Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 319 - The Makin Raid

Episode Date: July 8, 2024

SUPPORT THE SHOW: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys A Marine officer builds a special forces unit on the ideas of Maoism and launches one of the strangest raids of WWII Sources: Duane Schultz. Evans Carlson, Marine Raider: The Man Who Commanded America's First Special Forces https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/the-makin-raid-what-really-happened-to-the-marines/ https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/raid-on-makin/ https://www.historynet.com/gung-ho-makin-raids-strange-legacy/ https://www.historynet.com/marine-veterans-recount-daring-raid-on-makin-atoll/ https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/evans-carlson-forms-carlsons-raiders/

Hey everybody, welcome to the Lines Led by Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe and with me is Nate. What is up, my man? Oh, you know, the usual just hiding out in the United Kingdom. The sun's been out like three or two of three days this week and I don't know what to do with myself. My buddy Hussain, who's one of my co-hosts and friends, said, do not let the sun gaslight you into thinking England can be redeemed. I understand because it's such an unusual occurrence to have the weather be nice here. But I have what might be described as symptoms that in combination with other things would be taken as asthma symptoms. Now, I don't have asthma, but I have a constant wheeze and cough. So it's sort of like, well, the weather is nice, but you're going to get the hay fever that kills you. Welcome to the United Kingdom. You're such a, a Teeaboo. You've acquired a Victorian era wasting disease. A wasting disease. I've acquired consumption. Yeah. I have, you know, years ago I did a

video call with some of my former soldiers and it was after I had grown the facial hair and he saw the mustache and he was like, fuck me, sir, you go native in every country you go to. I appreciated that line. I did something similar, not growing a mustache because I think I'd look terrible with one, but we had very good weather here in the Netherlands over the weekend and I went to the beach and, you know, people have been listening to the show for a few years now. I'm a pretty big fan of the beach. I lived in Hawaii for years. I'm like, I'm gonna go. I live in a place that has ocean access Which I didn't previous this one is living in Armenia. So I'm gonna go take advantage of it

I did not realize just how busy the beach gets in the Hague There's so many people on the beach It's like there's a roiling carpet of humanity to the point you can hardly even move It's interesting because that's what it was like at Jones Beach in New York City oiling carpet of humanity to the point you can hardly even move. It's interesting because that's what it was like at Jones Beach in New York City. But Jones Beach has a sandbar that while it's not a mile long, feels like it might as well be. So it's like you traverse the great sandy desert and then you get to the most insanely

crowded beach in the world. Whereas from what I've seen from the photos of The Hague, it feels like it's right up on you just walk up to the beach. That's cool. Yeah. It's right off the main, well, I won't say the main road. It's 20 minutes outside of city center. It's not hard to get to. I have never seen a beach this crowded before in my life. Even, when I was living in Hawaii, I didn't exactly hang out in Waikiki or anything. I imagine it gets pretty busy during tourism season or whatever. Yeah. I see photos from the beach in the United Kingdom I've never been to the beach here, but it definitely looks similar to what you're describing

It's like all of humanity is there but I mean that was that that's Rockaway Beach in Queens that's to some extent Long Beach and Long Island got got that crowded too Like it's I guess it's just the except in New York City to get to the beach is still a long journey regardless It's not like you know, mr. Cool euro vibes Joe Kasabian when you just walk out of your apartment and you're right there on the water You got to take the subway a long way or the Long Island Railroad a long way or to Jones Beach You have to drive because Robert Moses was racist and was like no public transit may ever come here Come to my neighborhood where you can either visit the beach or the ICC detention facility where war criminals go. Well, I was joking recently about how my life choices coming before me as I approached the

age of 40 are either do what you did and use the DAFT to go to the Netherlands or, you know, obviously my wife's job wants to sponsor us and take us to Geneva. So flipping a coin and saying heads of Geneva, tails of the Hague is like, I might as well be like a dictator who realizes his regime is going to collapse. I either take my money to Geneva or they fucking get me and slap me in the ICC, you know? I do like posting pictures of the ICC because the ICC prison is just like a wing off of a normal Dutch prison. Like it's all behind the same wall. And like whenever I post a picture of it, the only comment I get is like jokes about

the Dutch language. They're like, oh they made the entire language for people who stutter. This is great. Oh fuck me. Jesus Christ. Yeah, I mean I made the joke before that we wrote the song Warrior's Heart and it was supposed to be about a guy who was like a Rhodesian mercenary and we made all the comments about I'll never face the ICC and I was like the ICC didn't come about until the 90s so

if this is supposed to be set in the Rhodesian slash Angolan Civil War era, it's it's an anachronism It was like, you know, don't care don't care And if you want to get out of going to the ICC you could do the same thing that my dad did to his children Just ignore it Just don't have to go anyway I look forward to Johannes vonk and the clog heads being the Netherlands 2025 Eurovision entry. I mean, it would be funny. Like right now, the thing about it is, is there's things that make going to the Netherlands somewhat less convenient for us. And so like it's definitely

plan B, but it would be poetic justice in a way. If after a significant amount of the popularity of my show, stemming from the weird creative output of music in which explicitly we make fun of the Dutch and the Dutch language. I then wind up moving to the Netherlands and having to learn Dutch. Like my two or three Dutch friends would, they would, they would put on a stoic exterior like all Dutch people do, but deep down they'd be like, yeah, fuck you. Yeah. Gotcha. Gotcha. Ass learn those weird vowel combinations. Yes, it is pronounced coal. It might be spelled school. Might be spelled the exact same way. It's whole and you'll fucking do it right. And what's that? You like soft G sounds, leave them you'll fucking do it right. Oh, what's that?

You like soft G sounds? Leave them shits in the UK, bitch. Oh, you, you, you, you walked a hundred miles at nine. You mean nine may can. Oh, do you like eating Gouda? Do you? How about you go fuck yourself? How about some howda?

Yeah. Get on that. Cough up some phlegm. Well, I mean, quite frankly, I'm doing a lot of that already, so I'm pre Dutch. Nate, thankfully we have accidentally worked perfectly into a segue about beaches into our topic for the first time in human history. I can't believe it. I cannot believe it. But we are professionals. Everybody put a mark down. We've done it.

We've done it. We've done a segue. And I'm ruining it by talking about doing a segue. Now, we've talked about before on the show that we love raids, right? They're fun. Previous to this episode, we did an episode on Zebra where like we talked about how raids are cool until you just throw a whole bunch of random people without training or anything with dumpster ships armored with mattresses and how that isn't how you do a raid. That was World War I, but we're going to be talking about World War II. So now you have commando forces trained for raiding. We're not talking about the

SAS or anything like that. We're talking about something run by one of the most crazy minds that in my opinion, one of the craziest units that the US had to offer in this era was, and that is the US Marine Corps. Specifically, Marine Raiders. It's really funny because I think about those units and their mission sets. Obviously, I went to Ranger school when I was a second lieutenant. The thing that they really harp on, that you train on the most, that you execute the most in the field training exercises is raids and ambushes. To some extent, recon's early on, but then that gets kind of like swallowed up in the larger mission. But like, Raid and Ambush is the shit you do all the time.

And Raid is just basically, it is effectively like, I can't remember the definition off the top of my head because it's been 17 years since I went to Ranger school. But something, something, something, Surprise Attack marked by a planned withdrawal. You do a thing, you take them by surprise, you show up, attack a static target. Or I think, I don't think it can be a moving target because that would be an ambush, and then you get all the shit you want and then you leave. Yeah, pretty much. You boogie out.

Yeah. And so when you talk about like the Marine Raiders, which I think they kind of like that, if I'm not mistaken, became part of the sort of Marsok thing down there online, that's kind of like the progenitor of a lot of this stuff. You had the Rancher companies and the Army in World War II, but you also had other units elsewhere that were doing this similar thing. Where like their job was to do raids and ambushes. Yeah. And we're going to be talking about the birth of the Marine Raiders, how exactly they were born and the raid on Macon in the Pacific. Now, the reason why I'm going to talk about the birth of the Marine Raiders is I'm going to go

out in a limb here and say they were created from a guy that you probably wouldn't think has his hands in such an integral part of American military history. And we have to talk about how they were born because in the beginning of the Pacific theater of World War Two, in the context of the United States, America wasn't doing so great. We've talked about this a lot. I don't need to go over it again. America's getting a third left, right and center. And from the outset FDR, the president of the United States wanted something. He wanted some kind of dub, right? And the United States lacked a commando force of any real body of strength.

So he looked towards the British commandos and thought, why don't we have those? Unfortunately at the time the US military is mostly mothballed, unprepared and not really ready for any like at the at this point the US army which was slowly getting larger like if you went to basic training you were training with like broomsticks and shit because they didn't have enough guns to go around Shit like that. It wasn't good. Yeah. I mean, it's one of those things where it was treated as common knowledge by the end of the 1930s that there was going to be another war and that the US was probably going to get roped into it. By 1940, they had re-initiated the draft in America because it's like, it's

going to fucking happen one way or the other. But the degree to which the training, the equipment, I mean, obviously you're coming off of the depression, But the degree to which the training, the equipment, I mean, obviously you're coming off of the depression, but like, yeah. A lot of dudes of draft ages weren't able to be in the military because they were under size and malnourished. Under weight, under height. Yeah. They're like, I remember hearing a story about a guy telling me about this, like in order to, because he wanted to be drafted in order to get drafted, he had to spend a week drinking heavy cream and eating bananas. I was like, okay.

