

U.S. Marine Corps barracks. Imagine that level of just nonstop hazing and shit, but in a unit that's as hard to get into as it is to get into the Ranger Regiment in the U.S. Army. Oh, so it's a cult? It's not as easy as becoming a paratrooper in the US Army where it's just like, oh, you enlisted. If you can pass airborne school, which is not

really that hard, let's be honest, you are a paratrooper. It's way more selective than that. I would say their program to become a para is like going to rip if you're an enlisted ranger. Oh, okay. I don't know what it was like

in world war ii but i mean in the modern day it's it's far more like that and i think that culture more or less was there before and and obviously remains i uh uh see i did a speed run and i ended up in 82nd airborne without ever doing any kind of special school so suck it i mean i can't tell you our brigade was sent to Afghanistan and they were getting ready to deploy us or like post NTC, they were getting ready to deploy us. And we were still so undermanned. They're like, fuck it. They just diverted an entire basic training class that was supposed to go to Fort Hood to us. So like a third of our brigade wasn't airborne qualified. Yeah, that's pretty much what happened to me. Yeah, we were an airborne brigade.

But yeah, that's just how it goes. So I't really it's not like we were doing fucking combat jumps in afghanistan i know my unit wanted to but there was no reason of course they all want to in case you're wondering why if you're not a u.s army veteran you don't know why it's because you get an extra special sweet badge if you do a jump in combat that you can only get from doing a jump in combat. And so the US Army being the most badge hungry, flare wearing ass people in the entire Department of Defense really, really want the coveted badge. And it's not a badge you can get on the waitlist to go to a school for. You have to jump in combat. So yes, that's legitimately a thing. It's to get a mustard stain or a little combat star on your airborne wings. And it's not even like getting a cab or a CIB, know when we were

and was quite literally signing up for a school day but it was deployment and you would get one eventually yeah although hilariously my unit was part of the era where they clamped down on that you had to actually be in a combat action so i got my cib towards the end of the deployment i knew a lot of guys who didn't get theirs because they just weren't they weren't in in contact ever um and i mean the incident where i got in contact also was like the worst day of my life so yeah it's like sweet i got a fucking badge i get to celebrate that every december 11th it's like hey man you got a sick fucking badge oh yeah by the way they told you that it was a medical technicality why you couldn't medevac a child

who then died yeah it's uh sorry about the worst traumatic experience of your life here have a very small piece of plastic yeah i was gonna say sorry about the hope diamond of moral injury but here's this sweet fucking rifle in a box jesus christ um so at this point digby was actually the last kid in his family to make his way to the war. Despite the fact they'd been going on for years, his sister Kit, again, I'm sure that's a nickname. It's a very normal British nickname from what I understand. As Milo would say, in a posh family, the dogs have girls' names and the girls have dogs' names.

So his sister's name was probably Kit and their dog's name was probably Sally. Yeah, perfect. Yeah. And they had like eight dogs. All of them hunt foxes um exactly oh he's from durham i mean yeah that's premium fucking fox knots territory uh his sister kit had been awarded the french war cross uh which i translate into english so

nate doesn't make fun of me while serving in the hat you should say it you should say i'm not gonna do it you should say quite a gear joe i'm not gonna do it now while serving in the hat. No, you should say it, Joe. You should say it. I'm not going to do it. You should say quite a gear, Joe. I'm not going to do it. While serving in the Hatfield Spears Ambulance Unit of the Western Desert Campaign, which is almost like a non-profit charity that was started up and then deployed with the military. Hold up, hold up, hold up.

Here's the thing I'm going to say, though. I'm not saying any disrespect here. I absolutely see the contributions of women and men, non-binary people, as equal when it comes to serving in a dangerous situation. But this was obviously an era of extraordinary, rigidly enforced gender roles and norms sure and there was absolutely an expectation in those days sort of like what one does as a you know an infantry or a military officer as a as a male and so you're basically saying that like his sister saw combat before he did because he was just fucking chaining it up in in india pretty much yeah uh and i mean like this is the era of like i would make fun of him but that's even more british somehow honestly like i respect his hustle. This is the only part I'll say that about is if you can write up all of World War II while just across the border of the actual war and not actually have to do anything back.

