Episode 370 - Operation Frankton

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Hello and welcome to the Lions Load by Donkeys podcast.

I'm Joe.

With me is Tom and Nate.

Fellas, how are you doing?

I'm very happy to be in yet another in a sequence of dungeons that we've spent in this weekend.

This is a nice dungeon, though.

It's a basement, but it's very comfortable.

We did our live show yesterday.

I did two in the same venue and it was a lovely space.

Well, it will be when it's finished.

It's currently unfinished.

It's all concrete.

Basically concrete and dust floor, concrete ceilings.

We got to record in a bunker.

The acoustics reflect that.

The first day, there were 300 people in the room, and it was 33 degrees outside.

That's that's Celsius for the Americans.

So, probably about 90 Fahrenheit.

It was about 100 Fahrenheit in there, and about 100% humidity.

And I think it's going to take me about two weeks to recover.

I could see it as like a miasma in the air because I sat in the back of the room during the Trash Future set because I saw the crush of bodies at the front.

I was like, Absolutely not.

You go in tactical mode.

You're like, I want to be as close to the exit as I can when shit goes down.

I want to be as close to a source of fresh air as possible.

And there was none.

The stage is looking like a mirage.

You can see the air waving.

You could.

Like, you could see the heat coming off of people and Riley on stage looking like he was dying.

I mean, Riley eventually gave up on his glasses because he could not keep them from entirely fogging the entire time.

So, I mean, if that gives you any indication.

I'm really happy that ours wasn't that.

Like, it was like five or six degrees cooler when we went on.

And the only thing that nearly happened to us was Tom almost falling off the incomplete backstage.

Yeah, yeah.

I like back at one stage, my chair nearly fell off the stage.

But I did very much enjoy that like shout out to Mooch for providing a space that is the closest thing to podcasting in 1993 in Sarajevo.

I mean, I was thinking about it more from the perspective of we've made so many references to like the infinity number of bunkers in Albania.

And the joke always leads to, we should record inside a bunker and now we have, effectively.

But same with me.

I was sitting on stage and I heard my chair kind of creaking, and I was like, this sounds like the sound a chair makes before it falls apart.

And I'm like, I'm just embracing it.

I'm glad that we finally flew the black eagle flag in the back of the

podcast, and we finally did our Albanian bunker show, but it would just happen to be in London.

The second

version of the Albanian Eagle handshake.

Well, I mean, at the end of the day, you know, we saw greater Albania, but that's not what we're talking about today, I presume, unless you're going to segue into this being an episode about Albania.

No, I figured we're in the UK.

We should talk a little bit about a certain kind of British guy.

But I need to preface this with, I'm going to tell you something, and I want you to think what it is.

All right.

British combat kayak.

That is something that only the British government could come up with in, yeah, like the 1920s.

I think it's an incredible idea.

I mean, I'm trying to think of when they would need kayaks and sort of, you know, riverine insertions like that.

And I suppose we're probably World War II era.

That would be my best guess.

You got it.

Like Burma, New Guinea, things along those lines.

You would think that, wouldn't you?

Oh, no.

Are you going to tell me it's like Algeria or something?

It's France.

All great.

All right.

Traveling up the Seine in a kayak.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm going to show these people.

Paddling through the muck of human shit that is the Seine.

Yeah, on the Muz in a kayak.

You know, half of the kayak is filled with wine.

It's technically the ballast.

But before we get there, we have to talk a little bit why British commandos rode into battle on kayaks against the German Navy.

Obviously, Germany and Japan were allies during World War II.

And this is something that, for some reason, is often left behind for a lot of people to talk about World War II.

And that is the logistical support between the two of them.

For some reason, like the popular narrative of World War II, you never really hear how the Germans and the Japanese actually helped one another.

It's kind of like thrown in the trash for the ease of listening, I suppose.

But by 1942, the Allies were trying to strangle off support, mainly coming from Japan and into other Nazi-occupied parts of Europe in the form of oil and rubber, mostly, loaded onto ships and sailed into Nazi-controlled port of Bordeaux.

From there, Germany could and did transport the Japanese imperial goods to Italy and other parts of their Nazi empire.

This turned the German Navy station there into what effect.

effectively was the world's most heavily armed blockade runners at the time.

We talk about blockade runners normally in the context of like the Confederacy,

but yeah, tens of thousands of pounds of materials useful for the fascist war effort made it into Bordeaux per month.

And as you can tell, that it's 1942 in this story, this is generally known as the era of the Axis, beating the living shit out of the Allies.

Meaning, more and more sources for their goods are going to be open as Japan advances across Asia, which in turn are shipped to Germany, and Germany then uses those to better beat the shit out of the Allies.

Germany in turn sent Japan manufacturing equipment and sometimes entire prototypes stuffed into like submarines and ships.

famously, they try to send like a Measure Schmidt 262 jet piece by piece.

It's like that Johnny Cash song, One Piece at a Time, just like building the world's most Frankenstein monster jet fighter.

You've talked about how you could smuggle a fighter jet in, you know, checked bags, multiple people taking multiple flights, eventually you reassemble it.

These guys just did it in a submarine.

Yeah.

Yeah, pretty much.

This is my emotional support jet turbine.

You can't take it away from me.

All of the submariners are just like squished against the wall because the turbine is taking up so much space.

Yep.

But this is in, you know, the era of commando raids

because we love a good commando raid, or as Churchill dubbed it, the concept of combined arms, which means something very different in the modern sense.

We talked about the raid at St.

Nazaire.

That just happened.

And remember, everyone believed, go back in time to when we did that episode, everyone believed that was a success.

Right.

Which it kind of was if you squinted really hard.

The idea that different branches could work together to conduct either a broad offensive or a surgical strike like Commando Raid was kind of new.

And even though the British had pulled it off, arguably since and at Nazair, there's no real doctrine for that kind of thing, no real planning method.

It was mostly vibes-based.

Throw enough shit to the wall, see what sticks, which isn't how you should generally run a military.

Yeah, vibes-based warfare is not a good idea unless you're like wearing fake knockoff Russian Adidas.

Like I am currently.

Yeah, I mean, I would say, obviously, like in a desperate situation, you know, the sort of

the immediate thing that comes to mind, you know, popularized in the not really great film Saving Private Ryan is the sticky bomb, that kind of a thing.

It's like, you know, small things, okay, make do with what you've got, great.

But the idea of like, you know, looking months, years ahead and how you're planning, procuring stuff, and you're like, hey, let's just see what happens.

Yeah.

I kind of don't want to be on one of the like, let's see what happens.

And they're like, hey, what if we, what if we took big jungle cats and put them in a submarine, sneak them in, cause chaos in the port?

Someone's got to be in that submarine with the jungle cats, you know what I mean?

Nate, I have some bad news for you because technically the war we fought in was vibes-based.

Yeah.

Let him who has not been in the situation to be told you have to wear this microphone that'll tell you where you're getting shot at from as long as you stay perfectly still and face the same direction after getting shot at.

Good news.

Every time it says you're getting shot at from every direction, we should give this company $10 billion.

I mean, they just sat in a shipping container, but like notionally we were supposed to be wearing them.

It didn't happen.

You experienced what it's like to take damage in Call of Duty.

The screen just goes progressively red.

I mean, I love that concept because it was basically extrapolating from the idea of if you put one on a Humvee, for example, and it's like, oh, you're in a convoy and you hit sniper fire.

It's like, it'll tell you where the shot came from based on the sort of acoustics, but like slightly more stationary in an armored vehicle than if you're wearing it on your belt.

And notionally speaking, it's like, oh, we're taking sniper fire.

Stand perfectly still.

Don't drop to the ground.

Don't take cover.

Don't change direction.

And then maybe you'll find out where it came from as the computer's just going,

I'm under fire.

I just immediately start P-posing.

Yeah, exactly.

It's like, don't worry, we've got the best Game Boy Advanced processor, and this thing is going to tell you as soon as the load screen finishes.

It's going to give you the missing no air from Pokemon.

Turning on night vision mode on the fucking Game Boy camera and scanning the horizon for the Taliban.

So eventually they established what was called the Combined Operations Headquarters.

And as we have pointed out multiple times by now, this was led by eventually Louis Mountbatten.

So everybody's favorite first astronaut

of the IRA.

Inside the COHQ, as it was called, is probably the much more and well-known group, the Special Operations Executive, or SOE.

