Episode 362 - Task Force Baum

you've ever wanted to see us live, well, we're heading back to London.

That's right.

Again, we will be performing June 22nd at the Big Fat Festival at the Big Belly Comedy Club in London.

So get your tickets now.

They'll be in the show notes.

You can come see us, like 20 other acts, including friends of the show that we have worked with before.

Get your tickets now, and we hope to see you there.

If you like what we do here on the show, consider supporting us on Patreon.

Just $5 a month gets you access to our entire bonus episode catalog, as well as every regular episode one full week early.

Access to all of our side series that are currently ongoing and our back catalog of those as well.

Gets you e-books, audiobooks, first dibs on live show tickets and merchandise when they're available, and also gets you access to our Discord, which has turned into a lovely little community.

So go to patreon.com/slash lions led by donkeys and join the Legion of the Old Crow today.

Hello and welcome to the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast.

I'm Joe, and with me is Tom and Nate.

And today we have brought you, our investors, a brand new opportunity.

We've been working with our fellow finance top dogs, who you've undoubtedly seen on Insta, introducing hype beast George Patton.

All you betas need to listen up.

When I was in Europe, I wasn't being cuckholded by the Axis or anyone.

You got to be a real top financial dog.

Follow my Insta tips and listen to me.

We're introducing a new type of coin, a new coin that you cucks need to invest in, or else you're going to be living in your mama's house for the rest of your life, introducing niece coin, the first ever kind of non-fungible niece you could trade your nieces with other soldiers and if you use aunt juice you can create three new nieces

i'm just saying george patton put marginalia in his own journals even at west point like future historians take note but i'm imagining insta george patton being like historians take note dick game incredible

we'd have to ask his niece yeah exactly future historians take note You brokeies won't be remembered in history without niece coin.

Invest now.

I think we've just invented the worst character ever.

Finance bro George Patton selling you his niece.

If it's George C.

Scott playing him, what flag is he standing in front of?

It's gotta have some ape on it.

I was gonna say, is it like the it's like the board ape, but it's like a it's a niece-coated board a.

It's a board patton.

It's the trad wife wojack that's like just on a big flag.

It's like you could have you could have it all.

It's illuminated by cool-looking UV lights.

They don't realize are sterilizing lights lights that's giving everybody fucking cataracts.

Yeah, George Patton's just like shirtless.

He's just doing dumbbell shoulder presses, hitting the sheet shoe in front of his laptop.

He's like, these lights aren't bad for you.

I got them fitted out in my car.

I'll never die in a car accident.

I know George Patton was bald, but imagine him with the worst influencer haircut.

Either like the Australian mullet that's becoming popular over here or

it's got to be like some kind of high top situation or cornrose.

We always again get George Patton, white guy cornrose

nay i'm just waiting for you to do the andrew tate voice as george patton

listen mate it's not about you dying for your country it's making some other poor son of a bitch die for his and i don't care if you and your dodgy chums down the pub are chatting shit what you need to do is get alpha with it you need to be in the gym lifting but you need to make passive income my passive income it comes from my extended family i don't do a thing my brother has daughters, and then I have sex with them.

I'm terrified about how good that is.

Well, I mean, I lived in England for six years, and Andrew Tate's an American guy who moved to England when he was like 16.

So,

you know, like, if I'm going to be able to do it,

God.

I have a problem pronouncing the word water.

Is he from Washington, like Eastern Washington, where they pronounce it all the time?

His dad is a black American grandmaster chess player, and he then moved to fucking Luton and fucking became a criminal.

Like, he is such a

son.

His son had to move to Romania to become a criminal.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, not, not, not, not Emery Tate.

Uh, Andrew, Emery Tate, I think he married a white English woman at some point or had kids with her, and then that's where Andrew came from.

But he moved to,

he and Tristan moved to England when they were like young teenagers.

And like, my friend grew up in the same estate as him.

He was like, he's just a huge piece of shit.

He's just a Coke dealer and a pimp.

That's all he ever was.

But now lots of fucking like 13-year-old boys think he's the coolest guy on earth.

So yeah it'd be a shame if he got hit by a car yeah anyway

in our day we didn't have to worry about this like we just looked up to cloud strife and he wasn't telling us to do sex trafficking in romania that's right cloud strife dressed up like a woman as god intended exactly exactly and if you acted like andrew tate towards the women in the game cloud would have to go on a date with barrett at the golden palace so basically like that's right if you actually followed alpha advice you had to go on a date with a man So, you know what?

Like, you should be sensitive.

You should give flowers to Aeris.

You should be nice to Tifa.

Don't be a weirdo.

You know what I mean?

It was all there.

It was always there all along.

And that is

Tate time.

This is a history podcast, a serious podcast, notionally.

And we're going to talk about something.

We're going to dial it back and be normal-ish.

I'm really happy to say that today's episode brings us back into Patton place as our intro.

Not Hype Beast.

Patton, unfortunately.

Fortunately, it depends.

I think Hype Beast Patton is worse than actual Patton.

For a podcast that talks about military history, we kind of don't talk about George Patton that often.

This isn't for any other reason other than I just don't want to.

Unfortunately, he has this reputation of just being this wonderful military commander because he did do a lot of good things militarily.

And I don't want to add to that pile.

Most things you see about Patton are just...

endless worship and things of that nature.

Yeah, it's like hagiography and then people oftentimes, not always, but often reading their own weird issues into Patton as like symbol of X or why we don't do Y anymore, you know, that kind of thing.

Yeah, and I mean, personality-wise, he's a horrible person.

We've talked about that in our last episode.

And I mean, he abused his soldiers.

He was,

you know, he beat them.

He fucked his own niece, which we need to underline again here.

A lot of people got mad at me.

Last time I pointed this out, I've brought you the forbidden truth.

The things that the deep state don't want you to know about George Patton.

And I point out in the last episode, this was a completely consensual relationship.

It was his niece via marriage.

They seem to actually be quite in love with one another.

But my stance on this is and always will remain, and I quote, ew.

It's just a little weird.

I'm sorry.

It's fucking weird, man.

Also, he was like way older than her.

Like, 30 years older than her.

Nate, it's like the thing that I always say is like, not being a nonce is the easiest thing to do in the world.

Not fucking your niece is second place to that.

Here's the thing, right?

Like, Christopher Isherwood's partner was much younger than him.

He met when he was the his partner was 18 and he would have been like 50.

And it was Don McCarty who was his partner.

And like, it's a little weird, but you know what?

They met on the beach randomly.

They didn't meet through marriage.

They weren't related.

They didn't meet at the Patton family barbecue.

There weren't like lines of succession involved.

You know what I mean?

Patton trying to trying to secure his holdings in Germany via fucking his own family.

It's fucking gross.

I'm not, I really like the words, George Patton, age discourse, are not entering the lore here.

But I mean, he was married.

He was cheating on his wife with his own niece by marriage.

And like to the point that his niece had developed a lot of weird things over it and ended up killing herself right after he died.

We talked all about this last time.

I am just underlining here that George Patton is a fucking weirdo at best.

And today's Patton-centric episode takes us to the future in comparison to our last one.

Damn near the end of the war.

Not all the way up until Patton's death, though, which might be something fun we talk about some other time.

And weirdly, I believe it was someone that worked for Fox News or still does wrote a book about George Patton's death that kind of implied that he was assassinated and didn't just die in a car accident.

He was assassinated by Big Nephew.

Yes.

This episode takes us to March 1945.

Allied forces are in Germany.

The race to Berlin is on.

And one one largely unimportant officer who happened to be George Patton's son-in-law, who was named, I swear to God, this name is just for you two, John Waters.

Oh, yes.

Yes!

John Waters found himself in a German POW camp, something that a sentence that the John Waters that we're all thinking of would probably have a lot of fun with.

There's a guy called Albrecht Becker, who is a tattoo artist, who got sent to the camps by by the Nazis and actually loved being there because he was like a sadomasochist.

