Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 200 - The Polar Bear Expedition Part 3: Go Chop Down the Poop Tree

Episode Date: March 21, 2022

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Hey everybody, Joe here from the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. If you enjoy what we do here on the show and you think it's worth your hard-earned money, you can support the show via Patreon. Just a $1 donation gets you access to bonus episodes, our Discord, and regular episodes before everybody else. If you donate at an elevated level, you get even more bonus content. A digital copy of my book, The Hooligans of Kandahar, and a sticker from our Teespring store. Our show will always be ad-free and is totally supporter-driven. We use that money to pay our bills, buy research materials that make this show possible, and support charities

like the Kurdish Red Crescent, the Flint Water Fund, and the Halo Trust. Consider joining the Legion of the Old Crow Led by Duckies podcast. I'm Joe and with me again for the last three weeks now, Francis. Hello, Francis. Hey, Joe. Very excited to hear more about your alma mater, the Detroit's own, the brave men fighting Bolsheviks for some reason.

Even that they aren't sure of. You know, you've explained to me that the whole idea is to open up the Eastern Front again so that the war isn't as hard for everybody else. But like there's really seems like, hey, we're going to get a bunch of guys from Detroit to go around and just start hitting rocks with sticks until a rock hits them back. And then World War One is going to go better for us somehow. Oh, don't worry. World War One ends eventually.

And these guys don't leave. Why would they? I mean, they're they're already acclimated why go back to sunny warm sunny detroit when they're uh ready to go they're in the arctic circle and in case anybody's wondering if i sound bad today because francis has already uh made it aware that i sound like shit i might have covid uh so might might you could also just have a cold normal normal diseases still exist. Yeah. I mean, honestly, it's been, what, almost three years now? Over three years? I don't remember.

I love it. I don't get sick at all. Like I told you, I got a cold a couple months ago. But I have a child and children are disgusting. Even though we homeschool her and everything like, you know, they still I used to be sick like every two months. I would always just have a head cold of some kind. Right. It hasn't happened now. It's it's it's pretty great. I'm all about mass mandates forever and nobody ever touching me again. I mean, I wear a mask whenever I'm in like crowded places, indoor places.

But mask wearing is not mandated here uh in armenia whatsoever i believe the maybe 20 of the population is vaccinated and maybe it's like up to 25 percent uh now is it hard to get a vaccination there or is it just anybody can walk in and get one it's 100 free you just walk in and get what nobody wants one um they don't want the bill gates microchip i get it oh no they don't want the bill gates or putin i get it oh no they don't want the bill gates or putin microchip because we also have sputnik here uh like there's there's uh the chinese vaccine the russian vaccine the american vaccines you could literally pick from any of them though to be fair most people get pfizer moderna johnson and johnson because sputnik and i think sinovac

um i don't think the EU accepts them because they don't exactly work all that great. Can you just bang them all into your arm and it's becoming a living god as you just get more and more vaccines. Bringing it back to Russia, there's a guy named

I think his name is Vladimir Zhirinovsky who's this incredibly weird psycho right-wing politician who's a huge ally of Putin, who claims he's had like 11 doses of the vaccine. So I'm willing to bet that he's been just like kind of... He got like a sampler platter of all of them. A short-shootery board of vaccines. Yeah.

Like when you go to a draft house and you get a flight, he got a flight of vaccines. Sure. I mean, I'm vaccinated, I'm boosted, and it doesn't really matter. But somehow I've managed to not get COVID this entire time. So if I get it now, what I truly hope I don't get hospitalized because hospital care is kind of hit and miss. But, you know, it's of course it would happen eventually but on the bright side francis i uh i do have a new energy drink which has turned into something of a bit during the series oh boy um this one is uh it's it says it's swiss but everything's in russian so i'm gonna say it's like a swiss company that operates in in russia but it's called aeon and this flavor is black power

well it is february so so aeon like a-e-o-n aeon flux aeon um it's e-o-n i'm assuming they're going yeah i don't know let's see what it tastes like. Does it taste like Freedom of the People? It tastes exactly like the one from last week. As someone burped Red Bull into your face. It's also barely carbonated. It's unpleasant.

Well, the unfortunateness of this uh swiss company really dropping the ball here in uh during black history month is noted but also um you're in an area that i that probably like i don't what are they going for there because it's not it's not like a you know black lives matter kind of thing is it just like the power of it would be very funny if that is what they're going for well for one i should point out russia is incredibly racist towards black people so it's probably not what they're going for our media doesn't exactly have a huge population of mixed race folks but i'm going to assume this is not imported as a as a blm thing uh i think so i think most people can't even read this can first off um like english isn't widely spoken here um and even if it was uh like latin

letters uh is not what our alphabet looks like so people don't know you got squiggly ghost letters it's like if someone made an entire alphabet made out of u's Like, so people don't know what the fuck this thing says. You got squiggly ghost letters. It's like if someone made an entire alphabet made out of U's. Somebody got really high and was just staring at like a bonfire and was just like, what if our language looked like this? Just wavy flames. That way the fire is always talking to you. I'm going to say Aeon is second place. It's better than the Bang Free from last week.

But Tonus is still somehow the best, mostly because of the name. I can't imagine that we're going off of flavor. We're going to have to go off of the art design work and the horrible translations. The art kind of just looks like a Trapper Keeper. You got a Lisa Frank drink there? Yeah. I did see another one at the store that was Lamborghini flavored. I might have to check that one out next time. You're going to have an energy drink that's called Rolling Coal.

Hell yeah. So, Francis, when we left you last week, the Bolshevik leadership finally realized that having a group of allied soldiers randomly stomping around in the north of their country was kind of a bad thing. While also winter finally began to set in, which is I have to say, I'm pretty annoyed whenever anybody, not by the concept of winter, but when everybody's like, you never invade Russia in the winter. Do people think that people have russia in the winter do people think that people have invaded russia in the winter like and not that they got stuck there and then winter happened right like we have this thing where like every every 365 days you know that we we have a bunch of changes and in the weather and different and i mean like if you're invading la that's fine because it's always nice there but uh russia i mean there's a reason why big furry russian hats

are like the thing i like the russian thing big furry hats and big cold coats and drinking vodka because fucking cold and miserable like everybody's aware of that and like when you invade russia everybody assumes you'll be done before winter starts it's not that like time to invade in february like that's so what happens guys i mean february might be a smart way to do it because then you're going into spring it's like you know playing the old oregon trail you always start like kind of in march or april and hope that a blizzard doesn't hit you i don't know starting in winter sounds like a really bad idea why not start uh i don't know march or april or better yet don't invade people at all just don't invade russia

in the winter or the spring or the summer or the fall just leave them alone the russians don't want it unless you're napoleon no motherfucker deserved it czar ass little bitch anyway now finally winter clothing reached the soldiers just in time as the white sea froze making everybody keenly aware that should anything go sideways evacuation was now completely impossible the days shortened as the sun barely

