Episode 381: Operation Vengenace

Hey everybody, Joe here.

Good news, I suppose.

Our October 4th show in Glasgow, Scotland is sold out.

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Hello and welcome to the Lions At By Donkeys podcast.

I'm Joe and with me is Tom.

And we're coming to you, the Imperial Japanese Navy, with the revolutionary new plane design.

We know that thanks to a few, let's call them setbacks, you find yourself a little short of trained pilots.

You probably sit there and think to yourself, how are we going to give the hundreds of hours of training to these new candidates so they can do complicated things like take off, bomb a target, and then land?

Well, what if I told you thanks to our patent new design, you only have to worry about two of those things?

Introducing the kamikaze.

I know what you're thinking, Joe, isn't that just a suicide plane loaded with bombs?

And to that I say, yes.

But for a limited time only, using the promo code Bonsai45, you can get six of these for the price of one Tom.

How's it going, buddy?

I'm doing good.

We're in person.

I'm enjoying the concentric thinking of the Japanese Imperial Army, Muhammad Atta, in that like you need to learn how to take off, but not how to land.

Landing's the hardest part.

Yeah.

Like taking off, I know there has been.

a lot of like air disasters of like taking off but you know it's the landing you know it's the reason why that saying is stick the landing.

Exactly.

We are here to be disruptors in the plane landing space, and we are, in fact, a subsidiary of Boeing.

Us, Boeing, Elphaba, and Wicked, we're all defying gravity.

Exactly.

Yes.

Now, Tom, you're here in the Netherlands at our lovely Dutch studio.

You had some other non-studio-related Dutch activities going on before you rocked up to The Hague.

Yeah, I went to the Amsterdam Tattoo Convention.

Technically classified that as work as well.

Got drunk with a group of Hungarians last night.

It's been fun.

I've been soaking up the Dutch vibes, those funny little cars that can drive in the bike lanes.

I saw a woman approaching what I like to call the blackface Rubicon.

where she was getting body paint put on and like then like lettering put over it in a kind of not not necessarily like Chicano style, but close to it.

And it was like the face paint was like up to the line of her chin.

I was like, we're about to cross into some real Dutch vibes right now.

Did she stop at chin or she's like, I can't go any further?

Then it's problematic.

Yeah, I'd like to posit that there is a, you know, a solid Rubicon for crossing into the Dutch zone.

In the same way there is the statatic zone, there is the Dutch zone.

If you get your whole body painted black, though, is that as bad as only your face?

I mean, I have seen in my time like people with their bodies fully blacked out in tattoos.

And I'm like, is there a line there?

Yeah.

It depends about the intention, really.

Maybe they're just really big Dragon Ball Z fans.

I'm Popo maxing.

Yeah, exactly.

A lot of people don't know that Mr.

Popo is canonically dude.

Yosh Goku, you must collect all Seven Dragon Balls to be resurrected by Shenron.

Yeah, people don't know that Popo is actually spelled three J's somehow.

Pio Pio?

In Dutch, it'd be Poi Poi, unfortunately.

He's getting that because I texted you the morning of like, I was like really hungover.

I walked half an hour from, this is going to be real Dutch vibes for people.

from

Nordus Park all the way to NDSM, which is a 30 to 40 minute walk in the like splitting sun.

I was wearing jeans and Doc Martens.

I also forgot my toothbrush, so I had to go to, what's the name of the supermarket that begins with an A?

Albert Hind.

I had to go to Albert Hind to buy a toothbrush and toothpaste.

I was brushing my teeth walking along this like industrial park and I had to like was using a bottle of water to like wash it out and like spit it in a bin.

I was like, you know, you descend into such depths when you cross into the Dutch zone.

I would say you cross into weird depths when you go to the convention zone.

I just spend a lot of time in a convention called Nova Open back in the US.

And after being at a convention for several days, you find yourself doing things that you would just never do.

Yeah.

Because everything is overpriced.

So you end up going somewhere else.

You end up like running down the street so you can sneak some food in before the next event.

Eating food in the convention hall somewhere where you can sit down some like kind of strange hotel goblin because there's never any chairs.

And eventually you will eat some food which will make you shit sideways.

Yeah, it's true.

Hilton fucking chicken tenders.

I'm looking at you.

I was going from one thing to another and I only had a few minutes to do it.

I'm like, god damn, I haven't eaten anything since this morning.

And I was at the Hilton where Reagan got shot at is where the convention was.

I hope there's a plaque.

It's commemorating the wrong side of that event, unfortunately.

And I found like this little food stall inside the Hilton, which is like wildly overpriced, but I didn't have enough time to leave the hotel and get other food.

So I bought these chicken tenders for like $10

or something like that.

They absolutely hit my stomach like a Z-pack.

Like breaded spears from God.

It was fucking nasty.

They were like rubbery.

I dominated that toilet.

in a way that I felt like I need to apologize for it afterwards.

And then I was just like kind of cold and clammy and sweaty afterwards.

Oh, yeah, God.

I'll be, Can't wait till November.

I'm going to my next convention, so that'll be fun.

I'll table that one for later and I have more information on it for our dear listeners.

But Japan.

Speaking of

something that has absolutely nothing to do with the Netherlands or shitting your brains out at a hotel in Washington, D.C.

I mean, being hit like a spear from God is kind of like a kamikaze pilot.

Yeah, those chicken tenders really did hit my stomach as if my stomach was a ship in the U.S.

Navy.

The chicken tenders screaming bunza as they hit your small intestine.

Well, the tenders didn't survive, so that doesn't work.

Now, when I say day of infamy, one thing probably comes to an American mind, and that is the day Starbucks runs out of its like Dubai chocolate mix for a Frappuccino.

Or the day when famed folk singer John Hinkley Jr.

met Ronald Reagan

from a not-so-safe distance.

The second thing that might come to your mind is Pearl Harbor.

If there's one man you could point the finger at and say, Pearl Harbor Harbor was your fault, well, that'd be Emperor Hirohito, but we made sure not to get him in any trouble.

But if there's a second man, that would be Prime Minister Hideki Tojo.

But if there was a third man, it would probably be Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto,

a guy we've certainly talked about before, everybody's probably heard of.

He was the commander of the Japanese Combined Fleet and the man who planned the attack.

on Pearl Harbor.

Though in reality, Yamamoto did not command the attack on Pearl Harbor.

And directly that goes to his subordinate, Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo.

But Yamamoto correctly gets most of the blame for the attack itself, which is fair enough.

We've talked about Nagumo before on this show because he was a vice admiral.

And because of how fucked up the Japanese military was and managed by idiots who were constantly stabbing each other in the back, he went from commanding Japan's most successful attack on the United States to dying in a cave while defending Saipan within a few years.

We've talked about him before.

But like I said, Yamamoto gets the lion's share of the blame for the attack on Pearl Harbor and became probably the only Japanese military commander an average American knew by name at the time because of it.

So this is the story of how the U.S.

assassinated him in what became known as Operation Vengeance.

With a poison chicken tender.

That's right.

That makes your colon implode.

He sits down on the toilet one day and knows, I shouldn't have eaten that chicken tender.

Yeah, I I mean, like, sometimes I have eaten food and desperately needed the toilet afterwards.

And we're like, I'm feeling like my colon's about to white dwarf right now.

Actually, so Yamamoto does spend some time in the United States at one time.

I'm talking about say he spent some time on the toilet.

I mean, hypothetically.

So there is a possibility that he did eat at least one chicken tender in his life.

What did the Colonel know?

Was Colonel Sanders a Japanese agent?

Quite possibly.

We need to bring back McCarthyism to find out if Colonel Sanders was a Japanese agent.

Maybe that's why they love KFC in Japan.

It's all coming back full circle.

