Episode 352 - The Attack on Mers El Kebir

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Hello and welcome to the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast.

I'm Joe and with me is Nate.

We're French sailors in the 1940s.

We have just left the local bakery for our regular six-hour lunch break and mounted our unicycles to pedal back to our naval base where we work out of.

Our ship is the pride of the French Navy, the flagship of the baguette class of destroyers, the SS.

I'm having an affair, but it's fine in our culture.

But, my God, would you believe it?

The Luftwaffe is bombing us.

We run to our ship and man our guns, but we're confused because we pull the trigger and nothing but a stream of warm, melted brie oozes out of the end of the anti-aircraft cannon.

Nate looks at me and calls me stupid because it's Tuesday.

Of course, the guns would be packed full of brie.

Unsure of what to do next, we surrender and spend the rest of the war being seduced by a series of increasingly older teachers.

I tried to stuff in as many things as I could in a paragraph.

There's a French film called Préparévau Moufoi, so like get your handkerchiefs ready, basically, like you're gonna cry.

And it's basically about the best way I can describe it is two guys who are friends and this woman.

And if I remember correctly, the story is that she basically is like a love triangle, but then she falls in love with a 13-year-old boy, but it's okay because he's got like 140 IQ, so he's basically like an adult in terms of intelligence.

This is the biography of Macron.

Manuel Macron.

I mean, like, when I say 13, like, the actor playing him is probably 13, not like a 16-year-old playing a 13-year-old.

You're sort of like in French film in the 70s, so there's definitely some

more than implied sex scenes.

And you're like, what the fuck?

They're like, oh, yeah.

So funny.

Kind of got an off-kilter screwball comedy.

It's like

the French screwball comedy is everyone involved in the production goes to jail in America.

Yeah, so, you know, France.

La Belle, France.

What I said was, ah, beautiful France, it's an interesting country, and if I say anything else, you're going to arrest me and put me in prison.

Yeah, I like that we've pissed off like all three of our French listeners already.

Look, if we end up talking about a part of your country's history, unless it's one of the sad episodes where I don't do it cold open,

we're going to make fun of you.

Yeah, you tend to not do that.

It doesn't feel right.

We're going to talk about Katyan Forest, and you're like, eh, all right, Nate.

So it's 1930.

We're Polish.

No, no, not doing that.

Nate, it's 1940.

It's May 1940.

And we're in France.

So bad things are happening.

To make a very long story short, because I really don't want to go into the battle of France, as it's called, because we will one day do a series about that.

In a frighteningly short amount of time, France falls to the Nazi invasion.

The reasons for this are many, which we will cover at length at one point in the future.

But for the context of this episode, you just need to know that France is, in fact, lose in World War II, which I'm assuming is a fact most listeners knew.

Yeah, the summarized version is they were like, we're going to reinforce a certain part of our border to stop German attack because the German military buildup is obvious.

The problem is that what they call is the Maginot line and it doesn't.

Basically, the Germans are like, well, then fuck it, we'll just invade via Belgium and the Netherlands and come down through northeast France.

It could be worse.

I actually have a book given to me by

someone at the Dutch live show written by the Dutch government that came out just before the invasion of the Netherlands that effectively says, don't worry about it.

If Germany invades, we can hold them off.

I cannot think of a worse time to publish this book.

But yeah,

things happened.

France falls, the low countries fall.

But during the period of France getting its teeth kicked and and its teetering on the edge, Britain was trying anything and everything to keep them in the war.

Even though the Allies had a deal with one another that neither would sign an individual agreement with Germany that would remove them from the war effort.

However, the Brits were starting to be a bit worried that the French might do it anyway.

The French premier at the time, Paul Renault, who you might remember from our episode of the Battle of Castle Eider, with the bear mocked and some French BOWs and some American soldiers teamed up to fight fight the SS.

He was involved in that, as was a tennis player.

But he declared Paris an open city, not to be defended, and by defended being destroyed in the catastrophic fighting that would have happened, and instead moved his government to Bordeaux.

That's correct.

This left the British government treading water on how to keep France in this shit.

So they offered them a Franco-British Union state.

This was surprisingly popular at the time.

More popular for the British than the French, I will say, but there were some people that were totally cool with it.

I mean, obviously, like, it's just, it's way, way further back in history, but it is funny when you look at some of the sort of like maps depicting, you know, situations at various points in the Hundred Years' War, and you're like, there's a part of Bordeaux and pretty much all of Calais that's just, that's territory that's owned by England.

Like, it's just English France.

Yeah.

Like, there was a time, so, you know, their borders are fake.

Actually, Calais is Britain.

Sorry.

There was actually a pretty powerful group of people within France, and of course, within Britain, that favored a union state, but not now.

For the French, they figured any union state now put the British in charge rather than any kind of actual equality-based union that they had talked about even before this, and they would talk about it again after.

But at this moment, the French main objection to it wasn't the fact that the state would be created, but that if they did, because they had been getting their teeth kicked in by the Germans, that the British would be in charge of it.

Yeah, I mean, I don't know how to describe this, but for one, it's very funny to imagine like Syrian Arab Republic, but for Britain and France, it's like British, yeah, like French Baptism.

By that, I am assuming they went as far as to create a flag that everybody forgot about it for a long time.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Yeah, tricolor union, Jack.

I mean, the thing about it is, yeah,

like there's a lot of francophilia in British culture.

There's a lot of anglophilia in French culture, but there's also a pretty profound mistrust that's I mean it's and I think like the modern incarnation of you know Brexit Boris Johnson bullshit and all this kind of stuff, you know seeing France as kind of like

France's like favorite holiday home place and also like the dreaded EU and stuff like that second only to the Germans like this is this is a tendency like there is a lot of mistrust and I'm sure you'll get to this that but can't imagine why

yeah, I can't imagine why famously uh Britain wasn't allowed to join the uh the what's it called the the European Mind I can't remember if it was the coal and steel community that led to the EEA that led to the common market in the EU until de Gaulle died.

He's like, fuck no, they will never join.

Fuck them.

They will stab us in the back.

They will fuck us over.

They're awful.

And he was right.

Occasionally, even someone like him figures out that you can't trust the British.

Worst military nickname in human history, asparagus, because he was tall.

It's so weird.

Look, my grandpa tried to kill Charles de Gaulle, but for very, very bad reasons.

Oh, what?

Like the paratrooper assault on Paris?

Because they're like, you're not,

you're too woke.

That was exactly it.

