Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 300 - Orde Wingate and the Chindits: Part 2

Episode Date: February 26, 2024

The conclusion to the story of a boy and his Chindits. SUPPORT THE SHOW: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys BUY JOE'S BOOK: https://www.amazon.com/Invisible-War-Military-Sci-Fi-Undying-ebook/dp/B0CQ6BH6BD/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2TQI3C0BO6I0B&keywords=joe+kassabian&qid=1707720101&sprefix=%2Caps%2C204&sr=8-1 SOURCES: John Diamond. British General Orde Wingate's Blurred Legacy https://thestrategybridge.org/the-bridge/2015/2/13/orde-wingate-and-combat-leadership David Rooney. Orde Wingate and the Chindits: Redressing the Balance.

Hey everybody, Joe here from the Lines Led by Donkeys podcast, but I guess you probably already knew that. What if there was a war raging for a million years, but it was kept a secret? It's a question that Sarkis never considered. He was born as an upper-middle class man living in Prime City during the so-called millennia of peace. As far as he knew, or as far as anybody knew, humanity has no army, no weapons, and no wars. The people of Earth had been expanding into the stars as long as anyone remembered,

free of conflict, while the Techno King and his royal cabal enriched themselves in the backs of their labor. It was as it always had been. Then, Sarkis died. Unbeknownst to him, an app he used every single day of his life hijacks his consciousness and uploads it into a synthetic engine of war known as a sleeve. Along with countless others, he's been conscripted into the Undying Legion, charged with fighting a secret, unending war in the name of humanity. Their minds stolen, uploaded into war machines, they fight a secret war to preserve humanity. My new book, The Invisible War, comes out February 20th via Atheon Books and is now available for pre-order on Kindle and Kindle Unlimited. If you like what we do here on the show, consider supporting us on Patreon at www.patreon.com slash linesledbydonkeys. Just $5 per month gets you every regular episode early, access to our community discord, a digital copy of my book, The Hooligans of Kandahar, as well as its audio book read by me, and over five years of bonus content. By supporting the

show, you support us and allow us to keep our show as it has always been ad-free. Thank you for listening, and I hope you enjoy the show. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe, and in the bowels of London, joining me here today on part two of the Chindits is Nate. What's up? Yeah. For a second, I was like, wait, are you in the bowels of London?

Are you here? But then I was like, oh, wait, he means me. me yeah because i'm in a basement in in a part of east london bordering on trending towards north london uh i don't know is hackney i think hackney is emphatically east london but it feels like north london because it's far enough north of the river yeah i'm good man uh you know what it feels like the other day it felt like indiana in march and now it feels like indiana in march different kind of of weather uh but it's all good. Yeah, I'm living. I'm becoming a morning person. I was a morning person after I had jet lag from fucking traveling back from New Zealand. And then a baby middle of the night wake ups and stuff just changed that. And then now,

because I have to get up every morning and let people in to fix the fucking tunnel to hell known as the sewer repair shaft, I'm now a morning person again. So it's 10.08 a.m. and I've been up for a while fucking in the studio. We're working. I'm hella caffeinated. I got my meds just fucking ripping through my brain. So let's podcast. Let's talk about weird British dudes in Burma.

Hell yes. I am the opposite of being in the base. Hell yes. I am the opposite of being in the base. I'm like 14 floors up in a Georgian apartment and the Caucasus are having their first actual winter storm that's hitting the capital cities. I didn't realize that you could stack empty bottles of brandy that high. But I'm in Georgia, which I assume means empty bottles of wine. Of incredibly sweet wine with writing on it that looks like something you'd see in hyrule yeah pretty much um it's always very funny hearing armenians and georgians complain about uh wine about like whose wine is better um because like oh we we are the first people to come with wine no we're the first people to come up with wine it's like georgia is dog country etc

etc yeah yeah yeah it's it's the balkans but slightly in a different region um and with less pure on pure genocide i can't i can't i can't say no pure on pure genocide but less what if the balkans was iranian somehow yeah that works i mean that's a good one yeah the caspian sea b Sea Balkans. I don't know. The, what's they call it? The Tadig Balkans. The Baked Rice Pilaf Balkans. The Pomegranate Syrup Balkans. Yeah.

You know, it's all little. It all tracks. We all have vaguely Persian shit in our countries. And I did, fun fact, get stuck in my elevator for about an hour coming back from the gym today, which was not good because I hit the call button. I don't speak Russian. That's not exactly a default language here for, let's say, obvious reasons.

I speak zero Georgian. I don't even know how to say thank you in Georgian. I hit the emergency button. And the voice that comes over it is only speaking Georgian. You should just speak back in Dutch. I bet you one of them will just be like, yeah, actually, my cousin runs a white van service in fucking Den Haag. So like, yep, I speak Dutch somehow. Well, I did find, so there's a lot of georgian

armenians right and i was like uh do you speak english and he just keeps speaking georgian and then i ask an armenian like do you speak armenian and he's just like yes and but also like my armenian not great uh and i for instance i don't know how to say the word elevator in armenian so i i resorted to uh i'm sorry the up down machine is that working i mean i was gonna say try a little you know throw some french try asan sir say lift you know you never know maybe maybe uh maybe you can just like go through some pigeon stuff and you know it works well it works it works yeah yeah it did work he eventually like restarted the elevator and i managed to get uh 10 more floors up to my apartment.

So shout out to you, random Georgian-Armenian man who operates my elevator. I'm just laughing at this idea that it's like, oh, they got the elevator operating because it's like the machine from Fritz Lang's Metropolis in the basement of fucking this building in Tbilisi. A guy's got to twist the lever really hard to make it work. I have no idea where this guy was.

I assume he's the building superintendent version, Georgian version of that. The superintendent Vili. Yeah, we turned the elevator off because we wanted to save the power to run our Bitcoin miner.

Okay, part of that is probably true um at least the same electricity it's a more annoying cryptocurrency yeah exactly yeah it's misha coin oh fuck's sake i i wanted to come up with another but i realized i don't know the the the shvili ending to a name i do know for georgians but the only thing i could possibly think of was yet another stalin joke and i'm like but that's old hat on this show with me it's all I'm ever doing I need to like get a primer on Georgia so I can make better riffs on Georgians like the only Georgian that's literally that I know is uh well correct me if I'm wrong but I I seem to

recall um that uh my brain is not functioning yet this morning. I falsely advertised how far fucking motivated I was this morning. But wasn't Leventry Beria Georgian? Yes, he was. Okay, so Beria, I know. Stalin, I know.

And then this Georgian army officer that went to Ibolik with who had smuggled hash into the United States, into the u.s state of georgia from georgia that's my boy i'll put five dollars his name was either givy or dato i don't remember what his last name was but that does sound familiar so i got i got a re that was my my my famous ibolec class where i had like this is the serbian guy who couldn't start stop permanently harming people during combatives. The second lieutenant from the Liberian Army, who's now the chief of staff of the Liberian Armed Forces. And it's a three star general.

The Georgian guy who was like, yes, I smoke ash in dorm room. And like 18 Lebanese lieutenants, to include the guy who told the story about when they made fun of them for being such shammers. And the guy was like, you are the son of the bitch your mother she is eating the big dick and she all my all my all my lebanese stories are from that one eyeball like platoon platoon so yes yeah i uh the i only know givy and dato as names here because it's like the georgian version of like every armenian being named armin or hike uh yeah it tracks um it's like the swiss thing that like the the most uh unbelievably swiss german guys like their their last names are either like muller or bernsley and so bernsley becomes like this like it's like swiss german baz except it's like guy who's constantly writing complaint letters so yeah this is just a universal thing and in in it's like keeping who's constantly writing complaint letters so yeah this is just a universal

thing and in in it's like keeping up with the joneses keeping up with high on or armin or keeping up with the unibrow it's always very funny whenever i meet like um a friend of the show neil howard he's been a guest before he's like you know hike right i'm like bro do you have any idea how little that whittles it down i mean it did happen to me one time that i was calling some random blooms i was like oh yeah my friends in the army do you know but it turned out that i did he was a soldier in my platoon and i'm not joking and i'm not joking she then said oh oh you know i was like yeah she's like what could you tell him i'm pregnant dead serious i'm not i was i was literally calling for like a power bill or something like that so i love i just you know

what and you you don't even bat an eye because you're like yep i believe it that's a similar thing happened to me uh i went home it was years and years ago i went to michigan which tells you how long ago it was because i actually went back to michigan and uh you know i'm from a small community within a big city and you know my my mom is one of those like overly proud military moms so she told everybody i was in the army and um their neighbor uh had their son also joined the army i never met um their son at all ever and uh like oh you you might know my my my son he's uh infantry he just joined i wasn't infantry as a tanker i was like oh you know the army is really big it was like oh, his last name is this.

I was like, fuck, I know this guy. Well, I know we got to get on topic, but I will tell the one last story. I think I've said this before. It's very funny. Years ago, I taught at a creative writing workshop for veterans and for veteran family, family members that are in New York City. One of the guys who was both an instructor and also a participant in the class was a new york national guard vet um who had deployed to iraq in like the early part of the war and he had written a story and it was it was good it was

like really surreal it was sort of like a story of like a a fatal incident where like people got killed in a humvee crash leaving the ecp and it was just sort of like this just very kind of slice of life haggard moment of like being in a cop and it sucks and life sucks and like who's supposed to be on this patrol how are you how are you filling the crews in your vehicles and there was this one soldier that that uh he was just sort of like one of their kind of like permanently in the gun turret guy and his name was just ass in the story i think obviously he's like he's like i'm not telling you twice ass put your kid on the kid and and it says there was this line of dialogue he's like take it up here or put it up your ass ass said and i was like who is the soldier named ass like, take it up here or put it up your ass, ass said.