That's a conspiracy theory that we just burned and now I believe it.

Yeah, I mean, like, the secret blend of spices, like, we don't know what's in that.

Maybe he's using a secret Japanese spice.

Daimyo Sanders.

What Dashiwa Colonel?

But first, the man, Yamamoto.

A lot has been attributed to him over the years.

A lot has been written about him, his politics, his personal ideology.

Some of it is completely true.

And a lot of it is doing a lot of like noble samurai shit to a man who was one of the main engineers behind Japan's genocidal imperial project.

So before we get to the day he's killed, let's talk about him as a guy.

So he was born Isoroku Takano in 1884.

to a former samurai family.

Obviously, by then, the nobility had been wiped out.

Or the extended nobility, let's say.

He was eventually adopted by the Yamamoto family and took their family name in 1916.

This is pretty common for samurai families, former samurai families back in the day.

And even during that era, owing to the fact that the Yamamoto family had no male heirs, they effectively bought him from his family to continue their family name.

This was like quite a tradition within Japanese culture of like adoption of children from people from a lower class into like a higher class that either they would like initially be like servants but then would be adopted like fully as you know their own child.

There's quite a few fully grown men that were adopted by families as well.

Yes, which is so strange.

Hello, mother.

Hello, father.

It's nice to meet you.

Knichiwa, mother.

Knich you wa father.

Here I am bombing Pearl Harbor.

God damn it.

Early in his life, Yamamoto was exposed to Americans and American culture, which is dangerous for any youth.

This is almost like when Psycheto went to America and was so disgusted by people like dancing that he went home and essentially founded the antecedent of al-Qaeda.

He discovered Americans, you know, a cryptid in the region, owing to missionaries in his hometown.

And that's how he learned English.

Though he never converted to Christianity, much to the chagrin of the missionaries who spent years teaching him English, hoping there'd be a payoff.

They're playing the long game.

Yeah, of course that's what they were doing.

And at the end, like, so would you.

Yeah, like to read this book?

He's like, oh, no, thank you.

Those missionaries were like incels who go on about being friend zoned by a woman.

Yeah.

It's like, I put so much effort.

I went on dates with her.

I like, you know, listened to her complain about other guys, all this sort of stuff.

And she still won't fuck me.

And these missionaries are like, we taught him English.

We gave him KFC.

We introduced him to Colonel Sanders.

And he still won't convert to Christianity.

This is, I can't believe this young Japanese boy has friend zoned God.

I have been cuckolded by the pure attraction of the Meiji Restoration and Emperor Meiji.

He's cheated on me with the human equivalent of Amaterasu.

It's Amaterasu.

Whatever.

You got the point, though.

He went to the Naval Academy and graduated in 1904 and was assigned as a gunnery officer, his first assignment being aboard the Nishin.

Some longtime listeners might remember back to the first time I think we've ever brought up Yamamoto on the show during our series on the Russo-Japanese War, and most importantly during the Battle of Tsushima, where the Russian Fleet of the Damned met their inevitable fate.

And during that battle, Yamamoto nearly died when his ship caught a full Russian broadside straight to the face.

This blew off a couple of his fingers and filled his guts with shrapnel, but he never left his station and committed to commanding his gun battery and would go on to complete one of the most lopsided naval victories of all time.

For this, he was given a massive pile of awards, and his naval and, by extension, political career was made as he began to rocket up the ranks, which is why the Yamamoto family wanted to adopt him in the years after the battle.

Exactly, like I said earlier.

He was a made man.

Yeah.

Parentheses, navy.

I must be loyal to my capo, but it's my, it's like my uncle who adopted me.

I'm like earning medals until I look like Shuko.

Exactly.

I just want my uncle to love me.

Oh, you know his uncle never loved him either.

Because he's like in his mid-20s by the time he gets adopted.

I could never love you.

I mean, like, I think there should be a foster care system for unks.

Like, unkn foster care is like being in your like.

early to mid-20s is a real important time for being an unkn because it decides what type of unknown you are eventually going to become.

So it's like the opposite where the nephew is adopting the unk.

Yeah.

Okay.

I like that.

The sword chooses its master.

The unk sword needs to be chosen by its nephew Sheath pulling the unk sword out of the stone.

He eventually went to Naval Staff College and at the rank of lieutenant commander, he traveled to the U.S.

to study at Harvard.

Now, this is not to say the United States and Japan were close at the time.

The two countries were absolutely not allies.

Pretty much as soon as the smoke settled in the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War, both the United States and Japan pretty much fully understood that there was going to come a time where we're going to kill each other over our expanding Pacific empires.

Virtually as soon as Russia lost that war, America started tugging on its collars and said, like, we probably shouldn't have helped Japan that much.

Because a lot of people helped Japan by feeding them intel about Russia because they wanted to check Russia.

Whoops.

That certainly won't lead to anything bad in about 30 odd years.

We got this new state that has a lot of like snow crab, alcoholism.

And if we didn't support Japan, it would not have created the environment for the formative career of podcaster Nate Bethay.

Alaska.

You're talking about Alaska.

Yes.

For Japan, this was an opportunity to send officers to the United States to just better understand how Americans, American society, their industry, their economy, how to understand how all of this worked.

And for America, of course, it was a way to win a cultural victory.

The idea that they could bring in these people on kind of like an exchange program, show them how amazing America is, and they'd go back and tell people that we need to be more like America, something that still happens today.

Hence, why, you know, Japanese people love American streetwear, hip-hop, they love baseball.

I'm just thinking of like a like a Japanese, you know, officer being sent to America.

And he's like, you know, being shown all of like the great cultural successes of America at the time.

And then you get to the section where they have to explain Henry Ford to them.

Yamamoto would fucking love Henry Ford.

Yes.

He spent a couple years touring the country, inspecting factories and most importantly, the oil infrastructure of Texas

because He went there understanding that the Empire of Japan is incredibly weak when it comes to resources.

Hence, why one of the beginning parts of Japan dragging the United States into war was the United States cutting off its oil supply thanks to their crimes in China.

I tell you what, Mr.

Yamamoto, you could fuel a great army with propane and propane accessories.

Just an aircraft carrier with a massive propane tank in the back of it.

I mean, you know, Jack Parsons...

What year is this we're talking about?

Oh, this is the 20s, I believe.

So yeah, 20 years later, a guy called Jack Parsons will discover Aleister Crowley and like get into weird magic stuff and L.

Ron Hubbard.

With L.

Ron Hubbard, who then cuckolds him and steals his girlfriend.

Yep.

And he will invent solid rocket fuel.

So

I do love the idea of Yamamoto falling in with Jack Parsons' weird occult thing and just never going back to Japan.

Weirder things have happened.

It's true.

During this time, it's often said that Yamamoto understood that any war with the United States was a lost cause and became some kind of anti-American war officer within the Japanese inner circle and would tell anyone in government who would listen to him that any war with the United States is pointless because Japan simply didn't stand a chance against them.

I cannot stress this enough.

This is absolutely not true.

Instead, he fully understood that Japan was underprepared.

for any conflict with the United States from a resource standpoint.

Namely, like I said, a lack of oil, something they would need for any war with the United States because it would be based around their heavy navies.

He took this with him when he went back home in 1921.

And when he got home, he was now in a position to be involved in the political-military debate that would effectively control the Japanese government until 1945.

This was a political knife fight, and sometimes it wasn't even a political one.

It was a literal one.

between the Japanese Navy, the Japanese Army, and the Japanese political class, most of whom were involved in one of the other two factions.

All of them agreed, Yamamoto included, of a massive expansion of Japanese imperial power within what they saw as their sphere of influence, East Asia, China included.

They saw this as the solution to the whole lack of resources problem.