And he was like, oh, I can like tattoo my entire body and inject, you know, engine oil into my nuts in private now, and they can kick me and beat me.

And I love it.

And then,

because he was an avowed Nazi beforehand, and then he was like, oh, maybe this isn't good.

What happens when the unstoppable force meets the immovable object?

Yeah.

But the insane thing about that guy is the like engine oil or whatever the fuck it was he injected into his dick and balls hardened so his balls and his dick were just rock solid for the rest of his life huh so this specific john waters not the filmmaker who i am largely unaware of other than very weird stories i've heard about i know he's made some very strange films yeah pink flamingo is probably a good place to start if you want to get the full oeuvre of john waters interesting guy He had been captured by the Germans while fighting in Tunisia back in 1943.

Waters was, like I I said, Patton's son-in-law, married to his daughter, Beatrice, about 11 years before his capture.

The two men knew each other very well, and it goes without saying being married to Patton's child was beneficial to Waters' career.

He got to pick his branch.

And I'm not saying that Waters wasn't a good officer, or at least passable, but he got into a branch of high competition, that being cavalry, which of course would turn into armor.

the best branch for destroying your knees and having very little career prospects after you get out.

Second only to infantry, I suppose.

Since Waters had been captured a few years before, his life in general sucked.

Obviously, he's in a POW camp.

He was sent from North Africa to a POW camp called Oflog 64 in Poland, which was converted from one of the most cursed sentences that I've ever uttered on this show, a Polish boys' school.

I don't know why, but for some reason my mind went to like, it must be some kind of weird educational institution that implies some kind of like just unsavory practice.

I don't know, like, maybe it's just reading through the ether, you know, the human connection that transcends the internet.

But then you said that, and I'm like, yeah, probably.

I was probably right.

Probably some bad shit happened.

If there are anything like Irish boys' schools, it just means you get molested by a different type of Catholic priest.

Yeah, instead of bangers and mash, it's kilbasa, different sausages.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

The problem is that, like, uh, it's compounded by the fact that you're often having to fucking do your studies in the dark because no one can change the light bulbs.

God damn it.

I fucking hate you.

Damn it.

Previous to being used as an allied POW camp, it was used to hold the Polish officers captured during the Nazi invasion of Poland until, well, you know, suddenly there was vacancies.

I don't really want to bring the mood down on this episode too much and talk about what happened to Polish officers in general by the Nazis and the Soviets.

All of this combines to make what possibly sounds like the most haunted American-only POW camp in Croatia.

But life in the camp was hard.

Soldiers had been planning on breaking out, forming a normal chain of command, which is very normal in POW camps.

It's actually per army and military regulation, you're supposed to fall back into the normal chain of command if you're captured.

But they follow those chains of command to start digging out with the goal of getting away in 1944.

Then word gets back to them in the aftermath of what is called the Great Escape at Stalagluft 3.

We'll do an episode about that or a series at some point, but just know,

largely fails and ends in a massive amount of retaliatory executions of POWs,

oftentimes called the Stilaglooft murders.

So word of that gets back to other POWs and they're like, okay, maybe we shouldn't try to tunnel out because if we fail, we'll all die and so will all of our friends who don't tunnel out.

As the war continued to turn against the Nazis in the east, they began to shift their POW populations back west to stop them from being liberated by advancing Soviet forces.

Oflag 64 was one of the camps laid to be emptied out, and on January 1945, all but a hundred or so POWs were moved west into Germany via a forced march covering about 400 miles.

The enlisted men went to Stalag 13C, and the officers went to Oflag 13B.

Both of them are located in Hamelberg, Bavaria, and for the sake of this episode, the only one that really matters is the Oflag, the officers' camp.

To say nothing of the other camps in Germany at the time, life in a German POW camp in 1945 was not great.

You don't say, Joe, you don't

say.

I'm talking about POW camps.

The other ones go without having to really explain it.

Because POW camps, you assume, were better than concentration camps, and generally, you are correct.

Now, depending on what country and race you happen to be, if captured, your mileage is going to vary on that one.

But specifically in American POW camps, things were getting much, much, much worse because Germany as a whole was solidly in the shitter.

Everything is being rationed.

Everything is in shortages.

Little to nothing finds its way down to POW camps.

And again, say nothing about the other camps where literally nothing goes to other than bullets.

In March 1945, a Red Cross visit to the Oflag found that there was virtually no coal to go around to keep their tents warm or the barracks warm.

Barracks were overcrowded, sometimes housing 200 people in a place that there should have been 20.

Men were frozen, and they were on slightly better than starvation rations.

Virtually everybody was sick with dysentery thanks to the Nazis just kind of not really caring about cleanliness of the camp and as everything continued to fall into disrepair.

And it was around this time through a very long network of intelligence resistance agents, officers, spies, things of that nature, that word of John Waters being held at that camp made its way back to the third army headquarters, third army being Patton's army.

As far as anyone can tell this is thanks to one officer being left behind at the polish camp who kept a running list of names who were held in captivity and when the soviets came through he gave the list to them like these are the ones that got moved the soviets then pass it on to the americans in a very long strange game of telephone and this is where things get weird Out of nowhere, on March 26th, Patton flies to the headquarter of the 12th Corps to meet with its commander, Manton Eddy.

Solid name there, by the way.

Manton Eddy sounds like he's vaguely related to a Morton Joe.

Like he's the cousin or something.

Like Amorton Joe is in control of the water.

Manton Eddy is in control of like cranberry juice or something.

Don't become addicted to the cranberry juice.

Your body will crave antioxidants.

Manton Eddy asking George Patton if he's turned his niece into a breeder.

George, have you ever had a spider crawl up your leg in a field?

I mean,

Nicholas Holt's character's death is also the way George Patton died, so I mean...

It's true.

It's technically correct.

There, he told Eddie, you're going to go east on a raid 60 miles through German lines, and you're going to find a POW camp there, and I need you to liberate it.

That camp, of course, being the one where John Waters is held.

Now, this is a real shock to Eddie, as the entire American offensive at that point was driving north towards the Ruhr Pocket, where the entire remnants of Nazi Group B, about a half a million soldiers, a slap-together force of the last remnants of the Wehrmacht, the Volkssturm elements of the Hitler youth, were dug in and would become one of the most important battles the Americans would fight on German soil.

So he's like, you want me to do what now?

Like in the middle of all of this?

Patton said, don't worry about it.

Just raid the camp.

And to be fair, I guess somewhat to Patton, there had been several camp liberation missions up to this point.

Though, not to give points to Patton, those were all well-planned and executed military operations.

Not while there was a massive offensive about to be carried out, and not where Patton is like, you need to go right now.

This massive operation to the River Pocket couldn't really lose anything.

Like, they didn't have anything to sacrifice for some side quest going in a completely different direction.

And Patton's idea was going to be like a battalion-sized task force.

So, 300-ish men, dozens of vehicles.

Eddie told Patton all of this, and Patton promptly told him to shut the fuck up and give the orders to the 4th Armored Division under General William Hoag.

Hoague got the orders and pretty much out loud said, this is the dumbest shit I've ever heard.

Now, mostly because what I told you, go 60 miles, hit a POW camp.

That was the extent of the orders that he got.

He didn't get any more details, really at all, and said he just got a list of things he couldn't have.

Namely, he could only, like I said, a battalion task force.

He wouldn't be given any air support.

And due to the distance and, of course, the offensive going into the river pocket, he would be out of range for any artillery support and none would be given to him.

And most importantly, the raid has to start tomorrow.

So you have a battalion-sized task force in World War II would have been in the six to seven hundred man range, maybe a little more if it's an armor battalion.

But to be honest with you, I'm maybe mixing that up because of just the way this stuff's organized nowadays.

It's not a lot of people, if you're going to be going over this kind of, in this kind of environment, and then also like you're effectively, you're attacking a defended position, even if it's not like, you know, a fucking citadel, it's still going to be defended.