And I was like, who is the soldier named ass? Like, how has this happened? And then I met you. And they're like, oh, yeah, the people in the army are too fucking stupid to say Kasabians. They just called you ass. Yep, they sure did. I never got away with that from when I was in basic training to the time I got out. I have to reach out to this guy. I realized this.

I'm like, I met ass. I found him. He is real. I podcast with him. The mythological Ass. Yeah, well, you know what? We're going to talk about a lot of mythological Ass about a guy named Ord Wingate, if I'm not mistaken, because there is some Assery taking place.

There is a lot of bullshittery, Assery, and all-around chucklefuckery, I will say, in this episode. So when we left you last time, our hero-slash-terrible person, Ord Wingate, had led his guerrilla army, known as the Chindits, in a disease-infested suicide mission into Japanese-occupied Burma, and things were going not great. Bordering on horribly.

Now, on the other side of the Irrawaddy River, Wingate found all of the intelligence that the British military had given him about the area was totally and completely wrong. Now, Wingate's entire plan required a jungle. It's cover. It moves his forces around all sneaky-like. you know, a jungle. It's cover. It moves its forces around all sneaky-like. But he found on the other side of the Irrawaddy,

it was completely barren and dry. There was no jungle to speak of. I hate it when this happens. I hate it when they invent primitive Asian orange and fucking deforest my jungle, you know, desiccate my beautiful overhead cover. It's just unfortunate. Yeah. To be fair, if anybody was going to drop that during World War II,

it probably would have been the British. I mean, in a couple of years, they would be dropping it on Malaysia. The thing about it is that they would specifically be dropping it not because it's a defoliant, but because they're like, this will cause birth defects. Yeah. We have to make them more British. You know what this is how i know you're gonna be good on the live show joe because you've got

you've got that comic timing you've got it you've got it down pat now on top of all of this many of the villages on this side of the river were actually pro-japanese rather than the ones closer to the indian border where the Chindits had started. They were pro-British or failing that at the very least anti-Japanese. And on top of that being dry and open, it made it a very good place for the Japanese to build infrastructure, specifically roads, which the Japanese then use for motorized patrols. So the entire area is swarming with japanese patrols and now the chindits are just kind of like completely lost and have nowhere to hide yeah it's like great

all right you guys thought you were doing jungle warfare instead you're starting it's level one of the original nintendo version of metal gear you're just like it's just air dropped into the middle of some kind of inscrutable landscape that's kind of a jungle and kind of a desert and kind of savannah. And there's just guys patrolling endlessly back and forth, just fully automated, never take a break. Just as soon as they hit one point, turn around, go back the other way, and you have to pretend that you're hiding in a box. Yeah. Or at wind gates, like, I have an idea. Everybody pretend you're 2D.

Yeah. The first time in human history that a military patrol said, huh, what was that noise? That was actually, speaking of airdrops, actually. Remember the last episode, this entire mission required resupply via air, via airdrop. And that immediately fell apart. And everybody was hungry and thirsty not to mention everybody's dead tired and sick because they've been marching for hundreds of miles through the fucking jungle and crossing rivers and that's not even counting being shot at well if i remember

anything from metal gear solid 3 you need to eat a specific mushroom in the forest and it'll give you night vision but it'll be green night vision like you're wearing knots to be fair if anybody believed that it'd be fucking ord windgate oh yeah absolutely yeah yeah and he would commune commune with the warrior spirit the the the the eternal you know like herb barbarian that's within us all he eats some fucked up mushrooms and starts seeing churchill floating through the clouds but churchill was alive at the time basically churchill was so fucked up off his like 11th pint of brandy that night that when Ord Wingate takes the mushroom that takes you to a different dimension, he meets Churchill because they're both sort of like, you know, their spirits have left their bodies in different ways. Now, when the airdrops actually did get to the Chindits, which was not very often, one of windgate's commanders had to remind his soldiers

that if anybody was caught stealing from the food they'd be shot um and a small a small side note here the supply system overall didn't work but when it did work it worked weirdly well like they had radios to the raf at which point they could call and say exactly what they needed. And most of the time it would not be delivered. But sometimes it was so accurate, it was strange. For instance, the Scottish soldiers ordered fudge and it showed up. And then someone else ordered new dentures and a porno magazine and those showed up. But they were always short of ammo.

They were short of food. they were short of food, they were short of water, but they had Scottish fudge, porn, and fake teeth. I mean, I feel as though you and I have both experienced echoes of this sort of thing in our lives when we were in the military. So I absolutely believe it, that the thing you need doesn't get delivered, but for some reason, the one-off bullshit, you're like, hey hey what do you want um i want five dollars for the tooth fairy and a birthday card yep you got it and it shows up like or like my buddy on a 10-day air assault patrol they put in a resupply for water and they get a pallet of muffins whereas or or like my first sergeant be

like i know they're like you know nate i know they're gonna fuck everything up please will you go down to the airfield and square this away for me and i looked at and i was like yes i will because what he needed was basically he needed a palette of water and uh uh what's it called um aviator bag full of batteries like radio batteries and what they had marked for him was a palette of sundry items, which if you've ever gotten the sundry item resupply packets, it's like laundry detergent toothbrushes. It's like famously during the Korean War, the Marines needed resupply and they got like condoms.

Yeah, my friend said that they basically, everyone was so thirsty that they're like, we don't even want the muffins. Basically, they packed enough muffins that everybody could have one or two muffins their backs and they threw a thermite grenade on the rest the taliban could not have these you will not have these you will not have otis spunkmeyer you are not allowed to taste the fucking munificence of american culture fucking otis spunkmeyer i will never eat an otis spunkmeyer muffin again as long as I live. And in fact, the very concept of muffins to me now as I'm 35 years old and I've been out

the military for over 10 years, I cannot remember a time I've ever voluntarily eaten a muffin ever since. Yeah, man, look, I make banana bread muffins and it kind of restored the concept of muffins for me because, yeah, between the bad stuff in the field kitchens, Otis Spuckbier, the Jimmy Dean meal packs, they're like, what if MREs were worse? We're getting through a historical story, but let's just say that there are echoes, there are similarities in the military resupply system now. And I can only imagine what it was like back then when you were talking on shortwave radio to guys who had the real voices of what you imagine the rabbits from Redwall talking like. And every now and again, you might get a porno mag and a new set of fake teeth,

but you would emphatically not be getting ammo. We will give you fake teeth, but nothing to chew with them. This is where Wingate discovered a critical flaw in his entire plan, something he should have seen since the very beginning. Because remember, this whole operation originally was planned to be a smaller part of a bigger offensive, but the bigger offensive was canceled,

and because Wingate's insane, he convinced them that the Chindit mission should go ahead anyway. Well, he was now seeing the problems with this, because that meant every single japanese patrol in the entire area can now be focused on wrecking his shit uh and they were constantly running from patrols they're constantly hit with artillery aircraft were always overhead and he was starting to be like i feel like I may have fucked up somewhat. But this did not mean he was going to quit.

He planned on pressing on ahead anyway. And that is when the British Army's command, Wavell, was like, this is fucking stupid. And ordered Wingate to get everyone the hell back to India on March 22nd. I feel like when the enemy is actually behaving the way that an eight-year-old would design a plan for a villain's fortress, like Technodrome style thing, they're actually doing... They've got fighter pilots doing patrols. They've got guys just crawling on the ground with knives doing patrols for some reason. When they're actually behaving like Captain Planet villains and they're henchmen, you might be like, okay, we may need to not engage. This may not be a good idea. Yeah. One of his Gurkhas comes running out of the woods like, you're not going to believe this. I saw some kid hold up a ring and scream out heart. I'm being chased by a guy who's also a pig. Someone threw a green shell at me. Let's get

the fuck out of here. There's this guy with a green flat top and really, really white skin. He's just flying around talking about recycling. I don't know what's happening, but it's scary as hell. What the fuck is recycling? Wingate followed these orders, but at the most Wingate way possible, he ordered his men to break into small groups and effectively do whatever they wanted on their way back to India. Ambush, blow up, and damage anything japanese you could find along the way and since wingate had trained his officers and ncos to ignore orders when they simply did not like them many many had gone like the complete opposite direction when he turned back towards india so they're like nah fuck that we're gonna go further into burma one of his commanders a guy named ferguson launched an attack on a village in the complete opposite direction he got cut off had his life saved by a single burmese soldier and had to sprint off into the night cut off from everybody in order to not get captured

and murdered by the japanese he would have to run all the way back to india on his own i feel like this is just... Every single one of these things seems as though it's been created to be able to be the subject matter of a different episode of our show 80 years later. It's like... Ord Wingate was like,

I heard there are these two assholes from America who are going to emigrate to Europe and do a podcast, and they're going to have a third guy from Ireland who's going to be on here fucking making them talk about anime. And I want to make sure that I give them as much content as possible. So I want every single one of my guys to go off on a separate side mission to do heroic feats of daring do and manly valor that's incredibly stupid and doesn't accomplish shit, but does involve you doing escape from LA in the Burmese jungleese jungle yeah and somehow this isn't even the dumbest thing that would happen during this

retreat like other columns lost contact with one another others just left their radios and maps for the japanese to capture others like had no idea where they were going even when they had a map because they couldn't read it in another case the column tried to cross a river, only to discover they did not actually cross the river, but made it to an island in the middle of said river, and then their boats were swept away, trapping them there. We're just going to have to live here forever with

this civilization on this island. I'm fucking one of you. Which one's it going to be? Exactly. One of y'all is getting pregnant. I don't know how it's going to be possible. We're going to repopulate the Earth. That's what dolly parton's islands in the stream is actually about it's a subtle message that's actually where dolly parton was born she's from a strange island at the middle of the hirawati river don't ask about her her parental lineage she just got to where did tennessee i can't remember she's from somewhere like that

i feel like it's let's say let's say tenn Tennessee feels safe. Somewhere in the South, yeah. Someone is screaming right now if we're wrong. Yeah, I'm pretty sure Dolly World is in Tennessee, so that would make sense. But like, she has a Tennessee vibe, but I could be very wrong. It could be like, I don't know, fucking very far Western Kentucky, Northern Georgia. I don't know.