We talked about this a little bit more during our Nanking series about the exact Japanese political ideology that led them to genociding their way across China.

So go back and listen to that one for more in-depth on that.

I feel like if he had been born earlier, we could have convinced Donald Trump to support, you know, the Japanese imperial war machine.

He'd love the bling, the pageantry that comes with the imperial throne.

They got a great guy in Japan, Yamamoto.

He's doing great things in China.

The Navy saw themselves as the center of this empire because any war throughout the region would have to be carried by the Navy.

The fist of the emperor where all Japanese strength came from, while the army saw the navy as little more than a means to support their land operations.

Yamamoto saw the navy's future as being centered around the evolving concepts of naval aviation, a combined fleet centered around aircraft carriers.

Because of this, after getting his own ship, he also went out and got his pilot's license.

So a lot of this could be solved if you just get a really shitty plane back then, just crash immediately into the ocean and died.

And in 1925, he was sent back to the U.S.

as a naval attache to the Japanese embassy.

And in some of the weirdest James Bond shit ever, he decided one of his missions was to gauge the mental capacity and attitudes of his American counterparts.

Oh,

I feel like there's going to be some real old school racism going on right now.

Well, not from Yamamoto personally, but from Japan ideologically, absolutely.

I've seen those cartoons.

Yeah, yeah.

Rather than trying to turn American officers spies with like pots or bribes or whatever, instead he went to social functions like dinner parties and galas and shit like that and challenged American officers to games of bridge as a study of their intellectual capacity and as like a study of their character, which is weird.

What's interesting here is, have you ever seen the movie Letters from Iwo Jima?

No.

It's very good.

But they kind of take a lot of this of Yamamoto's background and put it into Ken Wantanabe's character character so they could get a flavor of that.

Okay.

Not saying that the band that Ken Wantanabe's character is based on didn't also do that, but it was definitely something Yamamoto is very well known for.

Also, he was really good at bridge.

So I think that had more to do with why he liked doing it.

He liked winning.

He's like, I could be in my office filling out paperwork or I could be.

looking at maps and plans or I could lie and say that me going to play bridge multiple times a week is, you know, strategically strategically important.

He's doing the Tony Soprano thing of like, it's really important for me to go to the Bada Bing all the time and to go to therapy.

Yeah.

Also, he's cheating on his wife constantly.

Like Tony Soprano.

Yeah, so I think that's probably a better reason as to why he's going to the gallas and the dinner parties.

I don't understand my Japanese gumars at the bridge game.

He's going to all these dinner parties and he's like, excuse me, gentlemen.

Can I interest you in a game of Magic the Gathering?

And they just bring out like the American version of Garry Kasparov.

He's like, no, let's play Mahjong.

I know Mahjong's Chinese.

Which means that Yamamoto would fucking hate it.

Yeah, exactly.

Just like swipes it off the table and is like, what is this?

By the late 1920s, Yamamoto's back in Japan and had his first aircraft carrier command of the Akagi as the Japanese Empire continues to expand.

He was, no surprise, a naval hardliner.

He, of course, saw the Navy as the true and only armor of the Japanese Empire, but he's also staunchly opposed to civilian government.

He was an imperial absolutist.

Because it's important at the time to remember that the civilian government of Japan is continuing their policy of limiting the power of the navy with Western powers through various treaties that we've talked about in other episodes.

To make a long story short, the West was worried about the Japanese expansionists' ideas bumping into their own expansionist ideas in the Pacific.

So they kept pushing treaties that admittedly still did allow Japan to have quite a large navy for how small of a country they are, but not one that could hypothetically compete with British, American, French, or Dutch navies in the region in case anything popped off.

To Yamamoto and most of Japan's naval class, this is just another reason why a parliamentary government with a civilian head was a literal national security risk.

But this is despite the fact that the imperial household, emperor included, at the time, not Hirohito, but They favored these treaties as a way to appease the West and leave them alone while they continued to build up their strength and expand into smaller territories.

But the idea that Japanese officers were openly disagreeing with the emperor is like so far beyond the pale is absolutely not true.

They routinely ignore the emperor all the time, to his face even.

Soon attacks on civilian politicians by the military were very commonplace in Japan, both by the army faction and the navy faction, who also...

constantly attacked one another as well.

Tons of political assassination still is completely normal.

This was made worse by what was known as the Showa financial crisis, which in turn led to the birth of the Zaibatsu system of economics, which was a complete and total monopoly of family-owned businesses over Japan's economy, most of whom were owned by members related to the Japanese imperial family or officers of the military or very, very privileged civilians.

This is a gross oversimplification, but it's a long story short.

Yamamoto saw the Zaibatsu system as wonderful because he saw capitalism as fundamentally flawed because he saw it as too democratic.

Yes.

Which, look, this is not the podcast to say that capitalism is wonderful, but it's very funny that that is why Yamamoto hated it.

Yeah, like, you know, it's going into the 1930s, the

like the Soviets are like kind of getting the Soviet Union off its feet.

And it's like, no, I'm not, I'm going to be anti-capitalist for the complete opposite direction.

Yeah, he fucking hates some communism as well.

Yeah.

He doesn't see the difference of the Zaibatsu system, which means that the government is control of the economy as being inherently communist or anything else.

He just hates the idea that with a unrestrained capitalist like injection into the economy, it could empower commoners.

Because remember, he's from an aristocratic family as well.

He's like, no, no, no, no.

This needs to be controlled by the military and the emperor.

And I'm really sick of this concept of democracy, even when it comes to how you earn your money.

Soon after this, the Japanese Kwantong army sparked a false flag attack in Manchuria so they could, you know, go and have an excuse to go on conquering Manchuria and parts around it as well.

Something Yamamoto was strongly against.

Now, he wasn't against the expansion of the empire, of course.

He's a stickler for details.

He hated the idea of the army, like the Kwantong army, which just did whatever the fuck it wanted.

Yeah.

Meant that the army was going to go get all this imperial glory for taking Manchuria, which it did, and the navy wouldn't get a share of it.

And he also didn't like the idea of them doing this on their own because they did.

This was pretty much just like an internal thing of the Kwantong Army that the central government was not involved in.

He's like, I need more medals.

Yeah.

I need...

More shit for my uniform and more victory points for my faction.

I want to sound like a bell factory while I'm walking down the street.

That's right.

I need more medals.

The Navy needs more planes.

We need to be flying everywhere.

We need a plan to crash into something.

We'll get there in about 10 years.

In the meantime, Yamamoto had been made commander of Japan's naval aviation department.

Virtually every Japanese plane you've ever heard of, he oversaw and developed in some part, whether it be why it would work in his concept of naval aviation or why it would work in support of naval aviation.

He was not an engineer, but he knew what the aircraft carriers needed.

When people say that Yamamoto built the Japanese Navy that would fight in World War II, they're really not far off the mark.

That is his ideology, his strategy, his tactics, and his hands on the development of how it would be used.

He built their naval aviation wing from what was effectively nothing into one of the strongest in the world.

Yeah.

In 1937, he came out strongly against the Empire of Japan, allying with Germany and Italy.

The reason for this is very strange.

If you want to take a guess, actually, I'm kind of curious.

Why would you think?

I would say it's because

they

don't place enough emphasis on aviation.

That would actually make more sense than what he ends up getting into.

Yamamoto saw Japan as...

Fundamentally neutral.

This is despite the fact that Japan was already firmly invading multiple different places in Asia, something he was also vocally in favor of.

He didn't see this as aggression.

Rather, it was Japan's right to do so.

Yeah.

He saw what the Nazis and Italians were doing as overtly aggressive, violent, and my God, even imperialistic.

Mind you, he serves a literal empire.

Yeah, like that is...

That's some real, like, nonsensical logic.