So you got some issues there.

60 miles behind enemy lines.

Yeah.

And also any, you know, like depending because you're that far behind enemy lines and, you know, you've got this huge concentration of people that are massed in the area, like you could very easily find yourself in a situation where like a much larger force just kind of envelops you.

And the last thing I'd say is, just from what you've described, like not to get too mod, like, you know, 21st century doctrine on the thing that happened, you know, 80 plus years ago, but there's no intent whatsoever there.

There's no specification of, like, what is it that is going, you want me to do to support the mission.

If the assignment is just go and attack this POW campus, like, oh, am I supposed to kill all the POWs too?

Like, it's my job to extirpate the entire thing?

Am I doing this fucking, like, I don't know,

Svetsnaz style?

It's like, you know, 100 guards killed, 700 prisoners killed, 300 of my own guys killed by friendly fire, mission success.

Well, that's one of the problems that is not ever solved by Patton.

Well, none of them are ever solved by Patton.

But, you know, he calls it a battalion-sized task force, but he also says he only could take 300 men, which is not a battalion.

He has, like, I think about three companies of vehicles, light and medium tanks, as well as some jeeps, but no, like, trucks to carry the POWs.

And he is told that you could assume there's about 900 POWs there.

Hoague gets these...

orders and he's pretty speechless of what's being asked of him based on what I told you and the small fact that Hoagu's men has been fighting non-stop for about three days before this.

They had not rested at all.

They hadn't had time to fix their vehicles.

They hadn't had time to rest, nothing.

So he asked Patton, how exactly do you expect me to do this?

Patton shrugs and said, that's not really up to you to question anymore because it's an order and this order has been green-lated by the boss, General Omar Bradley.

Now, did Bradley approve of this mission?

Is probably one of the greatest questions that have never truly been answered because Bradley and his handling of Patton is very interesting.

And that is, he can't really stop him from doing whatever the fuck he wants, despite being his superior.

At the risk of sounding like I'm using language that I'd like us to have moved past at our day and age and the age of us as people, George Patton was a messy bitch who loved drama.

And if he couldn't get what he wanted,

he would go to his superior superior.

He did this all the time.

It's so beyond the pale of what you would normally expect with the sort of chain of command stuff in the military.

But Patton just kind of did it.

Patton got away with it all the time.

Like, if Bradley told him no, he would just go to Eisenhower, which is crazy.

Like, the supreme allied commander getting rang up by his annoying subordinate.

Yeah, calling him up in Malta and like he's in the room that gives you like consumption to getting a phone call be like, dad won't let me go to the movies.

Like,

so a lot of time, like, like we talked about in our last episode, Bradley would just kind of give a non-committal answer.

So, like, if it went right, he'd be like, yeah, it's fine.

If it went wrong, he'd be like, oh, I told you not to do that.

But at the end of the day, Patton's still never getting in trouble for anything.

I think one of the problems with Bradley is he couldn't be seen.

And admittedly, this is probably the same for any superior officer.

I was an officer.

I don't know.

To be punked by your subordinate.

It's pretty bad.

Yeah, like you could if he told pat no patton would just do it anyway and then make bradley look bad and bradley wouldn't be able to fire him because eisenhower wouldn't let him yeah yeah

it's hard to command someone who has read the secret version of the art of war that has the secret extra page that tells you to fuck your knees

constantly getting disrespected by your bratty sub but being all having to say face the entire time uh you know stolid midwestern guy you know very very modest mannered etc., but like, you know, seething with rage because of this little bastard who keeps fucking disobeying you.

Omar Bradley was spiritually Canadian.

The patent polycule is getting very complicated.

None of these people were eating enough fiber to bottom.

I'm, I'm sorry.

Okay, got that C-rat ass.

Yes.

That's why they teach you how to fucking break up a fecal impaction in cold water survival or cold weather survival training, man.

You know, at the end of the day, it's...

That's important.

You got to keep your buddy warm.

Well, exactly.

You got to make your buddy smile.

And And sometimes, you know, you got to got to understand the mechanics of things like that.

You know, they didn't know this in World War II.

Sometimes you got a Luke Skywalker inside the taunt on your

comrades.

Oh, my fucking God.

Yeah.

Oh, wear me like a jacket.

Now,

that's a very, very different version of that scene from Enemy at the Gates.

So we don't know if Bradley really did give the green light or not, but we do know that Eisenhower absolutely did not.

And it should be pointed out here that at no time did Patton tell anyone that his son-in-law was in the camp.

Patton biographers tend to breeze over this fact that he knew.

He undoubtedly knew, saying it's, quote, unconfirmed.

And let's put aside the fact that the Third Army itself had intel documents confirming it for two days at this point.

But we have Patton's own letters to his wife, the same wife he was cheating on, with his own non-fungible niece.

The secret page of art of war.

It's the most important page, and most people don't read it.

I would also say, too, that like, all right, this is obviously, it seems like historical, deliberate oversight to make Patton seem like less of just unprofessional person, but like, largely, this is not unprecedented.

The entirety of British military history did this for fucking Bernard Montgomery.

Like, this is just a thing.

They've decided this guy is, because of his accomplishments in Italy and in France and Germany, they've now decided that this guy rules so hard we're going to look over the fact that, like, he effectively was like, Hey, I'm going to create task force suicide intentional, and you guys are going to go save my son-in-law.

I hope.

But I can't tell you that's the actual commander's intent because then people will get mad at me.

So, just kind of just go off in the woods somewhere.

Have you tried driving to the east?

What happens then?

You'll figure it out.

I got to save my son-in-law because who else is my brother got a folk?

Exactly.

Now, right after sending the task force out, he penned a letter to his wife that said,

I sent a column to a place 40 miles east of where John and some 900 prisoners are said to be.

I have been nervous as a cat, as everyone but me thought it too great of a risk.

If I lose that column, it will possibly be a new incident.

Two things there.

Nervous as a cat.

Who taught him how to write this way?

They spoke fucking weird back then, man.

That's just, that's just old timey ass.

Man, my pussy is nervous.

My pat pussy is nervous.

All that like fucking old Jiminy Gall Dern, Buster Brown, kind of fucking weird ass shit they they said in the early part of that.

I'm nervous as a cat.

Yeah, yeah.

And

it'll be a new incident is my favorite part of that.

Yeah.

Like it has happened so many times and him like, oh man, they're going to be mad at me again.

They're going to tell me they're going to fire me and then I'm just going to be able to keep playing with my tanks again.

But the fact that people breeze over this, I mean, I haven't read the histories in question, but the fact that they treat it as if it's unknowable when it seems very deliberate here, it kind of reminds me of.

historians of Frederick the Great being like, oh, you know, he just, you know, we're unsure about his sexuality where all his letters are like, I cannot wait to bottom for you again, dude.

I'm so fucking horny.

I really, really need a dude to fuck me.

Also, I love you romantically.

Like,

this isn't just a sex thing.

I love you as a person.

It's like, if there were only a term to describe sexual orientation in this day and age, I would absolutely use it for myself.

Now, the mission is dropped on Hoag, who sends a letter to Lieutenant Creighton Abrams, who told Hoag, well, sir, this is about the dumbest shit I've ever heard, but we kind of have no choice.

They come to a way to fix this, which is like, we're not going to be able to get out of this, but if we're going to do it, we need to send more people in, not just a task force.

Hoague said, I can't do that.

Patton is refusing, and I need a commander for said task force.

So a guy named Harold Cohen is put in charge to begin planning, planning what really, I have no idea.

He has no idea.

The only orders that he has been given is to drive to the east and find a POW camp.

Fun fact here, and I promise this is not just me taking a dig at Cohen.

This is going to become important in about five seconds.

He has what has been described as, quote, a debilitating case of hemorrhoids.

Once again, if you're bottoming, fiber is very important, or else you'll get piles.

Nobody told this

to Cohen.