Yeah, I was going to say, because Burma was a fucking hell on earth at that time. Right. I mean, it was absolutely insane. Yeah. It was horrible. So was Hong Kong, so was Singapore. Those are not that far, relatively speaking. And he was attached to a unit that actually left India, the Ox and Bucks light infantry unit that was pivoted away from India and up to war. And somehow he's just like, no, I'm going tos army liaison to minas air base in kyrgyzstan

except if it had like better weather and just like lots of opportunities for alcohol and sex less malaria i think uh but there's uh there's it seemed to be the one thing that finally motivated him to go was his brother dying um and i don't think that there's any like familial pressure of like you need to go to war now but like he didn't really he didn't really like write anything that he was oh no my brother died I have to go get vengeance or whatever but like that really does seem to be what happened on his own not to mention his sister made him look bad like getting a war cross yeah it's like if there's three kids well you know one brother and one sister,

and both of them have been in the shit for real, and you've just been like, yeah, I know how to make a really great gin and tonic. You're gonna have to face up to your lack of action at some point. Yeah, if he was 100 years before, someone would have given him a white feather at this point. Now, he went off to uh lincolnshire for training and he became known as an all-around

weird fucking guy uh shocker i know uh and this is remember he's an officer so he's surrounded around surrounded by people like him same upbringings and stuff even they thought he was weird um but everybody began to like him because he had an endless amount of stories about, remember, fighting tigers in India. And he endeared himself to other infantry and para-officers by getting way too drunk and getting in fistfights. At one point, he stole an American plane

and flew all of his company officers and friends to London for a party. Nobody's entirely sure where he learned how to fly. See, that was just the shit you could do back in those days i mean you know it's like yeah you you uh you also could be executed by firing squad but small detail you know i was gonna say you'll see that's that that's the freewheeling nature of the european theory of operations if you're eddie slovak you just get shot to prove a point if you're this guy you can steal a plane and people just be like oh good show old chap

yeah if eddie slovak was an officer who committed grand theft plane he would have been like give that man a victorious cross uh but unfortunately for eddie he was a poor motherfucker from detroit uh and he cut the wall uh now after training he he completed a paratrooper school and was made a company commander of a company second 2nd Parachute Battalion. And he quickly set himself apart from his peers, but not for being an overly great officer for anything or anything, but he had weird tendencies. He was a strange guy. We're talking just like eccentricity. We're talking some sex things what are we talking about

I'll say that definitely the first not the second that I've ever anything I don't think I can get sued by saying anything by his family I mean it's just very funny that it's not because this was such a common thing that the British we talked about this on Trash Future before Alice finds this particularly

funny but in I believe the 19th century the British as, as science existed in that day, hypothesized the existence of an affliction within certain boundaries of latitudes towards the tropics. They called the Sotatic Zone, which they believed the weather made you gay. Because this was particularly not just gay, but also that it made you attracted to much younger people. And while I'm not saying overtly being a pedophile, we're talking about some cringe age inappropriate relationship kind of stuff happening here. And some of this was to hypothesize, to explain the prevalence of, let's say, sexualized coming ofof-age rituals in indigenous societies.

But mostly, as I understand it, it was meant to explain why colonial administrators went abroad, went to the tropics, and then developed a reputation for noncing. And so literally, they described it as within these boundaries of latitude, you will get turned gay. So the fact that he didn't, that the harsh son of india did not convert him it's weird that they built the entirety of uh of buckingham palace on one of those zones um uh it's funny this it's weird how this this entire country is one big grooming gang but you know what that's a topic for another day uh i don't like i i didn't see anything nobody ever wrote anything weird about him and in regards his conduct in India like that.

Sexual proclivities and whatnot. Yeah. I mean, that's the thing, right? Like like either it's been scrubbed from history and he or he was discreet or it just wasn't. I mean, like I said, it's it was a thing. And I think more than anything else, like jokes aside, the reason why it happened was because more anything else was because there was this really disgusting notion that like, well, it wasn't a crime if you were victimizing people who weren't white and who weren't british citizens yeah i mean that's just their violence as well and that's what happens on

for example in native territories in alaska and america today like you know when you hear stories of you know uh non-native cops who go there and have a reputation in the village like oh yeah it's the cop who molests people like people that that that that that impunity is so tied up in a kind of colonial mindset and like yeah fair that the British the British biggest empire in history so I mean that

shit was happening and and there's plenty of plenty of evidence for it but I guess in this guy's case not not so much evidence in his case that that it would be it would make it into historical record i i think that's possible as well as because of what we'll talk about any weird any funny business would have been scrubbed because he is uh something of a national hero despite the fact i never gave him a victorious cross uh yeah yeah so is so is bernard montgomery who uh wrote

love letters to a 12 year old-old boy for some reason. What? I can't tell you why. Oh, my God. Yes. Subject matter for another episode, but Monty, there's some stuff going on there. Good thing that we're talking about Market Garden in this episode. Oh, fucking hell, yeah.