But so you just shooting his brains out or is that just me? I guess I guess the idea was the moment before you shit your brains out, you build up this massive heft in your bowels and that gives you additional weight. And so the army can be like, okay, you know, you're whatever weird 1920s name you have you are you are in fact Augustus bumblefuck from Nebraska. Yeah, yeah, yeah 16 liters of whole milk. Yeah some dude named like Clifton humps, but then again he'd be next to a guy named like Audie Murphy So, you know, there you have it Too small undersized. Yeah, and you know specifically when it comes to the Marine Corps the Marine Corps is not what we know it as today

Which is you know effectively a parallel army, but for the Navy Marine Corps is not what we know it as today, which is, you know, effectively a parallel army, but for the Navy, Marine Corps is very, very small. So he was thinking I need to create a commando force, right? But it's probably best given to the Navy because the key focus for the United States at the time is the Pacific theater. So, and everybody knew even back then that the main fighting force for the Pacific theater will be the Navy, even if the army and the Marines are doing a lot of ground fighting, which they obviously do, the Navy's going to be the backbone of that. So if we're going to create a commando force, we need to give to the Navy. And the Navy, by extension, is going to give it to the Marine Corps, which is part of the

Navy. And they have a history of irregular raid-based warfare. For example, the first real operation carried out by the organized US Marine Corps was a raid against the British forces during the American Revolution. So far behind enemy lines, it was in the Caribbean. And after that, and we've talked about some of these, and this operation we'll talk about at some point in the future, but it's largely a clusterfuck that ends up with most of the naval commanders being brought up on charges, but they did do it. And after that, the Marines cut their

teeth in what could be considered America's wars of empire, you know, through China, South and Central America, other places. It was the one group in the U.S. military with a history of being sent into places and what kind of honestly amounted to suicide missions. So they're like, let's give it to the Marines. Yeah. I mean, the Marine Corps were also sort of like America's favorite military unit to use to either punish or subjugate Haiti and Nicaragua. I mean, it's also the reason why is because the army really didn't exist yet. No, no. I mean, that's a good point.

The army like- It was like, oh, I'm in the army and by the army, I mean, I'm in like the 10th Michigan militia and I go to work once every three years. Yeah, it was basically all reserve component. After they demobilized people after World War I, there was no real, there was a very small active duty on a professional army. But weirdly a good thing to read if you want to get a sense of how annoying and and and like clickish it was is The novel from here to eternity

I don't know if you've seen the movie or you've read it the from here to eternity is one of those books that gives you the sense of like what it was like basically being a broke- ass American who joins the army to be able to get away from being poor and being starving. And the army in the thirties in Hawaii in the case of this novel, but in general sucked. And the Marine Corps by contrast was doing stuff. Quite frankly, the Marine Corps only left Nicaragua because of pressure to cut the defense budget because the U S economy was collapsing. Yeah.

And the Navy and the Marine Corps really the only, we've talked about this a few times, were the only real large well-funded part of the US defense structure. I mean, the US is mostly using militias all the way up until World War I. Basically the situation was such that it was just a different concept of the state, a different concept of how we spent money on things, our budgets for stuff like defense, like Joe is saying, it went to the Navy. Yeah, the Navy was the military, pretty much. And we've talked about this in other episodes that it's just such a different world to now.

Just a little. It's hard to perceive it because the Army and the cult, like the Marine Corps, like the world, like basically the only congressional lobbying organization that also has a standing army. The Navy does get huge money because it's such a big investment to make aircraft carriers and destroyers and all these things. But like the degree to which they dump money into the army and explicitly the bigger one, the biggest sump, the air force. Oh yeah. It just didn't exist.

It was the army air corps. It wasn't the same thing. Like the defense establishment, I think the cold war and the sort of fix it, fixation on strategic bombing, that changed a lot. But in this era, yeah, as we were saying, there was a small professional army, there was- Boats and dudes on boats. That's pretty much it.

And then there were, there were boats and then was the, the, the, you know, from the halls of Montezuma, the proud organizations sent to go like, hey, go kill some dudes in Algeria. Okay. Hey, go fight in the mountains of Haiti. This has never ended badly for people not from Haiti before. Okay. Well, sending the Marines places could, from an American standpoint has two things. It's either, you know, if you're in the, if you're in the U S government or you're a naval commander, right? You're either going to complete your mission or you're going to have less Marines, which to either point of those things is a positive outcome. If you're a commander of a naval ship.

Now FDR got this idea of a Marine commando unit from a Marine veteran, from one of those many wars we just named, a guy named Evans Carlson. Carlson was, I guess he's most easily described as Smedley Butler, but without all the political introspection later on in life. Can I throw this in? Max Boot's a dickhead, but he wrote an interesting book at least basically about American expeditionary wars called Savage Wars of Peace. And he talks about Smedley Butler a bit. And one of the points that he made is like Max Boot, like I said, dickhead. Massive douchebag. Yeah.

Hat weirdo. But he makes a point that I did find interesting was that Smedley Butler's introspective turn took its public form when he was turned down to be the Commandant of the Marine Corps. And up until that point, he had been pretty fucking enthusiastic about doing marine shit Which was like yeah, it was much later on in life And you know he may have had some problems internally dealing with the things that he was doing But you know it only shows up when he's pretty advanced in age I mean even beyond when he was doing Wars of American Empire He was like effectively the military dictator of I think

it was what Philadelphia? I don't know I mean he's one of the main reasons why cops became soldiers effectively like Smedley Butler may have said some very nice things shortly before he died but he did a lot of fucked up shit to get there. Well yeah and you know what's crazy is so it's same with Audie Murphy. Audie Murphy could be at turns like a massively anti-war person and a massive like insane Jingoistic dude about like Vietnam for example, like it's one of those things where people are complicated Audie Murphy like wrote was like a songwriter was well and wrote like a lot of

Basically songs about like how war fucks you up, but then he's like it's good that we're in Vietnam Yeah, Audie Murphy is a mixed bag if anybody should like his story of being you, turned aside because he is so undersized and becoming like a literal fucking Terminator and killing Nazis, we all can agree that's a good thing. But you know, then he becomes like an abusive alcoholic later in life because of untreated PTSD becomes anti-war. But then he's also like, war is great. It's like, yeah, pointing a gun at his wife numerous times. Like, yeah, it's, it's a sad story. So we're kind of off topic, but I think it's relevant in the sense that we can bring it back. That basically, like the culture of the Marine Corps, like now, because it's got such incredible PR,

you would think it would that's like a constant. You know, that was like the Marine Corps has been this way organizationally. But it was a very, very different organization back then. And like Joe was saying, it was used primarily, like think of it as like, It was the US's only real force to project power is by putting Marines on the Navy boats and then sending them to faraway shores that the Marines have never heard of to kill people. Yes, 100%. And then also to guard embassies and to get tattoos and knock up native women, bad stuff like that.

Yeah, thankfully none of that has changed. Not yet, not at all. So Carlson ran away from home and lied about his age in order to actually join the army first back in 1910. After that he went on a world tour of American overseas violence. First he took part in fighting the insurgency in the Philippines, which we did a series about, and the expedition against Pancho Villa, we also did a series about. He fought in World War I, he had a body full of shrapnel for his efforts, and he left the army in 1921.

However, he was not done. He left the army as a lieutenant and decided being a civilian would end with him probably in prison, due to, you know, no longer being allowed to commit violence. So he joined the Marines, but the Marines made him start back down at private and he had no problem with that. Though within a year, they also made him an officer. He went off to fight Nicaragua. He earned the Navy Cross for fighting off massive ambush, seemingly single-handedly,

and again getting wounded. Though from there, he kind of got a cushy gig, and this is where he gets in good with the White House. He was sent to command the Marine Detachment that protects the President, at this point it was FDR, and he became pretty much best friends with his son James. Then he was sent to China as an observer, just in time to witness the beginning of World War II in China, known as the Second Sino-Japanese War. And this is normally when he, you know, whenever we talk about an American or a British person being embedded during this period of time,

they have some kind of weird story about hating the Nationalists because they end up meeting Chiang Kai-shek once and everybody fucking hates him. But this time, Carlson is embedded with Communist forces, and he became fast personal friends with Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, not to mention Xiao Enlai. And I'm not saying like he was like on the periphery. He was marching with them through the mountains for hundreds of miles through the forests and like launching ambushes against the Japanese. He worked side by side in workers co-ops. He became a Maoist. And this is actually where the American military term of gung ho comes

from because Carlson heard communist co-ops using it as a rallying cry to go to work because it roughly translates as work together. And he thought it was great. That's so funny. He literally came back from China carrying like Maoist literature and giving it to his fellow offices. Like this is a real, but he, the thing is, is like, he was a communist kind of, and I don't mean to say that like he kind of suppressed it or whatever. He was 100% an American patriot and he saw like the communist forces, the way they carried themselves, and the political ideology of Maoism, or what would turn into Maoism, whatever, as a great thing for the military. He didn't like the

idea of communism for a country necessarily. He's like, no, communism's great in the military. Look how good they're doing. I love these structures, how these things work. And then it ends there. I mean, that's extremely funny. I got to be honest with you. It gets weirder, I promise. It's rare that you find people that are like this. There was a guy named Norman Bethune, who was a Canadian surgeon who is considered a hero of basically the Chinese Civil War on the communist side. And similar thing, but he was a doctor. He went and he practiced medicine in support of the communists but the idea of a US military

embed who got really into it normally that that's like Daschle Hammett shit and you wind up getting to the that you enlist to fight fascism and they put you on the fucking Aleutian Islands like as far from anything as possible and he's not gonna be the only kind of communist okay there's some people that we're gonna talk about absolutely communist he's kind of communist. Okay. There's some people that we're going to talk about that absolutely communist. He's kind of this weird gray area, but he was like working, doing manual labor in the fields because he thought that like this builds spree decor, which is not untrue, right?