Also, I did not know what piles was.

I had to look that up.

Like, oh, it's hemorrhoids.

Yeah.

Now, Patton arrives at that specific command the next day, and he shoots out any concerns that anybody brings up until someone says, hey, Cohen's asshole is falling out and he can barely walk.

Maybe we should get a new commander for this thing.

Now, normally, this is where an officer would be like, that's a good point.

Thank you.

I'll pick someone else.

But Patton looks him dead in the eye and says, I don't believe you.

Show me.

So, after grabbing his personal doctor, he walks Cohen into a tent and he's like, let me look at your asshole.

And Cohen drops his pants, spreads them, and proves that he does, in fact, have really bad hemorrhoids.

At which point, Patton says, okay, pick a subordinate to take command.

Patton's a real piece of shit.

What if he, like, really hated his son-in-law, actually, and he was trying to sabotage this as much as possible to just get him killed?

But then, like, he wanted his wife to be convinced that he did the best he could.

Because, I mean, all of this feels like, it's like, all right, dude, okay.

So, you know, indiscretion.

This looks like, this looks very, very bad if you're sort of redirecting the war effort.

You know, it's sort of like, we have examples of this from modern things, not quite quite as dramatic, but, you know, it looks bad when it happens.

But in this case, it's like, we're going to do this, but I'm also going to set it up for failure in every possible way.

That's what's confusing me.

Operation, I hate my son-in-law.

George Patton doing weaponized incompetence and just being recommended, like, George, you need to solve this.

This is a problem.

You need to read some bell hooks.

Oh, fuck me.

They're going to make a movie about this.

You know, it's going to be the same cast as a bridge too far, but it's just, I don't know, a niece too far.

One niece is one niece too far.

Yeah, fair enough.

What's interesting here is like Patton is famously anti-Semitic and kind of sympathetic towards the Nazis in his writing.

A rare thing amongst American and British officers, let's be fucking real.

Really, really rare.

Well, less so amongst Americans and Brits, but because there's not the aristocratic angle to it.

To be honest with you, like there's a pretty significant trend of that in America in the sense that like had Japan.

Yeah, thankfully that ended and that doesn't happen anymore.

Yeah, yeah yeah yeah yeah the reason why it's interesting is Cohen is a Jewish man who has hemorrhoids and has to pick a subordinate to take over and he picks a captain named Abraham Baum uh which Patton is not happy with he's like I fired one Jewish guy and I got a second Jewish guy

this does not make Patton happy this feels like the setup for an extremely anti-Semitic joke there's no setup here this isn't even a joke this is just pat being an asshole you know there's a part of me too that's just like, Mel Brooks was literally an ETO veteran.

He fought in the European Theater of Operations World War II.

So like he could have been present for some of this.

I would love to see the Mel Brooks rendition of, I thought, you know, I hiring a witch doctor to curse my Jewish subordinate with ass cancer, but then he also gets to pick another Jewish guy to lead the mission.

It's just sort of like, what kind of like Nazi rune witch doctor shit do I have to do to rid myself of this?

Like, I could see, you know, Mel Brooks, he always found a way to make it funny one way or the other, even when it's insanely racist, like Blazing Saddles.

Something that's kind of weird here, and maybe this is me and my modern brain reading Patton's words after the fact.

I'm willing to give him that much credit, but Bomb meets Patton afterwards, and Patton tells him, quote, if you people pull this off, I'll give you a medal of honor.

Oh,

that you people hits too hard.

And the reason why I think Patton's saying you people to bomb me specifically is a Jewish man and not his entire task force is because he's telling bomb he would get a medal of honor.

Obviously, he's not giving the medal of honor to everyone.

He's giving it to Bomb.

So I think that was like a little bit of, ugh.

That's like the censored version.

What he actually told him is like, you'll definitely get the medal of honor, but like, you're not allowed to pawn it for money.

I know you people love doing that shit.

God.

I mean, that's probably what he wrote in his diary.

Yeah, I was going to say, I mean, old-timey, old-timey.

It can sometimes feel just like fully foreign country level of like overt shit people would say, right, et etc back in those days uh the idea that you could be like hi i'm trying to get a hotel room at like a hotel in new york and they're like no we don't rent rooms to jews like that was legit the thing until like the 50s or the 60s like it's yeah america was a weird place and credit where credit's due bomb did not really take that sitting down he looked patton dead in the eyes you don't have to bribe me to do my job hell yeah that's what i'm fucking talking about okay okay This dude's laying it down.

Elliot Gould gets to play him in an east too far, okay?

Abraham Baum played by Elliot Gould, chest hair fucking exposed at all times.

Moggin David, necklace, exactly.

It's all there.

Patton, after staring at hemorrhoids and changing everything at the last second, left the command, but not before leaving his aide, Major Alexander Stiller, to stay behind and babysit Baum, who, despite being outranked by Stiller as a major, would still be in command.

Baum asked, why are you coming?

And Stiller kind of just shrugged and said, oh, quote, for the thrills and the laughs.

But the real reason is because Stiller knew what Patton's son-in-law looked like and could identify him and make sure they saved him.

Again, still nobody knows about Waters.

As for the makeup of the task force, this is from the National World War II Museum, quote, it consists of 314 men, 16 tanks, 28 half-tracks, and 13 other vehicles.

This amounted to a mechanized infantry task force comprised of infantry company and half-tracks, a company of Sherman medium tanks, a platoon of light tanks, and a command and support element from Cohen's Cohen's 10th Armored Infantry Battalion.

These are seasoned battle-hardened troops, and the tanks are from part of Abraham's old command, Company C 37th Tank Battalion, famous for being the first unit to reach Bastone.

And despite Cohen no longer going, he was going to do his best to not let bomb get shit on.

He pointed out to Stiller multiple times about all of the problems with the plan.

Namely, their vehicles didn't carry enough fuel for the round trip of 120 miles.

Stiller said, just bring fuel cans.

Cohen pointed out that due to the fact that you gave me a 24-hour mission turnaround time, he could not get any more.

They did not have any extra fuel rationed out to them to fill any extra cans.

So Stiller said, just steal some from Germany, seemingly forgetting that Germany was, as a country, virtually out of fuel thanks to the whole war thing.

Also, they didn't have the vehicles to transport an estimated 900 POWs they might have to move.

Stiller's answer again was, steal some German shit while you're out.

Then Stiller gave the maps a bomb, which, of course, he would need for the mission, assuming he would get detailed military maps.

He did not.

He got an old basic roadmap.

The POW camp was not even on the map because Stiller admitted he was not entirely sure where it was.

So his suggestion was, we'll just kidnap some German civilians and get the information out of them.

Honestly,

there's an element to this where it's like Stiller kind of seems like he could be played by either Mel Brooks or Sid Caesar in one of Mel Brooks' movies.

Like, where he's just like, oh, just fucking did they take that village out at gunpoint and kidnap them or something.

Just kidnap them.

Yeah, it's fine.

Incredible.

George Patton then has to be played by Dom DeLuis because it's a Mel Brooks movie.

Yeah.

I'm fine with that.

Yeah, it's fine with me.

I mean, since we're casting people who are all mostly dead.

So because nobody had any idea where the camp was, it would decided that they would need to conduct more of a small offensive than a raid in order to get there.

It would involve sending in a tank company and a motorized infantry company in to secure the town of Schweinheim so that bombsmen and the task force could burn through it as fast as they could, making the drive towards Hamilberg in the middle of the night.

So, wait, S-C-H-W-E-I-N-H-E-I-M?

Yeah.

So, it's Pigtown.

Yes.

Man, once again, this is a fucking Mel Brooks movie.

We're going, we have to liberate Pigtown.

We've got the Jewish company going to liberate Pigtown.

Man, fucking

everything about this is just hitting all the notes.

This is incredible.

This offensive is certified, not kosher.