Monty's triumph. Yeah, that'll have to be a series unto its own at some point. But one of the weirdest things that Digby made his soldiers do was ignore radios because he simply didn't trust them. And your voice is kind of traveling that far. Naturally, that's devil work. You want to know what he came up with? So he was a bit of a history nerd. I think he majored in history in history in in college um like god nothing is worse than the fucking the historian in charge of military shit it was like we're just doing semaphore from a hot air balloon for some

reason bugles he did bugles uh specifically from a british army manual that dated back to waterloo i mean there's a part of it's like, okay, well, if it's uncrackable, then hell yeah. But at the same time, if it's super inconvenient, then you know, that's kind of dumb. I'll stay agnostic. Yeah. I mean, inconvenient to the extent I'll say this. He proves me wrong,

but it's inconvenient to the extent you suddenly have to teach a whole bunch of paras how to play the fucking bugle. Exactly. And the Germans certainly aren't going to know like their bugle calls or whatever that's very funny that we had wind talkers in the pacific theater and the british managed the same thing with esoteric horn noises it's because it's their indigenous language fair enough uh uh the digby was also notoriously forgetful and this is where uh one of the more famous things about him started um now there's a thing called challenge and passwords nate and i are familiar with it some of our listeners might be when you're approaching a friendly position

someone yells out a challenge and you give them the password so you don't get vented by a sleep deprived private with a gun. You probably still will in World War II but the whole point is if you're familiar with, you've watched Band of Brothers when they're always saying like flash thunder that the challenge is flash, the response or the password is

thunder. And the reason they picked that is because saying thunder is extremely challenging for German speakers and so they thought that that would give it away. A shibboleth, if you will, that they would mispronounce it. And thus, it would be obvious they were faking. We had challenging passwords in Afghanistan, and I actually forgot them on the regular. So when everybody would yell the challenge, I'd be like, shut the fuck up. They're like, oh, it's Kasabian.

Oh, man. Joe, I don't want to derail this episode, but I want to tell you a quick story. When I was in Afghanistan, I encountered challenge and password in a really dramatic way and came close to a very unpleasant end, except for a last minute intervention that may have saved my life or certainly saved me getting shot at, if not directly shot from 10 feet away by a PKM. And that was... We went to a checkpoint, not realizing the people we needed to get from the checkpoint had already been brought into a different base. And the guards freaked out when they saw silhouettes of people approaching and racked the PKM and screamed at us in Dari and said, what's the fucking password? What's

the fucking password? And my interpreters were trying to communicate with them and saying, we're friendly, we're American, we're Afghan. What are you doing? We're friendly. The guy kept saying, what's the fucking password and screaming at them. And he said, I'm going to count down 3, 2, 1. If you don't give me the password by the time I count 1, I'm firing. He goes, 3, 2. And I guess some of the way he said 2 was very obviously Uzbek. And one of the ANP that we had randomly brought with us from the checkpoint, we left the ANP checkpoint and the guy was like, hey, take some of my guys with me, with you. So you got A&P with you.

And one of them was Uzbek. And he immediately heard that and he started yammering at this guy in Uzbek. It was like, dude, what the fuck are you doing? And I guess the fact that he also spoke Uzbek, the guy was like, oh, oh, my bad. Sorry, guys. I'm like, yeah, yeah, big misunderstanding. But straight up had the weapon on fire, basically not quite at the high ready, but very close to it, thinking, ah, this shit's about to go down for real. I'm literally about to get in a firefight

with the friendly side because these guys are scared of the dark. And so yeah, challenging password. I can only imagine in World War II when you think about the sort of Pacific theater, people getting their throats cut in their foxholes or in the European theater where they're just randomly getting hit by fucking 155 rounds, how freaked out people were. So this was serious business. Sorry for the derail.

No, it was very serious. And thankfully for you, as someone who trained Afghan cops, you probably would have missed anyway. I don't know, man. That PKM was fucking close. That racking sound. You probably know this.

Some of our listeners who are veterans know this, that if you want to scare the fuck out of someone like me, the most thing you can do is make a metal racking sound and yell, Dreesh! That, oh my fucking God. How many times walking around a base is, Dreesh!

Like fucking just people screaming at you and you're like, I'm friendly. I can't even remember how to say friendly in uh in dari but like oh this is why i made really good friends with my interpreter just say dark weather scary violence lots and lots of hash and soviet weapons not a great combination it sounds like a fucking party as long as it's the right country um yeah now like i said digby is super forgetful he never remembered the password so rather than i don't know writing them down which i know you're not supposed to do either um and or i don't know

come up with some kind of bugle related call to get his way through he did what he became probably the most famous for he started carrying an umbrella now his big brain explanation for this while swinging a goddamn umbrella around the battlefield is nobody would bother to ask him a password because, quote, it would be quite obvious to anybody that a bloody fool carrying the umbrella could only be an Englishman. Sure. Fair enough. But now I'm just imagining like if there's any culture on this planet that would create a specialized unit for a really, really stupid purpose

just to own the British in one particular way, it would be the Germans. Yes, they have very specific guns that fire rain that is too heavy for the umbrella to stop. I should note that because he's carrying an umbrella, he can't carry a rifle, so he's only carrying an umbrella and a sidearm. Which, I guess

back in the day, there's still some old culture where an officer wouldn't need to carry a rifle, but most para-officers did. He did not. Now, the 2nd Battalion and specifically Digby's A Company was chosen to be the lead element

of one of the more botched allied operations in the entire Second World War, Operation Market Garden. Now, in a nutshell, it was one giant leap to bypass the Siegfried Line and end the war much earlier than if it wouldn't have succeeded, which some people say up to a year earlier,

and I don't really believe that. But, you know, they failed. We will eventually do an entire series on this operation that is for some reason still up for debate by old white men who probably watched the History Channel around the same time I did when I was a kid on whether this actually succeeded or not. Well, as they say in the dramatic climax of the most influential movie on the topic, it is simply just that bridge.