came up for a few hours a day because remember they're in the polar north days shortened incredibly. And soldiers were forced to construct an ice road in order to stay supplied via sleighs. The real concern came to trying to survive the insane polar winter rather than the Red soldiers. In the meantime, General Poole,

if you remember, he's the British psycho in charge of this entire mess, had finally pissed off enough allied governments. And by that, literally every ministry and department of state fucking hated him to include his own in Britain. And he got fired. Now, despite all this being his plan, meaning that it was now completely untenable

with the only guy who actually believed this shit would work now being fired, it was given to a british general edmund ironsides which despite him being both british and a general officer is a fucking sweet name the problem is when you have like a good plan or a bad plan rather definitely not a good plan there's been a good plan yet yeah there's not been any good plan since the start of the war i would imagine i don't know i think the the best plan that's happened so far is the guy who shit vomited and died the best plan is just dying without uh just like shit this sucks i'm just gonna die i'm just gonna lay down here

guys and die i'll see y'all in the next life where the rest of y'all are being cold and vomiting your asses off but remember that like the plan has already been kind of started there's far-flung outposts everywhere there's really nothing ironside can do to fix this situation even if he was a good officer and and francis let me tell you he was not um but i have gathered yeah um, but he was at least realistic, unlike Poole, who was a fucking idiot. Poole had constantly talked about the day where hundreds of thousands of reinforcements

would suddenly show up from the Western Front and support the efforts in Northern Russia. He truly believed this was going to be another full front of World War I. Let me rephrase that. Unless you were the Japanese, that did occur. But again, we're not talking about that side of this expedition. That's for a different time. We'll get to the other side of Russia later. vast distances supply trains had to travel just to get food and water to various little outposts that he realized if he was ever going to like have to withdraw tactically or otherwise,

he was going to like have to leave these people to die because there's no way to get to them. I can't imagine that's a thing that would ever stop any of these people at this point. Like some of your people might die. Like, uh-huh. And? That is a price I'm willing to pay. I will say it seems like Ironside at least realized at a tactical perspective how bad that was. Because he didn't have a ton of people. Like, it's not like the Western Front where it's like, well, just fed a division to a woodchipper. I'll get another one tomorrow.

Like, he has like 6,000 people. And that's it. Like, if he wastes them them all then he won't have fuck all left so he's kind of got to um not do the normal uh officer thing of of 1919 and hemorrhage an entire fucking brigade every time he sneezes send wave after wave at the murderous kill bots until they reach their limit and shut down that's right um now he also saw the soldiers mentally and physically falling apart at the seams the british and physically falling apart at the seams. The British and the French more than anyone else. Now, this wasn't because they were worse soldiers, but it was simply because they had fucking seen enough.

They were war veterans. They had come from the Western Front. The French had fought at Verdun. They're like, you know what? I've been through a lot of bullshit, but this is one step too far. God damn it. At least Verdun was warm i would imagine warmer if you're stretching really hard for an upside of verdun it was in fact warmer than this

comparatively yes the other you know better stretch of it would be like could i die faster at verdun so i don't suffer as much absolutely Oh, absolutely. Yeah. There we go. You would have been dead by now. Rather than, yeah, rather than march around the Arctic Circle getting shot at by Bolsheviks and, you know, shitting myself to death, I could just get hit by a bomb and die. And that would be much faster and easier for me. Yeah, I don't have to, like, get frostbite or get attacked by wolves or whatever. At Verdun, I just have to stand there long enough for an artillery round to turn me into blood, shit, and piss. Oh my god, they got attacked by wolves? Oh yeah, we're getting there. Oh boy.

Oh boy. The fucking... This is gonna turn into the gray. Alright, let's go. Officer Liam Neeson here. Somehow this is not the first time that we've talked about people getting attacked by wolves. It happens so often. Hey, if you're gonna be out traipsing around in wolf territory like i mean this is a hundred years ago and i'm sure that you know currently it's not any more you know modernized or you know

it's it's probably better than it was back then i bet there's still a lot of fucking wolves and if your dumb ass is going to be wandering around tired half you know fall your entire body is falling apart because it's like you've had seven different diseases going on a wolf's going to eat your ass wolves can smell your weakness wolves are into some kinky shit they're all alphas and you're the you're the beta bitch the wolves stalking through the fucking woods like i meet that motherfucker's ass um like for instance there's a there's a lot of wolves here uh like one of my friends is in the the armenian military and they were telling me that when they go on ruck marches like they don't

go on you know in the u.s we generally ruck march on roads they don't uh and when they go off into the woods there's someone in every formation that has an AK in case a wolf shows up. Wait, what are the rest of them got? Nothing. You have nothing. You fist fight that fucking wolf. I guess if, you know, our guys, when they do that, there's not a lot of wolves that might, you know, jump out at you on Fort Bragg. So nobody needs to bring an AK. I mean, that makes more sense to go march in the woods and not

on the hardball somewhere, because I'm sure you didn't do a whole lot of marching on hardball when you were in Afghanistan. Not really. Yeah, they don't do that. It's like the one thing I've heard about the Armenian military. It's like, wow, that's actually a pretty good idea. Training

like you fight. Weird. Now, the Royal Scots, which is a unit in the british military uh for instance had a majority of men within its ranks that had been wounded uh while fighting in the western front and most of them uh when told that they were going to russia remember to guard supplies figure that this is going to be a fucking cakewalk and they were like hell yeah bro let's do this um but you know of, that didn't happen. They found themselves again in a war. And this is even worse because remember, they thought they were kind of going on vacation on like a cake guarding duty.

And when they found themselves under attack by the bolos, they simply like, yep, fuck this. And they ran away. Yeah. I mean, their job wasn't there to do. I showed up. There's nothing here. I'm going home. wasn't there to do. I showed up. There's nothing here. I'm going home. Fuck off.

Even better, they threw down their rifles and equipment. And when an officer asked them, like, why would you do that? A soldier stated, quote, they prevented me from running away faster. So if I could get rid of the pants to make me go faster, I would. Now, this is also when rumors began to spread to northern Russia from the Western Front. Because remember, there's ships going back and forth, like soldiers working on the docks catch rumors from time to time. There's newspapers, like wire communications exist. Communication is obviously much slower, but it's you know the 1800s where if the war ended

in europe they wouldn't find out russia for like six months or whatever they were starting to hear rumors that the western front might be closing people are talking about peace and shit uh so the french soldiers upon hearing this told their officers if there's peace in europe they had no intention on fighting anymore. No. Yeah. The Bolsheviks aren't going to come fuck up Paris. They don't give a shit. They got their own civil war going on. So, yeah, fuck off.