Please don't hurt me. I know Dolly heads are like, literally will slip my throat in the night like a fucking, like the Shogun's Ninja Assassin. So please don't don't don't do that so it's a dress up like a chindit to assassinate yeah my house my house is an open sewer shaft in it right now like i'm already fucking at my last goddamn like really hanging by a thread here please don't do that to me and so other soldiers and officers saw them on this island they're like oh fuck we have to get over to them so they tried to swim across this river and immediately drowned at the at this point the one officer did make it onto the island

and realize his men were refusing to move um on account you know the murderous river and the fact they had no boats and if they were going to make it any further they have to effectively leave everything with their weapons they're gonna strip naked minus boots and swim for their lives and nobody would do it so he's like if you don't start moving in 30 minutes we're going to leave you behind for the japanese a full quarter of his force elected to take their chances falling into japanese custody than swimming across the river yeah i mean sometimes i feel like there's Ord Wingate and some of just the British guys that make up this sort of coterie of weirdos in general

lived their lives as though it was like they behaved like it was a video game where you had at least three lives before it was game over. And Ord Wingate definitely thought he had the Konami code. And it's like, you need to remind these guys, no, when you die, you actually die for real. Like, it's not just it plays like the Mario do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do music

and then you start over. Like, you're actually dead. Trying to swim across the Irrawaddy like, was it up, up, down, up, left? Fuck, shit, as you're sinking. I remember I met a dude from Nepal who was incredibly good at Contra and he didn't know about the Konami code

when I told him about it. And he was like, you motherfuckers. Do you have any idea how hard that game is to beat he's like I beat it I played it so fucking much in my cousin's village having to fucking hike three miles to get there play it on the tv I used to sing the Contra theme music to like fucking keep myself motivated on my hikes like I beat that game without losing a single life and you motherfuckers had 25 lives like the Konami code hadn't made it to nepal yeah unfortunately for the chindits the final boss is some japanese conscript who's bayoneting them in the skull yeah exactly and

he doesn't have a big glowing red spot that's his weak point you have to shoot at it did make things somewhat more convenient yeah you have to fight all the way to the emperor before you get to that boss fight uh now many of the columns of chindits were running away so quickly they couldn't stop for resupply leaving them to survive on a steady diet of tea and malted milk tablets or as we call it british food i was gonna say that's basically like yeah when when tesco's been cleared out and you don't have time to fucking wait for them to restock the shelves it's just like all right this is how i live now uh and the men were starving to death but they are still managing to march most of them were on the verge of literally dropping dead when they're lucky

enough to be saved by burmese villagers who hated the japanese so they would feed them and be like hey you should go this way the japanese don't patrol that way uh one of the columns got so off course they finally figured out it would be easier for them to walk to china than india and they made it and the chinese nationalist army sent word to the british army headquarters in delhi india be like hey don't worry we found your soldiers which must have been really fucking confusing for the delhi hq like what do you mean you found our soldiers why are they in china chilling they heard there was noodles. They heard there's a guy with this thing called TikTok and he can down pints of beer while eating huge meals of stew. And they're like, yeah, that sounds like a life.

Hell yeah. Chiang Kai-shek just ordered several people to feed them grapes while they're laying around. Yeah. I mean, at the end of of the day it's just one of those things where you forget that okay like geographically speaking the borders are very close to each other here but that it is very very funny um i mean i i've heard of the people doing this in the modern day by mistake and uh without giving too much details because i don't want it to become an opsec thing that gets people in trouble if they haven't escaped if they've escaped it already uh i do some guys who were doing a jay set as special forces guys with people in trouble if they haven't escaped if they've escaped it already uh i do some guys who were doing a jay said we had special forces guys with people in a country that borders a

country that's hostile to america and they didn't bring a gps during a training exercise wandered into that hostile country's borders got rolled up by their security forces americans got let go their fucking foreign counterparts did not let go they got interrogated as fuck and uh yeah probably damaged the military working relationship between those two countries. And I won't go any further, but some people out there who know what I'm talking about are like, oh, yes, I know exactly. I know exactly this incident. It's nothing several billion dollars of military aid can't fix. Column three of the Chindits all but fell apart.

Its commander saw that his men were dying and the entire group was simply not going to make it back so he came up with a plan to split off into even smaller groups to give you know the stronger ones a better chance of making it so they didn't feel like they have to slow down for the weaker ones and you know other columns ran into similar problems but they had a trick up their sleeve they had been supplied with Benzedrine, the first amphetamine made for pharmaceutical use. Oh, hell yeah. They're just like me.

They got legal speed, and it makes their brain work fast until it doesn't, and then you have a complete collapse. They got ripped to the gills on amphetamines and stormed through the jungle without a thought of food going through their head. And one guy who loved Benzedrine was Ord fucking Wingate. He ate tab after tab of the stuff

while his men took a break to butcher and eat their own mules, while he paced back and forth rambling about the Italian Renaissance, the idea of a United Nations, because remember, it doesn't exist yet, and Marxism. Bro, have you ever taken so much meth

you start talking about theory joe all i can say is adhd representation is so important it's really really heartwarming to know that like there's i have people i can look up to that you know just like me i mean i don't walk around naked with garlic over my neck like i'm fucking fending off nosferatu and vlad tapish but like you know you should try whom among us has not based around endlessly fucking talking about whatever the fuck comes to your mind confusing the hell out of all the people around you

uh you know and then you're like you know I need another one of these pills you know unfortunately the meth high was only interrupted by the time everyone got sick because they ate bad python meat and began shitting themselves this is 100% Metal Gear Solid 3 it's so fucking stupid

but in that game if you leave your saved game and you come back 48 hours later or more the meat from the animals that you fucking butchered in the jungle will have spoiled because they're like ah isn't this funny like literally so you don't have your inventory anymore because it's all gone bad and you give yourself food poisoning and like shit yourself and slow down because it's like

oh it's rotten like like I didn't even know what like a gavial was like some kind of weird I think it's a saltwater crocodile thing that grows in Southeast Asia somewhere Metal Gear Solid 3 is set in the imaginary Soviet jungle which I don't think there's a jungle climate anywhere

in the borders of the Soviet Union like Sochi is the closest I can think of and it's not it's not a jungle it's a rainforest in this video game like I don't think there's a jungle climate anywhere in the borders of the Soviet Union like so cheese the closest I can think of and it's not it's not a jungle it's a rainforest in this video game like I don't think the Soviet Union had a rainforest maybe I'm wrong but anyway yeah you get weird ass animals but if you come back like a week later or whatever like all your meats rotten and I was like ha that's

funny but apparently they're the case study Hideo Kojima was just like I've heard about Ord Wingate I want to make a game based on him, but also it's going to have Solid Snake. And also we're going to make fun of Raiden from Metal Gear Solid 2 by making him a Soviet officer who's gay.

Yeah, Solid Snake is just Ord Wingate ripped to the gills on meth and bad Python meat, like literally shitting himself. And like all of the sickness, meth and starvation, of course led to a break in discipline because of course it did this led officers and ncos to get men moving by literally holding them at gunpoint and occasionally pistol whipping them to motivate them

and and mind you remember while they're pistol whipping one another all their pants are stained with shit that that was a point very much driven home in the source material, is that this wasn't like they had an upset tummy. They're all actively shitting themselves for bad python meat and meth. It's like, listen, men, if you don't get

in formation and get ready to march, we're going to SP in 30 minutes. Get in formation or I'm taking your jewels away and you're not allowed to hit the jewel anymore no more vaping until we get on the march and they're all like fate worse than death those are fucking dropping yet another tab i mean i'm gonna say like like i was i was prescribed top up medication in case like the shit was wearing off you know in the day and i realized that like for one reason or another, maybe it's because I've lost weight being on these meds. The top ups are too much for me.