But, like.

When the paratroopers got their peepees slapped and got their camouflage taken away as punishment.

I don't know if you know this, but literally, like, they're like, you're not allowed to wear your cool ass camo anymore.

You guys tried to get away from the kids.

It was like a tank.

I was over the legion at the time.

And the only people that got killed were, I believe, some legionnaires because they were stupid.

But, you know, I do respect a man that is far too tall to be a tanker who becomes a tanker anyway.

That's the only nice thing I can say about Charles de Gaulle.

I was going to say, not that you know anything about that.

Nobody ever called me asparagus, though.

I was mostly just called homophobic slurs.

I was going to say, well, I mean,

yeah, I was going to say that a friend of mine in a writing workshop who was a veteran did a story, and one of the characters in this platoon in the story he was writing about was called Ass.

I'm just like, who in the fuck gets the nickname ass?

And that's all they refer to in the story.

And then I was going to say, I met you, and your last name is Kasabian.

And you're like, everyone just called me Ass.

And I'm like, wait, Ass is a real guy.

Yep.

Yep.

Now, a lot of people in the French government wanted to take this union deal, but eventually the weight was just too far against it.

Renault told the British he couldn't take the deal.

There's no way anybody was going to vote on it.

But Renault also said that he would fight on until the end.

He was not going to take a separate peace.

He was not going to accept an armistice.

France would fight until they were completely conquered.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And Marshal Petin was like, well, speaking of Petin, he was Renault's deputy prime minister at the time.

Make a very, very long story short for people who are unaware, Philippe Pétain might be

history's greatest Uno reverse guard who went from World War I national hero to collaborationist fascist piece of shit all in a few decades.

The only thing saving him from hanging at the end of a rope was from his service of World War I.

I mean, De Gaulle said as much.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, he was the closest thing to a national hero.

He was a real piece of shit.

We don't really need to go into it.

But basically, like, the long story short is that you wind up with free French government zone as well as the government that's controlled out of Vichy.

Yeah, we're going to end up talking about that.

Yeah.

Pétain and the commander of the French army, Maximi Wegon, both thought that continuing the fighting was pointless.

France had lost.

There is no reason to deny that.

And continuing the fighting in a completely lost war would do nothing but end in more meaningless French deaths.

There is some truth to that.

That is the nicest thing I will say about these two men.

I also want to point something out that's not meant to be like, oh, you should compromise with the Nazis and the Germans, but you can understand why this sentiment is pretty powerful.

Because if you've ever visited small towns in France, anywhere in France, anywhere you go in France, in, you know,

near the Spanish border, in

Provence, in Burgundy, in Champagne, in Lille, in Brittany, anywhere, any small town, there's like, oh, there's a nice little monument with like dozens of names of men who died in World War I.

Like every

basically entire generation of men died in World War I.

Yeah, and that's very much in their forethought of their mind.

25 years ago.

Yeah.

So imagine if in the year 2000, like 98% of our high school graduating class just all died.

And it wasn't from opiates.

Yeah.

Fuck it.

It wasn't from the great, the great Lawrence County Walmart fire.

Our personal battle like Assam was that the time that someone stole oxy from their dad.

I mean, like, Baton's a piece of shit.

He should have been executed at the end of the war, but you can, if you divide him from his political beliefs for just five seconds, you can understand why he wanted the war to end.

He was already a fascist, though, and so was We Gong.

Yeah.

Yeah, and Petan, you'll hear about this, but a lot of the stuff as regards the kind of narrative and historiography that they kind of created about why the Germans rolled them over was like, oh, France was too woke and spent too much time on like socialist exercise clubs and fucking like diversions and fun and not not like military training and being fascist and being the military technology and tactics simply pass them by.

Yes.

I mean, not that this is a thing France has any fucking history with.

Like,

no one has ranged artillery.

That's impossible.

They go fucking blunder into a war with the Prussians in 1870.

And they're like, oh, wait, they do have ranged artillery?

Not to mention, like, it's also framed.

Again, we'll talk about this a lot more when we talk about the Battle of France, but like France rolled over without a fight, which is absolutely not true.

The French military fought tooth and nail.

They just lost, which is also a possibility in war.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm still thinking about your book about, don't worry, we can fight off the Germans.

It's

1939 or 1940 in the Netherlands.

And it's like, the only thing that's aged worse than that is like Belgian architect in Leuven being like, this cathedral is unburnable.

Without going into the depths of Petin and Wegon's political ideology, they were both complete fascists, even before they surrendered to the Nazis.

I mean, Pétain himself had more in common with Hitler than he did with his own government.

So,

for instance, We Gon, when the Nazis were steamrolling their way after the French military finally began to truly break down, We Gon was worried that rather than losing the war, that there might be a communist uprising in Paris and the Nazis could help them stop it.

We gon has some rehabilitation going on his image because later on during the Vichy regime, he protests against the Nazis, but it's because they slowly but surely, of course, strip away the sovereignty of the fake puppet state in Vichy.

Like, it's not because he didn't like the Nazis.

Well, it's just funny because, yeah, I mean, like, okay, people being fixated on fighting the last war.

Like, there might be a communist uprising in Paris because of the instability created by this invasionistic.

Yeah, that literally just happened to be a lot of people.

I don't know a ton, but knowing what I know about Philippe Petson and Maxime Weigon, like, they are from a very, very

like right-wing Catholic.

Yeah, their version of fascism was more couched in Catholic ideology rather than like Germans, which were more atheist in a way.

Yeah, and like weirdly esoteric fucking mysticism shit.

Where Peton was like, no, all glory to the Vatican.

Remember that a lot of that, the tradition of that and this kind of like, you know, return to Catholicism and like as a form of national restoration is post-1870s.

Yeah.

I mean, arguably, it's still a response to the French Revolution being anti-Catholic.

That is true.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's interesting.

There's things you can trace back where like you're always on the right side of a certain argument if you just look back to a certain event.

Basically, similarly, any French politician who's from the part of France that used to be Italy and then got annexed in the 18th in the 1800s will be a right-wing fascist.

Like it's just, it's just a thing.

It's like, if they're from around Nice and their last name is like Spaghetti, they are a right-wing politician.

It's what Spaghetti.

Yeah, exactly.

Abno Spaghetti.

Initially, he's like,

Yeah, that's 100% true.

But eventually, meetings in Bordeaux with the government about what to do with the armistice, the Franco-British Union, all of this stuff began to break down.