Like, I mean, it does, but it's also annoying. I mean, nobody likes doing manual labor. We'll, we'll talk a little bit more of how this ends up impacting his commands down a little bit. And what's interesting is everyone in the White House, everyone in the secretary of war and the secretary of the Navy, whatever, at the time was like, this guy's a fucking communist when he comes back from China. But one Marine general remark, he might be red, but he's not yellow. And I know that sounds racist in context as he came back from China But yeah in what he was meaning is he might be a communist, but he's not a fucking coward

Yeah in in weird early 20th century English yellow yellow-bellied that would be taken not to be like a prejudiced Statement against East Asian people but rather to mean a coward Yeah, yeah, and we still kind of use that a little, but I think it's like not, it's kind of an archaic expression, isn't it? Like, yeah, it's extremely like date yourself to like the 1920s kind of shit. Yeah. Like your parents aren't saying this anymore. Like your grandparents that are great grandparents would have to say from beyond the grave. I mean, my, my grandparents would mean it racially though. Can you imagine what my great grandfather on the American side, the one who was born

in fucking Sunflower County, Mississippi and died in like 1975, like what kind of shit he would be saying from beyond the grave? Now after his time in China, Carlson retired, but it wasn't so he could go back to a farm and like build a co-op or whatever. Instead he started writing and going on speaking tours about the grave threat of the Japanese Empire and fascism and its expansion to the entire world. Because remember, he had seen arguably some of the most fucked up shit that would happen in World War II firsthand, when the Japanese invasion of China.

And he kept saying, like, if Japan is not checked, they will become a threat to everyone. And he ended up being rapidly proven correct when the United States entered World War two and He immediately rejoins the Marines and they give him the rank major Inspired by the guerrilla warfare detachments of the communists in China He immediately petitioned FDR to let him build his own and FDR agreed without any kind of doubt I guess this is why it pays to be homies with the president's son. Ah, even better. Carlton's like, okay, well, I'd like to pick my own second command. And they're like, yeah, sure. I'd like to pick James Roosevelt. Now this is actually, this is both a nepo hire, but also practical by having the president's son

as a second command and then nobody was really going to fuck with him. But also, James Roosevelt had spent his time observing British commandos. So it's not like he knew absolutely nothing. He was the most knowledgeable person that also knew about commandos other than himself in the entire US military. It's annoying because there's so many examples of it going badly, but there have been times in my life when I met people who, like, parents were senior officers and, like, they were actually pretty good because like

They'd been fucking raised in that shit their entire lives You know what I mean? It was like my friend who said he grew up in this town outside of the other side of fucking fort Bragg Playing like fifth grade soccer against kids whose death were all in Delta Force and these kids were just like little uber benches Just running around destroying everyone. It's like well I mean, I'm not saying it's like genetics or national selection, but there are a lot of factors that would encourage them to be obscenely athletic. My dad shares his weird supplements with me.

Yeah, exactly. It's like cocaine for when we win and ecstasy for when we lose. The hardest part about making a lunch for your child is packing the HGH just so. Yeah, exactly. You know, but at the end of the day, like they're never worried about getting their immunizations before they do their fucking sports physical because they've been giving themselves shots for years. Now, at this point, this, this new unit had to find a thousand men and they were part

of the agreement was like, okay, but all the men have to volunteer, which was something that Carlson insisted on. He said, you know, people who don't want to be here aren't going to do a good job. I only want volunteers. And people thought he'd have a hard time finding a thousand men, but he got thousands more than he actually needed. He greeted them with a simple marketing strategy. He wasn't going to lie to them. He promised them horrific training, near suicide missions, terrible rations, and the worst living conditions the Marines had to offer. Part of his speech was, quote, All I can promise you is rice, raisins, wet blankets, and glory. I mean, look, I'm gonna be real with you.

That would work. That would've worked on me. When I was 16, people were like, oh, the hardest sport is swimming. The swim team is so fucking hard. It's so physically challenging. It's so competitive. You'll never make it. And I was like, I'm going to do this. And then I did because I was like, I am a sucker for pain. I hate myself and I love making myself feel pain. And then I was like, oh, the army is hard. Let's do that. I'm going to do it. And I'm going to be in the infantry and I'm going to go to SF. And eventually I'd be like, you know, you don't have to hate yourself. You can actually like

be comfortable and enjoy your life. We both waged war on the connective tissue of our joints for years because we thought it was the cool thing to do. Bro, I got to be real with you. I don't know which is worse. This would kind of still work on me depending on the context it's put in. I mean, yeah, if you did this, but it was for being in the IRS and doing commando raids on billionaires for avoiding their taxes, sign me the fuck up, dude. And I'm too old, obviously, but like sign me the fuck up. Now we know that's not how it would be used. We can't

sneak up to anybody's houses because like the billionaire would inside be like, do you guys hear that popping noise? Yeah. You hear those cracking and popping and creaking and groaning grunting. Cause someone had to bend over to pick something up. Yeah, exactly. It's like the red dots kind of wobbling on the fucking on the guy because I had taken a hit off the vape and I forgot that now I'm getting to the advanced stage where it makes my hands shake. Do you guys smell banana? The fuck is it?

Milo calls it the chicken Corma vape. It's the banana flavor vape. Most of the volunteers are dismissed immediately when they balked at random questions that Carlson or Roosevelt would throw at them out of nowhere, namely asking like, could you slit a Japanese soldier's throat without warning? And you're probably like assuming he just wanted a blanket, yeah absolutely I could, but that's not what he wanted. He didn't want his men to just be like bloodthirsty idiots, because that wouldn't do. He wanted people to be able to say yeah or no depending on why they would need to kill someone and how they

would feel about it. Which, and the thing is, is he still had a thousand men at the end of it who could articulately explain why they would slit someone's throat, which is in my opinion, significantly more terrifying. I mean, this was the thing that I remember people talking about this and it probably has changed because a lot of this, it may have been apocryphal and if it was the case, it's probably changed. But one of this it may have been apocryphal and if it was the case it's probably changed but one of the stories about CAG selection or what the Delta is being called now or whatever the new acronym they have is beyond the fact that like you've got to be really really good at marksmanship and like most

people the overwhelming majority people in the military even in combat arms do not get enough marksmanship training to be able to be this good like that's a reason why it's like mega overrepresented by Ranger Regiment guys I think I qualified maybe three times a year yeah like we just don't do it enough but one of the things that they do is I mean because the star course the land nav course for SF is really hard but it's on one map sheet man fuck that course fuck that course went to the Sun bro I've done both of them I've done the selection one and the queue course one different ranges at

Bragg and they're both awful I it's like you would never think you would hate the concept of vegetation and running water so much, but like when you go through those draws, but that's a whole different story. But like the CAG selection, land of course, it's like multiple map sheets. Like it could be, as I understand it, like 10, 20 kilometers between points. Like it's very hard and it's in West Virginia. So it's fucking challenging terrain. But one of the things at the end, they've do long bullshit like this, rock marches,

et cetera. And supposedly one of the final tests is end, they've do long bullshit like this, rock marches, etc. And supposedly, one of the final tests is, once you have completed a very long rock march, you then get put in a very hot room with a couple of books and you have to read them in handwriting analytical paper. I'd fucking do that. Like not me personally, but if I was building a commando force, I would make them do that because having like, big, dumb, strong psychopaths isn't what you need. We've talked unendingly about the horrible crimes of the US industrial complex and the United States military. So this is not like a good job US, but from a practical standpoint, you need your small team commandos to be incredibly intelligent and also bloodthirsty as fuck.

Yeah, willing to do violence when they need to, but not necessarily like stealing a friend's story. But basically he went SF and he's been successful in SF, but he was, he did a six month hitch or three month hitch basically augmenting a ranger unit on a deployment. And they were trying to basically more or less strong arm him into going to rasp and becoming a ranger officer instead. And one of the senior ranger officers made a good point to him that I thought he was like, I don't think you would be a good fit in regiment because you are the kind of guy that your sort of mental and physical toolkit has got lots and lots of different precision tools for specific situations.