Go home. Yeah, they're going to be sidelined for a couple of years, folks. And if there's one thing anybody knows about French soldiers in World War I, when they say they're done fighting, they fucking mean it. Well, like, as you said, they went through a lot. Those guys have been through some things like the idea of like, you know, back then it really felt like, look, you're drafted into the war and you're here until you're dead or it's over, which obviously would not work out for things, you know, today with our 20 year ass wars. But on the bright side, congrats to everyone on their new retirement. Everybody's getting out.'s gonna be great i buy it i mean the french should go home they can't see into the future they don't know uh how things are gonna get you know in in the next you know 20 25 years but let's go home go uh smoke some

cigarettes and have a baguette and impregnate some people or something whatever the french do i've been racist towards armenia enough i need to find another country to do it towards so we'll do the french which isn't cool i keep telling you that we're actually not white but you just keep going for it now uh i i will say that the french are not alone in this uh and it would spread but we'll get there eventually before you jump into this though i i do have another question. Because you talk about desertion, you talk about how they're just like, fuck this, I'm out of here. They're in the Arctic Circle, though. So where does one go? They're not deserting. Platoons, companies, whatever. They're just like, no. And then they just sit down. Like, fucking make me. Yeah, fair enough we'll talk about a little more later on but there's this uh phenomena that occurs that like it's just not incredibly funny within the ranks where everyone

kind of comes to the conclusion like wait a bit officers can actually make us do anything if we don't want to there's like not a court martial system out here in the middle of fucking russia so yeah look at that the enlisted folks are forming a union well i mean there's a reason why the french military shot so many people during world war one because the officers can make your ass do something if you don't want to do a bitch you're right we cannot in fact make you work however if you don't we'll put you against the wall i'm not going to continue feeding you if you're not going to do that. And so you can either starve to death or I can shoot you one way or the other.

Yeah. Then like the 15th Regiment of Piers is just like, you know what? I've changed my mind. The Western front sounds lovely. Now, Ironside saw this as a problem. He realized that he wasn't really going to be able to control the French because the French officers are like, what the fuck do you want us to do? We can't shoot them. We only have so many people here. We can't start gutting our own people down. So he went to the local government, which is, remember, headed by the guy Tchaikovsky,

the cult leader. And Ironside pointed out that one of the things that he and former Commanding General Poole agreed on is that tchaikovsky would form his own army and you know recruitment wasn't going so well he had a few volunteers but you know people didn't really want to deal with this bullshit and ironside was like okay why don't you try drafting people and tchaikovsky shot down that idea saying it was quote undemocratic which yeah true nailed it you nailed it Now, at that, Ironside realized he was kind of fucked, and he was moving slowly, as was everybody else,

because they assumed that the Bolsheviks were also in as bad of a position as they were. It's cold. It's miserable. How are they possibly going to attack us right now? We have time. Simply trying to survive the winter as temperatures dropped below zero and snow began to pile up to these soldiers' thighs. But the Bolsheviks were

actually totally comfortable with this, or at least their officers were. And they were recruiting, training, and deploying, getting ready for a winter campaign. Now, while their enemies were doing that, Ironside accepted Poole had waited too long to pull the various troops back for the winter at all of these far-flung outposts that we had talked about and instead ordered them to stay in place and reinforce their outposts because this is their only option at this point and the fallback position would be at the end of winter of course because you're not exactly building a whole lot when it's like negative fucking 30 out he was going to build a concentrated defensive line 18 miles away from Archangel.

It's kind of like an encircle. Well, they don't have a circle because the ocean's right there. But like, you know, an actual reinforceable, resupplyable defensive line, not all these random outposts in the middle of nowhere. It would be much easier to defend. And it's what any decent officer in the situation would have done in the first place. Unfortunately for everybody, their officer was Poole, who was a fucking idiot. For now, however, it was impossible for allies to move back or forward, and each unit being left to defend their various little version of Fort Apache in the middle of fucking nowhere.

So you can tell this is going to go great. It's going to be fantastic. Everybody's going to come out perfectly fine at the end. Now, trapped in their winter hell, American soldiers, along the british and the french and whoever else that was out there began hearing the political officers of the revolution just across the way yelling out to them quote americans why are you fighting us we're all working men you american boys are shedding your blood way up here in russia and i ask you for what reason my friends and comrades you should go back home you have no war with us.

The co-workers of the world, which I think that might be a typo or mistranslation. It's funny hearing the co-workers of the world. The co-workers of the world are uniting in opposition to capitalism. Why are you being kept here? Can you answer that question? Now, if you're in case you're Americans in the normal thing, like suck my dick or whatever, which is like what any American soldier would do at this point, they've been so broken down that despite the fact that to be completely clear here, these guys had no fucking idea what like communism and socialism was like, they're just like farm kids, city kids, like they have no ideological mindset in any way. They just know some guy's yelling at them in the middle of the night. And Harriet Costello, one of the American soldiers, said that this would go on for about 20 minutes at a time. And he had to admit he could not answer the man because he had no idea why he was there. Just a bunch of Bolsheviks yelling, you should read some theory.

I'll toss some books over to you. Just start with the Communist Manifesto and we'll work our way up from there. Harry, get the rifle. Comrades, I have some theory for you. And he tosses Harry Potter over. This kind of stalemate where they would yell back and forth.

In some cases, the Americans had learned a couple of, uh, swear words. They'd yell them back. The Russians generally would do the same thing. Um, there wasn't that many of them that knew English, just like,

as this might surprise you, how many of these guys knew Russian? It's wild. A bunch of guys from Detroit. There was a lot of, uh, like polls, uh,

and like Eastern Europeans had immigrated to Michigan. And those guys actually spoke Russian and would yell back and forth. So this area became known as the Kaddish Front and is kind of a stalemate, but offensive still went on. Ironside was desperate to capture the Bolshevik base at Plisetskaya. Sorry, Russian town that probably isn't named that anymore.

At Plisetskaya, it was something of like a logistics and material base for the Polos in the area. The Americans would have to capture it if they ever wanted to move on to Volgogda. Or Vologda? I don't know. Sorry, guys. My Russian

is great, by the way. But the Russians had burned the bridge that crossed the river. The town was split in half with the river cutting in the middle of it. So this left soldiers to try to paddle across on burning pieces of bridge and down timber, as well as the occasionally badly made raft to try to get to the other side. As you can guess, this is not a good way to launch a military attack, and it was called off with americans digging in on their side in an area that can only be described as a marsh with water up to their knees remember it's

winter yeah it's now sleeting and below zero uh and they're up to their knees in water in case you're wondering if you could make a checklist a dying of exposure this is it nothing like that below zero but still liquid water that's like that's a hateful water right there it's like it's now i need to be like negative temperature for me to freeze i'm i'm bog water you will you will slosh through me and die the marsh exists only to hate you now a ferry system was eventually worked out between the two sides to get people uh like across the area, supplies, water, food, things like that. So you didn't have to slog your way through it. But in the winter,

at least early winter, in some parts of Russia, you get an incredibly thick fog that descends down on places. And that had happened. And this led to a very interesting situation where both the Russians and the Americans had ferries trying to get across the river. And they would just bump into one another because they couldn't see more than like a foot in front of themselves. Oops, sorry, comrade. Would they just start fighting or they'd be like, oh, shit. Sorry. Sorry.

