Episode 356 - The American Suicide Fleet of WWI

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Hello, and welcome to the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast.

I'm Joe, and with me is Tom.

We're trapped aboard a U.S.

Navy vessel, circa 1917.

Our ship was not meant for war, but was instead converted from a pleasure yacht.

Our commanding officer, who doesn't have a single day of naval training, but tells us he spent a good portion of his time at Yale Law in the yacht club.

He constantly yells at us because the metal fixtures are rustic, because this ship was never meant for actual duty.

We can't clean any of the fixtures because all of the ship's important supplies have been replaced with overpriced bourbon and medicated dog food for the captain's 12-year-old French bulldog, who is so sickly, all it can do is shake and shit on itself.

We're required by the captain to salute the dog whenever we pass it.

After several days of interchangeably suffering from seasickness and having to hear about the captain's favorite kind of cigar, Tom and I grab the bulldog, say our final goodbyes, and jump overboard.

How are you doing, buddy?

I'm doing okay.

What rank did the dog have?

I don't know.

I mean, let's call it lieutenant.

Yeah, because it has to be like a reasonably high rank that everyone who's on the ship bar the captain has to salute it.

Well, the way military working dogs work in the U.S.

military is they always have one rank above their handler.

But this is like a really sickly old dog that's not working.

So maybe it's one rank below.

I don't know.

Fuck this dog though.

This dog I made up.

I'm mad at.

I mean, listen, to be fair, Varyon brand for this show.

And also, I would just want to say as well.

I have seen the light.

People have informed me I was wrong about crocodile control in northern Queensland.

I accept that.

I'm sorry, Australia.

Let the crocs run free.

That's right.

Arm the crocs.

Arm the crocs.

They are our comrades.

But I had an argument the other day with someone about whether ACAB includes police horses.

I mean, it does for me.

Everybody knows the answer to that question.

That horse doesn't have to be a cop for me to hate it.

Look, you know, I agree on a fundamental level, but I'm like, you know, I can fully see a horse committing a hate crime.

So ACAB includes horses.

Yeah, Mr.

Ed was racist.

Yeah.

What animal could be part of the police that wouldn't be included in Acab?

Hmm.

Sloths?

Well, okay, actually, no.

Jellyfish, because they don't have a brain.

Yeah.

They get a pass.

I'm sure there's some kind of Floridian police jellyfish.

I mean, like, that would make them closer to cops than jellyfish, though.

Not having a brain.

Can a jellyfish play candy crush for four hours a day?

I mean, the real question is, is what kind of hate crime can a jellyfish commit?

Stinging people of color.

True.

But it doesn't have a brain, so it can't be doing it on purpose.

So therefore, it's just the NYPD.

No, no, they do it on purpose.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Can nature's taser be a cop?

Look, if an animal becomes a cop, we have to hate it.

Those are the rules.

That is true.

Like, punch that horse.

You know, do you know the way it's totally legal to reach for a police officer's gun?

It's totally legal to punch a police horse in the face.

That reminds me, God, I'm going to show my age here.

Have you ever seen the movie Half Baked?

No, okay, it's a really bad stoner film.

It stars a lot of people who turn into real pieces of shit later on in life.

That's such a Jim Brewer, it has Dave Chappelle in it.

They're both absolute fucking scumbags.

But there's the scene where a guy gets really high, goes into a 7-Eleven, and buys a bunch of snacks because there's a police horse outside, and he's really high, and he thinks it's hungry.

So he feeds it all of these snack foods, and the horse dies because the cop comes out and says the horse is diabetic.

Oh, fuck's sake.

Yeah, like, you know, that like Dave Chappelle fucking joke on Twitter saying, like, half or like 50 minutes into a stand-up special is like, on X day, my friend died.

Just like getting real serious.

Oh, God.

Actually, speaking of people who died, I met up with a friend of mine on Saturday and we're just having beers.

And he told me the story again about how he went on a date and the dude

sitting at the table beside him just died, and no one noticed.

Was he eating alone?

Or was he like the most boring date on earth?

Not your friend, the guy who died.

So, what happened was he was on this date, and he went into a pub, and like the football was still on, and there were some like older people sitting beside him.

And, like, the date was going fine.

They were chatting or whatever.

And then there was just like this horrible, like, stench.

It was like, this, you know, it kind of smells like shit.

And like, I, yeah, yeah, I wonder why.

The pub that he was in, I was actually there on Saturday.

Like, the toilets are kind of almost in the pub.

So it, like, it could reasonably smell like shit.

So it's one of the really small pubs.

So essentially, like, in London, there are, like, pubs that have, like, a little small kind of gap hallway in between doors, in between, like, the actual toilets and then the actual bar.

This place just does not have that at all.

So someone lights it up, it flows right into the scene.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's like taking a on an airplane and they're on the side of the bar where the women's toilets is so they're like okay he's like i'm gonna go for a piss and i'm gonna maybe see if it smells a bit better on the other side so he goes to the toilet and it's kind of like waving it's like oh come over come over and the girl he's on the date with is like oh come over here come over here and he goes over and he's like oh what's wrong it like doesn't really smell over there so maybe we'll go over there She just goes, that guy beside us is dead.

He's just napping.

He was like, what?

How do you know he's dead and she's like he wasn't moving and i leaned over and touched him and he was ice cold so he had been dead a while without going into why i know this because i worked in ems for years it takes a surprisingly long time for a body to get cold so that guy's been dead for a minute like when my grandmother died last year In Ireland, there's like a thing where you stay with the body overnight until the funeral services come.

So like me and my two brothers stayed with my grandmother in the care home like as her body went cold.

And I'm like, after a few hours, yeah, bodies do sting.

Yeah, they don't smell good.

But he was kind of like freaking out.

He was like, what?

You touched the dead body?

And I was like, so the football was on and like, he was kind of old.

So like, he had his arms crossed.

And like, I assume the people he was with just assumed that he had fallen asleep.

I also assume that's something that happened frequently.

Cause like, oh, yeah, Billy fell asleep again.

Yeah.

And yeah, he was just dead.

Tom, I actually get to tell you something.

This will somehow be the only guy who dies during this episode.

What?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So a episode called The Suicide Fleet features no death.

Other than a guy dying at the pub in London, yeah.

Huh.

Where?

Today's story brings us to World War One, otherwise known as that time where a bunch of inbred Euro trash imploded the world over Imperial fuck fuck games.

Famously, a war where not a whole lot of people died.

Yeah.

Thankfully, that's not something that would ever happen again.

It was the war to end all wars, famously the last war we've ever had.

Yeah, if World War II had worked, we wouldn't have gotten the masterpiece that is John Lennon's Imagine.

Hmm.

I'm kind of speechless with that one because I don't think I can say it was good that John Lennon got shot.

Thank you, Mark Graham Chapman, for shooting John Lennon.

Look, say what you will about John Lennon's musical talents, whether you like them or not, but he was a real piece of shit human being.

Yep.

Real piece of shit.

Yep.

But today's story doesn't take us to Europe during the war, but rather to America, when it finally decided to get involved in the war, pretty much at the very end.

Now, to make a very long story short, the U.S.

got involved in World War I for multiple reasons, but the key, most important one amongst them was unrestricted submarine warfare launched by the German Empire, which ended up killing a lot of civilians.

The U.S.

pretending it wasn't using civilians as a kind of human shield while shipping war supplies into Europe.

And, you know, there was that time Germany tried to goad Mexico into invading Texas,

which is also a lot of conspiracy theories behind that one.

Imagine a world where we could have had German-Mexican Texas, Tex-Mex cuisine, loads of beans in it.

You know, what's interesting is there actually was a German settlement in Texas, and there is a lot of random towns in a certain part of Texas that I used to drive through quite frequently that are German.

