Historically High - World War 2: The European Theater

Episode Date: October 4, 2023

After  Hitler defied the League of Nations and marched through Austria, Czechoslovakia, and then into Poland seizing those lands to build the Third Reich, France and Britain finally decided to do something about it by declaring War. The world was plunged into another global conflict hardly 20 years after the last Great War. Nazi Germany initially steamrolled everyone in their path, until some very bad decisions by Hitler lead to a turning of the tide. Join us as we blaze through the European conflict from the declaration of war to the unconditional surrender. Support the show Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

How's it going, ladies and gentlemen? Thank you for joining us again for a hearty helping of history is what we're going to be serving you today. With me always, send over to my left. He's cooler than the other side of the pillow. I don't know what else I can say about this guy. Oh, he served as the stunt dick from Mark Wahlberg in Boogie Nights. Weirdly enough, he was 12 years old when he did that, but his parents signed a waiver and he was able to participate. They didn't want to stifle my creativity.

Yeah, unfortunately, it did not make. his IMDB page. Professor Adam, ladies and gentlemen, I have finally somehow tricked him into dipping his toes

into the full-blown World War II pool and at this point he's dick-deep now. We had to shitter get off the pot that's sort of the deal with World War II. We've tickled

the tip a little bit. We didn't tickled the tip the last two weeks. Yeah, tickled the tip the last two weeks. We also got a double on D-Day. We have Pearl Harbor, we have Midway.

So we've played with the idea, but we just finally decided that we have to lay out. Maybe you didn't find, I think what it was, is you didn't find your World War II spirit animal until we start doing this. Well, I will play innocent and blame the education system in our state or probably our country for not really adequately explaining what World War II all entail.

I think me and you kind of touched on this too, and I'm not sure if we probably talk. about it during the two hit letter episodes previously. But until, it's the Hemingway thing, until we're in the story, the story for us doesn't pick up. There's no exposition of being like, this is what's been happening in the five years since you guys showed up into this story. But our dudes were in North Africa.

I didn't know shit about North Africa. The assumption is that our first time getting into World War II for, you know, on the European side was like storming the beaches on Normandy. Yeah, no. Uh-uh. Like you had so much stuff going on before that. That was just really, I mean, that's a year. Normandy took place closer, less than a year to the end of the war. Well, and shit, we had what, five years into the war, technically, almost six years into the war before we did Normandy? The actual... Everybody, the Allies did Normandy. Yeah, what they would consider, because it was in 44 that they did Normandy. It was a little bit less than four, a little bit less than five years. So, I mean,

Yeah, I mean, there's all of this. And then you have this last bit that is really the most well-known stuff. But we've covered pretty heavily the buildup to the war in Europe. What's getting ready to kick it off? I believe we ended the last episode with Hitler with his eyes on Poland. We ended it with Hitler with his eyes on the Czech Republic, which will be a very quick, easy way. Wasn't that the one, I thought we covered that, because wasn't that the one where he went into the, what was the name of the region? The Sudatenland. The Sudatenland. He was going in there to protect the German peoples, the German-speaking peoples, because as always per yuge, the government that's currently in control of that country is persecuting them. So they need Daddy Adolf to fucking roll in to help him. And then through essentially them marching the army in there, they were just basically like, well, why?

we're here. Why don't you just sign over the country, which apparently was a thing. There just came a contract and they're like, so this is ours now? Just be a lot cooler if you did, sort of a deal. Like, hey, protect our people, but be a lot cooler if you just threw in the rest of the country. So yeah, that's kind of our plan.

That's kind of our idea. Basically, going over World War II right now, if you know some shit about World War II and we come across it and you feel like we don't cover it enough, Fear not. This is going to be kind of a springboard for only about what I can say would probably be 20 episodes. Don't get us wrong. They're not going to be in line.

They're not going to be in order. We're going to pick and choose. We're a history podcast. We're not a war podcast, even though we seem to really enjoy war. History is kind of war-centric. If there's one consistency throughout history, it's conflict. Yeah, that's very true. So yeah, that's going to kind of be where we head with this whole episode.

We're going to dive into some things. We're not going to dive into some things so deep just because they're all going to be really episodes in and of themselves. Just with the way that it feels like everything is with just the way that we don't understand World War II like we should. And I feel like a weird old man saying that shit. I never really thought those words had come across my lips. But yeah, we don't really understand quite what World War II was. Like you said, this is going to be a great jumping off point for a lot of future episodes. But basically what we're providing here, it's we're focusing almost explicitly on the war in Europe.