Sorry. They're Midwesterners. So I imagine it's a lot of oops. Oops. Let me squeeze by you there. Didn't see you there. Oop. Now, it was only after killing one another over a tiny village for two weeks did the Americans succeed in taking it.

Men were excited because they were out of the elements. They had captured a village and they would actually be able to sleep indoors. There was rooms. This is what you call a low bar in your existence. Now, I need to point out here that these Russian peasant houses are horrible. Russian peasants were, at the time, destitutely poor in these areas. These are houses slapped together. The bathrooms are inside.

No, there's no plumbing, in case you're about to ask that. You effectively shit on the floor because it was too cold. Livestock would live inside as well. They were not the nicest houses. It's not a comfortable situation there. I will still say it's better than sleeping outside in the polar winter. I mean, comparatively, yes. Low bars all around.

Yeah, for me, who likes my little white noise and uh my my my squeeze and pillow you know not not ideal for me i'm so i'm too old for that nonsense my back hurts too much the good news is there's probably plenty of white noise is like the men around you moan as they're dying of the spanish flu i need bleeding sheep and the sounds of the dying to fall asleep even better than that is the russians are like the bolos who knew that they were pulling out because it's not like they were defeated and killed in space like they normally did they engage with their uh with the americans before like all right time to pull back and when they knew they were pulling back they shit all over the floors because they knew i mean so being soldiers like they're

gonna sleep here this will be hilarious they just started shitting on everything these guys have had dealt with horse poop their own poop now bolshevik poop there's a lot of poop going on just poop all around a lot of poop now after uh this ironside officially ordered all forward movement should end for the winter. However, the Russians definitely didn't have the same idea. Apparently sensing this shift from offensive to defensive, the Russians upped their patrolling and constantly shelled American positions. Raids were common as the Americans were strung out over long distances with really no good way to communicate or support one another. The cottage front began to get pressured. Soldiers were hit and began withdrawing back towards the Amsta River, across which the American engineers had built a new bridge,

only to realize that the Russians were aiming to encircle them and cut them off from their escape route. During this, several outposts were surrounded and cut off as the Russians sent fresh soldiers forward to try to dislodge them only to run into machine guns which was the one thing that the americans seemingly did not have a shortage of after the machine guns broke the russian attack for a week under the cover of night the outpost simply pulled back slipping away across the imps of the river but like hitting them with the uno reverse card because the russians have been doing that to them the entire fucking time it was at this point in mid-october that French soldiers of the Allied side straight up went on strike, which is fucking rad. They're discovering their own theories, like rather than rather than having to be like, wow, you know, the officers really are the petite bourgeoisie and we need those like, no, it's like, fuck this.

Fuck you guys. I'm not going. That's my theory is fuck all y'all. like no it's like fuck this fuck you guys i'm not going that's my theory is fuck all y'all and a lot of it is based on remember these guys are all veterans and they're the rumors of peace in europe they're not exactly rumors anymore yeah the war's over what are you doing like it's getting close to being over like facing the total collapse of the german army in france eric lundorf and paul von hindenburg demanded the new chancellor prince max of baden to extend the old olive branch to the allies the war would last another five

weeks as the details were hammered out but for the french soldiers in northern russia hearing that meant this shit was as good as over not only were they asking the question every other soldier was asking of what the fuck are we doing with russia people other soldier was asking of what the fuck are we doing with russia people are starting to ask of when the fuck are we gonna leave are we leaving when the shit's over the answer turns out to both of those things i don't know and no i don't know shut up things between french soldiers were strictly forbidden as soldiers were forced to stand by themselves and groups of three were broken up by force by their officers and while a wider mutiny

didn't happen they would hardly be the last unit who decided they had enough of this shit morale was tanking mostly from the horrible fucking living conditions if you didn't notice from the literal houses of shit but also because the soldiers hated their American made Mosin Nagant

rifles like the americans had trained in the lee and failed and had given the nagant which had been manufactured to count russian paces like i said not yards so on top of the living conditions being terrible the americans constantly made jokes about the like we can't even fucking defend ourselves, right? We can't shoot these fucking things. And then on November 11th, 1918, World War I ended. At least everywhere not named Russia. I mean, was Russia really even involved in World War I at this point? They had their own thing going. Only in the north and Vladivostok.

Yeah, only these assholes. The Allied mission to Russia was 100% a part of World War I, just not Japan's. Japan was expansionary, but everybody else, at least on the surface, was because of World War I. Now, depending on which part of the British government, especially Churchill, who believed that, okay, war's over, but now we have to kill communists. As you do. Surprisingly, that was not a popular line of thought. People didn't care quite yet.

And soldiers knew something was up as Russian patrols egged them on and civilians were seen building bomb shelters. So, like, what do they know that we don't? It's like when you turn the corner in the small Afghan village, you're like, what happened to all the people? Why are they all not here anymore? I don't want to walk down that street, as it turns out. Yeah, it's 10 a.m. and this town is abandoned. I am getting fucked up today.

Yeah, it's either going to be enemy soldiers or it's going to be Pyramid Head. One or the other. My Mosin-Akin helped me on either of those fronts. Okay, hear me out. What if Pyramid Head joined the Taliban? Pyramid Head is ISIS. He'd be like the biggest dude, and he's already got a mask, so he's good to go. He's a huge fucking guy.

Now, soon the shelling of the Allied held town of Tolgas clued them in that maybe, just maybe, we should be worried and just start digging in. So that same day as the war in Europe ended, millions of people around the world were celebrating, you know, not the ones in Russia, and hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers began to charge the American and Canadian positions in Tolgaz. It was not the only town under attack, however. The Russians also launched an attack against Seltzo, throwing themselves against the fortified block houses and trenches that had been built after they had secured the areas. The Allies were badly, badly outnumbered, as they pretty much always were, with only a weakened company or so to hold the area against, again, thousands of Russians, hundreds of thousands over the entire area. Thousands of Russians, hundreds of thousands over the entire area. The soldiers in Salto held out for a day before running back to Pugas in the night,

including an American who had been shot in the eye. This kid in the fuck out, man. He's missing an eye and even he can see the needs to get the fuck out. The best part is the doctors took one look at it and assumed that the bullet had lodged in his brain and there was nothing they can do. But good news, the man didn't seem to notice. Another man had to undergo a battlefield amputation when a doctor cut his leg off with little more than a pocket knife. Turgas, however, would not be ready for the next attack. While Russians were recovering from their last attempt, American engineers would build 47 blockhouses,

1,100 yards of trench line, and 8,000 yards of razor wire to pair with the 13 dugouts that already existed. That is, they fortified everything they thought would need to be fortified. In a big Maginot Line moment, that would not be the case.