Yeah, it's firmly based in Japan's, the Empire of Japan's intensely racist ideas of their neighbors, where it's their right to take over these places.

But if someone else does it, that's imperialism from the West.

It's okay when I do it.

When you do it, it's bad.

Exactly.

It's problematic.

And we need to cancel Mussolini and Hitler for being imperialists.

They're sus.

It's similar to...

When people's minds get a little melted and they talk about like the history of the Caucasus.

Yeah.

Of like, no, it's it's imperialism when the Russian Empire invades and takes over Armenia and Georgia.

It's liberation when the Soviet Union does it.

Yeah, look, you know, like two things can be true or bad or anything at once.

And there's not necessarily like one truth.

And also people are hypocrites.

And it's,

yeah, this is kind of like a lot of rhetoric you see replicated later in the 20th century.

with other dictatorial regimes.

Can't think of a one.

Yeah.

And as ridiculous as that is, he does have a point with one part of his objection, saying our empire allying with these other empires is naturally against our best interests because eventually we're going to fight, which would have happened at some point, right?

Like if somehow the Axis wins, Japan and Germany are going to war within months.

Yeah, yeah.

Because what were the...

Did Germany have many holdings in East Asia?

Not by World War II.

No.

And in World War I, remember, Japan's on on the side of the Allies and takes over a lot of the stuff from Germany.

So it's only a matter of time before the two end up biting heads in some capacity.

Because in a way, you know, let's say Britain or the United States or whoever fully collapses.

Germany would want their colonies too, which would put them right up against Japan.

Or in some cases, literally combat, like...

Getting in an argument with Japan over the shit Japan had already taken.

Like the Philippines, for example.

On the other hand, you could have gotten a guy who was like, we must return Ulster back to the glory of the Weimar Republic.

We must return Ulster to the glory of the Showa Throne.

Imperial Japanese supporter guy from North.

Look, I know I've brought him up before, and there is a non-zero chance that he will hear this, but there is...

an Imperial Japanese

enthusiast and supporter and apologist who lives in London and sports Tottenham.

And my friends see him at the matches all the time.

I'll give you like one guess what ethnicity he is.

He's whiter than the driven snow.

It's like those pictures of what would become King Edward VIII in Japan in like 1921 or 22 and he's in like full like samurai gear.

One of my favorite funniest pictures from history of a character that we've covered is Armenian revolutionary hero Monte Melconian,

who went to Japan, learned Japanese, and is like wearing kimono everywhere.

And there's pictures of him out there.

It's just like, man, that is awkward looking.

See, everyone likes to think that they were, you know, the original non-Japanese otaku, but like it's been a thing time immemorium.

Oh, yeah.

Go back to,

you know, this story of the ISO Republic where there's like a French guy fighting with the samurai.

It's just like, no, I just like their drip.

I'm sold.

A good uniform will sell a lot of people.

It's true.

Get this all eventually.

I wouldn't know anything about a good uniform because I was in the U.S.

military and all our uniforms during my era were dog shit.

Yeah, because you

was it Flechern?

No, that's German.

Yeah.

Ours is the terrible like gray ACU digital pattern.

It is awful.

Fucking awful.

In 1937, Japanese planes bombed an American ship, the USS Panay, outside of Nanking.

Something that the Japanese government claimed was an accident.

Now, it's generally agreed upon that this was probably on purpose.

That's kind of like, hey, get the fuck out of here.

Whoopsie, sorry, didn't mean to drop a bomb on your ship.

Thankfully, no other country would ever do that to an American ship and claim it was an accident.

Yamamoto penned a public apology to them, which was his job because he was deputy naval minister at the time, and he was a guy that American naval authorities had a good relationship with.

However, after his apology to the Americans and his continued opposition to the Axis alliance, the most militaristic voices in the Japanese government began to publicly pen letters and publish them against him.

There is more than one assassination attempt, one of which came from with his own naval department.

The military police, which was a branch of the army, sent men to guard him as like a favor.

But in reality, they were there to track him and probably set up another attempt on his life.

And he's just like, I never thought I'd see my dogs turn into snakes.

Facing a constant stream of hatred and rumors of his impending doom, he resigned from the naval ministry and his friend Matsumura Yonai.

quickly created a new naval command for him at sea, the combined fleet.

And that the reason for that is according to Yonai himself, he did this to get Yamamoto out of Japan to save his life.

They're doing the same thing that they did with Catholic priests.

Just like move him to a different parish.

His parishes are all just aircraft carriers.

Yeah, there's like, look, they can't get you.

There's no laws at sea.

Yeah.

Welcome to the holy mother church of flat top aircraft carrier.

Despite both factions of the military still fucking hating his guts, they knew that once he was out of Japan and and at sea, he was no longer a political problem.

However, once Hideki Tojo becomes prime minister, most people assumed that Yamamoto's career was done.

Tojo was a staunch opponent of Yamamoto.

Remember, Yamamoto was just speaking out against the Kwantong Army in Manchuria, which Tojo was in charge of at the time.

He was a member of the army faction, and he was a hardline militarist.

And for a split-second, Yamamoto's career was doomed.

He was given a promotion to admiral, but it was one of those situations where he was promoted out of the way.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

He was promoted and given command of the Yokohama Naval Base, which is like the rubber room for naval officers.

Effectively, like, you're going to go be a base commander and shut the fuck up.

If things remain this way, there's a good chance that World War II looks an awful lot fucking different for Japan.

Because despite Yamamoto being, again, a massive piece of shit, there's no denying that he was easily the best commander the Japanese Navy had, or any branch for that matter.

But he would quickly find himself out of Yokohama and right back into the command of the combined fleet owing to two things.

Emperor Hirohito really liked him personally.

See, this is the problem with Hirohito is that, like, he

very much liked to have a court full of people that he personally liked.

Yeah, and he was a lot more directly involved in Japanese military affairs than people like to give him credit for.

And we talked about this again on our Nan King series a while ago.

The main reason that that was kind of like glossed over and Hirohito is simply a figurehead that lost control of his government.

That's a creation of the United States government to rehabilitate him after World War II.

And like the thing with Hirohito is that like both politically within the military and like in kind of the general country, like he was dealing with like so much turmoil in terms of like interfaction fighting like we're seeing in this episode.

So he's kind of like, I need to have a very close circle of people that I can trust personally and I like.

Right.

And because he was like quite involved, yeah, did he create his own downfall?

Yes.

Well, he didn't have any downfall.

Yeah.

He got away scot-free.

I know.

He died peacefully in his bed.

After World War II, he became a gentleman marine biologist.

I mean, more so the downfall of like

Japan as a whole.

Yes.

No, he took the like, he took the post-career path of like country singer Fred Neal, who like was a big influence on like Bob Dylan and like Neil Young and

people like Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, etc.

like Roy Orbison as well.

And he just quit performing live and quit making music and went and became a marine biologist and is was for a long time the like foremost expert on dolphins.

He has a great song called Dolphins.

If you take any music recommendation from me, listen to Fred Neal.

Actually, he wrote the, you know, the theme song for

Midnight Cowboy.

Nope.

Fred Neal was the original songwriter for Everybody's Talking, which was then used in Midnight Cowboy.

It was covered by Harry Nielsen.

So listen to Fred Neal, listen to Everybody's Talking Dolphins.

That's the bag I'm in as well.

Yeah, one of the biggest problems here, Hito is he also stopped performing live.

Emperor Hirohito farewell tour, but it's like, casey just keeps coming back.

There's another thing going in Yamamoto's favor, and that was the rank and file of the Japanese Navy loved him.

The Japanese military was quite open to telling the emperor to shut the fuck up and disobeying him whenever it really worked for them.

