Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 32- Everyone is a Nazi!

Episode Date: December 31, 2018

On this episode Joe is joined by Army Veteran and one of the characters from The Hooligans of Kandahar, Mike Huang to talk about how a number of people ended up volunteering for the German Army during World War Two from a guy who ended up becoming a US Army Green Beret, the son of the founding dictator of Taiwan, and a poor Korean conscript who ended up fighting for everybody on accident. Support the show: http://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Buy some merchandise: https://teespring.com/stores/lions-led-by-donkeys-store follow the show: @lions_by follow Joe @jkass99

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe. Nick is still in Japan. So with me today is Mike Wong. Mike is a U.S. Army veteran, college student, and one of the starring characters from my book, The Hooligans of Kandahar. How are you doing today? Oh, fantastic. What's going on, everybody? Yeah, Mike is joining us from New York, Brooklyn, right?

I was in Brooklyn, but I live in Queens now. I'm always going to claim to be from Brooklyn, though. At least until you're priced out by Amazon. Yeah, until I can't live in New York anymore. It's coming. It's coming. It's coming soon. I give myself at least two more years. Oh, you're generous. So I wanted Mike on with us today because we're doing something a little different.

We're not going to talk about a specific person or conflict like we normally do. Instead, we're going to have a theme. And that theme is people who just cannot stay in one place for very long and always ended up as Nazis. Some of these people are well known, but some of them really aren't. And one of them has to do with a pretty important person from Mike's birth country of Taiwan or the Republic of China. I don't mean to offend you, Mike.

No, no offense taken. It depends on which economy is doing better is which country I claim to be. So today, I'm going to say Republic of china is pretty good okay uh but before we jump over to asia we are going to talk about uh a northern european country that apparently has a conspiracy theory on the internet now that says it does not exist and that is finland what yeah have you heard that one is it like finland doesn't exist

people actually think an entire country doesn't exist i don't know if it's real it might be one of the stupid like people believe the earth is flat just because they want to be like contrary to everybody else i don't like it's a reddit thing but at the same time at the same time like president trump came from fucking 4chan so these things have real impacts yeah they seem to pick up steam real quick it's like it's like shit picking up steam down a sewer and then eventually impacting the water supply somewhere that's how i feel like is a good analogy for what's happening yeah yeah i think they just call that flint oh yeah that one hits close to home there yeah that's why i live in washington now where I can just be poisoned from the Boeing plant instead of the city.

Oh, so getting away from it. Yeah. Back on target here. The first person we're talking about is a guy named Laurie Allen Torney. Laurie Torney was born in Valpuri, Finland, in 1919 to a ship captain father and a homemaker mother. Now, he was born with an interesting part of Finnish history. About one year removed from the end of World War I as well as the Finnish Civil War as they broke away from the dying Russian Empire who was caught in the throw of the Bolshevik Revolution and the Russian Civil War. Interestingly enough, Finland actually elected a king and then attempted to stand up a kingdom before all those came crashing down in less than a year um and that's the the the situation that

he was born in um and torney himself was renowned across his hometown for being something of a natural-born athlete and even trained with a future boxing gold medalist named sten stuvio which sounds like a gold medal boxing game. This sounds like somebody that Rocky would fight. Yeah, absolutely. It sounds kind of like royalty, too. It sounds like he should be fighting with a crown. Yeah, yes.

King of the ring. Yes. It seemed that no matter what Torney picked up, he would be better at it than just about everybody else. He was probably like the shithead you went to school with that you fucking hated like if you got a c on a test this dude got an a he had a leatherman jacket he'd fuck he had frosted tips oh god yeah he fucked your girlfriend he he he was the guy that nobody liked but everybody wanted to be effectively and that's

something that he would be good at like his entire life which makes him even more like makes me hate him even more yeah i used to secretly hate those type of guys but i hate them much more openly now it's just the stain has grown throughout the years yeah yeah because they end up having jobs that impact your everyday life and make you hate them even more exactly they've got it all yeah and you know they don't have to worry about losing their apartment uh after so after graduating school he joined the finnish civil guard which actually got its start as the in this finnish civil war as an anti-communist militia uh this would kind of impact torny's life uh as you'll find out um it was known as the white guard like their white army

anti-communist friends bordering in bordering Russia. Post-war, however, nobody's really sure what their job was. They weren't a reserve or a national guard. So instead, they just hung around and organized sporting events like some kind of weird ass militant YMCA. This guard was so unorganized actually they actually made them buy everything uh themselves to include their own rifle like you just showed up one day with nothing and they gave you nothing like well come back when you have money kid oh god yeah uh eventually though torney came of age and enlisted in the finnish regular army, joining the 4th Independent Jaeger Infantry Battalion in 1939.

Generally, Jaeger at the time was a catch-all term for light infantry and scouts and things like that. Okay. He did small unit stuff. Like most people, he was probably expecting to do his national service in peace, but instead the Soviet Union invaded a year later to start the Winter War. So he doesn't have good luck uh he probably wanted to use a gi bill too and get out and go to college yeah

got stuck got stuck in the middle of a war it sounds like a familiar story yeah and unfortunately for him the finnish government extended his enlistment contract indefinitely once russia once Russia invaded. Yeah, that's a tough one. He got Finnish stop lost. Torni found himself smack dab in the middle of the invasion around the Lagoda Lake area of Karelia, which is like the whole part that the Soviet Union wanted.

There's a single Finnish division stationed there, and they found themselves outnumbered nearly five to one. Oh, no. And as something that would become pretty common during the Winter War, the numbers really didn't matter. Torni and his Finns

totally fucked up the Soviets in every single way. Torni himself led to the surrounding and destruction of an entire Soviet Army division, which would actually go on to be one of the Finnish tactics of the war. uh this to the surround surrounding and destruction of an entire soviet army division which would actually go on to be one of the finished tactics of the war um the fast light finished forces which didn't really have any heavy weaponry to speak of would pick apart the massive

slow-moving columns of the red army before surrounding and destroying it bit by bit like kind of breaking it up into small pockets and taking them on one at a time that's kind of like guerrilla warfare yeah effectively and uh there's there's actually like an added anecdote of they would purposely go out of their way to make life for the soviet troops miserable like they would target their kitchens and stuff in the field so they'd have nothing to eat and then they would freeze to death uh as they blew up their their like closed depots and stuff. And I kind of wish they had blown up our kitchen when we were deployed together. I think we could have gotten out of some food poisoning.

Yeah. Yeah. But we would have significantly less energy drinks, which would have been a problem. I don't know how I would have survived without rivets. Yeah. They're the fuel that actually led the war, not JPA. Exactly. Torney was recognized for his actions and given a battlefield promotion and then sent off to Officers Training Academy. He graduated as a second lieutenant.

Unfortunately for the young Torney, who was really only good at war, the Finns signed a peace deal to end the Winter War before he graduated and could return to battle. That's when things got weird though uh the fins during world war ii made some strange allies and one of those was nazi germany um and it wasn't because they were fascists although that can be argued that uh manor heim was kind of fashy uh it was more of a defense thing um it's fascism light yeah uh like diet fascism finland knew the soviet union was going to attack them again and the only people in the neighborhood that wanted to help them against the soviets was nazi germany so it was it was an alliance of self-defense i see is that kind of like an enemy of my enemies my friend type deal right and you know that would be underlined significantly

more in a couple years which we'll talk about um and then they briefly go to war against each other also so um oh man but one of those things that uh that they did uh to become closer was like an officer's exchange program um and during that piece torny was part of that he traveled to vienna austria for seven weeks and began training with the waffen ss he would officially gain the rank of unterstrumpf fewer which is like the ss version of second lieutenant um and this this wasn't like um ceremonial he was officially commissioned as a waffen ss officer and. And an official picture exists of him in the Death's Head uniform. Oh, man.