More and more cabinet members began to see things Pétain's way, leading Raynaud to resign because he refused to be the one that signed the armistice.

That leads to, of course, Pétain being appointed prime minister of France.

At this point, the British British had accepted that the French were absolutely going to give up the fight.

They were going to break their gentlemen's agreement to not look for an individual peace, so they demanded that the French Navy quickly sail all their combat ships to British ports so they did not fall into German hands.

The commander of the French fleet, as well as Pétain, refused to do this.

The British reason for wanting the French ships to effectively remove themselves from France is pretty easy to see.

Once France surrendered, the Brits would be alone at both land land and sea against the Nazis and the Italians, who people still worried about for some reason.

Because if there's only one thing less intimidating than an Italian man, it's an Italian man in military uniform.

I mean, I was thinking about an Italian boat.

The Italian Navy was, to make a very long story short, an episode will eventually cover the future.

Paper tigers?

The term paper tiger doesn't really work for Italy.

Paper meatball?

It's a Potemkin paper tiger because, like, the paper tiger is only, it's two-dimensional because people have sold all the luck and slur dimension on the black market that's a black market dimension

yeah exactly yeah yeah yeah the brits only hope of holding on was by commanding the seas and keeping supply and trade routes open because obviously they're an island britain has a pretty big achilles heel when it comes to self-defense the british already depended on the french fleet as it was When the war started, the British and the French split defense duties at sea, with the French checking the Italians in the Mediterranean and the British checking the Nazis in the Atlantic.

If that check in the Mediterranean was gone, the Italian Navy could hypothetically roam free, closing off any route that the Brits had to their positions in the colonies in the Middle East, as well as their shortest path to India.

So, bad.

Churchill reaches out to the French government and the French naval commander, Jean-François Darland, and the men have a conversation where Darland effectively tells him, fuck you, we're not doing it.

He refuses to hand the fleet over and simply tells Churchill that no matter what happens, we're not giving the fleet up to anybody, British or German.

It doesn't matter what the armistice says.

Churchill agrees to this, kind of saying, whatever happens, do not give up your fleet.

The implication, of course, being that kill it rather than hand it to the Nazis.

And Darla, it seemed, understood and agreed that he would do this.

He told Churchill not to worry because he would never surrender his fleet to anyone, regardless of what his government told him to do.

What of that like, those old like honor of the naval officer type thing?

The Germans did the same thing at the end of World War I.

The German Navy scuttled their fleet at Scapaflow rather than hand it to the British, despite the fact they knew the war was over.

It's kind of a tried and true naval tradition.

You'd rather kill your fleet than surrender it.

I mean, the Germans also have a pretty...

They took their traditions to such a profound extent.

They also scuttled their civilian population trying to escape.

God.

That's a story for another day, but yeah.

I hate to scuttle my civilian population.

I hate to scuttle 6,000 people on a boat.

I'm not exaggerating.

The real kings are when you scuttle your air force like the Japanese did.

Also their navy.

Also their navy, actually.

We've talked about that.

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

This is where things begin to get a little weird, though.

Darlon agrees to keep the French fleet out of Nazi hands, but he gives no specific order to the French fleet to do so he makes no move to support that he did not order them to sail for british ports though some french ships did this entirely on their own we've talked about this before in an episode with the very very dumb submarine the sirkov which was a submarine yearning to die before it even saw combat then the armistice which was in reality a surrender of france to the nazis was signed on june 22nd 1940.

I was never aware.

This is actually two days before my birthday.

Oh, well, look at that.

You know?

Part of that is funny because how much of a French nationalist my Armenian grandfather was, that I love that two days before I was born, his beloved country surrendered to the country that he would like more, but just for the government part.

Yeah, I mean,

the armistice had a lot going on inside of it.

Nazi occupation of large swaths of France, the Atlantic coast, the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, and anything not outlined in that, namely southern France and the overseas empire under the control of the fascist collaborationist French government, normally known as Vichy France, led by Pétain.

I have to interrupt you for a second because there's nothing that I find funnier than like people finding patterns of like, oh, the same thing in a tangentially related way happened on the same date, X number of years ago, and that must be related somehow.

They broke ground on the Pentagon on September 11th, 1941.

It's in the numerology, bro.

60 years later, and it's just like, and all I can ever think of when you, because you brought this up, and I'm not making fun of you, but you brought this up about your birthday, and all I can think of is years ago, there was a guy, Kay Thor Jensen, on social media crowds, and he was, it was in 2015 when a certain famous guy from Bloomington, Indiana became unfamous.

And he's like, 2001, the fall of the Twin Towers.

2015, the fall of Subway Jared.

2029?

Now we're all waiting what's going to happen in 2029.

Jared was from Bloomington.

Yeah, yeah, he was from Bloomington.

You know, he walked walked to Subway because he lived above the subway, the subway on like 2nd Avenue or whatever.

There was an apartment building.

He lived in there and he walked downstairs to go to subway.

That's the story.

And then nothing else ever happened.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He moved

to the same suburb my parents lived in for a while.

And he was like, I'm going to found a children's charity.

And that's what they're going to remember me.

Now he's a sovereign.

Yeah, he's just having a summer vacation for many, many, many, many decades in a federal housing project.

Moving on.

Another part of the armistice was, in effect, the total surrender of the French fleet to the Nazis.

However, it didn't give the fleet over to the Nazis.

The fleet was to be, quote, disarmed with a clause that allowed the Nazis to use the French fleet for coastal defense and surveillance.

In short, it left the entire French fleet in something of a gray zone.

with little more than a paper arrangement between a collaborationist government and the Nazis keeping them out of direct combat operations.

Then Darlane continued to give orders to the French fleet that said, in short, they're to make sure that their fleet fell under no foreign command, but, quote, our former allies are not to be listened to.

Now, Darlane did this because he believed that if the French fleet simply chucked up a white flag and sailed over to the UK or wherever, they would join the Free French movement, which they probably would have.

Though the evidence of this isn't ironclad, a lot of French ships did surrender to the British, and then their sailors were given the option to join the free french or just go back to france a lot of them just went home so like who's to say if if this would have been a one-for-one transfer but darn lang was worried that if these ships did go over to the british even to just surrender germany would see this as a violation of the armistice agreement and throw it out the window and fully take over france because he was under the fake belief that that had not already happened.

Yeah.

Which is something that happens quite frequently with the Vichy government when you look into them.

They constantly complain about their sovereignty being violated by the Nazis, kind of hilariously.