They operated under the idea that nobody would cut through the deep swamp to the west. Because because I don't know. Ew, swamp. So they barely fortified it. So, of course, the morning of the armistice. That's exactly when the Russians charged out and ran across the swamp. Yeah, Russians don't give a shit about a swamp, man.

I just love that the military tactics are like swamps are gross. They don't want to walk through that. are like swamps are gross they won't want to walk through that if they could understand russian maybe they would have heard the bolsheviks being like fucking yes swamp bro let's go get our swamp on out here i fucking love bogs steve would you fucking walk through a bog no well decision made nobody's walking through the bog um so that's of course where the russians immediately attacked out of where they attacked through however was right where the Canadian artillery was. And through countless attacks, the Canadian artillery held them back. Despite the obvious weakness on the west side, the rest of the town was a fortress. And having the western side mostly open actually helped the artillery. actually help the artillery. Enough time was bought for them that they were able to swing their guns around and lower them to a complete level firing platform like it was the 1800s

and fire a full battery's worth of shrapnel directly at charging soldiers in the swamp. We're doing that North Korean execution style, man. Just like get the egg, point it to the ground, just start wasting people. Some of the bolos were as close as 50 yards when they opened fire the result was quote ghastly dismembered corpses their flesh and blood thrown high into the sky in a sickening splattering atom that's that's i mean i'd rather that than you know have to get my leg cut off with a pocket knife that seems quick at least yeah i mean of all of the ways that people have died that i've talked about in the last three

episodes i'd rather just get like atomized by a canadian artillery shell at point blank range right yeah mortar around to the face seems uh it's not great for the guy who's gotta you know mop it all up but for me i mean whatever think of the guy about 10 feet behind you as he's just coated in like a pressure washer of human blood and at one point the russians stormed into part of the village and held it for some time including the area where the hospital was located if you consider what it was actually a hospital which it was not it was mostly just a dying room full of wounded people. Sure. It was full of the sick and wounded, allied and

civilian alike. A Bolo political officer named Melchovsky is the only name anybody's ever been able to get or the entire hospital to be executed, killing dozens of people with a bayonet. Now, the counterattack that retook the hospital short time thereafter pushed the Russians out and killed Melchovsky.

So, rest in piss, guy. And that's something that is pretty common towards this part of the campaign. There would be BOLOs captured. There would be Americans captured by the BOLOs that would not be executed. But it really seemed like there was no overwhelming order for it. The Red Army was not an organized military

force, really. It was a lot like the Whites in that it was kind of like a warlord army at the time. Centralization would occur, of course. It took a while. So depending on who the officer was in any given area, you have a good chance of surviving or you don't it's all up to the political officer the officers also just being some of the dumbest motherfuckers too as always yeah i mean and for the american unit it was more like americans and french and british for the matter would come across surrendering enemy soldiers and would either execute them or capture them on the spot there was no organization to it which is generally the case there was nobody like hey here's the ro here's the rules of engagement

while you're out there it's just like you guys feel like capturing a guy or killing a guy today pretty much and not to mention a lot of them knew what happened to like their friends that had fallen into captivity especially after this hospital incident. And they're like, no, fuck these guys. But that would ebb and flow as the campaign went on. Now, another position in a single machine gun, which is manned by two people, stopped a charge of 600 Bolshevik soldiers, though the Russians finally did get their artillery moved up to attack the blockhouses, which were pretty easy targets at that point. But the Canadian artillerists were pretty fucking good at their job and immediately laid accurate counter-battery,

meaning that no Bolshevik guns survived for very long once they opened fire. Because it's easy to train gun crews to be artillerists. Counter-battery is much harder to train. So a lot of these gun crews on the Bolshevik side were kind of new. These were not their most hardened soldiers. So they could shell blockhouses. But when came to like dialing in against enemy artillery they were found wanting um whoops hey i mean like you said you gotta you gotta be able to think on the fly you can't be like oh okay let's get the protractors out you gotta like i see them it's the the concept of tracers work both ways. Or in tanks, it's a shoot and scoot.

Because as soon as you shoot, now everybody knows where the fuck you are because a tank just shot something. So you better fucking get out of there before somebody shoots back at you. And it's definitely like big on the job training moment. Because a lot of czarists were, of course, in the Bolshevik military, but not all of them. So like a lot of people join the movement with no military training. They're like, congratulations, comrade, you're an artillerist now. I'm like, huh? And you go through some growing pains in your new career field. On the bright side, if you survive the Canadian artillery bombardment, you'll be a better

artillerist by default. But at the end of the day, eyewitnesses said that in the swamp to the west, at least 400 dead bodies were floating. But that wouldn't really matter. The battle would start again the next day all over again with more frontal assaults against the allied positions that probably looked very normal for the Western Front or the Eastern Front, to be completely honest. But remember, these Americans are not hardened combat veterans. This is the most combat 99% of them had ever seen. So they're like, what the fuck are these guys doing? They're just running directly into machine guns. Now, these eventually failed as generally charging at machine guns

does not normally work out for you. Yeah, and this is a time when there's really not, like, crew-serve weapons of that kind are not, like, they're still very new, I guess. work out for you yeah and this is a time when like there's really not like crew surf weapons of that kind or not like they're still very new i guess well not like mounted machine guns like you know the maxim or whatever has been there since the day one of world war one um but like squad automatic weapons are certainly new uh like now squad tactics are kind of new as well. They were developed on the fly. Russians really don't have those quite yet. And the Americans in Russia didn't.

If you read the firsthand accounts of Americans in Western Europe, in the limited action that they saw, they did develop those things. The Americans in Russia were just like day one. When the AEF stepped foot in France and then had to kind of develop these things on the fly the americans and russia were the same except they didn't have all of this action all around them to learn it it was very limited um so like in the growing pains you know much like the bolshevik artillerists they didn't quite understand what the fuck was happening either and you know when these frontal assaults failed the, the Russians leaned back on the fact that we have a lot of artillery and they have a lot of long range artillery, which the Canadians really don't. So

they could just sit back and lob rounds where the Canadians couldn't get them. This began to completely wreck the block houses and defenses. All while, remember, there's a river around this town. While Bolo gunboats circled the river, giving very, very slow drive-bys to defenses. Just float on by and stick your guns out the window and take a couple of guys out. Now, this bombardment went on for days, making sleeping impossible, which is always fun. On the 13th, Captain Robert Boyd gathered his officers together to try to figure out just how the hell they could get out of this mess. Surrender was not an option. It was understood that at this point of the war, at least in this situation,

no prisoners were being taken. The events in the hospital that told Americans that should they surrender, they would all die. So it was decided that a counter attack would be the only and best option. They hoped if they charged through the swamp at night, I assume kicking aside the hundreds of dead bodies along the way.

