Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 74 - Exercise Tiger Ft. Francis Horton

Episode Date: October 28, 2019

Joe is joined by the co host of the What a Hell of a Way to Die Podcast Francis Horton to discuss the worst training exercise in military history. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/creator-home Follow the What a Hell of a Way to Die Podcast: @hellofaway Sources: https://www.history.com/news/d-days-deadly-dress-rehearsal https://www.history.navy.mil/browse-by-topic/wars-conflicts-and-operations/world-war-ii/1944/exercise-tiger.html https://www.npr.org/2012/04/28/151590212/operation-tiger-d-days-disastrous-rehearsal https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-devon-27185893

Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe and with me today is Francis Horton of the Hell of a Way to Die podcast. How's it going Francis? Oh it is fantastic. I'm here to do some history. I'm excited. Do a big ol' history. I'm excited to be Nick in this one because I've done...

You told me slightly what it was about and I did zero research so I can just hear sit here and be like damn and that's fucked up and what the fuck like you all you need is a soundboard of nick being like no that's fucked up and you've got you you know in case nick is never there you just hit that every time you finish a paragraph what if i told you there was no nick and all i had was like a soundboard from some soldier that i recorded while drunk you have a very elaborate backstory for nick then uh it's been a work in progress i work on some characters from time to time uh i also have break their legs uh joe has actually never been to war he's just a really good improv uh actor yeah the improvving the tvi was a real bitch uh it required a couple running my my head into the walls uh my dogs are real concerned for my health i mean it's a real

tragic what is a deployment other than a year long yes and you're not wrong or figuratively running your head into the wall uh so i thought today would be a good uh good time to have you on because you've been in the army a very long time so you and you're a public affairs uh nco so you probably are kind of like the subject matter expert for like glossing over the army's fuck-ups certainly uh certainly i have been it's not i would say it's not a cover-up we it's it's getting ahead of the story and putting up right putting a positive spin on it uh so have you ever uh been privy to or witnessed or had to report on like just some really dumb training accidents no but i know people who i i have i have been around them and been in the pao shop that has

had to deal with it and uh generally like depending on the like depending on the severity generally you just put out like a very basic like kind of uh press release or a very short news story that's got like the who what where when, when. Four soldiers involved in LMTV rollover on the base today. Injured, they'll be out of the hospital or something. And when you want to go a little bit further in depth, you get a sound bite from the base commander or the commander of the unit that was involved. And you're just like, we're doing safety

and we're going to wrap all of our LMTVs in reflective belts and that's going to save us all. So, you know, something along those lines. Yeah, I've never been on that side of it. I've been the one getting in training accidents for the most part. Like I know Nick has gone to NTC about four times because he hasn't deployed,

but they're trying to make up for that by sending him to NTC on an annual basis. Guess what? We're still going to send you somewhere where it fucking sucks. They actually almost sent him to JRTC in a leg cast very recently. He's had multiple

rotations where people get ran over by tanks. I remember once I accidentally chopped off a guy's pinky with a humvee uh guard the thing that's in front of the hood because uh there was like a rock wedged in it and uh they were trying to clean out their pinky and without telling us and you know it's like a cigar cutter so i lifted it up his pinky came right off he was also my roommate in the barracks which made things really fucking awkward So I lifted it up. His pinky came right off. He was also my roommate in the barracks,

which made things really fucking awkward. Sorry, Lawrence. Were they able to glue it back on? No, he lost just... It was just the tip. He lost like half a fingernail. It was pretty gross. So no disability then. See, look, if you're going to injure me look if you're gonna if you're gonna injure me

if you're gonna injure me in a training accident or something you need to at least be getting me 20 oh definitely uh like put me into a river roll my tank over do something um right like me i'd be the one going back like you didn't get enough just try it again let me put the whole pinky all up in there um like i've heard stories of people getting shot um you know uh i there's a tank at fort knox that i was nearby and that launched a main gun round into the next city um due to a problem with the with the gun or is actually the gunner but whoops you know training accidents happen is it that thing where i know you tankers talk about like when you've when you're set for he and you shoot sabbat or something like that and then you accidentally blow around the moon yeah from

what my understanding that's pretty much what happened and uh the master gunner had a stroke and everybody got fucked up we hit the We hit the button that said shoot too far instead of the button that says shoot just right. And you know what? It's a thing that's in the M1 Abrams. Hopefully the next gen will have that button taken out. Yeah, it'll just be dumber and controlled by a drone or something. Yeah, AI controlled tank name.

I'm sorry, you can make a tank dumber than having a pfc in charge of it uh you can make a dumb tanker uh you can make a tank dumber by putting four tankers in it i can attest to that uh so i'm gonna set the mood here for what might be uh and i think is the worst training accident in human history uh so on j 6th, 1944, nearly 300,000 allied military personnel took part in Operation Overlord, otherwise known as D-Day, one of the largest operations of all of World War II. Their goal, of course, is to storm the beaches of Normandy, break through the so-called Atlantic Wall, and cut the heart of the Nazi war machine out in Berlin. This is not that story, so sorry to get your hopes up.

So as anybody who's probably aware now from school or Medal of Honor games or whatever, Operation Overlord was a hugely important operation for the Allied forces in the conduct of the war. That is because not only were they going to storm Western Europe, the heart of the Nazi Empire was against what was thought to be one of the strongest defenses in all of human conflict up until that time. This was known as Festung Europa,

or Fortress Europe. This is mostly a propaganda term used by Nazis and has since been co-opted by our history books, good job historians, to describe how they plan to fortify all of europe to protect themselves from the allied invasion they knew would someday be coming after their failures at the battle of britain are you at all familiar with the giant array of shit they put up in western europe uh the the nazis yeah yeah i mean there's obviously there's like those those fortified

pill boxes there's they they had the beaches covered with like um tank traps and stuff uh so that you couldn't get you know vehicles up the beach i know like but i i watched saving private ryan so uh but other but you know like that makes you a subject matter expert i i i now cede the podcast to you well well like when you think about like you know the last 20 years of war that we've done everything has been you know quote permanent like semi-permanent like bases and fighting fortifications like we put up a hesco barrier and stuff and that makes you a or a t-wall but like it doesn't take long to put those up like these were like pillboxes that were like some engineer and like foundation had to be laid and they had to pour concrete and they

had to like you know it's basically it's something that like somebody planned out so this was a like um this wasn't so much like oh shit the allies are coming get some fucking arty rounds down there it's you know there's a lot of planning to to keep this uh to keep this festooned or fortress i suppose yeah and it's something that i think the scale has been kind of lost like i know personally uh when i think of the atlantic wall i think of kind of saving private ryan you know they got pillboxes some some wire they have you know dragon's teeth uh you know the the tank traps on the beaches and that was that was it that's that's kind of what it's shown to be um but that's kind of it forfeits

the massive scale and just the sheer dumbassery of the nazi leadership that went into the production of this thing uh so in 1942 hitler ordered the construction of what would now be known as the Atlantic Wall in what is now known as Directive 40. Mass construction would begin under the command of the German Army, not any kind of construction firm.