You can't live that down. Yeah. You probably shouldn't be able to live that down. That's crazy. So what happened next? So the peace between the two countries would only be about 15 months. After the Germans launched Operation Barbarossa,

the invasion of Russiaussia for people not aware uh finland uh decided to join in uh because they wanted to recapture the territory they lost in the winter war uh so they invaded as well their goal was to recapture karelia a province they are forced to cede in exchange for peace um and it was kind of like a world war one piece. It was so brutal that, um, uh, it, war was inevitable.

Crayola was 30% of the Finnish economy. So there's no way they could live that down. Um, and this is now known as the continuation war because there was such a pause between the two wars. They might as well just, you know, blend them into one.

Uh, of course, uh, T tourney's individual unit uh which was you can't necessarily call them special forces they were they were light infantry but they were kind of they operate in small unit tactics guerrilla war type stuff um but it was what they were good at um they were they were so devastating to the soviet army that the red army placed a bounty of three million Finnish marks on his head. The closest converter I could find, because the Finnish mark doesn't exist anymore and hasn't for some time, equals to be about a half million dollars.

That's a lot of rubles. For some random Finnish second lieutenant. Yeah, that's a lot of rubles right there. You must have pissed somebody off. He was actually eventually awarded the Mannerheim Cross, which is the highest award in the Finnish army. So it's their medal of honor.

This officially made him a knight. Oh, now he's actually a real team now. Eventually, though, this war would end as well. The Moscow Armistice was signed between the Soviets and the Finns in 1944. Again, the Armistice wasn't super nice to Finland, but it was better than being invaded by the entire post-German Red Army, which is now no longer being destroyed by purges, fueled by Lenz leases. Now they're fully mechanized you

don't want to fight that red army it's a completely different red army than the winter war yeah um a part of the armistice was the expulsion of all german forces from finnish land um obviously the germans weren't really keen on that and they refused to leave um for good reason i mean they owned a flank of Russia effectively, not that the Germans were going to be able to invade again. But, you know, there could be a thorn in their side. Yeah, of course. So with the Germans refusing to leave, the Finns launched another war, this one against the Germans. And it was called the Lapland War to kick forcibly kick the germans out um after the wonder if he had to take off his uh

ss waffen uniform when they finally declared war again you know nobody really seemed to mind that um uh torny fought against the germans too uh which is which will become uh ironic very quickly here in about a year and a half um after the lapland war ended in 1945 uh torny and most of the rest of the finnish army was demobilized uh is also part of the armistice which kind of seems like a trap to me but the soviets left fins alone um good yeah yeah um and but 20 wasn't done uh you see, whether it be through weird, twisted loyalty to the SS or because he hated the Soviets this much, he skipped Finland and rejoined the SS in 1945 to fight near Schwere, Germany. And if you notice that the date there, this is pretty much just about the end of the war. He surrendered to American forces in June. So he,

he really only fought with this, with the SS for a couple months. Um, he was placed in a British POW camp, which he then quickly escaped and ran back to Finland. Um, that'll be another claim where he claimed to be finished once again. Yes.

Yeah. He's, he's finished of convenience. Um, the small problem though, is he was a literal card carrying nazi now and that was illegal as fucking finland and that this actually wasn't illegal before uh again because they were allies but part of the armistice with the soviets was uh like you have to a make the communist party illegal again and and b get rid of all the fascists which included people who trained with the trained and joined the ss so that meant um 20 attorney guy had to go yeah that meant 20 was quickly arrested and put on trial for treason um now normally when you think of this in history, like he was put on trial for treason.

Um, this is normally where I say something like, and then he was shot or, and then he was hung. Um, but he wasn't, there's no, no happy ending to this story. Uh, no. Uh, instead he was sent to just six years in prison. Yeah. So like, I've seen people get, get longer charges for like a bag of weed. That's insane. Yeah.

I mean, this is... It kind of speaks that the Finns really didn't care about getting rid of all the Nazi sympathizers. They were just doing it to appease the Soviets. But since this is Tony we're talking about, and he just escaped the POW camp, he escaped prison again. Nice. But he was caught this time and sent back to prison a second time i i've got to be wondering like how is he getting out of these prison camps does he have some sort of special skill is he people got to reevaluate when he escapes prison like the second time yeah they're in prison they're doing it wrong obviously um he i don't

know he's just fucking crafty man and and you have to realize torny is like almost a household name in finland he's a war hero oh okay so he probably had some help oh gotcha and uh because of those two things um he was actually given a presidential pardon in 1948 uh so they kind of forgave him for the whole treason thing. He got off scot-free. Not quite. Even though he got a presidential pardon, he was still kind of frowned on for effectively joining Finland's enemies. Because the Finns lost thousands of people fighting in the Lapland War, which then he went and joined the Nazis. So he wasn't really liked much after that. And like many Nazis post World War Two, he ran to Latin America where he ran to several of his army buddies.

Oh, boy. Yeah. He went to Brazil and like a lot of people who went to like Argentina or whatever. He went to Brazil. Apparently, it's it's more agreeable to the Finnish war criminals. It's more agreeable to the Finnish war criminals. Apparently, the Latin life wasn't for him, however, because he quickly went and got a job on a boat called the MS Skagen. And once it was in the Gulf of Mexico, he quickly jumped overboard and swam to shore in Florida.

This is ending up to be like that show Prison Break. It gets dumber because he actually, from Florida, he hitchhiked his way up to New York and worked in New York as an undocumented immigrant for quite some time. Wow. And in 1954, he enlisted in the U.S. Army. So there is a provision at the time called the Lodge-Philbinbin act which allowed for foreign nationals to join the u.s military um now the the act was effectively uh not necessarily like it wasn't in the text but it was meant for people from eastern europe to join the military uh because this is you know height of the Cold War type shit and the idea of a war against the Soviet Union is very, very, very real.

So they wanted something of an American foreign legion made out of all these satellite states to be like the liberating army. So they wanted the inside scoop on these guys. Right. They needed people who spoke the language. They needed people who knew the cultures and the customs and everything.

Torni was none of those things. And he actually should have been strictly barred from from joining through the Philbin Act. Now, he got through on a loophole and that was the act forbade German nationals or countries involved in the Marshall Plan from enlisting. This is for the sole purpose. They didn't want to accidentally recruit Nazis. Now, Torni was never technically given German citizenship. And due to the way Finland negotiated their way out of World War II, and Finland wasn't part of the Marshall Plan, he was exempt from both of these clauses.

And citizenship was promised to all of these enlistees after five years of service. It was kind of, yeah, it was kind of like, uh, the French foreign Legion. You get French citizenship after five years of service.

Um, okay. Just to be safe though. So nobody caught on to who he was. Uh, he changed his name to Larry Thorne. Wow. Um,

there's a lot of people who are listening right now who have never heard of hornyny but the name probably piqued their interest because he's something of a green beret legend uh which he probably doesn't yeah which he probably he probably doesn't deserve and we'll go into that um and in case you're wondering if this lodge philbenack sounds like a really good way for immigrants to get american citizenship well it expired in 1959 it It was never resigned. So, no, it doesn't exist anymore. So let me get this straight. The last uniform you put on was a WAP and SS uniform,

and then the following uniform was a Green Beret? Well, he was a basic infantry guy at first. Oh, okay. Yeah, and there's no saying that the U.s military did not know 20s passed um okay the wartime oss or the precursor of the modern cia have been tracking his x points since his service in the winter war they knew that who this guy was okay um his official u.s army record even mentions his time as an officer in the Waffen-SS. Wow. Now... Imagine that showing up on your DD-214,

just your time spent in the SS. Yeah. Nothing follows. Now, there's a good reason why I bring this up. This is because the U.S. government labeled the SS a criminal organization during the Nuremberg trials in 1945. The only people exempt from this label were SS conscripts,

of which there were hundreds of thousands, from 1943 onwards. Not only was Torni not a conscript, he was a foreign volunteer, which normally meant a death sentence in battle if he was captured. Right, makes sense. Yeah.

There's actually an SS unit made out of French volunteers called SS Charlemagne. And they actually were one of the last units to fall apart during the defense of Berlin because they knew what would happen if they were captured. Oh, they're all going to be killed.