It's like, what do you think this arrangement is, you fucking morons?

Nobody ever accused fascists of being intelligent, but still.

Got some bad news about territorial integrity.

Yeah, I'm starting to be worried about the territorial integrity of my puppet state.

I mean, you can see how the British government begins to get a little nervous at this arrangement when it comes to the French fleet.

And when it comes to the French fleet, there are two formations that give the British, much like the UN in the middle of horrific crimes against humanity, deep concern.

For starters, there is the French fleet in Toulon, but due to its location, it's effectively unapproachable.

The British were not going to be able to touch it, right?

However, there was another fleet stationed at Mirzel Kabir in French Algeria.

French Algeria fell under the administration of the collaborationist government.

However, it was far enough away from France.

The British hoped that the French military men there wouldn't be some kind of unwavering, loyal, fascist baton.

I have really fucking bad news for you about Pied Noirs and French Algerians.

Yeah, that's like the biggest bit of military intelligence failure of the British was not understanding what being a French military commander in Algeria meant.

I mean, I'm just thinking about a friend of a friend who was doing some research and published this thing.

He's like, this is just an example of all the different, like, explicitly anti-Semitic magazines that people were subscribing to in French Algeria.

Yeah.

And it's just like, ah, yeah, I'm just saying.

I mean, put it this way: it's like ultra-manifest destiny.

Algeria was to France, like, I mean, imagine if like people saw holding on to Alaska as like, you know, an innate thing that you had to preserve to maintain the spiritual integrity of the United States.

I mean, I feel like a fair amount of people would believe that now.

Yeah, maybe.

I mean, it would disagree with me.

Disgusting people with bubble to the surface, just with a lot less French being spoken, I would imagine.

But just as much anti-Semitism, I'll probably.

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

But I mean, we'd see if the $250,000 Ford F-150s could handle Musca or not.

A whole fleet of technical cyber trucks immediately breaking down and catching fire.

It's like that Volkswagen ad that they couldn't air where the guy tries to do the suicide bombing, but the car is too strong and contains the explosion.

Fuck, I remember that.

In this case, the commander of the French fleet in Algeria was Admiral Marcel Bruno Ginsol.

He was, from what I could find, not a fascist, died-in-the-wool type.

He was more of a traditional, I'm a naval officer with decades of service behind me, that kind of thing.

White glove, naval, tradition-believing psycho.

Spoiler to something we're going to talk about soon, but it's sort of like you're still a bit of a fascist in terms of your affect, like the colonel in Akira, but you're not actually a fascist.

Oh, for sure.

He was still an admiral serving a fascist French Navy.

You're an authoritarian dickhead, and your entire life has been been shaped by this, but like you're not like, you know, we have to complete the runic circle so we can eliminate the Jews or whatever the fuck the Nazis are.

Yeah, he probably like, if given the choice, he'd probably still vote for Peter, to be completely honest.

Military guy, national hero, fascist, probably would have voted for him.

By all accounts, not a huge fan of the Nazis, but so were some French fascists.

They wanted their own fascism.

Yeah, exactly.

They appreciated Paul Renault being

opposed to the Nazis, but they still thought he was tainted by the Wolfgang.

Exactly.

So Winston Churchill began to think, well, how the hell do we get rid of this French Algerian fleet as a threat to the Mediterranean war effort?

And this was not a worry isolated to the Brits.

FDR, his army chief of staff and his chief of naval operations, were worried about this turn of events as well, despite the fact the U.S.

was not even in the war yet.

So they considered transferring half of the American Pacific fleet to the Atlantic to counter any kind of European war spreading to American shores via that direction, which is quite ironic, because if he did that, he would have saved them from Pearl Harbor.

I was going to say, I was going to say, because, you know, I just thought about what happened to the most of the American Pacific Fleet, you know, as existed before the start of the U.S.

entry in World War II, and, and then the opening riff of Metallica's Seek and Destroy sort of playing in my head.

It's just like, yeah, you know, there would be fewer tourist attractions at Pearl Harbor.

Pearl Harbor would just be a place.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, you wouldn't, you wouldn't really have to, you wouldn't be obligated to remember.

Well, I suppose it really is still just a place if you happen to be the U.S.

Navy and, from my understanding, a really shitty place to get stationed for my breathing I've heard.

The Japanese hit it with their famous limit break plane.

Yeah, exactly.

And then the Americans hit it with their famous limit break ecological disaster.

So Churchill decided the only thing they could do was issue an ultimatum to the fleet at Mirzal Kabir.

Destroy your fleet, surrender, move the fleet to British waters, or face the use of force.

This was unsurprisingly incredibly unpopular in Churchill's government.

Even the two men that would be charged with conducting this operation, Andrew Cunningham in Alexandria and James Somerville in Gibraltar, both hated the idea.

Most people in the British government, and specifically people in the British military, still saw the French as their ally, especially the French Navy and the army.

Remember, the French army fought like absolute fucking savages to protect the British during their miracle at Dunkirk.

A lot of people leave that part out of the story.

Yeah, exactly.

You can imagine that between

these two officers and their two commands, that the expression, it's just not cricket, probably got said multiple times.

A lot of monocles got dropped in the glasses.

Somerville specifically saw the idea of giving the French an ultimatum and even turning his guns on them as one of the most fucked up things anybody could ever order him to do.

Now, the other camp in the British government said, fuck the French.

They violated our deal and surrendered.

They get what they get.

So Churchill took both sides of, you know, this disagreement, so to say, and went with his original idea of the ultimatum, passing the orders to Cunningham and Somerville to compel the French admiral into negotiations just to see what would happen.

It does seem that Churchill believed that Gensol would capitulate with negotiations.

It doesn't really seem like he actually thought he'd have to go through with it.

Somerville would be in charge of the main effort, which would be called Force H, because the Brits love doing stuff like that, and was called Operation Catapult.

Somerville accepted his orders, but did object to the possibility of having to use force, in my opinion, for very good reason.

He pointed out that if they started bombing the piss out of French sailors, the Frenchmen who joined the Free French movement might be pretty fucking unhappy with the British.

The British government took his complaints into account and told them to shut up and do it anyway.

We're gonna do it anyway.

Obviously, this sounds a lot easier said than done.

The French fleet at Mersal-Kabir was not exactly small or weak.

It consisted of four battleships, six destroyers, a seaplane carrier, and called a dispatch boat, which was kind of just a small boat to maneuver through the fleet.

It had thousands of sailors, dozens of pilots.