It's pretty... A lot of people, mostly people who subscribe to PragerU think National Socialism is socialism. Pretty much the entire conduct of the war as far as weapons procurement was done by corporations like Porsche, BMW, Volkswagen. They even took part in the Holocaust, stuff like that. But this massive construction effort was under the command of the Wehrmacht,

which is a supremely stupid idea. Now, this would eventually cover 2,000 miles of northern Europe. Now, obviously, this wasn't going to be a solid 2,000 mile long wall. Anyone who thinks you could string a lone wall effectively, unbroken, and

securely over 7,000 miles of land is pretty stupid. I think we could all agree that giant walls are dumb and a waste of resources, which is why we don't do them anymore. Anymore. Anyway, why is it that

it's always like when you go back in history and you read about Nazi leadership and Italian leadership during World War Two and then like looking at stuff now and just like, why are fascists like, why do they get in charge but also are just like the dumbest human beings ever? Like it really says. I think it's aesthetics. It says something about like humanity in general that you're just like, yeah, I'm going to follow this guy. And then they like Hitler, who's just like, oh like oh i'm just gonna fucking sleep in for a bit and then nobody wake me under pain of death otherwise you know and they're like oh we're getting we're getting shot like uh i mean

i'd rather get shot by the allies and shot by hitler i guess so don't wake them up don't don't get baby up or anything and you know now we've got a guy who you know just gets up and like his brain melts out of his ears and everybody's just like everybody's just like yeah man that's what that's that's the shit that i'm into that's what i want i don't get it but you know he's he's really i mean at least hitler was a good orator i guess like he got up there and he was able to pound a table with the best of them he had a really weird habit of like practicing his poses have you ever seen those pictures he'd practice his poses and have his photographer take pictures of him so he could judge them later on i you know what though i get that at front look i need to preface this i am in

no way uh saying that you know you've got to hand it to hitler but uh but i get that from a public speaking like thing where like if you want to um if you thing where like, if you want to, um, if you want to be good, if you want to get better at public speaking, what do you do? You get up in front of like a small group of people. Uh, you have people,

you know, tell you about it. Sometimes maybe you take video of yourself just so you can see like, Oh, I'm, you know, standing weird or I can see that I'm sweating. I need to,

you know, work on this or that. So like, I, I understand, you know, the, the,

the practice, uh, there, what i don't understand is you know the the genociding that's not i don't get that part but you know the the practice for for for speeches i'm i'm with him on that yeah he was definitely uh he had one thing right also like the not smoking in restaurants thing so like vegetarian he owned a dog like i mean so much of so much of hitler if you're just like if you take this little small chunk like hitler owned a dog like i mean so much of so much of hitler if you're just like if you take this little small chunk like hitler would have been like a dude in soho he's got a weird mustache he's got a dog he's a vegetarian he doesn't smoke he doesn't drink

like all right hitler sounds pretty good and then you just like pull back the camera a little bit you're like oh god oh god oh god no no this is bad now this is bad pull it back in the only difference between him and like the beat generation guys is like they got a publishing deal because he was on a fuckload of drugs too so like if some art school assholes would have let Hitler in he would have just like

painted the visual shitty beat version of the road would have hate Nashbury in the 70s except we gave everybody a gun oh man What if Hayden Ashbury in the 70s, except we gave everybody a gun? Oh, man. You know, that is probably some kind of dystopian novel that should be written. You're either going to get shot or fall on a pile of needles.

So the Atlantic Wall would actually be a three tier system of fortification. There'd be like observation points, listening posts that would stretch all the way from the Franco-Spanish border all the way to the tip of Norway. Important strategic points like Cherbourg, Brest, and Antwerp would be designated specially built fortresses, and they'd be defended and have huge caches of supplies. Secretary areas like ports, radar posts, military bases would have independent commands and they would decide how their area

defense would work. So when you broke through one area, there would be a completely independent command to resist you. It was a decent design on paper until a lot of things until you roll it out into the real world without testing it at all. I like to think of things until you roll it out to the real world without testing it at all I like to think of the Atlantic Wall

like that scene in Lord of the Rings when they're like Gondor calls for aid they're like Berlin calls for aid and they all just like start shooting their guns in the air to like let the next people know it's like oh fuck it's probably a better communication system than some of the ones that are going to be used

in this podcast, unfortunately. Bad things happen. Of course, large beaches like the ones that would be split up during Operation Overlord would be heavily fortified, some much more than others. The big trick is the Allies use big inflatable tanks and fake armies to get them to believe that the invasion was going to come somewhere else. And then they hit them at Normandy, where they kind of also thought it was going to happen, but not so much. So there's a really weird arraying of defenses that only made sense if you have the fever dreams of a half-insane fascist dictator. if you have the fever dreams of a half-insane fascist dictator. So this is an engineered project, so large and ridiculous and obscenely wasteful of supplies,

it could have only happened in Nazi Germany. Now, while design and construction began in 1942, a time when the Nazis were already short on supplies, because they had not really finished their rearmament from the pre-World War II armistice. It was a situation they found themselves from the beginning of the war. And by the time that it finished two years later, the Germans' position

was now much more dire. But through all of that, construction never stopped. But the construction materials did get marketably shittier. Now, if there's the one thing that nazis were good at other than dumb mustaches and horrific genocide it was blowing through resources on really dumb projects that were thought up as the fever dreams of a deranged strongman just to put numbers on how

much like every day is another f-35 uh this honestly this wall might be the dumbest engineering project uh that i've ever covered uh f-35 is definitely the more modern version of this um except this actually killed people that it was supposed to kill um the f-35 just kills its pilots um so just to put into numbers how dumb and how much shit that they wasted uh on this wall so they wasted 1.2 million tons of steel enough for 20 000 tiger tanks which is 20 times more 20 times more tigers than the nazi war machine ever managed to build and more tanks they'll ever be able to field during any length of the war in any number at all. Good thing they wouldn't need those later. Now, when you say waste, what does that mean?

