Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 216 - The Dieppe Raid

Episode Date: July 11, 2022

The British feed hundreds of Canadian soldiers into a wood chipper for no reason. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Sources: Fowler, Will. Allies at Dieppe. https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/operation-jubilee-dieppe-raid-1942 https://www.veterans.gc.ca/eng/remembrance/battles-and-stages/battle-of-dieppe https://www.warmuseum.ca/cwm/exhibitions/newspapers/operations/dieppe_e.html https://www.canadashistory.ca/explore/military-war/dieppe-a-colossal-blunder

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 today. And now, back to another episode of Minds Up by Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe, and with me is Liam. Hi, Joe. Oh, thank you, buddy. Yeah, I'm back on the pod circuit now doing doing the pod rounds doing the pod rounds yeah i uh i was i was on the uh the uh injury list for a while there the podcast injured reserve yeah deep deep on the bench uh so we had to uh but now i'm here all is well if podcasts had like a minor league or like the ahl what would it be uh i feel like that's what podcasts already are for like

getting an actual radio show yeah i don't know man i mean i think like i guess it depends on how you define like listeners and shit because there's like huge leftist podcasts and then there's sort of the next tier. We're I think the AHL. I don't consider us like a political show. I consider us a history show. Oh, okay.

I would say especially with your listener base, I would say you're solidly NHL tier but maybe I would say the Florida Panthers NHL tier, but maybe the Florida Panthers. But they made the playoffs this year. So you're not in the draft lottery anymore. No. We do all right.

I think it's like... But there's such a divide between the huge ones and then even us. Yeah. It's true. I'm curious where we fall on the hl scale for uh for history bears is that the name of the hl team there the hershey bears yeah all right they're fucking good dude well then we're below them no because we're the best of the worst you have like the super serious history shows like you know the the hardcore histories the um histories of rome

anything by mike duncan really uh and then like you have 36 hours on world war one go listen to it that shit rules uh blueprint armageddon is fucking i was working this fucking shitty job and it was right around when my ex-girlfriend broke up with me and i started drinking heavily and listened to blueprint armageddon honestly i actually was listening to it under almost the same circumstances except i was working i was working a really shitty job as a medic in a factory uh that sounds horrible it was the most boring job i've ever had um and the factory was just awful so like i literally sat in office for 12 hours a day three days a week um and i was allowed to have my phone in the office

but not outside of it right so i i consumed vast quantities of hardcore history but like under the serious history shows you have the funny history shows which i don't i guess we qualify as though neither of us are comedians um we're not we're not especially funny people yeah if you find being grim at all times funny that we're your guys but yeah we're somewhere in like the

the I don't know like the the serious history like the Dan Carlin's Mike Duncan's it's like NHL the funny history guys are like the KH um and we might be the next tier down to that which might be like the qmh we're like sweden or someone yeah we're we're like the swedish first league or something there are worse ways to make a living yeah i'm not complaining it's a lockout you know we gotta go get our reps in. It's not so bad.

I always laugh when people are just like, oh, how's the podcast going? I'm like, still doing great. Still not really sure how. Yeah, I think I've talked before, but I occasionally get emails from people like they want to start their own shows, which I think you should. I mean, fuck it. Why not?

It's like one of the few versions of entertainment that has a very low bar of entry. But I have no idea how to make a podcast successful. Speaking of having no idea how to make things successful, we are talking about probably one of top 10 most requested things today. The Diep Raid. Are you familiar with the diep raid uh

vaguely i feel like that's most people it's like unless you're canadian uh they they yeah the canadians and the tanks were trying to do like an amphibious assault right but it didn't go so good that's yeah that's it um that was a long and short of it uh so like in the annals of warfare there's occasionally a battle or an operation so famous uh so groundbreaking so revolutionary it's like the first thing that comes to your mind when someone brings up that kind of thing like when you think of amphibious landings you probably think of like operation overlord or d-day right um when you think of urban warfare like what do you think battle of mogadishu mogadishu uh stalingrad um you know maybe some more recent things unfortunately um yeah we will never call

over to cover the battle of stalingrad right here right now folks surprise i've hit you with a swerve uh this is the start of a 10-part series in stalingrad so their operations so fucked up that nobody ever really likes to talk about them um whether that because they went so incredibly badly that there's no way to spin it or they they spin it to make it look um good for history books diep is one of those um actually like diep is like the textbook version of that what are some other ones i'm now i'm trying to think because i feel like uh i mean what's the what's the evacuation that they made a movie Dieppe is like the textbook version of that. What are some other ones? Now I'm trying to think. Because I feel like, I mean, what's the evacuation that they made of movie after?

Dunkirk. Dunkirk, yeah. It was like, but like that went, didn't that go well tactically? But like, it was just a humiliation. Yeah, Dieppe went, or Dieppe, Dunkirk went shockingly well. And a lot of that is like, in the modern retelling of it, it's it. It's like the grit and determination of the British people and not like the French military launching a suicidal rear guard action to protect them. And that's a German fuck up 100% rather than like that. Things can be a tactical fuck up and a rousing success simultaneously.

The Germans should have wiped them out at Dunkirk. But the Germans being bad at their job meant the British were able to skirt out. I'm trying to think of stuff that's like... Because the thing that comes to mind is the Civil War, but that also gets wrapped up in weird lost cause bullshit nonsense. There's cases like that um like honestly the the russo japanese war comes to mind but nobody actually learned those lessons except maybe the japanese uh because everybody was so fucking racist they didn't want to learn uh about all of the things the japanese learned about modern warfare before world war one started um and uh like diep comes to mind because as we'll talk

about it you realize that is more and more and more of a catastrophic fuck up that it's spun not so much anymore admittedly uh well not by canadians but by british it still is that well if it wasn't for diep we simply wouldn't have been able to successfully carry out operation overlord like two years later um complete bullshit i have heard that yeah um like it's the opposite of it this is a mario to wario relationship if if d-day is mario diep is wario i don't know if that works. Nope. I'm sticking to it. So the Dieppe raid was Canada's, though. I don't want to call it Canada's because Canada didn't really have the freedom of choice here as they were still. Well, there's still a not a colony. What is it? What are they?

I mean, there's still I guess they're still technically Commonwealth. But they fell fully under British command for the most part. Yeah. The Canada's generals are not free of blame here. We'll talk about that in a bit. But this was an attempted amphibious landing in Europe in August of 1942, a full two years before the Normandy landings. Dieppe failed so hard hard it was considered a step by step checklist of what not to do and all future amphibious landings going forward through the rest

of the war and honestly forever as long as people keep daydreaming about amphibious landings that simply won't fucking happen anymore um this is it's an anachronism like paratroopers like there's no point for the shit anymore the people still daydream about it um like the marines still largely exist based on circle jerking about this shit uh despite the fact that the largest amphibious landing of world war two was done by the army but you know whatever um and that is often why people explain this away as being necessary. Like, well, if what,

like, like I said, if we didn't fuck up here, we wouldn't have learned anything. But as you'll find, like, that's how I treat my first year of college too. And that's $60,000 lit on fire. Boys and girls don't do that.