And then we're just basically giving you the timeline of events. What happened? We're going to touch a few details on certain bigger events. But those things that we touch on, they require their own episodes in themselves to really kind of paint the picture of what happened. So we're taking you soup to nuts from the start of the war, the invasion of polls. to fucking boom yeah from from fucking

taking the easy way out in the bunker maybe but yeah before we start we got another very nice review from a gentleman named Tofer Thompson on Apple love this pod great sense of humor easy to listen to and you learn a little bit along the way

that's really all we're saying just learn a little bit along the way appreciate it like Tofer read or what is it's not read Listen, rate, review, subscribe. Yeah, yeah, it helps our numbers. We're so goddamn close on Spotify. Is there a one that's like, is there an R word that is for subscribe so we can just do all ours?

Rate, review. Retaint, no, not rate, retain. Reserve us for yourselves for some easy listening. Yeah. Oh, and to finish up, we have to give a shout out to our buddy Zach who made our music. Tofer also said, I hope you never changed the intro song. Oh, we don't plan on it. If anything, it'll be updated maybe as we get bigger and everything.

And it'll be the same guy that does it so you know it's going to be good. Definitely. All right. Without any further ado, we present to you World War II. All right. So the H-man, he is poised at Poland, which, for some unexplained reason, I think we touched on it last week. How does Poland not immediately know that, like, as soon as Hitler starts invading Austria, they're like, we're the country made up? the largest portion of the previous German Empire.

We think we're going to be on his hit list. But then at some point, he did sign like a non-aggression pact with Poland, correct? Yeah, at this point, if there's anything that we know about Hitler, and it's going to become very clear in this episode, the guy would promise just the world, and it never fucking mattered if he came through. His signature was literally meaningless. Yeah, yep.

Unless he was signing someone to be killed, then he expected it to be honored. Well, and if they didn't do it, he'd just do it himself. So he just a very, the man never kept his word. Yeah, we just, this is after he rolled through, took Austria to the applause of all the Nazi video that survived, headed it into Czechoslovakia. Freed the Sudatans also felt that the Sudatans were being attacked. Wasn't it like 10% of the population too, right?

Yeah, it was just like the Sudeten lands in Czechoslovakia. Yeah, but again, while. we're here. No one said stop me at this point. No one said anything after Austria. So I'm just going to keep

pushing my luck and see if I can take more of this. So takes Czechoslovakia. The gentleman's plowed through two countries without one shot being fired. That's the whole point. It's been bloodless at this point.

So I don't know if people are looking at it being like, this really is in a war. Maybe like from the outside perspective, you're looking at it that battle hasn't occurred. Shots haven't been fired. You're like, so I guess these people really didn't want their freedom that much or really weren't opposed

that much to this. sky when in essence what was keeping the firing and the fighting from happening is because you're marching troops in and basically using intimidation to get what you want under the it's not even a veiled threat it's under the actual threat of like military invasion and overthrowing your current government it's super fucking easy to just deny somebody that walks in with their fists up it's real hard to deny somebody that walks in with a full military force and i think they're called panzers Is that what the little tanks were called? Those are the most adorable things I've ever seen,

like the little one-man Fisher-Price-looking tanks? No, the tanks were in different lines. So, like, you had the Panzer, but you also had different, like, Panzer 1, Panzer 2. Okay. I think the little ones you're thinking of, it's like a little one-man tank. It looks like a John Deere tank.

Okay. Like a little tractor. It might have been, like, a version of a Panzer, but, like, he had Panzers, Tigers, Leopards, like. It looked like they went from mowing the lawn and they pulled the blades off of it and just attached a gun to it. It was mechanized. That's the whole point. It's able to travel a lot quicker than somebody. So finally, September 1st, 1939, Hitler invades Poland. Now up to this point... Oh, yeah. For that, though, we got to talk about the elephant in the room eight days before.

Eight days before, through a volley of trying to figure out how Hitler... was going to protect himself with his next lie. There were times when there was a non-aggression pact against Britain, or he wanted one. There were times when Britain wanted one against them. They went back and forth. As you can imagine, a very, very communist Red Soviet Union would have talks with Great Britain along the way for non-aggression packs to partner up just in case any shit happens. And mind-blowingly enough, we run into a communist and a fact.

who have used each other kind of as political fodder to gain support and to gain votes. Using each other as like the boogeyman? Yeah, exactly. They had done a lot of trade deals before that, but there had never really been an alliance. But it turns out that the best way to make an alliance out of a communist and a fascist is to put a piece of land between them that's not on by either one of them. Oh, or do you refer to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact? Yeah, from August 23rd of 39. Yeah, it was the non-aggression pact. they're like hey

Poland's looking pretty fucking sweet you want to tag team Poland basically like of course we do yeah that sounds awesome she's hot Nazis will take the closest part of Poland to them they're going to go ahead and I think it comes along a couple rivers or some shit the Soviets are going to take the other part of Poland

also to sweeten the pot they were like why don't you just snatch up Lithuania Latvia Estonia Finland all those are kind of already kind of close to you anyway between you and the North what is that the North Sea. Yeah, they're just playing war. It was like they had a war board out and they're like, do you want this? Yeah, take this. Do you want this?