What happened to the steel? It was put into various fortifications that would just never be used. But that's not necessarily a waste, though, right? I'm just thinking, okay, we're going to build obviously not a physical

wall but like all right we're gonna you know there's a huge beach here and we're just gonna build pillboxes and throw a bunch of nazi soldiers there and say you know if anything comes you know shoot it and then nobody comes is that a waste or is this are these like construction projects that like even if somebody had shown up they've been like uh i'm just gonna go ahead and step over this and uh keep on moving uh it depended vastly on where you happen to be along the line obviously in like strong points like normandy and some of the others that they'd be much much stronger but at the same time there was never any hope of these defenses working at all never okay uh a Obviously, a lot of this has to do with a small country

such as Germany attempting to defend all of Europe from various different powers all at once. But also, it has to do with the fact that Germany themselves pioneered Blitzkrieg. Now, Blitzkrieg is more of a propaganda term for maneuver

warfare, but they kind of pioneered blitzkrieg uh now blitzkrieg is more of a propaganda term for maneuver warfare but you know they they kind of pioneered that so they should have known static defenses were not going to work um this is a lot like me purposely giving myself a bad dosage of medication i should know better but i'm gonna do it anyway uh so it's pretty much every army medic ever um now they they use 17 million cubic meters of concrete which is enough for 1100 yankee stadiums uh and just the french part of the wall with modern inflation and currency exchange included which is you know kind of a finicky figure uh of around 206 billion dollars today bucks. It should be noted that this is more of the

entire budget of both the Chinese and Russian armed forces combined, but still $400 billion less than the US budget because we are a sick, sick people. You have a country that is... No world

was the Nazis ever going to win this war. But you're now fighting a two-front war, then which would turn into a three-front war. And you're already critically short on supplies because they started the war off not thinking this war was going to last, you know, five years. They thought they would storm through, take over France, it would be over. Boy, have I heard that one before. yeah uh real quick in and out adventure uh we'll be greeted as liberators and then we'll we'll all go home it'll be great yeah uh and like they had plans to like talk to britain and america and america into a peace to keep everybody out of the war obviously didn't pan out because everybody involves fucking nuts but like they didn't plan for this to go on very long because you know a lot of what we

understand about german war efforts during world war ii is a is a propaganda push that they put out that we've kind of bought as whole cloth truth um like the blitzkrieg the vast majority of the german army was still pulled by pack animals or walking. They were not a mechanized army for the most part. But they still use maneuver warfare because it helps when you're fighting an incredibly overmatched Polish army that's split in two by the Soviets as well. So they had a lot of successes. But they started off like the rearmament was not complete when World War II started, when they started it. Because even the

high command of the German army is telling Hitler, like, yo, we are not ready for this. And that's why they call it the area that turned into the phony war, because they had no idea they were going to succeed by fighting as so little as they did like it was

mind-blowing to them they're sitting in paris so because you know you have to remember everybody in charge of the german army in world war ii fought world war ii for the most part so you know they fought for years and years and years to go 10 feet and they just drove into paris with very little effort but didn't they go around like through the mountains and everybody was like they'll never do that and then they did and then they went through the woods they literally just cut through the woods like the french the french were never like you know seven or ten year old boys just like wandering around the woods playing soldier and the germans were just like, this is our shit, actually.

Let's go. Yeah, they couldn't possibly fit through there or drive tanks through there. Well, they did. Shit, what can a tank do? Run over trees? Damn it. Nobody thought about this. I mean, the tanks that they built at the time when the Maginot line was conceptualized

really were giant piles of shit so like they wouldn't really think of thought of as as like modern machinery uh for the most part all the western armies had uh with france being kind of an exception france actually had some really good tanks when world war ii started their tanks were actually better than germany's they just didn't use them correctly um they were still using them as infantry support formations rather than like actual armored maneuver groups so they got badly mauled but you know tanks weren't thought of as the future of warfare so they're like yeah they're not just gonna walk through there uh newsflash they're still not

i'm slayed uh now um don't worry we'll get into why the airborne troops are no longer useful right now either but go ahead oh yeah uh i would say tanks can at least do something other than wear stupid hats but you know i would rather be in a tank than jumping out of an airplane yeah so everybody else who isn't high uh now if if you thought that Germany wasn't going to be like totally evil about this building a giant literal wall of fascism, you'd be wrong. Shocker. Only a few of the workers on the wall, like one out of a thousand, were actually Germans, and they're normally the supervisors. Where do they get the rest of those workers, you're wondering? You already know where the answer is coming.

workers you're ordering yeah you already know where the answer's coming albert spears organization tote supplied the german army with literally hundreds of thousands of slaves many of which were killed from overwork accidents or outright executions while on the job many of the ones who managed to survive the work probably didn't survive the war because they went back to concentration camps uh now the best part of this is after all this is complete all the work's done erwin rommel the commander of the slave fortresses looked over it and said this isn't gonna work uh the even dumber part of this is like we just talked about is the entire german military should have known it wasn't going to work and if you're educated in military hubris you should know that the Nazi army started the

western theater of World War II by storming right through the Maginot line which was a giant series of fortifications that covered the French border and looks suspiciously a lot like the Atlantic Wall if I can, this sounds on par

the Nazis doing this is like george lucas making the phantom menace where you're just like everybody's just like going along with it because you're just like okay new star wars all right cool we're finally going to get it and then like everybody like the people who see it first are just like i don't think that this was a good idea and then everybody kind of has to go along with it. Cause they haven't gotten a new star Wars except with, with genocide. Yeah. Somehow.

Um, I don't think George Lucas murdered anybody. We don't know that for sure. We don't know what he's hiding in that giant goiter. Uh, like the, the star Wars prequels can only look good in comparison to slave labor. So that's,

that's, that's a hell of a flex. I mean, only look good in comparison to slave labor so that's that's that's a hell of a flex i mean i think the nazis might be the only people dumb enough to accidentally foreshadow their own downfall which is kind of impressive when you think about it yeah we didn't just do this this this couldn't possibly happen to us shout out to the nazis for like creating but this is why people love world war ii so much is because it's such like a romance novel and like the bad guys are always cartoonishly bad like like hitler has the dumb mustache but like in a different world in a different story he'd be like twirling his mustache like i've got it now you know know, it's like James Bond villain level. There's like,

oh, well this, you know, overly complicated laser slowly goes up to cut you in two. Allow me to explain all of my plans and how to turn off the bomb. And, and, you know,

there's no way that this could ever go, go wrong for me. And like, you know, nowadays you look at, you know, anybody who has like some background in military tactics or, or whatever could could probably look at and just been like here, here and here. And also you should have just shot James Bond in the head and walked away and dumped his body in the fucking ocean.