It was heavily armed, and by all accounts, very well trained.

The battleships were a bit older, but the destroyers were as modern as any other in the world at the time, which was one of the reasons why the Brits were so worried about them.

But the fleet had made no move since the armistice.

They stayed at port, anchored in a line, the perfect picture of what a fleet at a country not at war would look like.

Like literally pulled in like a parking lot, nose first.

Somerville's Force H was comparatively even stronger.

His flagship was the HMS Hood, one of the most powerful ships of the British fleet at the time, which of course, this is the second time we've talked about the hood and had to point out that it is doomed to die in about a year

when it's killed by the Bismarck.

But we'll eventually talk about its death at some episode of the future.

With him is the aircraft carrier, which I have to say, for an aircraft carrier name, Solid Aim, the Ark Royal.

That sounds like something that's absolutely going to fucking kill you.

Yeah.

It's like you do a side quest in Castlevania's Symphony of the Night to get the coolest fucking whip possible.

Yeah.

Oh, man, did you get the Ark Royal?

No, I only got the bat with a nail in it.

Yeah.

No, I only got the morning star that's always on fire.

Thankfully, morning stars are really good for clubbing seals to death, as we've recently discovered in the Batavia episodes.

On Patreon, there's your plug.

They also had 11 destroyers, two battleships, and two cruisers.

In short, Force H, more than powerful enough to hand it to Jinsoul's fleet at Algeria.

So on July 3rd, 1940, Force H makes contact with the French fleet.

Somerville sends his second, Captain Cedric Holland, aboard the HMS Foxhound into the harbor to negotiate for him.

The Foxhound.

That Foxhound, but then also Force H laying waste to Algeria sounds like William Burroughs on vacation.

Christ.

The HMS Foxhound goes into the harbor to deliver the British terms to Admiral Jensoul.

Holland was picked for some pretty obvious reasons.

He had been the former British naval attaché in Paris.

He spoke fluent French, and he knew Admiral Jensoul personally.

So not a better person for the job, right?

However, remember how I described Jensoul as like the pitcher-perfect naval traditions guy?

How do you think an admiral responded to a captain delivering terms to him?

So I'm going to say that I can only assume that this is a thing that crosses national boundaries and cultural boundaries, that the Navy takes rank shit even more seriously than other branches of service who already take it really seriously.

God, yeah.

But navies are so into the idea of like

rank and grade being matters of life and

I guess they are in the sense of honor.

Yes.

I mean, I guess in the sense of sort of like, as we learned from the Batavia, sometimes on, you know, a plague hulk drifting in the ocean.

So, like, you know, there's a certain, the system has existed for,

you know, to kind of like put people in charge and what they say is absolute.

But like.

Also from the Batavia, you could just invent your own ranks.

Why not?

You could.

You could make your own uniforms.

Yeah, yeah.

You could make your own uniforms.

You could pull out the guy fox masks and

do some crimes.

You could.

You could have a governing council called the Rod, which kind of, which sounds like the discipline system in British boarding school.

Like, yeah, anything goes.

Yeah, he was unfucking happy that a captain came to talk to him.

He believed that if there was going to be any.

And a naval captain is only like two or three ranks below, but it's just a matter of life and death.

It's the principle of the matter.

My fascist honor demands that only an admiral speak to me.

Yeah, yeah.

Sorry.

Sorry, brother.

Sorry, but that doesn't work for me, brother.

Hulk Hoganing your way into naval negotiations.

Again, something that you probably would have something in common is Hulk Hogan's politics.

But

Jinsul is so mad that he refuses to beat with Holland, and instead he sends a lieutenant to go out and meet him, thinking it was like a clever dig that he was then sending someone lower ranking than Holland to negotiate with him.

Yeah, Jensul sending his lieutenant to get him a really strong coffee because he just cannot believe the amount of stress this is causing.

And he just says, I need a cup of serious mud, brother.

I need a cup of the world's strongest but smallest coffee.

Get me my mistress.

God.

Holland doesn't give a single shit.

He negotiates Lieutenant without issue because it turns out he also knows him personally.

Holland is

just the guy that knows all the people in the French Navy on the specific boat

because coincidence is a motherfucker.

He delivers the terms.

He's like,

you really want to stand up?

You want to talk back to me?

I fixed your Vespa so you could go see your mission.

So he delivers the terms to the lieutenant.

The terms were simple.

Continue to fight with the Brits against the Nazis, surrender the fleet at a British port, and those ships would then be given back when the war was over.

If they believed that surrendering the ships in the Mediterranean or the Atlantic to the British would violate the armistice, they had an agreement with the Americans that the French fleet could sail all the way to Hawaii and surrender to the American Pacific fleet.

Who the fuck are they going to do that?

A very, very long trip, which I'm sure in our show's history will tell you would go perfectly fine.

I'm trying to think, like, would they go to the Panama Canal and go that way or would they go through the Suez Canal and go all the way around the other side of the world?

Either or either way that

route would suck ass.

It would be really, really bad and they'd almost certainly be attacked in route.

And the final point, quote, if you refuse these fair offers, I must with profound regret require you to sink your ships within six hours.

Finally, failing the above, I have orders from His Majesty's government to use whatever force may be necessary to prevent your ships from falling into German or Italian hands.

Yeah, in short, give up the ships, sink them, or we're going to blow you up.

I'm holding a shotgun and racking it gesture right now.

Jensoul received the letter, and, you know, remember, Force H is parked right outside of Mirz al-Kabir.

Like, he sees this fleet staring at him, effectively.

William S.

Burrows hearing that there's a delivery of heroin coming.

Force H is parked right outside.

I gotta go.

Get me a truck.

Jensoul also had orders from his government that he wasn't allowed to do any of that, nor was he he even allowed to talk to the British.

So he told Holland to fuck off.

Holland decided he wouldn't, instead got on a motor launch boat and made for Jensoul's flagship, the ironically named Dunkirk.

But in the French spelling,

but I pronounced it correctly.

He wanted to go to plead his case personally, thinking that, you know, maybe if he saw the urgency in his voice or whatever, he would give up.

He never got close and only managed to deliver a handwritten version of the demands to him personally before being threatened to leave the ship and return to the Foxhound.

Jinsoul then sends an alert to the French Admiralty, telling him the British ultimatum, but he fucks it up.

He says that the British fleet demanded they sink their ships and surrender or they would immediately be attacked, which, as you noticed, is not what the British had said.

