Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - *PREVIEW* Operation Ginny

Episode Date: August 21, 2024

This is a preview. For the entire episode subscribe to our Patreon and support the show: https://www.patreon.com/posts/bonus-episode-110498160

Hey everyone, what you're about to listen to is a preview of a bonus episode that is available on our Patreon. If you like this clip, you can grab the whole episode, as well as years of other bonus content, at www.patreon.com slash lions led by donkeys. Then he became, you know, erred, like, spook of the CIA, so like, you know, ever... Die a hero and live long enough to see yourself become the villain, you know, ever die a hero will live long enough to see yourself become the villain. You know? Anyway, Donovan's first role is coordinator of intelligence, which is exactly what it sounds like. And every other agency, and not to mention the entire military hated his guts

because he was stepping on their turf. But his office was directly under the president, meaning nobody could fucking touch him. So he began to lay the foundations of a spy agency. He set up espionage and sabotage schools. He established front companies, arranged clandestine collaborations with international corporations and the Vatican. He oversaw the invention of new espionage-friendly guns, cameras, bombs.

Like he's doing what you would imagine a guy like him would do. He also recruited agents and he didn't pick from like any specific group. He just scatter shotted it based completely on your merit. And if your background would be useful in such an organization, like intellectuals, artists, hardened career criminals, businessmen, actors, psychologists, aristocrats, and specifically aristocrats, because he knew about from his time looking for speakeasies and rating them that upper class elites tended to be a hive of gossipy bitches that loved informing on one another.

By 1942, his position was turned into an official spy agency, the OSS, and it was folded into the Joint Chiefs of Staff, with Donovan returning to active duty with the rank of Colonel. And by 1943, the OSS on the ground as like an active commando thing was in its infancy, lacking experience, resources and, you know, all that fun stuff that comes with the dumb world of commandoing. Right. They have a lot of the bare bones ideas of what's going on, but no one's actually done anything yet.

They were doing very small things. They had people, agents, for instance, during the Africa campaign, they went out into the desert, into villages and stuff, made contact with locals and turned them on their side to help the allies Other than point. Yeah effectively I mean they were working with like the French resistance and stuff like that in small groups to Well, I guess we call it if you're a small T player Yeah, they're working with the insurgency not against it. So I guess one way the counterinsurgency. That's still Technically it's it's oin There I coined a new term it's oin

You oint a new term. Yeah, I owned a new oin Pentagon get at me Don't please please don't I'm done with you people What's that drone like noise outside your window? That's fine. If it wasn't gonna be an Azari drone, it was gonna be an American one Let's be honest But this lack of experience was not the fault of Donovan He tried to get his men out there as much as he could but the military Actively worked against him for a lot of the same reasons. We just talked about they hated commandos Like they thought well if these, like these OSS agents

were going through so much training and they were like they were training on the same kind of stuff like what would turn into the SAS, you know, the SOE, they're getting the same kind of training. They had people working in the UK to figure out how they were doing so they could bring it back to the United States. They were very well trained. But the military is like, well, if they're getting that kind of training, why aren't they fighting the war? Why are they doing these commando operations? And we don't see, is that important?

That's my- Yeah, see? Yeah, see? Like, I can't do a 1940s guy voice. I'm just instinctively pulling my pants up to my nipples. Why aren't these 20 guys doing the Battle of the Bulge with us? Yeah, like they didn't see the importance of commandos.

And again, probably even more important than that, they really hated the idea of someone dipping their toes into their turf. Like, planning operations should be my job. I'm a military guy. And Donovan is technically a fucking colonel in active service. Like, no, but a different kind of military guy fuck off over there Even today though the the commandos and the special forces will come in to your area of operations Fuck your shit up and then leave for you to deal with it So yeah, but then I think the hate that they're like the special operations community gets nowadays is 100% earned

like the special operations community gets nowadays is 100% earned. Well, whereas back then having I mean, the OSS, let's be clear, these commando groups were what special forces community today wishes they could be right by that. I mean, they were literally allowed to do whatever they wanted. There is no coin going on. They were literally death squads. Effectively, they weren't taking prisoners. They were blowing things up and killing people

and getting the fuck out of there. There was no, yes, there was a quote, rule of land warfare, kinda, but we kind of look at that with, you know, rose tinted glasses. We hadn't invented war crimes yet. The OSS, the SAS, the SOE, they were executing mad amounts of fucking people in the field.