I mean, they'll definitely let me power through things. But I will definitely also be like, googling niche Excel formulas to solve a problem only I know about at three in the morning. So I understand it. And also, I understand that sometimes your tummy will hurt from taking legal speed and you have to poop a lot. And if you can't poop or you ate rotten python, you probably are finding yourself in a situation where it's just kind of coming out. It's snaking its way out of you like it snaked its way in. I was going to say, rotten python for me is normally trying to teach myself how to code at 4.30 in the morning because I drank a Pepsi Max and took another speed pill at eight o'clock at night. So I empathize. I sympathize. I feel them. By this point, some groups of the Chindits had made it back to India, but Wingate hadn't, sparking rumors that he had died. But he finally did make it back to British lines three weeks after everyone else. Groups and individuals of men would appear out of the

jungle for days and weeks afterwards or end up in China, a full one-third of the Chindit force was completely lost during the mission, dying in one horrible way or another or simply never being seen again. Out of 3,000 men, 2,180 returned, but everybody who returned was broke the fuck down from campaign stress, disease, and starvation. Despite Wingate himself being worried that he would face charges for how many men that he had lost, the British press immediately spun the mission as a daring, adventurous success and made sure to point out the fact that he was related to Lawrence of Arabia.

And the media ate Wingate up. He's a character. I wouldn't want to eat him up he's got shit all over him he's got shit he's got shit all over him he's full of rotten python can you imagine how insanely disappointed just all those dudes who dealt with his bullshit forever like he's finally fucking dead he just jumps out of the jungle looking like the chupacabra which is completely like putrescent python hanging out of his mouth you guys want any this is good as hell tastes great

emerges from the jungle caked in his own filth butt naked wearing onions and garlic ripped to the gills on speed he's like let's do it again you guys want to talk about the Medici's he's a fucking cryptid dude this man would have been a great podcaster is all i'm saying no because remember like at the time things were not going great for the war effort for the allies

in asia so like they just grabbed on to wingate as a lone victory story and wingate rolled with it because he loved attention if there's one thing that ord wingate loved it was ord wingate so despite him knowing that the mission was pretty much a failure he was just like fuck yeah we ruled uh and they're like sir could you please take a bath it's been weeks no so what you're basically saying is ord wingate was uh he he was actually the uh the inventor of the concept of the Sante Raid, which... Kind of. You know that? I know you know that whole story.

They're like, oh, we inspired the POWs. It was like, no, you guys went to an empty camp because you had bad intel. You just got a helicopter shot down. Well done, guys. Nailed it. Nailed it. You guys did Chuck Norris shit, and it fucking sucked. You're like, yeah, well, at least we did it.

And it's like, well, yeah, at least those guys tried to rescue the hostages in Iran in 1980 and crashed three planes together. I don't know how you even do that. Hey, most people only believe you can crash one plane at a time. The U.S. Air Force looked at that and saw a challenge. They adapted and they overcame. They said, that's rookie shit. You know

what? We're a professional fighting force. Just wait. However, behind the media blitz, the military was asking important questions such as as what the fuck was the point of all of this they had lost quite a lot of men and a lot of material to accomplish effectively nothing other than what you could consider a proof of concept for wingate's tactics also like you now can you imagine how expensive it was to get porn fake dentures to to the Indian slash Burmese theater of operations? Right. Our strategic fudge supply is running low now thanks to Wingate.

Yeah. Go ahead. Sorry. Go ahead. And while the military was asking these questions, Winston Churchill got involved, and it turned out he loved the entire thing. He invited Wingate back to London for dinner. And Churchill was a huge fan of this guy. And despite his obvious flaws, and remember, Churchill knew he was nuts.

And for all of those many, many flaws you don't want in a military commander, Wingate did know a lot about the various problems in the Indian and Chinese theaters because he was still a very intelligent, well-read man. And unfortunately, his answer to all of these problems were throwing the Chindits in there. So before long, the Chindits became a major part of all allied planning in that particular theater of war, especially in northern Burma. However, this would require him to vastly expand his force as well as replace all of the ones

that died in various horrible ways in the last mission and that entire thing would be under the command of wait for it Lord Louis Mountbatten oh fuck me I was going to say that Wingate and the Chindit sounds like yet another counterfeit Alvin and the Chipmunks band

when you bring in Mountbatten, it's just like, great. And this is fresh off of his massive fuck-up at Dieppe as well. He was already known to be kind of a dumbass. It is kind of amazing to me that, I've made the comment

before that the Brits, especially middle to upper class Brits, have this notion that you can basically reverse gravity if you just bully it hard enough like and it feels the same way with their kind of military history and they're like the people particularly from the 20th century that they venerate is that like everyone knows these guys fucking sucked and were terrible at their jobs and the sort of combined effort of both veterans organizations and like professional historians that are sort of within the the acceptable discourse in britain

is just to bully and try to publicly shame anyone who acknowledges reality who says like sir actually the the ass flap of your old timey pajamas is hanging open and so that's how you get all these stories but these people are like oh there's a blah blah you know guys like bernard montgomery and it's like he was an idiot he sucked in his job everyone fucking hated him and amongst other things yeah yeah i'm not gonna say he's definitively announced but he wrote love letters to a 12 year old boy in switzerland and it was very very weird so let's just we'll leave it at that um at the end of the day it's so bizarre to me because you just like you read this and you know your your boilerplate kind of british military history thing about world war ii about the 20th century in general would be like ah

mountbatten and it's just like you and i know like oh god fuck me no great you know we do have to credit mountbatten with one thing he's the first person to go to space while using a boat. Yes. Yes. Yes, he is. Yes, he is. And you know what? That's the thing. Someone got really mad at us about the episode, the series that you and Tom did, and all I can say is, yeah, it's not

funny that some kids, some teenage kids died. However, the fact that Mountbatten died that way is funny. And it's sad. It's a tragedy when families lose their loved ones, their innocent loved ones. You know what I mean? And yet we have to be able to have the openness of spirit and intellect to say that is a tragedy. And also, in the capacity of killing Mountbatten on his pleasure boat off the coast of Ireland,

the bomb is funny. I'm sorry, but we've got to have that capacity as thinkers. Otherwise, we're doomed to repeat our own mistakes. Now, you need to send your thought process into the clouds, much like pieces of Louis Mountbent. Yes, exactly. He had Mountbent been put in the command over everyone else despite him being incredibly unqualified for such a promotion we talked about this more on diep uh on our diep

episode a long time ago um and somehow to make this entire situation even worse wingate was given a personal letter letter from churchill that effectively authorized him to do whatever he wanted and if anybody tried to stop him he could just wave the letter in their face. And Churchill promised him the world. But as soon as he got back to India, the entire British army did their best to let him know how much they hated him. On top of all of the other shit about Wingate they already hated, his newly established staff had no offices,

and they were forced to work in the hallways. And when it came to planning anything, everyone in every single meeting told him, damn, we just can't help you with that, bro. It sucks. We can't really fit the chindits in this operation. We'll try again next time. Yeah. I mean, it's the worst case of blue balls ever for all the British military staff in

India that they thought they were done with this guy forever. And then he just full on Bigfoot is is real storms out of the tree cover. And they now Winston Churchill loves him. So, yeah, I get it. They're frustrated. They really don't like him. And they didn't like him to start with. Now they hate him even more.

Others told him that planning any future operation in Asia was pointless until they had made some progress against Germany and Europe or Africa. This was mostly because General Woodburn Kirby, head of staff in Delhi, fucking hated Wingate for his personality and tactics, but also because he was jealous of the amount of access he had with Churchill. And Wingate in turn hated him, telling Mountbatten that they should fire him, but Mountbatten couldn't. None that slowed Wingate down, and he began a new punishing training regimen for his new batch of chindits. He immediately got typhoid fever, however,

and nearly died, because instead of going to a hospital, he tried to heal it via running, which did not work. This is just like, wow, this guy should be one of General Stanley McChrystal's fucking chiefs of staff, because I swear to God, there's just so many echoes. These guys, like the dudes who are like, I don't eat.

I don't sleep. I drink. I have a burrito every night at 9 p.m. Other than that, no food enters my body. I run 14 miles a day. I fucking suck at my job. But you know what? Everyone respects me because i'm really

fast at running it's like wow something's never changed and when when wingate finally got to the hospital doctors figured that he would be bedridden until at least february of 1944 because he had waited so long to get treatment and then you know actively made it worse meanwhile the first chindits who had survived their last mission picked up the job of training the new Chindits, which would turn into a 20-week-long jungle-bound hazing side quest. And they were actually ready to go by the time Wingate had healed. And when he came back, he devised what would become known as Operation Thursday. Chindits would be flown into Burma via gliders and set up strongholds.

Once there, they would carve out landing strips and defenses, and for the first time, the Chindits would have artillery support provided from these strongholds. They would effectively set up fire bases. They could then raid out of them and return to the safety of the defenses rather than camp out in the bush and hope for the best. And on February 20th, 1944, Wingate was to document this notion of a stronghold, and the entire idea did not come from a place you think it did. Joe, I just got to say that I someday would hope we could do an episode about

World War II gliders, also known as the plane that falls and that you die inside. Because it is such a fascinating concept of plane that doesn't have a motor, but is towed behind a plane that does and is then released and you just drift in and hope it's all good. Now, I'm going to let you continue because I know we've got a script to stick to. But just to me, when you say gliders, I'm like, attrition rates just pop into my head like thought bubbles. You know, like a cartoon character having an epiphany, a big ass light bulb. All I can think of is like at least 25% of people just burn in and die. Well, good news, Nate.