It's so far. Digby is in that movie, though they do not give him the name Digby Tatumwater. If you noticed in the background of that movie, and I believe he's played by Robert Duvall. There's something like that. There's a guy in a bowler hat with an umbrella. That's Digby.

Funny. Yeah, I don't recall, but I think Milo brought that up when we did an episode about A Bridge Too Far. Yes, That's Digby. Funny. Yeah, I don't recall, but I think Milo brought that up when we did an episode about A Bridge Too Far. Yeah, it's very funny. I guess having Robert Duvall play an English guy is no worse than having Gene Hackman play the Polish colonel. So I'm like, whatever. Outstanding. Yeah. Gene Hackman wits. I don't know, man. I'm down for any movie that just has Elliot Gould with a cigar in his mouth, nonstop, just running around and yelling.

Yeah, that's how I assume he just goes about his business. Now, anyone familiar with Market Garden probably knows what this means. Digby led his company and his battalion towards Arnhem Bridge with the goal of taking and holding it for what they thought might be 48 hours until an armored relief column could punch through and reinforce their position. until an armored relief column could punch through and reinforce their position on september 17th 1944 just before 3 p.m digby and his men parachuted into holland landing their designated troop zone kind of uh they ended up way too far away from the bridge around seven miles away um and uh now that doesn't sound super long to anybody who's just plotting things over a distance, but seven miles of fighting is way too long to secure a bridge. Now, the first part of the mission went according to plan that they were sticking to residential gardens and backyards rather than main streets to like sneak around the Germans, which somehow worked. I guess the Germans, the German military in the area was working on like Metal Gear Solid type enemy

like finding where enemies are they only can see in a specific cone and if you go around them, they can't see you. Now the company snuck past most of the opposition unharmed. There were some small firefights, but by the time they captured the northern end of the Arnhem Bridge at 8 p.m.,

things have gone shockingly well, at least as far as Market Garden goes, with one major flaw. None of the radios worked. Yeah, this is for a lot of different reasons, and the British were studying exactly why the radios failed all the way up until 2006 so um now i will go so i found an entire uh like radio nerd forum thing that went in depth of how

the radios actually failed and i will use that at a later time when we actually cover this in depth but long story short the radio put out uh too low of power to cover the distances they needed to use. The specific kind of radio was simply not powerful enough. And also, some of them had a really weird flaw where they would just eat through their battery three times faster than they should have. Oh, you mean ciphertext frequency hop? So even the radios that would work in the immediate vicinity didn't after like three hours. Now, the advance to take Arnhem was only really able to go forward

because Digby and his fucking bugles that worked. That's so funny. I mean, that's insane. But yeah, there you have it. It was a combination of Digby's Bugles and a system of runners because we had apparently jumped back in time about 100 years. Now, somehow a weird British man in 1944, armed with only a pistol, an umbrella, and a small corps of buglers

managed to lead a successful airborne assault across the fortified German position. Sure, history's stupid sometimes. Again, I don't know how. this man did not get a victorious cross yeah but it's weird because it's like you don't want the guy who insists on on using horns for propriety reasons to be correct that's the guy you don't want to see be right you're like no fuck that guy he shouldn't get to be right but in this case he he absolutely was like that's basically like uh no we're not we're not going to use the the tax sat we uh we need to use smoke signals and then like you know the a fucking meteor knocks the satellites out of the sky and it winds up working everyone's going to hate you if they're glad they

didn't die right like i i'm glad you thought of it but god damn it i'm not gonna give you the props uh especially because it's like thank thank you for leading us to victory of some source also fuck off nerd fucking horn nerd uh and there's a there's a like a specific kind of reason like you know you have fail saves and and stuff like that but his thing was like he just didn't trust radio so like if someone's like, what was your brilliant plan? Why did you think of using horns? I just don't trust technology. Oh, thank you, Captain

fucking Unabomber. Also, by this time, he did get promoted to major. Good for him. Now, they couldn't cross the bridge, however, because their path had been blocked by burning trucks and they began to get hit with mortar fire fired from the germans who managed to get their

shit together so instead of crossing it they hunkered down and waited for backup once again thinking the reinforcements in the form of an armored column would only be a short way away the british paratroopers are about to learn the fun flaws of a plan like market garden like say not having enough planes for all the paratroopers at once and planning an entire offensive around the use of one single road you know I guess in retrospect