Yeah, I'll take that. Trading cards. Yeah, dude. And so, yeah, you get this. The country is with live people inside of them. So you get this thing invented by basically, I think Molotov was like the prime minister or something like that.

He was their trade consigliary guy. Minister of foreign affairs or some shit like that. Also, if you're wondering, the name Maltov and Maltov cocktail, yes, that was named after him. Yes. So they had this non-aggression pact. So basically the closest country that could do anything to assist Poland is like, nah, we're going to wait until the Nazis invade you.

And then we're going to wait a little bit. And then we're going to make our move. We're going to test the temperature of this war and kind of see what it looks like. So as far as the standings go where like France, Britain, the traditional allies are, before the invasion of Poland, they tell Poland, hey, will support you. if you happen to get invaded. And, well, lo and behold, against September 1st, 1939, the fucking Panzers and the Nazis roll across the Polish border. And how long did it take them to actually even take over Poland?

Poland officially surrendered October 6th. So from September 1st to October 6th, but it took them, I want to say it was about a week just to walk in there and make it happen. And like you were talking about Great Britain and France were talking, a big game. They kept telling Germany, it better not. Not a week. If... It took them a month for Poland

to just surrender. But way, way before that, it already looked like it was going to go to... Oh, it was already in a position where it wasn't going to be able to defend them off. I get what you mean. Yeah, this was... October 6th was an official surrender. It wasn't them going to the table. And again,

just with... The way Germany wanted to do this. and we might talk about this one for a little bit longer just because it's the fucking the tip of the iceberg the way Germany wanted to do this was Hitler was trying to say, I got a new way to do this, I got a new way to fight this war.

We saw what trench warfare looked like in World War I. Those motherfuckers died for no reason because of stupid plans. We used up way too many resources. We ran out of money. This was a bad deal. This new plane we're going to put in place? The Blitzkrieg.

The Blitzkrieg, we are going in there, balls to the wall. it's lightning war. Is that what Blitzkrieg means? Yeah, lightning war. Really? Yeah. Huh. So that's exactly what it was,

because they were able to come up with essentially a mechanized army. And that's not to say, like, you'll hear a lot about, like, the Blitzkrieg and, like, the mechanized army and everything. Basically, it's like tanks, transport trucks, planes,

all that kind of stuff. You know, mobile artillery. All the things that they didn't have, really in World War I. I mean, they had artillery, but it wasn't as mobile. They didn't have tanks. The British had some takes

to the very, very end, maybe the French did. They probably went from like 80% horsepower and horse strong carriages and shit to like 40%. Germany still used more horses out of anyone else in the war. But that's what I mean. Like they were able to mechanize enough of a force to be able to push faster. It wasn't that big though. But what it was is one tank, you know, what is even like a hundred guys going to do with just machine guns against a tank?

A hundred guys still aren't going to be able to do anything if they don't have anti-tank weapons or some way to blow. They can't just get on it and stop it from moving, get rolled over. So when you're able to roll in and not only roll in tanks, but with speed, you're not giving enough time. You know, this isn't the age of communication where it's like, you know, radio to base. We, you know, mobilize the troops, all that kind of stuff. If you start getting overrun, communication sometimes is still carried back by messengers. And so that's taking additional time. Even if it's radioed back to mobilize then where all your troops are to try to get them in position for like a counterattack,

or defensive moves, that's really hard to do. And so the biggest thing with the Blitzkrieg is it's covering so much ground so quickly that by the time they can mobilize a defensive front, they've already taken territory and they're already pushing toward these capitals or strategic locations. It was almost a perfect strategy to use against Poland because like you said earlier, Poland was what the biggest landmass that Germany lost during World War I. So that means that Poland's only been a country for, what, 30, or 20 years.

Guaranteed to have a sizable German population probably. Yeah, but... You know what resources are going to be there. And technically, because that was part of the empire, chances are that all these generals that you still left in play as part of the army and everything have knowledge of operating in what would be the Polish territory at that point.

They're like, this is how I would defend it. This is how I would attack it. All that kind of stuff. That was part of your country. That would be like here in the States if for 10 years, the, like Texas or something was its own country. People that have lived and been in Texas would still be able to be like, well, Texas isn't changing in 10 years.

Here's the weak points of Texas. Here's the strong points of Texas. You would still have a strategy to be able to attack and defeat that or defend it. Maybe that's where my confusion comes in, because I would just assume if they were starting a new country, rule number one of the new country would be like, hey, anybody that was involved in World War I with Germany, you're not allowed to be there.