If I, if I simply didn't fail horribly, how was I supposed to learn? Governor Andrew Cuomo. Yes. Like, and the failures weren't, Governor Andrew Cuomo. Yes. Like, and the failures weren't,

it's kind of like when we talked about Tarawa, right? Like when, when we went over the failures of Tarawa, they were all pretty common sense. That's the same thing here. They didn't learn anything revolutionary here. I mean, it went so badly that to this day there are conspiracy

theories that the germans knew about it in advanced in advance and like and like they had been waiting for them um which we'll go into a little bit about that and so why did an allied force mostly made up of canadians with some british British and a couple Americans thrown in for good measure. Launch an operation planned by a pedophile and future IRA assassination target Louis Mountbatten. Raid a French beach and lose 50% of its men. Here comes the ambush. Here comes the ambush. Yes, this is the Troubles episode now. Now, if you'll join me in booing joe off the stage so i can release the

troubles episode as god intended uh i have nate tied up in the basement it's time it's time for the troubles episode ladies and gentlemen you know what i'm gonna steer this rapidly away because the last time i talked about the ira a journalist got murdered and i had to write i had to do a fucking bumper beforehand oh yeah also we don't plagiarize while we're just throwing stuff in. It's weird. So I have to say, alleged pedophile. I don't think

the... Great. I don't think the royal family is going to sue me for shitting on Louis Mountbatten, but whatever. We're hosted in America. We can do whatever we want, dude. Unfortunately, our producer's in the UK. the royal family is going to sue me for shitting on louis mountain button but you know whatever we'll be in america we can do whatever we want dude unfortunately our producers in the uk uh for now now um we do we will talk a little more at length about mount benton here uh in the future um a couple uh minutes from now uh but also the process to get this far is a lot dumber than you probably think.

Why would it not be? And admittedly, I thought going into this that this was just a badly planned operation, which it was. But it turned out to be an even worse plan than I had previously thought, which is quite impressive. So way back, think back a few years before this in 1940, the British Expeditionary Force had been kicked off the continent uh and you know had carried out the dunkirk evacuation and one of the things that the british really wanted to do in order to reach beyond their holdings at home uh to continue to strike at the germans was to commit to a tactic of raiding via amphibious assaults which fell under the combined operation headquarters. Also, there's this weird... This is like Britain standalone.

With the help of another country doing it. Like several other countries. If you look at the map, this is the waning days of the British Empire, but they still control the vast quantity of the fucking planet. The British Islands didn't stand alone. the british empire but they still control the vast quantity of the fucking planet right the british islands didn't stand alone come on guys like i understand this is like a propaganda thing

but it's 2022 it's time to move on um there are brave voluntold canadians yeah and indians oh yeah and various africans and you know remember when they got mad at dunkirk for including uh brown people even though brown people absolutely would have been at dunkirk they did the same thing with uh was it 1917 yeah uh yeah uh they had a sikh soldier um and you know they did completely discounting the fact that vast quantities of uh indian soldiers fought world war one then went home with uh no benefits whatsoever only to be forgotten about by the Empire. Cool! Same thing happened to the Africans, and actually

happened to the Gurkhas until like 10 years ago. England, bad. Anyway. Now, generally, the idea for these raids was to be done with specially trained commandos. Their job was to be

secret squirrel shit. Their whole training... This is where the British commandos come from. And eventually the SAS is raiding airfields. And this is effectively the birthplace of the Royal Commandos. And as we'll

find out that... This is a concept called mission creep, right? Uh, where you come up with this brilliant idea and then come up with, I mean, quote unquote, brilliant idea. They're generally not. Um, and you like, okay, well, to do that, we need specially trained people and we need specialists to do this effectively and then you'll end up liking this brilliant idea so much it quickly outpaces the amount of specially trained people you have um the u.s has done this quite frequently in the last 20 years uh and the british kind of did that within two years um they they their rating ideas quickly outpaced the amount of raiders they had also a small side note here the combined operations headquarters badge

I noticed this for some reason because my brain doesn't work correctly it's supposed to be an eagle a submachine gun and an anchor which is rad however when you put it on a patch it kind of looks like an eagle with a huge dick. America!

Which is a different kind of threatening. If we don't show up, we get the badge. You want to be threatened by an eagle with a submachine gun, but there's something weirdly threatening about eagle hang and dong. Yeah. Who put a ban on the moon first i had to be fair there's someone out there it's like eagle hang and dong you say it's like it's their thing don't do that that's a federal crime folks it's a protected animal don't hang dong on eagles um

now when you think of it this kind of makes makes sense. The raiding tactics, not the eagle with the comically large penis. All right. I'm tracking. I hope. The British had the Royal Navy for sea deterrence, the Royal Air Force for air deterrence. And this force was supposed to be able to reach out and be a land deterrent. At a tactical level, these types of missions could accomplish specific objectives like capturing a radar station or destroying German dry docks. At a strategic

level, commando operations were really good PR. As kind of dumb that sounds, because after Dunkirk, despite the fact that was, like we said, a pretty good thing to pull off, even after the victory of the Battle of Britain, which this will occur

after that, it was thought of like a stinging to your morale that the fact that you were kicked off the mainland, you weren't fighting the Germans on land. So this idea that you could send out commandos to fuck with the Germans is really good for morale. Sure. And not to mention. It's a little right for the same thing, right? Yeah, pretty much. sure um and not to mention for the same thing right yeah pretty much um and not to mention this if your shores are constantly being blown up by random groups of angry dudes with fancy mustaches and weird names um like you have to you have to expand or extend your land forces out

to defend them so this will slowly overst overstretch Germany more than already is. Right. Right. Now this plan, this raid of somewhere on the French coast was originally called operation rudder. And it ended up being way too many things all at once. And all of them ended up being bad.

Now the operation rudder would eventually turn into operation Jubilee, which was the official name for the Dieppe Raid. But Rudder came first, and there's a reason why these two things go hand in hand. At this point of the European theater of World War II, most of the fighting was in the Eastern Front. Go figure. The North Africa campaign was grinding on, and it would for probably like another year. But it might shock you when I say 1941

and 1942, the eastern front wasn't going great. Put it lightly, Joe. Yeah, seems bad. Joseph Stalin spent way too much time invading Finland and Poland while being gross. Joseph Kasabian invaded Finland? I did.