There's even a dialect of German known as texan german you're very welcome to berlin texas

we we do things a little bit different here in berlin texas we uh we don't drink the piss but we do wear the leather well it's like why am i going from like a place called like parker heights colleen new bromfels interesting

there's texans out there somewhere like nodding sagely as they i i don't know take out a large sausage from their jar of moonshine

And this isn't even to go into even more conspiracy-minded things that people sometimes believe about the American entry into World War I.

To make a very long story short about that one, it's the Jews.

Because

at any point anybody believes a conspiracy theory at any point in history, they're just bigots and they're dangling keys.

They're jangling little keys around, talking about banks and shit.

It's not true.

It's not true.

The only conspiracy theory you should believe is that the Irish built the pyramids.

Exactly.

I will never forget being locked in a pizza place in Yerevan at 2 a.m.

because it doubled as a bar, listening to a neo-Nazi Australian Armenian explain to me that the Jews started World War I and the big banks dragged America into it.

And also the Jews did the Armenian genocide.

I was like, look at, man, I'm going to be honest with you.

I thought we had that one figured out.

We're in Armenia.

There's kind of a consensus about this.

You know,

you're really fighting on already lost ground.

Yeah,

we don't need to bring new suspects into that one.

As a nation, we are racist enough against the people who did it.

We don't need to invite a new race in to consequently discriminate against us.

Yeah, it's real

arguing that a triangle has four sides.

Yeah.

Real dunking on your own basketball hoop on that one, buddy.

Anyway, World War I and the U.S.

entry into it brought with it what was new to a lot of navies at the time and something we just talked about submarines these submarines were slightly more evolved than the turtle but honestly not too much we've talked about uh a bit before about the evolution of naval warfare that led to submarines on the show and we'll keep talking about it in the future because submarines again are very dumb and fun assuming you're on the outside They seem very not fun if you happen to be on the inside.

Yeah, submarine technology lost the core concept of the turtle in that you cannot fit yao ming in them it's like we need to fit more yao mings in the submarines how many yao mings could i fit this u-boat we need people you need to be able to dunk in the submarine

the submarine you can't the submarine is not combat ready it has terrible ups it just surfaces and like the ballasts are like emptying out the water and then you just see a basketball hoop like shooting up out of the top of the submarine

periscope

I mean, that is definitely like a basketball hoop coming out of a submarine surfacing offside America.

And then you just see Chinese people dunking on it is 100% a Facebook thing that someone's uncle believes.

It's probably true.

Someone somewhere is getting really mad about the basketball player gap that's developing.

Yeah.

Now, every world power at the time had submarines in their navy at some capacity, but they were still largely considered a niche, something experimental until World War I really kicked them into high gear.

And, you know, but that's, you know, it's a lot like any of these large wars, like World War II, for example, where if you had something somewhere that could cause human misery, you're probably getting the green light.

Previous to this, submarines are really, really openly used in decently large numbers for the first time during the Russo-Japanese War.

But even then, people still weren't entirely sure what the fuck to do with them.

I mean, the concept of I am in a tube under the water is fucking terrifying.

Yeah, it's not good.

And somewhat traditionally, the crews that were in said submarines weren't the best sailors.

They were generally volunteers because even places like the Empire of Japan was like, look, we're not going to make you get in that thing, which is never a good sign.

I do not want to get into the suicide Pringles can.

I mean, they did have one of those.

It's called a Kaiten.

Of course, the Japanese had a kamikaze submarine.

Yeah, they didn't work great, but they're look.

i mean they only gotta go one counts as the effort yeah exactly this led to a parallel development of something else that was new anti-submarine warfare and there are some interesting fits and starts like we always talk about in these new technologies but the the old standbys ended up being the main thing sea mines and depth charges

people tried to sail ships in a line with chains linked between them and like whole nets trying to just like trying to go like deep sea fishing for submarines.

They tried those, didn't work.

But my personal favorite though, coolest military job that's ever existed.

All right, hear me out here.

You got a speedboat.

Now, forget that speedboats back then also really sucked, but you got a speedboat.

You load it full of guys armed with hammers.

And then you ride up next to a submarine and just kind of smash out the periscope with your army of dudes with hammers.

That is something people actually tried.

Honestly, I can see the logic behind deploying the tactical carpenters.

I mean, it's not any dumber than anything else because one of the main things that's eventually going to come is like a sub-chaser is obviously going to be the weapons platform, the boat that people generally use to patrol for submarines.

But that's a new kind of ship.

You know, you need to think of a new layout, new blueprint, develop all these things while weapons go on them.

Or you get a speedboat and you put a bunch of dudes with hammers in it.

Yeah, and once again,

I'm imagining the eternal version of Shocks as if he's like Doctor Who just like trying to negotiate the terms for the guys with hammers.

Get a CBA for the fucking anti-submarine hammer crew.

We need to get a, you know, a stipend for sub-chasers, aka Pepsi Max after the 12-inch meatball marinara that everyone has to get.

Catching a fucking cease and desist letter because your unit's creed is it's hammer time.

Now, like I said, we're all eventually going to come down to sub-chasers, which is, I have to admit, something very, very different depending on what website you happen to be on.

I was about to make that same joke.

My definition of a sub-chaser is probably very different than some of our listeners, okay?

Yes.

But I respect you both, sub-chaser and sub-chaser crew people.

Some of whom may be sub-chasers.

I don't know.

Now, these are smaller ships that could act as coastal patrol and defense ships.

And if you happen to be in the U.S., that is a big job to have because you find yourself in the middle of a war that could hypothetically encompass both the Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean, which you happen to be in the middle of.

And most importantly, the U.S.

did not have any sub-chasers by the time they found themselves in the war.

For what happens next, we have to go to the U.S.

government at the time.

led by famed racist piece of shit, President Woodrow Wilson.

One of my favorite examples whenever anybody's like, why don't we have more PhDs run for president?

Well, we had one.

He re-segregated the White House.

He picked a guy named Josephus Daniels.

Yeah.

This is the last good era where you could get a dude named Josephus.

He's not Mormon.

Yeah, like this is, you know, the last era of like the Jedediahs, the Josephus.

You're going to get a guy who's like hiding up the primordial OSS called fucking Ignatius.

Yeah, that was a a true generation that was lost in the trenches of the Western Front was like dudes named Phineas.

We lost our best at the psalm.

All those guys with fucked up names.

We'll never have weird city blocks full of guys named Josephus, Phineas, Ignatius, Augustus.

And like, I don't know, Leonidas was also popular there for a while.

Yeah.

But Josephus Daniels would be his secretary of the Navy.

But Daniels was not a military man.

Rather, he was a newspaper guy that had Wilson's back during the election.

He was, you know, this is solidly that age of just pure open government corruption, which thankfully no longer exists.

Anyway, let me click on this link that says Washington Post.

Oh, I was going to go like, I cannot wait to inject my RFK-approved tremendous.

Daniels was also, let's say, in agreement with Wilson's politics.

And by that, I mean he was a hardcore white supremacist, even for the 1900s.

He played a key role in the Wilmington Insurrection of 1888.

And for people who are unaware, we will eventually do an episode on that.

But it was a white supremacist coup and massacre against the freely elected black and white government.

and civil population of Wilmington, North Carolina.

It is the most, I guess you could say, effective, infamous coup in American history.

Asterisks, so far.

Unless you're talking about the 2016 election.

I hope your apartment catches on fire.

Hey, listen, the apartment downstairs burned to a crisp a couple of weeks ago.

Don't say that.

I'm terrified of dying in a fire.

Opening up the podcast death note.

One floor short.

Fucking goddammit, Ryuku.

Redirecting my fire.

Now, Daniels may have been a racist.

He may have been a piece of shit.

He may have played an active hand in a racist massacre.