Yeah, I don't think you can move populaces like that are people like that. And you can't change geographical features, points of like where roads come in, all that kind of shit. So yeah, you still had a country that... You still had people that were fighting against you though.

Yeah, but... So you had the Polish Army and the Polish Air Force and everyone that had a sizable force. And so they put up, you know, for as quick as it happened, Poland put up pretty good,

pretty good fight. They had to just be so new, just with everything. I mean, they'd ground through World War I, but as far as like a Polish unit together. You've been a 20 country for 20 years.

Yeah. And yeah, I'm sure honestly, because it was made up of people that served in the military and probably military commanders that then lived in that land that got annexed, you had people that knew what they were doing. You just didn't have people that were used to

fighting this type of war that we've now seen. Well, we also kind of buried that Poland had just come off a very successful defense of their lands. against Russia. The Soviet Union, yeah. This was what, like 10, 15 years prior, 12 years prior?

Something like that. It was like Russia felt since they were a new country, they could probably get some of that sweet, sweet land. Turns out Poland defended themselves well. The Soviet Union underestimates countries in a crazy, crazy way. Still to this day. They're so big that you think that they could just... Yeah.

And technically that will come into play as part of why they still exist. It took them that long to figure it out, though. We'll talk about Finland later, but holy shit. you're getting beat up by the fins. Yeah. We'll only take 7% of your territory, thank you. That's not a win. So with the Blitzkriek, kind of how it would work is you would have the German Air Force come in,

bomb the shit out of you, so all those strategic defensive positions are now getting carpet bombed and strategically bombed. You would then essentially have the Air Force come in or like the Stucca dive bombers. And as they're coming in and clearing the way back, you're then rolling in the tanks to where all this chaos. is already happening. All these positions or, you know, soldiers running around not knowing what's going on,

severed lines of communications, and then all of a sudden you got tanks rolling in on you, and then behind that, supporting it would be the infantry. They, their doctrine for the way they were fighting was really not seen before.

It used to be thought that you would send an infantry first, not tanks in front of them. You'd have to send an infantry first to like clear the way for the tanks, which seems completely counterproductive. The tanks are armored, so send them in first.

And then no one had seen any type of like bombing campaign like this before. It's a fairly brilliant strategy if you just want to shock on all the people. That's what it was. Yeah, but it also doesn't hurt. This happens. We start September 1st.

By September 17th, the Soviet Union's like, okay, it's time to play our part in this. Let's run into the Eastern Front. So you're defending the West against the Germans. You're like, what the fuck is going on? Why are these guys coming? And you just hear a knock on the back door. You already repositioned everyone that was on the Eastern.

front over left skeleton crews there, which is exactly probably what the Soviets were waiting for. Prior to that, at least on September 3rd, two days after they invaded Poland, Great Britain and France declare war on Germany. Oh, yeah. That's a pretty big deal to declare war on somebody. I'm only going to make mentions of this just to kind of give them frames of reference for when we have future episodes. So at this point, it did not take them long at all. Basically, as soon as the Nazis invaded Poland, Auschwitz, which I believe was like an old army barracks and everything, Auschwitz started being used as a concentration prisoner of war camp. Is Auschwitz in Poland?

It is. Okay. Yep. So basically, while all this is going on, it's not like France and Britain are like, okay, well, we're coming in to help and everything, because they would essentially have to, in order to help Poland, either move all the troops through what I guess would be the North Sea or whatever that is, or. you would have to basically go through Belgium and Holland, then through Germany to get to them via land. And so you don't really have an option at this point to really help them. So their way of helping is Britain sends over the British Expeditionary Force. And France kind of mobilizes their people.

But then they just go set up shop like on the French. border where they believe if an attack is going to end up coming, it's going to end up coming from this location. Well, correct me if I'm wrong, but they also had a fancy setup called the Maginot line that they felt like they would be defended behind if they were to be advanced on. Yeah, so the Maginot line was, I actually have some notes on it. Hang on. This sounds like they tried to build the wall. They will, in their way, apparently these types of lines, this is just what you did.

like after World War I and maybe even pre-world one is, you know how you have like the Great Wall China. Uh-huh. You have like Hadron's Wall, which was in Great Britain as part of like Roman against barbarian times and everything. And then as technology progressed, you would then just make a wall that wasn't really a wall. It was just guns pointing in one direction

and you would have like obstacles that they couldn't get through and sometimes rivers would be your fortification. It was like prison. Yes. It just seems so bad because the biggest issue with this line and we'll talk about it is there has to come to an end, and it can't come to such an abrupt end. Yeah, you're going to make a defensive fortification,

and it's attempted at several points during this war. Like, these lines apparently just become all the fucking rage. Yeah. So you're going to have places that, like you said, either you're assuming a natural defense is not really as defensible as it is, or you're going to have weaknesses exploited. Well, part of this will come through, too. We had, as soon as the war kicked off,

We had Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Norway, Romania, Sweden. Everybody's like, ugh, neutral. Not going to be a part of this. You guys got some shit going. We're not going to step in your way.