And you go into it knowing exactly what tool you need to solve a problem, which to me sounds like sort of the commando thing. He's like, and I'm looking for guys who have a toolkit with one big hammer in it. Yeah, that's Rangers. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so that's the thing, right, is that that mentality is so different, and it's like, if you were actually, when you think about what you're going to be doing in this era, it's not like door knocking direct action stuff

in the sort of counter-terrorism context. It's like, you are going against a uniformed army, or the auxiliaries of a uniformed army, and they're gonna have stuff like barbed wire and land mines and dogs and fucking all this shit. They're gonna have a whole support network of things to augment because they are state actors. So like you got to be smart because if you're not smart, you're going to get everyone killed

and everything compromised. It's like you think they would have learned that lesson every time they tried to send somebody into fucking Albania in the cold war. They did not. Yeah. Operation Oboe Puss. That's a very sad and funny story. But my God, they sent hundreds, if not thousands of people into Albania, and every single time

they were captured in like five minutes. We touched on that one in the episodes we did a long, long time ago. The one that made the Albanian prince really mad at the podcast. And yeah. Still furious at old Uncle Enver. Now Carlson learned in China that you can't ask men to endure hell without first bonding them together, as any unit is stronger with a real bond rather than that baseline soldier bullshit. So, he got rid of all uniform and grooming regulations that Marines normally had to follow.

The rigid hierarchy of rank was done away with, and Marines, NCO, and officers of course still existed, but that was only for command and combat. Everything else would be communal across the board. Men of all ranks would sleep, eat and hang out together. Every bit of manual labor would be done as a team and they would get rid of all barriers that would normally separate the ranks. After that would come what could be considered political and ethical education. He instilled in the men that that more than patriotism of any kind of any that shit they had a duty to one another over anything else or Gun hope work together and through all that their mission be completed and by doing that they would serve their country

But without doing the small communal things they couldn't take part of the larger picture. And he had struggle sessions. I see. I mean, there are some folks I think could benefit from a good old struggle session, being honest about your failures. It seemed to work. What is an AAR, but a struggle session in the army context? You try to do AARs with foreign militaries, they look like you're fucking out of your mind.

Why would you admit to doing a mistake? It's like, that's how we exonerate ourselves. We do our own little struggle sessions three sustains three improves You know, you got to have them and remember this is years before any of that idea and of course no No, that shit is like post national training center being established stuff Like that's it's I understand like probably after Vietnam. Yeah, like it's it's this it's a recent thing But it is funny that in the context of the era, I mean, struggle session comes from a very different place socially, culturally, politically, but like, what is an AAR, but a kind of struggle session? Well, this was like interesting because obviously they talk about how training went, how someone

may have done something incorrectly. And it was always constructive. Nobody was ever insulted. And Carlson himself was not free of criticism. They would, you know, talk about everything, whether it be like, you know, so and so, you know, private fucking bill from Indiana or whatever, wasn't really pulling his weight when we were doing farming or whatever, because he did make them farm. He did all of this stuff.

And if someone refused to take part in these discussions for fear of, you know, repercussions, which he, Carlson made sure there was never any. So if you're an NCO or an officer or even a lower ranking Marine, and you refuse to take part in this kind of struggle session type idea, that is what weeded you out rather than being like physically weak because, you know, you can become stronger but if you don't buy into the ethos of the unit they can't work with you. So that's how they actually got rid of most officers because they couldn't handle criticism

from lower ranks and Carlson himself would criticize privates, privates would criticize Carlson, and that's how they would try to get people to buy in. And that isn't to say that the physical training itself wasn't horrible. Men were forced to march 30 to 40 miles a day just in the worst terrain that he could find. They could only live on small meager starvation rations of rice and seeds just like Carlson had done while working with Mao in China. And he told them don't complain because a Japanese soldier wouldn't and that's what they would have to be prepared to fight.

And they needed to be prepared to fight to the death. Remember, this is a man who's seen human warfare and violence at its very worst so far in World War II. And he kind of bred that thing that maybe you and I are used to, which is like, if someone fell behind on a march, you didn't leave them behind. Everybody slowed down to pull them forward.

Because the failure of one man was seen as a failure of the larger group, and it needed to be solved collectively. Yeah, I mean, I would say, to be honest with you, it's interesting to hear it phrased this way. But yeah, just out of, you know, because of my own background having done the... out of curiosity and interest in the subject, when I had to write a battle analysis in the career course, I talked about the Papwin campaign in New Guinea. And so that's where I know, what I know of combat with Japanese in the Pacific, I know from reading a lot of sources about that. And then, you know, other historical things, stuff about Guadalcanal. There was a memoir by a guy who fought as a Marine in the Pacific war that was, I

found pretty interesting. I read that as well. And yeah, he's correct. He's correct. Like Japanese soldiers were dying of stuff like berry berry because of malnutrition, but like they were fighting on those kinds of that. That would have been good rations for them. Yeah. Like one of the things that I have found to be a really horrific story, but it is true is that in places like New Guinea, there were a lot of incidents of cannibalism in the Japanese military. Oh yeah, we've talked about quite a few of those. Yeah, I know we've talked about it on this show. And at the end of the day, he's right.

30 to 40 miles on shit rations, that is what you should be expecting to do because that's what you're going to do on the Kokoda track, in Iwo Jima, in Saipan, Guadalcanal, places like that. Those aren't names they know yet. Like, Leyte Gulf, places like that. Like those aren't names they know yet. Like late golf places like that. Like that's going to happen. There's so much fighting in the Pacific that we only talk about the major victories, but like the Marines were basically engaged doing the shit in the jungle from 1940, 1942, beginning in 1942 until 1945. And they were, they were

doing it until the very end. I mean, there was Okinawa and then, then the Japanese surrendered after the atomic bombing. But like, this is, there's no, no lies detected to put it that way. Yeah. Yeah. And, and to be fair, people bought in and in the end, Carlson had created the Marine Raiders and the Marine leadership fucking hated them. I can only imagine it's the forties and you're like, Hey, what if we had a brotherhood of man where people were judged on their actions and merit and not on their rank and we had relaxed grooming

standards and like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Clifton Bumpo, except he's a major general in the Marine Corps, is flipping his shit. He's finding Bible verses that justify why you should be both executed and stripped naked beforehand. Like, they are absolutely, like they're calling up Senator Clifton Blumpo back from fucking Arkansas to be like, please find a way to make this guy's commission go away so we can sentence him to jail at the bottom of the ocean. One of the main problems that people had with Carlson was he was a fucking communist.

And they point out that many men within his ranks had fought with Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, which was true. A lot of them had. And those men had rapidly risen to positions of leadership within the early Marine Raiders. But not just because they were communists. Obviously they could buy into the unit ethos that was bringing everyone together. But they were also hardened combat veterans, which is something the US was fucking lacking at the time. I've told the story before and maybe we should do an episode on him someday about the German anti-fascist who fought in New Guinea in the US Army, but he was battlefield promoted from

Staff Sergeant to Captain. Because of which is can you think about fucking how crazy that is? He was similarly he was he was one of those people that fought in the Spanish Civil War. He fled Germany because he hated the Nazis. He fought in the Spanish Civil War. He had been a major in the international brigades, but was denied a commission because of, in the US Army after World War II started, or the US entered the war because of having been a communist. And yeah, as a result, they,

he had to basically rise up in ranks as an enlisted guy. But like, you could see these kinds of things. Veterans of the Civil War, the Spanish Civil War had combat experience in a way that other US military units did not have because like it's just been too long since World War I. Yeah, if there's World War I veterans they're either... They're sergeant majors or generals. Like high-ranking officers or they're sergeant majors or they're retired. And you know, other people in the Navy brass point out that why are they giving all of this training to men that they're going to send on suicide missions? It seemed like a waste. And when a battalion of Raiders are sent to Hawaii for formal deployment, Admiral Chester Nimitz said, quote, here I was presented with a unit which I had not

requested and I had not planned for. And just to get rid of them, he sent a few companies to Midway to pay for the coming Japanese invasion which of course wouldn't happen but Marines spent their time rigging the island with homemade explosives for fun and Scaring anyone that came near them due to the fact they carried screwdrivers to stab people Because they insisted while the real knife has its uses it would get stuck in someone's ribs while the screwdriver one. Yeah, I mean students like knives and screwdrivers strapped all over their bodies Well, also very happy like shaggy beers long hair like no uniform insignia on anything Talking about dialectical materialism and Marxism Leninism and fucking the Maoist thought like they are anti-fa super soldier

and Marxism, Leninism, and fucking Maoist thought like they are Antifa super-soldiers. Like we found them, they're real. Now at this point the battle of Guadalcanal had started and the US was worried that the Japanese might eventually send reinforcements to the battle turning into much more of a slog than it already would be. The Navy decided that they should launch diversionary raids and attacks on lightly defended Japanese-held islands to convince the Japanese that another invasion was coming so they could have to disperse their reinforcements away from the main theater. And they settled on Makin Atoll, six miles long and a half mile wide, about 2,000 miles from Hawaii. And one of the islands of Makin they were gunning for, Butari Tari,

was guarded by less than 50 Japanese soldiers. So it was kind of a perfect target. And these men were commanded by a Japanese warrant officer. And like this idea was like Butari Tari, it was kind of a kush gig, you know, far away from the front line. They weren't really doing any killing or dying. This is like for the Japanese, even this is like, oh, thank God I'm on Makan Atole. This is perfect. So the U S Navy was like like found it found the target and carlson got to pick