However, even though Tojo was an army faction guy, he couldn't risk having the Navy literally launch a coup because both the army and navy had done that in the past.

Not to mention, Yamamoto wasn't much of a political beast.

He wasn't like Tojo, for example.

Yeah, he penned that letter, but it was his job as deputy naval minister to do that.

It was also cop-out by the naval minister to put the blame on Yamamoto because he knew people were going to find it really fucked up.

Tojo's like, yo, pussyo Yamamoto.

Dickhead.

He operated within military rules, which is he followed orders.

He wasn't going to maneuver behind Tojo as prime minister.

So even though Tojo fucking hated him, he rose back to the surface.

He wasn't going to do anything outside of his job as the guy in charge of the combined fleet.

And obviously, as you can tell from the events that we're talking about and the dates, you know what's going to happen next.

The attack on Pearl Harbor, which we're not going to go into here.

We're eventually going to cover it in a series because it's going to need a series.

It's often said that Yamamoto hated the idea of attacking the United States.

And according to the story, after the attacks on Pearl Harbor was over, Yamoto said, quote, I fear all we have done has woken a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve.

It's ironic that like the attack on Pearl Harbor has like obviously massive historical implications in terms of like, you know, the U.S.

entering the war.

But for my specific interest, it is like an incredibly important part of like tattoo history because Sailor Jerry was in Honolulu and he was just tattooing loads of soldiers.

And then post-war, when you know Japanese tattooists would go and visit him he would always bring them to the Pearl Harbor memorial and point out like you did that Sailor Jerry was an extremely racist man but not surprising

but yeah look at thank you uh mr.

Yamamoto you have uh sustained the uh art form that I love so much the thing is Yamamoto Never said that shit.

Do you want to take a wild guess on how this quote was was fucking invented?

It's dumber than you probably think.

So I'm going to say, did it come about in the same way of that fake Lennon quote that George Galloway made up?

Dumber than that.

Okay.

For anyone who doesn't know, the quote from Lennon that's like, oh, there is like years where weeks happen, and then there's like weeks where decades happen, or whatever the specific phrase that like people share all the time.

George Galloway made that up in 2001.

Yeah, and Galla, like, I have a personal policy is i don't listen to anything george galloway says or lenin for that matter

i i think he made some good points i think he could off i'm gonna throw that embalmed corpse of his directly into the fucking sea yeah anyway invaded the wrong country how did they make russian country how did they make up the quote who came up with it so the 1970 film tora tora tora invented that of thin air ah okay people who worked on the film said they swore up and down They found it in a previously undiscovered diary owned by Yamamoto.

They never showed that diary to anyone.

It's never been proven.

They just made that shit up.

I love

historical anachronisms in movies that they've clearly just fucking made up.

You could totally get away with it in the 70s too, because like nobody can correct you in real time.

Yeah, I mean, like, Torator Toro is like making up quotes at around the same time.

Stanley Kubrick is being like threatened by the IRA while he's making Barry Linden.

Yeah.

So what is true?

Well, it is absolutely true that Yamamoto thought that Japan would never win a protracted war against the United States.

However, it is he who advocated for a surprise attack on the United States to quickly knock them out of the war in short order.

This is because prior to the attack, there was another plan being worked on by Japanese Admiral Nagano Osami that called for a large-scale assault across Asia, including into American and European-held territories, with the goal of completing the conquest before the U.S.

Navy could get its ass out of Honolulu and retaliate.

And when they did, Japan would be ready to confront them effectively.

Yamamoto thought this was dumb as hell.

Yeah, I mean, like, it makes sense that he would, like, think this plan is like very, very foolhardy and that, like, you know, you recognize, like, the risk of American retaliation is like a very big deal, especially considering how reticent he was to join it, like for Japan to join the Axis.

Yeah.

It's like, you know, punching someone who's like two foot taller than you.

Yeah, it's not a good idea.

Yeah.

He spent a lot of time with the U.S.

Navy.

He's like, no, you fundamentally misunderstand and you are underestimating the United States Navy.

They are fueled by a mix of 16 secret herbs and spices.

You do not know what's happening.

We only have eight herbs and spices.

There's a deficit in our spice count.

If we do this, then Psych Tub will go to America and start Al-Qaeda.

Yamamoto believed that any attack on American holdings in the Pacific needed to happen alongside a massive surprise attack on the American Pacific Fleet stationed at Pearl Harbor.

And that attack needed to be strong enough to cripple the Navy completely and force the U.S.

into suing for peace after a very short campaign.

According to Yamamoto, if this plan did not work, If Pearl Harbor and the other attacks were not completely decisive, Japan stood no chance in the long term.

He said, quote, in the first six to 12 months of the war, I will run wild and win victory after victory.

If the war continues after that, I have no expectation of success.

Also, to correct myself, Psych Tobacco founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, not al-Qaeda, but you know what I mean.

Before someone says it, I know.

I've read The Looming Tower.

Yes.

And to be fair, Yamamoto was right about all of that.

And also, spoiler alert, Pearl Harbor was not a crushing victory.

Famously, they didn't hit any of the aircraft carriers because they were out at sea at the time, which is exactly what Yahamoto was worried about.

He went on to say that if the Empire of Japan was to win a projected war against the United States, it would literally need to march on Washington, D.C., which was obviously impossible.

His full statement was much more complicated and diplomatic in nature because that's just who he was.

He would never say something is, quote, impossible.

Instead, he put it in a very particular way.

He said, quote, should hostilities once break out between Japan and the United States, it would not be enough that we take Guam and the Philippines, nor even Hawaii or San Francisco.

To make victory certain, we would need to march on Washington and dictate terms of peace in the White House.

I wonder if our politicians who speak so lightly of this war have any confidence to the final outcome and are prepared to make the necessary sacrifices.

That is obviously saying this war is impossible.

Yeah, and like you said, it's like he had like quite intimate knowledge of like the American Navy, but also like having spent time in the U.S.

and understanding, I suppose, of the scale of American geography.

Because even if you like knock out what, the West Coast, like there's still thousands of miles.

And again, the whole oil shortage problem, which is only going to get more stark as you try to invade them.

Yeah.

He ran into that problem in China already.

Try and like march Japanese soldiers over, you know.

The Rockies, the Ozarks, like, you know, the Appalachian Mountains.

If there's one army I believe that could pull it off, it would be the Japanese because they wouldn't give a fuck if their dudes were freezing to death or starving.

You got the mountain, conscript.

You could cross America and have so many different types of ants on your feet.

They would need to invent new kinds of corpse infrastructure across the continent.

Now, it's clear in context, he's saying that the rising sun would never fly over DC.

But the same Navy and Army militarists who fucking hated him reprinted that quote in Japan, minus that final sentence in an effort to tell the people, see, our greatest naval commander says we're going to invade Washington, D.C.

Isn't that great?

And like I said, Yamamoto is absolutely right and nailed all of this to a T.

I will give him credit.

He knew his job.

Japan did run wild with success for about the first year of the war in the Pacific, before things went rapidly and terminally pear-shaped.

in a death spiral they would not recover from.

By 1943, Japan was getting hammered.

Island island-hopping campaigns are slowly and brutally reconquering the islands taken by Japan, and the Japanese Navy was getting fed into an aircraft carrier-sized wood chipper at places like Midway and the Coral Sea, two battles we will eventually cover.

And with that, the story brings us back to the Japanese-held island of New Britain and the city of Rabal we've talked about before.

Japan turned into a massive air and sea base, home to about 100,000 Japanese sailors and soldiers, and one Admiral Yamamoto, who turned it into his headquarters as the Japanese attempted to counterattack against the United States, who is currently waffle-stomping their way through the Solomon Islands.