But he was also someone who wanted absolutely nothing to do with the job of being Secretary of the Navy.

So instead, he selected someone that everybody here has heard of.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt to be his assistant secretary.

Daniels then promptly left DC and barely ever returned the whole time he was Secretary of the Navy, including during World War I.

Hell yeah.

Just like absentee work, you know, fucking whatever they're calling it now, coffee badging, whatever.

Just like bare minimum, do the bare minimum.

These goddamn 1900 racist millennials don't even want to work anymore.

Yeah, like back then, a fucking like Slack channel was when the fucking Telegram line was too loose.

Fuck off.

Hey, I thought for a second you were like, he was racist.

He was XYZ.

I thought you were going to do an Iron Sorkin joke there for a second.

He was a goddamn good secretary of the Navy.

He really wasn't.

Actually, there is something to say about that, that he kind of recognized that he didn't give a fuck enough about the job that he picked someone who actually was good at the job and then stayed the fuck out of his way.

Now, the FDR in kind of in charge of the Navy was not the FDR you're probably picturing in your head.

He wouldn't be hit with polio until the early 1920s.

He was not in a wheelchair yet.

He was a very young and, quote, energetic politician.

He largely fit into the most gilded ass kind of life an American of the day could have.

He went to Harvard.

He was a frat bro.

He went to rich people's clubs in Harvard, like yachting.

Also, he was a cheerleader.

I thought that was interesting.

Interesting.

Very, very interesting.

You know, good for him.

You know, we need...

diversity in cheerleading.

Yeah, I mean, also, like, such a dangerous fucking thing to do that statistically it was much more likely to end up in a wheelchair from the cheerleading than Napoleon.

Yeah, it's surprising.

Cheerleading is probably much different back then, but I know some like 13-year-old girls in like Texas would almost certainly whoop FDR's ass in that shit.

Just doing like a school report on like your like hero you look up to and like some kid who's into cheerleading.

It's like, oh, my hero's FDR.

Like a lot of people didn't know he did cheerleading.

I don't really care about the New Deal or any of that stuff.

I just really like he was a, we had a cheerleader president.

He had no Navy experience to speak of, really, but he really, really, really thought he did because of his time in the yacht club.

I swear to God, he believed that his yachting experience was

better than that of like being a trained naval officer.

And he kind of proved this and one time.

Okay, I don't want to say he proved it.

He did show he could steer a boat real good because one time he was traveling on a U.S.

Navy destroyer and he insisted that he needed to take the helm, that being the steering wheel for non-boat people like me,

because he was able to pilot the ship around the coast of Maine better than the captain of the ship.

Now, this is normally where the captain of the ship would laugh in his fucking face and tell him to fuck off, but he was the assistant secretary of the Navy.

And that guy was like, here you go, sir, take the wheel.

Yeah, it's like when a regional manager visits the the fucking McDonald's that you work in and you know that, like, if he doesn't, like, latch the burger press thing, when he puts his hand down, it's going to fall and just like completely eviscerate his fingers.

I want a double, double of assistant manager hands.

Regional assistant manager, because you don't want like the actual regional manager, because it's like.

They'll know what to do.

But some like 25-year-old whose dad is probably like works for McDonald's as well.

McDonald's nepotism.

We need to track the son of Ronald McDonald and find out what he's doing.

He got married off to the burger queen.

You had to solidify those political alliances.

Now, this is normally where this story would turn into like, this is how FDR died before anybody ever heard of him.

But no, he actually could steer the ship pretty well.

So, yeah, I mean, it doesn't make him a fucking combat captain.

It just means he can steer a goddamn destroyer.

Yeah, well, like, what is a destroyer if not a big yacht?

What is an aircraft carry, but a really big yacht?

Exactly.

I mean, the only difference is between a submarine and a yacht is a yacht rarely has 17 Yao Mings inside.

Yes, exactly.

It's like we need to measure the combat capacity of all seafaring vehicles by how many Yao Mings can comfortably fit in an Antung.

I mean, if you load them up sideways, like they're torpedoes, you could probably fit a lot of Yao Ming.

Fire the Yao Ming.

That's just the episode of The Simpsons where they fire the captain, not the submarine.

We need tactical yellowings.

That being said, FTR did see the problems facing America's Navy, and he had for some time.

He was one of the people in Wilson's administration that had been begging the government to ramp up armament for the United States since the war in Europe had begun, because he figured there's a pretty good chance that they might end up getting dragged into it.

And if they did, they needed to be ready.

Most of these people were ignored.

The U.S.

did do some rearmament, but it wasn't nearly enough.

Like when the U.S.

really started mobilizing for World War I, they didn't even have enough rifles to go around.

There was like dudes drilling in open fields with sticks and shit.

But, you know, they got there eventually.

But in the context of this episode, FDR, along with everyone else, was worried about the gap that the Navy needed.

Like, you know, every ship imaginable, because the U.S.

was not a world power in World War I.

Its navy was certainly much more powerful than its army, because the U.S.

did have an empire at this point.

We did a series about kind of the birth of that in the Spanish-American War, but it wasn't exactly the most powerful navy in the world.

Not even fucking close.

They needed pretty much any kind of ship you could think of, especially because now America could be fighting peers.

Before this, the closest they came was fighting Spain, and it turned out Spain was mostly a rotten house that just kind of fell down as soon as America looked at it.

Yeah, that's like fighting an 85-year-old.

Yeah, yeah.

An 85-year-old you aren't aware has like really bad osteoporosis.

Yeah, you just like punch him once and the bones just turn to dust.

That's, yeah, that's pretty much what happened.

included in those ships that fdr knew that they needed were sub-chasers which the navy really had none of one of the first actions fdr took once the u.s was formally entered into the war was well to resign from his job and try to join the navy as an officer um

this is something that president wilson was like what the are you doing go back to work So FDR was like, okay, and went back to be the assistant director of the Navy.

Look, I gotta, I have to applaud the enthusiasm.

Like, you know, get stuck in, you know, be, you know, the common man.

But it's like, nah, bro, you got, like, a lot of responsibilities that you were meant to look after.

Like, if you get shot, we have to find another guy to replace you.

Yeah, Joseph has picked you to do his job for him.

So you really need to show up at the office by 8 a.m.

Like, FDR isn't the only person who tried to do this.

Famously, Teddy Roosevelt attempted to restart rough riders for World War I, but everybody's like, bro, you're old as fuck.

Go home.

That's when the old regional manager tries to come and grill the burgers.

I was three days away from retirement.

I mean, I do think that Wilson was mostly worried of like the optics of what it would look like a former American president getting his fucking skull ventilated by a machine gun in France would look like.

But, you know, could have happened.

I used to grill these burgers back in 19 dickety too.

We called them horse wheels back then.

I remember when I fought my war against Spain and

I took that San Juan hill and made sure to move all the black soldiers out of the way of the camera so they didn't show up in my victory picture.

Anyway, we lost a whole whopping 50 men that time, which we have lost in the last 30 seconds since I've been speaking.

The great thing about war is you get a lot of human mulch you can turn into horse wheels to then serve to customers you know i do like the idea of teddy roosevelt who is like still kind of to this day championed like this macho masculine man for mostly bad reasons and and morons i really like the idea of if he went to like fight in like like the bellow wood in world war one and just getting the worst case of ptsd ever and he comes back he's like you know what i was wrong yeah i was so wrong and that people wouldn't be able to do that to him anymore i was wrong Here's all this poetry I wrote about it.

I can't

be around when the fucking horseshoes hit the stones.

It makes me want to get under a table and hold my knees to my chest.

Yep.

He could always start a podcast.

Now, FTR had a plan for combating the submarine menace that would be, hypothetically, fully bearing down in the North Atlantic.

