Episode 372 - The Siege of Petropavlovsk

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Hello, and welcome to the Lions of my Donkeys podcast.

I am Joe, and with me is Tom and Nate, and you're still in the bunker with me.

Fellas, how are you doing?

I feel like it's unfair to call this the bunker.

The actual bunker was far more concrete everywhere, dirt everywhere.

There could be concrete under this.

Maybe, but like, it's nice, you know, if you feel like home.

It's a home bunker.

We're slowly becoming more and more beleaguered by podcast psychosis as we riff more and more into the podcasting satatic zone.

Tom's gotten married and he has a dog called Blondie now.

Fellas, last week we talked about a siege.

And by last week, as for our listeners, for us, it's about 20 minutes.

I figured we should talk about another siege this week.

We're siege maxing here on the lions led by Donkey Spot.

We're rationing our food.

We're dying of thirst.

We all have cholera.

We have blown through our ration of white monster down here.

It is true.

I feel like if I have any more, I might die.

I've opted to not.

And it's, unfortunately, cherry Pepsi Max, very hard to get in Central Europe.

So every time I'm here, you don't find it in store.

You have to go to like a big grocery store to find it.

And so it's just like, yeah, here it's everywhere.

Any flavor of Pepsi Max you want, they've got it.

Big Coke is keeping it from you.

Yeah, well, I mean, they do bottle Coke in Switzerland.

So Pepsi.

Unfortunately,

the anti-imperialist choice is not available, which is not true at all because it's also an American company.

See, this is why I don't drink Coke because I hate the Swiss.

Look, man, I'm just, you know what, as I said before, to the immigration authorities of the Republic and Canton of Geneva, I'm just kidding.

Last time we talked about Persia, Lebanon, and Greece, and Alexander the Great.

This time we're putting on our furs.

We're jumping in our steamers and we're going to the Russian Far East during the Crimean War of 1850s.

You know, what's funny is that when we talked earlier, and I said the best way to understand the mid-2000s, like bape, bathing ape, you know, technicolor camo fashion is to see a domestic or a flight going to a regional city in Russia.

I saw this experience, what I'm just describing, of guys lining up and everyone in like counterfeit bape on a flight from Naruta airport in Tokyo to Vladivostok.

So that's the best way to picture the furs that we're wearing.

I'm a very big fan of Creation by a man called Nigo.

Have you heard the second Clips album?

A friend of mine was just into it a lot.

I mean, it was appropriate in the era.

It was like 2006.

We actually went to the original vape store and to go there, it was like super, super unmarked.

There was just like a tiny little text thing in like the very bottom corner of the window.

But you had to go in and get a ticket so you could join the queue.

So it took like four hours to go into the store.

And like, yeah, the sort of North Face vape jacket was the equivalent of $1,500 in 2006.

So I bought a keychain that didn't last very long.

I mean, very badly made.

To be fair, we are maybe about 300 meters away from the contemporaneous version of that, which is going to the Amé Leon d'Or shop to buy a coffee, but you have to queue up across the street to get in to buy a coffee to then look at like a monogram basketball.

Yeah, I can recall having errands to run in random government offices that happened to also be in the Lower East Side.

And you're like, why are there so many Scandinavian teenagers standing in line?

You're like, oh, the Supreme Store is here.

But I'm kind of dating myself to like 2014.

For this one, you have to think, okay, we're Russian, you know, in this context, straight Jorkinet in a Russian sense.

So today would be, we're all DJs and we probably live in Dubai.

That is the more modern take on that.

Why Ushanka has camo on inside with fur?

Well, let's not talk about my previous three girlfriends who died hanging off of building accidents for TikTok.

I believe that was for Twitch.

Yeah, Yeah, TikTok may not have ascended by that point.

No, it goes without saying, judging from the name, that this war largely involved and was fought in Crimea.

Thankfully, a place has known only peace ever since.

But that isn't, you know, entirely true.

It's a war that's largely thought of as being European-based, and little to no thought is given to the far-flung reaches of the conflict that managed to stretch all the way to Russian Alaska.

Which was the thing.

People may not remember this.

Yeah, the U.S.

bought Alaska from the Russians in, I believe, 1867.

for virtually nothing.

The Russians were like, Ayo, let me hold $5.

We don't lately used Alaska.

Yeah, we don't need this shit anymore.

Sorry, it's just,

it's too cold, too many, you know, like armored mosquitoes.

We don't want it.

And then they're like, three years later, they discovered an enormous gold deposit.

And then eventually oil.

Now, the Russian Empire is much like the Russia we know today.

And by that, I mean hyper-racist and aggressively territorial.

And also very big.

The Russian Far East of the 1850s was even larger, going so far as, again, to take over Alaska, which at the time was known as Russian America.

Russian colonization in Alaska began in the mid-1700s and been going on approximately 100 years by the time the Crimean War commenced, which honestly makes sense.

In the grand scheme of things, Russia proper is obviously not far away, and every imperial power has wet dreams about expanding into a new continent.

They really hoped about expanding down like the American western seaboard.

And they kind of tried through the Russian America Company, because of course their imperial dickheads are going to have a company to do this shit.

And it did the same thing that all these companies did, which was enslave indigenous people to extract wealth from the land.

But the Russians were not very good at colonizing things that were not directly connected to them.

I'm going to say, because they were pretty successful in conquering Central Asia, but yeah.

And the Caucasus and Eastern Europe, and, you know, but, you know, they're connected to them.

It's a lot harder.

And, you know, Alaska is a much harder place to exist than.

Also, the places with the biggest Russian influences won't surprise you are all on the coast, but like those areas are extraordinarily extreme bad weather most of the time.

Incredibly hot in summer, very easy to get diseases, insanely cold in winter, dark.

It's yeah, very, very inhospitable.

It's also weird that there's like a Russian Orthodox church still there.

In like Barrow, not Barrow, but you know what I mean?

Like some of the

Kotzebue Peninsula and stuff like that.

Yeah.

By the time the Crimean War started, the colony in Alaska, as well as they attempted other colonies in like Sonoma, California, and Hawaii, they were all failing miserably.

They're flat broke.

And when the war did kick off, it gave Russian colonial holdings in the Pacific and in the Far East a new value and importance.

Or should I say, it gave them value, period.