Like anybody, anytime, like if ever I come, somebody I'm being investigated by MI6 and there's a 007 that comes up and i have him like i captured him just fucking kill him don't don't get complicated about just fucking kill him yeah that's like uh if there was a part of this is like now that my wall is complete i'm gonna stand at the edge of the beach with this loudspeaker loudly shout my plans across the channel at england like oh he's doing it again somebody take the fucking loudspeaker away um now that we've talked about all of these defenses that the allies were arrayed against because that makes the the main topic of today's episode make a little bit more sense or at least the idea behind it we're going to talk about exercise tiger sometimes it's known as operation tiger but there's an actual military

operation known as operation tiger so the whole's an actual military operation known as Operation Tiger. So the whole thing, it's kind of confusing. So everything I just explained to you, the Allies also knew. They knew if they were going to defeat the Swald, they're going to have to prepare their soldiers for training exercises that would closely mimic the operations they were going to conduct on the infamous day. This is something of a double-edged sword because they knew this operation was going to be the largest one they've ever conducted, and they would need a suitably large amphibious training operation to prepare for it. Which brings us to southwestern England and a place called Slapton Sands, because everything in England is named something ridiculous, and only five weeks away before the coming D-Day landings. five weeks away before the coming D-Day landings. Now, Slapped in Sands was chosen because, according to Dwight D.

Eisenhower, it held a striking resemblance to the Normandy coast. Never been to either one, so I can't be sure. I'll take his word for it. It's got sand, it's got hills. The fuck do you want? It's got a little bit of hills there. It kind of sucks when you squint at it and throw a whole bunch of armed people.

Yeah, fuck it. Good enough. Also, it's probably the only large stretch of beach they could randomly launch a military operation on and get away with it. It had a ton of open space, so 30,000 soldiers, tanks, and other vehicles could come to shore at the same time. At least that was their plan. their plan uh now this would hardly be a training mission if they're just storming a scenic british coastline area and seizing their weird breakfast beans or whatever i don't know um or their jams and their gollywogs or the fuck it is nato says whatever you fucking brits got we're here for it uh the entire area was transformed into a battlefield. 3,000 residents of the town of Devon were forcefully evacuated,

many of whom had never left their town before. Hey, look, a lot of people join the military to see other parts of the world. Sometimes you just happen to be in that part of the world, and then you get to go see another part of the world, because we have to blow up your beach right now. Sir, we need you to leave. Why? We beach right now yeah so sir we need you to leave uh why we can't tell you but we need you to leave uh the military has a has a uh a history of that i mean just like the bikini atoll as well but they're just like hey you guys gotta go uh they're like why u.s americans why why would you why would we have to leave our beautiful islands like we're gonna turn into a chunk of glass uh and then we're gonna move you back in for funsies so come on let's go

and then don't worry we'll give you your houses back it'll be fine it'll be fine uh they're ikea houses they're all flat back now oh that's awful uh now your house comes free with a healthy dose of you're going to die in five years. On the bright side, you won't have to worry about defaulting on your mortgage that will also take from you. The downside is that all of your children will be deformed. The upside is your dick doesn't work anymore, so you can't have children. And it'll probably turn you into some superhero origin story in 60 years that you won't be alive to see. Now, once all the people were gone, allied commanders went to work turning it into a battlefield.

They strung up barbed wire and then decided to plant no shit live landmines, concrete obstacles and trenches. Tens of thousands of soldiers taking part in the training mission were also issued live ammunition explosives and everything else they would need to storm normandy joe now look i i fully understand you know live live ammo training um it's good live ammo doesn't doesn't it just don't hit the same way that blank does so i i understand that but like what why live landmines like who's that helping like does somebody do they have a way to trigger like because because sure you and i have done you know basic training where they have like the simulated explosives in the can or whatever that they're like sure don't don't run over here just

run over there uh and and then you're fine but like what what does a live landmine do for you what how are you training here so it's not a good idea it's a really bad idea but the but the idea was the engineers were going to clear the beaches like they were going to clear the beaches at normandy which remember is only five weeks away so like this is pretty pertinent stuff but also i'd hope that the engineers would know how to handle landmines by now okay sure but like put inert ones in there so that they can find them and then they can dig it up like i don't know look i understand it's 1940s maybe there's not a way to like you know make it so that like if you fuck up the landmine it like puts up a little flag it'd be like oh you fucked it up jimmy you gotta you know go back and try it again so that if you fuck up the landmine, it puts up a little flag. It'd be like, oh, you fucked it up, Jimmy.

You gotta go back and try it again so that we can just bury rocks or something. It gets worse, I promise you. Of course it does. Go ahead. So now if outfitting a bunch of soldiers with real weapons and ammo and making them sprint through minefields

sound like a really bad idea, this is where I get to say it. Wait, it gets worse. so it's important to note that most training exercises before missions are meant to drill very specific jobs duties and things of that nature that are supposed to be so difficult or otherwise complicated that they're thought they need extra training outside of that of a normal soldier to make sure that their mission can be carried out. A good example of this is like the D-Day Rangers scaling Pointe du Hoc or the Navy SEALs building an exact reconstruction of Osama Bin Laden's house in which they ran drills in for literally months before shooting him over and over again until you can work out all the kinks. I mean, shit, even in the Civil War, the United States Colored Troops did this before the Battle of the Crater, which obviously, as everybody knows, did not turn out well. Okay, this is where I get to tell you that this is not what Exercise Tiger was about.

