*PREVIEW* The Battle of Eniwetok

Are you familiar with the battle line with Doc?

No.

See, that's interesting because you probably are, but for one simple thing, and that is a single picture.

This one.

Oh,

the thousand-yard stair picture.

The famous marine thousand-yard stair picture, which will be the cover of our episode.

So, you know, listeners can see what we're talking about.

Right.

That comes from this battle.

Does not have a happy ending, but we'll talk about that later.

That's probably the only reason anybody is vaguely vaguely familiar with this.

When I saw the name, the title of the episode in the link for the recording session, I thought I was like, that

almost thought I was, oh, is it this Dutch history?

And then I was like, no, that sounds like something like Austronesian or Melanesian.

So it's like, I bet you this is one of those island campaigns.

But no, I've never heard of it.

For starters, Anwataka is an atoll, and it was known to the Japanese by the very, very catchy name Brown Island.

I don't know why I find that so delightful, but I I do.

I like it.

Living and dying for Brown Island.

Like a Primus Live album.

It's a tiny little coral speck of the Marshall Islands that measures less than two and a half miles of land.

It's broken up into 30 different smaller islands, though, for really the context of this episode, only three of which are important because they were made use by the Japanese for military purposes.

And Aetoll is a ring of small islands with a lagoon in the middle.

We're lagoon maxing.

Well, also, one of the important things about atolls and why people live on them in these societies is that typically, because of the increased salinity of the lagoon, because of evaporation, it creates when rain falls, fresh water collects in like a lens

on top of the saltwater in the lagoon.

And so you can have a source of freshwater as long as it's not like an extended drought period.

And so, yeah, people did, society, you know, Pacific Islanders did live in these places, but they are quite austere and harsh environments.

And the lagoon is a protected body of land, so fishing is quite easy in it, things like that.

If you drove from one end of Ainwatak, if it was in a straight line, which it's not, but if you drove from one end to the other, cover maybe 50 miles lengthwise, it's almost entirely flat.

It's mostly open coral with a few sparsely dotted trees and bushes, almost all of them on the island of Ainuatak itself, one of the islands which has the same name as the Atoll.

And effectively find yourself in a like a gigantic coral crater in the middle of the Pacific.

And it's like all you need is some kind of weird metal sculpture, and it's the setting of Michael Crichton's sphere.

Like, it's just, it's a strange environment.

It's a strange ecosystem, put it that way.

And there's a good reason why, despite being settled by humans about a thousand years ago, the population never really increased over a couple of hundred people.

I wonder why it's a ring in the middle of the fucking Pacific Ocean.

Yeah, it could only support so much life.

And for that reason alone, it was pretty much completely ignored by Europeans all the way up until the 1800s.

Between original settlement and the 1800s, maybe a dozen ships ended up there at one point or another.

None of them stayed.

And the reason why I'm drawing the line at the 1800s is because that's when the German Empire appears.

And in 1885, they claimed the entire Marshall Islands.

Typically, it's because of guano or other kinds of stuff that collects over time that they got phosphates from.

That was

specific to other islands in the Marshalls, but for Einwatok, just nothing there.

The German Empire wanted to get in the colonization game in the Pacific, struck a deal with the British to split things nicely amongst themselves.

And the Germans move in.

They don't really do anything to Einwatok.

The German Imperial project, the Pacific, is mostly phosphates and guano, but failing that, recoaling stations for their fleet.

It's one of the reasons why,

for the example, phosphate, they they wanted to take over Nauru, which we did do a bonus episode about a long time ago.

It's a deeply cursed island.

It really is.

Yeah.

I just love the idea the Germans are like, well, this does seem like both environmentally and socioculturally a place where you can just be naked all the time.

So it's perfect for us.

Yeah, we really need to bring in some schlager and everything will be fine.

Yeah, it's like the main German export to the Central and South Pacific was Freikerkerkultur.

Getting Volkish on the atoll.

Bringing my canoe around to my neighboring island, and I hear oompa music for some reason.

Yeah, they're harnessing the salinity of the lagoon to season their sausage, you know.

Eventually, World War I happens, and the German Empire in the Pacific largely falls into the hands of the Japanese under what was eventually known as the South Seas Mandate.

But again, Japan pretty much leaves Ayn Watok alone.

Really, not a whole lot they could do.

Of course, Japan does horrific things in the rest of the South Seas mandate.

We've talked about those before.

They really just liked randomly showing up and beheading people with swords, like katanas and shit.