Yeah, they knew they weren't going to be sent to a pow camp the french would get it we're gonna kill them if they went back home and most of i think like out of the 60 survivors half of them were executed by the french government so like yikes yeah that's normally what happened from friend from foreign volunteers um but the us has balls deep in the cold war and they had all kinds kinds of Nazi war criminals in the military and the government. I mean, the entire rocket program that we sent people to space on was Nazi science. So we weren't shy about this.

We just needed somebody who had a decent record of killing communists. And that was Torney's favorite hobby. As Torney was incredibly highly trained soldier already he quickly rose above everybody else and joined the u.s special forces um like the ss he was quickly sent to officer's candidate school and became an officer in the third military of his career wow yeah now if you were to think uh if you look at the time, where do you think he's going to apply his trade next? I mean, he started in Finland and then he worked for the Nazis and now he's a Green Beret.

So, I don't know, space? That's the last frontier. Well, before that, he was sent to Vietnam in 1963. Fuck off. He spent his time training Montagnard anti-communist militias, which was the original Green Beret purpose, and found himself caught in the middle of Tien Bien.

And in true Nazi action movie fashion, he was wounded twice, but was integral to the camp not being overran. He was awarded the Bronze Star for his service and immortalized in the famed Robin Moore book, The Green Berets. What? That was him? Yeah. Now, they change hisized in the famed Robin Moore book, The Green Berets. What? That was him? Yeah.

Now, they change his name in the book, but there's a very Finnish man in the book with a different name that's very obviously Larry Thorne. Oh, okay. And this is where things get dark. Now, I have to point out... Things have not gotten dark already?

No. So, there is no evidence. I keep calling him or criminal but that's because technically all SS people are war criminals they're criminal organization so there is no evidence during his service with the SS or the Finnish Army that he took part in any atrocities none there's no evidence so he quickly made up for that in Vietnam oh boy so on his second tour in Vietnam. Oh, boy. So on his second tour in Vietnam in 1965, he played a founding role in a unit that a lot of people may have heard of.

That is the Military Assistance Command Vietnam Studies and Observation Group or MACV SOG. Oh, man. Now, this unit existed before Torney got there, but Torney literally wrote the book of their tactics and procedures that's right one of the most famed special forces units in american history was fine-tuned by a nazi oh fuck uh while like i said he took in part of no ss war crimes that we are aware of

he made up for all this by being one of the founding minds of the phoenix program so the phoenix program i'm glad you asked mike it is probably one of the largest black eyes on america for the entire vietnam war oh shit it's got to be pretty bad then so the phoenix program was a ci-led mission during the vietnam war that was meant to cut off the political support for the north vietnamese government in the vietcong in south vietnam they did this through targeted killings and massacres torture was widespread and it was described by author douglas valentine as quote

rape gang rape rape using eels snakes or hard objects and then rape followed by murder electric shock rendered by attaching wires like rape they just that rape. Oh, it gets worse. Oh, man. Electric shock rendered by attaching wires to the genitals or other sensitive parts of the body like the tongue.

And there is a water treatment and the airplane in which the prisoner's arms were tied behind their back and the rope looped over a hook on the ceiling and suspended

the prisoner in midair after which he or she was beaten, beaten with rubber hoses and whips and used for police dogs to maul oh my god um this was so the whole point of the program was obviously the regular regular army was fighting um the vietcong and the cia thought well the vietcong wouldn't exist without support so the cia attacked the support channels which is semantics for saying they attack the civilians who supported the vietcong right and this included all like the vietcong uh

communist leaders in the area all the the village chiefs things like that um by the end we're trying to win any hearts and minds here no no this was like straight up um like the the closest parallel to this we can see uh in in other wars recently is like the soviet war in afghanistan where they just thought uh since the taliban or it wasn't taliban time but since the mujahideen drew the vast majority of their support from the countryside we'll just kill everybody in the countryside and that was kind of their idea effective strategy right so by 1972 it is estimated that this program killed 80 000 people man uh yeah so torny made up for that um war atrocities on war atrocities it's crazy yeah uh torny took part in

infiltration missions uh where he would chart out the Ho Chi Minh trail. So it could be more easily attacked by aircraft. Um, and one of those missions would be his last. In October, 1965, Tony was aboard a South Vietnamese helicopter where it went down 25 miles from Denang.

Rescue teams were unable to find the crash site and he was declared missing in action. He wasn't discovered until 1999. Um, so he finally died, uh died uh three three militaries in and uh one phoenix program later he died doing what he loved yeah that's all that's all we can ask for uh so if you were to say um this man's legacy do you think he's thought of well or like kind of swept over the rug? I mean, the fact that I've never heard of this guy, I think it's kind of been swept over the rug a little bit, swept under the rug a little bit. I can't believe that. I hate to be the one to burst your bubble, Mike.

So Major Larry Thorne is buried in Arlington National Cemetery in Section 60, Tombstone No. 8136. He also enjoys something of a heroic reputation to this day and was recently prayed by some shitty vet borough companies on Facebook. He is also honored in the form of the Larry Thorne Award, which is awarded to the best special forces detachment. Wow. Also, right before we went on air i was curious if i could find anything from like an official military website uh about him yeah and the u.s european military command official website has an article entitled the ideal green beret that's about him let me guess they don't they don't list all of his other accomplishments before the green beret

though uh you know the interesting part is they don't shy away from it they say yep he was definitely in the german army uh now a lot of people like to say the german army rather than the ss but he was not he was not in the wehrmacht like our next two people no he was up there yeah i'm gonna go on a limb here and say, if a photo exists of you in full Waffen SS dress regalia, you should probably not be celebrated, given a spot in Arlington, and given a spot in the Vietnam War Memorial, which he also has.

You shouldn't even get likes on Instagram with a picture like that. That's crazy. Yeah, and I really wish I could find this shitty vet bro company. They try to make a t-shirt out of them or something. And I couldn't find it. I think they finally realized they're... I don't know. It's probably their brand.

But Sofrep, if I don't know if you've ever heard of them. Sofrep. They're a really, really shitty Vetbro news... They like to call themselves a news agency. They were the website that first published the GoPro footage of the Special Forces soldiers being killed in Niger. They still openly

praise him quite a bit. There's a lot of kooky vet groups out there. Don't praise Nazis. Don't praise Nazis. A lot of the support for current day Nazisis is coming from those you know right wing groups that right they're kind of fishy yeah yeah there's there's a

lot of dog whistling going on there like there's a reason why you keep praising some dude that was in the ss man yeah that shouldn't that shouldn't be happening in 2018 yeah yeah you would think that um so that is the the tale of larry thorne and our next story brings us all the way to korea uh to a tiny peasant rail yard worker named ying king jong i probably fucked that up uh yeah that's pretty good that's pretty close i'll take it um so yang was born in the japanese protectorate of korea sometime sometime around 1920 because records weren't kept really good in Japanese colonial territories. The record of his life is pretty spotty. Also, it helps that he was declared dead like 50 years before he died.

But we'll get into that. Okay. Yang was born to a desperately poor family and as such went through uh to northern manchuria to work in the japanese railway industry uh the japanese thought their korean subjects were uh subhuman uh so life was pretty terrible and most of the time he was not paid nor was he allowed to leave once he got there so things aren't looking good for yang uh and he is hardly an adult at this point i think he's like 15 or 16 that's a hard knock life right there yeah uh but uh just because he was a subhuman korean doesn't mean he wasn't too good to die for the

emperor because in 1938 yang like tens of thousands of other ethnic koreans was forced in the military service with the kwantung army uh now the kwantung Army it was technically an army group of the Imperial Japanese Army kind of they weren't ran that way in reality it was a totally independent army being ran by its commanders like they were like the Emperor themselves

they would act they were the army itself attempted multiple coups against civilian government in Japan in an attempt to return the emperor to absolute power. Some of these were actually during World War II themselves. Oh, wow. Yeah, they had very little accountability. Yeah, so Dan Carlin did a pretty good overview of the Kwantung Army in a recent episode of his show.