So, this isn't really important here, but I have to say, the name of the tank commander of the tank company going to liberate Pig Town for this particular action was, and I swear to fucking God, his name was Captain Dick Pancake.

What

full name Richard Pancake?

Dick Pancake liberating Pigtown.

Oh, hi, I'm Dick Pancake.

This is my wife, Vagina Waffles.

All in a niece too far.

Coming to theater soon.

Dick Pancake, played by John Ham.

Yeah, she dicked pancake on my Schweinheim to like bomb.

I fucking died.

Imagine showing up to like as a conscript.

Like, oh, this is

your commanding officer, Captain Pancake, Dick Pancake, this is his XO, vagina waffles.

Yeah, I mean, but there's not, like, I don't know, Ricky Pancake doesn't work.

Rick Pancake, Richard Pancake, Richard Pancake sounds like a fucking porn name.

Dick Pancake sounds less horny somehow.

Might as well be called fucking Dick Cream Pie.

Yeah, exactly.

It's like, see, if you get his cousin's name, if you get, like, an interview from a private investigator, it's like getting interviewed by Richard Pancake.

That absolutely sounds like a metaphor for like someone setting you up with an escort.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

Man,

did you meet Richard Pancake this weekend?

Yeah.

I can't fucking walk for shit.

Getting double teamed by Dick Pancake and Willie Cream Pie.

All in Pigtown.

Getting big roasted in Pigtown.

Pigtown does sound like a gay porn production company.

And I promise I'm going to be saying the name Dick Pancake as much as possible whenever I can, as long as he plays a role in the upcoming operation.

Go insane

attention to detail and make sure that everything is reflected.

Like the operations order has commander's critical intelligence requirements, and the only thing listed is no loads refused.

No loads refused in Pigtown.

No loads refused

raiding party.

Signed off by

Captain Dick Pancake Armor Commanding.

We didn't set out to make this into like somewhere between novelty gay porn and or homophobic joke, and yet the jokes write themselves.

Hey, this is an episode about saving John Waters.

So John Waters has to be saved from a Nazi prison camp, and the guy in charge of it can't do it because he's got debilitating ass problems.

So this isn't a Mel Brooks movie.

This is a John Waters movie.

This is a John Waters.

You're right.

Yeah, exactly.

That's right.

This is a John Waters production by way of Pig Town.

Starring Dick Pancake.

Now, the Germans defending pigtown were thought to be from the volksdurm and for people who are unaware the volkssturm is a people's militia made up of well boys and old men between the ages of being born and still alive though sometimes like it was originally supposed to be 16 and 60 but you had kids like as if you're old enough to hold a rifle you'd end up in the volksdur yeah i mean that was the thing with uh with people like gunter gross that like their generation they called the flockhelfer like they were more or less drafted at the end of the war from the ages of like famously Pope Benedict.

10, 11, 12, really more like 12, 13, 14, 15.

But yeah, like they were, they were notionally too young to serve, but like they're like, well, we killed everyone else.

So you're next in the, in the, the, the command succession here, you know?

Yeah.

And for a lot of the old guys, they were previously exempt from military service due to being too goddamn old and also having medical problems.

So obviously, this is a militia slapped together for a nationwide last stand.

They had no standard uniforms, no standard weapons, and no standard training.

Some of them had special weapons though, and I don't mean special in like a good way.

I mean like the Nazi state put together what amounted to be zip guns and gave it to them.

Some of them were bolt action rifles and others were submachine guns that would blow up in your face.

In short, Dick Pancake and the infantry captain Adrian Tessier thought that their part of the mission of capturing Pigtown, That is a sentence that just left my mouth, would be incredibly easy, but if you've been listening to this show long enough, you know that Pigtown is going to be hard to conquer.

It's important to note here that nobody involved in the operation had any real intel.

No scouting had been done on Pigtown or the surrounding area.

They had no maps.

Their intel is based more upon some rumors of POWs they had captured, but not POWs had served in Pigtown.

So it's like second head, I heard this town is staffed by Volkssturm.

Yeah, I've heard that it's staff, it's defended by a special crack unit composed entirely of Twinks and Daddies.

Pigtown, the biggest bear circuit party in the European theater.

Pigtown staffed by the Volksstrom wearing oldly fucking leather bodysuits and gimp masks.

I feel as though that would probably strike fear in the heart of any kind of attacking force if all of a sudden...

That would strike fear in me.

Like the enemy is bifurcated of like teenagers and old men all dressed like gimps, but their commander is divine from pink flamingos holding a huge gun that may explode and kill them, may explode and kill you.

You never know.

Any town defended like that, there's more than one thing bifurcated in there.

You know what I mean?

Tom, thanks for that knowledge.

I was going to say, yeah, yeah, this does communicate an image of like Tom's specialty of like weird body modification.

You know, it's like basically you're broken down.

The companies are divided on what kind of like dick splitting you've got.

On which axis is it split?

Is it split side and side or down the middle?

Octopus.

What was the joke that I made when we were in the bar in Belfast?

It's like, you guys have your X, Y, and Z axis dick splitting body mods, but I've got mine kidded out to receive a rumble pack for the N64.

So when I play Star Fox, it gets me off.

This brings us back to Captain Dick Pancake.

Him and his boys had no idea what they're driving into, the Pancake Brigade.

Dick Pancake and Tessier moved.

in at 6 p.m.

on March 26, 1945.

And as soon as they began to attack the town, it was abundantly clear they weren't just fighting the Volksster daddy tweens and retirees.

Thanks for that, guys.

They had been reinforced by several squads of veteran SS men who had been through the fucking ringer at that point.

I mean, if you're a seasoned and veteran SS trooper and survived till 1945, you've done some horrible things and survived some horrible things.

A lot of them had survived the Eastern Front.

So they knew how to turn a town like Pigtown into a death trap.

I mean, Pigtown is picturesque, small German town, you know, small roads, buildings very close together.

So it's really easy to turn a town like that into a death trap, even if you have a 12-year-old with a machine gun.

That's exactly what happened.

Tessier's men begin to get shot to pieces.

And then as if it couldn't get any worse, they get bogged down.

They call up Dick Pancake for armor support.

I'm trying my best here.

And the lead tank at Dick Pancake's company gets knocked out with a panzerfaust, blocking the rest of the column on the road so they can't get into the town.

And what was supposed to take no more than an hour had turned into a pointless meat grinder that went on till 11 p.m., so almost six hours at that point.

And Stiller, who is waiting with Baum a few miles in the rear, looks over at him and says, seemingly unbothered, quote, I think we're running behind schedule.

Yes.

You've nailed it.

Good job.

This apparently caused Baum to lose his mind.

He began screaming and yelling at the major and demanding to know why Patton was so fucking determined to take this goddamn POW camp.

Because Baum and every other man in the army knew Patton does not give a single shit about soldiers.

Stiller finally admitted that it's because Patton's son-in-law was in the camp, which caused Baum to get even madder and threatened to call off the entire operation.

Only to be reminded that he is in fact only a captain.

There's no way he could do that.

Dick Pancake and Tessier's men are already engaged in combat, so he had to go in.

And at 1130 p.m., he ordered his men to move out.

Even though Pigtown was not secure, the captains in the town, again, one of whom is Dick Pancake, I'm saying it as many times as I can, said, we probably need another hour before the town is secure and you can move through.

Bomb tells them they can't wait anymore and they're going in anyway.

So he orders his task force to simply floor it through Pigtown as fast as possible.

and it works.

They don't take a single loss, and they get right through Pigtown, flooring it down the highway towards Hamilberg.

But it's already 2.30 in the morning.

They're way, way, way behind schedule, meaning that by the time the sun came up, they were still 35 miles away from Hamilburg and broad daylight traveling on the highway.

Remember how I said Baum and his task force had no intelligence, really?

Well, as they're hauling ass down the highway, they happen to drive straight through a town called Gemuden, which housed a major rail complex used for moving men and material around the front.

So that meant they suddenly ran into hundreds of German soldiers just chilling on the side of the road.