222 of his men that he thought were best for the mission out of a thousand So the japanese not in a great position to win this battle Yeah, so you basically you get the varsity squad of the antifa super soldier vegan bodybuilders malice lead in his thought and You are basically you are on sham duty on an atoll in the middle of the ocean. You know, you figured that if they related to terms of a video game, you have no idea that exists. Cause it's like a hundred years in the future age of empires for the person playing for your team has decided to just put a castle on a random fucking Island. That's the size of like two grid squares in the middle of

the ocean. And it's your job to guard it. Normally they'd leave you alone, but instead they're sending boats full of cannons. They're sending the hardest geezers. They're sending everyone They're sending the guys who are armed to the teeth with screwdrivers homemade explosives and sharpened shovel edges They've got a guy who's got a weapon. He invented himself and fuck it It's a gun that shoots a knife and he's qualified expert with it he shot 40 out of 40 with it and like meanwhile you guys are basically the closest to R&R than the Japanese RPS. It's that bit from the Simpsons it's like well you're gonna send the dogs that bark and shoot bees out of their mouth but they actually have them. Yeah the Marine Raiders have those too but they actually they do fucking halo drops with

those dogs so the dogs then fucking can't be detected on radar and then come and shoot bees out of their mouth Every time the dogs bark they they're barking a Mao quote, but then the bees come shooting Yeah Screwdrivers the bees form the shape of Chinese calligraphy of the Mao quote and then sting the shit out of you That just sounds like a Wu Tang video You know what they say, Wu-Tang is for the raiders. I mean, fair enough, fair enough. Now they would have to be inserted in secret and the Navy set aside two submarines to do the job, the Nautilus and the Argonaut.

Now they set these aside because much like the men themselves, they were seen as expendable. They didn't really have much of a, let's say a good service record as full of failures. The submarines were out of date. They, for example, they had a critical engine flaw that would lead to spontaneous explosion. Whoops. Whoops. I get the impression they don't really like the anti-super soldiers. That's why they're putting them on the fucking counterfeit Honda motorcycle, the toned motorcycle submarine. And so they're like, yeah, fuck it. Yeah yeah we'll send you to make and get on these suicide boats and head out that way and None of the problems that will eventually come up have anything to do with the submarines

But yeah, they they sent those because if the Japanese sank the subs they wouldn't have really given a shit Yeah, and the submarine set off on August 8th 1942 and it was quickly discovered that World War II submarines were probably not the best delivery vehicle. There were too many people inside. People couldn't stand all the way up or lay all the way down. The air conditioning couldn't keep up with all of the heat their bodies were generating, and it turned into a fucking hotbox. And I should also remind you, they couldn't shower because, you know, lack of facilities, let's say. Limited supplies, limited water. And they couldn't exactly surface because A, that would give away the ruse and B, it would probably be hotter. Yeah. Best case scenario is you stay in the submerged hot box.

Imagine how awful that must have been for the submarine crew to be locked in a tube full of like American Maoists communalists. Yeah. And they're all fucking giving each other like atta boy quotes about like struggling for the will of the proletariat and like they're not high at all. They're actually like super energetic, like doing pushups, making the place even hotter. And you're just like, I got drafted out of a town called hell Indiana. Like, I just want to survive the war. All they're doing is chanting gung ho and stabbing the walls with screwdriver. Let's get the fuck out of here.

Now finally, by the way, the trip took eight days, so this is not a short trip. And just offshore the subs surfaced and the Marines climbed into small motorboats to make their final approach, all without any enemy opposition, though they did get pounded by the sea, which flooded several of the boats and destroyed their motors, leaving them to tie their boats together and paddle ashore. However, Carlson fucked up at the last second. He decided to change the beaches that he was supposed to be landing at and did not tell a detachment of 11 men, led by Lieutenant Oscar Petrus, who continued on towards the

original landing spot, all on their own. And it did not take long for Japanese defenders to run right into the Marines. First, it was only a few of them. And then the rest of the Japanese force rode in on bicycles to reinforce the beach. Only then did the Japanese realize, oh God, we're being invaded and we're horribly outnumbered. So they called in more reinforcements. And remember when I'm talking reinforcements here, I mean like maybe like five or six people at a time. Yeah, they didn't exactly have like, you know, the Fort Bragg size garrison on this tiny little atoll in the middle of nowhere. They don't even have a company of soldiers. So it's like

little bits and pieces and reinforcements were brought in by a truck and it drove directly into an ambush laid by a guy named Lieutenant Wilfred LaFrancois, which of course the Marines nicknamed Frenchie because they're still Marines. They're still Americans. If you have, if you have a funny French last name back then, your nickname is Frenchie. You as a guy, apparently Cassabian, not particularly challenging to pronounce was too hard to pronounce and just became ass. Like I'm just saying, you know, we are not good. Anyone with a Slavic last name is going with a ski and it just becomes ski. That is true. I have served with dozens of skis throughout my military career. And if

your last name is really fucked up, you just get called alphabet. Alphabet. Yeah. And you know, most of the Marines were armed with shotguns and sub machine guns, cause you know, those are solid raiding tools and they tore the truck apart. Meanwhile, Petros and his men carried on their mission of attacking the Japanese radio station. Then, they saw that they were alone, and the entire Japanese garrison was now between them and the rest of the Marine Raiding Force. So he decided, well fuck it, we'll charge right through it. That is when Petros and his marines had discovered just what the Japanese had been up to while sitting on this island on R&R gig.

Since the Battle of Guadalcanal had started, the garrison commander had been given strict orders to reinforce his position and had done so with bunkers and machine guns. Now the Marines are running directly into them. Petros and his men were savaged by incoming fire. Virtually everyone in his detachment was killed or wounded, and they pulled them all back to their boats and then back to the submarine.

So that detachment's gone. If there's anything the Japanese love in those days, it was like octagon of interlocking fields of fire. Like they just they love they love support by fire positions that become like a Venn diagram with nine circles. Like it's just it's not good. The Japanese at this time would have loved Enver Hoxha if they lived long enough to see bunkers you say? Oh yeah I was going to say the Japanese Albanian handshake yeah. I mean some of them actually did they didn't realize they were still fighting the war in

1975 they could have hung out. Now the Japanese command who was not stationed on this island but rather a little bit further away was confused as to what the fuck was going on. Because the island was small and functionally meaningless so like why the fuck is it being attacked? They sent planes over the battlefield to scope things out. They quickly saw two submarines parked off the coast, giving the Marines support fire, and they began to bomb the submarines, forcing them to withdraw and submerge. Then they began coming back around and strafing the Marines on the beach,

while seaplanes began to fly in reinforcements a few dozen at a time It probably didn't help them in terms of keeping their cover that in between volleys of buck and support fire from the submarines They were all singing we all live in a Maoist submarine a Maoist submarine Yeah, you get the point could have gone with red submarine, but I'll take it but the still doesn't scan right? It doesn't scan right. Yeah, it's gotta be Mao Yellow, two syllables. Hmm fair. I'm not the songwriter here. I am not the main songwriter of Johannes Funk and the Clugheads. Another problem that the Marines are running into were snipers. Since the Raiders didn't wear rank, the snipers weren't targeting NCOs or officers but they

were targeting something about as important. Radiooman and medics. Ah, hidden in the tops of the palm trees, Japanese snipers dropped all but one marine radioman on the ground that first day. Sitting through all this, one raider named Edward Weigal turned berserker mode. He grabbed a Browning automatic rifle, charged out into the open, began mag dumping into the treetops, silencing the snipers. But then he ran out of ammo, so he ran towards the machine gun nets, continuing to shoot at them with a pistol, ran out of ammo with that, and continued to assault into positions with hand grenades. And when those ran out, he began stabbing dudes with a knife in one hand and a screwdriver in the other.

I mean, look, war as hell, also this man understood the assignment. I'm just saying, if you were the guy who made your home brew creation screwdriver knife, you should think of it as like, you know, third or fourth echelon weapon of choice here. Guy worked down his entire personal inventory, personal ammunition store. At the end, he got to the screwdriver and he used it. Anybody who's stabbing someone who's like wielding stabbing utensils Akimbo is also just as comfortable beating you to death with I assume a rock so nothing's gonna slow this guy down Other than a bullet yeah normally you hear the story because John Walsh is talking about it on America's most wanted so like it's just

One of those things we're like you know this man this man has really gotten to fucking the end of his tether He's like I am I am sick and tired of all these motherfucking snipers and these motherfucking trees. And he's going to do something about it. After this, the Japanese pulled away from the beaches, but combat continued. Carlson had completely lost control of the situation because you know, he had no radios anymore because they all the radio operators had gotten shot. His radios were stretched out over various different points of the island, and he had no way to talk to them. So he employed a system of runners to bring messages from one position to another as he tried to figure out where everyone was. And this is actually

where his ethos kinda came in handy, was despite the fact all these detachments were split off from one another, even if there's no officer or NCO in any of these groups that were separated, they quickly just like came together and came up with the best way to handle things through like emergency struggle session. Yeah. I mean, I guess in the end of the day, when you have a sort of training and doctrine network in terms of your unit that allows you to just like control C, control V, clone, roll and spears of everything. It's like you put a hundred roll. Like that's like a mega AI glitch in the war simulator. You are suddenly the opposing team has a hundred Roland Spears. It's just like, what do you think's going to happen? Yeah. And the Spears thing will actually be a good comparison here in a little.