The COHQ had a litany of other different committees to pitch ideas for operations, other committees to look at them and decide if they were decent.

And then they'd be kicked over to a planning committee until everything was eventually approved by the COHQ HQ Command Staff, with final approval being left to astronaut Mountbatten and Prime Minister Churchill personally.

It's amazing how often Louis Mountbatten shows up just at random points.

And every time his hands are on something, it fails.

Yep.

Every single time.

Like famously, the Dieppe raid.

And he never gets in trouble for any of it.

Again, I need to point out that he was put in this position because he was a normal officer within the Royal Navy on ships, but he constantly did terribly.

All of his professional reviews were sub-par, but they couldn't fire him.

Louis Mountbatten famously never had a successful naval expedition.

I would argue you had precisely one.

So Streak just went on unbroken his entire career until I guess he created a reverse seaplane.

Yeah, exactly.

Now, if this sounds like something of like an assembly line of military planning, that was the goal, like to make it flow, you know?

And Mountbatten's operational goal was to launch one raid or SOE type mission per week.

He never quite got there because, you know, he was busy doing other things to children.

Yeah.

But

I mean, allegedly.

No, it's not allegedly.

He's dead.

You can say what you're doing.

Yeah, you can't liable to dead.

But I mean, like, I know that every time they'll ever do an inquiry about you, they'll just be like, oh, we'll never know.

No, because we refuse to make the people who do know testify.

Every time they do an inquiry, it's like, no, he just really liked hanging out at home.

Homes.

Yeah, he just really liked specifically hanging out at Concord boys' home.

Yep.

And it was into this system that Roundell Cecil Palmer, Lord Selburn, was spat into.

Spat being the correct term to what you do to a man called Lord Selburn.

Lord Selburn was a Tory elected into the Commons, but then his dad died, leaving the family Earldon open, which he then stepped into, which meant despite that he just got into government and was kind of just a fail son, he immediately became the Minister for Economic Warfare due to his dad dying.

Yeah, yeah.

And uh, Lord, what's it called?

Uh, peerages definitely don't run this way anymore.

I was gonna say, the ministry for economic warfare sounds like an office that the Tories have now, but now it's just directed toward their own people.

I mean,

I mean, one of the things that I've noticed too is like this will happen.

You'll hear like somebody loses their seat, you know, in the commons, and so they immediately get made a lord and then get put right back into government.

It's sort of like if, I don't know, the best way I could describe it is like if Joe Lieberman loses his seat in the United States, and so they just turn around and just install him as governor somehow or install him as the secretary of it.

But the level of just cynicism involved,

it was worse then.

Didn't you know he's the Lord of Delaware?

There is a Lord of Delaware, but he can't remember his name, so just leave him alone.

Keep forgetting he's in Delaware.

On top of just becoming a minister, he also became the head of the SOE off the drop of a hat.

Now, this is all despite him not having a single solitary second of military experience or training.

And to his credit, I have to admit, he had a pretty good idea right off the bat.

Namely, hey, we should do something about all those Nazi blockade runners making it into Bordeaux, because this is something that everybody else had kind of just been like, there's no good way we can handle this, so we should just ignore it.

At the time he suggested this to COHQ, there was something like 10 German ships at port in Bordeaux offloading their cargo, and Intel suggested that there was even more coming in.

So Lord Selborne said, you know, we should wait until they all show up and hit them while they're all at port.

The problem, of course, was the Navy said it was far too risky to get close enough to bombard it, and the Air Force said there was no way they could bomb the ships at port while also not bombing the shit out of the surrounding population of French civilians.

To make matters worse, due to location and the very heavy defenses in the area, the COHQ thought that any actual land and sea operation to take out the port would be like D-Day.

It would require like 50,000 men and dozens of ships.

So no serious thought was ever put into the idea.

Yeah, it's never a good time to go camping with 10,000 of your friends, and there's never a great time to go to the beach with 5,000 or 50,000 of your friends.

Yeah, history says it's normally not a good thing.

Yeah.

Enter something called the Combined Operations Development Center under the command of Captain T.A.

Hussey.

Loki, name alerts non-stop this entire episode.

Although I have to say, it is very funny that Mount Batten immediately getting outshone by like a 23-year-old named Crispin or whatever his name was.

My name is Lord Selborne.

This is my dog, Michaela.

I kiss her on the mouth.

Being outshone by Lord Hussey, who is the fucking military version of Quinton Chris.

I mean,

at the end of the day, it's like that person doing 501% above failure is probably better than many of the storied names that we know from this era.

Certainly Batten higher average than Mount Batten.

This was largely a dead office at the time.

It was something like, are you guys familiar with the term the rubber room?

And not by like a psych ward situation?

No.

It's kind of a place they send teachers if they can't fire.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think I weirdly, like, I've heard this used in just from living here in British English a bit, but like, yeah, it doesn't quite mean the exact same thing that we do, but sort of like a like go and be left alone room sort of thing.

They can't fire you, but they, so they just stick you somewhere where you don't do anything for a really long time.

That's like my old maths teacher who at the time I was in school, he was a roaring alcoholic.

He's not anymore.

But I remember one morning we had like maths at like 10 in the morning and he came in stinking of drink and puked in the foiling camera and then turned around and proceeded to teach the lesson.

Most normal Irish high school ever in Irish high school.

Or if you watch Silicon Valley, it's the roof where they just go to collect dividends or whatever.

This office had no money, no power, and it really did just seem like the place they stuck operations officers until they found a better place for them.

Maybe as a resume bullet or something.

I'm sure there's something officers in the U.S.

Army do, but I don't know.

Well, I mean, yeah, I mean, they saw you in the, in in the, basically, in battalion headquarters, like in the three shot, but I'm just laughing too because I'm like, I love the idea that your military career gets you stationed in the exact same kind of position as like a mafia guy's girlfriend in like a government job in New Jersey or something.

It's like, hey, yo, you don't got to do anything.

Just show up to work on time.

Hey.

It was here that Major Herbert Hassler was stuck after already being showered with awards for actions in the war so far.

Since he'd gotten assigned to the development center, all he had done was write a paper about how like a small sabotage team riding on kayaks could probably easily penetrate

a heavily defended harbor if they planted magnetic bombs on the ships within and then got out, completely getting away from any direct combat.

We aren't entirely sure who took a look at Hassler's paper first and decided to grab him, but the credit is often given a mountain batten.

I really don't buy that because he doesn't seem like the kind of guy who's reading weird policy papers floating up from the basement.

Well,

he's reading other weird things floating up from the basement.

Yeah, like Hassler's kayak sounds like the world's most homophobic River Ryan expedition.

It's like you go to like, you know, adventure camp and you

have people just yell homophobic slurs at you non-stop.

Or Hassler's kayak is just a thing that Sambankman Fried is terrified of.

If

the kayak becomes sentient, it'll have impossible powers.

It'll want to subjugate all of us.

Getting subjugated by my kayak.

Rather, I think it wasn't him because Hassler's paper had been submitted a while before and COHQ had already passed passed on it.

That tells me someone else remembered it existed and along with Lord Selburn's whole Bordeaux situation and they remembered the paper and they gave it to Mount Bennett and then he promptly took credit for it because he also always does that.

He always takes credits for good ideas but then when the plan fails, it's always someone else's idea.

I mean, that's just, you know, if you are in a completely impenetrable position of power with no recourse to your mistakes, you just do that.

I can think of a recourse, but it's not coming for several decades.

But lying in wait off the Irish coast, some recourse.

Mind my life, isn't some recourse.

Either way, soon afterwards, the world's first yacht astronaut then sent for Hassler to talk to him about this kayak paper that he wrote.

However, Hassler's plan required a kind of boat or kayak that simply did not exist.

It was supposed to be foldable.

and rubberized with canvas sides and a hard bottom, able to carry heavy equipment without collapsing, and a flat, rigid bottom so it could be in shallow water.

And the reason why it'd be folded up and things of that nature is because it needed to fit inside of a submarine.

Bro, I was just trying to invent the fucking combat crocs.

I mean, I just part of me is like, well, you just put like a trailer on the back of a submarine.

It kind of defeats the purpose.

What if you gave a submarine to a redneck?

He's going to find out a way to carry his kids in the back.

The rednecks in the submarine slide over.

I'm on heroin.

Put a camper top on the submarine.

It's all right.