According to British historian Giles Martin, Dwight Eisenhower's entire purpose for the training mission was quote he wanted to put them out there in the rough waters in the channel to have them shaken around expose the seasickness everything else that soldiers would be prone to do yeah that's that's a very like that's a very old school general kind of way like we got to make sure that they have the right stuff um and and yeah like you said this is that's a completely like i already know how to throw up like i don't need training on how to throw up and you know shit i've seen you do it right like do it like we need we need training for these guys and what to do after they shit their pants like i i will figure it out like you do please train me on like how to get over these obstacles so that blast your boot and you kick it out right

right it's like i look i i am sure that i will will operate perfectly fine with the pants full with pants full of shit like but i need to know how you know to overcome these barriers with my pants full of shit like otherwise it doesn't that doesn't help me at all yeah it was just supposed to be it's it's kind of like the thing that you were talking about where I know when I was at Baystream, we call it night infiltration, where they're just scaring you, which had no training value whatsoever. No, where you're just low-crawling

and they're shooting an M60 machine gun over you and it's just like, this is what battle is going to be like. And it's not. It never was. I never had a battle anywhere near that. I don't think anybody ever did where you had to low crawl through fucking puddles but you know it was what what how else were they going to do it i guess other than and it was only the thing about

that that is that was one night near the end of basic training for me uh all the rest of it was like actual like here's how to put your pro mask on in case of emergency here's how to uh deal you know here's how to do shooting you know um i don't know that it's it was one day to do it and like let's be honest it was kind of fun it was kind of exciting and exhilarating oh totally yeah yeah but uh nobody died when i did it so go on joe so here's my plan for my night infiltration course basic training is only going to be held in central Texas hot as fuck it's going to be August so it's like 120 degrees

115 or whatever full battle rattle and we're just going to have you stand on the side of the road for like 12 fucking hours now the mission is EOD is on the way and then at one point a drill sergeant just gonna drive past you and try to take a shot at you while you're probably pissing into a bottle

and then he's gonna drive off and if you didn't get hit you're not gonna be really sure what happened and then you're totally gonna brag about it for the next 30 years and start a coffee company exactly and that's night of filtration now but yeah he was this whole training mission which is which is taking tens of thousands of soldiers and hundreds of ships all boils down to that same three hours that we did at the end of basic training where you're just trying to scare people who are all already done with training they like they didn't need to be like turned into soldiers anymore right it's like we had this extra night and like rather than let you do anything fun or let you sleep in we're

just gonna like shoot a machine gun over your head for fun yeah this is exactly like if you tried to train for like an mma fight but your hands are handcuffed behind your back and the only thing you're doing is getting punched in the head. What did you learn? Well, I don't know my times tables anymore. So speaking of Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower, who was actually watching the entire thing from a nearby ship, he decided that all of these really bad ideas that he had come up with were not just shoelace eating insane enough on their own this was amateur hour he needed his army to go pro i'm gonna let you take a wild guess at what they did to turn this to 11 uh let me see i'm gonna say that eisenhower told the ship that he was on to

start shooting at the other ships close very very close so he or the british royal navy to fire on the beaches right before the soldiers were going to land something that and this is important the soldiers were not told about at all like fire like like fire artillery onto it yes okay sure and they were not warned about this at all uh now according to a veteran of the mission a guy named paul gerolstein uh quote they told us nothing they told us absolutely nothing we didn't know a fucking thing somehow this is way funnier coming from a 93 year old man because i can hear the I can hear the 19-year-old private in his voice with that one. For the last 75 years, that has been running through his head. They didn't tell us a fucking thing.

Those bastards. Of all the shit he's been through, that's the thing he's still the most bitter about. And what is super important to remember during this entire thing this training exercise is supposed to be a secret totally secretive the germans can't know about it because remember at this point they don't know where d-day is gonna land um so you know what a really good way to keep a secret is no just fucking kill everybody like this is the only way you can do it you use a three mile long convoy of allied ships 300 of them in total to start slowly making their way towards slapton sands aboard which there's

30 000 soldiers it's a really good way to keep a secret right uh so almost immediately these ships began to break down get lost or otherwise fuck up the strict timetable that was in place for the training mission required. Not only were they hampered by all those problems, they were hampered badly by a terrible communication system that rendered many of the ships totally and completely

unable to talk to one another. Most importantly, nobody could talk to the landing ships carrying tens of thousands of soldiers. I'm very glad to hear that even like now we still have see back then they at least didn't have like cell phones to fall back on like like every training mission in the United

States inevitably goes to where we all just like pull out our cell phones like fucking god damn it the daggers are down again the nobody knows how to how to uh load a single channel into the Syngar just just fucking text them hit them up on whatsapp snapchat that motherfucker my grid coordinates all right so funny story about that that was not only in training missions uh during large portions

of my time in northeast afghanistan during my first appointment there our radio simply did not work in the mountains so our our third line of communication after our radio is failing and then literally sending a guy running up a mountainside with another man pack to try to get uh like a relay with the french base that was nearby was to use a afghan cell phone the afghan cell phone always fucking worked always yeah you want to know why they're so good at like blowing up our humvees and shit it's because their cell phones always work and it's always always got four bars you're wondering what happened to all those brick nokias from the 90s they're all in afghanistan and they're killing soldiers like if not if not if not triggering an

ied just dropping them on us from uh from a drone and after the fucking 500 pounds of hme goes off and turns the mrap to dust and kills four people the nokia tumbles away completely unharmed to be reused again now um this isn't the surprising part almost every military mission i've ever taken part in uh has been delayed or otherwise ruined by bad planning that's include the smallest patrol to the largest con op i've ever taken part in it just never works out but rushing through a situation normally only makes things worse um are you ready to tell me are you ready for me to tell you how things got worse for everybody that's exactly why i'm here joe as the landing boat slowly made their way towards the shore behind schedule,

nobody informed them or the Royal Navy to adjust their timetables. To make things worse, Eisenhower saw the setbacks and decided, fuck it, we'll just change the timetable. This, of course, is not relayed to most of the landing ships or the Royal Navy. So, just as the boats hit the shore,

the Navy opened fire on their own men. That's not optimal. They sprinted directly into a full bombardment from the Royal Navy, which, remember, they had no idea was coming at all. Shells rained down on the confused soldiers, and many of them tried to run, only to find themselves surrounded by barbed wire landmines. In the ensuing chaos, 300 soldiers were killed. Thankfully, the bombardment was called off as soon as it began,

but since this is a fucking naval bombardment, it did not take much to kill 300 people, and the damage was done. Yeah, that's... That is a what? Like, just in, like, five minutes, 300 people die. Like, that's incredible. I think it would probably be more like 30 seconds

like not no guns fired a second salvo so it was like oh god what have we done and since like no radios work I have to assume they like had transmitted back to the ships by doing the

fucking panic symbol from like team America just flailing their hands wildly and hoping they stop shooting them all right Joe the ships by doing the fucking panic symbol from, um, like, um, team America, just flailing their hands wildly and hoping that they stop shooting them. All right, Joe. Well, I know, I know that not just 300 people died on this,

so please continue. Oh yeah. Uh, now this is where every training mission would have been called off. If every training mission ended with hundreds of people dying, a fucking training mission would get called off if somebody stubbed their toe really hard. Like, but go on, please.