He wanted to build different patrol boats, purpose-built sub-chasers, but, you know, that would take time.

And it it would take time that the security of the East Coast just did not have.

So he looked for a stopgap.

And a guy who only understood the Navy through his Harvard Yacht Club meant he went back to yachts.

Aftier believed that his fellow yachtis were true American patriots who could easily defend America's shores and thought that the average yachtsman was far better trained in seamanship than a naval officer.

And unlike today, most of these yachtties owned their their yachts.

Like today, it's common for a lot of people to work on yachts, and obviously they cannot have possibly afford one.

And yachts have gotten larger and larger and larger, and they require more and more crew.

So back in the day, if you were a yachtsman, you probably also owned a yacht.

I cannot conceive of the accent of these people in order to do a bit.

They are like so.

It's like the Kennedy accent.

It's like that

weird elitist Atlantic accent, which I cannot fake.

It's It's a weird accent that is completely dead.

Yeah.

Like if someone walked around me talking like that, I would think they came, they like, I found the world's first fucking time traveler.

Yeah.

Or another Kendi that a gunman has missed.

Or like the insane guy that I follow on TikTok who's convinced he's invented perpetual energy and drives a Ford Model T.

Yeah, I feel like that'd be the guy that might fake that accent.

Yep.

He does.

He does.

Also, probably has a lot in common with Henry Ford.

So FDR thought as a stopgap, they could simply retrofit these yachts into coastal patrol ships.

Like just bolt some shit on the side, call it a day.

They only got to work for a couple months.

And since this is a high society rich person thing, FDR and these yachtsmen all knew one another.

They were friends.

They had drinks in parlors and whatnot, whatever it is that fucking rich people do or did.

Knowing who owned what, FDR put out a call to these titans of industry to bring their boats forward to be purchased by the United States government.

He would not be requisitioning them like what pretty much every other government was doing.

No, he would be giving his friends a sweet fucking deal.

Bring this boat up.

The government will buy it for more than you bought it for.

And at the end of the war, if it's still alive, we give it back to you for free and you keep the money.

Yeah, well, American methods of procurement haven't changed that much.

No, not really.

I can't wait for the first combat Tesla to be

deployed in Ukraine.

I mean, to be fair, Kadyrov was gifted a Tesla cyber truck, which he promptly turned into a technical, and allegedly it was remotely shut down.

So there were several yachts, and really, there is no need to go into every single one that the government purchased.

So I figured we should hit the highlights, the high notes, if you will.

Hit me.

I want to hear it.

This is from the U.S.

Naval Institute.

All of this is from the U.S.

Naval Institute.

if it's from something else i'll make sure i tell the christina was one of these yachts it had been built for frederick fletcher in wilmington delaware by the firm pussy and jones

we hear is that a pussy and jones build the finest yachts for any of you well-to-do sorts it comes in with an inbill sweater vest warmer

I love the idea of going down to the harbor and being like, that's a fine yacht you you got there.

That looks like a pussy.

Is that a pussy yacht?

Let me tell you, you, if you're seen in the Riviera with a pussy yacht, let me tell you what you get, boy.

Respect.

There was another yacht, the Helenita, owned by the Gould family, then led by Frank Gould, who was described as, quote, he loved cavorting with Charlie Chaplin, J.

Paul Getty, the Rockefellers, and the Kennedys.

He was a Randy Playboy who had several wives and multiple girlfriends and was rarely seen without someone famous or beautiful, including a very young Elizabeth Taylor.

And if you do the math on that, that is conservingly young Elizabeth Taylor.

Oh, fuck.

Yeah.

I just did that in my head.

That's not good.

But the family money came from his father, Jay Gould, who historian Ron Chernau described as, quote, the notorious railway king.

A small, swarthy, full-bearded financier who bribed legislators and committed acts of larceny on a scale never before imagined.

Jesus Christ.

He's literally a robber baron.

It's like we have the fleet of it.

This is literally the nepotism fleet.

It is.

There's also Isaac Edward Emerson, a chemist who created the headache medicine bromo-seltzer, which sounds like something you'd find in fucking Fallout.

That's 100% something that, like, you took two of them and got cancer.

It's kind of what Elka-Seltzer was, in that it was an effervescent yeah but it was highly toxic due to the bromide in it yep

yep 100 gave you cancer uh bromide is used uh to this day in certain medications uh but uh back then there was way too much bromide way too much bromide not enough seltzer yeah Emerson was a personal friend of FDR, and FDR personally pushed for the government to buy not one, but both of his yachts, as well as commission him as an officer in the U.S.

Navy, owing to the fact he had personally bankrolled an entire naval squadron during the Spanish-American War.

Was anyone accusing these guys of stealing valor?

Like they're going around with the fucking commissioners?

Commissioners?

No, they didn't steal it.

They bought it fair and square.

Is that just what happens when you go to West Point?

Yeah.

How much were they like actually paying these people to procure these boats?

So I found a number

on a few of them.

Like the Margaret is one, is the one we're going to be focusing on the most.

It's the the funniest.

But most of these yachts were worth anywhere from $50,000 to $90,000 in money back then.

So it's quite a lot.

It's a couple million.

And the government was buying them sometimes for two times the price.

Government scams are just like, if you want to make money quick, don't do identity fraud.

Don't sell drugs.

Figure out how to scam the government out of grant money, procurement money, anything.

What is this, Elizabeth Holmes music?

It's like the guy who fucking during COVID in the UK was like, oh, I'm going to like have these ferries to bring like PPE from Europe.

He just didn't own any boats at all.

It's like every small business owner in America who ripped off the government and like frauded PPP loans.

Yeah.

And now they're all slowly but surely getting thrown in federal prison.

Or like the guy in Ireland, they built a bike shed for the doll that cost like 300,000 Euro.

Sorry, what?

Yeah, like a standard like 10-bike bike shed.

Incredible.

All these people probably would have been better served giving a job with Raytheon.

Soon, all of these yachts were sent over to the naval yard to be reconfigured, refitted, and armed up.

And ooh boy was this one hell of a job they had done to them.

Now, for the sake of a narrative.

And for the sake of the funniest ship that came out of this, we're going to focus on the yacht called Margaret, which had been owned by Emerson of Bromo Seltzer fame, and was now officially the USS Margaret.

The Margaret was built in 1899 in Pennsylvania.

It was 126 feet long.

So I'm going to use some ship terms here

that I had to also Google and figure out what they meant because I am not a naval person.

But its beam, which is the width of the ship at its widest point,

was only 21 feet.

This made the Margaret incredibly top heavy.

And for the non-ship heads in the crowd including myself and tom this means the margaret is really hard to control and gets its ass absolutely whooped in any kind of seas yeah like as soon as there's any chop you're just fucked yeah it's like you're inside of a fucking washing machine yeah it's like it's so good that you decided to base the entirety of your navy on the like nepotism grandson of the guy who invented screws now tom you might be wondering why these rich people spent all this money, millions of dollars in bucks of yore, on a ship that would fare about as well as I would in rough seas without a boat at all.

I'm going to guess it's insurance scams.

Now, I think that would probably be true if they were like built today.

But the reason for that was the Margaret was never designed to sail.

Can you explain that for me, please?

It was built to sit at port, tied to the dock, and have exquisite, very expensive dinners.

Okay,

that makes sense.

If you're that level of rich, it's like, yeah, this is my dinner boat.

Would you like to go to my dinner boat?

And remember, Emerson had two yachts that the government purchased.

He actually owned three.

So he had the dinner yacht.

I assume he had.

Breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Yeah, breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

And then he was like using the government scam money to buy a fourth one, which is the fucking yacht.

Yeah, yeah, that's that's fourth meal, baby.

Yeah, yeah.

We're all eating something.

It wasn't designed to necessarily never leave port, but not very far.