It won't affect the buoyancy at all.

but you know hasler's like okay well i'll just find a way to build them he contracted out to a local woodworker to start building them and thus was born the cockle mark ii uh the reason why it was a mark two is because he tried to build a mark one and it failed so we're on a part two surprise surprise do you know how the first one failed it collapsed in the middle yeah uh because he wanted something that foldable and light but rigid on the bottom where you could carry bombs and stuff and it turned out that uh that's harder than you'd think to have.

But he would also need to staff the boats and man the cockles.

The Royal Marine Boom Patrol Detachment was formed.

This is sometimes said where the Royal Special Boat Service comes from.

Okay.

But at the time, they're the Boom Patrol.

Like booms, like buoys, like

it sounds really cool if you think of it in the American English way.

I've heard there's a large father and son duo from New Jersey who are very excited about this.

And there is also a small fat child from Miami who is also involved.

Yeah, there's a reason why there's actually a statue in Trafalgar Square for the Rizzler who was killed during World War II

doing the sad boom at his funeral.

Not all people know the IRA killed Lord Mountbatten because they wanted to save the Rizzler.

I'm still just thinking tonight.

I'm just like, yeah, the Boom Patrol sounds like someone tried to make a counterfeit Vangu Boys in the United States.

With that, the Royal Marines put out an announcement they're looking for men to volunteer for a new special service, but they couldn't tell them anything other than they were looking for men that were, quote, indifferent to personal safety and, quote, without strong family ties.

Did they not say anything about you should be able to swim?

Nope.

No, there were several people they had to teach how to swim when they showed up.

Soldier, we hear you're a loser.

Get in.

We hear you hate life and have no family ties.

You're indifferent to personal safety.

Get in, loser.

We're going kayaking.

This is just how Nerve fucking recruited the kids for the Evigillion Project.

Are you suicidal?

I mean, it's just, yeah, I guess it's like, yeah, I'm so indifferent to life.

I never learned how to swim.

You're the man for this.

But I would want to know how to swim if they were going to put me in the folding kayak personally.

Hassler himself wanted men who were unmarried, a combination of street smart and book smart, and what he described as, quote, scallywags.

I mean, this is going to sound really fucked up, and I'm not trying to make this in a glib way, but like, I'm sure Mountbatten knows how to find people like that.

I mean, we are recording in Soho.

Sure, you're like, we need some book smart, street smart, young scallywags who are indifferent to personal safety.

And Lord Bill Mountbatten will be like, I call that Tuesday.

Let me call my friend Fagan.

Hassler has to continuously remind his boss, like, sir, they have to be 17 or older.

In his words, he wanted Oxford-educated street fighting pirates,

which is a vibe, I suppose.

This is the era where that guy exists, to be fair.

Yeah, but I mean, at the end of the day, it's just sort of like, invariably, it's going to be like, oh, we've drowned 15 guys named Crispin yet again.

Let's dip into our role of guys named Hoyt.

All my Crispin's gone.

I mean, unfortunately, it's a little bit, it's been too long and hot of a weekend for me to remember other sort of stereotypical posh names in British English.

Horatio.

I feel like that one's

Holden.

No, that's Holden Hold.

Holden.

Holden.

Major

Lieutenant Holden Bloodfeast of Oxford.

I mean, there's

your Hugos, your Crispins, your Quentins, your

one that all of those sort of like Guardian columnists always love to use as an example of.

So go by like TA, perhaps.

No, I mean, like Hassler tests.

It's one of those things where it's like, I kind of purged all of this knowledge from my brain since leaving the UK.

So I was like, I guess it's just not coming back.

Yeah, you're just instead of knowing about like Olibex migration patterns,

collecting weird diseases.

No, no, they have a ton of volunteers.

Unfortunately, none of them have any history with boats or even swimming.

The reason for this is that men with any background with those have already been pulled into the UK's various special units for boatsmen or swimmers or the navy.

So Hasser would have to create them from nothing.

Many of the men had no idea how to swim, so their sergeant major, nicknamed Bungie,

just kept taking them out of the main bungie.

Good get on boats.

Get on the bungee boat.

Just all these people talk like Boris Johnson.

I mean, like, I'm surely they could find like disciplinary records from Oxford and find people who were, you know, who were sanctioned for narrow boat-based perversion.

And they'd be like, these are all your guys right here.

But this is like, I remember my dad told me because he used to live in the UK in the 80s.

And it was obviously a time where being Irish wasn't a very popular thing.

There's a reason there's no bins on the northern side of the Jubilee line.

But

he was working with these guys, these English guys.

He was like fascinated with like, oh, you know, like, they're all so like prim and proper.

And he realized they're very posh.

But one of them invited him for a weekend in his family's home it's in the home counties it was like a manor house and he met this guy's little brother who's a guy called blubs who wore a cape because he had been elected head boy at school and his first action was to bring back the uh that the head boy had to wear a cape i mean and the reason he told me this story is we're watching the news and jason and jacob rees mog was on tv and my dad goes oh he looks like blubs and i was like he looks like he'd wear a cape i will like i don't know much about british politics i don't know much about Jason, Jacob Reesmog, but he does look like a guy who owns a cape.

Yes.

There was the thing where Jacob Reesmog has always been a Tory even since he was like 12, and he was interviewed on TV when he was 12, basically being like, you know, I want to study Austrian economics or something.

Like, whatever that kind of thing.

I really want to make the train suck.

Everything should be back on the gold standard, but like he doesn't look that different now that he did when he was 12.

Like, genuinely, in affect, the...

The just sort of weird woodenness.

Also, the fact that

he's not even that old.

He's not.

He was 12 in like 1981.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's so weird.

Like, Jacob Reesmog and all all the members of Blur are the same age.

Blur and Blob.

I'd like posters of Morrissey Oasis, and he just had like daguerreotypes of Friedrich Hayek.

Well, I mean, in 1981, it probably would have been like the Human League or something like that.

Printouts of incredibly anti-Semitic French literature.

Yeah, obviously, Jacob Reese Mogg and like, I like a different Human League, and it's just like early days eugenesis text.

Oh,

Sergeant Major Bungee would take all these guys out into a boat that didn't know how to swim and just throw them into the water until they figured it out, which is how my dad taught me how to swim.

I do not recommend it.

It made me afraid of water until I was like 16.

It's like we said before, Armenians are hydrophobic.

It's like we all have rabies.

Are all built like hedgehogs?

You're not supposed to leave the ground and you're not supposed to enter bodies of water either, I guess.

We're supposed to just walk over mountains forever.

The problem is when it came to the boat aspect is Hasser wasn't exactly a boat guy either.

And the boat they were training on, remember, had never been used before.

So there's no expert in this field.

So everyone was just kind of learning on the job and then winging it.

And this worked better than you'd think.

It was hardly foolproof, though.

This is an entry from Hassler's diary on July 24th, 1943.

Quote, the new troops almost drowned themselves again.

They didn't live in Royal Marine barracks either, but rather they just kind of lived in a small coastal village couching across people's houses.

And because of their training one officer and one soldier per kayak, kayak, that meant there was no real officer or enlisted man difference.

They all had the same jobs.

All of their training was exactly the same.

And some of the officers in the first batch of volunteers withdrew from training because they just couldn't put up with having to live alongside an enlisted person.

That was no comment.

I mean, like, I think back in those days, this just was particularly in the UK, but I think also in the U.S., it was just a lot more like.

explicitly like oh no this is officer business you have your officer's mess you have your officers club you have all this stuff a lot of people It was always bad in America.

No, especially the well, the Navy was always bad.

The Navy's still in the battle.

But the Army in the U.S.

was always like officers and enlisted people are all pretty much the same treated.

They used to have more like explicit institution things for officers, and those have all gone away.

But my impression, I've obviously no experience with the British military, but my impression from friends who were in is that now it's still very much.

I can imagine the weird class system of the U.K.

carries perfectly into the military.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, like, every officer's name Jaunty, and every, you know, every sergeant major is named Baz Gaz or whatever.

Bungie.

Well, the Bungie, those kinds of nicknames, like, kind of indicate way more of the sort of fanciness, you know, like.

This is Sergeant Major Bungey.

This is my peer, first Sergeant Big Balls.

Yeah, yeah.

It's just like, yeah, everyone's like, yeah, Bungie or Floppers or something like that.

They all have these goofy nicknames.

That is 100% real.

Sergeant Big Balls.

By September, the men had been training for months, and they still pretty much sucked at their job.