Like you hear a lot, there's a lot of stuff.

The Japanese took over ex-native Italy or ex-colonial outposts or missionary stations, like 55 people beheaded with huge swords.

They're rolling a dice, which on the dice says, beheaded slave, word I'm not going to say to bring the vibes down, and then like secret fourth thing.

Legitimately, super villains in the Pacific.

But Einwatak, again, largely ignored.

Japan doesn't even really displace its population because there isn't much one to speak of in the first place, but also because they don't really see a reason to need to.

They don't really want to use this ATOL for anything.

And Inwatok pretty much is ignored until the beginning of World War II.

And even after that, in the grand scheme of the various islands that we've talked about, Inwatok might have been one of the few Japanese Pacific islands to just be able to ignore the war.

If it was not for one thing, Japan eventually built an airfield on one of its islands.

This is a tiny airfield.

There's no large garrison to go with it.

It's pretty much just a gas station for Japanese planes flying further east.

Very few defenses are put up, nothing very hard or large.

Very few ground personnel are left there.

It sounds like a pretty great place to be stationed if you happen to have the misfortune of being in the Japanese military in World War II.

Just sit in this inhospitable atoll that hates your existence, and maybe you won't die horribly.

I mean, you'll probably catch a tropical disease or something that you're not prepared for.

Yeah, but then, but then again, it's like basically the summarized version of everyone else's experience of the Japanese military elsewhere: the eclipse episode from Berserk.

So it's like what you got by comparison is good.

Fuck me.

Except the demons are the shapes of American aircraft carriers.

Yeah, exactly.

The bail that makes the face of porky pigs.

That's all, folks.

I'm just imagining Chester Nibbets as Griffith now, and it's fucking me up.

I've been watching him on YouTube, and because of my fucking IP address, I keep getting the French dub, which is interesting, but

watching Berserk in French is just surreal.

I'm sorry.

I've been thinking a lot about Baylets.

I've been thinking a lot about Band of the Hawk or La Bon des Foucault.

Fucking French guts.

Guts.

Rivites.

Revit.

That serious.

Oh, God.

That makes the whole thing turn into a comedy.

But it's actually funny because there's so much of like the ministerial intrigue and scheming viziers and shit.

And so, like, translating that into like really, really like sycophantic court French actually makes sense.

Like, it's, there's things about, well, it's kind of set in fake Japanese-envisioned Europe, so it kind of works.

But yeah, it's, it's, it's, I'm sorry, it is La Bonte Foucault.

I love it.

Then in 1943, the Gilbert Islands, also held by Japan, were taken back by the United States in a horrific battle that we've talked about in pieces.

You know, battles like the Battle of Taroa, Macon, and with the sole purpose of reinforcing America's position for an eventual invasion of the Marshals.

At that point, it was decided Inwatak would need to become a Japanese strongpoint, another rock in an attempt to break the oncoming American waves sweeping through Japan like so many berserk perky pigs.

Jesus Christ, I'm just trying to just horrible daffy duck with just like fucking weird corkscrew ducks in it.

I love Kentar Amira's insane, kind of like horrific monsters with the shape of animals or insects that still retain enough of a human visage to be like really, really disconcerting.

Like you apply that to the Looney Tunes cast and then deploy them in World War II.

I mean, canonically, the Looney Tunes were involved in the war effort.

That is established.

Yeah, no, absolutely.

Because Donald Truck was Hitler at one point.

Yeah, exactly.

Also, R.I.P to our good friend of the show.

And to our

R.I.P., buddy.

The goat.

The goat.

Or if you're in French, the goat.

Ilé le chevre.

Actually, I saw somebody saying,

using goaded in, but the English sense, but in French, and they said goatesque.

It's just like, oh, God.

No, I hate that.

I hate that so much.

The guy in Académie Francais, like trying to decide, how do we translate the goat?

God damn it.

I hate it.

So the Japanese sent over the first amphibious brigade under the command of Colonel Yoshimi Nishida to hold the Atoll.

This is not exactly a crack brigade of troops, however.

Nishida and his men were reservists.

They were garrisoned troops far away from the front line in the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo.

So they were not exactly psyched to get these orders.

Now, imagine going from Manchukuo to surprise or going to the tropics with no training or medicine.

This is a loot box full of disease.

This actually does kind of happen sometimes when random Americans join the military and think they're going to go to your normal military place.

And you're like, we're going to fucking Diego Garcia.

And you're just like, oh, well, I get to recreate the Battle of Ainwatak somehow with my bowels.