You kind of nailed it. Now, his idea for strongholds didn't come from the military or any kind of military education. Rather, because remember, he kind of grew up in a cult yeah it came from the book of zachariah and specifically from the pack the passage turn ye to the stronghold ye prisoners of hope and then he added underneath the motto of the stronghold is no surrender this is like what the worst nco you ever dealt with would have tattooed on his chest. A hundred percent, yeah. Either that or like a Boondock Saints tattoo, it's hard to tell.

I think I'm showing my age with the second one, though. No, a hundred percent. Brother, I mean, I had fucking guys who put whatever the stupid tattoos they had that were in Latin as the names of their tanks on their tank barrels and said, yep, I gotcha. Losers. Now, pretty much everyone in India

thought this plan was insane, and so far outside of what anyone else had ever done, it could only exist in the damaged mind of Ord Wingate. Wingate had the complete support of Churchill, Wavell, and the British Allied Americans who were so inspired by him, they started their own Chindit unit

known famously as Merrill's Marauders, in case you're wondering where they came from. Very quick pot of history. Basically, this is the foundational unit that then becomes the Army Rangers. Basically, Merrill's Marauders become Ranger units. Ranger units become a standard kind of equipment thing in Vietnam that companies will have a Ranger unit. That goes away. Then early 70s, they stand up.

The Rangers are supposed to be like the world's best regular Army Airborne Infantry Battalion. And then eventually, they become a Spuck a Ranger unit. That goes away. Then early 70s, they stand up. The Rangers are supposed to be the world's best regular army airborne infantry battalion, and then eventually they become a SPAC ops unit. But yes, Merrill's Marauders, fucking venerated in US Army history, especially if you're airborne infantry ranger, etc. We'll eventually do some kind of series on Merrill's. That's actually how I

ended up doing this two-parter. As I was looking into Merrill's Marauders, I'm up doing this two-parter as i was looking into merrill's marauders i'm like this is this is a much longer series but this ordwin gate guy is fucking nuts it's just very funny to me they're like yeah it's inspired by a guy who did great feats of daring do in the jungles of burma british guy then you read about it's like oh he's that kind of british guy roger so the mission went on ahead however However, at the last second, aerial reconnaissance showed that one of the three landing zones for the gliders, codenamed, of course, Picc we crash into some tree stubs we have to crash into entire whole trees all right it's the principle of it you crash the plane and you hope you don't die that's how literally how it works someone watched like a bird slam into a window and they're like i have an idea

like the neon was not an original concept this brought up some serious questions when it came to military planning though had the japanese figured out their plan did the mission get leaked because they were working with chinese nationalist forces and they weren't exactly the most loyal or secure on earth so this was a possibility had their like code been broken or something and if they had they were going to their certain death so it made sense to call the whole thing off then wingate thought wait i can't do that the entire delhi headquarters fucking hates me and if we had to call this plan off they could claim a victory on him they'd have won over on him so wingate simply changed his mind decided to cram the entire glider force originally meant for three landing zones into one known as broadway

so then the mission started anyway only an hour late he did all of this in an hour which is not how you want to plan a mission no probably not um and then everything immediately starts going bad because the gliders start taking off so yeah so just just so we're clear for the last time the way that a world war ii military glider works is and i say this without any joy, without any excitement, without any smugness, it is a plane with no engine. And it gets dragged behind a plane as it takes off and then you let it go and it goes

and you just drift it on and just gently drift it in and hope that you've got a nice clear grassy field to land it in and crash it in because you're literally crash landing it because there's no brakes. You're landing with style. not really to speak of and uh and then uh but most of the time you just crash into trees and everyone dies yeah generally there's a reason we don't use them anymore because it never ended well like no glider mission went great because we found far more

efficient ways to kill 15 to 25 people at a time it's called chinooks and you know if you're if you're no i take that again chinooks are wonderful it's called Chinooks. And, you know, if you're... No, I take that again. Chinooks are wonderful. It's called the V-22 Osprey. I do think it's funny that they flew the president and won those ones. I mean, if you're going to find a more economical way to kill that many paratroopers at once, just let them jump out of

a plane normally. Just be like, guys, we're going to get your combat star. It's called Sicily. It's going to whip ass. Now, as soon as the planes are taking off, the gliders, which were being towed by a leash, the leash broke free, throwing the glider just randomly into the jungle minutes after taking off. And honestly, when you're using gliders, you kind of expect shit like that to happen.

You expect them to crash. But one thing you don't expect to happen is the planes towing them to forget to put fuel in their planes and then having to randomly cut the glider free so they could return to base before they crashed and those gliders went sailing off into the distance having no communication with the plane that's towing them, right? So the gliders crash, thinking they're in Burma, emerge out of the glider, shooting and throwing hand grenades in the middle of the British staff office.

Oh my fucking God. They're like, wait a minute. These guys aren't Japanese? Fuck. I'm speechless. Normally it's like, ah, it's time for Nate to say something funny and stupid but wow let me let me just reiterate

this for clarity Joe did not share a script of this in advance I did not read Wikipedia because I can't read and I did not prerequisite for being a co-host of the show I did not do any advanced research for this that would spoil my reactions I did not know and then thereby direct the

joke about fucking the gliders crashing and stuff. I just, there was a time when I could read and I read a book about gliders and so, or and also I was like, well, that's funny because there's old glider training grounds at Fort Benning and then you read about it and you're like, oh, well, that sucked. I wouldn't have wanted to be in one of those. Like the only thing worse than

that is like the first iteration of army. They weren't even i don't think they were tanks the tanks they used in north africa during fucking operation torch or whatever it was where like they they're like they were gigantic turrets that always profiled you on the horizon it's called the thing the germans shoot at and it explodes so like much yeah it's just like terrible equipment glad it's gone didn't know so. And to make matters even worse, everybody was so stuck on Piccadilly being blocked, they didn't actually do aerial reconnaissance of Broadway. So as the gliders are landing,

they realize that giant ditches had been cut through the landing zone, which the gliders discovered by crashing directly into them as gliders began to rapidly pile up. Because remember, this is the only place all of them are landing now. This created a boneyard of gliders while men tried to climb out and run away before the next glider came flying into the pile of gliders.

30 men died. This is just the fucking car crash on car crash shit from the Blues Brothers where it goes on for like 15 minutes. Yeah. yeah they have 50 total casualties 30 dead and 20 wounded just from landing people had to work through the night and the early morning just to clear the wreckage by hand to open the landing zone for the rest of the gliders and somehow this worked they cleared the run runway dug an actual landing strip and began flying in men and material with actual planes and at no point did the japanese figure out what was going on and the next day the chindits started doing their chindit shit a detachment of uh of chindits charged a japanese position called pagoda hill which led to hand-to-hand

combat where a british officer got into like a knife fight with a japanese officer who was armed with a katana this led to the brit having his arm hacked off and then as the brit was like falling he remembered he had a revolver drew his revolver and shot the Japanese officer and then both men collapsed on top of one another and died like those dinosaurs skeletons locked in like eternal combat this is just like yeah I was gonna say in my in my mind's

eye he like his eyeballs bulge really huge after the blade swing and it was like after he pulls the revolver out and shoots the guy that then his arm just perfectly slides off with like blast lines in the background it's just like yep yep this is uh the whole world is just anime anime you get like a you get like a kurosawa burst of blood i mean i was just thinking of like akira which is that works like five animes i've ever seen because it's just not my thing i mean it was when was 13, like most 13 year old boys who were not getting laid in 1997.

Well, now I just feel personally attacked. Go on. I mean, I'm not saying it's bad. It's just one of those things where there's a few things here and there that can capture my attention. But by and large, like the only thing I wind up really liking is the weird aesthetics, particularly from 90s stuff, because the 90s stuff where they envision what the future will be like is like off base in many ways but cool but it's just not my thing like i i don't i'm not a hater i'm not judging i have seen enough anime to make the same joke over and over again at infinitum but uh you're right this sounds like to me this sounds like something out of anime or a kurosawa film or an insane japanese film like tetsuo the iron Man. So if you're listening and you can draw anime,

I have a scene for you. Yeah, exactly. Now, in other places, groups of chindits set up to blow up rail lines and roads. And in another place, Gurkha soldiers wielding flamethrowers attacked a village, charging at it,

firing jets of burning fuel, taking the village down in the process because, you know, that's what a flamethrower does. And then after their flamethrower ran out of fuel because they don't have that much, they ditched their flamethrowers, drew out their kukri knives, dove into a trench,

and started hacking the Japanese to death. Yeah. You know what? Fuck the Japanese. Fuck the Imperial Japanese Army. So you deserve it. But also, I mean, you know, it's like, hey, he trained his guys to do this stuff. The Gurkhas trained their guys to do this stuff. It's just a shame that in order to get to the actual point of engagement, they had to travel in like world's most casualty causing mode of transit. to travel in like world's most casualty causing mode of transit but I'm actually pitching an idea to Armenia

to redo our public transportation infrastructure but only using gliders you know you know that like it's weirdly being funded by the Azeri government I'm not sure why you know deep down that like that just this is gonna happen to us

that like you know when we do the world's dumbest stage prop for a live show and it kills all three of us, we're going to be reincarnated as people who fight in fucking a glider unit in World War II. That's the eternal punishment. Yeah, it's like we'll probably still be Americans, which means I'll actually learn how to throw a baseball correctly because I'll grow up in 1920s America like,

hey, sunny boy kind of shit, but we'll all die in a glider. It's like that Tom Cruise film where he keeps dying and being reincarnated to fight in a war, but it's just a glider crashing over and over again. It's just you're constantly, it's Groundhog Day for being a glider.