So the French Admiralty reacts by telling him immediately not to do any of those things.

And then things get weirder.

The French Admiralty of the Collaboration Estate, Darlon, being the head of it, could not be reached due to the fact that the Admiralty had been evicted from their office in Bardeau by the Germans and were in the middle of moving their new offices to Vichy.

We are in need of these buildings.

You can find something equivalent in Vichy.

The rent will be much higher, I assure you.

Yeah, but it's okay.

You have spare rooms.

You can do it on Airbnb.

The French showing up and finding out they're walking into a German rental, which means it comes with no kitchen appliances whatsoever.

Like, what the fuck?

There's not even a stove in here.

You will discover that there is a great line of white goods from Bosch.

So, Gensol ended up talking to Rear Admiral Maurice LeLuc, which was Darlane's deputy.

Leluc and everybody else's orders from Darlane were pretty cut and dry in his absence.

He was not allowed to change the standing orders, which were do not negotiate with our former allies.

And since Jensol fucked up the most straightforward game of telephone at all time, Leluc orders French ships both in Toulon and Algiers to fall in line and sail for Murzal Kabir to reinforce it.

Obviously, the Brits had tapped and decoded everything from the French Admiralty for a long time at this point because they love to spy on their allies.

And so when, you know, the French become their enemy, that just carries over.

And they quickly learn that more French fleets are gunning it to Murzal Kabir for a fight.

So Somerville deploys several planes to begin dropping sea mines at the mouth of Murzal Kabir in order to prevent the escape of the French fleet.

This all occurred so close to the French ships that French sailors watched them do it.

And by all accounts, French sailors are incredibly disinterested in any of this.

It's often said from Holland, who was there and watched them, that the French sailors mostly wanted to surrender, or at least didn't want to fight the British.

And so they were just kind of lounging around, not really having a sense of urgency whatsoever.

It's kind of like you're playing Little League and your friend's dads are about to fight to the death and you're sort of like, why?

This is stupid.

Yeah, just I want to go to Pizza Hut.

I want to go to Algerian Pizza Hut, the 40s.

Pizza Hut.

Somerville had given the French six hours to make up their minds and it was almost 1.15 p.m.

And so that time was running out.

Somerville, really not wanting to be the guy who opened fire on the people who had just been their allies a few weeks ago, told Jensoul that he would have two more hours.

He did this without any clearance from the British Admiralty or the British government.

Jensoul then sent word to the British fleet that he would like to talk to Captain Holland again.

And as soon as he did so, Somerville again gave the French fleet another two hours to make up their minds.

Holland sailed for the Dunkirk and met with Jensoul in person.

Despite Jensoul being absolutely fucking pissed, I mean, He was given an ultimatum and he's being held at naval gunpoint.

So you can imagine he's not the most friendly.

Yeah.

He told Holland that if the Germans tried to take his fleet from him or, failing that, ordered the French fleet into combat against the British, he would personally sail for the United States.

This, according to the Frenchman, was as far as he could go as far as making an agreement with Somerville without violating the orders that had been given to him by his government.

So at 5 p.m., Holland told Somerville no deal was going to happen before the end of the time limit.

So Somerville was going to extend it again.

He wanted this to last as long as possible, hoping that Jensoul would eventually just cave.

But the British Admiralty then sent a wire to him saying that the French fleet was on its way with reinforcements, meaning there's certainly a fight that was going to happen.

There was another concern as well.

Somerville and his fleet had been sitting off North Africa for 11 hours now.

There is a really good chance that the Italian Navy is going to be onto him soon.

At least one guy has said, hey,

oh, I'm fucking sailing.

So Somerville wired Holland with one last message for Jensoul.

Quote, if none of the British proposals are acceptable by 1730, it'll be necessary to sink your ships.

Meaning he would give Jensoul another 30 minutes tops.

Jensoul read the messages, said goodbye to Holland, asked him nicely to leave his ship before the British blew it apart.

And the French officers saluted him as he left, only five minutes before the time limit expired.

Then, as one final fuck you to the French, as Holland left on the HMS Foxhound, he deployed sea mines his entire way out of the harbor.

Like, bro, why did you have to do that?

It's just naval Mario Kart throwing banana peels and blue shells at people.

Yeah, naval mines are kind of the banana peel of warfare, aren't they?

Yeah, exactly.

You know, few people are aware of British military tradition being one where when you do this, you're supposed to say, I'm Milario.

I'm going to win.

Actually, never mind.

The Italian Navy is right there.

Yeah, it's all fun and games until your ship hits one of the bananas and spins out and falls off Rainbow Road.

Yeah, I was going to say, I can't, it's it's very inappropriate to bring up the british with this when the italian navy is is basically like they're they're accidentally doing this to themselves about 50 miles 50 nautical miles away but somerville still didn't open fire he was really hoping to see some white flags or some form of communication from the french fleet so then he sends out a message to the french crews in semaphore flashing lights and whatnot from the ship telling them to surrender or join them anything other than fight them the french fleet was still lined up moored to port nose in, completely helpless, and not prepared to fight them whatsoever.

He receives a semaphore message back reading, I will go down with this ship.

I won't put my hands up and surrender.

There will be no white flag above my door.

I'm in love and always will be.

I fucking hate you.

Slowly, the British crewmen sitting on their ship start hearing Katy Perry's fight song emit from the harbor.

Then at 6 p.m., he finally gave the order for the fleet to open fire, and it was about as accurate as it could possibly get.

Not only were the French fleet still just sitting at port, prior to opening fire, the Ark Royal sent observation aircraft to fly up and act as spotters for incoming gunfire.

So as soon as the British sailors opened fire, everything was smashing directly into French ships.

The battleships Brittany and Strasbourg, as well as the seaplane carrier, are immediately on fire.

The French tried to return fire, but their biggest guns, the ones on Strasbourg and Dunkirk, couldn't even be used.

They were pulled into port nose first, and their biggest guns were on the forward portion of the ship, meaning they could not be fired whatsoever.

I'm just trying to think of an equivalent.

This is like you're trying to roll coal, but your truck is backed into your garage, and so the smokestack is in your garage and it's just giving you carbon monoxide.

That's just a Viking funeral for a piece of shit.

That's a Viking funeral for a dude with a salt life sticker in the back of his lifted truck.

Everybody standing outside the garage crying, dabbing their eyes slightly, also hitting the dab because they're pieces of shit.

I mean, I remember there was a dude who was, I want to say it was his Navy SEAL and he died.