But it is really weird. It's like if a random army battalion in the u.s army today just decided to completely run itself and start its own wars and everything that was the quantum army jesus and they're trying to they're trying to install the uh the emperor back back in is that what you're saying right like the the emperor existed uh already like this is the showa age so emperor hirohito is is already there uh he had, like, there's a prime minister. There's a whole dite of the parliament that they have. Oh, okay.

Yeah, he wasn't really in charge as much as a lot of people like to think. He was influential, certainly, but the Japanese emperor was not an absolute ruler. Okay. He was kind of used by a lot of people. Yeah, well well more powerful than the queen he's like okay uh i'll give him one step above the queen okay but he absolutely knew like complete side note here he definitely knew about all the japanese war crimes during world war ii he was just given a pass uh the army actually so one of the founding reasons that started

the second Sino-Japanese war which would also eventually fold into World War II was the takeover of Manchuria where they would install a puppet empire called the Empire of Manchukuo

that happened just before world war ii the kwantung army did all of that on their own without even talking to the government wow uh so they also installed several of their commanders in high positions of the japanese government um there's a guy named shishiro itagaki who became minister of defense pretty much just based on the fact that he was a Kwantung Army commander and another guy that more people probably heard of named Hideki Tojo as prime minister so

yeah they have some pull yeah in case you were wondering what kind of terrible shit army happened in Korea that these guys did both those guys were hung for war crimes so it's not a good army it's not a good start there no um so yang was caught in the middle of

all this uh and this is despite the fact he did not speak any japanese whatsoever uh japanese military basic training at the time was so ruthless it was actually blamed for a lot of the cruelty they showed people later on. They fought throughout history. Makes sense. Yeah. Training was framed in like the 18th century Prussian style, where skill was secondary to individual soldiers discipline. And they got that through frequent and severe beatings for the smallest problems. Jesus. uh i imagine this problem uh or this kind of like problem solving would be difficult for a young korean person who doesn't understand the orders being screamed at him yeah he probably doesn't

even understand why he's getting beat yeah so you can imagine that yang had the dog shit beat out of him quite a bit absolutely yeah uh within the japanese military the kwantung army had something of a reputation of being nearly unbeatable on the field of battle um this had to do with them not really fighting any army of note until uh they ran smack dab into the sleeping superpower of the soviet red army um now the two sides were not actually at war uh but the border between the Manchurian puppet empire and the Soviet Union is largely uncharted, and both kind of disagreed where it began and ended, so they shot at each other quite a

bit over the border. While regular nations and, you know, the governments would probably want to talk this whole thing out, the Kuantan Army really only believed in fighting as a form of discipline and diplomacy, so they decided to try to push the thing out. The Kwantung Army really only believed in fighting as a form of discipline and diplomacy. So they decided to

try to push the Soviets out. They sound like the original Spartans. No diplomacy, just ass kicking. Yeah, except they wore clothes in 300. And they were significantly less cool because there's a whole bunch of poor peasant kids who didn't speak the language being drafted.

And significantly less oiled bodies. Yeah, you would hope so because there's a whole bunch of poor peasant kids who didn't speak the language being drafted. And significantly less oiled bodies. Yeah, you would hope so because it's really cold up there. The oil would just freeze to them. Exactly. Now, there's a small reason why the Kuantan Army thought it was a good idea to pick on the Soviets. The local NKVD commander actually defected over to the Japanese side and told them that the Red Army was completely falling apart due to all the political purges that were going on. So this is around the same time that Stalin got really paranoid and started shooting pretty much every lieutenant who looked at him wrong. So there wasn't really a lot of command and control in the Red Army.

They had several small clashes before they finally threw down in a major battle. Now, reminder, this whole time, they're not actually at war. This devolved into the Battle of Khalkhin Gol, which the Soviet Red Army was joined by the Mongolian Red Army, and they fought the Kuantan Army in a

border conflict that involved north of 100,000 men of both sides. That's a shit ton of people. Yeah. And the Red Army was they had their issues, but they were also being commanded by Soviet legend Georgi Zhukov who would go on to take Berlin

a couple years later. So they had a pretty decent commander in charge. So it turned out the Kwantung Army was not ready for fighting an actual army. And what amounted to a total defeat, the army lost around 10,000 people killed, another 8,000 wounded and 3,000 captured. Now, Japanese military doctrine completely forbade surrender of any kind. So if you surrendered, like those 3 3 000 people who were captured they just told

your family that you died to save them to any desire what the fuck yeah like yep he's dead and like that's it uh so that's why uh yang was declared dead uh because he was uh captured he was one of the 3 000 pow's uh thankfully for yang however he was captured when the two sides weren't at war as opposed to being captured a few years later when it probably would have been a death sentence because the soviets were worse to their pows and virtually anybody else um yeah yeah instead he was just sent to a siberian gulag which is somehow better i guess he got to keep his life yeah and slightly better and he was used to awful slave labor because he worked for the Japanese before this.

So like there was probably nobody more prepared for a gulag. Oh, he's already used to the beatings. I mean, that's that's part of his daily routine now. Yeah. Just substitute in people screaming Russian at him and Japanese. And he's he didn't move. He's still where he was. It's not like he understood either people anyway.

Yeah, and that's where he stayed until 1942, so he did some time. Jesus. That's when the Red Army came calling. Now, the Red Army had all but collapsed in the face of Stalinist purges and the German operation of Operation Barbarossa, so they needed pretty much any warm body

they could get their hands on. That's where Yang came into their plans plans and he was given a rifle, a different uniform and shoved off to the front line again. Oh boy. If he disagreed, it didn't really matter. The only, yeah,

it doesn't say whether he was like, cool, sign me up or he understood what was happening again. Like I'm being given a rifle again. I don't understand. Oh yeah. Just for a second imagine how fucking confused this dude was first he was uh first by the japanese uh he now he's being

yelled at by some soviet commissar in a second language he doesn't understand yeah so wait i've been a prisoner this entire time with my daily meetings and now you're gonna give me a gun yeah okay okay all right let's see how this plays out yeah and you know yang was one of probably hundreds of thousands of people forced into service this way uh like there was germans who end up there was actually um an interesting story of an american who ended up fighting with the red army uh which is not included in this episode because the episode already got too long but yeah he was uh wounded and put in a POW camp, which was then liberated by the Soviets. And then he joined the Soviet Red Army

for like six months. And then he met Georgi Zhukov in a hospital because he got wounded again and was really curious about the guy who spoke no Russian. And that's when he told him his story. And then Zhukov realized how bad that looked and immediately sent him

to the nearest American embassy to be repatriated so there's a happy ending for this story at least so much like his time in the Red Army or his time in the Red Army much like his time in the Kwantung Army would be brief but once again he would find himself in the middle of a giant meat

grinder before the end and that was the third battle a giant meat grinder before the end. And that was the third battle of Kharkov, where the Soviets were trying everything they could to take the pressure off the encircled Stalingrad. And what they really did was grind their armies down to about as few as one to two thousand combat effective soldiers per division. Yeah. Which is, you know, on brand for the Soviets. The Germans knew this and launched their push to retake the city of Kharkov. Yang was one of around a half million

Soviet soldiers caught in the middle of it all. Over the course of the next several months, almost 90,000 of them would be dead. Fighting in the city would be brutal hand-to-hand, room-to-room affairs that were kind of reminiscent of what they describe in Stalingrad where like people try to retake

the kitchen from the living room type stuff oh shit yeah it wasn't that the Soviet way to just throw bodies out of problem oh yeah yeah that was their main material where they run out of bodies yeah yeah and then they can just dip back into the prison camps and because

this is the Eastern Front, very few prisoners who were taken were kept alive. Most of them died horrible, horrible deaths. And if you're paying any attention, you know who one of those prisoners who got lucky was. Our boy Yang. Dude, he's like a Korean version of Forrest Gump just tripping over his dick through major parts of history at this point because you have to imagine he has no idea what's going on he's just trying to finish the race at this point yeah he's like uh now i'm getting like i don't

understand who you people are but you know you didn't shoot me so i think that means we're friends yeah yeah just to keep running. Yeah. Uh, and that was how Yang was, uh, drafted into his third army of the war. Jesus Christ. Uh,

so, uh, there's a reason for that. Um, by 1943, the Nazis would take almost anybody to get their hands on, uh, not to mention former Soviets into the army who would be like propaganda wins.