Oh no, it's just a fucking war crimes. Yeah. You know it's coming, right? Like, you know, it's coming. Oh, there's the Pacific war. I bet there won't be any war crimes there. As I looked through the life magazine photos from Boone and Gota and like half of them are just coming. Oh, there's the Pacific war. I bet there won't be any war crimes there. As I looked through the Life magazine photos from Bunagoda and like half of them are just like, oh, this guy executing a wounded prisoner. She's like, ah, yep. And they had to put out like a warning to Marines

to stop sending Japanese bones back to family members as gifts. It's not good. In James Jones's novel, The Thin Red Line, there's a scene in which they try to dig up Japanese bodies in a graveyard on Guadalcanal or the Guadalcanal equivalent for trophy hunting. And they aren't explicitly confronted by the spirits of the Japanese soldiers as they are in the Terrence Malick

adaptation. But there's a foul smell that is not just putrescence, but also just sort of like a warning from the other world to like, leave us the fuck alone. So you know what? Do that. Don't put it in the mail. People don't like getting ears in the mail or bones. Some Marine fucking doing war trophy hunting and the Japanese spirit materializes in front of them. It's like, yo, what the fuck? Yeah, what the fuck, man? I need that. I will say too that how I know that James Jones was a combat veteran is that that book

has both incredibly realistic depictions of combat and also a lot of scenes of dudes using the syrup from army mess kit, tins of fruit punch to make hooch and get drunk in the jungle. And I'm like, that man was an infantryman. Well, all this is going on. The Japanese continued to fly in more reinforcements with local Islanders telling Carlson that there must be around 150 Japanese soldiers on the Island now. And right as Carlson was trying to figure out what to do with that information, a goddamn Banzai chargesai charge has emerged out of the jungle less than 100 yards from his command post. It's like, oh, you guys want to send a berserker with a sword? We've never done anything like that in all of our history.

I see you want to fight us on our footing. That's great. You bring screwdrivers, we'll bring swords, bitch. Yeah, yeah. We've got like three of them and we've got a whole doctrine of how you wield one or the other. I see you guys have a weird bayonet and a screwdriver. This is because the European brain pan is too small to comprehend the honorable combat.

American Samurai but they're armed with one of those longer screwdrivers and then another shorter one. And then instead of wearing like kimono or whatever they're just wearing coveralls. Wearing my sacred vestments. The Phillips head one is the one you use to kill yourself if you fail in battle. The guy behind you acting as your second just smashes you over the head with a pipe wrench. Yeah, I was gonna say he's he's got an angle grinder to finish the job. I think instead of inventing an American samurai, we've invented like a home depot samurai.

of inventing an American samurai. We've invented like a home depot samurai. Yeah. Yeah. You you've invented like we haven't seen them because these guys have been digging water tumble number three under New York city since 1970, but they're going to emerge and just become a political class in America. Once the tunnel is done. Now his command staff had to drop what they're doing and shoot down the dozen or so sword wielding Japanese soldiers who was running right towards them. They survived of course and the entire episode lasted less than a minute because they burst out from the jungle less than a hundred yards away. But like everyone has a sub machine gun and a shotgun, which if you're armed with a screwdriver

and or a samurai sword, that's the last person you want to be running up against. It's just like a whole bunch of Tommy gun wielding assholes. I feel like the thing about it is, is that like the Japanese are going sort of Japanese military spirit, but like anyone who's played fucking, you know, shinobi games on Genesis knows like you gotta be quiet. If you're doing ninja shit, you're doing samurai sword stuff, swinging things, you gotta be quiet, you know, don't be yelling bonsai and screaming like sneak out, get crafty with it, you know? We did an episode a while back where the Japanese had snuck up through the jungle

to get within like a hundred or fifty yards away. And it was a huge bonsai charge. It was like hundreds or maybe a thousand people. And they signaled it to start via trumpet. It's like, well, why do you even bother sneaking? You can't bring your fucking ska soundtrack to this ambush. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. The mighty, mighty Bushido tones kicking off the ambush. It's like, no, guys, no, no. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. The mighty mighty Bushido tones kicking

off the sand, the ambush. It's like, no guys, no, no, no, no. Biggest casualty producing weapon. The trumpet has to kill someone or have it be an elephant playing the trumpet through its trunk and killing someone. Imagine being the, the NCO that comes like after the end of the bonsai charge and you're surveilling damage and you find one of your soldiers dead with a trumpet lodged in his rib cage Like oh fuck. How do I write this letter to his parents? Yeah, I'm just gonna burn his personal effects cuz I don't want them to know that he painted his his combat boots black and white checkerboard He wore his finest combat suspenders to his final say instead of people discovering something about your private life or like your sexual Identity like after the fact posthumously discovered outed as a scoffin you know it's

like that's probably led to more personal effects being burned than people figuring out you were gay. Now the entire time the Raiders are on the island Japanese aircraft continuously tore through the sky over their heads. However, these were hardly dedicated like ground attack pilots. These are mostly seaplanes that had a few guns strapped to them. Their pilots did their best to dive down on the Raiders and drop their bombs, but they couldn't really aim them and most of the time they flew wildly in the wrong direction and at like one point they just bombed an island or village while trying to bomb the Marines.

And they had no idea where the Raiders actually were and what they controlled on the island. So at one point a seaplane landed in a lagoon with Japanese soldiers on board to try to send them out into combat. But they had no idea that lagoon was under Marine control. So the seaplane kind of just pulled into a firing squad and the Marines unloaded on the plane and killed everybody in it.

I mean, I feel like being able to do like an L-shaped ambush on a plane is just a very, very funny concept. It's like things that shouldn't happen are happening. Like once again, it's like AI glitching stuff. It's like you shouldn't be like the plane shouldn't be able to fall victim to a ground ambush, like assuming it's not anti-aircraft fire. Yeah. And imagine that the Marines themselves are like is it pulling there's no fucking way there's There's no oh god. He's actually coming over here boys. Let's get ready No one's gonna be able to do this again. Just detonating a claymore on a plane Like it's just this is this is you know left is right up is down

There's a scar Bushido core you know like they've got a tactical elephant They've managed to keep all their troops from eating planes are flying so low that people are basically coming up and putting, putting a sign on the side of them that say, shoot me. What is happening? It's the end days unloads with their Tommy gun into this plane. Meanwhile, some throwing screwdrivers from a bandolier that you'd carry like shurikens in the fucking opening up their coat, like a flasher, except it's got lots of little

pockets for different Milwaukee tool. And just, just throwing drill bits, screwdrivers, different wrenches, you know, socket wrenches. Those ones will leave a lump at this point in the mission. The Raiders had only accomplished one of their goals. That was destroying the radio installation that had been done mostly on accident. The other goals of the mission were pretty vague, destroying facilities, gathering documents, capture some prisoners for interrogation, but they have not been able to do any of those. But Carlsen was beginning to worry because, you know, the islanders who

obviously hated the Japanese kept telling him more reinforcements are showing up on the island. But he hadn't seen any of them yet. This led him to believe that they were massing for a large counter-attack, at which point he knew his marines would be fucked. So he ordered all of his forces to pull back to the beach and prepare to reboard their boats and meet the submarines out at sea at 7 30 a.m. the next morning. The submarines had surfaced offshore, however the weather had turned on them and now they're getting battered by horribly rough seas which were in turn of course Crashing onto the reef covered shores making it nearly impossible for the Marines to get off the beach in their tiny rubber boats It was made even harder by the fact that remember

Like I said, virtually all of the motors on those boats had been busted in the landing This meant the Marines would have to paddle through the surf back out to the submarines. And it would also have to be in the dark so they could hide themselves from any watching Japanese soldiers. Mid would jump onto the boats, bust their asses, paddling so hard they're literally nearly passing out from fatigue and couldn't get through the waves. They were just spat back onto the beach. Yeah, because you said this was August when it started. I mean, that time in the Pacific, it can be really weird. You can go from idyllic to like horrible, you know, you lived in Hawaii like it can become horribly churned up Yeah, it's not a good time to be trying to paddle off of a mostly reef covered shore

No And the force and power of the surf made like they pulled weapons away from men They lost their boots. Sometimes they were stripped naked after getting caught in riptides and stuff like that. So now a lot of them were just sitting naked, exhausted, and unarmed on a very much still Japanese controlled island. I got to say, I am a very comfortable, confident swimmer. I swam competitively for years. And the scariest I've ever been in the water has been the first time that I actually swam I got out of the breaker in the boat line boat launching site into the actual unbroken unmitigated waves of the Central Pacific on the Hilo side of the island of Hawaii which is like the first big thing of land for thousands of miles that holy fucking shit you if the if the current

isn't going there you are not going there no I got caught in a riptide actually off of electric people die all the time. Yeah, it's nuts. Yeah, but fuck. I mean, I tried swimming in Canna Beach once, which is hell beach and yeah, don't recommend it. But yeah, like, it's just, it's very difficult to explain, even if you are familiar with the ocean. The two things I'm trying to say here, number one is just how rough the Pacific can get in churned up weather and also just how strong those currents are. If you are used to swimming in places in the Atlantic, unless it's like swimming off the coast of, I don't know, the Canary Islands or the Azores or Cape Verde or something,

there's not really that of comparison. There's just so much ocean and it's so incredibly strong. Yeah. The ocean is terrifying. Yep. Big swath of human existence has confronted this fact. If only we would have learned our lesson to leave it alone. But normally when you're butt naked on a reef, it's because you've had a vision

from God and you've licked a mushroom or a toad or, or smoked some dank Polynesian weed, not because you were trying to get back on a submarine, a thing that no, no seafaring culture could have predicted. And certainly not because the riptide was perverted somehow. Yeah. The riptide itself had taken mushrooms is now fucking your shit up. And now they did this for hours and a process that was only supposed to take a few minutes became impossible.