No, being a glider crewman, not being the physical. If you're reincarnated as the glider, then that's just hell. That's Sisyphus. That's just glider-based Sisyphus. It's important to imagine the glider happy when it crashes. It's its thing. It loves it.

It's kink, yeah. Oh, God. Someone's drawn naughty kink glider now. Now, while all this is happening, the Chindits began to build their strongholds. One of these was called White City, which popped up seemingly overnight, because they didn't take a break while building it. And then as it was done, the Japanese launched an attack against it. They ran smack dab into trenches, intersecting fields of fire, landmines, and booby traps.

And as soon as the battle ended, the Chindits immediately went to work improving their defenses. So they butchered the Japanese again when they attacked again. And pretty much this just kept happening at Broadway and again at White City. By the time the Japanese launched an attack, the Chindits had been so dug in, the Japanese bounced right off of them. And this is where Wingate kind of noticed the problem with the stronghold idea. Despite massive air and artillery support, the Chindits were still wildly outnumbered by the Japanese garrison, which meant that they could just keep attacking the strongholds.

This pinned the Chindits in place to defend them, constantly rebuilding them, and maybe, possibly, actually needing to rest in between attacks. This meant they had no time by the end of that those first chaotic movements of the operation to actually attack the Japanese as they intended. Do Chindit shit.

Though this did mean that while the Chindits' original goal was dead in the water, they were acting as a massive thorn in the side for the Japanese, drawing all the resources away from the northern Burmese theater. So it's kind of like an

accidental victory on the part of Wingate? Yeah, I mean, part of me was like, wow, what a brilliant thought leader. He invented the concept of Dien Bien Phu 10, 11, 12 years early. However, yeah, I see the point. My grandpa isn't very happy about this invention.

Exactly. He's just like, oof, this is weird. I hate Brits already. And then there's this one weird guy who had this, he has this one weird trick. This one weird trick will kill an entire French empire. Now, despite, I guess you could call this a success, right? They hit the ground, strongholds are built. They are a massive thorn in the side of the Japanese. But Wingate was where he wanted to be the least, acting as a staff officer and not

leading his men from the front. But he was doing his best to get to the front constantly, jumping into any plane he could find to fly over to the strongholds, visit soldiers, raise their spirits. Because even though this man is nuts, even though every single other officer outside the Chindits, and actually some inside, only a few, fucking hate him, the Chindits themselves worship him. They love him.

Just seeing him show up at a stronghold would raise their morale. But during one of these trips from Chindits themselves worship him. They love him. Just seeing him show up at a stronghold would raise their morale. But during one of these trips from Chindit headquarters to a stronghold, the Mitchell bomber Wingate was flying in, crashed into the jungle, and killed him. He's dead. I knew it. I knew it was going to be something like this. It was going to be relatively ignominious.

It wasn't going be like you know leading a charge from the front doing heroic fucking you know martyrdom shit it would just be like uh uh we forgot there was like a power line there and it just kills everyone like the enemy the enemy couldn't kill him a shitty british bomber had to be the one that took him out and there's been a fair amount of retreading about how exactly this happened over the years at one point the weather was blamed for taking him out like taking the bomber out but you know the weather was actually fine there was only slight rain which only takes you out if you're flying like whiz airways or something then it came out

that one of the bombers pilots reported to their commander that one of the engines isn't working correctly however the flight was ordered to go on anyway because that commander did not want to be the one to delay or to wind gate and incur his wrath so he crashed and died because people were actually worried about how he would react to the flight being late which again only happens uh if it's whiz airways most of the time yeah i was gonna take cadence and just sing it and be like oh there are no chindit forces in the air force no there are no chindit forces in the air force because they fly up in the sky and sometimes crash and burn and die oh there are no Chindit forces in the Air Force.

There you go. As the Chindits were in the field and actively in combat, Delhi headquarters quickly went to work finding Wingate's replacement, and they found it in a guy named Walter Lantanier. Now, this shocked everyone in the Chindit organization, because

it was no secret that Wingate himself did not like Lantanier. Previous to this, he was Wingate's second command, but he'd been forced on him. And Wingate tried to use his clout to get rid of him, but Lantanier was one of Archibald Wavell's boys and therefore stayed in place. And the reason for Wingate's hatred was pretty basic. Lantanier didn't like Wingate or even his tactics, which seemed pretty important for a commander of a unit

specializing in said tactics. Then he had failed pretty much every task he had ever been given by Wingate to do in the field since the beginning of Operation Thursday. But he ended up in command anyway because, you know,

he's Wovell's boy. And as soon as he took command, he ordered several of the strongholds to be taken down, and the men ordered North to establish a new stronghold called Blackpool. Now, for some reason,

he decided that this stronghold needed to be very, very close to the Japanese northern line of advance, which put them in range of their heavy artillery. So as soon as they just started building Blackpool, the Japanese began bombing the shit out of it

with their artillery and attacking it. At no point did La Taniere even bother to visit Blackpool or even leave his headquarters. He hadn't even looked at a terrain or weather map for the area. So as soon as the men got there, started building, and started getting hit by the Japanese,

they were hit by a fucking typhoon. Whoops. Which he would have seen coming if he even like went to the ignored office of the army's meteorologist or whatever. I'm just imagining like no one doing the code word translation and telling Churchill like, oh, the Japanese obliterated Blackpool with artillery and then a typhoon hit it. And he was like, oh, thank thank christ i fucking hate that place and weirdly it hasn't been rebuilt yet um blackpool is famously kind of hit a shit but like i i'm not gonna hate on it in the way that english people do because there's there's definitely some class shit going on there. It's always class shit. Yeah. Talking trash about Blackpool is very much like a Southern English guy thing. Or when your kids leave the lights on saying it's like the Blackpool illuminations in here.

So you know what? We'll leave it with that. But the fact that he called it Blackpool and it gets obliterated is going to make a lot of British listeners laugh, I think. If I can comprehend their minds sort of kind of trying. Our British cultural liaison, Nate. Yeah. Guy who was a Tiaboo until he actually moved to England. And then he was like, fuck.

Why do they talk like that? Then, because he had actually ordered the other strongholds to be abandoned in order to build Blackpool, there's nothing to slow the Japanese down. And before long, Japanese soldiers were inside the wire at blackpool fucking shit up less than a month after being established blackpool had to be abandoned so quickly that medical officers executed their own severely wounded rather than let them fall into the hands of the japanese then dump their bodies into the jungle and ran for it oh my god fuck the retreat itself was a nightmare as no retreat had ever been planned and no orders had ever been passed down. Nobody even knew where to

go. And by the time that they had gotten away, they got down to a river and were evacuated like the worst off were evacuated by a small army of flying boats. Yeah, I assume Mount Batten actually saw into the future on that one like

well it worked at dunkirk and mount batten was like no i want to reach the stars and then someone someone in ireland was like we got a plan in development just you wait about 30 years or so the irish republican space program this was like only the worst off of the wounded and the sick and virtually every other soldier was you know the ones that were considered not the worst off were still really bad off they're the walking wounded they were very badly ill they were starving and they were exhausted so they were left in the field to continue fighting as latanya ordered them to attack a place called point 2171, which is never a good sign, that overlooked the Muagong River. This is despite everyone barely being able

to stand. The Chindits were ordered to advance up this hill, which, because a typhoon had just hit, it was a muddy wasteland, all while being battered by still the monsoon rains which they called quote slime up to their knees which normally only happens at certain conventions and like the Japanese were hitting them with machine gun bullets making it rain with mortars

and grenades and remember how weak and sick these men are like they're mud zombies shambling up to the top of the hill, but they did capture it. And let me guess, the Chinbits also invented the concept of the Vietnam War or the US War in Vietnam, and it was immediately abandoned afterwards? Well, yeah. Typically, when you've never heard of it, it's just a number for a hill. That tends to be the case. It's any time that I start a podcast off with it like an exact date and time you know

something bad's coming and any time a position just simply has a number you know it's going to be a horrible waste of human life sounds about right and the weather was still very very bad their train was awful they couldn't be resupplied by air so as soon as they capture it they were ordered to abandon it and start hauling their supplies back down the hill because after supply drops were canceled they began to drag shit up the hill and now on the trip back down men were literally dropping dead their bodies were left in the open because everybody else was simply too tired to bury them or even to cover them. Yeah, I mean, as we're constantly saying,

il faut imaginer les chindits shitting themselves. Sisyphean is only scratching the surface. Sisyphean plus dysentery. There's so much. It's foundational dysentery. And no poison, no bad python meat to speak of this time.

And discipline completely collapses, because of course it does. Men are openly talking about murdering Le Tannier if they ever see him, because none of them have seen him in weeks or months. The Chindit's medical officer demanded that if the mission was going to go on, he needed to do an in-depth examination of his soldiers. So he found that what was left of the brigade, which at the best of time would be 3,500 men, was about 1,000 men less at this point, 2,200. But after the medical officer's examination, he found only 100 men were considered fit for duty. And these were still sick. I mean, it's just a 97% attrition rate. You know, it's still good. Well done. Hey, Stalin's smiling onto you from the Eastern Front.