Now, thankfully for the Americans, the Germans hanging out there also had no idea there were suddenly going to be hundreds of Americans hauling ass through the neighborhood.

So they just kind of stared at each other as they drove by.

And some shooting does take place.

It turns into more of a drive-by shooting than anything else.

They don't stop.

But there is another problem here.

The Germans in that town can warn the other Germans further down the road that, oh, by the way, there's about 300 Americans hauling ass in your direction.

And that does happen.

They reach a bridge which Baum would need to cross.

And when his column pulls up to it, they drive right into a massive ambush.

They lose two tanks, about a dozen men, and then the bridge is blown up directly in front of them.

Because of how shit his maps are, Baum did not have a backup route.

So he decides he needs to wing it, gunning across the German countryside and not stopping for anything until he cornered a group of Volkssturm preteens in the woods and took them hostage.

At which point, he gets the location of Hamillberg from them, like at gunpoint, and puts one on the lead tank.

Let's just like just guide us there.

So there's like a terrified child soldier at the front of the tank.

And this works, but This whole roundabout journey has added hours to the mission, which was again supposed to to be a surprise raid and has now turned to a several hour long firefight with the entire German countryside.

And now the captain of the task force is relying on a very scared pre-teen conscript to guide him towards Hamilberg.

There's German scout planes in the air.

So like Baum now realizes that this is going to be a lot harder fight.

I can't go anywhere without these planes relaying in real time where I'm going.

Kind of like watching someone rob a bank and try to get away with a helicopter overhead.

You know, you're fucked.

But the column pushes on.

It's now late afternoon, and he is a few miles away from Hamilberg.

His vehicles are low on fuel, and a ton of people were wounded, and they have burned through a lot more ammo that they thought they would have at that point.

And to make matters worse, Baum was about to discover that the Germans were lying in wait for him all the way down the highway.

Not the Volkssturm, not SS or Wehrmacht infantry, but eight Nazi heavy tank destroyers known as the Elephant.

Now, Elephant is fucking massive.

It's so heavy that it's actually bigger than most modern main battle tanks.

It's armed with the infamous 88mm anti-tank weapon as its main gun.

And it is probably the best tank destroyer built in World War II when it comes to pure KD ratio.

And this is not me getting really high on Nazi engineering.

Trust me.

It's thought that for every elephant that was killed or lost in combat, they killed 10 enemy tanks.

That being said, the elephant had some hilarious engineering oversights because this is a Nazi vehicle we're talking about.

For example, it had no outside machine guns when it rolled out of the assembly line.

So it just had a cannon.

And Soviet infantry learned quite quickly that they could defeat it via a casual stroll.

As long as they walked in two different concentric circles, the gun could not traverse and hit them because the tank destroyer, right?

Also has so many flaws in like the electrics the hydraulics you name it the the power plant it breaks down constantly and that only gets worse and worse as the war goes on and resources get scarcer and scarcer by the time we're talking about 1945 there's maybe 20 of them left out of 91 built most of them are lost due mechanical breakdown and then the crews just abandon them so The ones that are still functioning, the ones that bomb runs into, are mostly still running on prayers to the Warhammer 40k machine god.

You also would figure that even if it wasn't running, if the cannon was working at like a static position, it would still be useful to you just because it's also that it can like when your tank breaks down, it just turns into a pillbox.

Yeah, and it's stupidly powerful.

I looked it up online when you mentioned it, and I saw an article called The Elephant: Incredible and also Terrible.

Yeah, that's most German tanks.

Like, it's like, oh, it did all these revolutionary things, but also, like, it broke down every 10 kilometers, which is the general theme of German engineering in the war.

A lot of that has to do with overengineering, lack of resources, things being rushed, you name it.

But yeah, impressive piece of weaponry if you could keep it running and most people could not.

What is actually impressive here is because by 1945, there's only about 20 elephants left, right?

Baum runs into about eight of them, meaning he managed to find about 50% of the surviving vehicles all arrayed down down the highway.

And no matter how slapdash the repair job on these particular elephants were, this is bad.

This turns into a mechanized firing squad.

And within minutes, he loses three of his tanks, five of his half-tracks, and a jeep before he is able to deploy his infantry.

Because like I said, the elephants are deployed unsupported.

Some of them have been fixed with coaxial machine guns or crew machine guns to fight infantry, but not all of them.

So to counter them, all Bomb does is send in his infantry and the elephants are forced to retreat.

So taking Tom's metaphor of the ice planet of Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back, that basically you just run up to their feet and just tie cables around them and shit and they fall over.

Yeah.

Like the ATATs or whatever.

Yep.

Yeah, you could do it.

I mean, you could do that if you just like jam a big log in the track.

That's pretty much the same thing, which the Soviets did do.

And we talked about that during our Battle of Kursk episode, that sometimes the Soviets' methods to take out these giant, stupid tanks tanks was to just like jam a crowbar in the track.

Well, I mean, tank destroyers and self-propelled artillery bring out the weirdest design and weirdest design impulses when it comes to things.

And I can, I can recall, was it the,

there's a French 155 self-propelled howitzer.

Was it at the GCT?

What is it?

I want to say AUF-1.

And the mnemonic device to remember it in a reconnaissance surveillance leaders course is giant clown turret because that's what it looks like.

Hell yeah.

Now, finally, finally bomb reached the pow camp he orders his men to charge in smash down the gates secure it most of the camp guards realize wait a minute we're pow camp guards we're cowards we don't want none of this smoke uh though some do shoot back but this is not a lot uh the men mostly suppress these guys quite quite easily but then he runs into more problems remember bomb had been told to expect about 900 pows give or take but there's well over a thousand of them as well as several thousand Serbian POWs.

Now, this brings up other problems, namely, as they're storming the camp, it turned out Serbian POWs were wearing uniforms that look very, very close to the Nazis, and several of bombs men gunned down Serbian POWs thinking they're Nazi camp guards.

Whoops!

Hey, look, I'm not going to say it's not their fault, but when you're suddenly surprised by several thousand Serbians, normally nothing good comes from that.

That sounds like

the biggest nightmare of every Albanian.

That's what they see in their mind's eye.

That's God's wrath.

It's like they thought they were being swarmed and they were going to get mobbed to death.

And it was just 500 Serbians all saying good morning and offering them the most powdery, incredibly dense coffee they've ever had in their lives.

Hell yeah.

And don't you dare call it Turkish coffee.

Yeah, yeah.

Look, I'm just saying,

I feel as though, yeah, that must have been an interesting experience in the camp itself.

The kind of Serbian-American handshake.

Yeah, how confused must they have been when they start speaking Serbian to them?

Like, what the fuck is that?

Shoot it!

It's like, hey, we've got that guy from the Chicagoland region in this company.

Hey, can you translate?

He's like, sorry, I'm too racist.

I can't understand your language.

Sorry, I only speak Estonian.

Yeah, exactly.

Sorry.

I only learned the language of the Baltics to make fun of those guys.

The Balkans, too far south for me.

Guy from St.

Louis.

I can be really racist to them.

Don't worry.

In the middle of of all this, a German camp commandant sent out a delegation to broker a ceasefire, having to know why that the Americans are there because he knew who John Waters was.

The Germans knew that it was Patton Sudinlaw.

And in order to show the Americans that they had like, you know, good faith and all that, in this delegation, they included Waters, showing the Americans that, like, look, he's safe.

He's fine.

We can all stop shooting each other.

You can take your POWs and fuck off back to your line, and we'll all be fine.

But then a camp guard popped out and shot John Waters directly in the gut, badly wounding him.

At this point, all hell breaks loose.

Soldiers overpower the rest of the camp guards.

Waters is rushed to the camp hospital, which is staffed by Serbian doctors because Serbians make up the majority of the camp.

Meanwhile, Baum is trying to figure out just how the fuck to get out of this situation.