We're not going to help on either side. Just understand war neutral. Like you motherfuckers are at war again. Yeah. And the same fucking guys are starting it? Didn't think about maybe raining these people in after the first time. So it just,

it really seems like Poland was left. They got put in a vice and then everybody around them just wanted to step back and step away. Like I say, it took until September 17th for the Soviet Union to turn on the Eastern Front. It took till September 20th for the Nazis

in the Soviet Union to run into each other. So it took them three days to traverse an entire country and run into each other. So the Polish government ends up like fleeing to Romania. It fell in a total like you said of five weeks. And

And basically Hitler goes to Great Britain and is like, well, if you guys want to go ahead and do like a peace agreement, you just need to recognize that the European continental dominance is going to be Germany. And Great Britain's like, cheerio, fuck off then. Appeasement, I believe, is what they called it. Or was appeasement before this. appeasement was what was happening during the entire portion before Poland, when he was taken, fucking Austria and Czechoslovakia. and when he took, what was the, there was a smaller portion too. I thought it was the first little portion of Poland.

No, there was a portion near France. Maybe that comes in a little later. It's like the star or something like that. There's a section of land that got taken from France, but I think they may have given it back to them just as part of the appeasement. Okay. And then you have essentially like the Rhineland and the Rur Valley

that then they come in, remember, because the French ended up leaving. So they reoccupied that. So the appeasement was basically what happened when they were like, hey, Hitler knock it off. Okay, one more country. One more. I think that's also what had happened too

was during that last appeasement with Czechoslovakia when they were trying to get it figured out. They're like, well, this area of Poland's good too. And Poland's like, fuck you. No, it's not. And Germany's like, or Great Britain's like, so you guys want that little section of Poland too? They're like, yeah.

And Poland's like, no, dude, don't take our land. then there's made the deal without Poland being able to consent. It was the Polish corridor. Is that what it was where Danzig was? Yep, because they wanted to allow Poland to have access to the north. If I keep saying that it's the north scene, it's really not. I apologize. It's the section that's like above Germany, above Poland.

The Black Sea, maybe? No, that's, I think, I want to say the Black Sea is down and like. That sounds more of like a Russian thing, like Baltic region. I don't know. I'm just going to call it the North Sea. Because it is north of where we're talking about. So that's what I'm in, that's what I'm referring to. Is it not on the map?

I can't read that. Okay. So, oh yeah, we got a map now so we can look at how stuff, you know, travels and everything. So all is quiet on the Western front. This wasn't like, hey, you know, like I was saying, we got invaded, get over here, help us. It's like, okay, what we're going to do from the British Expeditionary Force? We're going to move into France, so we're on the continent. But us and the French are just going to set up and kind of defend here.

but you guys you know keep fighting and their other idea too correct me if I'm wrong was didn't they travel up to Norway because they knew that Norway was very important to Germany

and wasn't that part of the phony war when they laid out and mined all those ports up in Norway to hopefully stop the Germans from going up into Norway and taking it and then Norway was just like yeah come on in Germany I will have to

look into that I'm pretty sure sure that was a part of their phony war because they kept blustering and saying don't do this you know we're not going to let you go any further and then they went further and they're like eh okay well don't go any further because we're definitely not going to come help and they're like okay it just it felt like great britain and france were trying to do everything except for engaged which i mean you can't blame somebody for not wanting to engage in a war i don't know strategically you could because like look so like you have germany right there

That's how much German area. That's where they would have had to come from, go all the way across to get into Poland. That's like the breadth of Germany. That's like the widest part of Germany. And at this point, too, even if... Is it widest or widest? Wideest and widest. Okay.

Like Wonderbred. But even if you were able to sail all the way around, you know, what you're saying Norway and everything is, and they were cool with it, you're still having to deal with all the naval power that Germany is probably just going to stack in there. to take out your ships and your troops. So strategically... But at that point, Germany didn't have the same kind of Navy, did they? It was just kind of... It doesn't have to be a lot when you're in a freaking shooting gallery.

We're at choke point like that. I'm just saying strategically to move that amount of troops to even stop Poland, especially after the Soviet Union starts invading. Like, what are the... What's Britain in? And France's like, what the fuck? Russia? And they're like, what?