Yeah. Wow, you're a bastard're a bastard man yeah those motherfuckers had it coming um all the snow i don't know anything about finland yes the the famous armenia finland beef thousands of years to time immemorial yeah i i want their cold weather um yeah like but you know joseph Joseph Stalin spent way too much time getting his ass kicked in the Winter War and splitting Poland with the Nazis while being overly friendly and sending oil to them to prepare his own country for a war that everybody

told him was coming, and when it did, he was fucked. He was solidly screwed for the first couple years of the campaign, and we talked more about this in our Kursk series. Listen to that. Firemines. Yeah. Things bad on the eastern front for quite a while um now but one of the things that stalin wanted everybody to do uh was to open a second front somewhere else in europe uh to this would force the germans to divert precious war material and men from the east to give the soviets

some breathing room obviously that would eventually happen uh with both the invasion of italy and the invasion of maine of uh like france with d-day and uh but this is 1942 that's not coming yet uh the allies simply lacked the ability the planning and the overall manpower to do that yet um But that didn't mean they didn't want to show Stalin that like, hey, we're allies, keep fighting. They wanted to, like, this was going to be a propaganda coup, not only for the British, but also for the Soviets. That like, it's going to force the Nazis to pull some shit away.

It doesn't work that way, but that's the goal. Take your balls in your face face a war on two fronts you know in the short term the british and their commonwealth forces as well as the americans thought this would be the best thing to do would be send out more raids give a high five to stalin while pouring material into the red army and slowly but surely piss off the germans to the point they end up having to you know fortify the the atlantic coast which would be a material sink right and what do they really start ramping up the atlantic wall after this okay that answers my question all right well i mean I mean, the Atlantic wall was like a stop start thing for a while, but it really ramped up after this. A lot of it's morale, some of it's tactical.

And for the Americans who are barely involved in DF at all, they had really just stood up the concept of Rangers and they wanted to try them out. Because they're training with British commandos. I got a graphics card to try to overclock as far as possible. As soon as I get it out of the box, like an asshole. Now, within the first few years, um,

like remember the British had been kicked off the continent, uh, which was, you know, unpopular. They'd won the aerial battle of Britain and ground-based raids would show the British military and public. They were still in this thing while the british solidly had an air advantage the germans had this thing

called all of continental europe uh so they could just kind of hide over the mainland right the like the british had an indisputable air uh advantage here as long as they fought over the channel uh obviously if the germans were over their own lines you're running into german radar anti-aircraft defenses etc etc etc so what the germans would do is simply hide uh the british wanted to continue to pound them from the air and pull them out from behind that protective curtain which is another layer here as you can tell operation rudder is quickly spiraling out of control yep like we're gonna do this large-scale raid that makes stalin happy makes everybody in in england happy we gotta blood the americans oh and now we need to defend the

fucking or defeat the fucking loof waffa like it's gonna go well perfect yeah and thus operation rudder uh the planning for Operation Rudder, began to spiral and build. And brace yourself for a full broadside of British royal naming. Enter Prince Louis Francis Albert Victor

Nicholas Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma. He didn't have the of Burma. Though I should be clear, he wasn't like, he didn't have the of Burma thing yet. That comes later, but that's his full name by the time he dies.

Nope, nope, not going to say anything. Now, previous to this, Louis Mountbatten had been recalled as captain of the HMS Illustrious and made an advisor on the combined arms or the combined operations headquarters within the British

Army despite the fact he was a naval officer since 1916 and not a very good one. I'm shocked that he wasn't very good at his job. Yeah, he I mean he's a royal right he's he's gonna move up the ranks regardless. He had no background at

all in land operations. Of course he didn't. He was known, according to an FBI intel file on him, written in 1944, a person of extremely low morals and homosexual with a perversion for young boys. He is an unfit man to direct

any sort of military operations because of this condition. It was further stated that his wife, Lady Mountbatten, was considered equally erratic. Alright, team of champions up here. Yeah. Now, outside of being

an alleged pedophile, Alleged. Alleged. We really can't state that part enough. He will not be the only alleged pedophile we talk about come on man it's we're talking about the british military what can i do here it's a good point that's no uh other than being an alleged pedophile mount batten was known for at least in military circles that were forced to work with him his charm which in hindsight after everything we just talked about is kind of gross um yeah um it's uh not good

now i feel like this these these other military officers who say that he was charming um is because that is the most neutral thing they could call him because remember like he was a member of the royal family and if you didn't like, yeah, Captain Mountbatten's great. He's a dashing, charming naval officer. Your career's going to be fucking sank, man. So rather than like... We'll do it charmingly. Yeah. Rather than, I don't know, praise his military abilities, be like, yeah, he can talk real good.

He's so good at talking as I eat a 90 millimeter shell. So calling him charming is literally the least that they could do because of all the paperwork regarding his actual naval career is really, really bad. During this time commanding the fifth destroyer flotilla, he fucked up so badly. His eventual supervisor, Dennis Healy, said, quote, but for his birth saved him a court-martial that any other officer would have faced. So, yeah. Cool. So he had very limited combat experience. That's right.

I mean, he had very limited combat experience at sea, but he had absolutely none regarding land warfare or amphibious landings. So, of course, he was promoted beyond being just an advisor to being the commodore of the combined operations headquarters. Another reason for this will not surprise you. Churchill really liked him, and Churchill hated the guy he replaced, who was Admiral of the Fleet Sir Roger Keyes,

who was significantly more qualified than Mountbatten was. It had nothing to do with Mountbatten being good at his job. Churchill really liked Mountbatten. I mean, this is hardly the first fuck-up at an amphibious landing that Churchill would have his name written all over. Remember, he is the guy who played Good Boy. Which tells me he should have known better,

but it's Churchill. Now, just for an example of things that Mountbatten did while holding this command before the Dieppe Raid, should have known better but it's churchill now just for an example of things that uh mount benton did while holding this command before the dup raid he proposed to churchill that the british navy should build a 600 meter long aircraft carrier out of a substance known as pycrete um like a what like a are we talking like a i'm thinking like a floating dock that has to be tugged. Pycrete is a mixture of ice with wood. Oh, I've heard about this.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm sure I was drunk and watching a History Channel thing on this before. Yeah, they actually built like a scale replica in Canada during this time. It was an idea pitched to him by a guy named Jeffrey Pike, who was noted for being a crazy person who wanted to build what would have been the world's largest aircraft carrier ever out of ice. Pike wasn't an engineer. He was a journalist and a bit of an eccentric. And you can fill in the blanks with that. I don't want to hear eccentric engineer. Yeah.