And his blue book instructions for his family was that they wanted to pull his Camaro up to the fucking grave site, literally to like

where the body would be interred and fucking blast like iced earth from the car and everyone slammed keystones.

The family was like, well, this is what he wanted.

It was for America.

That's the closest thing that we're ever going to have to like a military citadel,

like where Napoleon's buried.

We just have dudes chugging daddy ice.

Oh my God.

Only two ships, the Brittany and the Province, had guns that could move their guns into position to open fire on the British.

However, the French ships were, for the lack of a better term, flooring it to try to get out of port as fast as they could to try to escape.

And when a ship does that, they pump out a massive amount of steam, which then fell directly over their own ships, meaning they had given their own crews a smokescreen they could not see through.

So the Brits could bomb them pretty much at will because they knew exactly where they were lined up, nose to nose, into the port.

And the French could not see the British at all.

So the French did not hit.

a single British ship with cannon fire at all.

And I was going to say, I don't know what kind of aviation support the Brits have in this situation, but it's like if you were looking to do like, you know, dive bomber slash like the way they employed fighter planes back then, and you're like, hmm, I wonder where the targets are.

And it's like an enormous fucking like smoke signal emanating from the port spelling out men

in fucking, you know, whatever the Morse code of smoke is.

Ah, putin.

Merde.

A growing human chain of French sailors smoking more cigarettes than the human mind can comprehend.

That's just very funny because this is a side note, and I know I'm not supposed to interrupt, but everyone thinks people in the English language are like, oh, it's not very au la la, like kind of the way they use that expression in French.

But the way people actually use that expression in French, it's not to mean like fancy and kind of, kind of fruity, the way that people do in English.

It's more like, well, there's your problem.

It's like, oh, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la.

When you find like

someone forgot to install a plumbing joint and fucking water's just pouring, you know, basically the toilet's just dumping onto the floor.

That's when you'd say, oh.

In the Midwest, we'd say, oh.

Yeah, exact.

Brother, I do it so often.

I mean, I do it as well.

Another British volley slammed directly into the Brittany, hitting the ship's magazine and exploding it into a pillar of flame.

The hit was a fatal one, and the ship began to sink within only two minutes, taking over 1,000 French soldiers down with it.

Jesus fucking Christ.

I remember reading that the death toll in this was like 1,200, 1,300 people.

I didn't realize it was like basically, it was like ultra HMS.

What was this fucking

like the Ultra Belgrano or the HMS Sheffield in the Falklands War?

Like there were two mass casualty ship sinkings in that war and it's like yeah and and uh yeah it's like wow a thousand people in one yikes but the brittany wasn't the only ship that was dying the seaplane carrier was on fire and the dunkirk the fleet's flagship struggled to get out of port as it was hit four more times the electrical system failed and the poor bastards manning the guns had to turn them with huge manual gears.

And I can't say how much that sucks on a ship.

I assume a lot.

I've had to do it in a tank before.

Would you do gunnery in a tank?

You have to do like a failure type shot where you don't have any hydraulic power and you have to crank the fucking manual gear thing to move the turret.

And it sucks ass.

I feel like I've used this metaphor numerous times on many podcasts, but it's just basically like the military version of like the horrible gear cellar in Fritz Lang's metropolis.

We were just doing the thing all day long.

Yeah.

The province was hit and caught fire.

The ship's captain was worried that another hit, which he was sure was coming, and it probably was, would kill it and block the port for any other ship trying to get away.

So he jammed that shit to the left and beached his ship to make sure it died out of the way of everybody else's.

The Strasbourg and three destroyers gunned it for the open sea, somehow managing to dodge all of the sea mines and hauling ass at full speed towards Toulon.

But these ships were the only ones that were actually able to damage the British at all that day.

Anti-aircraft crews aboard the French ships managed to shoot down five British planes that took off from Ark Royal, killing killing two people.

The Battle of Mirzal Kabir was a naval shooting gallery.

In just nine minutes, Somerville ordered his ships to cease fire and give the French a chance to surrender.

10 minutes past 10 p.m., Jensoul messaged the HMS Hood, quote, All my ships are out of action.

I request to you cease fire.

And they did, but not before requesting Jensol fly a white flag, which he didn't have, so he resorted to just flapping a blanket outside the window.

In the end, 1,297 French sailors were killed, another 350 were wounded.

The British lost two men, another two were lightly wounded.

Pataon's shitheel government broke off official relations with the British and ordered the French planes to bomb Gibraltar, but they didn't really do anything.

Churchill, and therefore much of British World War II history, often frames this attack as brutal but necessary, a necessary evil that needed to be done in order to protect themselves from the fascist fleets joining up against them.

That is, surprisingly, what Charles de Gaulle thought when he learned of the attacks afterwards.

In, you know, much more morose terms, he said it was a necessary evil.

Churchill, of course, says being ruthless to a ruthless enemy, bolstered the few British allies left and scared the hell out of possible allies of the Nazis, like Spain, for example, is often cited as being so intimidated by the attack in the Mediterranean that it was one of the reasons they stayed out of the war, which is just not true for many, many, many reasons.

They were a bit busy doing this to themselves.

The Civil War had just ended.

They're not exactly in that dimension.

They do a lot of business with the Allies.

They're not in the mood of, you know, shooting that in the face.

So with the attack against, let's say, technically a neutral country that had previously been an ally was actually now more of a puppet state, was it really a necessary evil?

We can't say for sure because we don't know what the fleet at Mirz-el-Kabir would have done if the Nazis did show up to try to take it over.

But we do know what the French fleet did at Toulon when the Nazis tried just that.

During Case Anton, the Nazi operation that chucked the armistice in the trash and fully occupied the collaborationist government of France in 1942, this exact thing was attempted.

The 7th Panzer Division was tasked with driving towards Toulon and securing the fleet from the ground, while elements of the German Kriegsmarine mined the harbor, ensuring they couldn't try to get away.

As soon as the Nazi ground forces entered the base, the French naval chiefs of staff knew what was happening and immediately ordered the fleet to scuttle itself.

Sailors quickly went to work getting out to deeper water, setting charges, and opening sea valves, because this was something they had always planned to do if the Nazis came.

The Strasbourg, who survived the Battle of Mirzal Kabir, even opened fire, using its naval cannons on Nazi tanks when troops tried to stop sailors from scuttling ships.

So we have a ship-on-tank battle.