I guess Monty was too busy writing to his 12 year old boyfriend um soon an army of children and unmotivated conscripts the british thought they would be fighting uh in arnhem revealed themselves to actually be a veteran ss unit who've been fighting since d-day and their commander field marshal walter modal a hardcore nazi and talented

defensive commander was stationed in the town of arnhem itself uh so whoops uh and this wasn't like the germans weren't like i have a feeling there's going to be an air airborne assault coming so we need to plan like they had just got there it was completely by chance um it was he was modal was in the middle of lunch when people said british people were raining from the sky so like he had no idea this is coming but the british were assuming they're uh coming up like against reserve units which they were there was like a reserve unit there and it would have been by itself if they would have hit like a week before um so as the ss began to attack the british positions at arnhem bridge digby launched into action and by action i mean

he somehow acquired a bowler hat from a nearby shop and was ordering men to uh like move ammunition around from one position to another using shopping carts okay um like people said that he was walking around this firefight which involved like a company's worth of tanks hundreds of of men, without ever seeking cover, while yelling at other people to get cover. Oh, while twirling his umbrella, by the way. It's not noted that he ever actually shot at anybody. I mean, there's an extent to which that's insane.

That's incredible. But also, it's just sort of like... We talked about this in The Falklands, somewhere like H. Jones, where it's just like they love these monumental acts of sort of conspicuous heroism or gallantry in the face of fire but in H Jones

his case he just got killed basically hand delivering a grenade into a bunker on East Falkland he was the battalion commander what the fuck is the battalion commander doing what exactly you gotta have a more important job as a battalion commander than being the guy to hit the foxhole.

But he's like, no, I will do this. And then he died. So, you know, once again, this kind of thing, like walking around with your umbrella, you know, cheering the men and whatnot. But like, if you get domed, then, well, they're kind of out there company commander. Occasionally your battalion commander,

like in their OER, it sounds like you, in fact, did suicide bomb and enemy machine gun position. Uh, we recommend you for posthumous promotion. Um, so at one point, and this happened quite a few times,

a Digby would notice someone stranded out in the open pin down by enemy fire. And he would just go out there and push them behind cover while walking. He never broke into a run like he just was calmly chilling um and one case you said this man was like six four two so it's also like he's not a small target if the germans just described decided to to adopt the chivalric code or if there was really bad shots it reminds me a lot of on Sword Beach, there was a bagpiper who came to shore playing the pipes.

And after the battle was over, the Germans were like, well, we didn't shoot him because we thought he lost his fucking mind. We thought he was insane. So we didn't shoot at him. And I think this might be the same thing. There's a man,

there's a gigantic skinny man in a bowler hat and umbrellas walking around the battlefield like don't shoot the crazy guy that's unsporting um exactly yeah uh but in one case is the battalion chaplain again named father egan uh and digby sprinted up to his aid and sheltered him by unfurling his umbrella and then guided him to safety uttering the words don't worry padre i've got an umbrella um in another situation a lieutenant named pat barnett rightfully questioned why in the fuck you'd be using an umbrella at a time like this digby replied oh my goodness pat what if it rains um i i think he legitimately may have lost

his mind because remember this is the first time Digby's ever been in combat. I think he may have just broken. Yeah, I mean there's a part of me that's like when you think about what the people who were in Market Garden experienced like there were you know there are plenty of other examples

of similarly awful conditions but it's still pretty atrocious given like what they had versus what they were up against. And I can see that happening. It would be like if you'd been the 356th People's Shoe Polish Regiment Command, fucking polishing boots to the rear in Vladivostok. And they're like hey uh we have a special mission for you can you go take a line command at stalingrad like you might have a bit of a change of venue and your mental health might reflect that so yeah man i mean that sucks yeah but it's funny it's also just like there's a part of me that thinks well it worked so it

adds to this mythos of the sort of British character, whereas I can imagine this going bad so many ways and people wouldn't remember. It'd just be that asshole who died when he got shot when he was carrying an umbrella. Right. Like 20 years from now, it's like, remember that fucking idiot who was carrying an umbrella that got domed? Yeah.

What was his name? I don't remember. I don't know. He sucked. But I mean, even if Digby had lost his mind, he wasn't like he didn't put himself out of the fight. He was wounded and didn't really seem to care. At one point, a Panzer column burst through British lines and Digby personally let a counter bayonet charge to push them back, which somehow worked. Still armed with only a pistol and an umbrella, he rushed up to a German armored car and jammed the umbrella through the driver's vision slit,

stabbing out his fucking eye and stopping them for long enough for paratroopers to swarm the armored car and shoot the people inside. But he also had a sidearm. Couldn't he have just put a gun through the same slit? Whatever. You know what? Listen.

Roll with it. Roll with it. If you know you got one in the bag, you're going for the umbrella kill like i'm gonna be the first motherfucker with confirmed armored kill with an umbrella um there it is yeah uh digby and his men held out for four days before they finally ran out of ammo at which point their radios decided to work in short bursts and learn that for the first time there was no relief coming. Uh, they were on their own. They were fucked.