And now I say the largest aircraft carrier ever. I fucking mean it the runway of this pykrete thing would have been 2 000 feet long now for comparison the gerald ford class super carriers uh which are for now the largest aircraft carrier class in the world in the united states has a runway of half of that it's like 1200 feet long or something like that again well they built a nice they built a 60 foot model yeah yeah i thought you meant when you said scale model i thought you were okay like i don't know what i was thinking 60 foot scale model thousand tons yeah and it just like floated out on a lake in canada for years or

something yeah wow it would have i mean to his credit like pike pitched this as being indestructible and i have no choice but to believe that because it would have been so fucking gigantic would have been impossible to kill uh unless i guess i don't know unless you just die of hypothermia while serving in it i don't know now what i'm die of hypothermia while serving in it. I don't know. Now, what I'm saying is Mountbatten is fucking stupid because he was so convinced of this. Again, so was Churchill because Churchill green-lighted the testing. And Churchill

was a huge fan of Mountbatten. This may have been why, at least at first, the Chiefs of Staff restricted Mountbatten to only planning small-scale raids using very specially trained commandos with generally a little over 100 people involved. Though this would grow and grow and grow until Dieppe happened.

Sure. And even then, he had a lot of handholding from generals and admirals who knew what the fuck they were doing. Sure. Now, these raids before Dieppe, anyway, were generally considered successful. Now, these raids, before Dieppe anyway, were generally considered successful. In 1942, before Dieppe, there was Operation Biting, where the British commandos assaulted Brunval in France and captured a German radar station for intelligence. Like, they could capture the station, take it apart, reverse engineer it, figure out how to defeat it, etc. Sure.

And then there was a raid on St. Nevers, which took out Normandy's dry dock. Now, the raid on St. Nevers was technically successful, but it probably should have been successful. Yeah, you know it's going places when I start off with saying it was technically successful. It should have been a warning sign that these large-scale raiding operations were maybe not the greatest. I mean, they did destroy the dock. Well, they put it out of commission. Right. But I'm sure we'll talk about it more,

especially when we eventually tackle Operation Overlord. But it suffered 50% casualties. Oh, that's okay. Yeah, killed capture otherwise. Yeah. But that's generally like, either we need to think smaller or not have mountbatten uh involved or i mean or simply bomb them like you could have bombed the dry talk

right it didn't it's cooler with it's cooler with raiders right uh they wanted to be sneaky and very clearly they were not um then in saloni went down, though, as the planning of Operation Rudder went into overdrive. Originally, Churchill wanted to conduct a large-scale raid throughout Norway or Cherbourg until someone pointed out that, actually, sir, those are so far away. If you did that, you would have no air support. So the plan had to shift and look for a target within the Calais coastline, so British planes flying from Britain could support the operation. Finally, the port of Dieppe was picked because it's only 70 miles away from the British coast. And within that distance, they're easily able to provide cover, especially it was easy to travel from point a to point b and hopefully surprise the german defenders spoiler alert none of that happens but i'll get there a plan also quickly

grew in size uh eventually including tanks and infantry eventually totaling like thousands of people this does not feel like a small raid jo Joe. No, this rapidly spun out of control. Eventually, it involved 10,000 people. That's not what I would define as a small raid, Joe. No, that's an invasion force. I mean, not all of these guys were raiders. Well, none of them were. Oh, okay.

We'll get there. It gets stupid. But not all these guys were going to land on the beach because remember you're transporting these guys on boats you need air cover you need to supply them so eventually this operation will encompass like out of control yeah now like i already kind of gave away this is going to require significantly more commandos than anybody had uh so looking around to see what they had in England that wasn't fighting in

Africa or blown apart from fighting on the mainland from a couple years ago, they settled on soldiers from General Bernard Montgomery's Southeastern Command. Again, an alleged pedophile. Yeah, we got another one. On top of being a terrible general, Monty was also a fucking monster.

And, you know, his southeastern command was mostly made up of Canadians. However, according to Monty, if you want to believe the guy who really likes himself and again is an alleged pedophile, that isn't what happened. Like someone didn't come to him and be like, we need your soldiers. Instead, according to Monty, Canadian Lieutenant General Harry Carrar, the overall in command of the Canadian Corps, because its original commander, General Andrew

McNaughton, was back in Canada because he was sick, demanded that Canadian soldiers be used in this operation. Again, according to Monty, Carrar went over Monty's head telling his boss, Sir Bernard Padgett, that the Canadian soldiers absolutely had to be used

for this operation, despite the fact they were not raiders. They had no special training whatsoever, nor was any kind of special training done before this operation to teach these guys how to do an amphibious landing. Good. Ideal. Why?

Why do you think that Carrar really wanted to use Canadians? Because he knew it was going to suck. He really... He was a self-loathing Canadian. Like, no, guys, we deserve this. In like a hundred years, we won't have won a Stanley Cup in

three decades. We deserve this punishment. Well well it was actually because karar believed his soldiers were bored oh well okay i mean i guess that's fair and i'm i swear to god i'm not pulling this out of my ass this is from uh an article on canada's history.ca uh by good yeah by uh jack garenstein um like it's it it's a canadian government website so like this is the best possible face they're putting on this um okay canada's history .ca says quote overseas lieutenant general harry car Carr fretted about the continued lack of preparation, operations, and the difficulty of maintaining the desired keenness and morale. The Canadian generals knew the restless soldiers needed action, and the troops themselves were tired of being asked by their British girlfriends if they were ever going to fight. And they largely shared that opinion. and they largely shared that opinion quote like every other soldier corporal robert prowse of the canadian provost corps which i need to remind you is like military police recalled in a published

account in his war experiences quote i was bored to tears with law and action and was itching for battle everybody wanted and needed a big raid on the continent so yeah their girlfriends were dogging out that's that's embarrassing man now a further underlying of this is karar saying uh when talking to his friend quote it'll be a tragic humiliation if american troops get into action europe before canadians we have been waiting in england for three years yeah so boredom pride and getting dunked on by their girlfriends that sucks yeah what a way to go man also on the flip side of this how like you're i mean i was a soldier granted i mean i know that our our vibes and morale is different if i was deployed to a war and all i had to do is sit in like in a nice peaceful place with beer

and women everywhere for three years i'd be fucking having to find a way to do that yeah i mean in like 10 years you're like yeah i fought world war ii but where were you fighting oh mostly vd like that's the life man i mean i'm sure all of these guys immediately reject immediately regret looking this gift horse in the mouth after d app like wow i don't care if she if she cheats on me it was warm over there phil i got some bad news as soon as what happened when you got in that landing craft like oh pierre's not coming back is he now uh so yeah like i said boredom getting dunked on by other girlfriends, and pride. And that's how we go from only doing raids with highly trained commandos to some punaks who happen to just be sitting around.

And hey, since the commandos were horribly mauled at St. Navarre, despite all of their training, that could only mean good things when Dieppe was assaulted by some randos, right? Right? Yeah, of course. Also, Dieppe is a significantly worse place to land for reasons we'll talk about. That's not good. Under no circumstances this place should have been pointed out

for an amphibious landing. Now, with that, Operation Rudder grew to include 5,000 soldiers British, Canadian, and American accompanying this dramatic increase in manpower was a grand plan involving parachute drops, infantry battalions, tanks, naval gunfire

support, and wave after wave of RAF bombers. There was the added benefit, at least according to the RAF, that the Luftwaffe would have, like I said, had no choice but to come out and respond, leaving their safe haven and fighting them in the air. However, plans change.