It turns out that training a bunch of non-seamen in seamanship, nighttime navigation, and long-distance rowing takes a lot of time, significantly more than a couple months.

It probably doesn't help that you're doing it in those collapsible shipping container things.

You know what I mean?

Like, you know, the boxes, you get the palletized boxes, you can fold up.

You're like, what if we put a little bit of caulk ceiling on those and you try to row them like a boat?

I mean, I imagine if you had a regular boat, learning the fundamentals would probably be easier.

A hassler with a little fold, like the

burns and seems like the spruce goose is like, get in.

It's a shitty foldable claw.

It's a little spruce, moose, bow.

Yeah, I mean, I feel like all of this feels as though it's just being set up for failure.

Also, where is it that they're, what part of the UK is it that they're training in?

I believe they're in the southern UK at this point.

Okay.

They move around a bit, but yeah.

I'm just imagining them off like the Cornish coast, famous for great weather all the time.

They do complain about bad weather constantly, but Hassler has a good point.

He's like, well, you know, where we're going, the weather's also going to be shit.

Yeah.

Because I should put out the mission they eventually get happens in the winter.

Yeah, and then like this one in the Bay of Biscay or whatever, that area is kind of in the wintertime, it's pretty garbage.

Hasl and others are pushing for a real mission for these guys anyway, with one officer saying, Provided it's a job that does not require very good navigation or seamanship, I think they're fine.

It doesn't require any of the skills you normally would expect from a guy on a boat.

These boat guys are really uh, you know, we should probably have a car-based mission, yeah.

I mean, like, also, but it sounds like based on how they're going to deploy them and use them, it's like a, you know, a squadron or detachment-sized element of Tom Hanks floating on the, what is it, like Detritus Port-a-John that washes up on the island in Survivor, or what is it?

Not Castaway.

Castaway.

Survivor would be a funnier combination there, but no, the castaway, yeah.

It's just like, these don't even really sound like boats.

They just sound like things you cling to and hope that you drift to land.

So we're in agreement.

He fucked that volleyball, right?

I've never seen it.

You've never seen it.

No.

He's trapped on island with a volleyball that became his best friend for like years.

They're friends with benefits.

I haven't seen like loads of real.

I've never seen, up until relatively recently, I've never seen Gladiator.

I've never seen the Godfather Here's the thing about Castaway, right?

In a lot of ways, it's not a bad movie.

It gets pretty goofy at the end in terms of the way that kind of resolves the plot.

The plane crash scene is genuinely one of the freakiest plane crashes I've ever seen in a film.

Like it's terrifying.

Like it's basically implied that somebody, it's filmed in 2000s, so this is pre-you know, chargeable vapes, but someone

like uh didn't mark lithium batteries correctly and that causes an explosion on the plane during a storm.

And you kind of see it from the from the perspective of like, but like one of the pilots trying to help Tom Hanks' character then gets thrown up against the and breaks his neck and it's really violent.

And then like you see through the cockpit of like, just, oh fuck, we're heading straight into the ocean.

Like, it's genuinely terrifying.

And I don't know, it's like weird to think of like, oh, yeah, but then it's also this heartwarming movie about a man who falls in love with a volleyball.

My opinion is he claps volleyball cheeks.

He also does dental surgery on himself with an ice skate, I think.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And now you have to have the NHS to do that.

Fuck it.

I feel it.

God damn it.

Now, Hassler was aware of the previous Bordeaux plan, which had been given the name Operation Frankton, and he pushed for that to be his boy's first mission.

Another important part of this operation is, well, the water and the importance of tides, the phases of the moon, you know, all that shit that you learn in school.

That sounds pretty science fiction when you think about it for more than a few seconds.

Any plan would need to be...

you know, nestled into that sweet spot of spring tides when the water rises higher than normal and the strength of the tides both coming in and out of the Garand estuary was at its highest.

The benefit, of course, is that the phase of the new moon also makes it pitch dark.

So easier to hide a kayak board assault team.

But one presumes that given the level of defense put up here by the Germans that like they're also aware of the concept of tides and phases of the moon.

There's probably like a big overlap of like, this is probably when some shit's going to happen.

100%.

Yeah, we called this the Incheon landings, except the people who should have been aware of this were like, it'll never happen.

Yeah.

Couldn't be us.

It was considered a a very hard thing to plan in such a small timeline and bearing a very, very heavily defended and well-prepared enemy and target.

Hassler sat down, jotted out a detailed plan in a couple hours, and turned in his proposal.

This plan involved using that tide window, dropping three kayaks from a mothership, which was going to be, at first it was thought to be a plane, but then they switched to be a submarine.

And Hassler thought that that should work.

Two men in each kayak.

at the mouth of the river in pitch darkness.

They would paddle from the estuary into Bordeaux, a trip that would take four nights, lay charges on the eight boats harbored there, blow them, and then paddle all the way back out.

Now, remember, the British military generally thought this would take tens of thousands of men, and then Hassler just scribbled up a plan that said, nah, I'll do it with six.

You know, I appreciate the audacity and the pure pig-headedness.

Yeah.

It's obviously going to work.

Flawlessly.

COHQ and pretty much everyone else saw tons of problems with this plan right from the beginning.

For starters, six men and three kayaks is a comically small force to use.

The men had never deployed the kayaks in the open ocean from a submarine before, either.

And paddling for what would be over a week would require some level of human endurance that nobody was entirely sure even existed.

The over a week part is what's got me.

Like the rest of them, like, yeah, you could probably train for this, but I didn't realize that it was going to be like, you know, the person crossing the ocean in a kayak record.

Yeah.

Basically.

Yeah, pretty much.

It's like, we're going to launch from a place the Germans will never expect, Greenland.

Hessler didn't see any of this as a problem.

He thought the small force would be hard to detect, but large enough to carry the amount of explosives they would need.

And as for the endurance, well, his men, by all accounts, were already freakishly in shape because that was the one kind of training they had been doing constantly.

So he figured if anybody could pull it off, it should be them.

Mount Batten quickly approved the plan, noting that it was highly unlikely that any of the men would survive and told Hassler that.

And he said, you should probably tell your men.

He was like, nah.

I mean, not surprised they recruited from like private schools because they're like, oh, you know, like, we need the best rowers in the country.

We need the best suicidal rowers in the country.

We need jaunty blobs, big balls.

It should come as no surprise that Mount Batten loved the plan.

If there's two things Mount Battle loved is suicidal commando missions and, you know, the secret second other thing.

I don't want to get too one-note with the Mount Batten jokes, but it's like, hmm, they're not going to come back most likely.

It's like, well, probably good.

I don't really want them testifying 20 years from now.

Yeah, exactly.

Well, another thing about Lord Mountbatten is that he's generally generally quite beloved in India because he was the last

governor general, right?

The last viceroy.

Or viceroy for partition, yeah.

That's why the

great joke in The Simpsons is like, I haven't cried like that since Lord Mountbatten gave Injo back to the Punjabs.

It's such an incredible joke.

So

Mountain Batten did have one complaint, though.

He said three kayaks was not nearly enough.

He wanted six.

That's it.

Okay.

With approval in hand, Hassler kicked them in training into overdrive, knowing that he couldn't make up for their complete lack of skill when it came to the sea.

Instead, he kept making them row harder and harder for hours upon hours a day, assuming the only thing that would keep them alive was being the most gacked out juice of the gill soldiers the world had ever seen up to that point.

Oh, and by the way, they're constantly taking meth.

They're on meth.

They're eating like a Castlevania-style roast chicken.

I mean, they're all lats rowing.

I just love the idea of like, yeah, how do you provision these guys to, you you know, fuel them for a week?

And it's exactly what we've just described.

It's just like, you just have, you know, a barrel full of roast chickens, just hold it in one hand.

You know, you can literally get a fork attached to the oar.

You can just keep it in place.

Each stroke of the oar, you just take a bite.

Roast chickens, pints of milk.

Like sacks of Dexis.

What the training would do is they would literally row all day until the men were completely exhausted.

And then they would take meth and then row again until they're completely exhausted and then they would be able to stop.

The more and more I learned about World War II, it's just the more I know that everyone was on method.

Pretty much, yeah.

I believe it was fictive, but I remember reading a book and there was sort of talking about like a some kind of like air station for the Germans in Antarctica.

Like, and it's like, okay, that's fiction, but that could have been a real thing.

Like, there are all sorts of insane remote places.

They did have weather stations all the way up in like Arctic Canada.