By the time Carlson called off that night's attempt, fewer than 100 men had made it back to the submarines. 45 to the Natalus it back to the submarines. 45 to the Natalus, 25 to the Argonaut. And about 100 raiders are still on the island. And that was when the Japanese could have easily wiped them out if they attacked, but they just didn't. And according to a Japanese soldier who survived,

he said the reason why is that they didn't launch the attack is they thought all of them had already left. Like they thought they all slipped away in the night. However, it would only last so long before a patrol found them and effectively trapped on the beach. Well, it said naked in the sun and they're white. I mean, you know Marines are white back in those days because of army was fucking segregated. So every single person is selected on the criteria of can you make it as a command and also will you die from a sunburn? And

now Poseidon has stolen your fucking clothes because you dared name your submarines after Greek mythology and you are naked unarmed on a reef that's sharp that's cutting into your ass and the Japanese are going to send out patrols and they've got like bayonets with bayonets attached to them. I have to say a bold idea naming the submarine the Argonaut and expecting to come back on time. Yeah. Yeah. Jeez. Yeah. Well, if it was the British commandos doing this, you'd know it would have been so fucking insufferable because they would have just been riffing about mythology

the entire time. They were in the eight days inside the hell ship. Yeah. It would have been known as an episode of Trashfuture. It would have made the inside of that submarine even worse. And that's the baseline of the inside of submarines back then were always terrible Anyway, as for Carlson, he had no idea what to do He gathered the remaining men together on the beach and held a meeting he flat-out told them I'm out of ideas Let's decide by committee and what to do next because the submarines were under orders to only stay on station for so long He assumed they would be leaving them behind any minute, leaving them stranded with no way off the island. So he asked them in. He kind of like framed

it this way. We have these options. We can surrender. We can hold out on the island and try to do as much damage as we possibly can before we're all killed. Or a third thing that I can't think of. Do you have a third idea? And they really didn't. As the Marines were sitting there, effectively deciding how they would die, the submarine nautilus surfaced once again and blanked out a code to Carlson. They didn't give a fuck about the mission. They would stay on station as long as they had to to get everyone back on board. So Carlson ordered his men to again board the boats they had left and try to get to the submarine if they felt that they physically could. Roosevelt and 15 others managed to make the journey, leaving Carlson and 70 others on the beach

when the Japanese patrol found them. Now, they didn't surrender. They managed to fight them off with a cache of captured Japanese weapons, rocks, knives, and of course, a couple screwdrivers. I mean, the American screwdriver industry is being proudly represented in this story. This podcast is actually brought to you by, I don't know, screwdriver brands. Just the American screwdriver lobby. Big screwdriver. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They used to be stronger than the Marine Corps lobby, but, you know, America lost its way. I know.

Now instead of making really useful tools to both tighten screws and kill people in World War II, we just get V-22s that kill you. This is why we have to go back prior to the American Meiji restoration that got rid of the Home Depot samurai. I mean, also it's like, can you imagine every single time you go, do you want to go to a fucking NHL game or an NFL game? And it's like, they've got to do like a flyover. They've got to do a military honor thing.

Every time you watch a stupid Marvel movie, there's got to be a V-22 in it. And yet it's not crashing and killing everyone on board. It's just like, this sucked. We could have had screwdriver samurai. American culture could have been way cooler. But you know what? I don't know. We lost our way.

Return to tradition. Return to tradition, exactly. Only our Marines with screwdrivers. That would cut our defense budget drastically in half. Yeah, but I mean also screwdrivers can be used to cut crayons. So you know, it might actually improve their diet. Exactly.

Finally, the Nautilus dispatched a boat with the working motor to try to rescue the last men, but as it raced through the ocean, a Japanese plane broke through the clouds and hit it perfectly with a burst of gunfire, destroying it. Like the one time they hit it on target. Once again, this is just like AI glitching stuff, it's really annoying. Dead tired and unable to get back to the subs, and the subs unable to help them, Carlson came to the conclusion that the most responsible thing he could do as commander was to offer his surrender to the Japanese and maybe save

his men's lives. Carlson sat down, scribbled a note out, and handed it to two of his soldiers with orders to go running out and find where the Japanese were to give it to them. Then they ran into a small problem. These messengers to deliver his surrender couldn't find anyone, when they did it was a lone low-ranking Japanese soldier The two Raiders were unarmed and the Japanese guy was holding a rifle with a bayonet attached to the end of it But his rifle was very clearly out of ammo Because each time like they tried to give him the letter the Japanese guy step forward and try to bayonet them

We can simply kind of like slap the bayonet out of the way and insist that he take the letter instead. And this went on for minutes. Hey, hey, cut that out. I have a fucking, hey, stop trying to stab me. Fucker, take this letter. Finally he did and the Japanese soldier vanished out into the jungle. Now they assumed that he would eventually come back with like a force, maybe their officer

to accept the surrender, but nobody ever came back for the Marines. So the raiders just started wandering around the island looking for anyone. Remember, this is very weird when you remember that most of them are unarmed and virtually all of them are naked at this point. Oh no, the rapture happened in the middle of this battle. Shit. Japanese deliverance. They've all returned to the Emperor. They finally came to a half blown up village full of islanders who told them, yeah, we got bombed on accident. And we know, we're trying to put out the fires.

And the soldiers asked where the fuck did the Japanese go, and the islanders were like, oh bro, they all left. What? The Japanese had evacuated the island. They just scattled. They were like, you cannot cannot you spent so much time developing Sharp reflexes and good vision in the jungle And if you go and fight them on the beach and see this many naked white dudes and the amount of sun

It's gonna reflect in your eyes. It's gonna literally cause corneal damage. We can't afford it We don't have LASIK surgery safety first. So like that's when they came to the conclusion like oh those seaplanes weren't Bringing in reinforcements. They were withdrawing men. So the seaplanes that were getting fucking enflated by dudes on the ground, like taking pot shots, those were the evacuation buses, those were the Chinooks, those are the magic school buses for the Japanese. Now, with the whiplash of going from about to surrender to suddenly conquering an entire island, Carlsen quickly ordered the last of his men to find some weapons and search the island to make sure there's no stragglers.

They did find around 80 dead Japanese bodies and two survivors who they promptly executed. Which is- makes no sense to me, like I know it's the Pacific Theater, war crimes are happening left right and center, but one of their explicit orders is to capture prisoners like ah fuck that shit just shoot it. Like no, we're gonna- we're about to go into the Maoist submarine and it's gonna be sweaty as hell. Like we can't, we just, we can't introduce, like at the end of the day, he's gonna die from the way we smell. So like, this is actually a humane death. I'm joking cause it's shitty, but I mean, at the end of the day too, like, I don't know.

It was framed in such a way that the two men were wounded and they're like, ah, we can't really care for them Just shoot them. It's like you still you were supposed to take prisoners and Statistically speaking they're not gonna surrender to you them being wounded is your best bet to actually capture Yeah, and rendering aid is literally your obligation legal moral ethical, etc They walked around setting things on fire before trying to make for the submarine from a different part of the island, which waves were much more forgiving on. They were able to get off the beach and by sundown, Carlson's detachment was back on the submarine. But not everybody was back on the submarine.