Like not leave a protected bay.

It wasn't meant for a way of to touch it, effectively.

Yeah.

The shipwrights that delivered the boat for retrofitting found that things were actually much worse than they appeared.

There was no inspection done in any of these yachts prior to the government purchasing them.

And the Margaret was kind of already falling apart at like a structural level.

And a lot of that has to do with like Emerson not giving a fuck and also rarely using it.

Like the bottom of the boat, the hull was wood, of course.

And most of that wood needed to be replaced because he just hadn't taken care of it.

He rarely had maintenance done on this fucking thing for the same reason that I probably wouldn't if I had a car that never left the driveway.

You know what I mean?

Like, what could possibly go wrong?

It's just sitting there.

Yeah, it's like, yeah, there's barnacles on it, but like, it's fine when I go for dinner.

Yeah, it's not going to affect his dinner experience.

Yeah, or his fourth meal experience.

Maybe you want the fourth meal boat to rock, you know, it adds a

kinetic assistance to your stroke game.

Yeah, some of us need that.

Sometimes Poseidon needs to lend you a hand.

Some people say to leave space for Jesus.

I leave space for Poseidon.

Exactly.

The yacht would require virtually a complete and total overhaul in order to be made into a stopgap that FDR had in mind.

But the shipyard is only given about a month to do all of this.

Oh, fuck.

So the engineers, the shipwrights, y'all just kind of looked at each other, shrugged, and said, yeah, fuck it.

I don't know.

Put a fucking ballista on it.

I don't know.

I don't think duct tape had been invented yet.

So they had to use like the 1917 version of where the fuck that is.

Tar.

Yeah, just tar.

It's all tar.

Got a tar over the fourth meal stains.

I know someone's going to message in.

It's like, actually, duct tape was invented in 1897.

And it's like, and I'm like, yeah, maybe it was.

We're morons.

We don't know.

Whatever.

I'm not the duct tape historian.

Leave me alone.

Shout out to all the duct tape historians.

And if you are, congratulations.

You have the one field of study that people care less about than mine.

The retrofitting only made all of the previous problems on the Margaret worse.

But just for some examples of the retrofitting that had to go inside, its wine closet was turned into ammo storage.

Its over-the-top gilded dining room was turned into barracks.

And they had to build an entire pilot house and bridge because it did not have one.

And they just kind of slapped that bitch right on top of a boat.

Making it even more top-heavy.

Yes, exactly.

What type of weapons are they putting on it?

Oh, we'll get to to that part.

Okay.

Zero effort was done at all to balance this ship, to counterbalance any of the modifications going on.

Things were just kind of bolted in place without any testing whatsoever.

Which brings us to the weapon system.

They were given dual three-inch cannons, one on the front and one on the back, and a rack of depth charges.

That would be its full armament, which is fine for a sub-chaser.

Yeah.

And this is when the Margaret, or the Maggie, as it affectionately became to be known, got its commander, Lieutenant Commander Frank Jack Fletcher.

Fletcher was a naval academy grad, the nephew of another naval officer, also named Frank Fletcher.

And weirdly, both uncle and nephew fought during the Battle of Veracruz in Mexico, and both of them were awarded the Medal of Honor for actions in the same battle.

So they're at least qualified.

I mean, to be fair, getting the Medal of Honor back then is a lot easier than it is today.

You just had to survive.

Yeah, pretty much.

But it is weird that an uncle and nephew both got the Medal of Honor for the same exact time.

I like this kind of like nephew command structure you know this is i feel like this is gonna garner a successful mission i mean unfortunately i have to tell you that uh that nephew fletcher is is really trying to leave uncle fletcher uh for the furthering of his career and by 1917 fletcher was still under the command of his uncle posted to the caribbean because prior to the u.s getting involved in World War I, there's a really, really, really good chance the U.S.

is probably going to invade Mexico again.

So they were kind of staged and ready for that.

But as the U.S.

found its way into the war, other junior naval officers were getting, you know, mid-range commissions, getting promoted up the ladder.

And Fletcher really wanted to get him one of those positions to move up and away from his uncle.

Yeah, there's a time in every man's life where they must step out of the shadow of their uncle.

Yeah, exactly.

And for me, it was really hard because my uncle's very tall.

So using his connections and pulling strings wherever he could, Fletcher was eventually offered his first ever command of the USS Margaret, and he jumped on it.

In case you're wondering, did he know what he was accepting command of?

No, he did not.

Oh, imagine the first day you arrive on it.

It was like, oh, what the fuck, man?

Oh, man, I got fucking assigned to the USS floating pile of shit that's also on fire.

Well, look, at least it's not the fuckboat.

We didn't have to clean all the comb stains out of the ship.

I don't know, man.

These are all rich people yachts.

Like, that shit, like, that come as in the wood grain.

Imagine Imagine the weird freak-ass party these gilded age douchebags are up to on there, you know?

Like, how clean is a yacht today?

But this is an age where like rich people could just do whatever they want.

They wouldn't even get like a mean article written about them in the local newspaper, which they also own.

Yeah, come, much like fried eggs is good for breakfast, lunch, or dinner.

Yeah, there you go.

Remember how we talked about the yachtis being patriots and able seamen ready to serve on their own boats and defend the country?

Well, none of that shit happened.

They sold their yachts to the government and they fucked off with the paychecks.

Some of them did accept naval commissions, but then stayed at their yacht club with their new naval commission.

Also, in fact, in case you're wondering, yes, they did draw a government salary while doing so.

Great.

Love this level of scamming, which is just so stupid.

Like the salaries that they're drawing as junior to mid-range naval officers is nothing compared to how wealthy they already are.

But they're just doing at that point for like a hat on a hat.

This is a statement piece, you know?

Yeah, hat on a hat, but this is how rich people stay rich is doing shit like this.

Yeah, like, Mr.

Emerson, you have a three to four yachts.

You are the promo seltzer king.

I don't think you need a lieutenant's salary circa 1917, which is like $200.

And that's just his walking around money, you know?

Yeah, this is just the money I used to stain the fourth meal boat.

He's wiping his mouth after dinner with his like salary money.

He uses it to throw at people and call them poor.

Get out of my face, brokey.

Throwing his $200 salary at Ye Old Strip Club.

Like the Yeol Strip Club is just like ragtime piano.

Fucking flappers.

Yakity shaking ass to Yakety Sack.

You gotta drop that ass the Yakity sack.

Did the Benny Hill team, Jew.

It's vigorous hip thrusting to fucking Beethoven.

That night when Fletcher reported to his new boat, the Maggie, he found all of the officers and sailors aboard were brand new, and the ship itself was a fucking death trap.

It leaked from every conceivable place, and the stern, that being the back of the boat, had been cut away so much to make room for these retrofits that the ship sagged in the water so badly that the portholes in the back of the boat were just barely above the water, even when it was at port and not combat loaded with supplies or ammunition, or most importantly, men.

Creating the like

boat-submarine hybrid, like it's a Taco Bell Pizza Hook combined together.

Oh, Commander Fletcher, you've noticed we've assigned you to the USS boat that kills you.

Don't worry, the name might sound bad, but, you know, normally the officers don't die.

Soldier, you have been assigned to the waterbed.

No, that is not what you think it is.

You are sleeping at the back of the ship and your bunk is floating.

Actually, Tom, hold that thought.

Oh, fuck.

Off.

Then Fletcher was ordered to take his yacht out on trials.

So he did.

The anchor immediately ripped off from the top of the boat.

Of course.

This was more of a crew failure than anyone else.

This wasn't really necessarily the boat's fault, but nobody on the crew knew what the fuck fuck they were doing.

Then he orders the ship to full speed, having been told that the Maggie should get up to 12 knots.