So knowing that nobody was coming for them and they were surrounded, cut off and unable to retreat, he radioed quote out of ammunition, God save the King. And then he was captured. Uh, yeah. Um,

now Digby actually didn't want to surrender uh it was his battalion commander's decision uh because of course he didn't right he still had his umbrella now he had been wounded in the fighting specifically uh he caught shrapnel in his ass like forrest gump and uh the germans dropped him off at a hospital which was really not guarded i think this is more of like a gentlemanly thing because he was an officer because it was just like a local hospital under the care of local Dutch nurses and doctors. So, of course, he just jumped out of a nearby window and ran off into the Dutch countryside. He he met with an English speaking Dutch woman who hit him and eventually met the leader of the local Dutch resistance, Dirk Vildboer. Yes. Yes!

Who he joined forces with. At this point there was around 200 people that had been left behind after Market Garden had failed. Hiding in woods and basements and attics and stuff. Mostly being sheltered by the local Dutch population. And there was a lot of

horrible payback that the Germans exacted against the Dutch for celebrating when the Allies landed in Holland. It was pretty gross. I'm not going to go into it, but I didn't forget about that. Trust me, Dutch folks. So Digby went about trying to organize them

into guerrilla forces. His idea was like, well, we're in Holland. We might as well keep shooting Germans. But this was quickly abandoned because Dirk pointed out that if you started doing that, they would just take their anger out on Dutch people. You probably shouldn't do that. So the mission

quickly turned into an evacuation. But first, he'd have to find them all. And Dirk didn't know all these people, and these people probably wouldn't have trusted him. So Dirk forged Digby a Dutch identity card so he could get around. Now, this is a problem. Digby didn't speak Dutch or German, so they decided to get around this by simply noting in his identity card

that he was a deaf mute. So with this ironclad defense, he jumped on a bicycle and simply began riding around the Dutch countryside, picking up groups of soldiers and slowly getting them together at one point he was so dedicated to his cover story that while riding his

bike he saw a German staff car stuck in a ditch on the side of the road and he helped the soldiers get them out of it he also slept in the same house like a boarding house as German officers were staying in Jesus at no point did anybody apparently question him uh like because you know you're even if you are a deaf mute he didn't understand dutch or german either so like yeah fair enough so he sort of he sort of

could could play the game yeah eventually digby plan and coordinated the evacuation of around 150 to 200 soldiers in Operation Pegasus. Now, famously, this operation is shown in Band of Brothers as paratroopers of various nationalities silently ferry over Brits and a few poles across a narrow part of a nearby river via rubber dinghies. At one point, their escape route was only 500 meters from a german machine gun nest and somehow they simply did not see them a band of brothers makes this thing look like a whole lot hairier than it actually was uh they just kind of floated out in the middle of the night and the germans barely saw them at all uh there was an american unit on the other side of the river that started a firefight along the flank to draw the Germans away.

But there was only one casualty, and it was a guy who went missing. That was it. Oh, wow. Yeah. Now, like I said, somehow this guy did not get a victorious cross for any of this, but he did get a distinguished service order instead.

But Digby's time fighting wars was not over, though World War II was over for him. At the end of World War II, he found himself in the Palestinian mandate. Now, this is normally why I say he did something terrible, but he wasn't there that long because he fucking hated it. Not for any ethical reasons, mind you. He thought the hunting sucked.

Very, very posh English guy thing to think, but fair enough. So he went to where the hunting was great. Let me guess, someplace else in the British Empire where he could do atrocities. Nailed it. He went to Kenya. Oh, fuck God. It gets worse than you can imagine. Let me guess.

Let me guess. Were there probably some documents pertaining to his conduct against the Mau Mau that got dumped in the Indian Ocean? Oh, no, they weren't dumped at all. They're still celebrated by his family. Now, at this point, he was out of service. He purchased a huge track of land in Kenya. Like it's noted, it's two,

it's quoted as two massive plantations. I don't know the size of those, but the word plantation gives me unease. But then he was there as a colonial subject, free from the military when the Mau Mau Rebellion started. And if you thought that being a civilian would have kept him out of it, you were wrong. He purchased his own unit of mounted police made up of only local white farmers. And this is true. His local polo team,

which he was the captain of, uh, as one does like a normal person. Yeah. Uh, and the mounted police units of the, the British side of the Mau Mau rebellion did awful fucking things. Uh,

just, just terrible slash and burn shit. Uh, so Digby did all of that. Uh, it's not noted exactly what he did, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume that his private police unit

made up of local white people and polo players did not in fact follow the Geneva Conventions. Yeah, fair guess. Now, when he finally retired from doing war crimes, he settled down and created what is effectively the first modern tourist safari. Now, normally, rich people obviously would rent people like him to take him out onto land to shoot animals. But he had significantly more respect to animals and he did people. And he decided to create a safari that instead you took

pictures and this is a revolutionary idea and this is what he did um i guess after murdering a man with an umbrella and doing imperial war crimes in kenya he decided to take it easy on on animals which is you know that's something very very brit British. I don't know if you know this, but the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children came about much later than the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. And it actually came about sort of in disgust at the fact that it was so hard to get people to care about impoverished children suffering. But they were like, wait, a dog is sad?