I mean, Dashel Hammett, the author of The Maltese Falcon, enlisted because he wanted to fight fascism because he was like a hardline communist.

He was in his 40s and the army was like, yeah, he's too communist.

And they sent him to the Aleutian Islands.

Like, he was literally on ADAC, like 500 miles from Anchorage and, like, basically the middle of the North Pacific.

And then he's like, you know what?

I'm going to do, I'm going to write, I'm going to, I'm going to take over the base newspaper.

And then he's going to get extremely communist.

I'm going to take a bunch of meth and become a journalist.

I love the forbidden handshake between these guys and Paul Weller in 1977 of being on insane amounts of meth.

I mean, but here at least, you know, it's got a purpose, I suppose.

Not great.

Paul Weller wrote a going underground.

Hey, it also has a purpose today.

How else am I supposed to steal copper wire at a rate that like the cops can't catch me?

Yes.

Yeah, just be completely gakfire.

Fast Hans.

Yeah.

But you know, he needed more precise training as well for the coming explosives and all the other stuff.

But he couldn't make it too detailed because then people would catch on that they're training for something because even the men don't know they're training specifically for a mission to blow up ships with magnetic bombs.

So instead, the never-ending brutal rowing regime, then they would have explosives trainings.

And that was about it.

Meanwhile, Hassler and another man, Jock,

full name Jock Stewart, were the only two men in the unit fully aware of the entire plan.

So they had to do all the logistical and tactical planning themselves because they couldn't let anybody else in on it.

According to the book Cockle Shell Heroes, they did this by doing a fuckload of Benzedrine so they could stay awake for a week at a time and do all the logistics and planning.

I could just imagine someone walking into their like planning mission afterward.

It looks like the Charlie Kelly like thread map on the wall because they're just so gacked out of their mind.

They've got the phonograph player and it's just like it's just skipping non-stop.

They basically invented the Velvet Underground 30 years early.

But like I'm really fascinated like what type of outside of like rowing, what training they were doing because this is before the popularization of like the use of weights in training.

Yeah, they were pretty much just running and rowing.

Yeah.

I mean this is the same thing where like people who

were running the marathon in the Olympics were just only training sprints.

They just did a lot of sprints.

It's like, all right, you've been sprinting for years.

Now go run 26 miles.

This is because, due to the dependency on the moon and the tides and everything for their mission, the operation would need to be fully planned and launched within a couple of weeks.

So they dipped into the Benzedrine supply real hard to the point that, like, in the book, Cockle Shell Heroes, they're working to literally collapse and then wake up from the floor, take more Benzedrine, and go back to work.

They're just doing a meth bender.

Yeah.

A tactical meth bender.

The submarine task of being the mothership was the HMS Tuna, commanded by the best name in this episode, Lieutenant Commander Dick Rakes.

Dick Rakes on HMS Tuna?

This is a riff that me and Nate would come up with.

It's just one of those things where I know that it's genuine.

It's not made up of rakes on my dick till I tune it.

I mean,

I suppose.

But also, I'm just laughing at

having the sort of like Alan Vega approach to creativity, but doing military planning instead of

10 different suicide albums that he put together in the 70s.

It's just like, yeah, all right, if it works, I suppose.

And from there, they went to Scotland for more training, specifically how to deploy the kayaks from the tuna and then attach magnetic limpet mines to the side of a, like the Hulk of a ship.

However, none of the other details about the operation or even that there was an operation at all was given to anyone other than those three people.

All of this training came ahead to a large-scale training exercise in November where the men would be deployed from the tuna, paddle towards Margot, attach fake mines, and then paddle back.

It was effectively a dry run, right?

It would require them to navigate at night in silence and do all of the stuff they would need to do during the actual attack.

It failed miserably.

I'm shocked.

I'm so surprised, Joe.

Every single kayak team got lost.

Most of them ended up completely outside the exercise area.

One team thought they were following in formation behind a Hassler, only to discover hours later they were following a seagull that was just bobbing in the ocean.

He said near Margate, like in off the Kent coast, basically.

All right, yes.

I feel like the fact that they're all on Bentadrine has something to do with the fact that someone thought a seagull was a boat.

It just winds up in Calais for some reason.

Look, when you take enough Dexis, it's kind of hard to focus your eyes.

So, like, it's vibrating in their skull.

Your eyes are just vibrating.

It's like, that bird, I want to catch it and drink its blood.

Is that bird talking shit?

So, you're basically, this is 1940s castaway, is what you're saying.

Yeah, except nobody fucked the seagull.

Though, they did prove one thing, they did have the endurance required to pull this off because these guys were lost paddling aimlessly around the coast for five days, but none of them stopped.

Cool.

You've invented the world's longest-lasting bath toy.

Tactical bath toy.

The only thing that ended them attempting to find the target was someone going over on a plane and telling them the exercise was over.

They never stopped paddling for almost a week.

When Mount Batten was informed by Haslet, the exercise complete and dismal failure, Mount Batten apparently smiled and said, Great, now you know what not to do during the operation.

Imagine the doms you would have after paddling for five days straight on Meth.

But how good is it as a pre-workout?

Finally, on November 30th, 1942, the men taking part in the operation, thinking they're once again only going out for training, were loaded into the tuna.

The hatches were locked, and they were informed, actually, we're going on a real operation, and this is what the operation is.

By the way, we're all probably going to die.

Hassler tells them the route is protected by searchlights, machine guns, cannons, armed trawlers, U-boats, not to mention daily air patrols over the area.

And by the way, now that you've been informed of what the mission is, you cannot back out.

You're all locked in here with me.

During planning, the only thing about the mission that had to change was their exit route.

Instead of getting back to the sub, whose captain, Dick Rakes, I'll say that name as many times as I can, informed them there was no fucking way they could safely extract them.

If they sat around off the coast, they were definitely getting blown up.

So now the exfiltration route would be over land into Spain, the hodge of all white Britishmen.

I mean, but from Bordeaux, that's a bit of a trip.

Yeah, also, none of them had been trying any kind of land navigation skills at all this whole time.

They were just kind of given maps like, there's Spain.

I can't imagine they have packs either.

Nope.

Anything.

Oh, cool.

Nope.

All right.

So basically, you're going to just, you're just going to wander.

You're going to go on a pilgrimage.

You're going to forage your way from,

yeah, Burgundy all the way down to,

I guess, the Pyrenees.

Yeah.

The whole idea was, well, the French Resistance will help us along the way.

We have some contacts in a specific town that we will get to, and then they will help smuggle us over the border.

Again, none of them had practice any kind of land navigation to get to said village, but we'll get to that point towards the end of the day.

Look for the guys who've got these enormous triangle-shaped torsos.

They're the ones who want to rescue.

They're very sunburned.

They're very wide.

It wasn't until December 6th that the tuna actually reached the French coast, which led to a small problem.

You know, the mission's a secret, so the RAF does not know about it.

So the RIF had just dropped a huge field of sea mines in the exact area that Hessler and his men and the tuna were now sitting in, and they had no idea where exactly the mines were.

Worse still, Hessler would need to figure out where exactly they were, you know, on the boat looking at the coast to match up with the charts that he had passed out to his men so he could figure out where exactly he was.

But the French coast was almost entirely featureless and it was a cloudy night, meaning he couldn't see the stars.

The tuna was also four miles from the coast thanks to the sea mines, meaning that not only the commandos have further to paddle, but the radar stations would certainly pick up the tuna and they would have to get the fuck out of there.

Hassler and Dick Rates decided, fuck it, let's go and order the operation to move ahead anyway.

The men began putting the kayaks together and getting them into place, and one of the men accidentally tore a massive hole in the side of one of them, meaning they were now out of the mission.

Somewhat hilariously, Hassler discovered that his men had been stealing chocolate from the submarine and smuggling it onto their kayaks, which is a problem because the weight distribution of the kayaks have been calculated down to the finest detail up until now, and they just thrown all that shit into the wind because they'd stolen chocolate from the Navy.

I hate being deployed on my combat kayak with Augustus Gloomy.

Don't push me.

I'm full of chocolate.

I love the because I was going to say the exact same thing.

It's like, this is what happens when you recruit from Charlie in the chocolate factory.

You wind up with situations like this.

I mean, the soldiers are experiencing kind of like a situation like the grandparents of the Bucket family, except they're in the boat.

They're all sleeping in one great big bed.

