*PREVIEW* The Close Quarters Combat of the USS Buckley

Today's episode has nothing to do with the United States Army and everything to do with the United States Navy because we're back on our boat shit again.

All right.

We've talked long enough on this show that if I was to ask you the question, we're talking about World War II era ships, destroyer escorts, destroyers, U-boats, submarines.

What do you think that fight looks like between

World War II?

They're not called escorts, they're called erotic ships.

I apologize.

Destroyer hookers um yeah

exotic vessels uh this is just a a rent destroyer when i say i support sws it means i support ship workers

but what what do you think what do you think a fight between a surface ship and a u-boat looks like right death charges torpedoes things like that we've talked about this before so probably not say hand-to-hand combat right probably not no well today we're talking about the uss buckley where that happened but before we get to why a u-boat and a destroyer escort that term is ruined for me now

got into a fistfight uh we have to talk about how exactly we got there and This all is a part of the Battle of the Atlantic, what would become the longest battle of World War II, roughly, if you want to consider it one large battle.

Generally considered as starting in September 1939, but not being labeled as the Battle of the Atlantic until 1941.

And I just realized I did quote fingers on an audio medium.

I don't know what's going on here, guys.

People can tell.

We can tell.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And this ran until the end of the war.

And for a long stretch of that time, Nazi U-boats were winning that battle, prowling the Atlantic on the hunt for largely transport ships.

and supply ships heading for the UK and the Soviet Union in their famous Wolfpack formations.

In the early 1940s, the Nazi U-boat crews were eating so well that they sank over 200 Allied shipping transports in only a couple of months.

And the U-boat crews jokingly referred to this as the happy times.

And the reason for that is like, obviously, it felt like they were winning, but also because we did a whole episode a few years ago on how shitty life in a U-boat was.

Miserable.

This is as close to happiness as they could possibly feel.

This feast was not only because of British unpreparedness in the face of a new, much larger U-boat threat that they had faced in World War I, but also because the Nazis had managed to crack several British naval codes, making hunting for ships much easier in the open ocean, paired with many new U-boat bases on the French coast, making it easier than ever for them to reach out and fuck up the British shit.

However, by 1943, things had begun to change.

A massive refinement to the convoy system, which we talked about a little bit before, but that is a protected convoy of supply ships, right?

Like rather than just running transport and supply ships over the open ocean, they're going with armed guards, destroyers, battleships, carrier escorts, things like that.

But also, as well as long-distance air power and radar advances, which meant that anytime a U-boat struck at an allied shipping convoy, there was statistically a high chance that they would also die on the process.

Like once they fired off their torpedo, they were going to get hunted down.

So a lot of U-boats decided that wasn't really worth it, but a lot of them did.

The advances in radar also meant that U-boats wanted safe to resurface at day or night to charge their batteries because they ran off of batteries when they were submerged and they could only recharge them in fresh air when they're on the surface.

And now, suddenly, they're never safe.

Long-range planes following accurate radar readings could hit them day and night so quickly they wouldn't even have a chance to crash dive to safety.

Soon, resurfacing at any time was like a game of naval Russian roulette or what the Russian Navy calls being in the Navy.

For a second there, I was just like, wait, charge their batteries.

And then I was like, oh, yeah, because they probably had to do it with running engines that they couldn't do underwater.

For a second, I was imagining the solar punk U-boat.

I realized that's not actually what it was.

That would be way cooler.

It was more, it was, it was more actually accurately described as the Grimdark U-boat, which is just a U-boat.

Yeah, which is just living in a submarine.

To be fair, one time we did do an episode on a diesel-powered submarine that could work underwater, and it was horrible.

So a battery-powered one is much better.

I mean, what we've just discovered is the bisexual U-boat, aka.

It only eats hot chip, charge the phone, and lie.

This fucking U-boat never charging itself.

Sitting weird on chairs, I've been told.

No, Joe, you shouldn't know that.

The things I've learned from this show.

Always on Wi-Fi because their phone's never on.

Get a sew in.

We watched the pussy twerk be bisexual.

Why?

This all stems from a post that a guy did in All Caps in 2015, and I'm not going to quote it verbatim because he's a black American dude and he uses

terms of phrase that white people are not allowed to use.