We've got D-Day to get to. Like, whoops, we fucking shelled ourselves. Let's take our ball and go home. But Eisenhower did not play by those ballgame rules. Instead, he decided to take a crack at attacking the speech the next day, which, despite containing zero fucking enemies, had subtly kicked the entire American army's ass and caused heavy casualties in a very short amount

of time. But just because there's no Germans on the beach did not mean there was no Germans there that day. Like I said before, hundreds of thousands of men and hundreds of ships carrying radios and other kinds of communication equipment just hanging out in the English Channel tends to draw a lot of attention. Not to mention, it was already a pretty well-known fact that German S-boats, U-boats, and E-boats trolled the Channel looking for shipping lanes and other military-related things to blow up and hurt England. A German torpedo boat under the command of Bernd Klug noticed this giant presence on the radar and swooped in to attack. The Germans saw a collection of landing craft and immediately knew that they'd be the easiest target. So they

ignored all the actual battleships and blew up the landing craft. Now, Gerolstein was aboard a boat LST 515 when he watched a torpedo race directly under his boat. Because remember, the landing boats are flat-bottomed. And the flat-bottomed

boat saved his ass. But the boat next to him, LST-531, was not so lucky. The torpedoes meant for much bigger ships than these landing craft pretty much totaled whatever they hit. It blew ships apart

and threw people through the air. It atomized people who were too close to the detonation. People unlucky enough to not be killed immediately were burned alive or thrown into the freezing waters of the channel and died from hypothermia how how didn't they have radar like how do they not just see a german torpedo boat like i have no idea i have no idea like because because this is this is one of the things that i read about it and i just i really want to like i i need i don't know if we need to talk to somebody here we need to dig somebody up just be like how like i i don't know like maybe right maybe they didn't

have underwater radar very well at that point like i just just the german and like imagine the balls on this guy to see like massive amounts of like battleships and landing craft and being like well target rich environment let's fucking do it i got four torpedoes i got four hits let's do it and then we'll fucking get out of here i mean i have no idea how the fuck they managed to do this because like even something as simple as scout planes or spotters or, or something. But it, nope,

nobody really knows. I guess like at the, at this point it's like the entire, like all the survivor accounts just kind of shrug their shoulders. Cause like Eisenhower never fucking talked about this shit for good reason. Yeah. Like he would never have been elected president if he's like yeah there's that one time he killed you know a thousand of your

children my bad all right joe tell me how it gets worse so one of the problems when why so many soldiers that fell into water into the water and died uh and and even though the water did kill a lot of them um because of how cold it was many people who fell into the water did kill a lot of them because of how cold it was, many people who fell into the water should have survived. The problem was that they got these new life belts. Now, many people probably remember what these look like. They kind of look like a bandolier that they wore in Saving Private Ryan.

Now, the life belt has to be put on a very specific way for it to work. These soldiers had never been shown how, meaning when they put it on incorrectly, they flipped upside down and got stuck there. Jesus Christ. What the fuck?

Many people had never even seen their lifebelts before or not issued them. Allied command in London immediately panicked and ordered all the ships uh so like instead of counterattacking because nobody has any idea what's happening and remember uh what's important here is not defending these soldiers what is important is keeping the secret of d-day so they knew they had to get the fuck out of there they ordered the ships to to scatter just get the fuck out of there. Also, it probably helped that Eisenhower was

there and he's like, I don't want to fucking die. This is like, all I can think of is like, you remember, I don't know if you remember, but like a couple, like a year or two ago, the army was like, hey, we'll let you guys roll your sleeves again based on command decision. And like,

I think that stopped like in 2006. So like like nobody knew how to roll their sleeves and so i was like hey let me give you all like a block of instruction because i'm i'm old school army i know how to do it there's a specific way that you roll it up and flip the end of things so that you know it it covers up and everything and so i held a block of instructions on how to roll your sleeves and it's just incredible to me that nobody was like hey by the way here's your new life your life belts here's how to put them on and like because i can imagine like here's that when you say incorrectly and then what you describe is they're just putting it on upside down and yeah come on we have we have minds that

literally say front towards enemy on it like why is it like is this is this like the the time when they're starting to realize like we really need to soldier proof our shit and just like put an arrow that says this way up on it somewhere i think that was actually one of the things they did to fix this problem yeah um really a good way to yeah a good way to soldier proof anything is kill a whole bunch of soldiers with it and the ones that survive won't do that again uh well and this is the problem it's never soldier proof it has to be designer proof like like honestly if you picked up the at4 you know anti-tank thing like if you didn't look at the the thing you wouldn't know 100 which way to point the fucking thing like

i mean kind of like if you sat down and thought about it but like in the heat of battle you need to like okay what is this and then it's like got the instructions on the outside and you slap the thing open and then you put it up and this way you know point it this way and then you pull the trigger and it's real fucking simple uh but i guess you have to yeah you got to kill like 15 people before you're like oh we should put an instruction manual on the device itself i guess yeah i think my favorite part of the AT4 is it has not just words, but pictures as well. Oh, man, it's like the perfect dumb proof weapon. Like, what if they can't read? Fuck, why did we give them a rocket launcher?

Well, and what that does is just makes it perfectly easy for like any enemy to pick it up and be like, I don't understand English, but I understand front towards enemy. So let's go. I mean, it will come in handy when in the future we supply it to Kurds that we then abandoned. So like, you know,

we know you guys can't read English, uh, but here you go. Thanks. So one of the important problems with this training mission is once they told boats to scatter, that left hundreds of men stranded in the water, many of whom would die there. Several ships ignored the order to scatter, attempted to fight off the German patrol, and began to rescue people from the English Channel. Now, this is where they finally gave up on Operation Tiger, or Exercise Tiger. At this point, nearly nearly 1 000 soldiers were

dead now the number is is not total like this number fluctuates between like 9 50 and a thousand because they simply never found some people which i mean this wasn't a battlefield if you lost a thousand people in the water like yeah we can assume he's dead like he's not captured he didn't just get buried under a mound somewhere like you know where he went there's but yeah there's there's absolutely at least one person like who survived the shelling on the first day and was like fuck this i'm disappearing into the english countryside fuck all this i'm just gonna go be british now and it's like you know this is nate's origin story sired like nine children in england it's just like yeah they uh the french blew you know blew up my buddy and i said fuck all y'all it turns out slapped in stands is pretty nice this is way

nicer than fucking arkansas i'm just gonna stay here now uh nearly a thousand people were dead and in comparison that is more people that were killed in action at gold juno and utah beaches and only slightly less in the slaughterhouse of omaha beach during the actual d-day operations and like the american military will never be outdone by anybody including killing american military i mean that's why they invented the humvee like what how can we completely mechanize our military but give them the worst fucking vehicle on earth to do it uh let's make the armor canvas good idea promote that guy uh now one survivor of both the training exercise and the overlord landing says that uh that tiger was way worse than d-day so i guess that means eisenhower's training plan actually

worked yeah i mean at least like you know when you when you're landing at d-day it's like hey we're not getting shelled by the french cool already already one up here yeah we just like there's all these machine guns that sucks but like at least i can move this is cool uh and then the navy is actually hitting the target they're supposed to now uh it is important that there was two things taken away from this training plan uh one was the communications their radios were almost entirely overhauled within five weeks to make sure this did not happen again. And I think they spray painted an upward pointing arrow on their training belt. So, you know, that was worth a thousand people dying.