He lost a lot of his vehicles.

very low on fuel and now had thousands of people he needed to transport.

Coming to the understanding that there is no way for him to pull this off, he decides he can only rescue officers at the rank of major or higher, or prisoners who are very sick and need immediate medical attention that the camp hospital cannot give them.

Then, if not for like a little bit of salt, final salt in the wound, the Serbian doctor looking after waters tells Bomb that his wound is so bad that if he's transported, he will die.

So he would be forced to remain at the camp.

At 8 p.m., Bomb and the rest of his task force with about 200 POWs, with them, most of whom are riding on the tops of Sherman tanks, took off into the dark back towards American lines.

And I don't know if you've ever seen how small a Sherman tank is in person.

I have.

That is a densely packed layer of POWs on the top of that motherfucker.

It's like those pictures of trains in India with like all the people hanging off them.

Well, it's like the thing that they used to tell, I mean, for officers, they were like, if your soldiers come back from reconnaissance in Afghanistan and say that they saw 30 people in a minivan, they're not exaggerating.

Like, it's that kind of a thing.

Just got to to pack them in.

You got to lube them up real good, sliding those POWs into the hatch.

Some platonic lubrication.

It's for transportation.

It's fine.

It's like, you know, when you transport a gun, they're covered in gun grease, right?

When they're brand new, you got to lube up your POWs so you can stack them more effectively on the top of your very small tank turret.

Because Shermans are fucking tiny.

Holy shit.

So they're driving, gunning it back towards American lines.

And they drive directly into another ambush.

This one is not set up by Elephants or the Volkstern, but from the nearest reinforcements the Nazis could get into position.

Instructors from the local infantrymen's school, a bunch of like junior NCOs.

Now, this is where things get really, really strange.

Bomb's lead tank gets hit with a panzerfaust.

Now, generally, a panzerfaust hit on a Sherman is bad.

The tank crewmen knew this.

It gets hit.

Smoke fills the inside of the tank, so they assume they're on fire.

They bail out, thinking their Sherman was lost.

But it wasn't.

It was damaged, but still largely useful.

So the German instructors rush forward.

They jump inside the smoking Sherman tank and stole it like out of Nazi Grand Theft Auto, hauling ass into the woods.

I hate when Nazi NCOs ghost ride the whip.

This is the second time in as many months we have the military version of someone ghost riding a whip.

I'm just imagining, but like if there were Serbian POWs being evacuated in this column and they see this happen, they're like, oh, oh, well, obviously, I thought you guys thought those were Nazis.

They must be Bosnians.

Fuck.

What's really weird here is the rest of the column had no idea what happened to the first tank, which had been hijacked by a group of German NCS.

This sounds like shit out of fucking Last of the Mohicans.

Like the point man just gets disappeared into the woods or some shit, and you hear some hooting and hollering.

You're like, what happened to that guy?

So the tanks behind it just follow?

The German hijack tank thinking this is the way they need to be going, which leads to three more tanks getting smoked by other German infantry instructors in the woods.

Bomb, at this point, having no idea what is going on anymore, or his retreat back to the POW camp, which has to be the most disheartening order anybody ever has to hear.

It's like, no, we need to fall back to safety.

The German POW camp.

By now, a lot of the POWs, some of whom have been killed in the ambush, some of whom have been wounded, probably were realizing.

We like our chances in the camp more than we do with the rescue party.

So all of the POWs elected to leave Bomb's task force and go back to their frozen, infected barracks upon return.

Bomb, now understanding that this entire mission had been a failure, decided the only thing he could do was at least try to get his men back across friendly lines.

But now he doesn't have enough fuel to drive the entire way because he's gone back and forth and gotten lost and all this other stuff.

So now his plan was just to gun it as fast and as far to American lines as they could go.

and then once his vehicles all ran out of fuel to just bail out and run for it.

Again, not a great order you want to hear from your commander.

Baum and his remaining men struck out in the morning of March 28th making for American lines.

But now obviously every German in the area knows about them.

They know that they're going to be leaving the camp, probably back towards American lines.

So As soon as they pull out of the POW camp, they're getting lit up on all sides.

All command and control breaks down down pretty rapidly after this, with Baum giving the official order of just fucking scatter, break into small groups, see if you can make it that way.

His literal orders were every man for himself, which is not good.

Yeah, you don't say.

Stiller just surrenders immediately, just walks and they're like ah, fuck this, I quit.

247 more men, most of whom were wounded in some way, were quickly captured.

32 men died, and 35 somehow ran through all of this and made it back to American lines.

Every single one of the task force vehicles were either destroyed or captured and then pressed into Nazi service.

Zero POWs are rescued, and Baum made it a short way into the woods before he was cornered by a group of Volkssterb soldiers and shot in the dick and balls and captured.

Oh my God, man.

I got my dick shot off by some Nazi pre-TV.

This is ending more like a John Waters film than a Mel Brooks film, to be honest with you.

Yep.

Yes.

I've been following, as you've been describing the places,

you know, looking on the map and whatnot.

And yeah, also I point out, like, this terrain sucks.

It sucks really bad.

It's really mountainous.

It's really wooded.

It's back in those days, it was even less developed and clear-cut than it is now.

Yeah, this would have been shit.

And in March in Germany, March, end of March, early April, it's terrible.

Yeah, it's rainy as fuck.

So yikes.

Everything's muddy.

Also, there's a town that they probably came by if they didn't pass through called Bad Orb or Bad Orb.

I don't want to fucking do military operations in Bad Orb.

Like, you have no idea.

Like, you already have the Volkssterman places.

What if they have Nazi wizards?

That's the town where they're at.

They've got a Bad Orb there.

That's where Nazi Hogwarts should be, or as we call it, Hogwarts.

So, if all this sounds pointless, and it's because it is, I should also point out that just nine days after all this happened, the camp was liberated anyway.

Yep, there's not even two whole weeks later.

And with only that, the actual liberation, was General Eisenhower told about any of this?

The Supreme Allied Commander of all of Europe.

And he was fucking furious.

He said, quote, Patton sent out a little expedition on a wild goose chase, an effort to liberate some American prisoners.

The upshot of this was he got 25 prisoners back.

and lost a full company of medium tanks and a platoon of light tanks.

Well done.

Patton's response was just shit.

I don't know, man.

Yeah, but I mean, can you imagine if I hadn't, the kind of shit I would have gotten from the wife?

And it's all the like vaudeville-ass 1940s dudes are like, oh, gee whiz, buddy.

I agree with you.

The whole thing willakers.

Yeah, exactly.

It's definitely worth losing an entire company.

Think of it this way.

If I didn't send all of those men and vehicles over the border, or across the lines, rather, the Germans would not have captured multiple vehicles they could have brushed into service.

I am helping the cause of fascism.

And Eisenhower's like, what?

He's like, I mean, uh, oh, god damn it.

Fuck.

I wanted to throw you a little bit of name alert stuff too, just because looking at these places, it's really genuinely incredible.

Now, obviously, you can't translate them literally, but there is a town not too far from here, at least on the way I've got it zoomed out, called Hosenfeld, which would actually translate literally to Pantsfield.

Pantsfield's right to Pigtown.

Pigtown, Pantsfield, Bad Orb.

This is a John Waters movie, but also this is just the German map for Fortnite.

We must defend Pigtown.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

American Boy set too, but the lyrics are about bad orb.

I do like the idea of Baum getting his ball sack ventilated and, like, you know, curled up in the fetal position holdings.

Like, I should have stayed in Pigtown with Captain Dick pancake.

Don't worry.

We can clean you, clean up your wound and get you dressed with new clothes.

Pants Field is right over there.

It's named after what they've got a lot of.

Patton immediately goes on the defensive about all of this when the true scope of his fuck-up comes out.

He says the entire raid was simply a diversion from the American offensive in the River Valley.

Sure.

He also insists that he had no idea his son was in the camp, which is obviously untrue, demonstrably untrue, by his own diary, because, like we said, he wrote to his wife before the mission, and then he also wrote another one after the mission.