Mount Batten and higher command in general. This is just like, yeah, dude, we're going to throw the biggest party you've ever heard of. All the girls are going to come. We're going to have beer. We're going to have weed. And then you get there and it's just nine dudes two medium pizzas and you're just like i'm just gonna go home yeah and maybe some like ragweed that they like looks like we mixed into a can of skull yes i bought this from a guy who

had a store under his ball sack oh man we're just talking about high school now um but you know plans change mount batten and the higher command in general eventually simplified the raid idea, which generally means making things better. Like simple military plans are always better. Normally. But every decision they made actually made Operation Rudder significantly worse. Now, it was going to be a frontal assault on the town of Dieppe itself with infantry and tanks. Slowly

resources were stripped away from the plan. The Royal Navy would not commit capital ships for gunfire support. Then the paratroopers were cut, and they were replaced with a detachment of commandos. And then the RAF cancelled the bomber support, replacing it with instead single-engine fighter planes. Okay, replacing it with instead single engine fighter planes.

Okay, this feels like a pretty significant downgrade. Yeah, this is like, let's do an amphibious operation. You have an amphibious operation at home. You can see how all of this makes the plan much worse. And this is one of the things that people say, they're like, oh, well, you know, they learned how to do D-Day. But the thing is, is they already knew hence like the original rudder operational plan would have been fine well i mean it would have been it still would have sucked but it would have been fine it covered all of the problems that they claim diep solved and made possible for overlord like fire support

air support communication paratroopers. You already planned this and you fucking axed it for budget cuts or something. I don't know. This isn't even accounting for the geography of Dieppe itself, which I've already given away. This is part of the French coast that is dominated by high cliffs, which is already a bad sign.

That meant as soon as you landed... Let's do this. This meant as soon as they landed, everybody was on the low ground. Bad sign. That meant as soon as you landed. Let's do this. Yeah. I mean, this meant as soon as they landed, everybody was on the low ground. Bad sign number one. That meant for massive stretches of the coastline, it was all but impossible for people to land there. So that meant if the Germans planned for an amphibious assault in the area, there was only one place it could have landed. Dieppe. That's the only beach that was even remotely

possible and you know say if you had been constantly being raided by sea from england over the last couple months you might reinforce this one beach they might land in and the decision to defend this beach was made even easier because the Germans also had maps. And they went, wow, this beach is really close to England, isn't it? It's only like 70 miles away. This would be a really easy place for them to raid. Well, good thing they're not planning anything, surely. Yeah.

So they built up their defenses. Artillery batteries on the high ground around the port. They supported concrete machine gun bunkers. Anti-tank guns that cover the beaches yeah i mean like of course they prepared for what probably was gonna happen at some point right and about those beaches they were terrible uh now the british assumed they would be like any other kind of beach made of sand but they weren't the beaches at dieppe were actually made of gravel and has been called like softball size gravel now i actually had to reach out to uh our ocean science friend sarah

of it came to the sea to teach me about the science that would happen uh when say you put a heavy something on a gravel beach which is saturated with water you sink you get it like it it removes you go to the sink yeah you fucking sink so say if you put thousand pounds worth of tanks on this gravel beach useless immediately i think that happens what are you talking about yeah now in case you're wondering like why didn't the british know this like it's only like i said 70 miles from the coast it's really easy to recon which is you know something that they should have known about for only several generations of warfare now i believe my baton it's because they didn't they they didn't uh they didn't do anything um they they were as few if any recon flights um and the

ones that they did have didn't even see the concrete pillboxes that were all over the place. So I don't know what kind of recon flights they did. Do we know why? Just like they just said, fuck it. Or I just like didn't think about doing it. They just matched a couple of recon flights, but they couldn't have been good. Maybe it was overcast or something, but nobody even saw the defenses. They just saw the cliffs and were like, that's fine.

And as for the beach, another important part. The recon they did for the beach itself, they looked at some holiday photos because Dieppe was a popular... Greatest empire in the world, baby. Yeah. Dieppe was previously, to the war a popular spot for british holiday goers so they including several of the officers themselves so they just like looked at pictures like beach looks fine that is that is amazing now uh yeah now um a report read quote intelligence reports indicate that diep is not heavily defended and that the beach in the vicinity are suitable for landing infantry and

armored fighting vehicles at some points, which is another one of those moments where a report is wrong in every single possible way. As of running down a checklist for a very, very bad idea, planning for Operation

Rudder was set to go, and before long a small flotilla began to get loaded up for the short trip across the channel but then as if right on cue the germans conducted an air raid right over that flotilla now uh it was in july uh of 42 and they bombed it there wasn't any real damage done by the bombing but they assumed honestly this is probably the most intelligent thing they've done so far it's like like, well, the Germans would see all of these boats. In fact, they're planning something. We should probably call this off.

And they did. That's when they canceled Operation Rudder. The final nail in the coffin being some really bad weather that made the landings impossible during the time that they wanted to launch them. So it was axed. during the time that they wanted to launch them. So it was axed. However, six weeks later, the plans for Rudder were resurrected and renamed Operation Jubilee,

which is a name that wouldn't carry over. Now, this is despite the fact that everybody knew this was a huge risk. Because like I said, like over 10,000 military personnel, and not to mention the accordant civilians that went with it, were involved in the planning and organization of Rudder. And since it had been canceled, these guys would have all been disembarked from Flotilla, gone off on leave to the bar, to their girlfriends, whatever, and talked about this dumb shit plan that they were going to attack. Yep, got loaded up in the boats, and then it got canceled.

So it was pretty, you know, like the information security of their raiding plans was not good right that sounds pretty bad i mean german spies pretty routinely hung out in bars frequented by soldiers because soldiers are drunk and loudmouths for the most part and they still are um like you see reports of that all the time of soldiers getting drunk thinking some hot girl really, really likes him. She doesn't. She doesn't. She doesn't ever do. No.