Uh. Uh. Uh. It goes also like on the other side of it too, it's also one of those things where it's like, well, and then, you know, cause then if you got caught, you know, you're, you're, you're going to go to like a concentration camp. Hold that thought baby.

Cause we are getting there. See then came the invasion of Italy in September of 1943. And after a lot of annoying hand wringing, Eisenhower agreed to allow the OSS commandos to begin carrying out raids against coastal German installations in order to pull men and resources away from the main front. They established multiple bases on tiny outlying Italian islands, using them to raid bases, and constantly harass German troops.

And they were so successful that Eisenhower was slowly won over that hey These guys are actually pretty fucking useful It turns out that the president's friend who's running the spook agency isn't just an old boys thing He actually knows what he's doing meanwhile in Italy things weren't exactly going great for the US advance one day I swear I read your emails. We will do a series on a lot of this shit I know we haven't touched most of the Italian campaign I swear, I read your emails. We will do a series on a lot of this shit. I know we haven't touched most of the Italian campaign. We'll get there.

I mean, you do little bits and pieces of it. We did the last days of Mussolini, like. Yeah, look, the nice thing about a history show is on a long enough timeline, technically I have to cover everything. It's not like this job comes with a retirement. Finally do the Francis Fukuyami thing. It's like, nope, we've reached the end of history. There's nothing else to do podcasts about.

At that point, I just have to walk out into the sea. As he probably wishes he had after publishing that given the last like 30 years. I'm not sure what the podcaster version of an honor death would be. I assume bludgeoning myself to death with my microphone stand. I feel like I get tired after a while. I need a second.

Garaucci with an XLR cable. Yeah, exactly. The Germans are putting up one hell of defense, the backbone of which was a supply network made up of multiple railways running along the western coast of Italy. This resulted in Operation Strangle, not with an XLR cable. It's weird that they added that as a parentheses at the time, but I don't know. Maybe they pre-saged it. They just knew. Where the Allied air forces tried to bomb the supply routes into submission over the

course of eight weeks. They dropped 22,000 pounds of bombs on this thing. I've heard that the report actually be like several thousand tons, like 22,000 tons in some reports. They flew 21,000 sorties all bombing the strip of railway, the tunnels, the infrastructure ledges, they failed. They failed entirely. They did no damage to this fucking thing at all.

A lot of this has to do with, you know, saturation bombing was how you aimed back then. But the supply lines are very well naturally protected. There is mountainous trains, there's valleys, there's multiple tunnels going through mountains that protected railways and roads, which obviously makes you impervious to air attack. I assume they decided fuck aerial surveillance beforehand or something. They should have known that. But so after blowing up a bunch of shit and doing nothing of any use, it was decided that commando action would be the only way of taking out the tunnels, because if you blow up the fucking tunnels, right, it's you're not going to repair them.

Yeah, you collapse one tunnel. You're good. Yeah. I mean, you blow up a mountain tunnel, you've done a pretty good job of making the Germans go, well, I guess that one's fucked. Yeah. That doesn't just like, you don't bang out that dent real quick. No, no. They just give up. That's going to take some time, energy, and effort at that point. I mean, it is funny though, because having a... We did all talk about, um, you know, the catch 22 mini series like years ago, German big dig to get back through the Italian mountain. Yeah. Famously that also went well. Um, I think the war went on for 20 more years. I was gonna say, I think the big dig went on

for like, you know, the big dig, uh, uh, went on for like four times as long as world war two. So, you know. And eventually got attacked by the Mooninites, I think. Wasn't the big take at the Mooninites? Fuck, I forgot about that. Yeah, yeah. That was a weird day in Boston. The Aquatine Hunger Force terrorist attack of 2007.