Now, everybody involved was sworn to absolute secrecy to to underline this. Wounded men and survivors were thrown in a group of nearby abandoned houses under armed guard. Many of them did not receive medical treatment for days. Like, who's the guys who agreed to do this? Like, to be the armed guards. Like, I'm sitting there with, like, shrapnel in my leg. And, like, oh, God, i need a doctor for like three days and and like there's an mp there but again i guess this is just like the the deep assholery of an mp

to be like i know it's fucked up but i'll fucking shoot you if you try to leave motherfucker i know it looks like that's getting a bit gangrenous but i'll fuck you up man i like my odds it's the only one i can win uh and so after a while they eventually moved into their own wing of a nearby military hospital under lock and key under strict orders not to say a fucking thing to anybody they couldn't send any letters or telegrams home to their family and if they did they are threatened with immediate prison time with no trial you couldn't get away with this right now. Like, you know, somebody, somebody would be immediately tick talking the, uh,

the French bombardment and like some, some weird, like, I don't know what movie you would be able to pull a line from to, uh, to, to, to do a tick tock,

but it would be, it, it would be both cringeworthy and funny at the same time. Somebody would fucking live tweet drowning. Yo, this landing craft is empty. Yeet. And that's your last fucking tweet ever.

He got yeeted out of the boat by a fucking torpedo. So one thing, there's actually the biggest downside to this operation to military command was not the egregious loss of life. It was losing a couple of guys who happen to have the actual real d-day plans on them uh not because they were like oh no we lost our plans the worst part they thought was like they could have been captured because remember they abandoned them in the water or their body could have been recovered by the germans hence giving up the entire normandy plan incredible like why would you send somebody in like we're not doing d-day but here's all of uh here's all the plans for d-day it's like it's like having a mobile skiff

you know like why why do you have that why do you why are you letting somebody go into battle with the laptop on their back with all of our uh all of our information because you know like the login information is duct is taped on the inside of it because nobody can remember 16 random characters that you need to log in it can't be a word vowel or or or name of any place on earth exactly it expires in 36 hours um not like this actually deadline the entire d-day operation for like like at least three days they were like fuck we don't know we can't launch the operation if we don't find those guys and they eventually did find the men's waterlogged corpses and the plan went on without a hitch so yeah yeah we found the dead guys

now according to the stars and stripes which was published immediately after the war uh the families of the ones who lost loved ones and eisenhower's colossal fuck up were told absolutely nothing about how their husband's dead or whoever died most of whom would simply be told that their loved one died on the date of which it happened like something of the soviet afghan war yeah here's a here's your zinc coffin sorry but by this isn't my husband oh fuck we got him switched up well he's yours now uh and now this was kind of like a really badly kept secret for about four decades um because only a few years after the war ended i think it was like 1947 or 8 that the government quietly admitted what it had what had happened and then never said another fucking word about it so

it kind of slowly vanished from public knowledge like it was something everybody willfully forgot about for a while and then you know obviously like the Korean War happened and we had more important things to worry about I guess but yeah it was like everybody just forgot about it there's always another war on the horizon to erase all of the

all of the colossal fuck ups from the time before at least you know the back then the army for the Army Center for Lessons Learned was a lot easier. Now it's like, okay, how do we do counterintelligence? How do we integrate ourselves in the customs and courtesies of the local people? Back in the 40s, it's like, what if we put an arrow on some stuff so that people don't drown? That's good. Good idea. Good idea, General. Here's another silver star.

Guys, I got an idea. What is it? What if we have radios at work? Holy shit. Why didn't we think of that? They still haven't done that, so. Yeah. What do these people learn in the military academies?

Like, I really want to know. I've had two West Pointers on this show. I guess I'm calling out all the service academies now why are you a thing like they learn how to bang rings on feet on things that's about it and then pay homage to confederate statues uh that's the litter of the campus um uh you know and now this secret was kind of kept under wraps until the 1980s, when the residents of the air began to find jacket buttons, piece of blown apart vehicles and shrapnel when they began to build along the coast, because the army just kind of threw a whole bunch of dirt over it and called it a day. That's about right. Just pull a bulldozer in, shove some stuff on it.

We're good. We'll get on out of here. those are in shove some stuff on it we're good we'll go get on out of here you know that like i know this was something thought of by like a an admiral or whatever but this is a plan a specialist would think of like well i can't fucking see it it's gone that reminds me of a story i heard about um in in afghanistan these guys were building a um a motor pool and their uh their dirt mover whatever they were using hit something metal and so they dug it up and they found a fucking buried connex and and they cracked it open and it was full of m249 machine guns and they're like what the fuck there's no paperwork anything like they're all

still packed in grease like never never pulled out never fired or anything and so what they figured was like somebody somewhere like got this and they lost the paperwork for it and there's nothing they could do about it they're like we don't know what's in here like well we know what's in here but we don't officially know what's in here what do we do with that and like some some commander was just like look i need you to message to garcia that's the fuck away from me okay it's so like some specialist in the middle of the night or some staff sergeant more likely Some commander was just like, look, I need you to message to Garcia. That's the fuck away from me. Okay. So like some specialist in the middle of the night or some staff sergeant, more likely was just like fucking bury it. I don't give a fuck, man.

Let's get rid of it. We just can't look at this motherfucker. Oh man. Like, well, I can't see it. It's not here. I am literally a T-Rex human being. If it doesn't move, I can't see it. Here's the thing.