Yeah. Like, I'm sure your 19 year old ass self with your E2 paycheck of $600 a month is really pulling. This person's very interested in you. Exactly. She's just sopping for you. With your fucking army issue belt, uh, on your jeans and wearing combat boots,

the bar or whatever. Yeah. They're very interesting to you. Dumb motherfucker. Um, and they, the people were like the Germans absolutely know about this by now. But,

uh, when the plan resurfaced, people were worried that if the Germans didn't know about it beforehand, they definitely would. Now, um, this led to louis mountbatten in his own biography by philip ziegler saying what has to be one of the most timeless quotes ever when it comes to military fuck-ups quote the very last thing the germans had ever imagined that we'd be so stupid that we'd use the same operation plan again. So yeah, that's what they did. They rolled out the plan again. The only real switch was all of the

original cuts, the no capital ship support, no bomber support, all that stayed, the paratroopers are gone, and the addition of 50 army rangers with the rangers being instituted not super long before, modeling the commandos, and even trained at their school in Scotland. They would be the first

soldiers to fight Nazis in Europe. US soldiers to fight Nazis in Europe. Cool. And I'm not going to defend Monty here, right? No, I hope you don't. Horrible pedophile. But even he thought this was a really fucking stupid idea. It was a really fucking stupid idea. And a really fucking stupid idea

and we're not pedophiles and we can say that and i i mean we've dogged on monty throughout the entirety of the show because he's a bad commander um and a pedophile pedophile um but you know he rightfully is like this is a supremely bad idea and Churchill was a big fan of Mount Batten so he's like actually I like I like the cut of this guy's jib let's go with it and you know so it went ahead it's terrific work really

the Raiders boarded their landing craft on August 18th and set sail that night from here on out everything went wrong though credit where credit's due they did load onto the ships correctly so they did get that part down outstanding work for starters the element of surprise was immediately ruined if it ever truly existed in the first place as the flotilla ran smack dab into a german coastal patrol uh they also then of course began shooting at one another

and this alert alerted the germans uh at the coastal defenses back on the beach. Like, you guys hear that? Sounds like a naval battle out there. And then they immediately went on full alert. So, surprise, dead. Gone before they even landed. Of course, running into coastal defenses and ships and shit meant that the landings were late. This forced them to fight through

German cannon fire, ships, whatever. And that meant that the cover of darkness was now ruined. So the beach was separated into different zones, each by color. Orange, green, red, and white. And red and white were pretty much one. And blue and yellow.

As soon as the Canadians landed, they saw something that you could rightfully consider a fatal flaw. 120 millimeter naval guns? Not quite. Well, also that, but also this. There's a lot of fatal plans here, or fatal flaws in the plan.

And this is a problem that anybody with a map or, you know, a recon flight should have seen coming. Well, good thing we didn't do those the beach that they landed on was dominated by those cliffs that we had talked about on three sides oh so it's literally shooting poor canadian ducks in a barrel yeah uh that meant as soon as they landed they were being shot at by all sides other than the open fucking ocean behind them and this was especially bad on Blue

Beach with the Royal Regiment of Canada, which probably is the most mangled unit of the battle. Not only did the Royal Regiment get dropped into a shooting gallery, the Germans saw them coming the entire way since the landing started a full half hour late. Long after the alarm had

already been sounded, due to all the fighting at sea, this meant their sneaky nighttime landing was now going to be done at dawn that's bad yeah also from where they are dropped their objective required them to salt straight up a nearby cliff uh where they were supposed to take out some machine guns and artillery even worse The only cover the Canadians had during this assault was a seawall, which the Germans knew that would be a cover to anybody landing on the beach. So that's

why they placed a machine gun bunker specifically to be able to sweep behind the seawall, which is what they did. So as soon as the Royal Regiment, as well as elements of the Black Watch of Canada, hit the beach, they were completely... Sick name, though. Sick name. I will say something. Commonwealth military names are much better than ours.

As soon as they hit the beach, they were doing 20 second. Don't tanker. Yeah, they landed at 5 a.m. Give or take by 830. The units on the beach are destroyed. Oh,

of the 556 men of the Royal Regiment, 200 were killed, 264 were captured, and only 65 escaped back to England. Jesus. Yeah, it's something like Passchendaele numbers. That's real bad. Green, orange, and yellow beaches were hit pretty much simultaneously. However, that wasn't supposed to happen.

On their way to Yellow Beach, the boats carrying number three commando and the rangers that were with them ran into more German coastal ships, which meant the landings had to be abandoned, and the order was given to do just that. But the communication systems didn't work great, and about five landing craft carrying about a total of 100 men just

kept going, having no idea if the rest of their backup had been called off. Also, independent of that, some of the landing boats had simply broken down and they couldn't take part in the landing. Somehow, these happened to be the most successful landings of the entire operation. This could easily be attributed to the fact that these were specially trained commandos. This was the one thing that they were supposed to be used for. While they also ran out and immediately got pinned down and shot to pieces,

they simply kept going. This is where the first American casualties of the war in Europe occurred, with Lieutenant Edward Vassilats of Franklin, Louisiana, being the first killed in action. The Rangers and the commandos of 3 Commando didn't do so great on their assault on the town of Brnoaval, and it had to be called off. But for commando over on Orange Beach actually achieved the remission. They got off the beach, assaulted into the town of Varingville and took out the German artillery batteries that were stationed.

So you did it. Nobody else would, though, unfortunately. Well, you did it. Yeah, good job for a commando. Landing at the same time as the commandos was Green Beach, made up of the South Saskatchewan Regiment and the Cameron Highlanders of Canada.

Their mission was to assault over the beach and into the town of Porville, which was home to a German radar station. They were to capture it, and a raf technician that was accompanying them was to like disassemble it and bring back pieces the south saskatchewan regiment landed on time in the darkness and achieved in element of surprise but the royal navy landed part of the unit in the wrong place ideal yeah probably also something to do with being the fact that you were landing in darkness.

Couldn't see where you were going. This forced that part of the unit to cross over a nearby river and bridge to get to where they were supposed to go, which ended them, of course, getting pinned down on that bridge. Despite all of this, the Highlanders landed playing their pipes while getting shot to

fucking shit. God bless them. Yeah. And when the South Saskatchewan soldiers got stuck on that bridge, their commander, Lieutenant Colonel Cecil Merritt, took off his helmet and was swatting soldiers on the butt playfully with it, saying, quote, Come on on over. There's nothing to it to get them to cross the bridge. come on on over there's nothing to it to get them across the bridge and you uh merit and a few of his uh soldiers charged machine gun nests and took them out one by one by throwing grenades into the firing ports merit is another one of those classic like old-timey badasses uh that looks more like a guy who would look at a they would like work at a library just rolled in

right yeah and he's a lieutenant colonel like work at a library. Just rolled in. Right. Yeah. And he's a Lieutenant Colonel. Like you don't see Lieutenant Colonel's charging machine gun mess with hand grenades. Let the good times roll, I guess. Yeah.

And I mean, it worked. He motivated his men to get the fuck across the bridge. So whatever. Fair enough. Despite all of their sick pipe playing, the Highlanders only made it about 2000 meters towards their objective before being forced to turn around and retreat back to the beach. Oh, fuckers.