Some of these counter-attacks in the region were doing a fair amount of damage to American shipping, though we're not entirely sure what Yamamoto believed that they were doing because those same Japanese units were lying their fucking asses off about their successes, specifically the one in Bougainville.

They wanted to make themselves look much more successful than they actually were and much less starving to death like they actually were.

I can't survive on the ants on my feet anymore.

I need more sustenance, more caloric sustenance.

I need more ants.

They're just like down there sucking each other's toes, trying to suck the ants off.

I can't imagine the quality of the feet would be that nice that you're sucking the ants off.

Oh, they gotta be vile.

Yeah, like you.

Every now and then you're accidentally like sucking a toenail off or a toe in and of itself.

You gotta accidentally look out for your homie who has trench foot.

The skin's going to come right off.

Oh, it'd be like sucking off like a fine layer of skin.

Yeah, it's like if you undercook a chicken, which still has the skin on, it just all comes off.

Yeah.

You got to make sure that foot is well done.

So it's nice and crispy.

Are you still listening to the show?

Hey, listen, if you're listening to this show, you understand that sometimes we got to get a bit vulgar to, you know, get the point across.

Award-winning history podcast.

Award-winning history podcast in a global category.

We are the best.

We're the only history podcast.

I'm going to cut a Kayfe promo against Dan Carlin to see he'll come out and fight me.

Now, Yamamoto fully understood that things have been going quite bad for them, right?

And he believed a tour from their commander to these various islands, specifically Bougainville and the surrounding islands, would raise morale somewhat.

And again, I'll hand it to him.

He's probably right.

However, his subordinates in Rabal were worried and they warned him that flying anywhere at the moment was a really bad idea.

The Japanese didn't actually know at the time, but the Americans had cracked their naval signal codes.

So when a few other high-ranking officers point out that, look, I just went on a tour like last week and wouldn't you fucking know it, we all nearly got shot down by American fighter planes.

It's like they knew where they were.

So like they suggested, because they knew Yamamoto wasn't not going to go, that just don't tell anyone ahead of time.

Just go.

The men will still be happy to see you.

Don't tell Bougainville Command that you're going.

So, Yamoto, listening intently, nodding his head sagely to his subordinates, then ordered his assistant to send a coded radio message to the commander of Bougainville, telling him the exact time, date, and plane he was going to use to get there.

Rear Admiral Takoji Joshima, who had just nearly been assassinated himself two months before, just kind of stood there dumbfounded that a guy he thought was so smart would do something so fucking stupid.

Yeah, once again, dogs to snakes.

I struggle to find why Yamamoto didn't listen to his subordinates because as a character study, he wasn't your normal Japanese commander who ruled like a dictator.

He seemed to truly treasure the opinions of the people around him.

He didn't expect to be surrounded by feckless yesmen.

He hated that kind of shit.

So it's just like, man, the one fucking time he didn't listen to your boys.

Maybe he was having a Steve Harvey moment.

He was like, thought about killing myself.

He was really depressed.

He was going to commit suicide by cop, but in a plane.

I mean, that is just what 9-11 was.

We are recording this the week of 9-11.

Yeah, we are.

Never forget what Yamamoto was very sad about.

You've got a handful of days to write a script about 9-11 that we can record on 9-11.

Never.

I'm never that.

Literally everyone warned Yamamoto not to go, saying, you're certainly going to die.

Yamamoto again nodded, went back to his personal quarters, and instead of canceling his flight and catching the next Wiz-Air flight to Bougainville or whatever, he wrote a death poem.

He did not write it to his wife.

Rather, he addressed it to his side piece.

Oh, hell yeah.

But he is, he is having a Steve Harvey moment of like, think about killing myself.

I mean, that's what he did.

He sat down and was like, gonna die.

Gotta, I gotta write out my, my elaborate suicide letter about cherry blossoms or whatever.

Yeah.

Like, just don't go.

I mean, he's like, Yamoto's a smart guy.

He knows the war is in terminal decline.

He knows he's gonna die at some point.

I reject the derogatory language of calling

Yamamoto's side piece a side piece because like if you are writing your death poem to the person you're having an affair with that is your lover not a side piece she's commonly referred to as uh his favorite mistress yeah he had many i mean but she was also very famous he never made any attempt to hide that they were together like she was a geisha who was famous throughout japan everyone knew they were clapping cheeks yeah he was french maxing yeah his own wife knew yeah um and she actually later on in life after yamamoto's dead and and the war is over she courts a lot of controversy by like kind of making an offhand remark about like all the times he cheated on her yeah uh and like people were not very happy about that meanwhile on the american side of things they immediately intercepted the coded radio message that yamamoto sent from there i sent the code breakers a unit made up entirely of second generation japanese americans many of whom had come from the internment camps and families were still there who deciphered it we have assembled a team of the most autistic Japanese people in America.

And man, do we hate them?

You'll never guess where we force their families to live.

40 to 50 years later, they will develop the technology to make Final Fantasy VII.

Like, if you worked for the U.S.

Navy as a codebreaker, I have a strong feeling, and I mean this as derogatory as possible.

You probably worked on Final Fantasy VIII.

And I say that as someone who really liked it, but I understand the minority in that situation.

I have never played a Final Fantasy game.

All of these jokes are just about things I've absorbed through cultural osmosis.

I play no game made by no Japanese man.

Well, actually, no, I love Dark Souls, so yeah.

And, you know,

all of the other games that you play.

And I have a Neon Genesis Evangelion tattoo.

Yeah.

Uh-huh.

And how was the second Death Stranding?

Yeah, really good.

Not as good as the first one, in my personal opinion, but, you know, still good.

Also, Metal Gear, pretty much anything that Hideo Kajima has made.

Zone of the Enders, stuff like that.

Yeah.

So what you're saying is you'll play a lot of games here by Japanese people.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I love karaoke.

I love sushi.

Yeah.

I'm realizing now that I should probably retract that statement, but I'm going to double down because that's what we do on this podcast.

Adele, I'm burning all of my copies of the games that I do not own.

I'm throwing my PS5 out the window.

Now, the message, other than being coded in the standard way, made no attempt to disguise what was going on.

It openly said that it was Yamamoto traveling to very specific islands around Bougainville, the exact time and date he was going to be doing so, and again, the exact model plane he'd be flying in.

Yamamoto and his staff would be flying in two medium bombers escorted by six fighter planes.

The medium bomber the Yamamoto was to be flying in was known as the G4M, or as the Americans nicknamed it, the Betty, or by its other, funnier nickname, the Flying Zippo, because it lacked self-sealing fuel tanks.

So if it got hit with a trace around, they just exploded into a fireball.

The men who decoded the message were sure it had to be some kind of like counter-intel bullshit.

It was too exact, and there's no way a guy like Yamamoto would be so careless.

Especially since Yamamoto was really well known for being intensely punctual about all of the meetings he would go to.

He was never late.

He was a stickler for details.

So they're like, it's too good that this is put out there.

Now, eventually, the opinion came to, it's probably not fake, but you decoded it incorrectly.

So they sent it to two other code breaker units, one in Hawaii and another in Alaska.

You can see which group of those dudes lost out on where they were being stationed.

And they came to the agreement that, no, this is legit.

This is no shit his flight itinerary.

And this is where things get a little hazy.

Some Some sources say that the messages run all the way up to FDR personally, and FDR gave the kill order.

There's no evidence of that, though, but then again, there wouldn't be.

Instead, what's more likely is that it's given to the Secretary of the Navy, who then left the decision to Admiral Chester Nimitz to make the final decision on what to do with this.

Nimitzon consulted with a few other naval officers, figuring out if intercepting his plane was even possible.

We gotta build a real big slingshot.

We gotta put our smallest soldier in there and tell him to curl up like a ball and and we're going to pull it back and fire right at that plane.