Hell yeah. Chin-dit brigade. Now we've got a company minus. We're still good. And this finally forced the operational overall commander, noted asshole we've talked about before general joseph stillwell of the united states military to grudgingly accept the chindits would need to be withdrawn back to india but he still bitched and complained about it and only really relented when one british officer pointed out that his own american and chinese soldiers

were also mostly dead uh so he backed off. And so the last Chindit would finally leave the Burmese battlefield on August 27th, 1944. And by the time they finally got back to India, the Chindits were destroyed. They had suffered 1,396 killed, 2,434 wounded, but even the men who didn't die were damn close to it. Virtually every man ended up in the hospital long term, racked with diseases like typhus, malaria, dysentery,

encephalitis, and weirdly, syphilis. It's best we don't look into that last one. We simply will not be examining it. One of those dudes had been stuck on Fuck Island during the last mission i was gonna say much like lord mount batten's relationship with the kinkora boys home we will not be looking into it so the survivors were so malnourished on the verge of death they had to

be put on a special tapered diet to slowly bring them back from the brink because if they're allowed to eat regularly as soon as they got back it would have killed they would die yeah exactly this is famously known as the same regimen holocaust survivors had to be put on yeah yeah it's really sad but yeah it's true that like literally that kind of shock to your system can kill you and will kill you in most cases so like yeah this is medical this is actual good medical advice but jesus christ the few men who didn't have to go through that were sent back through training camp to prepare for the next chindit missions when allied command stopped and thought for a moment what the fuck are we doing here the casualty numbers are by far the worst in the entire allied army in the West, at least, like per mission. And it would require the most amount of training in order to bring them back up to strength.

They consumed a huge amount of material when in the field and was a massive weight on the ankle of the logistics system. massive weight on the ankle of the logistic system. And as good as that logistic system was, it doesn't work well when it's only being used via air supply. Then wondered, on top of all of that, what did they actually accomplish? Nothing, really. And also, Field Marshal William Slim pointed out, Wingate, even though he's dead, but, like, the concept of the Chindits required the best soldiers, the most fit soldiers to even survive the training and possibly survive in the field. However, he was losing them at such a rate and killing so many and possibly, like, handicapping for the rest of their life, the ones that survive. He degraded the overall quality of the military for no gain.

I would argue that there is actually a purpose to all this, and it's a thread running through the entirety of Ord Wingate's life from earliest childhood, is that he set out to find a military purpose for being fucking annoying. And when you look at what they did to the Japanese in Burma, they annoyed the shit out of them nonstop. That's really it.

I mean, yeah, that's true. He purely weaponized himself. He created a new operational term for annoyance ops. He's just being annoying as fuck in a military context you gotta i don't know the the operational term and graphic should be like a you know like a like a friendly square or an enemy diamond symbol and it's just like a garlic necklace and that's just being annoying it's psychological operations but against my own men yeah exactly just just just just do pulling an oar pulling a wind gate doing your thing you know chin dittery that sounds vaguely racist i'm sorry

that sounds like a secret slur you would only learn if you had a private audience with churchill oh what is clear is that army command whether on purpose or not killed the concept of the chin by promoting a man to lead them after the death of wind gate not, killed the concept of the Chindit by promoting a man to lead them after the death of Wingate, who actively hated the idea of the Chindits. Despite the fact, there's plenty of true believers who embrace Wingate's doctrine within its ranks. They could have easily

promoted them instead, but they didn't, because they didn't like them, for the same reason they didn't like Wingate. So do you think Lantini was placed there to basically run them into the ground so they didn't have to deal with them anymore? I don't think so. I think thatantanier was placed there to basically run them into the ground so they didn't have to deal with them anymore i don't think so i think that was just an unintended secondary purpose i don't want to be like mega conspiracy theory but yeah it does i stake your i take your point that like yeah of all the people that could have been like windgate you know in post windgate's death they picked a guy who clearly didn't care and basically his his approach to leading this

unit was like when you build a wall around your sims and let them starve to death effectively like he a lot than you was the worst possible choice he did not care for the tactics he never really learned them he never really bothered to command them during the operation um and he was bulletproof because he's a wavels guy um i think by promoting him it had the unintended consequence of having the operation go so horribly badly that there was no coming back from it because wingate he was more of a experimental concepts guy you really can't even argue he's a great commander himself but it's hard to think that it would have gone so badly if he was, if he lived through it.

But also it's one of these things where it's like, uh, he probably for all of his weird eccentric idiosyncratic approach to military planning and operations and whatnot, he probably wouldn't have concentrated all of his strong points into one big strong point and been like, put it inside the bubble of every single Japanese artillery piece? Probably not. Yeah, that's a good at minimum thing that he wouldn't have done.

Because again, I don't think he was a great battlefield commander, but because he was effectively a concepts nerd, he would have realized that was a bad idea hence why he didn't originally plan it that way if he had done that what he actually would have done is that all of his actual outposts all of the things that we're going to be engaging with the enemy you know in force on force stuff in direct fire would have been totally protected but the latrines for all of his men would have been in every bubble in every range fucking of all japanese munitions because shitting is for the weak or something yeah yeah you actually want if you want to be a warrior you shit yourself after eating a rotten python

take an awful amphetamine shit full of rotten python and keep on trucking baby that's the lines led by donkey's promise we'll invent a new way to make dysentery worse. Now, Nate, we do a thing on this show called Questions from the Legion. And if you'd like to ask us a question from the Legion, donate to the show on Patreon at any level. You can join the Discord. Tell us your questions on the Discord. You can ask us on Patreon.

You can pack your question into a rotten python nate will eat it he will then shit it out and we'll read the question on air and the worst form of kopi luwak anyone has ever devised let me get my coffee filter um today's question is what is a weird hill you will die on your wildest hill that you will die on i mean i could i could i don't know joe do you can you think of one off the top of your head for yourself because i mean i i feel like there's philosophically morally etc there i might have some and then uh and then i feel like there's a lot of like big ideas but since this is like a dumb wild hill that i'll die on i have to think small picture i mean i definitely have one for for a dumb dumb one that i absolutely believe i the hill that i

will die on is that if you're talking on speakerphone in public i should be allowed to smack the phone out of your hand i hate it so much i mean i agree with you yeah i think uh i think at best like there's a degree to which it's it's interesting to me where someone's like well we're on a public bus or something you know surely everyone on this bus has noise canceling headphones and wants to hear me have my annoying conversation uh except when you can defeat the noise cancellation because you're that fucking loud and not everyone has headphones there are times when i'm like i wish you got thrown out the window like that scene in whatever harrison ford indiana jones movie it was where he throws the people off the zeppelin or some shit yeah like if i'm trapped in a metro a tram um elevator

and there's someone sitting and they're on their speakerphone i just like my whole body like recoils because i can't imagine having a public conversation like that um and they're never like normal conversations it's always like the weirdest most fucked up shit you've ever heard to the point that i'm like am i am i being filmed for some youtube video that i'm unaware of like is this like a bit yeah yeah yeah there is that sometimes. You're like, I just genuinely can't believe you're doing that. And I mean, well, look,

if I was to go out on a limb and be serious, I would say that like, I think that it's very, the hill that I have to die on is that, my serious one is that I don't like the fact that there are certain attributes that people would describe as being small C conservative, that there's no other word in the English language to describe them that way.

Because when it comes to a level, call it of cautiousness, of sort of being... If you save money, not because you're a miser, but you're being cautious, you're a conservative with your money. I don't money not because you're like, you know, a miser, but like you're being cautious, be like, oh, you're a conservative with your money. I don't like that because it's like at this point being conservative apparently means being racist and stupid and also dumping trillions of dollars into the dumbest shit ever. So maybe the point is like true conservatism has never been tried. And I don't even want to be, I fucking hate it. But like, it's irritating to me

because it's like, I can't think of any other word like like in the same way that you know if you're people would say that if you're not like a i don't know like someone who isn't necessarily into like being insanely sexual but isn't weird about it but just it's just like not it's like it's just that stuff's not for me it's like people would say that's being like prudish but it's not like you know what i mean there's just different strokes for different folks man everybody's exactly i don't give a fuck what people do like it's just one of those things where i know what's for me and what's not from that kind of a thing that failure of language and so it's like i get very frustrated like it's not even if definitionally calling that some of that behavior is conservative it's like at this point what a conservative and conservatism

means in practice has polluted it to the point where like we need a better word um my dumb funny hill to die on is duran duran are good especially their first fucking three albums are exceptionally good and as people who wrote all their own songs played all the instruments they're great and i feel like that's not necessarily controversial but it was 20 years ago because there was such a sort of like first wave of american alternative like basically like people really were ah fucking dren dren a goddamn mtv fucking they're all gay as hell kind of band that read that reaction but like the funniest explanation of this i can ever get was there was a dude in my eye bullet class who was uh he was an air marshal like he was the guy who like secretly has a gun on your plane um and he was a new york

national guardsman um and he was just like yeah you know my job's federal air marshal i just hang out on planes with a gun you know but i do it for good reasons um he was a huge duran duran fan and i remember he's much older this was you know in 2007 and he was probably like in his late 30s he'd been like i'm doing the math here you know was in his 20s what in the early 90s like late 80s or something like that anyway he was just like yeah it was so funny to me because growing up people were like andre andre and so gay he's like those dudes fucking nailed some of the hottest women to ever exist on this planet and meanwhile all you like metalhead heshers were like you listen to a real band for real men like judas priest which is like not not to cast aspersions

but when rob halford came out it's like oh now all the leather shit makes a little more sense like i wasn't aware that there was like a a concerted effort to assault the hill that was duran duran you'd be amazed at how much people think of that as kind of like a disposable bullshit band and it's like no i mean they were they were really good i mean they went through their once cocaine didn't work to get them through the day anymore they kind of fell off but like those those first couple years like that that first like call it half decade like they were great they were genuinely great and it was weird to me maybe this i'm showing my hungry like the wolf yeah i'm just saying dude like if you're cocaine i mean i don't think john taylor would

argue with that uh i will just say it yeah if if you probably one of the, well, you know what? I'm going to go out on a limb and say among the best things to ever come out of the city of Birmingham, England, Duran Duran, check out their self-titled album. Check out Rio. Check out Seven and the Ragged Tiger. Say Rio is probably the best out of the three. Good band. You know what?