This time as naval bases to strike out at the much more successful, if that's a term you want to use in this context, colonies of their enemies, in this case being France and Great Britain, which obviously have colonies all over the place in that area.

It is to say nothing of France and Britain's goal in the Pacific of trying to put a stop to Russian expansion in China and Korea.

And now having an open war to allow them to do that, oh, that's just handy.

Yeah, some of the ones people forget about, like the Gilbert Islands in the South Pacific, was now the nation of Kiribati.

That was a British colony that didn't achieve independence until 1979.

Similarly, the British controlled the Chinese city of Dairen, like not far from North Korea.

So, like, yeah, there was a lot of people forget

that they had planted the flag lots of different places.

And, like, at this time, it was extremely at the expansion period.

Yeah.

And France as well, and Polynesia and everything.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because Because you've got, you still have Tahiti, New Caledonia, Southeast Asia, famous admission territory, New Caledonia.

New Caledonia, yeah.

Another thing the French and the British are worried about were the Russian settlements in and around the Sea of Okost, east of the Kamchakna Peninsula and north of Japan.

Because, of course, these are all places that Russia wanted to bleed into.

So the Sakhalin Island is the Russian territory, and it's sort of like, yeah, it's Japan, Korea, Russia, all mixed together.

And all of them claim Russian power in the region, despite Russia being the closest of the three countries involved here, the various colonies, the outposts things like that, was actually very, very low.

Normally, to patrol and secure such a far-reaching empire like the one Russia was trying to eke out required a fairly large navy, and they just didn't have one.

Russian naval history, after all, is generally one of comedic failure, and we've talked about the show.

Several times.

And even knowing that, the power that they had available in the Pacific is surprisingly low.

The Russian Pacific Squadron, which covers the Far East, had only six ships, all of which are pretty badly out of date and in a general lack of fuck it level of disrepair.

For example, the Russian Pacific Fleet flagship, the Pallada, was broken down and trapped in port due to being so old that nobody was entirely sure how to fix it, forcing its captain and overall fleet commander, Yevini Petuyin, to switch his flagship over to a different ship, the Diana.

They'd lost track of a Misislav, the engineer.

Yeah, exactly.

So they couldn't repair the ship, and the Misislav, the shipbuilder, was also nowhere to be found.

They got them all mixed up.

And I'm not here to constantly shit on Russians.

That would be unfair.

And also, it's just low-hanging fruit.

In some situations, they just got hit with such bad luck that God himself was also shitting on the Russians.

In February 1853, the new flagship, the Diana and Potinian, stormed into a Japanese port and forced it open with like the Russian version of gunboat diplomacy.

in direct competition with Commodore Matthew Perry.

However, this process is interrupted by a massive fucking earthquake and resulting tsunami, which destroyed the Diana, leaving Petinian and his Russian contingent just stranded in Japan.

This left him to like rent a whole bunch of Japanese laborers and work together, despite the fact he was just forcing them to sign trees at gunpoint, to build a replacement ship so he could go back home.

However, I should stop and point out here that the Russians saw the eastern portion of their expanding empire as remote and frozen.

as it was massively important.

Though it had failed so far, their territories were also known for being a natural equivalent of a bank vault.

If they could just figure them out and get some roots down where not everybody's freezing to death, they're dying of like frozen death cholera,

they would make a fuckload of money off of them.

Timbers, furs, things of that nature.

And like the Russian military and Russian imperial court really wanted to make sure they stayed safe and secure.

So while they didn't have the naval strength to really do that, they made sure to staff their Pacific fleet with who they saw as their best naval officers for the job.

This was not the case case for the British and the French.

The Pacific theater for the Allies in the war was a sideshow.

And almost like what is below a sideshow, it's more like that.

They didn't see it as fucking anything.

Yeah, so it's like, well, you're not good enough to be sent, you know, Asia or the Indian subcontinent.

So we're going to stick you up in the frozen wastes near Alaska.

Yeah, we're going to send you to do a Tite 5 in the Russian Far East.

We're not going to send you to die of cholera and malaria in Crimea like so many other people are doing, which is what that war is most famous for.

But at least you can't die from shitting ass disease because both your cheeks are frozen together.

Yeah, it just makes a seal, like a giant scab.

The ascarapis.

Yes, the ascarapus once again.

They were led by people that collective military minds in Europe just knew they could do without.

To say, that's the best thing you could say about them.

And just so you get a better picture of what everything looked like, British holdings in the East were many, but very far apart, leaving their comparatively large fleet of 20-something ships to be scattered across various different Chinese ports.

Held even the British Chinese fleet commander James Sterling was just chilling in Singapore when the war broke out, weeks away from the rest of his men.

And this is where we see the key divide in their war plans in the east.

The British, regardless of the quality of their leadership in the region, had muscle and they wanted to use it to destroy the tiny Russian fleet.

And once that was done, they'd reduce the Russian eastern colonies to ash, or maybe take them over.

They weren't entirely sure.

Meanwhile, the Russians knew they really couldn't do shit with, you know, what started with six, but now it's actually four ships.

So Putinian and others were given the mission to ensure Japan stayed out of the war and also try not to lose the rest of the ships.

And if you can, protect the Kamchaka Peninsula from being taken by the joint Anglo-French navies.

Of course, Russian officers and politicians in the region quickly understood that there was really no way they could do all of that with how little resources they had.

So they consolidated their navy and infantry forces up the Amur River and deployed their forces in four settlements, which were all very far apart because this is the Russian Far East we're talking about.

The most important of these settlements for our story today is Petropavlovsk.

Now, Petropavlovsk is literally in the middle of nowhere.

It's on the like the end of the Kamchatka Peninsula.

It was established 100 years before this.

And due to the rugged mountains and the sheer inaccessibility of Kamchatka, despite it was not on an island, it could only be reached by sea.

It's really, really remote.

Like it's uh like it's called Petropavlovsk Kamchatsky now.

And like, yeah, it's if you want to go there, you basically have to get a charter flight unless you want to take a boat.

Looks like Juneau, Alaska, but like imagine it in a much worse state of repair.

The Kamchatka Peninsula, because of map projections, looks relatively small or like, you know, not particularly large, put it that way on the map.

It is gigantic.

It is enormous.

And like getting places there is very difficult because the roads are incredibly poor quality.