Yeah. Merritt and a few others organized a defense of the beach as a rear guard action. So some guys could actually reboard their fucked up shot to shit landing crafts and retreat back out onto the ocean. While commanding the defense, all of his runners were killed. onto the ocean. While commanding the defense, all of his runners were killed, so Merritt just said, you know, whatever, I guess I'll do this myself, and began running from position

to position to pass commands. Somehow he survived, was taken prisoner, and was awarded the Victoria Cross. I think he earned it. Yeah, I'd say he earned it. He's like, I guess don't pass orders to do a job that you have to do yourself now all of

this sounds really bad and it is um but we haven't even actually gotten to the main landings which were at red and white beaches this was the bulk of the normal soldiers uh to assault the town of diep itself sure by the time the main body of soldiers landed there, all of the battles we had already just talked about had started, which meant their defenses were fully manned and preparing for their turn. Right. Sure. As these landing craft were slowly floating towards them, the only support that they had in any way was some strafing runs from British fighter planes. Come on, man. Yeah.

Come on. Which was not enough. You know, the infantry landed first and then the tanks, which immediately got stuck in the beach. On our snowball-sized gravel. Yeah. And the ones that didn't get stuck couldn't get over a nearby seawall, making them completely useless.

Jesus Christ. No, dude, just think of them as stationary guns. Well, once you get stuck behind something, it's very easy to take a tank out, which is generally what happened. There's no shortage of abandoned or burnt down tanks from the beaches, or pictures of those from the beaches

of Dieppe, or curious German soldiers sitting on them and smiling. Now, for the infantry, that meant they had no support whatsoever of any kind once they hit the shore. And they were facing hardened concrete bunkers

and trench lines that the Germans were fighting from. Not a good day at the office. That's not what you want to fight. You don't want to fight a concrete bunker with weapons you can carry in your hand. Most soldiers did not make it far when they hit the beach. Though some managed to assault through

this and actually got into the town of Dieppe itself. But it's not very far and not for very long. Then, somehow, some way, someone radioed back to the fleet telling them that the assault

on Dieppe was going great and they had achieved a breakthrough. Now, I don't know why this happened, but according to the operational plans, once a breakthrough was achieved, they were to send in reserves and secure the beaches. in reserves and secure the beaches. So this meant while units on the beach were being mauled, someone sent a message back saying, everything is going great. Please feed more soldiers into this buzzsaw. What the fuck? And so General John Roberts, a Canadian general,

got this message and he could not see the beach himself. So one of the things that the, there were British destroyers off the coast and despite not giving gun support, one of the things they did is fire smoke screen shells, like a smoke shells to form a smoke screen. Sure. And really all it did was obscure the beach for air cover and the fleet.

So he could not see the beach. Um, he had no way to confirm that there was a breakthrough. And he just kind of... Sounds like he's going swimmingly. Yeah, he's like, well, okay. And sent another unit towards the meat granite. This one is like a Montreal-based unit.

And that unit was immediately massacred upon landing. Some were, again, able to crawl into the town of Dieppe itself before falling apart. And then Roberts ordered the Royal Marines to land in support of them. Now, the Royal Marines were not supposed to be any part of this landing force. They were actually manning gunboats, like really small gunboats to escort the landing craft. So they weren't ready. They didn't have the right kit.

They effectively had to jump from their gunboats into the few landing craft that actually made it back undamaged and able to go back to shore. And just like, okay. And they jumped in those and started towards the beach. And they started being killed.

When it became clear that the Marines were being massacred on the beach, their commander, a guy named Lieutenant Colonel Phillips, jumped onto his blown up boat that was on the beach and waved off the rest of the men desperately trying to get them to escape back to the fleet oh oh oh no of course because he was standing on top of a boat on the middle of a beach full of dead bodies and machine gun bullets he was shot and killed oh my god this is the happy laugh. This is a bad laugh. His actions did, however, wave off the rest of

the Royal Marines. Now, at this point, the operation, well, the operation had been completely lost for quite some time, but at this point the operational command accepted that the operation was a lost cause. And the only problem now is how to get the survivors off

the beaches. And that started around 10 a.m. So at this point, some elements have been on the beach for like five hours. No, I just want to go fuck at home, bro. This required rear guard actions. A lot of Canadian units, like we already talked about, stood and fought while they got

as many wounded as they could off the beach. But by 2pm that afternoon, the people that could and did get off the beach had gotten off the beach, but a lot of people didn't. So how bad was this? Very. Let's look at the numbers. 907 Canadian soldiers died on the beach. 586 suffered wounds. And 1,900 were captured.

The British commandos and Royal Marines had 45 killed and 197 wounded or captured. And the Royal Navy lost 28% of the vessels used in the raid. Not to mention a further 550 men from both enlisted and officers. The Royal and Canadian the Royal British and Royal Canadian Air Forces lost 106 aircraft which were the heaviest single day

losses since the beginning of the war which is also including the Battle of Britain. As for the Germans, a drop in the bucket. They lost 300 guys uh around 280 wounded they lost some aircraft of course um but you know in order to explain this historic fuck up a lot of explanations have been given one is that the germans knew about the attack and had prepared for it there's no evidence of this unless you count the fact that diep was i mean like we point

out the one beach on that side of of France where a landing could take place. Then sure, despite countless security failings of the Allies, the Germans didn't know that there was a raid coming for Dieppe. Not concretely. Even after their Air Force had stumbled across the flotilla meant for Operation Rudder only you know six weeks or so before they didn't do any major changes around diep uh those defenses were already largely there which meant they didn't see anything coming and weren't preparing for anything special several people claimed that germans had been preparing defenses for weeks because they knew the raid was coming this includes like firsthand accounts of french

civilians um but there's no documented evidence uh with like captured german military documents to say this actually happened um they just knew where it was gonna be basically and would have had the ability to if there's one place yeah okay yeah i think it's like well where else could it have landed um and not that's what i'm have landed? Not to mention the Germans were not shy on generating paperwork. They probably would have gotten some evidence. They did it for a whole goddamn genocide. Yeah, they did. And not to mention the British had broken the German encrypted communications sometime before this. So you can break those encryptions, but you

can't do a recon flight those are interesting priorities right um so if they if there was germans talking about possible english plans they would have known about them and you know i assume they would have called them off even the german coastal ships that the british bumped into couldn't actually get on their radios and mourn the shores um which is another thing that people talk about is like well when the german ships saw them and uh warned the coastal batteries but they didn't their communication arrays were damaged in the fighting and they actually never relayed back to the shore what they saw uh like they couldn't be like hey this is more than just like a random destroyer whatever there's a whole fucking flotilla out here they couldn't tell them that um there though there was um a radar station and a lookout

point that could clearly see holy shit a flotilla so yeah this wasn't a for knowledge it was just general military tactics of having a fucking sentry on guard. My two favorite bits to add to the German, the Germans new theory are also the dumbest. One was the daily telegraph crossword that came the day before the raid. Come on, not the crossword thing. The clue was French port six letters with the answer being Dieppe. Now, to be fair, the war office rightfully thought like this is some spy shit and they're relaying shit back to their German handlers or something. But when they investigated it, they found it was an insane coincidence.