They would be framed as like free Soviet men wanting to liberate their former country from the despot Stalin. No one realized that one of their, you know, captured Soviet guys looks suspiciously Asian. Well, that's the thing is there's a lot of people in the Soviet Union who were Asian, like Central Asian Republics like Kyrgyzstan. Yeah. Oh, I see. Yeah. I mean, you remember Manas. I mean, I'm not saying that Koreans and Kyrgyz look the same, but to an untrained racist Nazi, they totally do.

To a Chinese eye, when I was in Manas, I was confused as fuck too. I was like, what are my people doing here i don't what part of china is this yeah and they probably just expect like they probably just thought he was some central asian soviet guy and not a korean um i gotcha yeah and it's not like i didn't know how to speak fucking korean so there's like whatever go into this unit and that's where he went. So the Germans founded what they called the Eastern Battalions or the Ostruppen. Ying served alongside people from pretty much every nation of the Soviet bloc. Most of them joined the Wehrmacht to escape horrible POW camps.

He was in the Wehrmacht, not the SS. There was several people there. I mean, there was a lot of Eastern European people who were drafted into the SS, but the vast majority of them are from Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine, stuff like that. Most of the Asian-looking dudes were put in the Ostropen. Okay.

All of those people were probably really confused when a Korean showed up because he didn't speak any of their languages. And there was actually another type of German unit that foreigners went into called the Ostlegions. And there was actually an Armenian legion, a Georgian

legion, shit like that. That sounds meaner. That sounds meaner for some reason. When you slap Legion at the end of anything, it sounds bad. I'm going to dent this Legion. That sounds awful. They probably work at Gitmo. They probably give you cavities.

Those legions were made up exclusively of volunteers from certain countries, so that's why he was put into like the kaleidoscope units, which is interesting because that means those battalions were integrated. Right. Which actually makes the Nazis one step more progressive than the U.S. Army at the time. The U.S.

Army was was not very progressive at this time. Oh, no. Like like if you one of the most highly decorated uh units of the war was a unit made of specifically japanese americans uh because nobody trusted them enough to serve in other units really yeah and they were sent to europe rather than the pacific theater for that exact reason um well because they thought they couldn't trust them when they got too close to home. That's bananas. You have to think where did the vast majority of those recruits come from?

Internment camps. Uh, okay. Yeah. You got a good point. Yeah. Uh, a lot of them,

uh, were like, they're, they're, there's pictures of them like going home on leave, but they were only allowed to go back to the internment camps. Yeah. It's, it's terrible. Uh uh and at the same time of course like black people weren't allowed to serve alongside white people in combat until the korean war oh man so yeah i've almost forgotten how racist we are oh man yeah i mean like they were ordering all black units of the U.S. Army during World War One to charge trench lines in the minutes leading up to the armistice that everybody knew was coming.

Sounds about right. Yeah. Yeah. That sounds about right. The U.S. Army doesn't have a great history on this. But so when Yang was forced into this unit. So, you know, like I said, he wasn't in the ss i guess he has won over on torny from earlier uh the nazis tended to know an army full of pows uh from the eastern front probably should not be sent to the eastern front so they shipped them all off to the western front uh and that is how yang force gumped his way into another major battle in history. D-Day. Yang was stationed on Omaha Beach. This guy's luck, man.

It sounds like my love life. Yeah. When American troops landed on Omaha Beach on June 6th of 1944, Yang and his battalion buddies were some of the tens of thousands of German soldiers dug in against them. Yang's unit broke and ran,

however, and Yang was once again captured and became a POW. This time he was captured by the 101st Airborne Division. Oh, the Flyboys. Okay. Yeah. Now this is where we have to come out and say that there is some contention of the existence of Yang.

This contention pretty much only comes from the south korean government uh there might be a good reason for this like it's not cool to accept that like um your countrymen went off and fought for the nazis but uh they did this claiming he doesn't exist yes uh they did a whole documentary where they said, nope, Yang didn't exist. But at the same time, they also made a movie of his life called My Way. So they claim to have no record of his existence, which makes sense as one South Korea did not exist at the time. And the Kwantung Army wouldn't either because they said he died three years and two armies ago. So why would they think Yang existed when Yang died at the Battle of Calc and Gull?

Right, right, of course. Okay. So, there's just a Yang corpse in that army now. Right. Zombie. Now, we do have some proof. Since he was captured by the U.S. Army, who is very good at taking a lot of notes, U.S. Army Officer Robert Brewer from from e company second battalion 506 infantry regiment

processed four strange asian looking german pows um brewer noted that three of them spoke german and russian explained them they are in fact turkmen and they don't know where the other dude came from we can't talk to him eventually they found out that he spoke Korean and another soldier would translate for him. And then they shoved his ass into a POW camp. Of course, as you do. Yeah. Eventually, Yang was transferred to a camp in the U.S. where he'd finally be allowed to wait out the end of the war. The U.S. Army did not draft Yang.

It turns out I'm partially convinced that the entirety of world war ii was just yang fighting himself in various different uniforms and not understanding a single word just that entire time not having not a clue what's happening like i'm 99 sure he fought the entire war without even knowing who adolf hitler was yeah absolutely it's like oh i'm just i'm giving a gun i'm pointed off in that direction i guess i'm just going to do that or die yeah um and because the u.s didn't want to send him back to korea for various reasons going at the time i was pretty much a death sentence sending him back to south korea now during the partition going on there between the the red north and the american supported south so they let him stay in the u.s

um he got released from a pow camp and settled in illinois which might be the biggest fuck you of this entire story really like why illinois like imagine surviving nazi pow camps russian gulags and the japanese kwantung army only to be like, yeah, you can live in fucking Illinois and nowhere else. Wait, they told them they could only live in Illinois? That seems like cruel and unusual punishment. Well, I know and

remember it, I could be wrong, that when the U.S. allowed POWs to settle in the U.S., they kept pretty rigid track of them and didn't allow them to move very freely. Oh, okay. That makes sense. That tracks. He finally died in 1992. I'm personally a little surprised

that he wasn't forced to fight in every succeeding American war between World War II and his death. Like, alright, Yang, off to Vietnam you go. Okay, Yang, off to fucking Iraq. That's why we lost Vietnam. we didn't have our good luck charm yeah and then he would end up fighting for north vietnam and things would get awkward

they would get awkward yeah you're right and that is the horribly tragic story of yang the man who fought and you know he's noted as being the only person to fight on every single side of world war ii um and not understand why he was doing it. Yeah. I mean, yeah, you have to think a fucking half illiterate peasant rail yard worker from Manchuria probably did not know what was going on in Europe at the time.

And then he ended up taking part in like all of the major battles of world war. Like the only thing missing is that he wasn't at Stalingrad and he didn't like fly a plane during the Battle of Britain or something. Exactly. It seems like a wild story. Yeah. And I hope he died happy knowing that all the Japanese officers who gave his life, made his life a living hell definitely died in World War Two.