So imagine what it was like.

That's what it's like now.

Imagine what it was like in 1850, something like the roads are always mudfields and then completely frozen over.

So I have to, because I lived in Alaska for three years, I have to say this.

Something that doesn't get talked about unless you've been this part of the world is that it's when it's cold, sucks, dark, icy, snowy, really dangerous weather.

Snow collapses buildings, so on and so forth.

When it's warm, it's almost impossible to walk because it's like semi-swampland and mosquitoes will kill you.

Oh, yeah.

They are gigantic.

They're like literally like you can see fur on them.

I'm not making this.

Yeah, they're wearing tiny tiny fur jackets because they work for Russia.

Exactly, yeah, yeah, with vape camo on them.

And I'll be honest with you, like, it can be well below freezing when it's dark.

And then as soon as the sun comes up and the ice melts and water starts forming, you are suddenly hit by clouds of mosquitoes.

And then it gets cold and freezes again.

And it's just like, yeah, you basically can't win in that.

A little mosquito buzzing by your ears here.

I sold farm of onions and bought mink coat for my mosquito and mistress.

Good news.

You've already alluded to what a lot of these guys are are going to run into as a problem, which is malaria and mud, my two favorite M's.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's, I mean, that's like I said, I was there from 2008 to 2011.

It was far worse back in those.

They didn't know that, you know, they didn't have pills you could take to stop malaria.

The Brits hadn't shared the secret alcoholic.

She didn't talk about it.

That same remoteness and those same mountains that made it hard to get to also made a natural harbor free of Arctic ice.

Most importantly for the cause of the Russian Imperial projects, it was the only station between Russian America and the major Russian hub of Vladivostok.

So it's an important way station.

And it kind of goes without saying that the place is important, but Russia only saw it that way about five years before the start of the war and dumped a comparatively large amount of money into it to build it up into something that wasn't just like a glorified death camp out in the woods.

Pretty much the first settlers here all died horribly of disease and like exposure.

So they built lighthouses, they built barracks and shipyards that could serve as military vessels as well as foundries and gunsmiths to better facilitate the ports used for military matters.

And they sent a ton of food there to make living there not so miserable.

Of course, this also made it the best target of all of the Russian settlements as well.

Normally, its commander, Colonel Major Vasily Zoivko, would have been absolutely screwed.

But he's a seasoned naval commander.

He's in the employ of the Russian-American company, and he knew he was at the end of the earth with no hope of assistance should a battle begin.

There was also a small problem of only having about 250 soldiers stationed there, with him and the Russian Pacific Squadron only being four rickety steamships that were held together by duct tape and hope.

He knew, you know, if a battle comes this way, I'm probably fucked.

So he ordered his men to dig in.

He ordered all able-bodied people to take up tools and help them.

The town of Petropavlovsk had a population of about 1,000, and he pressed all of them into service: men, women, and children.

Yes, child soldiers.

Build my bunkers, kids.

I mean, I'm just imagining what good can in that climate can, you know, a battalion of child laborers really do?

You can throw enough of them at the problem.

I mean, I'm just imagining it's like bucket brigade to hold the world's tiniest bucket.

Hands.

They can get into small places, you know, to get mangled by machine menu.

No, they can do hand-to-hand combat.

If the mosquitoes are really, really big and the kids are really, really small, then it's an even matter.

It takes the least productive child to make a sacrificial offering to the mosquitoes.

Within hours of Zoiko getting word that the war had begun, which, to be clear here, was about a month after it actually started, his chain gang was hard at work building massive earthworks, eventually constructing seven different batteries, which the British would eventually call forts, carved out of the surrounding cliff faces.

And as Zoivko, his soldiers, and the impressed civilians waited, some bizarre shit was going on out in the ocean.

And this brings us to David Price, commander of the British Pacific Squadron, about four months before this.

Because all of this that we're about to talk about happens on accident.

Yeah, there's like a really kind of

insane sailor on a small boat with a man called Quequeg.

They're like

they're chasing the mythical whale, you know.

Actually, kind of.

What?

Just not a whale.

It's a proverbial great white whale, but you know.

When the war started, he was nowhere near any of this shit.

Instead, he and his fleet was parked in Calel, Peru, hanging out with his French counterpart, Du Poin.

Now, Du Poin was old as fuck.

Every account of this battle and everything that's about to happen is that everybody says that the man should have never been in command.

Like he was old and chronically ill.

Okay.

Like he should have been retired, but France is like, no, go to the Pacific and die.

War hadn't started yet, but rumors were that it might soon.

And it took about two months for the news to get from Europe to Peru, where he was.

And while they were hanging out, the Russian ship Aurora showed up.

And now, people who've listened to the show for a long time might remember Aurora is one of the names from the Voyage of the Damned.

It's a different Aurora.

It would be funny, though.

The British and the French watched the ship nervously as it resupplied before leaving.

A week later, word of the war got to Peru, and with it, orders for Price to chase down and destroy the Aurora.

Price was manning a state-of-the-art 50-gun ship.

He had several other ships with him, including the French fleet, because they were supposed to be working together.

Now, the French fleet was ordered to help Price, but not to fall under his command.

So there's like this weird parallel command system, but DuPont was largely fine with it.

He was never arguing with Price at all.

He was too old and sick to really give a shit.

He could have easily stomped on the gas, caught up to the Aurora, and made short work of this whole thing.

And this battle that we're about to talk about never would have happened.

But he didn't.

He just kind of hang around.

Instead, he sat around in Peru doing nothing.

His supply logs say his ship had been fully stocked.

All of his ammunition was on board.

But in his personal journal, Price complained that he simply did not have enough beef to set sail.

He's like, look, I need more beef.

I need more lovely jumpers made out of alpaca wool.

All of my sailors are on the carnivore diet.

Oh, God.

The sailor latrine somehow managing to be even worse because everyone's just eating like eggs, meat, butter.

And this nice little poultice made from a local plant that just makes you work faster.

It was only a week after that that he finally orders his fleet to make for Honolulu, which by then the British called the Sandwich Islands for some reason, but it was an independent kingdom, not under British command.

And I mean, this does lead me to believe that he was just hungry, right?

He's like, my men don't have enough beef.

Let's set sail for the Sandwich Islands.

I mean, like, stationing British sailors in Peru, the cocaine poultice is the most likely thing that happened.