Instead, it barely got to four, which was not enough to defeat the tide at the port.

It's somehow moving backwards.

It's just spinning its tires.

This resulted in the engines flooding and dying, and the ship slamming into the pier.

Because

I assume they like retrofitted new engines on it as well.

No, they did not.

Okay, so I was like, let's throw like maybe a couple of tons of extra shit on it and not change the engine.

That's going to take too much time.

Remember, they only had a month.

That sounds like a month and a half worth tops.

But, like, this is just like the guy in your neighborhood who has like a completely fucking chopped up car that he has done himself.

And it's like, that thing is going to kill everyone in it at any moment.

This is any bike ever built by Orange County Customs.

And the fucking old guy's just like throwing the chair at the captain.

Yeah, he comes with the boat.

We needed an extra man on board, so we got the old angry guy who hates his kids.

But he did manage to get the engine going again, and they slowly pulled away from the pier once the current died down a bit.

And then they got out to open sea after several hours of trying.

This is when Fletcher ran to other problems.

The badly overweight and unbalanced ship was so slow.

at full tilt, even at perfectly calm seas, that he did the calculations in his head and realized that if they dropped the depth charge, they would not be able to outrun the explosive.

So they would blow themselves up if they used the depth charge.

I'm starting to get the title of this episode now.

It also went so slow that it could not catch a submarine, you know, famously its job to do, to chase them.

And submarines themselves, notoriously slow at this period of time, going single digits miles per hour most of the time.

The balance issue made controlling the Maggie, even at these pitifully slow speeds, one hell of a job.

Fletcher figured he could actually fix these balance issues, but he would have to offset them with ballast.

That is, adding weight to a different part of the boat to offset it.

But he figured, you know, I'm going to need about 35 tons of ballast to offset this.

The ship only had room for five tons of ballast.

And also, he was worried that if he did add 30 more tons of ballasts, the added weight would make the engines not work at all.

I think at that point, it was like, it might just snap the fucking boat in half.

Yeah, there's really not a whole lot holding it together at this point.

It's just fucking cum and duct tape.

It's mostly forth beal cum.

That's actually the adhesive that was holding all the like planks down on the deck, you know?

Yeah, exactly.

Probably the funniest part of this entire sea trial is afterwards, the Maggie, who despite failing the sea trials in every possible way, was immediately given the thumbs up by the U.S.

Naval Department because the U.S.

simply had no other options at the time.

That meant there'd be an official commissioning ceremony.

This is like, you know, a ceremony.

Captain comes out, gives a nice little speech.

They might smash a bottle of champagne next to it.

They run up the flag and, you know, it's this whole big thing.

So they're doing this.

Fletcher gives a speech.

He's notoriously not a very good public speaker.

So his speech is quite short.

Then he turns around to salute.

the ship as it's running up the American flag, only to find a junior officer had run the American flag up the ship's mast, upside down on accident.

For fuck's sake.

And Fletcher kind of like joked about it.

He's like, well, we are in distress.

Yeah, fuck me.

It's just like, you know, the short speech is like, I am very happy to be here.

The boat is very good.

The war is very bad.

Thank you.

I have seen the boat we are going to serve on, and I apologize ahead of time.

This whole story is just like a simpsons episode yeah pretty much that being said the crew did their best in a very shitty situation they really couldn't train because the ship was hardly seaworthy but they did what they could at port and fletcher was despite being given a pile of shit to command he was a seasoned commander and most importantly in a kind of like a hopeless situation like this one his men loved and respected him i think a lot of it had to do with like the the sailors despite not being experienced whatsoever they knew knew that the situation is pretty fucked.

And whenever they were working on the ship, Fletcher was always working with them.

Yeah.

Like he was just suffering in the shit with them, which to be fair, as I was never a sailor, but I was a soldier.

That is literally as little as an officer has to do for us to like them.

Yeah.

Like he was kind of, I suppose, this is the situation we're all dealing with.

I'm going to help you with it.

That impresses upon people like, you know, you are willing to do what needs to be done.

Yeah.

Enlisted people are not easy to impress, I promise.

Which is a good thing, because while the crew loved Fletcher, they fucking hated his dog.

Oh, here comes the fucking dog.

The stu like French bulldogs, like annoyance.

Poor little things.

It's not their fault that humans did that to them.

Yeah.

Fletcher had an old, mostly dying French bulldog that just kind of limped around half blind and bit everyone that came near it.

Also, it was just kind of pissing and shitting everywhere it went and Fletcher let it.

He just let the dog do whatever it wanted.

And the men actually conspired to kill the dog by throwing it overboard, but they decided not to because they liked Fletcher too much.

And they thought he would be sad if they killed his dog.

I'd be sad too.

That's that's not nice.

Yeah, don't kill dogs.

Fletcher had no hope that he would get the actual combat command he was looking for.

And he assumed that the Navy, having seen how horrible this fucking yacht was, would hold them in a kind of active reserve, a boat version of in in case of emergency, break glass type thing.

But

then he and the rest of the rickety leaking yacht fleet was ordered to sail for the Azores.

As they pulled out of port and went south, one of Fletcher's aides gave the fleet the nickname that has stuck with it ever since, the Suicide Fleet.

The horrible nickname aside, the mission had some pretty serious flaws.

For starters, The Maggie couldn't store enough fuel to actually get to the Azores.

When When Fletcher told his bosses about this little problem, they told him, well, just figure out how to make it work.

So Fletcher did something another famous fleet from the history of this show did.

He simply jammed coal anywhere it would fit.

It worked the last time, to be fair.

Flawlessly.

Famously so.

There are other problems, though.

Namely, fresh water.

Most boats back then could not purify their own water.

They had containment vessels for it, right?

The Maggie, being a yacht never meant to actually leave port, did not have those.

So there was no way for him to store fresh water.

Fletcher would, again, just have to figure out a way to make it work.

How long is it to sail to the Azores?

A couple days.

I mean, it's not the worst, but...

It's hot.

I mean, it's unair conditioned, manual labor the whole time.

Men need drinking water.

I mean, bathing is out of the question in a situation like this.

Like it was for most crews, to be completely honest.

But, yeah, they need to drink water.

So Fletcher went out and procured two large bathtubs, which he then stuck on the deck and filled with drinking water.

Yeah.

This is before you could give them like white monster.

Yeah, exactly.

Fletcher going down to the local Seminole Avenue.

He's like, boys, I've bought you something that I know is the nectar of the gods.

It's filled with gymson and juniper berries and gives you effervescent energy.

But he also knew this wouldn't be enough water.

So then he ordered the lifeboats to be filled with water as well, which is a problem if you end up meeting this.

Like, don't worry, sir, the lifeboats come pre-flooded.

Then, because the yacht was made out of wood, they would need to bring wood aboard to fix, you know, anything that might break, any, anything that might need repairs.

This was thrown in with the water and the coal, making the boat even heavier.

Somewhat ironically, the fleet's mission was to escort an actual sub-chaser to Bermuda.

And while I assume Fletcher looked out of his window and got really, really mad at the boat that he thought he was going to be captaining while he was stuck in the leaking death trap full of coal and bulldog shit this is a fun thing to think about as if that wasn't bad enough maggie and her crew didn't even make it a single day before things began to go wrong they ran into a storm within a couple hours which caused the badly balanced and overweight ship to buck and roll in the rough seas to the point that everyone on board had seasickness and was vomiting everywhere, including Fletcher, who was a seasoned sailor.

That's how bad it was getting its ass kicked.

It's just a fucking top-heavy boat.

It's just like about to barrel over at any point.

Yep.

Seas were so bad that Fletcher forced his men to sleep inside, which, you know, at the time it was common for ships going through really hot areas, say like the Caribbean, for men to sleep on the deck to get some fresh air.