Other sailors got in gun and knife fights, struggling with Nazis who had boarded their ships to try and arrest them, all while actively setting bombs to destroy their ships.

Soon afterwards, scuttling charges began exploding and the Toulon fleet died one ship at a time.

In one case, Germans managed to get aboard the ship before the main charges and its magazines were set, so the captain just lit charges on an extremely short fuse and jammed them down the main turret of the cannon.

This forced German and French sailors to run for their lives or die in the resulting explosion.

In the end of this mass naval explosive suicide, they managed to sink 77 ships.

The submarines ignored the orders to scuttle and instead ran to join the Free French movement.

The Germans were only able to seize three functional ships, all of which had been disarmed, though the Italians Italians eventually descended on Toulon to steal a whole bunch of scrap metal, which is kind of funny.

I'm just thinking that, like, the last thing you expect, you know, being

kind of raced up in the German Übermensch military tradition is to have a French ship captain holding an enormous fucking charge that's lit, like comical, fucking wily coyote style fuse, jamming it down the cannon and being like,

Hitler and the Allies did agree on something in the situation.

It was a victory for both of them.

Hitler now saw that the French fleet couldn't be used against him, but the Allies saw that the French fleet couldn't be used against them.

I guess what I'm saying here is the answer is, yeah.

Attacking Mirzel Kabir was not necessary whatsoever because the French fleet, when they said that they would sink their own ships rather than give them to the Nazis, they fucking meant it.

Yeah, it's sort of like the scary role version of Hitler Reacts.

Hitler reacts happy.

Hitler reacts brackets positive.

He's just like,

ya, ya, ya.

He's like, he's like,

I'm not here throwing up a defense of the collaborationist French government, but, you know, murdering over a thousand sailors

when it doesn't really need to be done, you know, didn't really hurt the petin at all, did it?

I don't think so.

I mean, fuck the Vichy Fredge, whatever.

The end.

Did it need to be done?

No, but let's not pretend that they didn't deserve it.

And also, it didn't keep Spain out of the fucking war.

It's ridiculous.

But also, it's just sort of like fucking, it's once again, it's like the world's worst outcome when two dads are fighting at Little League.

Two dads fighting at Little League armed with katanas.

Yeah, exactly.

Two dads fighting at Little League, and then they fucking knew Tokyo is going to explode the entire fucking baseball diamond.

We have to like rebuild civilization in the ashes of what happened.

We have to rebuild Neo Little League.

Now, Nate, we do something on the show called Questions for the Legion.

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

You can ask us in the Patreon DMs or the Discord you also have access to, and we'll answer it on the show.

Today's question is: What is the funniest negative review you have ever gotten regarding a podcast or something else?

I know what you're going to say.

You can say,

Yeah, I mean,

okay.

I think Tom quoted this thing that he saw when you and I did Stalingrad and somebody said, lib shit from two fags that makes you wish you could have rooted for the Taliban.

And our comment was always, but you can root for the Taliban if you want to.

Sometimes I kind of did when I was in Afghanistan.

I mean, it's always nice to be a bandwagon person when someone's winning, you know?

There was somebody who was a huge hater of November, who gets a lot of psychos, who was really mad at us and the show and so on and so forth.

And Hussein and I had kind of riffed and made jokes, making fun of this very unhinged person who it was like trying to find creative ways to tell us to commit suicide they were being trying to be transphobic to november but hussein and i and and november were all we're all kind of riffing with this person and november and i had both commented back and forth and then this person replied to me squeakiest voice on the podcast riffing with deepest voice on the podcast

i was just like that's really so fucking fucked up

but like it did kind of lodge in my i mean we all laughed it off but it it kind of i mean i remember saying something the person's like oh i see lieutenant behay calling in reinforcements.

And I was like, that's actually Captain View.

We get a lot of negative reviews that say like really weird shit, but I think my still favorite negative review of all time has nothing to do with the show.

It was one of my books.

I don't remember which one that said, this person's so woke.

They obviously never served in the army and they have no idea what they're writing about.

Like, yeah, I became so woke.

It had stolen valor.

I mean, I do remember somebody getting really mad at me and being like, you're a, you're stolen valor, you're fake.

And I was like, you know, I'm on a commuter train.

It's going to take me two hours to get to work.

So I actually have time.

I'm just going to redact my DD 214 and you can look at it.

Because here, look at it.

And then they were like, oh, you fucking liar.

You fake bullshitter.

You think I'm not smart enough?

Look at that.

You spent, it says you were in Afghanistan for 29 days.

Ha, combat diploma.

I was like, no, dude, you just don't know how to read military dates.

That says February 2009 to March 2010.

And then the guy just deleted his account in you.

Yeah,

the person, I think it was one of, it was certainly one of my military sci-fi books.

I do not remember which one, but the person said that because I had a non-binary character play a pretty important role, that I was too woke to ever be in the military.

Famously, in not a place where there's people who are gender non-conforming.

And I clearly had no idea what I was writing about, which was very, very funny.

Yeah, that's one I can think of.

I don't know.

Yeah, I mean, as far as I don't really go looking for it,

I try not to look at podcast reviews.

Some of them can be really fucking hurtful, and I have feelings.

Yeah, I I mean, Hussein will sometimes share stuff that he finds funny and like, I don't know, I just don't really need to see it.

Like, I don't go looking.

I don't name search.

I just don't care.

Like in the sense that, I mean, like, one time I was trying to find an episode.

I was trying to find Combat of the 30 and I just, it was easier to Google search it.

And I wanted to send it to a friend.

And instead, it brought up like the subreddit.

And it was somebody being like, do you guys find Nate fucking annoying?

I was just like, I was like, you have no idea how fast I clicked on this and started uploading all the comments that say that I'm a piece of shit.

I know I'm annoying.

I know I'm fucking annoying.

I just monetized it.

That is a podcast, Minate.

You work on other podcasts.

You can plug those other podcasts.

Yeah, Trash Schucher, What a Hell of a Way to Dad, Kill James Bond, and then also No Gods, No Mayors, sort of executive producer.

So check those out.

This is the only podcast I host.

So consider supporting us on Patreon.

Just $5 gets you.

almost seven years of bonus content, Discord access every regular episode early, gets you side series, both audio and video, gets you e-books, audio audiobooks,

a lot of other stuff.

Donate to the show.

It's fun.

Do it.

Until next time, jam Brie into a machine gun and die.

You know what?

Or run down the gangway with a gigantic grenade.

Scuttle it all.

Vive la France.

Bye.