Well, it's no longer a swamp. It's all solid now. You don't need a bridge. Just walk over the hundreds of dead bodies out there. Corpse Pier. Actually, this is just the regular old Corpse Road. We're back to square one, baby. We've gone full circle

to the Iran-Iraq War. Now, the Americans had an idea that if they all charged through the swamp at night and attacked in one direction, they might trick the bolos into thinking that a much larger force was actually in the town than they originally thought. Because put yourself in their shoes, what idiot would split their force and already outnumber like five to one, right? Like, you got to go crazy man theory on this. And I'm shocked to tell you this, this kind of worked. When Boyd's force charged through the perimeter, they hit smaller perimeter units, like picket forces that the Bolos had left out there. And in the middle of the night, these half asleep, I assume teenage Bolshevik conscripts were like, oh shit, we're under attack.

And they took off running. And when they ran back to their commanders, they told like, bro, there's thousands of Americans attacking through the swamp. We got to get the fuck out of here. In reality, it was two platoons. About 70 people. Because the platoons were a little bit bigger back then. So what's being reported is thousands of Americans, but

what we got is about 75. Yes. Okay. Sure. Hey, you know, that's some art of war shit there you know make them think that you're bigger when you're actually small i love deep art of war thoughts you know like sun tzu says if you shoot your enemy they will die like huh you don't say wild man or if you trick the enemy you might have the upper hand if you're close you should make the enemy think you're far away but get this if you're far away you should make your enemy think that you're close whoa whoa that philosopher wrote this down now like maybe when he wrote these these are

big brain moments but now it's like yeah yeah, uh-huh. That's right. Right. Well done. I don't know. My personal favorite is like business people who read the Art of War. I flipped through a copy of Art of War and it's just so dumb. Oh, it's very stupid. If you're going to read old timey dumb books that are at least entertaining, read Hagakure.

It's at least entertaining read hagakure it's at least entertaining i mean at least read sun tzu art of war and don't make it your personal fucking philosophy like you shouldn't watch um fight club and be like whoa i i too could be like tyler durden you shouldn't want to be that's that's not that's not good this is a direct attack on 13 year old me hey me too buddy my fight club the fight club poster listening to icp i was there with you now like i said this kind of worked and the reason why i did is that these russian pickets um like they fell back we were screaming and yelling about thousands of americans which led to something of like a domino effect more and more and more bolshevik units were like holy shit there's thousands of americans coming holy shit look at how many of us are running this

must be true so it's like a self-realizing prophecy right and then before you know it like a tidal wave of retreating soldiers and the bolshevik officers like fuck we can't control all this no you're not shooting a guy in the head and getting everybody's attention at this point nah that that ship has sailed and the americans to their credit didn't actually execute the prisoners that were left behind this time so like shout out to boyd for that i guess your boys are coming right behind us so you've uh just just kind of hang out with them even funnier is like uh though the bolsheviks who were like talking to the russian volunteers were like there's only like fucking 30 of you.

What the fuck? Where's the rest of you? Now, the Boyd's order to keep POWs was probably something that the Americans regretted because they soon learned a patrol commanded by Lieutenant Francis Cuff. So, you know, the greater Francis family had been surrounded. Around 30 of them were surrounded by 600 or so Bolsheviks, give or take. The fight was short and brutal. And while some Americans were able to run off into the woods, in the end, 13 of them were killed or went missing. When soldiers found their dead bodies, they discovered that many of them had been executed with axes.

Many of them had been castrated. And there is unfortunate evidence to suggest that some of this castration occurred while they were still alive that's not just shoot a guy man yeah just just shoot a guy you shouldn't shoot a guy you certainly shouldn't shoot a prisoner of war but don't castrate him and then shoot him man that's just yeah like what's the point man um now some were actually taken captive um and uh three survived this entire ordeal. It has like wild first-hand accounts of their time in captivity. They were brought to like Moscow and met some very high-ranking Bolshevik officials as they were interrogated and were treated very well.

They were apparently to get there, they had to watch all their friends be axed to death. Yeah, it's nice that everybody was very cordial later on, but there's also the fact that you guys cut off my buddy's balls. Yeah, I've been skimming this theory book. Where is the same thing about cutting up people that dick the backs is? Because we've only really touched on some minor war crimes here, we're going to talk about some more, this time with the Allies. Now, at this point, after several different battles and the winter setting in with a nice balmy temperature of about negative 30 hitting everyone, and honestly, I think that's Fahrenheit. I don't think this is in Celsius. It was decided that the position would

have to be consolidated, meaning the more far-flung positions or at least the perimeter positions would have to be pulled back into the bigger ones because they simply didn't have enough men to man them all unfortunately this position was a town remember tolgas was split in half by a river and connected by a bridge so it was decided in order to consolidate this position they would simply abandon the upper section of the town however you can't just abandon the town then you're leaving buildings for enemies to occupy and shoot from, right? So we'll simply burn it all down. Joe, please tell me they accidentally burnt the entire town down. No, they did not. However, they did force the population of the upper part of the town

into the wilderness and negative 30. They all probably died. Yeah. It was now around November 14th, several days after World War One ended, that Colonel Stewart, remember the guy famous for kind of sort of existing in his own heated apartment, decided to set a cable to D.C. Now, he danced around the issue as to why the operation was largely pointless and stupid, mostly because he literally didn't know the details. Remember, he has no idea what's happening to his soldiers. But he did note that they could still withdraw for 30 more days as the port would remain kind of sort of unfrozen.

If they waited longer than a month, they would have to wait until June to retreat. This is like one of those nudge nudge hint hint things. Yeah. This is about as upfront as front as stewart could get because remember he's a huge pussy yeah he can't just be like get get us the fuck out of here this is stupid he's gotta yeah he's gotta be like i don't mean you'd have to pay us for like six more months while we're out here that's not fiscally responsible gotta cut that deficit uh yeah he

he probably would have been more urgent uh in his appeals if he knew about the reality that his men were living through because remember he did not uh but there would be no withdrawal as a long arctic nights began to set in now you might be wondering what exactly the old doughboys would be shacking up for the winter like where would they be staying well with russian civilians of course y'all ain't got a third amendment that's right this was a fucking horrible idea for one remember and i can't stress this enough everyone has the spanish flu fucking everyone the soldiers immediately spread this to the russian civilians who living out in the middle of bumfuck nowhere northern russia had previously never had to deal with the Spanish flu before.

The result was immediate. Hospitals already with no medical supplies were no help, and corpses began to pile up faster than anyone could bury them. And even if the hospitals had supplies, they were more of a threat than the goddamn flu was. The soldiers had chosen a few small buildings to use as hospitals, and to the shock of everyone, these small buildings were actually bathrooms.