We're not missing a connex full of M249s.s therefore this is not our connex full of m249s therefore if it is buried again and that's what they did they're like what the fuck do we do with them they don't fucking bury it man let's move the motor pool over here let's never talk of this again i assume they picked all the bodies up because nobody said like yeah it's weird we find a whole bunch of skeletons but uh yeah um well they had to find those d-day plans i wonder if they were like counting bodies and when they got to like 600 they're like we got the d-day plans we're good we don't need to find the rest of them that's a probably a really good joke about what happened uh that's probably exactly

what they did like well we know we're missing 400 people but we got the three plans so then eisenhower is like tapping his watch the sharks will take care of the ones in the water we're good British sharks I mean they definitely they definitely would eat some things that are that are just floating around wearing monocles and top

hats and shit now that was not all that shit was nothing until a local fisherman hooked a fucking Sherman tank and bedded it off the coast. Jesus Christ. Fully intact and full of ammunition. Which is like the coolest thing ever. Obviously, he didn't pull it up.

So, like, is it my line is cut on something? Because I'm not a fisherman, but I have been fishing. And I know that if your thing gets caught on something, you can't get it out. You're just like, I'll just cut the line and i'm not a fisherman but i have been fishing and i know that if you're lying if your thing gets caught on something you can't get it out you're just like i'll just cut the line and we'll get a new lure so did he like dive he died it was just like a cartoon he hooked it and he's like whoa and the line bent a little bit and a whole fucking tank came up now it was like some kind of net based fisherman so after i got caught on something he dove down well that's not what i expected to fucking find and uh so he wanted to buy the tank because who the fuck wouldn't um after negotiating with the united states government for several years he bought the rights to the tank for 50

dollars just fucking take the tank dude why even talk to anybody about it like it's gonna fucking stop you right like the the american government's not gonna come like you said how long was this after afterwards like 40 years uh almost 40 years yeah yeah i don't think the government's gonna be like shit we need that like just fucking take the tank bro it's yours it's on your land oh no they found our strategic reserve right you caught it it's yours that's how it works that's the law of the sea i assume yeah if the the known law sees if you catch tank you now own the tank um and then he pulled it up from the seabed i would like to assume he pulled all the explosives out first but probably not i mean why i'm sure that those were inert right we uh if there's one thing that the british uh know it it's that unexploded ordnance after 40 years

will never explode, ever, ever, ever. Never. That's why the German cities are routinely sending out EOD teams to find fucking unexploded ordnance from World War II. That tank sits in Devon today and is the only memorial for the thousand dead men that happened that day and it's still it still sits there it's the only memorial that exists for the mission

sounds like a patreon pilgrimage uh yes somebody fly me there and i will climb inside the tank and make sure it's still full of ammunition and then i will drive it through the english countryside we we only did like the only war memorials that I ever want to go to are memorials to absolutely fucked up things that should never have happened you know that's a shame that the Navy can't have any memorials because they just keep crashing into each other but yeah but that

that is that is operation slash exercise tiger and I'm pretty sure it is the largest loss of life in any training mission ever that's phenomenal like I just I'm I'm it is the largest loss of life in any training mission ever. That's phenomenal. I'm surprised by the hubris of losing 300 people and just being like, well, we worked out that kink, so that's not going to happen again. That probably can't happen twice, right?

To be fair, nobody expects... No, I'm actually not going to say to be fair because like if you're if you're doing if you got 30 000 soldiers and all of these people uh all these you know boats and shit you shouldn't say like well i mean i'm sure the germans wouldn't show up to this right fucking of course they would like you know that they're around you know that it's not this it's not like us and isis where you're like well there's not an isis person there's not an isis fighter like you know in my neighborhood in St. Louis. That would be fucking ridiculous.

No, you should always assume that there's a German U-boat off the bow somewhere. I mean, shit, there's German U-boats everywhere. There was cities along the eastern coast that would have forced blackouts at night so they didn't spot targets. Like the east coast of the United States. So they should have known that at any point in time this all could have been fucked by a German U-boat. And imagine that guy that stumbled upon there with his U-boat patrol. I think they were S-boats, but whatever. And they're like, no fucking way.

What the fuck is going on right now? And they're like, no fucking way. What the fuck is going on right now? I imagine Eisenhower's face during the entire time was just that gif of Michael Scott from The Office doing the cringe face. Just like for two days straight. Just like, ugh. His entire army explodes.

No, no, no, no. It's outstanding what they could get away with. Also, I'm forced to believe that things were kept such a secret that like after 300 people got blown up like none of the other soldiers knew about it well it's not like you're gonna tweet it like oh fuck what the fuck like they you know you have to send letters or wires and at this point in time like you could actually get away with uh with keeping things secret back then there's absolutely no way there'd immediately be like some board specialist who's like hiding somewhere smoking a cigarette and then watching

like people get blown up and like would immediately be putting that shit up on periscope and that person would mention like every every single person is a fucking uh gopro on their helmet right fuck everybody harvest the gopros off your dead friends uh so yeah i i don't even know how to close this one out other than like maybe eisenhower should have been fired but he wasn't there there's a lot of generals that should have been fired at some point in time but hey this is counter fire all generals all generals are bad fire them like out of a cannon into the sun and into the sun they could they can command their armies from the sun uh so francis would you like to plug your

pluggables yeah y'all know me uh what a hell of a way to die you're probably listening to it if you're not you should listen to it uh imagine uh a bunch of a couple of angry veterans who try to be funny but instead just get mad about shit, and also we're leftists. It's kind of like a regular military podcast, except we're not racist. You got that going for you. I don't even have to plug mine,

because you also plugged Lions Led by Donkeys with that same sentence. If you think our show is worth a shit and you want to support it you can do that on patreon our show will always be free but a dollar gets you one bonus episode a month gets you access to our discord which we share with francis and the hell of way to die um and it's always a good time and covers literally everything um if you think you want

to give more than that five dollars more a month month will get you two bonus episodes a month. We'll get you a copy of my book, The Hooligans of Kandahar, access to the Discord early episodes, and $10 and more gets you everything I just named plus a sticker. So there's that. we will again be using the Patreon to donate to the Kriush Red Crescent to help what we can in the coming, almost assuredly is going to be ethnic cleansing that is going to visit Rojava. So everything you gave will either go to my producer or go to a good cause. And I would argue it's a good cause in keeping his lights on.

So thank you for listening to the show, Francis. Thank you for stopping by. This is the first time I got you on a regular episode. Oh, hey. Yeah, we don't normally do bonuses. And speaking of, we got to get ready for our next bonus. We got a lot of garbage stuff to watch. So much bad stuff to watch.

Until next time, y'all.