And he didn't. Yeah. That's the ultimate fuck you surviving. Yeah. And that's what brings us to our final story and back to asia to someone mike might be familiar with and that is generalissimo chen kai shek oh boy the father of our of our country there let's see dear leader dear leader um for people not Mike

and not familiar with Kaishak he was the ultra nationalist some would say fascist leader of the Chinese Nationalist Party some people would say or Kuman Tang or they also call it the KMT I don't know Mike you'd probably be the best presenter

here was the KMT are the KMT still fascist? Well, the party still exists in its current form in Taiwan. They were part of an election recently for the presidency, and they are the political party that's mostly associated with the Taiwanese independence. And I think they just lost the last presidential election. So the political landscape is kind of changing in Taiwan. A lot of the younger people in Taiwan want to be a part of China, and a lot of older people don't. But everybody knows who Chiang Kai-shek is.

but everybody knows who Chiang Kai-shek is. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's interesting that, well, I mean that, that divide of not wanting to be part of China, but also wanting to be part of China is,

is it more rooted in reality that they know if they declare like unilateral independence, that China will blow them out of the fucking sea? Or is it that they still hope that one day that they'll retake China? Um, I think at this point with how how big China is getting, has gotten, there's no chance of, you know, the quote unquote legitimate government, and I'll claim that for life, you know, to ever regain power. And I think at this point, it's probably best to just cut our losses

and, you know, try to assimilate ourselves into one of the most dominant economies of the current century. And also in particular, in recent years, Taiwan used to be able to count on America as an ally to protect us from Chinese aggression. And ever since 2016, we haven't felt like that we could rely on our American ally in that way. So the landscape is changing a little bit where we're seeing less Western support. And we're trying a lot of the younger people in Taiwan are leaning towards China, that support that we used to get from America. And is there like free movement between the two or is, uh, or is China not so happy with that?

Um, as of a couple of years ago, they had opened up tourism between the two countries for the first time. And I think that was back in 2012. Uh, I think nowadays there, there is, um, immigration between the two, but I don't know if it's completely open yet. I'm not sure about that. It's been a couple of years since I've been back. Interesting. So we aren't going to be talking about Chiang Kai-shek directly. Instead, we're going to be talking about his son, Chiang Wei-ko.

Which is going to be interesting that I think Mike can explain here a little bit. Ko was actually born in Tokyo to a Japanese woman and a Chinese father. Who was not actually Chiang Kai-shek himself. Rather, he was some dude named Chai Tao. Tao was having an affair while the Kuomintang was exiled to Japan by the Biaoyang government. And he didn't want to bring his side piece kids home with him and ruin his marriage. So he just kind of handed them off to Sheck. What?

Now, do you think a half Japanese adopted kid would have a hard time growing up in Taiwan? A pretty hard time. I don't care. If someone handed a kid to me and was like, he's your problem now, I would not be like, okay. I would not say that. That's bananas. Which is weird because

Chiang Kai-shek has several actual kids of his own. It's weird that he would just accept somebody else's. And that adoption thing would be something that Ko would deny and even fist fight people about if they brought it up. So, yeah, he handled that adoption real well. And, like, it's really obvious that he's not Chiang Kai-shek's son.

He looks nothing like him. Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, to the untrained eye, maybe we might still look alike. Well, he's very obviously Japanese. Oh, okay. I got you. It's a very dominant facial trait that he has that Chiang Kai-shek is distinctly missing. I hear you. It's the eyes thing. It's all in the eyes, man. It's a magic distinction. Go ahead.

So Ko actually had an older brother named ching uh who was sent to moscow uh for school but it was also around the same time that uh the communist party and the nationalist party in china were having a rift so moscow just kind of took a hostage and wouldn't let him go home oh shit um so so he's really good at hanging on to people. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's something they, they're, they're good at making people disappear. Uh, yeah.

Time and time again. So when co came of age, Shaq had only one place to send his one free son for an education. And if you've been paying attention to the episode, you know where he's going. And that is the German, the German military Academy at Munichich known as the creek shul the motherland yes and you know being a national nationalist government um chinkai

put a pretty big importance on his military military education at least as far as like nepotism went like he wanted his kids to have the best education even though the entire uh kumatang's military was incredibly defunct and stupid yeah of course ku uh ko would not be one of the stupid leaders uh he would actually be one of the best and the germans are the reason why okay i mean obviously his goal was not just for his son to get a good education but also a modern military education he'd be able to bring home and serve the nationalist cause he graduated at the top of his class despite not actually knowing German

before showing up. He kind of just taught himself. It's a typical Asian thing. Just going to a new school and then excelling. Yeah, he taught himself German while also learning in German. It's insane. It's such a Chinese thing to do, but go on.

He completed his basic training and attended the elite german school of alpine warfare and earned the edelweiss sleeve insignia which is like a small white flower uh okay it's the sign of like an elite soldier um and the only way you can get that flower um is by climbing a mountain where it grows and it's like 10,000 feet above sea level. Wow. Yeah. That sounds like one of the actual trials that like Hercules has to go on. Yeah, it's

not easy. And that's like to the point that when people were like German soldiers, even all the way through World War II, they'd like wear the Edelweiss on their uniform. And I think in band of brothers, it shows, um,

somebody like plucking one off a uniform and talking about, I don't remember though. Oh, okay. I gotcha. Yeah. Um, he was also really,

really good with weapons. Um, as in all of his pictures, he's wearing a German marksmanship lanyard, also known as a shoot and sneer, which is, um, not easy to get. I actually have one and it fucking sucks like i imagine i imagine it was way harder back

then it's just an overachiever it sounds like yeah by 1938 um ko was a sergeant officer's cadet and given command of a tank uh it is around this time that Germany annexed its neighbor, Austria. This is actually, yeah, this is known as the Austrian Anschluss. Now there's a lot to this event that we're not going to get into. Just know that Germany was heavily involved in the Austrian Nazi movement

that also include allowing Austrians to vote in German elections, which would eventually lead to the Nazis winning a bunch of seats in the Reichstag. People got assassinated. Eventually, things came to a head, and by 1937, people were openly talking about taking Austria by force. In 1938, Hitler was

demanding that power be given to the Austrian Nazi party, or he would invade. The Austrians would not go down that easily and refused to appoint a Nazi chancellor, which is how Hitler came to power. So Hitler went all Hitler-y and invaded them instead.

As Hitler does. As Hitler's do. He'd be crazy. On March 12, 1938, Coe and the German army stormed across the border to cheering crowds of Austrians. This looks like

a triumph of victory. All the pictures show Austrians clapping and cheering for the German soldiers. It's seen as the first major test of German power, which would lead to World War II. In reality, it was a totally confused clusterfuck, and German units got lost, broke down, and ran into one another.

Yikes. None of this sounds like the U.S. Army. Yeah. And, you know, none of this really mattered because the Austrian government ordered their army to not resist the German army. Otherwise, there would probably be a lot of dead German soldiers. Yeah. Apparently, Coe did good enough in the middle of all this to get promoted and he was commissioned a full lieutenant in the german

wehrmacht oh man uh he was given a full command of an entire platoon of tanks which i don't know about uh 1939 that's in modern day that's four tanks so he was given a fair amount of responsibility yeah and then him and his unit were awaiting deployment to poland

where they would uh take part in the event that would actually spark World War Two. But that wasn't in store for our boy, Ko. Before he was given orders to mobilize, I think his dad realized his son was about to get involved with some real, real shit and then quickly recalled him to China. And then quickly recalled him to China. But then he took part in the Chinese fighting against Japan's invasion during World War II. That's crazy. So he just finds out one day that my son is actually fighting a war. Oh, no, no. He needs to come back.