We're going to give them what they gave us.

A surprise attack

with our one naval slingshot that we developed.

We need to create human artillery.

We've enlisted several men from Missouri.

They've built a potato cannon.

We're going to stuff a guy from Idaho in there.

We're going to kill Yamamoto with the world's biggest spud gun.

It could fire the whole potato.

We have to bring in our finest Irishman to figure this out.

Irish engineers just arriving there with calipers measuring the

width and diameter of the potatoes.

This is the most aerodynamic one.

I mean, if Yamamoto's flying in the flying Zippo, if a well-aimed potato could probably take it out.

A potato going fast enough will take out a plane.

I mean, birds take out planes, and they're significantly weaker than potatoes.

Fire that bitch directly into the engines.

Flying behind in your beddy, like, oh no, we have a potato strike.

The indicator light starts flashing.

It's just a red potato.

Yeah, but see, this is what people don't know: is that like it was actually the Irish mafia that killed like Buddy Holly and Richie Vallins.

You know, with the potato gun.

Yeah, with the potato gun, because they saw that like Italian Americans were getting too popular.

Yeah.

They need to be taken down a peg or two.

I agree.

We need to do that again.

Yeah.

Building the world's strongest potato gun with some engineers from Dublin to fire directly at New York City.

No, we're making like the the I'm aiming for Andrew Cuomo.

We're gonna kill Andrew Cuomo with the Gustav version of a spud gun fired from Limerick.

Fired from Limerick.

No, Shannon Airport, we're gonna build the Spud Gun Gustav and fire it directly at him.

We're gonna destroy Long Island like it's you know it's Nagasaki with a giant spud.

Look, I'm here as, you know, as an economist to give jobs to all the nice people of Limerick building my doomsday potato gun.

The Americans were operating out of a base in Guadalcanal, and the closest intercept point to Yamamoto's flight path was over 500 miles away, out of range for the Navy's Corsair Wildcat planes.

The only plane with the required range that could take out the plane was the U.S.

Army Air Corps' P-38 Lightning, probably one of the weirder-looking planes of the war, because it could be outfitted with drop tanks with extra fuel.

So, the mission was given to Army Major John Mitchell.

He'd lead a flight of 18 Lightnings, four of which were designated as the Kill Squad, meaning their whole job was ignore everything, kill Yamamoto's plane no matter what.

The Kill Squad was led by Captain Thomas Lanfier, and the others were sent in to protect them and fill in in case, you know, plane broke down or someone was shot down or something like that.

Instead of being told who they were assassinating officially they were simply told it was a high-ranking japanese naval officer after all they've gone on these missions before from the other japanese leaders however for an extra little bit of morale boosting someone's like pss it's admiral yamamoto oh i thought they were gonna say is like pss got this chicken it's got 16 herbs and spices you have to die for this yes we're bringing in some experts from shannon ireland to build a cannon

colonel Saunders, did he know?

And like, the idea was, because obviously those other assassination attempts were not successful.

They believe that telling them that this is in fact Yamamoto meant that they would not let him get away at all.

So on April 18th, 1943, the Flight of Lightnings took off, flying a very confusing roundabout route to throw off anyone who maybe detected them on their way there.

Heading towards the interception point near Balale Island at around 7.30 a.m., the Japanese flight spotted the unmistakable outline of a P-38 kill squad flying at pretty much water level.

Remember, it's only four planes.

The rest of the flight was 18,000 feet above them, flying what was known as like top cover.

So in case like more planes came in, or if the battle went particularly sideways, they could fly down and support them.

Two planes of the kill squad had to bow out due to mechanical failures.

So two of the top cover planes had to run down there and replace them.

but that left the two original planes lamfier's personally and his wingman rex barber i can't take anyone seriously if their first name or their their name that they go by is rex i can't can't do it

rex is like short for reginald i think i think it's short for t-rex

hello this is my son tyrannosaurus rex shut the up joe

boo

boo me all you want yeah how does it feel to be booed for once it's not It's usually me.

Both men immediately pulled up and gunned for the lead betty of the Japanese flight, assuming the lead flight is probably Yamamoto's.

They guessed completely right because there's actually two Betties in the flight and they had no idea which one was Yamamoto.

So they're like, fuck it, it's that one.

They both completely ignored the escorting Japanese fighters and the second Betty and did a gun run on the first Betty.

They hit so fast that the Japanese escorts could really do nothing but to watch them just go, go whoom

and just fly right by them.

Like, what formation was Yamamoto's

transport in?

Was it in like a diamond, as in like he was at the front and then the other Betty was at the back?

Yeah, it was like his is the first Betty, then there's a second Betty, and then there's three Japanese planes on either side.

According to eyewitnesses, the main one being Yamoto's chief of staff, Ugaki, that was flying in the other plane,

this whole thing only lasted 20 seconds.

Jesus.

They pulled up at like a death climb, holding down the triggers of their 50 caliber machine guns as they closed in on the betty.

And then that lead betty, riddled full of holes, catches on fire, crashes into the jungle.

But remember, there's two betties in the flight, and they have no idea which one Yamamoto's in.

So they have to circle back around.

and do another gun run on the other betty.

Again, this takes 15 seconds.

Just whoa, right by.

The second Betty is knocked out of the sky, crashes into the ocean.

Somehow everybody inside survives, to include Ugaki, the chief of staff, who's knocked out cold, thrown from the aircraft, and wakes up floating on a pile of debris in the sea.

Joe, I think I have a diagram for you to describe this situation.

It's a plane with a lot of red dots on it.

In the exchange of gunfire, two other American planes rushed down to help, especially after they saw like, oh, God, these guys are just letting the escorts shoot them full of holes.

One plane piloted by Lieutenant Ray Hines got hit and went down, and he died.

Shortly afterward, the rest of the Zeros were chased off, and the Japanese were not actually able to make it to the scene of Yamamoto's crash until the next day.

What they found was Yamamoto's body still strapped tight into his seat, ejected clear from the scene of the crash, and according to very reputable Japanese sources, his samurai sword clutched firmly in his hands.

Of course, this was certainly not true because he was hit by two bullets from a.50 caliber machine gun directly in the chest, which meant that there was not much left of him.

Yeah, brother, you got exploded.

He is, as you say professionally, dead as fuck.

For people unaware, a 50 caliber machine gun bullet will just render you to pulled pork.

Yeah.

There's not much left of you after.

You were being turned into pink based.

I believe his legs are probably still strapped in the seat because they said he was hit in the chest.

Yeah.

Which Which tells me everything from the chest up was probably gone.

Yeah, looking like an exhale of a strawberry ice vape.

In the immediate aftermath, both Lenfier and Barber claimed to be the one that shot down Yamamoto.

And for a time, credit was split amongst the two of them.

They both got 0.5 kills.

This spawned a decades-long beef between the two men.

Of course.

And I don't mean like not only personal, but official.

Barber specifically brought this shit to court and like demanded an official inquiry for decades.

I think the guy, all of like, all of those, like, morons who all claim that they shot bin Laden should do this.

Yeah, yeah, mostly so, uh, like, what's his name?

Robert O'Neill could be proved a liar in court.

You want to guess when the military came to its final decision on who actually shot down Yamamoto was?

It hit me.

When were you born?

1995.

Okay, happened only a few years before you were born

1991 hell yeah so around the same time nevermind came out

yeah george bush senior was still president you know that's when the military's official decision was finally made on who shot down admiral yamamoto and you want to guess what they came to uh both of them did it yep

The official inquiry found, look guys, we have no fucking idea.

Yeah.

Just get over it.

Historians tend to, while looking over the post-battle reports, give credit to Rex Barber

because Lamfier seems to have gotten the two planes confused.