And I guess,

if you're going to go with this metaphor, then that means that Hassler has to be the character of Ruk Assault and just bossing them around in a rude way non-stop.

So now they only have five kayaks, ten men in total, weighed down by a strange amount of illicit chocolate, and they made their way to the French coast.

As soon as they hit the water, German searchlights opened up on them.

And thankfully, they couldn't see too clearly from so many miles out.

So they skip past that one.

But there's another issue: Hassler discovered his compass was broken, and he needed to navigate via the North Star alone.

Thankfully, it's December in France, a place known for good, clear skies.

Why wouldn't you check?

And why wouldn't you bring it back up?

I'm sorry.

No, you could only have one.

He dumped everything else for chocolate.

My chocolate compass is not working.

It is melting in my hand.

Okay, I've got a kinder surprise.

Maybe there's a compass inside.

This is cracked the egg open.

Who took a bite out of the north side of my chocolate compass?

Augustus, was it you?

No!

Is there chocolate all over his mouth?

Then Hessler discovered his kayak was leaking so fucking badly that his other crewman, a guy named Sparks, spent his entire time bailing it out while he did all the rowing.

Sergeant Wallace, one of the men in the other kayaks, For reasons nobody's entirely sure of, just began vomiting into the ocean, which is something of a problem during a sneak attack where everyone has to remain silent.

You just hear the slight swishing of the water and then,

the British are coming.

I guess maybe there's like an interaction between that much chocolate and that much dexadron.

The only people who've ever happened to

them outside of this mission are like people outside a corn shop at 3 a.m.

Yeah, like famously, you should not have an appetite on that much berries.

So he's just forcing it down.

Thankfully, I guess for Hassler, Wallace and his kayak simply vanish.

They're never heard from again when they pass through a tidal race at St.

Elbans Head.

So, yep, he's dead.

So now the kayak force is reduced to four kayaks and eight men.

They make it to the first landmark, a lighthouse at Pont de Grave, which also meant another tidal race with five-foot swells and roaring rapids.

They paddle directly into it, getting smashed around under rocks, but everybody makes it to the other other side.

But another kayak was damaged to the point it could no longer be used.

Everyone is soaked to the bone and beaten up at this point.

Because remember, it's December.

The water is ice fucking cold.

It's really cold, yeah.

Everyone is now beginning to have the beginning stages of hypothermia, which again, they try to counteract by taking more meth.

I feel like you could also maybe gain these guys

protective gear as well as methamphetamine.

They have some protective gear, but like the gear they have is not great.

It certainly wasn't a military thing, but it just went rafting in Alaska one time.

And I remember they were like, you can float down the river to like the exit point basically if you want.

So we, you know, we were wearing wetsuits and we were wearing like they had shoes we could wear on top of the wetsuits, like the foot covers on the wetsuit.

And I got in the water and I was like, fuck, there's a hole in my wetsuit.

And I'm like, fuck it, this is so cold because it's a glacier melt river.

Even in August in Alaska, it's like one degree above freezing.

One pinhole leak is all it takes to become miserable.

Oh my God.

Like, I'm literally going to lose the ability to move my feet.

Like, I have a life jacket on.

This is genuinely, really dangerous.

I get to the landing finally.

I'm like, fuck, I check.

There's no hole.

It was just that cold.

With the wetsuit on, it was just that cold.

And I was like, yeah, I can't imagine the, I mean, it's not quite freezing, but like doing that for hours and hours.

Yeah.

And I do it for days.

This left two commandos who are without a kayak now.

So they decided to just hang off the back of the other two kayaks, being towed to a nearby beach and try to escape.

I have to ask this question, though.

You said that the tuna was anchored or stopped four miles off the coast.

How is it going to take days if it's four miles?

No, that's just to get into that part to begin their operation up the rivers and stuff.

Right, okay, got it, got it, okay.

Yeah.

So now they have two commandos who are out there without a kayak, and they decide to just hang on to the back of the other two kayaks with the idea that they're going to be towed to a nearby beach and try to escape, right?

So now they have three kayaks and six men and two dangling off the back.

And there's another tidal race coming.

And at each race, they lost a kayak.

And this time they have two dudes just hanging on to the back of a kayak because they're about to go into rapids and shit.

All while the point, the Grav Rey House lights them up like New Year's fucking Eve, but they make it through the tidal race.

These guys somehow managed to hang on to the back of these kayaks, but they've been paddling for six hours now.

I mean they're on so much meth, they're probably holding onto the back of it with their teeth.

Their jaws are so clenched.

They still hadn't reached a beach to drop the two commandos off, and now they're completely hypothermic from being submerged in cold water.

Hessler knew they'd have to get them out of the water soon, but another tidal swell took the kayaks and they're so weighed down with men they couldn't fight against it.

So at that point, Hessler literally looked back at the two guys like, you have to go.

You have to let go of the kayaks.

You're going to drag us down.

And they're going, and I don't know if this is true or not, but apparently they just went, yeah, all right, and let go and floated off.

They were still wearing their life vests and they slowly, half dead from hypothermia, floated towards a Nazi hell town of Les Verdon.

And at this point, we know what happens because we know what happens at the end of the story, right?

The Germans eventually find one of the men's dead bodies 70 miles away down the river, and the other guy is never seen again.

We know from records kept by the Nazis around the world that he was captured and executed by the Gestapo, which is not important, but it is actually a violation of Nazi law.

What?

He was supposed to be turned over to be interrogated.

Not just executed.

That's the reason why the Germans had no idea this commando operation was coming.

They had a guy.

They just shot him.

I have to kill him.

He's not giving over his chocolate.

Exactly.

Now, once they did that, Hassler realized yet another problem.

Four small destroyers were anchored at Le Verdun, owing to the fact that there was actually an ongoing inspection by a local Kriegsmarine admiral.

Obviously, the destroyers would have armed guards, and they would probably see the kayaks just floating on by.

My thing is that, like, how much ordnance do they even have left if they only have three kayaks?

At what point do you say, oh, we're not going to be effective anymore?

We're not going to be able to destroy enough stuff.

This is probably when he should have made that decision.

Instead, he came up with a master plan.

We'll lay all the way down in our kayaks.

We'll cover ourselves with this shitty tarp that we have and rumple all up so we just look like floating garbage.

And then we'll, one by one, we'll float by the destroyers.

This is basically hoping that the naval equivalent of it's just a box.

Yeah, exactly.

It's some Kojima shit.

The first two kayaks make the trip without any issue, one at a time.

Then the third never shows back up.

No gunshots are heard, nothing like that.

But we know afterwards that they're immediately captured.

Because, like, they see the first two go by, like, oh, that's weird.

They see a third of them, like, all right, all right, all right.

And they pull him out of the water.

Gestapo again pulls him out back and shoots them in the face.

Again, not interrogating them at all, or they would have known what was coming.

Hassler is now down to two kayaks and four men.

Then he finds a place for his men to come to shore and rests.

It's 7:30 a.m.

They've been paddling for 11 hours.

Then, just as daylight broke, Hessler realized that he thought he had made camp on like kind of like a deserted coastal area, but instead it was right next door to a pier full of local French fishermen.

Obviously, he has no idea how many of them are collaborators or whatever.

So, Hessler approaches them, knowing that they had already been seen.

So, he addresses them, telling them in French that he's English.

Please don't let the Germans know that you have seen anything.

Now, here's the weird part.

Hessler did speak French pretty well,

but he had learned French because he knows German.

And he learned French through his his German teacher.

So he spoke French with a German accent.

Nate, would you care to elaborate?

That's only me, because I learned German before I learned French.

And everyone I know who speaks French natively says my French accent sounds like I'm a German.

And like the French immediately think this guy is a German, like, infiltrator, a spy, because he's speaking French with a German accent, despite the fact he's English.

Regard tout le chocolat, tout des notes, avec des letters d'amours de l'orde mountbatten, je promé, je vous promé, je

So, the fishermen think he's a spy, but this actually works in his favor.

They think he's German, so they're not going to go tell the Germans on him.

Stupid like a fox.

I mean, I will say that does look like a weird thing.

The Germans would just pull, like,

let's test what happens with these locals in this random French fishing village.

Let's see how loyal they are.

So, they don't bother to report him to the police, but they also stay away from them.

So, he and his half-dead soldiers, who are still alive are just left alone as they rest on the shore.

Nobody slept that night, probably due to nerves and, you know, coming down from meth.