And I was also laughing too, because it's like, the problem is, is that you might get food on the Sandwich Islands, also known as Hawaii, or you might, in the spirit of James Cook, become the food.

That's right.

You got to make sure that you know what day you're arriving.

But then he canceled those orders and instead sat around for another week and then ordered his fleet to make for the Marquesa Islands.

And then he ordered them once again to go to Hawaii.

This is despite the fact that all their intelligence pointed to the fact that Aurora was going to Honolulu.

And it did.

And now they're a full month behind schedule.

Maybe he was like, you know, the way you're not supposed to go to the supermarket when when you're hungry.

He was like navigating.

He was like,

let's just go to Sandwich Islands.

You know, like, I haven't had lunch.

It's like the islands are just Tesco.

The island of big Tesco.

That implies the Marquesa Islands are the fancier ones.

So yeah, that's the Waitrose Islands.

They're the M ⁇ S food islands.

He learned from the Hawaiians upon arrival that, oh, yeah, there was definitely a Russian ship here, but it left about a month ago.

So now knowing that he was falling further and further behind, Price, once again, did not start chasing chasing the Aurora instead, just kind of hung around with King Kamehameha III of Hawaii for a week, including grilling with him.

Grilling with your home.

Grilling with the boys.

Apparently, the king and him all got blind drunk, and he took the king on the tour for his ships for a little while.

King Kamehameha just seemed like he was having a good time a lot of the time.

His white boys came to the barbecue.

They're

invited to the cooking.

I mean, yeah.

Well, he can't kick him out, unfortunately.

Yeah.

We got this liquor we made made out of Lillikoi.

Completely gives you the worst hangover you can possibly imagine, but it definitely gets you in the mood to consume more of the pork barbecue.

I mean, man, you know, the food would have been great.

Fuck yeah.

Maybe that's why Akira Toriyama like named the Kamehameha the Kamehameha because it's like, well, Goku, like, what's his main characteristics?

You know, he's really strong.

He loves eating.

He loves eating barbecue food.

What's who else loves?

There's a weird amount of people in Dragon Ball Z named after food.

There you go.

So, you know.

He left Hawaii on July 25th, heading for Sitka, Alaska, thinking that must be where the Aurora is going.

But then he stops and sends two ships back to Hawaii.

The reason for this is he's worried about British holdings in California, and he simply orders them to sail up and down the Californian coast to make sure the Russians can see the British flag there.

So now he's to down two ships.

Then he sailed his fleet directly into a thick blanket of fog and got very, very lost.

His ships got separated from one another, and he figured out the best way to keep the fleet together was actually is quite common for the day, but is very funny, is to play Marco Polo, but by firing off cannons so you could go towards the sound.

I mean, they didn't have GPS.

You never know, maybe his compass also was.

Magellan may have meant something very different back then.

I mean, it is funny to think about that.

It does make a lot of sense that he did it.

Also, it's like terrain association would be somewhat difficult because you're like, oh, look for a big mountain.

It's like, I've got bad news for you on the Alaska Panhandle.

That's kind of all there are there.

They can't see shit.

They're lost in this fog for a week, only leaving the fog behind at the end of August.

Now, this is where finally Price gets a look over the bow of his ship and get a lay of the land.

And that's when he realizes something.

Oh, fuck, that isn't Alaska.

It's fucking Kamchatka.

Okay, okay, okay.

So

he has traversed the entirety of the North Pacific, not realizing.

On accident.

That's, I mean,

he was that lost.

But also, like, there are some telltale signs that you've kind of gone, such as the most insane wind you will ever ever experience in your life when you start to get out.

I mean, because he's past the Aleutians.

He's past the Bering Strait.

Like, you're in the Eastern Hemisphere now.

He was going for the Aleutians, but he missed.

I mean, remember, Price is not a good naval officer.

There's a reason why he's there.

I mean,

okay.

And again, DuPoin, the commander of the French, is old and sick and spends most of his time shitting on himself in his cabin.

Well, I guess, I mean, it could have ended up a lot worse.

I mean, you could.

It was going to be.

Well,

Captain Price, we've got a problem.

They've eaten our chocolate compass.

So as Zoivka looks over, like out of his defenses in Petropavlask, he sees warships parked out there.

He's like, oh, fuck, the attack is coming.

And the weirdest part is, the Aurora was there.

Like, they'd accidentally found where the Aurora had parked.

Stupid like a fox.

Exactly.

Price is like, that's right.

Got him exactly where I wanted.

Despite the fact there is a bite taken out of my chocolate compass, it's still brought us in the right place.

He thought he was staring at an invasion force when in reality he was staring at a bunch of very, very lost, increasingly sick, and exhausted group of Brits and French sailors.

To make matters worse, Price had taken so long to hunt the Aurora that the Aurora and one other ship, the Dewina, had already pulled into the harbor and effectively been disassembled to help the defense.

Like half of the Aurora's guns had been taken off and added to coastal defenses and the entire Dewina's guns had been taken off.

But also 500 or so Marines that staffed those ships were now added to Petropovlosk's defenses.

This number was further bolstered by local civilians who volunteered to fight alongside the soldiers once they saw the Allied fleet parked outside.

And it shouldn't surprise you, the kind of people who survived out in Petropovlosk were about the hardest fucking people on Earth.

He just got a kid with the ship's cannon riding on the back of a giant mosquito.

Long enough timeline, they achieved supremacy over the mosquitoes.

The mosquitoes changed sides.

They joined the Russian Defense Force.

The mosquitoes started buzzing in Russian.

These were like wolf hunters and trappers in the fucking Arctic and shit.

So the most hard-nosed fucking people on the planet.

I mean, because you hear the stories invariably about some person who went out to make their fortune in the Russian Far East and he's like, was devoured by wolves two years later.

Like, it's just a regular occurrence.

It's that fucking workplace hazardous wolf attack.

My friend told me a story of going to a funeral for one of his relatives in Kurdistan, and it was separated.

Like, you know, there's the men's tent and the women's tent, and then they heard screaming from the women's tent.

And so, like, of course, all of his male relatives drew their guns.

They went to go see what was going on.

And what had happened is somehow a wolf, a snake, and two scorpions had fallen through the roof of the tent.

That sounds like a warning from the Quran.