And because no one else directly saw who did it, it was

his word versus mine, yeah.

But Barber's report seems to be zeroed in on shooting that specific Betty.

Okay.

But I do need to point out he's been so annoying about this.

I'm going with the Department of Defense's official inquiry.

Listen, you got to be so annoying that you're going to side with the DOD report.

Like, I always use the kind of metric of like, yes, you can be right, but if you're so annoying about it, no one will care.

Exactly.

Lamfier, to his credit, never really seemed to give a shit.

Yeah.

The official inquiry also found that Lamfier alone shot down the second betty, which pissed off Barber even more.

Yeah, obviously obviously Rex Barber didn't do a whole lot with the rest of his life that he spent decades saying that he was the one who shot down Yamamoto.

Once again, like the guys who shot Bin Laden.

Yeah.

One specific guy that has threatened to assault multiple people of this podcast on Twitter.

That's a long list of people who like have threatened us on Twitter.

Including current deputy director of the FBI.

Dan Bongino, who threatened to kill me because I kept calling him Danny Bongo.

I feel like I could definitely get Pete Hegseth to like

call out a hit squad on me by making fun of his tattoos constantly.

Yeah, it's almost certainly, and the fun part is his WhatsApp group chat plotting your death will be leaked to the public.

No second.

Because the problem is he won't be able to order the death squad because he'll be too drunk.

He can't type properly.

He'll put in your last name wrong and forget like the apostrophe.

So some other Irish guy will get whacked.

The other Tom O'Mani, who's also a podcaster and is a comedian, is going to get assassinated and not me.

Yeah.

The Japanese military and government managed to keep Yamota's death secret for a month before it was finally announced publicly.

A state funeral was held, carrying his remains through Tokyo and through his hometown, making sure, and this is important, to pass right by the front door of his mistress's house, but not his wife.

He is the exact opposite of a wife guy, even in death.

And what's telling is the Japanese government knew about all of us so much, like, he'd probably appreciate it if it went by his mistress's house and not his wife's.

Yeah.

Now, normally, this is what I say, the end.

But do you want to take a guess on where the assassination of Yamoto pops its head back up in, let's say, 2020?

Oh,

is it when Shinzo Abe got caught?

No, but that would be funny.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, after all, what we're describing with the Shannon Ireland-based potato gun is just the device, but Irish.

It's when the U.S.

military assassinated Qassam Salamani.

In the explanation for the strike, the White House specifically cited the Yamamoto assassination for their

legal precedent, ignoring that whole thing about the U.S.

being in a declared war.

Against the Empire of Japan and, you know, not ever being in one against Iran at all.

Oh, God.

But yeah, isn't that not fun?

That's a not fun fact.

Yeah, I mean, like, look, they have

Pete Hag South is now like the Secretary of War before unofficially.

Unofficially, because it requires an act of Congress to change that.

The president can't just do that with an executive order.

Yeah, so it's like, I don't know, will we see a war around?

Probably not.

Not any more than the one we just had.

Yeah, no.

R.I.P.

Sulamani.

I don't want to say that.

Look, I can be against an assassination Shrek and also still hate the guy.

Yeah.

But that's my official stance.

Anyway, the end.

How do you feel about Operation Vengeance and Rex Barber?

I mean, like, look, I think as much as Yamamoto was dedicated to the aerial domination of the Pacific, I think Rex Barber has, you know, shown equal dedication to being a petty bitch.

I mean, imagine because, like, those guys were definitely friends before that.

100%.

Like, imagine that's being what ruins you.

Like, imagine you and I get into an argument over who fires the spud gun first.

Yeah.

The anti-Andrew Cuomo spud gun that we're building in Shannon.

Like, that, that ruins the show.

It ruins our friendship.

And it goes on until like 2045 until the Irish government has to officially declare who fired the spud gun.

I hate that the anti-Italian spud gun is such a good idea for merch that we will never legally be allowed to make.

Nope.

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

Today's question comes from our Discord channel.

If you'd like to ask us a question from the Legion, support the show on Patreon or we will fire the Spud Gun at your home with the world's first GPS guided potato.

And today's question question is, what two sports should be combined?

Ooh, do you want to go first?

Because I have to think about this.

Okay, I do have to let in a little behind the curtains thing here.

We talked about this question before we came and recorded and we're talking to our show's producer, Ani.

And she said, oh, it has to be chess and boxing.

And that gave me the wonderful opportunity to introduce her to the actual sport that once existed, chess boxing.

You can see it on YouTube.

It's the dumbest thing.

It's wonderful.

And there's, of course, the, we've talked about it before, of the mix of mosh pit slash MMA slash rugby slash football.

That is, I think it's called Classic Astorio, which only happens in like one specific town in Italy one time a year.

Where each district has a team and they'll play for like, it's kind of like a show thing.

They like.

These guys are trying to kill each other.

Yeah.

It's awesome.

Actually, there's a really good documentary.

I think it's on Netflix.

I think it is on Netflix, Netflix.

And it's incredible.

Like all these guys are just insane.

Yeah.

I respect it.

Yeah.

Don't ask who they voted for.

Yeah.

I would say for me,

one that hasn't been invented yet is I want to combine like fencing,

but you have to do it with a bayonet.

So like kind of a combination of like competitive shooting and fencing.

So it's like you have to do gun kata,

French gun kata.

cada.

Well, what's yours?

Come on.

A lot of good ones are already like someone kind of invented fencing and MMA.

That's just like the night fighting stuff, which is just lovely to watch.

I will never take part in.

I have enough brain damage.

Oh, what about competitive cycling and MMA?

So you just have to like.

That's just the game Road Rash.

Yeah, true.

Actually, actually, I'm 100% on board with that.

Put the Tour de France in like a really big octagon.

Give Lance Armstrong a gun.

Yeah, like full contact bicycle racing.

Like, yeah, you can wear MMA gloves, but you also can use non-sharp weapons.

So it's like doing like roller derby in a Velodrome, but you can kick people?

Absolutely.

Yes.

Get the Olympic Committee on the line.

We have a winner.

Give Lance Armstrong or give every cyclist a gun with one bullet in it.

And you have to choose when you're going to do it.

No, I don't like the gun because like it does, it it means you can keep a distance.

I really like flail type weapons.

Or like a bow and arrow.

The bow and arrow.

The Mongolians would be great at it.

Yeah, they're capturing all the gold.

I'm a Mongolian.

I don't know.

Cycling around this area, I think the Dutch have a really good chance on that.

Yes, the Dutch are good at cycling, but they're not good at simultaneously riding an archery.

I'm a Mongolian cyclist archer, and I am aiming at Lance Armstrong's one remaining ball.

And steroids completely leak.

Yes.

I mean, if if we're going to have Lance Armstrong involved,

he's going to be on his cruising dose of the Suzul.

But that's an episode of this podcast.

Tom, you host other podcasts.

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

All of my books are currently sold out, so you can't buy them.

I do have some new stuff on the horizon that you can both listen to and look at that will be coming out shortly, a handful of different projects.

So yeah, keep

an ear out for those.

This is the only show that I host.

So thank you for listening.

I hope you enjoy the pure chaos that happens when we're in the same room together.

I'm happy to say it's been happening more frequently, which is lovely.

We do have a live show coming up October 4th.

The show itself is sold out, but live stream tickets are still available.

They'll be available right up until we go up on stage.

So check the show notes, see the link, get your ticket, or again, the spud gun will be be fired at your home.

It brings me no joy to say this.

You will be spudded.

I will fire the spud gun while shaking my head so everybody knows I disagree with it.

And if you are Italian or Italian-American, it's immediately a critical hit.

Thank you so much for listening to the show.

Until next time,

beware the spud.

Cheat on your wife, never get in a plane.