A literal shitter. The hospital was a shitter. And we aren't talking about, say, a public restroom in Moscow, which I don't know if this is true. I assume it'd be nicer than out here. We're talking about a public latrine in a village with no running water

or electricity. And by all accounts, this latrine had a village with no running water or electricity and by all accounts this latrine had never once been cleaned yeah this is this is a uh a long bench with holes cut in it there's also no hole dug into the ground for the shit to fall in like it was elevated so like the toilets on like the second floor or whatever it's a hole in the house and it just piles up under the house now as if that wasn't bad enough the mortician a russian man named shep which i assume is a nickname because you know americans love to give american nicknames to everybody who has a name they can't pronounce he got fired because he kept stealing shit from the dead then he was replaced by an American, a man nicknamed

and this is true, Pork. He got fired because he kept trying to embalm people while they were still alive. I guess he's just trying to cut out the middleman. He's like, look, man, you're going to die eventually. It's like the bring out your dead scene. Why are they embalming people? Why not? Fuck it.

Where do they have that? that like you're on the fucking eastern front here like where do you get embalming fluid i like that they're so short on medical supplies but they have mortician supplies yeah this is like we don't have band-aids but ma'am we can we can make you look great after you die yeah um now as you can imagine all of these places were horrible horrible vectors for disease and i didn't even mention all the rats uh because there's a lot with doctors conceding quote sanitation is almost an impossibility the rats don't need to be mentioned because that's just an assumption but you know the rats the nits the fleas the spanish flus the the poop the things that grow in poop it's just not great speaking of poop

let's dive deeper into poop first of all the rats were drafted uh they're out they're actually in the army now uh but i do have to regale you with the account of one harold weimester which honestly probably my favorite story in this entire like series He was living in a place at a toilet on the second floor above a cattle stall. He said that when he shit, it was so cold it would freeze before it hit the ground. This had the cumulative effect of spearing one turn on top of another until eventually a solid telephone pole tower of shit formed under the toilet to the ground, rendering the toilet no longer usable. They then had to chop the shit pole down with an axe. This happened twice. I bet they wish they could have just

been on shit burning detail, because at least they'd be warm. That is true, yeah. But to be on shit chopping detail. Go chop down the poop tree. I should point out that they don't really have a lot of wood in this area of russia there's not a lot of trees um they're mostly burning animal shit so every everything is coated in shit smoke everything is just coated in shit i

think pretty much in another place the bridge over the emsa river a strange piece had fallen over the two sides americans on one side russians on the other but no Emsa River, a strange peace had fallen over the two sides. Americans on one side, Russians on the other, but no shooting occurred. At one point, a Russian commander walked over to the bridge and announced, Comrades, we have no interest in shooting at you as long as you don't shoot at us. And like that, an informal truce was formed.

So of course, I was ruined by some asshole. That's all it took. It's just like, hey, this shit seems kind of stupid. Doesn't it? Like, yeah, done. There you go.

Look, I solved all war. Would it surprise you if I told you that a major was the one that ruined it? Wouldn't surprise me. The major would always ruin it. Major Mike Donahoe just promoted from captain had gotten drunk off his ass, which is a pretty normal occurrence and decided he wanted to fight someone. The shit face. He stumbled over to the riverbank and began hucking grenades towards

the russians of course this guy isn't like an mlb pitcher so they didn't go that far but the russians like it's like i fucking threw him grenades at us you only get so many grenades thrown at you before you're like let's shoot at that guy um one is what it is for me you throw one grenade at me and i will shoot you yeah it's a deal breaker for me uh and i should point out that this is not the first time that donahoe did this he had gotten drunk and thrown hand grenades at at other shit at various other occasions he was fucking known for it it was his thing like oh there's donahoe thrown grenades at shit again did he kill anybody

no like his own people i mean no somehow he didn't on another occasion he got shit-faced walked over to a machine gun position and like kicked the soldiers out of it because he wanted to shoot some russians and the only thing that stopped him is that the machine gun was frozen solid which happened a lot. And despite General Ironside's order to halt all offensive operations until things, you know, weren't so ball shiveringly cold. I think I talked about this last episode. Remember, these machine guns are water cooled. They're Vickers water cooled machine guns.

In order to use them, you have to boil them because the water jackets around the barrel have frozen solid so like you know maybe a war isn't a great time right now but of course this is where i tell you they went on anyway though as the men charge across the frozen winter wasteland they discovered that the russians had spent most of the winter digging in building their positions into something that resembled a fortress which is funny because many of the the Americans had previously noted that they had heard the Russians chopping wood constantly over the last several weeks. They assumed it was just for fire. Eventually, however, the Russians pulled out

of the town of Kadesh, ceding it to the Americans. A town so lovely, it was noted as its drinking water was, quote, odorous and vile. Yeah. Of course, Kadesh wasn't their objective. It was actually two towns over with the intent on capturing them all in a single day and this might surprise you when i say that would not

happen and the advance would grind to a halt again this devolved into an artillery duel as 1918 turned into 1919 and ironsides was pissed about the entire thing firing a guy named colonel hazelden the man who ordered this shit show. Because remember, the generals like, stop advancing. And this colonel thought better of it. He appointed a guy named Colonel Pitts to take his place. Now, you remember, I believe his last episode that I told you that the British had a loophole in their promotion system, where they could just temporarily promote people without paying them or without any kind of prerequisites, just so they could keep Americans out of command? Yes, correct. That is how Pitts became a colonel. Not once, but twice.

He was actually promoted four different times to become a colonel. This man was actually just a lieutenant, and it was 20 years old. Fantastic. Americans noted that he looked barely old enough to drink but now he was in charge of all of this like fuck it you're a colonel he's like wait i am again this week shit that was when lieutenant alexander batsner and company k decided they didn't feel like defending cottage anymore they simply set the town on fire and retreated back over the river, which was probably the best decision that Lieutenant Batsner ever made. This infuriated

Major Donahoe, who, in a moment of sobriety, ordered them back across the river and into the town to defend it. And they did. Now guarding nothing but smoldering and smoking ruins with no shelter, when they were eventually given reinforcements, it was Russian volunteers who had been enlisted

straight out of a nearby prison after pinky promising they totally didn't do any real serious crimes you guys promised you're not rapists and murderers yeah for sure bro Serge years are a motherfucker what are you gonna do like looking down at

his file like it says here you did like 10 murders nah doc it's all liberal bullshit all right here's your papers now two days later a massive russian counter-attack hit the emsta river line while they overran part of the defenses which has been reinforced by some british troops some french and uh some french trained white russians which is the first time that these russians are actually connected to the white movement in general, they were eventually pushed back. This effectively ended the Kaddish front,

with the two sides staring at each other from across the river, nobody really wanting to do anything, both of their goals out of reach. Elsewhere, hundreds of miles away, and even more remote outposts, the war would continue on for reasons that nobody's entirely sure. One of these places was called Ninjigora, a small outpost manned by Americans and Canadians, defended by several blockhouses. The defenses in the town were so bad that the allied Cossacks,

which had thrown their lot in with the northern government, when they were told to take their turn defending the area, they simply refused, called it a death trap, and left. Yeah, they were correct. I don't like to hand it to the Cossacks, but, you know, occasionally they nailed this one. They moved to the town of Unstpadanga, which was 700 yards away and much

better defended. I assure you I'm pronouncing that one correctly. I've never pronounced anything incorrectly in the show's history. Unstpadanga. It sounds like something that if you look it up in, like, the Urban Dictionary, it means something disgusting. It sounds like something that if you look it up in the urban dictionary, it means something disgusting. It sounds like the backbeat of some Euro trash kind of disco music. Unz Padanga.