I was like, okay, that's a bad fucking oath.

A snake, I get it, you know, climbs up, whatever slithers up, falls.

Scorpions, yeah, absolutely.

But how does a wolf get on top of the tent and fall through it?

The wolf falls is like, cut my airborne wings big.

And I guess it was that, like, he's like, hypothetically, one assumes the wolf was hunting the snake and was like oh he's on top of that brightly colored thing on the side

one must be mindful when the wolf hunts the snake

proverbs over here and shit the idea though average day in curtis day it is wolf falls from tent ceiling onto you it's just like okay imagine how freaked out that wolf was though yeah yeah

these volunteers were just a gang of dudes who were probably the most comfortable of dying than anyone was there Price didn't know any of this, though.

He didn't know the defenses.

He didn't know the Aurora and the Winna being there.

He literally knew nothing nothing about Petropavlos because he wasn't even supposed to be there.

So Price took his fellow commanders aside and held a war council and decided, you know, after a scouting mission, like, oh, the Aurora is in there, so we have to go in.

But we need to suss out the strength of the enemy.

So we're going to just sail into the harbor and start shooting at them, you know, like recon by fire.

So they did on August 28th, 1853.

And it did not go well.

As the article, Petropavlos, the Crimean War's Forgotten Battle, puts it, quote, the Allies had put considerably considerably less thought into capturing Petropovlossk than the Russians had into defending it.

Okay, yeah.

I mean,

if that's the summary off the top, I can only imagine the details are going to be a little more illuminating.

It's not good.

They quite literally had no idea what they were sailing into, and once they did, they caught some serious hands in the form of dozens of cannons ripping shells at them.

This is when the Allies learned that the ships in the harbor were mostly harmless, like the guns had been taken off them.

The Aurora was still firing at them, but the Allies broke off contact and left.

Thankfully for them, the only gun crew seemingly worse trained than their owns were the Russian ones, and neither side really hit the other.

At this point, Price is reportedly, it's called despondent, combined with a healthy dose of shocked into speechlessness.

Captain Price, it seems you're very morose over this battle.

I recommend you listen to the high-performance podcast, or maybe Stephen Bartlett.

Well, we haven't had a chance to resupply since Peru, so the carnivore diet is running out.

You know, he's having a crash.

He's not, he's not.

He's having in the calm down of a lifetime.

He's no more poltas and no more mead.

Alpha mode has been turned off entirely.

I really need my cocaine beef.

He was sure the sight of his squadron forced the Russians into surrender while simultaneously unsure of what exactly to do next.

You know, he was kind of lost for words the whole time.

He's like, well, surely they'll surrender when they see the glorious Royal Navy.

But he was also probably, you know, according to his diary at least, really regretting all of those pointless delays he made along the way.

Or he could have caught the Aurora open sea and smacked it in about five seconds flat.

You wouldn't, yeah, it's much more challenging when it gets absorbed into the larger hive mine into the city and then all the guns get moved and it just becomes a floating armor wall.

He writes, like, if I just got the aurora at sea, none of this would be happening.

Or, you know, if I haven't gotten fucking lost and ended up in Russia,

which happens to the best of us, you know, I wouldn't have ended up squaring off with a mini fortress.

If I hadn't rolled up and down the California coast, the very first instance of someone cruising USA, then I genuinely would have been able to get this thing on the open sea.

I really shouldn't have hung out with my homies in Hawaii.

But now you have to fight the seaborne version of Hell's Moving Castle.

I mean, I, I, but here's the thing, too.

I think, take it out from the mode of jokes, also, it's like there's no resupply for them.

There's no, there's no support.

So it's like any kind of big change in the calculus like this, then you're really on your own.

And it's like, if things go bad, then you drown in the North Pacific or you become Russian, I guess.

After a while, he brought his other commanders together and tried to come up with a plan to proceed.

The plan was quite simple, with the squadron massing their fire on each Russian battery in order to overwhelm them one by one while staying out of range of Russian guns.

When the French commander pointed out that that was actually impossible, Price said, don't worry, trust me, this somehow worked.

And DuPois was like, yeah, sure, because he has to agree to this.

He doesn't have to follow Price's commands.

And on August 30th, the attack begins once again.

As the ships move into gun range and begin bombing the Russian positions, Price and his other commanders did exactly what you'd imagine naval commanders would do in the middle of battle in the 1800s.

They retired to the dining hall to have a large, several course lunch while cannons are going off and everything.

What are they eating?

They don't have any of their carnivore diet stuff left.

Maybe

Joe Rogan supplements.

I don't fucking know.

I've got you...

Oh, lovely serving of boot.

They've probably got...

I mean, you think about it, they probably have...

Salt beef.

Yeah, salt beef.

Some kind of hard bread dissolved in hot water, things of that nature.

Yeah.

No vegetables, no fiber.

The toilet is all either abandoned or punished in the extreme.

The punished toilet.

After he finished, Price got up, told everyone, I'll see you in a few minutes, went back to his cabin aboard his flagship, which is called the president, found his service revolver, and shot himself in the chest.

Did he die?

No.

No one would exactly say Price is good at his job, but he was also very bad at pistol marksmanship because he missed his heart and said blew apart one of his lungs,

doing him to a very slow, horrible, and painful death.

Something he made sure to apologize for when people came running into his room at the sound of a gunshot.

See, if only they had Aubrey Matarin on this ship, he could have been saved.

That's right.

I mean, maybe he shouldn't have been saved.

Remember, the battle is still going on, and the ships and his men are actively engaged in combat as he attempts suicide.

So, as people stand there confused, not really believing that this shit had just happened, the command structure completely breaks down due to the small fact that the Allied commander had just self-connected to God's Wi-Fi.

The sailors didn't come running because of the sound of the gunshot.

They just heard that song by logic playing in the background.

I don't want to be alone.

I just want to die today.

I mean, it's just the idea of

basically missing with what sounds like a small caliber pistol and then people be like, oh, terribly sorry.

Like, he's like slumped in a chair, like, oh, sorry about the mess.

I should have been dead by now.

The squadron, confused, broke off the attack without orders, unsure of what else to do.

The other commanders went to visit Price as he lay screaming and dying in bad pain at the surgeon's cabin.

The French commander was the highest-ranking man left and should have been put in command, but he was like suffering from this mysterious illness.