A real stringer bell moment.

He writes of the failure saying, quote, I feel terribly.

I tried hard to save him, and I may have been the cause of his death.

So, yeah, I mean, in his own diary, real stringer bell moments, taking notes on a criminal conspiracy.

Baum is furious about the whole thing.

Even writing years later, he fucking hates Patton.

He was never given the Medal of Honor either.

I saw some pictures of him doing a visit to the battle site in 2005, and he looked fucking pissed as shit in those photos.

It wasn't like, hey, bye guys, be guy guys.

He looked mad as fuck, honestly.

I mean, if anybody deserves to hold a grudge, it's Abraham Baum.

Yeah, I agree.

John Waters himself says it was incredibly stupid.

It was very, very dumb to send all of those men to try to save him.

Though he does kind of not use such exact wordings.

He's like, if the mission was to save me, it's very stupid, despite all of the evidence saying that it was.

Patton, being Patton, only partially accepted blame for everything that happened.

And even that was not publicly.

It was in his diary where he says the only only thing he regretted in the failure was not sending more soldiers in the raid, which would have made it successful.

But because it is Patton we're talking about, he suffered no repercussions for any of this whatsoever.

The end.

That is the story of Task Force Bomb.

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

If you would like to ask us a question, you can support the show on Patreon, which you should be doing anyway.

And we will answer your question on air.

You can ask us in the Discord or on patreon and today's question is what is your most recently developed pet peeve

this is our airing of minor grievances mine's easy my recently developed pet peeve because it's not a pet peeve i could have ever developed anywhere else was people who do not know how to use cycling lanes using cycling lanes or people just think it's like oh look at the strange sidewalk that nobody's walking on it's perfect for me and my five-person family to walk shoulder to shoulder.

That drives me nuts.

That absolutely drives me insane.

This is not the case in Britain and certainly not in America that like stuff is completely closed on Sunday, but it is absolutely here.

And I have gotten, I realize that it's a vibe shift is taking place in me.

And so if I get like a phone call or an email or anything from anyone ever on Sunday, I'm like, how the fuck do you presume to be allowed to contact me today?

And then I realized, like, wait, it's actually normal to do this basically anywhere else.

I'm just, I've just gotten so Swiss pilled.

Yeah, I guess that one's mine.

Swiss pilled chocolate and mystery bank maxing.

Swiss pilled and chocolate based.

My one's like so minor.

In the past, I'd say like a year and a half to two years, there has been a shift in London where the accepted kind of polite thing to do when the train stops is you stand to the side and let people get off before you try and rush in the doors.

Yeah, of course.

People just don't do that anymore.

They just stand there and you're like, oh, there's like six people two layers deep in front of me.

Like, get the fuck out of my way.

I'm getting off the train.

Where do you expect me to fucking go?

You'd like to get on the train.

Well, I would like to get off the fucking train.

Uh, I need to get off first.

Uh, we have that here.

Oh, another pet peeve, actually.

Um, I don't know what this is obviously a much bigger thing in Amsterdam, which is a different story altogether.

But a lot of people here have dogs, and a lot of people, it seems, really do not like to clean up dog shit.

There is a staggering amount of dog shit on the sidewalks, and it is like enough to notice.

It's, you know, unhygienic.

It's gross.

It spreads disease to, like, my dog just got sick the other day that probably had something to do with it.

Like, it's fucking weird, man.

Yeah.

Clean up your dogs.

Yeah.

I have another transport one since it is

getting into the summer and it is hot.

And the central line in London is like.

Fucking 100 feet underground and has air that's been trapped in there since the 50s.

I've heard and I have not not experienced.

Yeah.

Natural deodorant doesn't work.

Get the fucking aluminium.

Fuck your endocrine system.

I do not want to smell your pits when I'm on the way to work.

I have managed to dodge.

I've only been to London once when it was moderately warm and that was just very recently for the show.

Obviously, we're going to be back in June.

There's the plug.

June 22nd, get your tickets.

They're in the show notes.

Come see us live.

And I will get to smell the central line.

Get on the central line, get hot as fuck, loud as fuck, get hearing loss.

It'll be great.

yeah and from my understanding that's when i'm gonna experience the the london underground in pure stank heat for the first time and i personally look forward to it it'll be peak tourist season as well so like every train like the jubilee line going to westminster you're going to walk out and there's going to be a hundred people right at the top of the steps taking pictures of big ben you're going to try and get off an oxford circus and it's going to be like you know the way in germany they have like the mayonnaise in like a squeezy tube it's going to you're going to feel like that yeah we have that here as well i mean that's why I'm really happy I live.

I mean, I do live in a city that gets tourists, but like not really that many and places that bother me.

Other than, again, going back to my first Pet Pee, the cycling.

But that's not just for tourists.

Dutch people do that shit too.

But yeah, I can imagine living in a city that gets crushed by tourists would be bad.

I mean, I did used to live in Honolulu, but I didn't live in a part where tourists went.

So problem solved.

You know, at the end of the day, I feel as though if you go to London and you experience London when it's hot, you understand why the society is fully breaking down because it's not built for this, but it's becoming a warmer country.

And it's like, it's just up is down and left is right now because, yeah, it's actually going to be above 30 pretty regularly in the summer or, you know, 30 Celsius, whatever that is in Fahrenheit.

I can't remember.

And yeah, you know what?

So prepare yourself.

Prepare your body for the Thunderdome and get the anti-purse print that actually stops it because otherwise you're going to be.

Because I'm wearing actual deodorant and yet I am fucking sweating and I probably would smell awful.

I can see that.

Yeah, I'm looking like.

Funny aside, and I know we got to go, but years and and years ago, if you remember this, when they did MTV Unplugged, they actually did LL Cool J and they had a live band basically doing the fucking instrumental part for the song Mama Said, Knock You Out.

It was really cool as fuck.

It was like 92, 93.

Anyway, there were videos that went viral.

And the thing about it is that he's performing.

He takes his shirt off and he's rapping.

And folks are like, Yeah, but that's crazy.

Like, you see, he's got like the crusty anti-person stuff on his underarms.

Like, he should have gotten the gel.

And someone had to be like, it didn't exist yet.

We didn't have clear roll-on anti-personal stuff.

Go back in time.

Give LL Cool J the gel.

He's that flaky shit i'm sorry it's all we had it's like mama said wear the gel exactly they should have had somebody come you know like fucking that like check out his look on instagram beforehand it's like i i hate to break it to you we didn't even have blue leds yet so you couldn't have had smartphones sorry man anyway so that is a podcast that is our minor pet peeves i look forward to cycling through a crowded area of people who don't know what a cycling is and rolling my bike through dog shit on my way home.

But fellas, you have other podcasts.

Plug those other podcasts.

Trash Future, Hell of Way to Dad, Kill James Bond, No Gods, No Mayors.

It's all there.

They're all have Patreons.

So subscribe, listen.

They're very funny.

Beneath the Skin, and this guy sucked.

Yeah.

This is the only show that I host.

So support it on Patreon.

Also, again, we have live show tickets available for June 22nd in London.

You can get it for the whole weekend.

It's a festival.

You can see so many other acts.

But you should come and see us.

And that'll be fun.

We'll have merch there.

I'll have books there.

We'll be there.

We have paid a ransom and Nate is allowed to come to our show this time.

Yeah.

Well, no, don't mention it to my daughter.

She's going to get another fucking,

she's going to kidnap you.

Yeah, exactly.

I think it's an adult nap if a kid does it to another.

Kid kidnaps you by becoming ill with child disease that you have to stay home for.

So yeah, it's unfortunate.

She's better now, but it was an emergency, unfortunately.

And we look forward to seeing you all there.

Leave us a review on wherever it is you listen to podcasts.

And until next time, shoot yourself on the balls and hang out in Pigtown.

Bye.

Bye.

Bye.