21 Marines were dead, but nine were missing. Those nine have gotten completely separated during the chaos and were left behind. Nobody even realized that they were either a not dead because nobody had like is like okay some people are dead I saw this guy die but I can't find his body anymore like okay he's dead but only when they were actually loading up on the submarine and leaving like did you see this guy did you see this guy and they did a final accounting like okay we have nine people that are left behind and this submarine commander's like we can redeploy you to the island to see if you can find them and Carlson of course Wanted to but he realized he couldn't so they had to leave

Yeah, I mean his guys I would imagine are not in any shape to do that And if they get hit with a counter-attack like then it's really done sauce So it sucks and it's awful But like you can't necessarily fault him on tactical grounds here more interesting than that is what happened with these nine men they survived on the island for a month and while the Japanese did return to the island and re-garison it they kind of went on a guerrilla warfare mission like fucking shit up that the Japanese had set up, like they were launching ambushes,

setting fire to rations and stuff like that. But eventually they were caught up to and captured. They were transferred to a different island in the marshals and interrogated for six weeks at the 6th Naval Base Headquarters, which according to Japanese records, they didn't say shit, which is impressive because you know that they were being horrifically tortured. Yeah Admiral Koso Abe, the local commander of that specific island, sent a message to Tokyo asking What am I supposed to do with these men? I'm done interrogating them and they need to be transferred somewhere on the home islands

Which is where the Japanese kept the majority of their POWs. The other option is executing them. Tokyo answered that transport back to the home islands was impossible due to the presence of the US Navy so they were ordered to be killed and Abe took the nine men out back and they were beheaded via sword. At a US Naval Tribunal held in Guam on May 15th 1946, Commander Abe was sentenced to death and his sub commanders and all the commanders involved in the transportation Those prisoners were given various different lengths of imprisonment from five to ten years Carlson and his Raiders were turned into national heroes for their glorious victory

Well, it was a lone dub that the US could rest their laurels on at the point Even if the raid in itself was actually a net negative and we'll talk talk about why in a second. They even made a movie about the Raiders in 1943 while the war was still going on and many of the Raiders were still fighting in it. I really hate it when they make the Zero Dark Thirty about me while I'm literally still on that deployment. And the first Marine to get the Medal of Honor in World War II was part of this mission, a guy named Clyde Thomason. Now the raid itself did have an impact, and this is what I'm talking about a negative impact, because it's not the impact that the US hoped for.

The Japanese realized how badly defended many of their far flung islands were and ordered a massive reinforcement of one island in particular, Tarawa. And we know what happens after that. We've done an episode on that. Short story. Not good. Tarawa's bad. As for Carlsen, he would lead his men through Guadalcanal and get horrifically sick, I believe with malaria, and he'd get bedridden for quite a while. But then he was deployed to Saipan. There he would get badly wounded in the fighting,

while running into combat to rescue a wounded man under his command. I should point out, he was a fucking general at the time. I mean, you can't doubt the man's persistence or convictions. Yeah. You know, what else can you say? This is definitely, in my opinion, a kind of guy that did not really get replicated post mid-century. No.

It's just a certain way of being and Unfortunately Carlson would never really recover from those wounds and he died from them about a year later Yeah, Carlson kind of a fucking badass Honestly, like we don't normally talk about officers in this show and have nothing terrible discrimination Look, you deserve it. And you know that I'll be the first to admit it's just I just find it very funny. I will say too though that like when you think about what you described that Abe was executed for war crimes for executing those prisoners, it's like, yeah, but that nine guys getting beheaded is not that much

more than two wounded prisoners that you were supposed to evacuate who have been disarmed and you know rendered What's the right word here? They have they are no longer a threat and you just execute them because you're clenched Yeah, can't can't really put them in the submarine Yeah, you know like say what you will about the tribunals all of the tribunals after World War two and being victors justice Because they absolutely were mm-hmm. I'm not gonna complain about most of no. I'm not either I'm just saying like Curtis for LeMay wasn't wrong in the sense that like if we lost this war we'd all be executed His work criminals. Yeah, there's a degree to which yeah, you said Victor's justice, but the same argument applies effectively here

It's like well, it's really annoying to transport these guys back. So let's just kill them Yeah the weird part about Abe's execution is that he was taken out back and Stabbed to death by a group of Raiders armed with screwdrivers I would thought you were gonna say that the weird thing about Abe's execution was that they had a guy built a fucking contraption taken out back and stabbed to death by a group of Raiders armed with screwdrivers. I thought you were going to say that the weird thing about Abe's execution was that they had a guy built a fucking contraption gun. The Raiders all got together, built the device, but this one just fired flechettes of screwdrivers

out of it. Yeah, exactly. It was made from like a 1930s plug-in power drill, like all sorts of just weird sort of like jazz-age steampunk. Now Nate, we do a thing on this show called Questions from the Legion. If you'd like to ask us a question from Legion, you can support us on Patreon. You can then ask us on the Patreon messaging platform. You can ask us on our Discord, which if you support us on Patreon, you'll have access to. You can tie a

letter to a screwdriver and stab it into a wall we will find it and we'll read it on air i said a wall it's okay to say just a wall not a person not a living thing just a wall what podcast are you a huge fan of that you have nothing to do with like guesting producing or personally know the people who run it i know that whittles down things pretty staunchly for the both of us. Yeah. I mean, okay. I would say that I have enjoyed some episodes of Reply All, but I have been a guest on Reply All a long time ago before I was into podcasting at the job.

So that one doesn't count. I'm not a regular podcast listener. I just don't have time. If I have free time, I want to listen to music. I edit a lot of shows. That's just the nature of the beast, I suppose. I would say The Nod. And I don't know if it's around anymore, but it was a show, I believe was via Buzzfeed podcasts. My wife is black and she would often share episodes of The Nod, which is like a black culture podcast and black American culture podcast. And they, for example, did an episode that was like an oral history of the song, Knock If You Buck. It was incredible. Fucking loved it.

So good. It was actually their interns idea and he produced it. It was tremendous. So that I would say, I would say that. Yeah. The nod because I like rap music among other genres, but because I like rap music, a lot of times that stuff will come up and it'll just be interesting stories and it's just very well done where it was.

I really don't know if it's still around because like a lot of the good successful beloved podcasts got axed because you know, Felix Salmon or whoever couldn't make a million dollars doing nothing at podcasting Inc anymore. So mine is actually a pretty recent, I was recommended the podcast Boonta Vista by our discord. See, I love Boonta Vista, but I know them. I had fucking Andrew made us lunch at his house in Canberra He was on stage with us in Canberra. So like yeah, see it works for me Yeah, Ben was our guest for one of the Brisbane shows have hung out with him like yeah They're they're all good dudes, but we're good goose and lady, but but yeah, I I do know them

I've never been on the show. I've never been to Australia. so I've never met any of them, but I find the show fucking hilarious. It's extremely fun. It's extremely fun. I can't really explain to you what exactly it's about other than you should just listen to it. It's very, very funny. I would also say because of connections to Australia, there was a thing that you described in this episode. And the only thing that could come to mind was the thing that if you know Australian comedians and Buntavista is in some ways related to this, Tom Walker is a comedian from Sydney. He's been on TF a bunch and we've done live shows with him, but he does a gaming stream where he plays GTA four, but the speed of every car is set to 9999. And so it's just a hell of a shit crashing everywhere. And

when you were describing this stuff of just like the plane just showing up on the ground and getting shot, I was like, or like all you have to do is cross one last thing you can't. Like to me, all I was thinking of was like the rescue boat immediately, a plane comes out of nowhere and destroys it. That's what Tom trying to cross the street once. GTA 4, it's so good. Genuinely, it's so good. You should watch it. It sounds stupid, but even my wife, who does not like gaming or gaming streams at all,

she watches like this is just the comic timing of this is just fucking hilarious. I don't know what it is, but even my wife who does not like gaming or gaming streams at all she watches like this is just the comic Timing of this is just fucking hilarious. I don't know what it is, but like a car going too fast. It's just very funny That is a podcast Nate you do other podcasts plug those other podcasts Yeah, like I said trash future what a hell of a way to die kill James Bond gonna be working on all of them today So you know what the life of a producer never ends I'm also a co-host but they're all fun shows. So check them out Yeah, I let Nate out of his producing cave to host a podcast not to stuff him back in and lock the door behind him He's literally gonna send me his file and I go back into like the salt mines

The Adobe audition salt mines the fab filter fucking total bundle salt mines now This is the only podcast that I host, but if you like what we do here, consider supporting us on Patreon. You get episodes like this one early, mostly a week early before they hit the regular feed. You get six plus years of bonus content. You get Discord access, you get eBooks, you get audiobooks.

And I promise I'm going to continue working through recording the Hooligans of Kandahar now that I can. You get first dibs on merch, first dibs on live show tickets when they're available, and a screwdriver that you will be sent in the mail. I won't send you a screwdriver in the mail, but... I would say that we could establish a really high Patreon tier, and that we will get something that we will deem the screwdriver of American Bushido Alive show I will sign it that I will sign it too. We have to get a live show booked

But I will sign it up just don't get caught by security. Yeah, that's probably illegal in Europe to just carry a Yeah, blade bladed instrument. They might think you're a freak an eyeglass repair Screwdriver perfect. Yeah, that's perfect. Yeah, or show up with the bike repair kit with a ton of screwdrivers You'd be like, you know, I keep that thing on me Everybody thank you so much for listening and until next time I don't know invent the the Home Depot fucking top-not arm yourself with screwdrivers and serve your Serve your nation by getting some non hipster car heart overalls, you know, some good non slip work boots and like three different

lengths of screwdriver swords for three different combat applications. You are a samurai. Swear fealty to your home decor lore. And make sure that you fight to the death to extirpate the inferior race of Lowe's samurais. They're not as good as Home Depot.