I mean, it's like a mix of cholera and dysentery.

It also sounds like he's just cholera and dysentery.

Effectively an invalid.

Yeah, pretty much.

He's an old man who's constantly coughing up blood and shitting himself.

So the British captain Sir Frederick Nicholson was tasked with solving this clusterfuck.

Then Price politely asked the surgeon to kill him so he'd be put out of his misery.

And the surgeon decided to overdose him with a massive amount of morphine.

Oh, that

felt really good for a couple of seconds first, though.

The man may have lived as a British naval officer, but he died as a Midwest suburbanite.

Now, the officers in charge didn't much care for Price, but the sailors are pretty demoralized by, you know, their commander killing themselves.

It's not a really good sign of how things are going to go.

He's like, hey, guys,

I got to retire to handle something really quickly.

And then it's like, kaboom.

Yeah.

And I'm going to go cash in my nine-millimeter pension room.

It's like the Steve Harvey clip.

I don't know about killed myself.

It's just like, I think about this.

It's like, you imagine being like lower enlisted sailor or whatever on this.

And it's just like, well, he got so mad at what's going on that he killed himself.

And now we've got a a 90-year-old French guy who is completely unable to stand in charge of us.

Great system we got here, guys.

This is really setting us up for success.

And honestly, Commander mysteriously kills himself in the middle of battle.

It's definitely something you'd expect for the Russian side.

Yeah.

Right, but I mean,

the thing is, I think the operative concern here is that the battle is still

going.

Imagine you're like, so why are we calling off the attack?

Oh, Commander killed himself.

Like, fucking cry.

Like, I'm just going to take a dive into the frozen waters.

You see, this battle would have went so much differently if they had invented madri by then you know like men's mental health beer

check in on your lads yeah you know prince harry wasn't alive yeah he couldn't check in on his blokes

no nobody checked in on price so price clapped himself

sometimes it's that 21 a day sometimes it's just that one guy in the boat once again if only the high performance podcast had been around then he would have you know checked in on his blokes had a can of madri you know but nicholson kind of had no choice but to continue continue planning the attack due to the fact that Price had gotten them into this whole fucking thing.

Nicholson's orders were still to destroy the Aurora.

Then, as if that didn't have enough problems, the ship Forte broke down, forcing it to be towed by another ship, the Virago.

So now their navy is towing itself.

Wasn't the Aurora kind of destroying itself?

I mean,

it's sitting at port with all of its guns taken out for the most part.

They're kind of scrapping it for defensive materials.

Just leave.

You can just go away.

Like, hit the bricks.

But But now with Price dead, Nicholson in charge, and everyone second-guessing this whole war thing, an argument broke out between the British and the French.

The French contended that this entire thing was wildly out of control, spiraling further, and most importantly, pointless.

The mission was to destroy the Aurora, not whatever the fuck this has turned into.

And full-on assaulting a port with all of their ships is going to put them in serious danger even if they succeeded.

The losses wouldn't be worth it, even if they did manage to take out the Aurora.

So Nicholson came up with a plan, using a landing force to get the shore, take out the Russian batteries, haul artillery ashore to counter-battery the other Russian cannons, and take the heat off of them with the squadron.

Only after the batteries were taken on land would the ships move in and bomb the shit out of Petropolovsk proper.

In a classic case of what we call mission creep, the goal was now to conquer Petropovlovsk.

Mind you, they're doing this without consulting.

anyone.

But also like situations changed, gotta get, you know, consult for more orders would be a great excuse to go fuck off for for like three months because how long it takes to get messages to the side.

Exactly.

This head is such an easy out.

To the French, this plan seemed even crazier than prices, and the French had the larger ground contingent, which meant their Marines would be doing most of the dying.

Nicholson, most importantly, lacked the command authority to just tell Du Poin to do what he wanted.

There was no unified command structure.

The French could say no at any time.

But one thing kept them following Nicholson's orders, and it's probably something we can all see coming.

Nicholson put the battle orders to a vote, making sure to point out that failing to go to battle would make the entire squadron look like cowards.

So

you're going to vote no, you a bitch.

I mean,

what are you?

You don't want to die?

What are you kind of pussy?

Exactly.

I mean, also, we've talked already enough on this show about the sort of like not being alive impulse that some of these people have that's like, all right, I guess.

This is just part and parcel of your job.

You know, it's like, hey, it was supposed to be go harass and annoy a ship in the ocean sea, open seas.

Now it's take over a city in one of the most remote parts of Russia.

Those are like the same thing.

Convince French Marines to fight.

Yeah, it's going to be all right.

I wish we had drops in this studio so we could play the thought about killing myself.

You can drop it in and post.

Of course, we've got the clip of that.

I do like the idea that everybody's voting is like, well, to be fair, dying in this battle is a lot easier than having to sail all the way back.

And DuPoin was like the most vigorous opponent to this plan.

But after being called a coward if he voted no, he's like, Well, now we have to vote and go ahead.

He immediately pressured all of his French officers to vote in favor after saying how bad of an idea.

Can you imagine being one of those officers and be like, Well, yeah, it's easy for you to say you're like lying in your bed, yelling at people and having your bedpan changed every 15 minutes?

Like, we're the ones who actually have to disembark and get shot at.

Yeah, the ship being captained by Grandpa Bucket.

I should point out before going into battle, the squadron came to the mouth of the Russian port and shook Price's dead body directly into the water.

It's point out with a quote, very little ceremony.

Yeah, he belongs to the sea now.

So the squadron steamed or was towed into port, guns blazing, heading for the closest Russian batteries, while the Virago, who was towing the Forte, who was in turn towing 15 paddle boats loaded up with French Marines, who had the mission to make landfall and begin capturing batteries on foot, trying to blow up as many cannons as possible to make it safe for the rest of the squadron.

They landed on the right side of the port, charging ashore and took several batteries.

Most of the reason for the success was simply surprise.

The Russians didn't think they would ever be dealing with a straight-up ground invasion because it's nuts.

And their cobbled together force of soldiers, sailors, townspeople, and fucking wolf hunters probably wasn't expecting it.

But as the French Marines began to blow up cannons, the Russians mounted a counter-attack by anyone who was in the area.

They got shot, stabbed, and beaten to death.