Unz Padanga. Unz Padanga. Now, a massive Russian attack commanded by Alexander Somalio and about 3,100 soldiers came on January 19th, targeting every single isolated outpost in the southern front with the goal of destroying the Allied garrison at Schenkersk, which was like the main logistical hub for this entire front. One of the first shells in the bombardment killed Supply Kirk Carl Berger, who had just rode the wagon train to the town from Schenkersk, a trip that took almost an entire day. It's noted that when the clerk Berger walked into the bunkhouse and laid down, the shell hit him directly in the face. That's how I want to go out.

It's like, oh man, I'm tired. I really don't feel like going back to Shedkursk. Monkey paw curls inward. Don't worry, you're going to stay right here. All over the place. Russian artillery focused on the three fortified villages before turning its full attention to Ninjigora. Ninjigora? I'm going with Ninjigora.

Fuck it. Godzilla versus Ninjigora. Look, I'm currently in a country where like 95% of people speak Russian and I refuse to learn Russian. I'm not learning it for the podcast. At this point, it's kind of your thing. The Russians then launched their trap. Gora's garrison had no idea they'd actually been surrounded by Russians. They were camouflaged with white sheets.

You know, we call that the Atlanta pattern. In the night, they sprang out of the snow and launched themselves forward this caused the americans of ninjigora to immediately order a fighting retreat to viscora gora which was another nearby town at one point a private named victor steyer had his jaw shot off and his tongue was like dangling out from the bottom of his fucking skull but like the horrors out of the pit of hell he charged for an incaptured Russian machine gun and then picked it up. A crew-served machine gun. This man

is missing half of his face. He picks up a crew-served machine gun and then uses it like a rifle to fight his way out of the encirclement before finally dropping dead. Hell yeah. Hell yeah. Dude's rock. I don't care whose side he was on. That dude's awesome.

The retreating Americans had to wade through waist-deep snow in minus 50 degree weather and fight from house to house to get their way back to Viskora. When they finally got there, they found their artillery support, some Russian volunteers, had run for their lives, as had their Cossack reinforcements. The only thing that saved Viskora was the Canadian gunners who had just been relieved and then ran back in the middle of fighting, remanding their guns and

firing shrapnel shot directly into the oncoming attackers once again. But it didn't really matter. These far-flung outposts of what was known as the Vaga Front would have to be abandoned, but the Allies would have to begin their long retreat back to Shenkursk, which was the real Russian target anyway. Viskora was burned to slow the Russian advance, but it made no difference. At one point, the Russians advanced so quickly, they actually overtook the Allied column moving towards Shenkersk. However, the Russians had no idea. The Americans, numbering only a few hundred and seeing thousands of Russians marching on the other side of the same hill, decided that if we just keep marching and don't react, the Russian forces might think we're Russian. And that worked.

Hell yeah. Just everybody marched real Russian-like. I mean, they're already armed with Mosin-Nagants. They're already dressed like Russian soldiers. They're cold and look like shit. I mean, at that point, everybody has to look virtually identical. Nobody's showering

or shaving. Everybody just looks like a fucking random wild person. Now, the soldiers were relieved when they got to Shenkirsk, getting out of the snow and being able to eat hot food. However, as soon as they got there, they were told they would also have to be evacuated. However, this brought with it a small problem.

Nobody was entirely sure how to evacuate Shenkersk. All of the rivers were frozen, so another river flotilla of doom was out of the question. The countryside was dangerous, not only because they were deep into the Russian winter, but also because virtually every road leading from Shenkersk was now controlled by the Russians. every road leading from Shenkursk was now controlled by the Russians. Though a Cossack unit pointed out that there was a winter trail that they knew about that nobody else would have ever heard of, and they could take that. Meaning everyone would be going overland, and in order to make sure that the Russians didn't see it, they'd be going out in the middle of the night.

Orders were given to take only what the men could carry on their backs. Everything else, food, clothing, access, ammo, even the wounded, were to be left behind to be captured. Soon, the townspeople of Shenkersk, not wanting to be killed by BOGO forces, probably for helping the allies and being collaborators or whatever, all joined the withdrawal as well. While the retreating column would include horses and sleds, the vast majority of people would be walking. For the next 13 days and 80 miles, the 350 men of the retreating column would get ambushed, blown up, and sniped,

but successfully held off the Russian force of around 5,000 that was on their heels, trying to murder them. By the time they got to the town of Kitsa, dozens were dead, and the ones who didn't had a fucking terrible frostbite. Nobody was having a good time here turns out it's a bad vacation spot in the winter um go to tahoe or something

uh but as january turned into february the strange and pointless american war northern russia would not end not yet anyway and that is where i'll pick up next time on the conclusion to the polar bear expedition god i like i don't know how long it would have taken me to desert all of this or just be like i'm like i think it's i think it's the the horse shit barges it's just me being like nah i'm done i can't like a drawn myself on this river right like me as a soldier you know in current times like the cattle carts were kind of bad but if you showed up like get into this shit covered barge we're gonna float you down the river nah sorry i'm not that's that's not what i came here for i want some college money and i want to get to shoot a machine gun that's about it oh good news the ga bill doesn't exist

yet like i think this is the perfect um war to kind of not have deserters because like where the fuck are you gonna desert to you're sprinting off into the polar north you just you'll just die it's like that the homer simpson meme of you're dressed like a doughboy in world war one you slink back into the bush and come out dressed like a russian peasant just me over here harvesting my beats please don't shoot me no i don't understand a word you're saying inexplicably now that is part three everyone thank you for listening uh thank you for supporting the show again you make everything we do possible and francis this is where you can plug your show yeah the other show what a hell of a way to die with me and nate nate who edits the show. And we have a store, hellofawaited.com.

But we are military talk from a not insane right wing kind of point of view, which I feel is the default. So we're not that. Thank you, Francis. And we will see you next time on the conclusion to the poop tree chopping express.