But now that meant the men were all locked inside.

vomiting into the sea water that was pooling on the floor due to all the leaking.

And that was all mixing with the coal dust.

And that mixture was now just kind of sloshing back and forth around their beds.

Oh,

fucking hell.

Then the ship began to break.

The steerage gear broke, meaning that sailors had to attach ropes to either side of the tiller, that being the big thing in the back that kind of directs which way the yacht is going.

Yeah.

And yank it back and forth as Fletcher directed the ship.

All this while, again, constantly puking and now covered in a fine mix of vomit, seawater, and coal dust.

Jesus Christ.

Who will be Yanken Day Tiller?

Gotta rope that tiller till I coal dust.

As more things broke around the ship, Fletcher ordered his engineer, like, you gotta go out and fix him, man.

And that's when he found out he has another problem.

The man designated the ship's engineer had no engineering education and was instead a salesman prior to joining the Navy.

And then the rough seas knocked over one of their bathtubs full of water, and now everybody had to be put on strict rations

you get one drop of water a day boys oh boys we lost the tub

time to start drinking our own piss someone yeah someone in the back is like man thank god this can't get any worse and when the tub just goes rolling by

he's there like trying to take a break in his like floating bunk that's like half mixture of like coal dust puke and water and he's like not the tub.

I was going to wash myself later.

Someone across the building is like, man, thank God I've been drinking my own piss for days.

Yeah.

Just to prepare.

With crew morale breaking down faster than the ship itself, Fletcher decided a good way to improve this was to fire off the ship's forward and rear cannons.

Because if there's one thing sailors, or really any enlisted person, enjoy more than questionable port calls and drinking, it's blowing something up, right?

This always works.

So he ordered the forward can cannon to fire.

And it should be noted that this is the first time that any of these guns had been used.

They had not been tested during sea trials.

Oh, no.

And the blast from the cannon shattered almost all of the windows of the ship.

When the rear cannon fired, it blew apart the aft deck railing.

and tore even more holes in the ship because of bad welds and seams and flooded the berthing where the enlisted men slept.

I hate being right, but also I'm surprised it didn't just break the boat in half.

Just Titanic that bitch into the sea.

Yeah.

If that wasn't bad enough, when Fletcher took a closer look at the damage that the cannons left after firing, approximately one shell apiece, he found that the force of the blast had ripped the cannons up from the deck mounts and made them completely useless.

He promptly gave strict orders that neither gun was to be fired ever again for any reason.

whatsoever.

Like even if a sub is coming at us, like we just look, we're just safer if we don't use these.

Yeah, it's it's better to die by drowning than exploding yourself.

I should point out here that this journey has only gone on for three days.

It has only been three days so far.

So many people were now violently seasick that there was almost no work being done.

The leaks, the breakdowns, everything just kept getting worse and worse, and nobody was able to fix anything.

So finally, the Maggie sputtered and died, its engine no longer working.

So Fletcher signaled to another converted yacht, this one made to be a minesweeper, the USS Uatoana, and asked it, like, hey, could you give us a tow?

This is when the captain of the other ship said, well, we would tow you, but we can't because we are also broken down.

Shit's Pokemon.

We just gotta sit here.

Like using light signals to signal, shit is fucked.

Please send help.

And then getting the same answer and response, shit is also fucked.

Please send us help.

Shit or boss?

Facing no other options, Fletcher forced his very, very sick crew to go back to work and get the engine working so they could at least struggle their way to Bermuda.

Then an alert went up.

A submarine appeared.

No.

Guns started going off.

And Fletcher ordered the Maggie into combat.

And I mean, we already kind of pointed out that there was no meaningful combat that they could engage in.

Their cannons.

self-destructed the yacht and they could not outrun their own death charges.

So I don't know what I don't really know what he intended on doing, but he did order the yacht into battle.

However, the Maggie and the other yachts were all so slow that the enemy boat just kind of left.

They damaged the French sub-chaser, the actual sub-chaser that they had, and now that needed to be towed.

But now that they had actually run into Germans, people began to call out submarine sightings all the time, despite

they probably weren't.

They were mostly just pointing at dolphins and screaming.

Then the Maggie ran out of coal.

This forced it to once again be towed behind another yacht, the Scythera.

By now, half of the yacht fleet was towing the other half of the yacht fleet.

These yachts were not made to tow other yachts.

As soon as they were lashed together, the rough seas forced the yachts to start slamming into one another, damaging them all even further.

And eventually, the Maggie and the rest of the fleet limped into port at Horta.

Some attempts are made to fix the yachts, but there's hardly enough parts or even wood left around to slap them back together and the reason for that is uh despite fletcher requesting replacement parts uh extra wood whatever over and over and over again the navy just didn't give him any the reason for that is the navy literally did not want to waste parts on the converted yachts knowing that no matter what they did they would still be worthless

Fletcher's ship being a waste of time and money had become official Navy policy.

So they just told him, work with what you got.

Also as as well, like not even that they weren't worth fixing is that like we can fix this if this boat survives it just goes back to the person who owns it.

So what's the fucking point?

Yeah, it was just fucking worthless.

Finally, he just kind of gave up just in time for another U-boat to appear.

Fletcher ordered Maggie out to sea to chase it down after the U-boat sank a Portuguese merchant ship.

But no matter how hard he pushed the boat, the Maggie just could not catch up.

Finally, the U-boat turned and left, with the captain of the U-boat writing in his notes, I swear to God that he had sighted the Maggie, but declined to open fire because per the captain's judgment in the U-boat, it was not worth the use of one of his torpedoes.

Folks say.

Which might be the biggest burn you can give to someone in war.

I could kill you, but you are literally not worth the cost of a bullet.

Fucking hell.

Now, back in Horta, the port, Fletcher wrote letters to anyone he could think of, to his uncle, any of the people he still had connections with, anyone in the Navy.

He wasn't trying to write letters to get parts for his boat.

He had given up on that.

Rather, he was begging anyone that might listen to him to get him the fuck off the maggie and give him a real command.

When that didn't work, he demanded a Department of the Navy survey to come down and inspect his ship, knowing they would find the damn thing was a death trap.

So the Azores detachment commander came down to do the inspection, and it did not take him long.

to find the following.

And again, this is from the U.S.

Naval Institute.

Quote, living conditions on board the vessel are very bad.

The ship was absolutely unfit for the duty which she had been assigned to.

The design of the ship was not meant for sailing out of sight of land or, may I say, out of Long Island Sound.

To sum it up in a few words, I consider the Margaret nothing more than a piece of junk.

And I cannot imagine a ship being bought by the government that is so worthless for the duty required.

Shit's fucked.

Yeah.

My the official Navy report, shit is fucked.

Then he gave his official recommendation that the ship should just be scrapped.

This is despite the fact that the government spent quite a lot of money.

It was $100,000 they spent to get it from Emerson.

By the time they would sell it for scrap, they could only get $12,000 for it.

Fucking hell.

And $100,000 buying it, not even including the money and cost of like fitting all the shit on it.

And it converts to several million dollars today.

And they only got a couple months of use out of it.

If you count use being the retrofitting period

and precisely one mission.

Fuck's sake.

The other converted yachts did not do much better.

The USS Artemis randomly burned down.

The USS May ran aground off the coast of the Dominican Republic and its sailors just ditched it.

The Navy thought it was so worthless that they never made any attempt to free it from where it was stuck.

And so they tried to sell it for salvage, but they couldn't even do that.

So they abandoned it.

Two other yachts survived World War I, the Helenita and the Scythira, and they were both returned to the people who sold them to the government.

And of course, those people are allowed to to keep all the money.

The Scythira was purchased from the family again during World War II, turned into a patrol boat, though this time a German U-boat killed it off the coast of North Carolina, taking several of its sailors with it.