And the French Marines quickly retreated under hail of gunfire, musket balls, and rocks back to their boats and paddled away.

Another landing party, this time made up of Brits and French, landed to the left of the port, aiming for a battery that housed five different cannons.

Like before, the initial landing worked wonders.

Marines and sailors sprinted ashore, chasing off gun crews and began setting the cannons on fire and blowing them up.

Then the Russians again ordered anyone that could walk or carry anything to join in on a counterattack and push them right off.

And this went on for 10 hours.

Landing parties hit the beach, took batteries, blew them up, then found themselves fighting every living thing in the town until they gave up and ran back to their boats, all under a massive amount of Russian support fire which ignored the squadron in the port entirely and focused on bombing the hell out of the landing parties.

At least until the same landing parties assaulted the cannons that were firing at them.

By the time the sun went down, Nicholson's first order of business was handled.

All the Russian batteries that were guarding the harbor had been taken out.

However, because it had taken so long, They couldn't follow it up with what they thought might be like a killing blow, like a full landing in daylight hours.

They're not going to do this shit at night in in the 1800s.

Instead, they withdrew for the night with a plan to attack again in the morning.

Meanwhile, the Russians didn't rest.

Zoevko ordered everyone who was still alive to get down to the harbor and start rebuilding throughout the night without rest.

By the time the sun came up, the Allied commanders were looking at fully rebuilt and rearmed batteries all across the harbor, making their entire first day of fighting completely meaningless.

Looking out of my fucking glasses and being like, god damn it.

This kicked all the broken shit in the ocean.

That kind of implies implies they just had like another 10 batteries worth of cannons just kind of lying around in case they needed them.

Well, they had a foundry.

They could just build them.

I mean, right, but the idea of building cannons overnight is something like, I don't know.

Maybe they can work that fast.

They get the Age of Empire hack, you know?

But then something strange happens.

As the Allied squadron is floating out there, they come across a small rowboat with three American whalers in it.

Obviously, these men were not a full whaling crew.

They were deserters or criminals that had been kicked off of a larger ship.

This is something that Nicholson completely ignored and just took them in.

The Americans had apparently been watching the battle the day before and told Nicholson, like, hey, you guys are doing it all wrong.

There's a way easier place to land to the north near Mount Nikolaivka, away from all those harbor guns, and then you can just go across by land.

Now, it doesn't dawn on any of them involved in this command structure that like, well, the Russians literally never go across to the city by land.

There has to be a good reason for that.

And the Americans are like, oh, we'll guide you.

We've totally done it before.

Nicholson decided this idea is much better than his own, and the French agreed.

So soon the Americans were leading them north.

Small problem, though.

The Americans had done this before, but it had been months ago before Zyvko had ordered the entire area to be reinforced.

So rather be no batteries at all waiting for them.

There's actually three.

And they covered the entire northern approach to the town.

The landing worked.

The three batteries were easily overwhelmed by a full force of 700 men who landed ashore.

They broke into three different columns and two marched towards Mount Nikolaivka, dragging artillery around with them, while the third marched towards Petropovlos proper, attempting to take the town from behind.

Everything was going so well, it seemed nobody realized that they were quickly moving away from their one advantage: the Navy.

They were moving so far inland, the Navy couldn't support them anymore.

The men on the ground are also discovering something else.

September in Kamchatka sucks.

It's hot, it's humid, it's wet, and it's muddy.

There's fucking mosquitoes everywhere.

And the soldiers were all still wearing their wool winter clothing.

Oh, that is a new level of swamp boss going on.

It's just like getting stuck up to their knees in this shit.

Because, like, it's cold.

It's below freezing at night, but it's still hot in the daytime.

It's really humid.

And yeah, like the terrain, because it's not fully frozen, it's just like bog land everywhere.

Yeah, and like they're getting stuck up to their knees in this shit, wearing like wool clothes and never-ending swarms of malaria mosquitoes.

Bog shit.

typically to make paths or you know ersatz roads and that they have to make washboard like they have to like put wood down and make a trail because like there just isn't anywhere solid to walk and it oftentimes just gets swamped anyway and you have to redo it all over again and then they start getting picked apart by sniper fire coming from russian hunters and i assume children riding mosquitoes these guys are completely prepared for this hellscape that they're fighting in because they live there like oh yeah we know this place sucks we love it exactly isn't it that is the most russian thing yeah It's like, well, you know what, it's horrible, but it's home.

And you know what?

It'll get better when it's minus 60.

Don't worry.

It's homable.

The hunters also aimed for officers first who are easy to pick out thanks to their uniforms.

Soon the poor fuckers slogging through that shit had no leadership.

They got confused.

They get lost.

Then if that wasn't all bad enough, they began to get assaulted on all sides by a growing number of Russian soldiers, sailors, townspeople, and swamp creatures.

Like, in a lot of cases, people are wounded and just fall face down to the mud and drown.

They run back to their boats as fast as they can, leaving hundreds of dead and wounded behind them as they go.

The march up the mountain was met with more of the same, and by 10 p.m.

that same night they landed, they managed to get back to their boats, and the squadron got away from the failed northern attack.

The Russians were rewarded by, you know, capturing swords and rifles and a British Royal Marine standard, which they had a little parade in town about.

And at this point, it's pretty clear to Nicholson that they were not going to be able to pull this off.

His French counterpart, DuPoin, was also getting sicker and sicker.

Oftentimes, he looks like he's about to die, but they had been saying that for months now.

Like the man looked like a corpse.

On September 7th, he decided to call it, pulling the squadron out of the port, bringing them back to the colonies in the western coast of what is today the U.S.

and Canada to refit and rearm.

But that wouldn't be the end of the fighting over Petropovlovsk.

The British and the French would return the next year only to find the Aurora and the entire Russian garrison had abandoned the port, evacuating inland at the first rumor of an incoming Allied fleet.

When they made landfall, the Allies found everyone gone.

Sailors, soldiers, civilians, except for one thing.

You want to guess what was left behind?

Wolves.

That standard?

Those two Americans were just chilling.

Ahab and Queque.

You guys need some trail assists?

Do you all need some guides?

It worked really well for us last time.

I know some rivers out here.

I built a canoe.

Jump like these star mops.

All the best sites.

I know the last British guys that we got left us a one-star review, but we think that's really unfair.