And that's in the 19th century. This is eternally a problem in this country that it's far easier for people to raise money for charities for pets than it is for the millions of children who are malnourished in this country. I really wish I could say I was shocked, but I live in the United States. Yeah, exactly. The US was created on that model and just had more guns and racism. Right. Looking over at the British, like, we learned from you. Yeah.

It's a lot more hysterical, a lot more... Americans are hysterical about everything. British people are hysterical about the wrong things. If there's an actual crisis, they're all going to die. And they're like, oh, stop making a big deal. We'll just put the kettle on. But if it's something that doesn't matter at all, they lose their fucking minds. It's supposed to be this way. If you't like it get out yeah exactly don't like it

leave there's a door i get that all the time here and i'm just like i'm trying get the fuck out of here um now uh this is where he retired he stayed in kenya until his death in 1993 um but there's also like weird notes because obviously kenya eventually gets independence from the british and like the british consulate to kenya wrote like uh scathing letters to uh like the local um like ministry of police saying don't let anything bad happen to digby tatum mortar like upon independence like take care of the strange man at the umbrella that killed a bunch of people because like people were legitimately worried there was going to be a lot of vengeance going on. But he had police protection until the day he died. So that tells me he did some fucked up shit.

Yeah. Either that or Jomo Kenyatta was just a really big umbrella fan. Yeah, it's true. They got around. It's like being a watch guy. You end up in the orbit of other umbrella guys. And you just sit around and shoot the shit about specific brands of umbrellas fair enough um also mao mao rebellion is famously where edie amin cut his teeth doing horrible things the name of the british empire so

thanks england um now uh he did he died but not before carrying on his family traditions of marrying off his daughter belinda rose tatum wardar, to the Duke Friedrich von Oldenburg, the great-great-grandson of Friedrich August II. So yeah, they're still doing this shit. What I would say about this guy that is interesting to me is that this definitely, like we talked about in the very beginning, strikes me as more of the life trajectory of someone from that background 100 years prior or 150 years prior. So the fact that this was well into, you know, the middle of the 20th century and that he didn't die until 1993,

that makes him feel like, in a way, kind of last of a type, if you will. He really is. I mean, this guy is sitting on his gigantic imperial estate and independent kenya outbrowned when grunge was becoming popular yeah i was gonna say i mean like you and i you and i were alive when he was still kicking around kenya doing uh ethical things with animals and not so ethical things with other people right notionally apparently allegedly allegedly sue me warder estate i don't care. Please don't.

Yeah, sorry. I'm but a humble podcast producer. Please don't sue me with Britain's awful libel laws. Yeah, that is really all right. So you're fucked. We do a thing on this show called Questions from the Legion. And if you would like to ask us a question

from the Legion, donate to the show, slide into my DMs, send me an email, hit me up on discord attach it to a tip of umbrella and jam it into the vision slit of my tank and i will read it on air and this one is and i'm adding a caveat to this uh is what is the most disgusting thing you've ever drank and it has to be something you're meant to drink like i kept like oh i drank dip spit on

accident one time i added that second part because i know our listeners are want awful things sometimes yeah hmm do you have one that comes immediately to mind because i kind of do but it's it's more for we'll call it circumstantial reasons absolutely uh so as i think i alluded to on Britnology before over on the Trash Future feed my first job was working on McDonald's and one of the things that me and other people did after we smoked entirely too much weed in the freezer was drink the syrup that came from like a bag of Pepsi

Pepsi heavy I guess we could call it uh it was awful i got sick uh because you're drinking like i don't know a two liter of pepsi in a mouthful um yeah don't do that just don't drink don't drink pepsi heavy oh god all right so i'll tell you i was like 15 when i was in korea a friend of mine from home, she's a Malay Cantonese speaker. She was visiting some friends and she and her friends, she'd been traveling around a bit. So she was home in Malaysia and then in Hong Kong and then in Taiwan and then in Korea. And so we went out and got the sort of Korean equivalent of sashimi.

But I think wherever our fish got butchered, like hadn't been sanitized because everyone in our dining party got sick from the food, like really, really sick. But the sickness didn't hit immediately. And my friend had gotten me a gift in Taiwan of... It's a kind of baijiu, if you're familiar with that. It's sorghum liquor. It's traditional Chinese liquor. It's very, very strong flavor. I think the Taiwanese version is called Kaoliang or something like that, but I can't tell you off the top of my head. And anyway, so I'd come home the next day and the sickness hadn't hit yet. And so I was like, fuck it, I'll try this liquor that she gave me. And I had a little bit. I was like, oh, it's a pretty weird flavor. And I had some more like, oh, it's a pretty weird flavor.