We captured the land. Well, and that was sort of part of their non-aggression. Are we not supposed to be in here? Yeah, part of their non-aggression pact that they had signed that everybody knew that the Soviets in Germany had the non-aggression pact. There was some writing in there about the equal splitting, like Chris was talking about earlier, of the Baltic states and then the parts of Poland. Nobody knew about that except for the Soviet Union and Germany. And it wasn't just that this was their agreement like, hey, we're just going to take Poland and then you do you and you did. there was so much trade as far as like oil coming in from Russia for the German war machine

materials and other shit going out to Russia from Germany as far as like war materials and shit like that from also their conquered areas from Austria at Czechoslovakia now they're a portion of Poland so there's like complete mutual assistance going on in all but like a tripartak type agreement like they're not going to they're not fighting each other right now so it looks to everybody being like, so are you fucking on like Germany's side down there? They're like, well, we're not not on Germany's side, I guess. Yeah, as long as they don't attack us,

we're cool. Yeah. As long as we don't attack them, they're cool. So sometime after September 28th, the Soviets threatened Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, and basically they all, all of their governments are like, listen. September 28th? Sometime after. Okay, so not while they're still in Poland?

Because October 6th is when Poland was finally Dunzo? Correct. After they surrendered at the Battle of the Cock. They send out, they can have different forces going into these countries.

And basically they're just there to be like, okay, well, eventually we're going to come out of Poland and then you can be our next target. Or you can just, you know, sign this mutual assistance pact. And they were like, fine, I guess we'll just sign this mutual assistant pack.

So they basically became like fiefdoms of Russia at that point. You just got to hold that guy and kill him. You can't let him get back there and just be like, he never got here. We didn't know he showed up. Why are you guys doing here? So Finland was like, nah, fuck yourself.

So they got invaded on November 30th and what took place was the winter war? And apparently the fucking Russians didn't want any of that smoke from Finland because after about, what was it? Let's see. That is on a different war? They invaded November 30th.

And when all was said done, it didn't take long for them to get tired of it because Russia accepted basically being like, I guess we'll take only 9% of your country and the Finns were like, fine, fuck it. Take the 9% and get out. Well, you have to think, too. I'm sure Finland didn't have a massive force. But it's not like it was a home game for Finland. The Soviet Union probably looks a decent amount like Finland,

but it was just Finland's ability to, I love that they went with the white camo. I think it was the first time in a battle that they had actually just worn all white to blend in with the snow in Finland. They had like skis and shit too. Yeah. Yeah. So they were cross-country skiing. I'm pretty sure that's probably how we got an Olympic event was the Finns against the Soviets.

They're like skiing is actually pretty relaxing when you're not getting fucking shot at. Yeah. Like we should just do this for fun. But let's keep the guns in it and still do target practice out there. Yes. What did they call that? What's that event? I can't remember.

Yeah. Yeah. It's not there. Yeah, it seemed like Finland, for being a small country, kind of had the Soviets number. And the Soviet Union talking about Joseph Stalin, where he's full episode worthy tenfold. But he had this way of when troops didn't perform, he just, like, killed their leadership. Stalin? Essentially, yeah.

Prior to World War II, when Stalin, I don't know how long he was already in. power. This thing called The Great Purge happened. 30,000 Russian military, I don't know if they're all officers, Russian military people were killed. He was just like, I'm fucking

cleaning house. His own people. His own people. His own military. Yes. The fact that we had to do business with this guy should not be like, the pictures that are like Churchill, fucking Roosevelt and Stalin, they're all just like, buddy, like, I got to think like Roosevelt and

Churchill are kind of like I can't believe rough in the fucking pose for this guy He's like I've And then I killed all 30,000 of them He's like it's funny right Like no it's not fucking funny I can't imagine Churchill

Sitting next to that dude For longer in like five minutes Because as soon as they got to talking about Something Stalin started to dominate the competition I'm sure a half drug Churchill Just like shut the fuck up Dude your country is cold 90% of the time You're not that cool

But at the same time I think it was both the Soviet Union and Great Britain like outpaced building materials and shit like that than Germany, like every single month of the war. Their industrialization powers were so strong that they were able to just outproduce Germany, which... But Germany's been building up to this point. The whole reason that they had been building up to this point,

and I think even Hitler might have mentioned it, he says once the war gets kicked off and they go into war production, we can't match them. So basically we're going to go ahead and get six steps ahead. And then this war is going to be over our schedule. If everything goes right, the war is going to be over in six years. By the time we hit that six year mark, then we'll reach parity.

But we're going to be winning at that point. And by the time that that happens, the war will already be won. So that's what some of it was being done. It is. And here's the thing too. This guy, he was a corporal in World War I. He was a fucking messenger runner. he at some point puts himself,

he already does take like a lot of the like military decisions. Like a ton of stuff has to go through him. He doesn't like using people underneath him. He feels like he has to have a hand in fucking everything, the invasions. But he's doing these things where he's just like, I want to invade this place.