They actually were good. But man, if you people who are like middle to old gen xers in america especially you say that and you might as well have been like i love eating dog shit off the street like they'll think you are like like oh you have no taste you're a fucking teeny bopper and it's like man i don't care about whatever weird ass fights y'all were having in the early 80s i was negative too i don't care i feel like this is like the same argument that comes between like the heavy metal or grunge coming out of hair metal and if you listen to hair metal that like you're a loser or whatever yeah it's all arguments that happened

before i was even a glimmer in my father's eye yeah or in my case like yeah when uh what like like everyone the the weird arguments about it it's like no man if you go back and listen to like mother love bone and shit like the stuff that kind of spawned pearl jam like they it was it was love bone fucking rules it was it's closer to fucking to it's not quite warrants cherry pie but you know what i mean like it's in that general universe and it's just like sound like sound garden early sound garden was just basically you know seattle cock rock hair metal except the dudes all fucking worked at fish markets and like you know it's it's just it was just a kind of reasonable rock and roll thing and a lot of the grunge stuff was just a and r and marketing like yeah it's just stupid i mean i'm i'm

i'm i'm i'm ecumenical about bad 80s and 90s music i actually like a lot of it and i feel like it needs a reappraisal if anybody if anybody here is gonna die on the hill of shitty music it's gonna be me um to quote a shitty band um i thought you were gonna say it was me because god knows i've got some opinions but like you know it's gotta be me like i i have argued time and time again uh with tom that i love metalcore music and i know it sucks but it's fun like i don't give a fuck i i grew up in the peak i mean we grew up effectively at the same time you're a little bit older than me but i grew up in the peak of like emo and screamo and metalcore and new metal and all the other shit and it's like it may if you don't like it okay it's just not for you man

like it doesn't mean that it inherently sucks because i think a lot of music sucks it's very very popular i agree i mean i i agree and i i find a lot of stuff that's that's that's good you know like doing well on charts unlistenable i mean god knows i remember being mega jet lag coming back from um a business trip in the uk for work where i'd gotten no sleep and trying to buy a ball of water at the fucking little kiosk outside at jfk and it was playing fucking the first time i'd ever listened to the lyrics of ed sheeran's The Shape of You and I'm like this sucks so bad I want someone to kill me like it's yeah it's terrible but at the end of the day it's like

some people like it you know randomly I went and saw Elton John because we got tickets and he played the song that he and Dua Lipa did and which wouldn't typically be a thing I'd want to listen to he did a fucking song with Dua Lipa yes and it was a number one he had a number one in like 2020 because he and Dua Lipa did a song Elton John starting off with like a black eagle across my chest.

Yeah, exactly. Well, it was remixed by the guys who formed a band. They were formerly in a group called Empire of the Sun. It's basically this vibe intersection of Australian yacht rock dance music slash Dua Lipa slash Elton John. It takes the hook from Rocketman and repurposes it. I love the idea of Lipa slash Elton John. And it takes the hook from Rocketman and repurposes it. I love the idea of Albanian nationalist Elton John. I mean, you know what? That man, I feel as though Albania recently showed up in some survey data as the country in Europe with

the highest cocaine use rate. And I feel like Elton John would be like, spiritually, then I am an Albanian. Or at least in the 1970s, I was an Albanian. Yeah, it's making a whole lot more sense now. He's like, he spent a lot of 70s in like an Enver Hoaxia bunker for no discernible reasons. Elton John's own autobiography, as he said, in the 1970s to stand out among other musicians in Los Angeles for excessive cocaine use was quite an accomplishment, but I was ready to do my bit for Queen and Country. I mean, that does make Elton John make a lot more sense from back then. Same with when you hear that Stephen King during the height of his best of books. When he was writing 3,000 words a day every day for a year. Yeah.

Yeah. He was just off his mind off booze and Coke. I'm like, yeah, that makes it make a lot more sense thanks bro yeah yeah i mean uh at the end of the day dude i guess cocaine did help you right it also fused a neural pathway that made you think that the way out of a plot hole was like what if we gave a handicapped boy special powers like what if he had magic behind him uh that's not that's not true He got his way to have a plot hole once by having a child gangbang in a sewer. He did, yeah. And there was a magic clown. Okay, correction.

It was more of a train situation than a gangbang. Yes, there is kind of a child orgy scene in it. It's weird. In the same way that if you actually go and you read the dialogue for Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game,

it's just like, what? It is the world's most Mormon sci-fi book in so many ways to include like a certain frankness that no preteens have about sex in a way when he's like, wow, we just won the battle. There's like maybe two

pubic hairs between the three of us. I'm like, no one fucking talks like that. You're weird. And I'm not making this up. And I'm not even exaggerating. Like, I'm dead serious. So we got off topic because I'm on the show. And technically, it was on topic because it was a question from Legion. We made it all the way there.

We made it all the way there. So yeah, my die on the hill is like, find a better word to describe some of these habits that you might call it like ascetic or austere that aren't conflated with horrible politics, because I really wish the English language would let me explain that and number two duran duran is good and number three joe said that uh you should die if you talk on speakerphone in public also he likes metalcore and bad music and also at the end of the day uh elton john is spiritually albanian but yes the song is called cold heart i think and it uh it was a number one so elton john has had a number one now in the 2020s well i guess that's one thing that me and elton john no longer have in common

one thing i'll say is i saw elton john live and he's very old he's still an incredible performer but obviously he's showing his age and they had a moving set with the piano but the moving set also like put out a bunch of fog and stuff and there was a point at which he was moving the moving set was moving around blasting out fog while he's playing. And I was like, it kind of looked like Elton John was playing piano on top of a Zamboni. But you know what? You never know, you know, it's getting old. I wanted to make sure I could see him. I didn't see Fleetwood Mac when I had a chance to, and then they finally kicked fucking Lindsey

Buckingham out of the band for good. So I'll never see them. Hey, Rumors is still one of the best albums ever made so is tusk is fucking insanely good and uh and and the god this is going on forever but i gotta say this this is just the lines led by donkey's music talk all right my last music talk thing that i'll say before we close this out is um i'm a huge fan of i made the joke about australian yacht rock but like australian musicians managed to do something bands like specifically bands like cut copy uh miami horror van shee uh midnight juggernauts there's just there was like a vibiness to and cut copy is the great example of this but what i realized it is

what i realized it is finally completely by accident is they just stole the fleetwood mac album tango in the night and added like drum machines and more sense to it. Like so much stuff is so wholesale stolen from that. And it all makes sense now. I mean, Australia itself is just stealing Britain and making it hard. Yeah, yeah. In many senses of the term.

But yes, when I realized the key to understanding where CutCopy got their thing was just sort of like, what if French touch producers like Philippe Zadar produced 70s and 80s Fleetwood Mac? That was it. So you know what? I'm always learning. I'm always figuring out new things. And at the end of the day, I love this show because I somehow am getting paid to talk about a guy who eats pythons and shit himself and also Fleetwood Mac. So Joe, thank you so much for a great series. Thanks for joining me, man. And you have podcasts that people should listen to.

Which ones are they? If anybody is still listening to us at this point? Yeah, I would say just check out the shows What a Hell of a Way to Die, Trash Future, and Kill James Bond. I am co-host and producer of the first two and just producer of the last one. They're all very fun shows. Aside from Hell of a Way, they tend to be smarter than me because Hell of a Way is just me and Franklin co-hosting. God knows, fucking we're not smart. But Trash Future's got some smart people. Kill James Bond has some very smart people. And it's always a fun time. So enjoy that. This is the only show that I do. So if you think what we do here is worth your money,

you can support us on Patreon. You get almost 6 years of bonus content, Discord access, every episode early. You get ebooks, audiobooks, first dibs on merch and live show tickets when we have them, and all sorts of other stuff. And if you, if you don't want to do that, or maybe you do want to do that, you could also still leave us a review on wherever it is. You listen to podcasts. It helps us immensely until next time. Eat bad Python,

do meth and shit yourself. It'll get you where you want to be in life. AKA crashed in the middle of a jungle and dead.