And there's caffeine and chocolate, too, you know.

Small amounts, but it does count.

But then they think they see that like the next morning they go to takeoff, right?

And they think they see 50 German soldiers marching in their position.

But thankfully for them, it wasn't.

They had taken so much meth that they thought that some sticks in the mud were men.

So they just started panicking.

You know, due to the meth and the hypothermia, they almost get into a firefight with some sticks.

I mean, having gone to the Ranger School in wintertime where it's very dark and very cold wearing night vision, I have seen people be like, oh, I found the trail and just run off into the woods.

Just like if they weren't, if we weren't basically like tied to one another or, you know, their stuff wasn't tied to them, they would have just disappeared forever.

So it can definitely happen.

I have been very sleep deprived to the point that I thought I saw things.

I mean, like, I can recall having to pull security wearing night vision,

having the feeling that the trees were talking to me.

There were faces in the trees.

Like, it's insane.

It sounds nuts, but like, you're just so tired.

And, like, you can't fall asleep or, like, bad things will happen to you.

So you have to stay awake and your brain just starts filling in the gaps.

I could have swore I watched like a whole field catch on fire in front of me because I was like so sleep deprived looking through night vision goggles and just like blinking trees move trees trees moving oh that looks like fire like why is everything on fire and I'm like oh no haven't slept in two days I mean, when I was when you're in leadership in radio school, some of the leadership positions are 24 hours, and I'd actually done really well, but I was, we were in patrol base at night, and it was almost over, but like, I thought I had lost my radio, and I was like, well, I'm so fucked, like, I'm gonna fail, I'll completely fail.

I'm gonna literally, like, recycle this phase.

And I was, like, trooping around patrol base.

Where's the radio?

Where's the radio?

Where is?

And finally, realized because we tie all our stuff down, it was just tied to me, dragging behind me like a tail.

And it just, yeah,

the brain can do a lot of strange things.

So they set off.

They hit some low water tide.

And it was like water so nasty it was uh filled with like sand to the point that they described as a thick ooze yeah getting lost in my ooze with my buddies then so they had to get out and drag their kayaks through this mess something the men were barely capable of doing at this point but they kept on paddling on the other side of it and it's noted in the cockle shell heroes that this is where they begin to run out of meth

So they start rationing their Benzedrine and their, you know, the brains are slipping from the cold.

They're not eating much.

They're not sleeping.

They're gaked out.

So they start paddling again for another seven hours.

And if this sounds like they're making good time, they're actually not.

All of the meth-addled paddling on night two was just to make up for their fuck-ups on night one.

And again, they had no sleep.

They popped more meth.

They got going on night three, which required scaling a six-foot-tall mud wall and then dragging the kayaks up the wall behind them.

And from there, they had to go across dry ground, carrying their boats through some woods, and they hid them, and that's where they decided to rest.

There's only one person who can direct a movie about this incident, and it is for an earthquake.

You see, the men, they are on so much mat, and they are stuck on a mud bank.

I'm just imagining.

The Germans have to just be able to smell them at this point.

I'm just trying to see, yeah, see if you can maybe find any French civilians that have a supply of math, but I don't know exactly how you would colloquially translate do you party into French in 1940 French?

Do you take le met

le PNP?

Yeah,

how the fuck do you know that?

You can thank yourself for that.

And they think that they're in like the middle of the woods.

So again, they get some rest.

And then the sun rises.

They realize that they are not, in fact, in the middle of the woods.

They have decided to camp out in a sparse strip of trees, smack dab in the middle of a French suburb.

with their boats and everything.

It's like being stuck on a roundabout.

That's what it kind of sounds like.

Strangely, this works to their benefit.

For the first time, there was like ambient noise, so they could like risk having a cigarette and taking a shit, which had to be horrible at that point from all the meth.

No, man,

imagine the calm down of waking up on a fucking roundabout in the middle of the spring suburb.

Oh, my God.

Like, oh, God, yeah, horrible.

So they get their gear together.

They start assembling their mines.

They take more meth.

They cover their faces in boot polish, and they wait for night to fall before beginning their attack run at the nearby port.

A quick note on those mines, though, limpet mines work on time fuses, which they set off like through like crimping a certain detonator into it.

And they set the mines time before their mission because they don't have time to do that shit when they're actually in the water.

Yeah, doing all the like the splicing and stuff or the

crimping.

So they decide that nine-hour fuse is good enough.

They clamp the now live mines between their legs to hold them in place and start paddling to Bordeaux, which only takes another 90 minutes.

And from there, the commando kayakers, which remember there's only two kayaks at this point, slowly make their way down the line of ships moored there, and everything was seemingly going according to plan.

They began attaching the magnetic mines to their targets as they went, including attaching two mines to the side of a German Navy frigate, which even, well, it wasn't even supposed to be there, but Hassler's like, well, fuck it, that's a good target, attaches the mines.

Weirdly, they get caught while doing this.

According to Hassler, a sentry on the ship sees them and points a flashlight directly down at his face.

He froze like a deer in the headlights, and the sentry didn't yell out or raise alarm.

And it's not like he thought that he was like a floating piece of garbage like before, because the guy is just staring at him with the torch in his face,

but isn't moving or doing anything.

And Hessler just kind of goes about attaching mines to the ship while the guy is looking at him.

And then he paddles on, and the guy follows him with the flashlight as he's paddling, but does nothing.

Nobody has any idea why.

Maybe that guy was also sleeping

on meth.

He was just fucked up on meth.

He was like,

I just stopped at my hallucinating sea

So yeah, and then in between ships, they do their garbage trick again of pretending that they're a floating piece of shit and like go on to the next one, attach more mines.

The kayaks finish placing all of their mines and paddle into the center of the bay where the tide sweeps them downriver.

According to Hassler, they should have been sighted by just about everyone at that point if they had even been bothered to look.

And to him, this is why he thinks the guys who've gone missing are still alive.

Because he's like, well, the Germans aren't stupid.

If they would have captured these very obvious commandos, just washing up ashore, they certainly would have interrogated him.

And after enough torture, they're going to give up.

So, like, the Germans would know we're coming.

But nobody does.

So he assumes these guys are still alive.

When in reality, the Germans are stupid because they just fucking shot them.

In accordance with their plan, they head for shore.

And the three kayak teams split up and escape over land in a journey of a minimum of 800 miles.

Jesus Christ.

As they escape, the mines went off.

Six ships are badly damaged, with several sinking due to the damage that the limpet charges had caused.

So it sounds like a success, right?

Well, none of the ships were loaded at the time of the explosion, so absolutely no goods were lost.

And Bordeaux was so shallow that the ships sank only a few feet.

So the Germans were able to just refloat them a short time later.

And to make the entire situation even more fucked up, COHQ had a spy in Bordeaux at the time.

planning a sabotage operation that would have waited until the ships were fully loaded, at which point they would have stuck a timed bomb on board so it exploded in deep water and permanently sank the ships, making them unrecoverable.

The two teams were completely unaware of one another, and like the two different groups within COHQ were left in the dark of the other's plans.

But the kayak commando raid had ruined all the other work that the other team was doing and they had to ban their operation.

There were two ships they planned limpet mines off that simply never went off and nobody's sure why and stuff that they just fell off due to like bad magnetic attachment.

Weirdly, the escape of the surviving crews went shockingly well and dare I say, even easy.

at least for a time.

Hassler and his kayak mate Sparks split up from the other surviving crew, making the other two men, Laver and Mills, like all of them to meet up over the border in Spain.

They were supposed to meet up with the French Resistance and they were supposed to kind of carry them over.

But Hassler and Sparks meets the French Resistance.

The other two guys cannot make contact, unfortunately.

And Hassler and Sparks make contact with a French Resistance hero named Mary Lindell, who pretty much much was an expert in smuggling people in and out of Spain.

She gets both men over the border, with Hassler flown back to the United Kingdom and Sparks being sent over by boat.

Both men are home by February.

The other two men, Laver and Mills, got caught while trying to sneak over the Spanish border without assistance from the French Resistance because they could not find them.

They got lost.

They couldn't find their contact point, whatever.

And now, normally, this wasn't actually much of a problem because remember, Spain is technically neutral.

And depending on which Spanish border guard you find, they'll just let you pass or you can bribe them.

They managed to find the one group of Spanish border guards that arrested them and turned them back over to the Germans.

And then they are, of course, executed.

Hassler became something of a hero back in the UK as a country's desperate for a win.