Yeah. Yeah. I think. It's crazy. I don't know if he was told about the Anschluss beforehand. Or I imagine there was significant censorship of any letters that Ko was sending back to China. I don't know if he was like told about the Anschluss beforehand or like I am I imagine there was significant censorship of any letters that co was sending

back to China about like an upcoming military operation so his dad probably didn't realize it happened until like there's this weird Asian guy driving a tank through fucking Vienna like oh that's my kid especially like your son was no longer with us for some reason

yeah oh shit's getting real especially like your son was no longer with us for some reason yeah oh oh shit's getting real just a coincidence i'm sure yeah uh and then and then he ended up fighting the japanese and he was one of the the most successful nationalist commanders of the war um he fought hilariously enough is the tanks he was using in the chinese uh war was you know m4 shermans things like that uh because yeah they were just given tons and tons of weapons by the allies to fight the japanese and then after the war uh the nationalist government was teetering from massive widespread destruction of almost every layer of society from long brutal years fighting against the japanese

uh they also uh they so the Nationalists had a significantly larger military than Mao's communist forces. They were also better trained and equipped. This has a lot to do with the Western Allies opening up a heavy weapons

pipeline to resist the Japanese. It turns out that Ko's dad was so corrupt, however, that even college-educated Chinese students, you know,

the same people Mao would mock and later execute, joined the Communists anyway out of sheer disgust of all the problems of the Nationalist government. uh, the, you know, the same people now would mock and later execute, uh, joined the communist anyway, out of sheer disgust of all the problems of the nationalist government. Um, so to make matters worse,

when the civil war did kick off, the nationalist generals and other officers were generally promoted out of political loyalty to Kai Shek rather than any actual skill. Um, uh, yeah, like, like any good despotic government. Um um this loyalty to the chain of command ended

pretty much as soon as it branched away from kai shek though with subordinate leaders refusing to listen to one another and actively backstabbing another in order to get like uh in the favor of the party leader so it sounds very familiar actually it kind of sounds like the current administration but yeah like it's nothing but backstabbing and political maneuvering all while attempting to fight a war and it did nothing but completely fuck over the nationalist army yeah now that's to be said i don't think the nationalists would have won even with the functioning military because mao was just so good at leading a people's war not so good at governance it turns out but uh a really good guerrilla leader um he's really good at starving people apparently yeah and making

fucking pig iron backyards and chasing sparrows around with pots and pans yeah um this explains why ko who was a lieutenant when the war started was a general by the time it was over only a couple years later um it should be said all nepotism aside he was the one of the best leaders in the nationalist army so while some of the the promotions were definitely nepotism related like a lot of them were skill skill related um see taiwanese people love sending their kids to to western schools and western academies and i didn't know that it started all the way back from the founding father of our country that's crazy i had no idea it's a tradition now that's weird too if you have any money at all or any sort of influence you don't let your kids go to school in the country you live in no you don't do that you send them across the entire country and the entire planet

and you let them go to school in like germany or america or something like that is that because do they see like taiwanese schools as not being good because i mean the general thought is asian schools are all better than ours it's not that it, it's not that, um, Asian schools aren't good. It's that, um, Western, Western schools have more recognition. Oh,

okay. Uh, like the, the whole saving face thing is, is very big in, um, in Taiwanese culture and, and I want to say most Asian cultures.

So, you know, it's not necessarily about what kind of education you get. It's about how, how big then is the pull that is the recognition of this of the school that you get get into and uh you know unfortunately or maybe fortunately most of those schools are in the western part of the world so that's that's where taiwanese people send their kids eventually interesting um yeah it's always kind of because we um in texas

we would train um and and when i was at fort knox from time to time we would train taiwanese armor officers and stuff like that and it was always really weird that they would come over to train on m1a1 main battle tanks when they were using like 40 year old vehicles in taiwan but it was yeah it was more of the the uh the claiming hierarchy type shit like well i went to school in the u.s i guess it's making sense now yeah they just get to get to say that you know they have to have that good american western training and that somehow puts them you know head and shoulders above their peers that's's how Taiwanese people view any sort of Western institution.

It must be good. I don't know if that's true necessarily. I'm a little biased when I talk about how amazing our armor education is but I digress. The multiple reasons why the Nationalist Army lost in the Chinese Civil War can be summed up by U.S. General Barr who was a U.S. military observer for the Nationalist Army lost in the Chinese Civil War can be summed up by U.S. General Barr.

He was a U.S. military observer for the Nationalist Army who said, quote, Their military debacles, in my opinion, can all be attributed to the world's worst leadership and many other morale-destroying factors that led to a complete loss of the will to fight. The complete ineptness of high military leaders and widespread corruption and dishonesty throughout the armed forces could, in some measure, have been controlled and directed had the above authority and facilities been available. So, yeah, the Nationalist Army was a bunch of shit. So we fucked up. We fucked ourselves up. Yeah. Like, I mean, I feel like that's most armies and nations led by like the great man theory like because without chen kai shek there

would have been no nationalist movement and the whole the whole party just orbited around him and he led with charm instead of you know having actual policies yeah and he was corrupt as fuck himself so that was kind of like one of those well well, if he can get away with it. And it just trickled all the way down to the lowest fucking private. I see. I see a little bit of that happening in the Philippines right now, too, with I think his name is Duterte or something like that. Oh, Duterte. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it was corrupt at the top and it's starting to trickle down all the way to the bottom.

Well, when your president openly talks about raping and murdering people like that definitely sends a message yeah it's not a good look no it's not it's not um like most people uh when the nationalist army fell uh ko and everybody else fled to taiwan or what is now known as the republic of china to some people to some people uh so because of his position as a war hero and the son of China to some people. To some people. So because of his position as a war hero and the son of the dictator, Koh continued to hold senior positions within the army and in the new one party state based on the island. That was until 1964 when Koh really fucked up. Oh, what did he do now?

So during a staff meeting of the first armor division of which Koh was the commander, an argument broke out about the state of the country uh not in disloyalty against kai shek of course um this was between ko and his deputy commander a general uh chao chi hua and they were arguing that their leader was surrounded by corrupt officials and they needed to deploy their forces to taipei to cleanse the government of them indefinitely so it wasn't that chen kai shak was leading an awful government it was like all the people around him are bad and must go um yeah it sounds like corruption all the way down yeah so they're they're leading something of like a really soft military coup uh but because this is 1960s taiwan however every single unit had a political officer uh

in the same vein that the ussr had these guys would be remembered as commissars the political officer uh at the time had power over anybody of any rank if they were talking about disloyalty right and because these guys are dumb as shit the political officer was in the room uh so they so the political officer arrested the commander and the deputy commander well i guess that's that uh well not really short and sweet because uh hua being a a regular army officer was swiftly sentenced to death um Ko being Kaishik's son was spared any real punishment instead he was

effectively barred from holding any real military power ever again he wasn't like demoted he wasn't sent away to like I don't know the farm up north for shitty old military officers he was like just banished to work at a military academy forever I don't know the farm up North for shitty old military officers. Um,

he was like just banished to work at a military Academy forever, uh, which I suppose is a punish. I don't know. I guess he actually has to work there. I think he got off pretty easy, you know, for,

for treason. Yeah. Yeah. Just having to work in school is not too bad, especially because the guy he was planning with fucking swung at the gallows for it yeah exactly like the other dudes did yeah he got off pretty late yeah and you know finally when chen kai shek died in 1983 this uh like blank check of him getting away with everything kind of went away and that led to a slight political liberalization of taiwan um and that was known as like the

localization movement also known as like the taiwanized nation movement um it refers to the empowerment of the local taiwanese uh culture that had long been oppressed during the mass migration of han chinese from the mainland after the defeat of the nationalism um i'm sure you can talk a little bit about that um yeah the the local the local people um they they look a little bit different than than the han chinese people and they're segregated in their own little communities in taiwan um and very similar to the way that native americans are segregated in um in in amer. And I just kind of think it's an interesting kind of parallel that they both, Native Americans and Native Taiwanese people, they both feel like they're oppressed by the new people

who came into their land and took away their homes. So now the Natives, they live in the mountains and they have a poor standard of education and standard of life and a lot very similar to some native american tribes that are on these reservations so it's kind of a sad story and that goes on to this day huh yep still it still happens to this day it's kind of like uh australia too the aborigines it just seems kind of like you know if you if you're slightly darker skin than the people who come bearing guns then you know they're gonna they're gonna think that you're lesser than

that's kind of something that's common in chinese culture i think uh even in the mainland um the uighur people in the far west of of china the the muslim uighurs are uh getting pushed out of their own territory and thrown in effectively concentration camps while the Chinese government encourages Han Chinese to move into the area and kind of manifest destiny the Uyghurs out of it. Yeah, absolutely. It's something that you don't really expect to be seeing much in 2018 because you just think, you know, hopefully the planet's moved past that.