But he basically says,

women born in the 90s who basically don't want to have a real relationship, and guys over 30 are trying and realize nothing's working because, in his opinion, all they do is

sit around at home, eat hot Cheetos, charge their phone, use the Wi-Fi because their phone's not on, twerk, be bisexual, lie.

And it's just like that entered into the abusion.

Yeah, that's easy to come from.

Eat hot Cheetos,

that became a thing.

And then someone did a voice dubbing thing with Bernie Sanders.

And as a result, yeah, it became a thing.

Things that I learned on this podcast.

If you would ask me, Joe, why in your years of history education at nearly 40 years old, you know that

according to your bisexual friends,

they sit in chairs in a particular kind of way.

I would say, I don't know why I know this, but it is something that I know now.

Yeah, because we occupy the space between being gay and being straight.

So much like in a similar way, we have to occupy a space in between standing and sitting.

Thank you.

All right.

Thank you for that.

If it makes you feel any better, I mean, like things that get lodged in your brain that like, unless you were, you were interested in, like, for example, basketball enough to know this story or are online enough to know it.

I don't know if you ever heard as an aside the story of the American basketball player, Ty Lawson, who was playing for a team in China and basically got banned for bullshit.

But it was, he went to a club and there was a girl grinding on him and stuff.

And he took photos and shared them, I think, Instagram stories.

And the text of it was: Chinese woman got cakes on the low.

People got so mad at him.

So mad at him.

That he got mega racist and they banned him from China for dead.

All right.

So for me, I want to say cakes on the low all the time, but no one's going to get it.

We'll figure out a way.

Put a pin pin on that one for later.

You got cakes on the low on mine.

I have destroyer sex worker on the mine.

Well, I mean, I have some.

In the literal sense of an English language sentence, you could say that when they tucked into their fucking tins of dessert biscuits while at depth in a submarine, they in fact did have cakes on the low one.

That's a factual sentence.

That's not what Ty Lawson meant.

I mean, to be fair, who knows what a lowly submariner would do with two cakes pushed together?

The lead vehicle in the convoy is just captained by a guy who looks like Cat Williams.

Well,

we weirdly bring things to cakes.

Another reason for this turnaround was the United States turning on that cheat code known as the industrial manufacturing capability of the United States during a time of war, specifically a type of war that they're not getting bombed in, right?

We've talked about this before, but even before the U.S.

was a combatant in World War II, they signed the Lens-Lease Act and various other additions onto it, with the Soviets and the British largely supporting their war efforts with its massive and most importantly safe industrial base.

And I fell into a bit of a wormhole here, so bear with me.

Specifically regarding the Soviets and spam, now the support was virtually everything from, you know, the beans to bullets, as the term was,

that is clothing, food, everything up to entire warships.

But like the United Kingdom and the USSR at the time were struggling quite hard and specifically the Soviet Union.

As Nikita Khrushchev pointed out, the USSR had lost most of what you call their breadbaskets of their empire, which is the place where their food comes from, right?

Most of the Caucasus, Ukraine, Eastern Europe.

I mean, the opening stages of Operation Barbarossa were largely bad.

We did a series about the Battle of Salinger.

We talked about that a little bit more in depth.

But the Soviets could not feed their own people and they could not feed their own army due to these losses.

Enter the cured pork shoulder product known as Spam.

Special product of pork and ham, I think, or something.

It's

something.

Nobody's nobody's entirely sure where the name came from hormel doesn't remember or they never wrote it down it's generally spiced ham is what spiced ham it's generally what people have agreed on delicacy in Hawaii and South Korea shit fucking slaps oh it's so good man it's terrible for you it's like it's like it's like instant colon death but it's really really good this is the one population that spam like nobody had to worry about how unhealthy spam was is like the fighting soldiers of the Soviet Union because it's like well this or starve yeah I was gonna say their life expectancy is like 21 so it really doesn't matter I mean like much like spam the soldiers of the Soviet Union will soon be turned into a homogenized meat product yeah that is true and if you pan fry them with eggs it slaps

but the Soviets actually politely asked Hormel the company who made spam like this shit's kind of gross to us could you make this specific Russian pork stew version that is more in tune with Soviet and therefore Russian tastes and they did they cheered out like after the Soviets said like hey this shit is kind of gross.

Could you make it taste a little bit worse for us?

And Horbell's like, yeah, sure, whatever.

Immediately popped up an assembly line for a specific Soviet spam that cranked out a quarter of a million tons of this shit, like with the flip of a switch.