And then they come up with the battle plan. He's like, okay, he's not coming up with this shit himself. He's not like a great military commander. This is why all this shit goes south. The only reason that they do as well as they do, do is because it's like a fucking surprise and nobody. First of all everyone's sitting on their thumbs.

Yeah. When they should have been gearing up for this shit for the last fucking three or four years prior to this. And everyone's just like, no, Hitler, don't, Hitler, he'll just stay over there. Him and Russia will bother each other. And then when shit does start getting real, they're like, well, we can't be ready to do shit for another

one or two years. Yeah, that and I just think that the dominant aspect of what went wrong and I think that you can kind of even put Stalin on the fence. Stalin's idea was just to throw more bodies at the solution and that's not really a great war strategy. But you have Hitler who has Dick for war strategy and wants to run everything.

Stalin sort of in the same way, he just got the numbers. Stalin is kind of like, you're going to run out of bolts before I run out of people. Yeah, exactly. You can't produce bolts as fast as I can. You can't outproduce my people. And then you have Churchill who I'm sure had a little bit of war strategy in his mind, but he knew that he had guys to do it. He didn't have the captain Ned the admiralty.

So he knew how to fucking, during World War I. He knew what he was doing. Even then, he wasn't, he had his hand in who he wanted in positions, but it wasn't like, I'm going to leave that vacant. Yes. Roosevelt, same way. Yes. Roosevelt knew that he had Eisenhower over there.

He had, uh, Patent. Patton. Yeah, he had great military minds to where they could kind of run shit. And Roosevelt and Churchill did give them, I think, a little shit on some of their decision making, but they were still left up to greater minds, where you had Stalin just throwing bodies on the problem and Hitler wanting to be a part of every single movement. Yeah. It just, whenever you have that just single figurehead, it always seems to go south unless

you're like Napoleon or Alexander. So because all this stuff has still been happening, what will be essentially on the eastern front, like the French and British are still just kind of waiting for shit to happen. So instead of doing anything moving in No, so they'll let their Littin Hitler just run roughshot over all the fucking Europe So April 1940, they invade Denmark and Norway That was that literally they're ready for another and again Europe at this point still isn't enormous

Like you're able to travel like what did I say last time? Germany at that point was like a little smaller than Texas Yeah which seems huge but in the grand scheme of things over there it's not that big. So even if you take two Texases and put them side by side, it only takes you, if you really drove, it would take you two or three days to get across the whole thing. If you were going 60, of course, these armies aren't going 60 miles an hour. What I'm saying is stuff can move fast. It's not like it's taking years to do these different operations. Stuff fucking happens fast. And Denmark and Norway had already come out and said that they were neutral. So it wasn't like

they were building up an armed force for, excuse me, for their protection. It was probably a pretty easy goddamn take again. So you end up getting the British or then like, fine, we're going to occupy Iceland since you're apparently

taking all this turdrait, which is, I mean, a good move. Yeah. It keeps them from also being able to have another area to launch

bombers from another place for resources and all that kind of shit. Strategically, though, you don't know what their infrastructure looks like.

You're still shipping everything into Iceland. Yeah, I think they also took a place that was the Faroe Islands and then Sweden was like, hey, we really mean it. We're going to stay neutral.

And that doesn't last. No. None of it ever last. So, okay, April. They just took Denmark and Norway. You're like, okay, they obviously are going to slow down. You know, the attack's not going to be for a while. Nope.

Fuck that. May 10th, Blitzkrieg happens through the low countries. And like when they refer to the low countries, like weirdly, like they refer to stuff geographically. elevation, everything. Topography. Yeah. So the low countries

are going to be the closest ones to the sea, and it's going to be kind of in the north. This is where you're going to get like Lithuania, not Lithuania, Luxembourg.

Luxembourg, Belgium, and Holland? Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Yes, Belgium, and Netherlands, Luxembourg. And the reason that they go into these areas is because they're

essentially softening France and then that Maginal line, that wonderful defensive thing that they spent years and years building. It's got so many crazy things. It was built in the 1930s against, and it was meant against the Nazis. Basically, the thing has like tunnels connecting. Did you read about the Maginolian line? Yeah, to me, it was like seven massive towers. Is that what it was? Or was it more than seven? No, no, no. It wasn't like a line in that sense because it spans such a huge gap. Well, the reason there were breaks in it, though, were because they thought there were natural barriers.

There was a, the Ardennes forest was in the middle of it. Yeah. And it only ran down to the line with Belgium, correct? Yes. Well, not down the line. It would technically be up. Okay, up, yeah, sorry. Okay.