But it's pretty evident in some places around the world, even in some places that we think are pretty first world. Right. Not all the way. Not in the entire country, anyway. In order to counter this localization movement, Koh decided that the only way to stop these goddamn natives from getting unrestive is to run for president. And he failed miserably in 1990 because even though he's Chiang Kai-shek's son, everybody knew he was kind of an asshole. And once you got rid of one Chiang,

you don't want to elect another one. Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah. And once you got rid of one check, you don't want to, or one chain, you don't want to elect another one. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I, I definitely think you probably would have been worse than his dad. Um, especially because the main thing that, that, and you know, motivated him to run was native people having rights. Yeah. Not a good look.

Um, it seems like a pretty bad dude. Yeah. Um, finally co kind of disappeared from, uh, Not a good look. Seems like a pretty bad dude. Yeah. Finally, Ko kind of disappeared from the public conscious and was about ready to fade off into the ether. But then his maid was found dead in his house. What? Yeah. So they found a police found his maid dead from a gunshot wound. They found a police found his maid dead from a gunshot wound.

And I can imagine that gun ownership in Taiwan is pretty strictly limited. And it's a very low. I was about to ask, like, where did he get a gun from? Which makes us the rest of us even stranger because when police searched his house, they found a massive cache of illegal weapons. At least it was like 60 to 80 different firearms

that seems like he would fit right in in america but that seems very weird right this isn't anybody's house in like fucking mississippi or something but yeah yeah uh this is like a military like he lived uh in military housing in taipei um i guess the way it worked i'm sure you can tell me if i'm right or wrong, was like, if you're a general officer, the military kind of just gives you a mansion. Yeah, yeah. It's kind of like the mayor's mansion or the governor's mansion. If you're a general, you get one too. Yeah. And that was the house where he had all these weapons, and they were all weapons from the army. Oh, okay. That makes sense. But which he definitely was still

not allowed to have because he had not been allowed to have a military command now for almost 40 years yeah so he just murders his his maid yeah and one of the weapons uh was used in in in the shooting and she was shot the way she was shot was like right in the face um and it wasn't um like there was no gunpowder residue on her hands and it wasn't it wasn't a point blank shot or anything um so the taipei police just declared it a fucking suicide and washed their hands of the entire issue yeah apparently the being a chang still helped him a little bit there yeah corruption runs deep let's just say that was finally what uh made the kumintang kind of shun him

they didn't kick him out of the party but they just didn't allow him to go to meetings or or have any party power anymore yeah yeah um now totally powerless ko spent the rest of his days petitioning the communist government of the mainland to allow his father to be buried in his hometown uh this is actually apparently something that kind of still goes on uh where uh people want to be buried in the mainland under a taiwanese flag and that you know beijing just laughs at them yeah that sounds that sounds about right yeah uh and i i is i assume everybody laughed and gave him the finger uh this this kind of speaks volumes of how little

the nationalists regard taiwan to me at least i mean correct me if i'm wrong um i mean this has been decades since the nationalists fled to taiwan and set up what is effectively an independent nation out on the island yeah but this nation that they built still isn't good enough to store his corpse yeah it's just it depends on i guess his corpse. Yeah, it's just, it depends on, I guess, if you're talking to Taiwanese people, it depends on the generation that you speak to. A lot of the, I want to say Chinese people too, but I know more about the Taiwanese side.

You know, the younger generations don't necessarily feel as much animosity towards Chinese because they didn't necessarily experience the actual conflicts, but the older generations all remember. There's a pretty big divide between the old people and young people these days in Taiwan. That seems to be the case with most things in the Chinese sphere of influence over there with younger people openly mocking Xi and calling him the poo bear and stuff like that. And then mysteriously getting disappeared.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. One person gets sentenced to like five years in prison for that, I think. Yeah, sounds right. China's doing a lot of crazy shit over there. I think a lot of it has to do with they have the New Age Mao almost.

Not in the insanity of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, but in the strong of like the great leap forward and the cultural revolution but like in the strong man tactics um absolutely it's definitely his way or no way yeah i mean imagine my twitter feed being from a chinese person i would be in jail so fucking fast oh yeah absolutely i mean the only thing i use my twitter for is to literally curse out the president of the united states and that would definitely not fly in china i would be i would be disappeared for sure oh yeah um and that was uh this petition to get the his remains and his dad's remains moved to the mainland uh was so stupid even the nationalist government didn't support it that's not a good sign yeah no it's not a good

look when your own government's like this is ridiculous yeah no it's not a good look when your own government's like this is ridiculous yeah and it's not gonna happen it was a pretty big sign that the nationalist government and the party and and the military was so over the changs um because uh so ching uh ko's son was not in the military which from my understanding is pretty surprising yeah because we have mandatory military service. Right. So he used his connections to get his kid out of it effectively. Nepotism.

Yeah, which certainly never happens in any other nation of the conscription. No, of course not. But Ko wanted to move out of Taipei. Ostensibly it was for health, but it was probably to get away from the party who hated him. Yeah. And so when he did that he handed his house over to his son who had not served in the military um this uh being the house that was a military gift effectively now this had happened quite a few times from other leaders and nobody really gave a shit it was like just kind of of shit it was like just kind of accepted as par for the course um so the government in ko's case decided to not only kick his kid out of the house they then fucking bulldozed it

all right you're not welcome here anymore yeah yeah like that that is probably the most stern fuck you the government has ever put on anybody who is supposed to be benefiting from being the founding father's kid. Yeah. Holy shit. I didn't know about that. Yeah. I didn't know that happened. Ko finally died in 1997 from kidney failure in a Taipei military hospital.

Having only really achieved anything because his real dad really did not want to fuck up his marriage. Cause I mean, I can't imagine, um, a half Japanese born out of, uh, a half Japanese kid born out of wedlock was going to accomplish great things in China in the 1920s.

No, funny enough that the hospital that he died in was the hospital that I was born in. So what you're saying is you're the reincarnation of Chang Kong. I'm continuing the legacy. And yeah, you'll be seeing me up for world domination soon. I'm sorry to start small with Taiwan and then China, but world domination. Yeah, yeah, for sure.

I look forward to KMT2, the electric boogaloo. It's coming with significantly less math. You have already won me over, sir. I am so terrible at math. Just not one of those math Asians, man.

Oh, man. So that's our story today. Mike, thank you for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. Yeah. We've known each other for almost a decade and a whole tour in Afghanistan. And you're on the other side of the country now, but I'm glad you could join us. It's always nice having a firsthand witness to some of the stupid history on the show. Yeah. And some of it is pretty stupid. I definitely agree with you. Yeah.

I mean, that's, that's our kind of our brain is dumb history. Um, like I probably would have called the show drunk history of comedy central than already beat me to it. Yeah. Um,

but you know, I look forward maybe, uh, later on having you on again. Um, yeah, absolutely. That was fun.

Yeah. Uh, thanks. And for everybody else, do you want to pimp out your Twitter Thanks. And for everybody else, do you want to pimp out your Twitter account or anything for people to follow for you screaming at the ether of President Trump? I don't post anything other than like literally, fuck you, Trump, on my Twitter. There's no need. There's no need. That's my outlet preventing my frustration towards the

current administration. But they should follow you. You should throw your various social media handles. Well, if you want to follow the show, you can follow us at Lions underscore by. You can follow me at Jcast 99. You can follow Nick, even though he hardly posts more than Nick and Nick Cass M1. And our show will always be free, but if you want access to our bonus, uh,

content, you can give us a dollar or so on Patreon. If you think we're worth it and, uh, help support the show. Uh, you'll probably hear Mike's life story and his time with the hooligans on there shortly.

So I look forward to that. Um, everybody else, we will talk to you later. Take it easy over there on the East Coast there, Mike. Hey, take it easy, man. Hi, this is Nate Bethea, and I'm the producer of the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. This show is brought to you by Audible. And as it just so happens, Audible is offering our listeners a free audio book with a 30-day trial membership.

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