I'm a little bit drunk now. It's still pretty weird. But then the sickness did hit. And so the best way I could describe it is imagine having the worst food poisoning you've ever had in your life, but the constant flavor in the back of your throat, in your mouth, et cetera, burping up, whatever, what have you, is like the strongest, grossest, weirdest alcohol you've ever had in your life, which is baijiu. And yeah, I... Oh, God. It's just... I mean, no disrespect to Chinese liquor distillers and all, but it just was a combination of circumstances that I never want to repeat ever again. Oh, yeah. I mean, I've drank some, I guess you could say, traditional Armenian moonshine off the side of the road and it just tastes like chemistry. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Something like that. It's harsh more than anything else. It's not as weird of a flavor. Yeah, it just burns all the way to the back of your eyes, but you can't be like, no, I don't like this. No, I won't have this. Like I said, in Korea, they make soju. In Japan, they make sho shochu which is sort of like like imagine sake but stronger and I've had sake like shochu that's been infused with all sorts of

weird things like ginseng shochu aloe vera shochu etc etc and like none of that that was always a little bit intense but it wasn't gross it was just weird and I'm pretty I'm pretty open-minded about weird foods like I love durian. I've had natto in Japan. I thought it was fine. I suppose the weirdest food for me was always... My mom tried to make escargot at home once when we lived in Germany and the smell made me deeply ill. Without even eating it, just the smell made me deeply ill for days after it was so bad. But I'm pretty, pretty good on weird foods, honestly. If you put me in the Philippines and you're like, you have to eat Balut, you can have anything else from Filipino

cuisine, I'd eat Balut, fine. But man, there's something about the combination of a really strong weird flavor and then also already being sick that will make it haunt your dreams for the rest of your life. So definitely, if you're going to have baijiu or some kind of form of it, dreams for the rest of your life. So definitely, if you're going to have phyjo or some kind of form of it, definitely make sure you eat something normal that you're used to before that is not going to give you E. coli or whatever. Yeah. Make sure you eat the fermented bean sprouts and just completely fuck your insides out. Exactly. Just plow through that. As much fiber as possible. Just grind off the inside of your intestines. Scorched earth on your insides. Nate, thank you for joining me. You can use this opportunity to

plug all of your various podcasts, which are part of your extended universe. My extended universe. Yeah. Like I said, I'm a little bit... I'm uncertain on whether I want to embrace that term, but I am... Embraced it for you. Yeah, exactly. First and foremost, the co-host and producer of What a Hell of a Way to Die, which is a podcast about military veterans news culture from a left-wing anti-war perspective with myself and Francis. I'm also the producer and co-host of Trash Future, a podcast about the tech industry and its serene morons and a lot of the financial crimes and general

malfeasance going on in the world today, and also British politics. As you know, I am the producer of this, The Lions Led by Donkeys podcast, and I'm now my first time appearance, but hundreds, if not thousands of episodes of listening in the past. I also produce a show called Kill James Bond, which is an anti-James Bond comedy slash film review podcast featuring Alice Caldwell Kelly, Abigail Thorne, and Devin, all very, very funny British people who present a unique perspective on the Bond franchise. And finally, I am the producer or co-producer with Milo Edwards of The Bottleman, which is Riley from Trash Futures Canadian politics and culture podcast, which is basically what if Canada land actually got to the problems at the heart of Canada, which as they have defined it is actually not a country, but rather three oil companies in a trench coat.

So if any of those shows are interesting to you, if you go to my Twitter, which is at In These Deserts, you can find links to the Twitter profiles of each of those shows are interesting to you. If you go to my Twitter, which is at InTheseDeserts, you can find links to the Twitter profiles of each of those shows. So please do check them out. And if they sound super interesting to you and you just desperately, desperately need to hear more of them and or me, just bear in mind that they all have Patreons. You can get bonus content, as does this show, which has a great Patreon and a bunch of benefits you should sign up for because it lets

Joe do the immense amount of work that he does to research each episode that we greatly appreciate. Thank you, Nate. And check out all of those shows. Thank you for supporting this one. Buy my books. And I'm not good at selling myself. And until next time, buy umbrellas and sharpen the tips, I guess. Exactly. You never know when you'll need it, especially if you're British. In the flatlands of Holland there's a game that we play And when they're down at the hog flats then you know it's match day It's all over the East Indies and it's down in Harlem streets And they're breaking out the polish but

it's not for their cleats put down your work gloves and pick up your glove stand on the home honk it's time to

fall in love honk ball hoof de classer on my Honk, it's time to fall in love Honk, ball, hoof, de klasse On my radio tonight I hear the team announcements And I know the time is right And I know I mustn't say it Though I feel it in the air. A home run for Rotterdam's Dirk van Bier.