They're just chilling in the middle.

They had a French servant, just like living in the wreckage.

The Allies burned everything and left, still looking for the Aurora.

But they would never get their hands on it.

The Aurora roared out the war, safe from Allied attack.

And in the story of the Crimean War, it probably shouldn't be much of a surprise that from the Allied point of view, the story of the siege of Petroproflosk really doesn't ever get told.

After all, the Allies won the war and they have plenty of other victories to talk about, or failing that, heroically failed defeats like the Charge of the Light Brigade.

But for the Russian side, it was a story of a victory against all odds during a war they mostly got their teeth kicked in from the beginning to end.

Even if the victory is a minor one in a theater, that was so small in the grand scheme of things, it was almost meaningless.

For the rest of the life of the Russian Empire, they always made sure to have at least one ship named after the Petropavlovsk.

And because it's Russia we're talking about, most of those ships were lost in one comedically stupid way or another, including one that was killed during the infamous Voyage of the Damned.

The end.

Well,

I guess we could make fun of them, but then then I recall the U.S.

just trying to invade the Soviet Union in like 1918 or whatever and invading Siberia or invading the Russian Far East, and it went really poorly.

Yeah, we did a series on that one.

I recall.

And it involved being so cold that people's poop froze into a giant shitsicle.

I mean, I can recall seeing the mass grave where they repatriated their bodies to Alaska and be like, well, that sounds like it sucked.

Yeah.

Whenever they have to, when it says Americans, you know, veterans home from Siberia in a mass grave, there's a gigantic mound in the middle of the city.

You know, it went really well.

We're having a mound parade.

uh but fellas that is the siege of petropavlovsk uh how are you feeling after that one uh

i i can't believe that they're like yeah let's just like march through this like marshy bog lands and believe these three americans i'm just kind of having like a fugue state negative sense memory recall of all the mosquito incidents i can remember from being in alaska and times when i didn't either bring bug spray or enough bug spray

so yeah i don't feel for you because it's stupid in general but i i guess i feel for the humble guy who just gets ordered to go to land by the sort of, you know, depraved obstruct class we're talking about.

I feel bad, like, because, like, not for anybody involved, but it's like, look, Kamchaka is giving you every hint that you shouldn't fucking be there, Russian or British.

Like, this is indigenous mosquito land.

Yeah, he's.

I mean, that was a...

Doing it in a lot of ultra text.

Like,

was it the Polish journalist Richard Kapiszczinski said this one time about being in Vorkuta in like Siberia and the mining towns, like in summertime?

These, like, being in Siberia in summer is like the best proof you can find that nature thinks of us as pestilence and wants to rid itself of us forever.

And it's like, I can only imagine that, but 1850 something.

Yeah, I think we just need to let it be a self-governing mosquito territory.

Yeah, you can't see the mosquitoes because they're all in babe multicam.

But on this show, we do have some good questions from the Legion, which is if you support the show on Patreon, you can ask us a question either on Patreon or Discord.

You can attach it to a mosquito, ride it like a horse to over the border from one of the places we record from, and we will answer it on the the show mosquito pony express the mosquito pony express mosquito air mail the world's tiniest little letters and today's question is if you could transfer something common in europe to the united states what would it be uh healthcare and public transportation i assume i mean yeah uh hmm

i have one i have one an example for both ways actually um we could just americans just need to get back on having small cars like cars are too gigantic in the us it's ridiculous you don't like the giant truck that you can't see people when you run them over?

Joe's favorite car, the Dodge F-150.

Where my parents used to live in rural southern Indiana, like the roads were super wide because they're big American roads, but like the mega fuck off trucks have gotten so big that like you feel as though you're driving on British roads there now.

They're fucking

gigantic.

But I'd say in the opposite direction, I swear to you, outside of Poland, I have never seen box fans the way that we have in the U.S., like Lasko's.

And every time I, I've got some from the U.S.

on Transformers because you can't find them in Europe.

And every time people say, these are great.

These are amazing.

Where can I get them?

It's like Walmart, Home Depot, Lowe's, and a Transformer

because they just don't sell them.

I get it because we use them in Windows and the Windows are typically different construction.

But even when you put them on like, you have little prop feet and you put them on the floor, they're great.

The only thing I can think of is stuff like in the studio or like more or less construction fans, but they're like big, but...

Oh, you mean if you were going to bring something from the United States?

Yeah,

I said I had one in each direction.

So I had box fans from America to Europe and small cars.

Ceiling fans would be nice.

Fans in general.

I have yet to have an apartment in Europe that has a fan of any kind.

Ceiling fans, I just, I don't know,

they always get so disgusting.

You got to clean them.

Oh, obviously you clean them.

They still get disgusting.

Yeah.

Yeah, I would definitely give to America the European sensibility of being quiet on fucking public transport.

Like I was on a bus from Stonehenge on Saturday morning after seeing the summer solstice and it was like half six in the morning.

Everyone had been awake since at least 11 a.m the day before or 11 p.m the day before and traveled to salisbury and this woman's just like on her phone at full volume recounting everything she had eaten that day to the person on the other end of the phone and i'm like everyone here is about to fall asleep all the seats on this bus are too small because it's a bus that's used to bring children on school trips.

So like, I'm a big guy.

I couldn't really fit in the seats.

And about four feet to my right is just like a lady who's like, Yeah, and we had these beans on toast.

I didn't really like them, and it was like, Please be quiet.

I mean, nobody really needs to hear from Americans complaining about America when they're when you're abroad, in the sense, because you sound like a like, I don't know, weird, like, oh, I'm not one of them, but like, yeah, it's true.

We are really loud.

I mean, I definitely feel the stereotype of a lot of Americans.

I do keep my mouth shut on public transportation.

Me too.

Anybody who's been in public transportation can vouch for that fact.

Yeah, he's a big, tall American guy, but he doesn't talk for some reason.

Yeah.

Anyway, that is an episode of this podcast, but you host other podcasts, boys.

Plug those shows: Trash Future, What a Hell of a Way to Dad, Kill James Bond, No Gods, No Mayors.

Beneath the Skins Show about the history of everything, Tolture, the history of tattooing.

You can buy my photography and art books at beneath the skin shop.com.

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And until next time,

at first you don't succeed, kill yourself.

So to speak.