So FTR's gilded pop-up navy did not work, but it did crank out a series of hilarious failures while greatly enriching the already wealthy and costing a small fortune to U.S.

taxpayers.

So I guess in reality, FTR was on that military-industrial complex grind set way before it was a cool thing to do.

Yeah.

The end.

I think it is just like a eternally American military story of pay over the odds for something that doesn't work.

It falls apart.

And then it's like, oh, we'll just pay more money for it.

And that's it.

Yeah.

This is why I sold my personal F-35 to the Dutch government.

Tom.

We do a thing on this show called Questions from the Legion.

If you'd like to ask us a question from the Legion, you can support the show on Patreon at any level.

And you can ask us that question on our Patreon DMs or in the Discord.

You'll also have access to, or you can stuff it into a yacht and crash it into Bermuda and we will read it on air.

And today's question is, what is the funniest or weirdest internet beef you've ever gotten into?

Oh,

I'll let you take the fucking wheel on this.

You're the person.

This questions, I am not.

I have a couple.

Okay, one is only the funniest because of recent events.

When Dan Bongino was named the deputy director of the FBI.

I trolled him for a while and he shot back at me with death threats because I just kept slightly misspelling his name.

How were you spelling it?

Dan Bogongo or Dan like

stupid shit like that.

Bonjin Jin Jin Gino or but no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Things of that nature.

He threatened to kill me.

Then he blocked me.

Another one is, of course, Prince Leka of Albania, who called me special needs after our episode about the Albanian Civil War came out.

I'm trying to think.

There's been a few good ones.

The guy who played Animal Mother in full metal jacket, he trolled me for years because I was making fun of him because he was trying to make himself be like this.

Because he's turned into a right-wing shithead.

Of course.

And he was trying to point out that like, oh, well, I played a Marine in a movie.

You have any idea how many people I helped recruit into the Marines?

That makes me pretty much a Marine.

And the only thing I said is like, bro, you were never in the military.

You just played one on TV.

That set him down a road, a very dark path.

Recently, Jake Shields has come after me.

I don't really use Twitter anymore, but I was, you know, just calling him a neo-Nazi and a Holocaust denier in his comments and got no purchase.

Yeah.

Like eight months ago.

So I kind of left at that.

And then he just started responding to me like two weeks ago.

Yeah.

And I was like, bro, are you aware aware you're responding to something that's almost a year old?

At which point he called me gay.

It's because right-wing chuds think about you the same way like loser men think about their girlfriend they had when they were 16.

It's like you are the one that got away.

It's like, if they could just get the perfect response off and dunk on you, then they'll be fulfilled.

Yeah.

And like you can't, that's like one of the things that you learn coming up as a troll on the internet.

If you get a response, you've already won.

Yeah.

It doesn't like very rarely are you, especially if you happen to be punching right, which I should point out here, you always should be.

Yeah.

They're dumb.

They're never going to get that like ethering dunk insult that we occasionally get on people because we're like, I'm not the funniest person on earth, but compared to those people, I'm a fucking stand-up comedian.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

Some of Nate's Alzheimer's are just fucking incredible.

Yeah, you look like a monkey the Soviet Union.

You have cancer too.

Yeah, exactly.

But I think those are the funniest ones that I've had because some of the other run-ins i've had uh weren't necessarily on the internet uh like i had someone threaten to sue me but that didn't come from like a twitter beef or anything that came from a lawyer yeah yeah

um i don't know like i i i suppose wasn't uh

really that much of like an online dickhead during like the prime online beef years where like you we turned you into an online dickhead by employing

i've always been a dickhead i'm just now and also an online dickhead.

And it was like, it was a kind of different, I suppose, cultural context when like you, Nate, Francis were like at the peak of your posting powers.

And this is what happens when you near, when you're nearly 40 is like, you just have to log off a little bit.

Yeah, I mean, that is true.

I mean, we, we have all backed off a bit.

And to be fair, the posting landscape just isn't what it used to be.

They're all doing it on TikTok now, and I'm not getting on TikTok to start beating people.

Nobody needs to see my face.

I have what my mother calls a face for radio.

Yeah.

There was the guy who like tried to get my Twitter account nuked because I told him to put a gun in his mouth and pull the trigger.

And

who was like, it was a guy who was beefing with you.

And I responded to it just like instantly.

And he like, he tried to go back and forth with me.

And I just was like, fuck this.

I was like, you should put a gun in your mouth and pull the trigger.

And then he like reported my account.

I was like, either delete this or we will suspend your account.

Yeah, I've had one of those.

I used to get those a lot more when I, when I was going hard.

I mean, I don't know if like, is it, would a block count as a beef?

Because I did get blocked by the president of Azerbaijan.

Yeah, I mean, that's pretty good.

I did get, I actually got an old Twitter account nuked because I told Enda Kenny former Taoiseach of Ireland that I'm going to punch him in the throat.

Ah, the good old days.

We'll never have it back quite like that ever again.

I don't even know what I did to get blocked by the president of Azerbaijan other than just be our median.

To be fair, is enough.

I'm also trying to remember what got your old Twitter account nuked because I remember.

I know exactly what it was.

It was actually a friend of the show.

He's actually worked with us, Neil Hauer.

He's a, he's a very good friend of, of mine,

very good drinking buddy of mine when I lived in Armenia.

And we occasionally would fuck with one another on Twitter.

And he used to have a verified account back when that was like actually a thing that you had to get.

And we were shitting on each other where we're from.

He's from Canada.

I'm from Michigan.

And we were shitting on each other's like states.

uh provinces and hockey teams and whatever uh and i and and i told him that like uh calgary should be burnt to the ground um and that is what got me blocked uh that is what got me banned of everything i have ever done me actually with my own friend that i was at the same bar with while doing it yeah is what got my accountant that is that's just the al capone getting done for taxes of posting Yeah, I mean, of all the death threats that I posted back in the day when those weren't allowed, this is what brings me down.

Like, and as well, because like I've been on Twitter for a long time in like different incarnations, like since like 2009 or 2010.

And like, when people go on about how toxic Twitter is now, I was like, you should have seen it in fucking 2011.

Like, way, way back, it was so much worse.

I mean, I'd argue it's certainly more toxic now, but I know people were complaining about it before Musk bought it, about like all these other things.

Like, no, you actually get banned for things now.

I mean, now it's literally just

fucking neo-Nazi hole from hell.

Yeah.

And it's nothing but horrible hatred and bigotry left, right, and center.

Whereas before,

those were still there.

Yeah.

But they just weren't the dominant voices.

They weren't dominant and they could get banned for it if you reported them.

Yeah.

Depending.

If they said like hard slurs, for sure they'd get banned.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But you could straight up tell someone to kill themselves and you would not get banned.

Yeah.

Now you just have both.

Yeah, like it's a, unfortunately, as you get older, sometimes you have to put down the sword and realize it's like, no, I don't want to be looking at my phone for the next three hours arguing with this person online it's like i'm going to watch a movie yeah read a book it's fun it's good yeah you could buy some of mine and read them yeah speaking of products that we have that you can enjoy

uh tom you have other podcasts plug those podcasts uh yes beneath the skin the show about the history of everything told through the history of tattooing and a new podcast uh called this guy sucked that i produce that is about um dead people throughout history who fucking suck and the guests are people who know them best aka historians and scholars who get to pick the guy who sucked hell yeah Joe refuses to pick someone who's dead so we have to wait for the one person he wants to do to die and then he'll be right on look David Irving is coming any day now that guy is old as fuck there's actually a report of him dying not that long ago that ended up not being true and I but it's also kind of iffy because he's the kind of guy that if he died I don't think think anybody would care.

Yeah.

Like he doesn't, he's not going to have like a family mourning for him at this point.

Yeah.

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