Like all of these commando operations, right, like they're all kind of catastrophic failures most of the time, but they're really cool.

Like we can all admit that, right?

Like this is really stupid, but it's simultaneously awesome.

So he becomes a hero.

The UK needs a win in the war.

So, here you go.

However, he was never awarded the Victoria Cross.

You want to guess why?

Uh,

stealing the chocolate?

No, that would be funny, though.

No idea.

Because his actions are, quote, not in the face of the enemy, meaning it was not considered combat.

Ah, here,

right?

But also, what's really fun is that Britain was desperate for a win.

It's like, well, we lowered the elevation of these boats full of like donated powdered milk for war orphans exactly two feet in the water.

And then they recovered them 12 hours later.

And it's like, yeah, but it's a win, right?

I mean, you annoyed the Germans a little bit temporarily.

It cost them like $20 at least.

Afterwards, he becomes a solo sailor racing yachts and shit around the world.

To this day, there's like a yacht race named after him.

I assume because he was so desperate to die in a boat, he had to keep searching for ways to do it after World War II.

I mean, some of those limpet mines went missing.

He probably could have just found them.

Bill Sparks, the only other survivor of the operation, had something of an interesting life afterwards.

For a starters, his escape route required him to be smuggled into Gibraltar via a boat, and when he got there, he had no proof as to who he was.

Because remember, he's in a commando mission.

He was kind of washed up there.

So he's arrested and sent to the UK to be investigated as a spy.

At which point, he escaped from the cops and ran to his dad's house, who thought he would been fucking dead for weeks.

Then he was arrested again, escaped again, and ran to COHQ, where he like kicked open the door.

It's like, will you please get the cops to leave me alone?

And COHQ's like, holy shit, you're alive.

From there, he goes back to military service.

He fights in Italy and Africa before leaving the army to become a bus driver in London.

But he does have a small break of becoming a cop in British Malaya.

But he does that for like a year.

He quits.

He goes back to being a bus driver, I assume, because he realized he'd really fucked up.

Yeah.

And he's a bus driver until the day he dies.

Uncritical support for the bus driver.

Yeah.

So, guys, that is the story of the Operation Franklin.

How are you feeling about British combat kayaks?

The little combat chocolate children.

Yeah, I mean, I feel as though it would be very, very inconvenient to get turned into a blueberry during this mission.

We already have enough stuff going on.

Oh, everyone could then ride on top of the

lifesaver.

Yeah.

Go into Veterans Affairs as a blueberry, only to be told it's not service connected.

But, fellas, we do a thing on the show called Questions from the Legion.

If you'd like to ask us a question, support the show on Patreon.

And then you can ask us a question on Patreon or our Discord, which you'll have access to.

Or you can turn into a blueberry, float over the ocean, ask us in person, and we will answer it on the show.

And today's question is, what is your most irrationally hated object, thing, or person?

Keeping irrational.

There has to be no good point for it.

Oh.

I was going to say bono, but I feel like that's rational.

I feel like that's rational.

It doesn't have to be a person.

It could be a thing, object, place, person.

You go.

You have so many.

I don't have that many.

I mean, I wouldn't call them irrational, but like, all right.

I just don't like Vampire Weekend.

I never have.

Even from the beginning.

And I made this joke because Jack Foreman, who has helped out with editing, used to work at SiriusXM.

And I asked him, like, do you guys have like some like under-the-table deal with promoting everything connected to Vampire Weekend?

Because any satellite radio station on Sirius XM, if it plays any indie music at all, you'll always have that.

Or Ezra Koenig or any of the other people or Rothstam or any of the people from the band.

I'm like, I've never liked them.

I didn't like them in 2008.

I definitely don't like them now.

And yet, it just never, and also periodically was like, oh, yeah, Ezra Kinig also like wrote Neo Yokio for fucking Netflix.

It's just like, cool, man.

Like, I can never escape the Vampire Weekend extended universe.

It's not like a moral thing.

I know there was some sexting underage thing, I think, with him.

So fucking, that's bad.

But the band itself, whatever.

If you like that, great.

I don't, I'm not like, it's like a moral judgment against the music.

I just don't like it.

And it will never go away.

It just feels ubiquitous and unending.

Maybe like Bono, I guess.

Well, no, Bono's different because like the argument that like YouTube suck, I don't really care about is more so like Bono is just such a like obnoxious, terrible person.

Very annoying.

He seems very annoying.

Who is like the embodiment of like Western neoliberalism?

I mean, he did own like a mall in Lithuania through a shell company.

What?

Yeah.

In the Panama papers that came out, there was like a stony or Lithuania or something.

There was this like investment vehicle and like it was like through a shell company owned by Bono.

I need to go buy shoes from Bono shoes.

shoes.

The fuck.

Because early U2 isn't bad, is the thing.

They were a regular band at one point, and now they're just kind of a symbol of whatever.

Yeah.

They just show up on your phone uninvited.

It's more so a pet peeve than anything.

And it makes me irrationally angry.

Is like now people don't step aside on the tube platform when the door opens.

Yes.

They like start to rush in as soon as the door opens.

I mean, I've also noticed that zebra crossings are apparently optional now.

Oh, yeah.

Jesus.

Everybody's jaywalking.

Jaywalking is is normal here, but like it used to be people would, I mean, because when you take your driving test, like that's an instant fail if you don't, if someone's trying to cross, you don't stop.

And like people just don't stop anymore.

Like zebra crossings are kind of like playing game with your life now.

It seems to have been like really in the past maybe like 18 months that like people have just like collectively decided to stop stepping aside.

when the doors open and it's just so it makes me so irrationally angry yeah i've i've experienced that and it's just like well you know i would love to make room for you to get on the train if you'd let me get the fuck off of it no i mean in fairness that's also what it's like in new york it is in the netherlands as well

even though our doors are much larger than the ones here and there's still people yeah the new subway cars are way bigger than two but yeah oh actually another one is uh i think uh anyone who practices optimal lifting is a complete rube

I don't even know what it is.

I guess I can't be a rube.

It's

science-backed lifting to optimize like muscle tension and hypertrophy.

But it's like the gains that you make are like so minimal that they will not make a difference unless you're not.

I got one that's irrational.

Some people can pull off the look of like

Chinos or jeans with like loafers and white socks, but most people can't.

Some people can pull it off.

Eric Tin Sena did a really good job of it before he died in a crash, but you know what?

Most of you look like you got robbed for your shoes at a bowling alley.

Yeah, I actually like that one a lot.

Oh, scarfs when it's hot outside for men.

What are you doing?

I mean, I think that's a personal choice.

I don't really agree with that.

I wouldn't do it.

I said it.

That's the topic.

It's like, I don't know why it bothers me, but it bothers me.

It's weird.

Anthony Bourdain, I'm firing shots at you.

I'm sorry.

Some people just don't get as hot or sweat as much.

I sweat basically like if like my phone lights up for a split second in my pocket or I start sweating and when it's a hot day outside some people are just like no I guess their neck is cold.

Like don't get me wrong.

I'm a sweater like for sure.

I don't get it.

I really don't get it.

But then again, I know absolutely nothing about fashion.

So whatever

I can't tell whether you're actually wearing Ralph Ren or U.S.

Polo Association.

I mean, like I will say that

given how people, I mean, Joe, I realize you've been out of the military a long time, but like, given how your typical, like, oh, wear civilian clothes guys look like, at least you didn't show up in tall white socks and fucking your running shoes from PT.

But, like, in fairness, that might actually kind of be a look here now.

Yeah, yeah, that probably is.

Uh, so I guess that's an episode, but you guys host other podcasts, plug those podcasts.

Trash Sucher, what a hell of a dad, Lion Slip by Donkey, or not Lincoln Slipper by Donkey's.

That's this show, Kill James Bond, listening to the Lines Libya Dunkies.

No Gods, No Mayors, yeah.

Look, can you tell it's hot?

It's been a long weekend.

Beneath Skin, a show about the history of everything told through the history of tattooing.

And also, you can buy my books on beneaththeskinshop.com, both photography and art books.

This is the only show that I host, so thank you for listening to it.

Consider supporting us on Patreon.

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Top Patreon too.

You get the piece of chocolate that turns you into a blueberry.

Actually, wasn't it a pill?

Yeah.

Man, that's dangerous.

These These guys are on pills all the time.

Accidentally take that one.

Until next time, take meth, blow up the German Navy.