And the same thing would happen in May 1944 before the Normandy landings. Right. I remember that. Which actually was even weirder because the words Normandy and Overlord were answers. Yes. Which is so weird. Now, again, maybe after

decades and decades and decades of investigating this, maybe it really was a sly spy thing from some double agent that never got discovered. But MI6 investigated all this and it's like, this is the weirdest coincidence we've ever seen. But yeah. Now let's look at the main explanation for everything from the plan to the results. We simply had to do this in order to make Operation Overlord possible. Well, this is easily discounted by the fact that they weren't planning Overlord yet.

So that was two years away. It taught us so many lessons we wouldn't have otherwise learned. Now, that is a reasoning almost immediately started by Mountbatten. Now, this is from, again, that article from CanadaHistory.ca. Back in England, nothing mattered except the reputations to be saved. The Dieppe Raid became a model for how to spin the facts as historian Timothy Balzer has conclusively demonstrated. Mount Bend's expert public relations team turned out to be better at preparing their media lines for failure than its planners had been for drawing up a strategy for operational success. Combined operations headquarters instantly claimed the raid had been a great achievement and learning experience oh yeah that's that's why yeah it worked so good guys and this happened

you can trust me an alleged pedophile that's right um and this was before the casualty list became public and they stuck to that when the casualty list became public two years later mount band's boosters maintain that without Jubilee's invaluable invasion tutor tutorial, D-Day would not have succeeded. General Carrar said as much and understandably

perhaps so did most of D-Up survivors not wanting their comrades have been thrown away for nothing. Historians in the Canadian public have largely parroted the

same arguments, perhaps because of the idea that a Canadian defeat, any Canadian defeat is just too hard to swallow. Sure. I guess. Yeah. parroted the same arguments perhaps because of the idea that a canadian defeat any canadian defeat is just too hard to swallow sure i guess yeah i mean that's that seems to track because if you think about it how could you have planned this lessons learned thing true if you had no idea about the operation that was to come that that's just like backwards washing i don't fucking know yeah retconning they call it and again um this article pretty plainly lays out that you didn't need to do any of this

here's the thing if you need a test run with a body count in the thousands to teach you a lesson that we need fire support a clear chain of command and oh yeah don't land on the fortified beaches dominated by cliffs you probably shouldn't have been command in the first place um now yeah none of these were revolutionary ideas um things such as fire support whether it be artillery bombers or ships had been known um for a very long time they had used them before in the raids. They had originally planned to use them here. And in fact, the concept of fire support

for infantry operations had been taught in staff colleges for decades. They just decided to ignore all of this. Yeah, well, men win glory, Joe. And the Victoria Cross sometimes. Everything's fine, Joe. Shut up. Hey, credit where credit's due.

It's not that Lieutenant Colonel's fault. No, that guy tried. He didn't blame the shit. He didn't blame the shit. He did his best. As the blame game got tossed around mysteriously, the minutes that would have led to this authorization within a chief of staff meeting, which would have included Churchill's final authorization,

are all missing, and no documentation of it exists. And Mountbatten would largely become the scapegoat for all of this. I mean, kind of fairly. According to Churchill's own war memoirs, he admits that he authorized it and personally went over all of the minute plans with Mountbatten beforehand. beforehand even funnier is that the complete plan of the operation carried ashore by by brigadier william south at which you should never fucking do just carrying unredacted top secret plans on your body as you land on the beach was captured by the germans meaning the germans got to look over the entire thing afterwards because you know know, bad things happened to William South.

And according to David Hall's, uh, the, the German view of the upgrade, uh, paper, uh, they saw the entire plan as a joke and completely impossible.

If anything, the opposite happened in regards to learning lessons. Well, the Canadians and the British really can't say they learned any lessons. The Americans maybe could because they had never done anything like this before. Sure, sure. But I mean, that's like looking at the best possible outcome. You know who did learn a lesson?

Nazi fucking Germany. They learned a lot from this. These are the guys who didn't want to learn at all. The raid at Dieppe was one of the reasons Hitler began ordering a massive static defense build-up operation to start at beaches and gave a specific document to commanders in these areas to plan for coastal defenses in depth.

Good job, everyone. Give yourselves a round of applause. You really did it. You probably made Overlord way worse than it had to be. That's British ingenuity boys yeah who would have thought all these pedophiles all these Canadians killed I hate pedophiles hopefully that's that's not a controversial thing to say to someone it probably is

so Liam on a lighter note we do a thing on this show called Questions from the Legion, which generally have nothing to do with killing Canadians or pedophiles. We will not be covering Stalingrad. Cannot emphasize this enough. Oh, we will be. I promise you we'll be covering Stalingrad at some point.

I will do that to myself at a later date. We won't. I'm your boss, Joe. You're fired. I'm going to put on my best Vince McMahon voice and fire you. Which means you can come back like six months later with really cool theme music. And then I'll act all shocked. I need the money.

Today's question, the Legion, is generally people in Hollywood suck. Who is a famous person you actually like? Woody Harrelson woody harrelson why yeah because he's in a lot of my favorite movies and he has decent politics i i like his dad more yeah his dad was a was he a serial killer he was he was a contract killer yeah i believe he assassinated a state or federal judge or tried to i don't remember which one we have all made mistakes. Uh,

I don't know if it's a mistake. It's just a job, you know? Yeah. I assume he's like nothing. The contract killing factor. Yeah, that's right.

Mine has to be John Cena. He's apparently a very nice guy. Yeah. I mean, he did some shitty things early in his career. Uh, like most wrestlers do, but like Everest, like I didn't even like

I wasn't watching wrestling when he was famous but like as a person he's done like 700 fucking make a wish yeah he's done the most I think of anybody yeah that's just cool as hell especially for a guy that clearly spends most of his time adjusting anabolic steroids like I'm glad

he can take time off to do that anyway this is where like someone comments like actually he did this terrible thing and then you know that's just how famous people are yeah um oh and peacemaker rules that show is fucking great yeah it's a good one highly recommended actually yeah um anyway uh liam thank you for joining us. Plug your show. I have two, motherfucker. Shows. Well, there's your problem. 10,000 losses.

Listen to them. They're shows about things that will interest you. And thank you for listening, everybody. If you like our show, consider donating to it. Or if you don't want to do that and get bonus stuff, a review is free. It helps us for algorithmic-based reasons reasons which I do not understand but it does engagement yeah whatever that's why

I don't understand metrics I barely understand the own platforms that I put the fucking show on okay well I'm just trying to help you stats guy to figure all this out from you are a stats guy anyway Liam again thank you everybody

don't employ British pedophiles to play yourself