So if you're looking at Belgium and Luxembourg and the Netherlands, they're basically right up next to like what the English Channel and stuff like that is, basically between France and Germany. And so the Maginot Line, France and Germany share an actual border for quite a distance. The main part of the Maginot Line is built along that. And basically what it is, is it's a series of, like, turrets and pillboxes and artillery. It's not really huge towers. They've even got farmhouses that are built, like, as a facade over, like, artillery positions and, like, guns and shit.

it's got a bunch of obstacles for tang anti-tank ditches I don't know if you've ever heard of these things called Dragon's Teeth they're basically those big concrete things that stick out of the ground and they were basically you know they weren't over like major roads because you would be expecting

if a military came through a major road you would just have your strongest military at that point so the big thing about the Maginot line is Belgium was like hey we don't want that like in our country or like dividing our countries we're supposed to be cool. We didn't do anything. And so France was like, okay, I guess we won't do

imagine a line between our countries. That's fine. Because you're a whole country. So if the Germans do end up attacking, they got to get all the way through your country. It's going to take them so long. We're going to be able to mobilize our forces. It's all good, Belgium. So as they move through and take the Netherlands and Luxembourg and Belgium, the French and British troops are like, they're obviously working toward us. This is where the attack's going to be. This is where we've got the strongest. I think they had like 300,000, 350,000 of the British Expeditionary Force.

And then pretty much like the bulk of the French military, the tanks and all that kind of shit. Well, and on that exact same day, it comes as no surprise that Neville Chamberlain is out as the prime minister of the UK. And our guy, Winston Churchill, steps in. So Neville's plan of appeasement and trying to cool Germany down and not make. them look as bad as they actually were, just finally got his number. He had to be out because he was letting Germany just run roughshot over everything. And he didn't have that leader sense that Winston Churchill did. And that was sort of, I think Winston may have gotten in there too late to help save France, but I don't know what he would have done differently because it was just like

you were talking about. They were ready, I think, for the entry of Germany into France. Yeah, well, it had been during World War I where essentially the Germans tried to invade France at that point. And so it was thought that they would be, because that's where you can move the most massive materials and men and everything, it's the most easily traveled area. So of course you're like, well, everywhere else is either defended by the Maginot Line. We have a system, they had such like a system of communication where like they had phone and radio lines. So they were immediately able to like signal back if like one station was under attack. me like this is exactly where they're at, communicate with all of like the local areas to go ahead and mobilize troops

and then be able to focus all of that. So I mean, it was a very elaborate and very like intricate, well thought of system. It was just in such, in places like the Arden Forest that were these huge heavily wooded areas, a lot of hills and ravines and rivers. You're like,

you can't get enough men and materials and tanks and stuff through here quick enough to catch us by surprise. At the same time, though, they fucking figured out a real nice three-headed pronged solution to get through it because they sent German troops to the Ardennes Forest. They sent them

down through Belgium. And I think there was a third flank that came through. I'm not positive on where they were, but they did actually travel. Luxembourg is where... If you're looking right there, you can see the one up top here, the one right there, I think, and then

the one down in Luxembourg. So yeah, there were a three-pronged attack coming not necessarily straight through the Maginot line, but they just made it useless because it was like going through a piece of Swiss cheese. They just found the holes in the system, but they broke off into smaller infantry groups. They found places where, because like the area where the Maginot line is, it was really sparsely like populated. So you're not going to have a ton of communication coming out of there being like, oh, yeah, you know, where we see a bunch of German movement, there's not going to be a bunch of quick communications. and again, it just wasn't expected that they could get through there. I don't think really anyone had attempted before,

but the French were just like, well, if they do trickle through here, we'll be able to mobilize enough people. It's not going to be a large enough force. They end up making it through, able to go ahead and launch enough forces through here, that basically what they do at that point is they get into France.

This is south of where all the troops are. It's not like right through the middle of them. And they're basically able to push into France and then swing, up into the north and try to kind of envelop the entire bulk of the French army and the entire

350,000 of the British Expeditionary Force. And pretty much just cut the head off immediately. Yeah, it didn't take long because they basically swept into the point to where it was what, May 15th, so five days was when they started

to push to Paris. Yeah. Well, they broke it up into two. So basically you had an arm coming through that was going to turn up to the north. Essentially, the region where, like, the Brits and the French were was called Flanders. Like, I've heard battle Flander. I don't know exactly what it. It must have been, like, an ancient French.

Ned? Did you just say Ned? Yeah. Kind of boring. Mm-hmm. And then the other, like, another prong of the attack was going to head toward Paris, essentially, the seat of power. So they were kind of splitting their forces. They were just pouring.

Like they had the bombers coming through, clearing the way they had, you know, it was the Blitz Creek, man. Yeah. And at that point, you had the official surrenders, Rotterdam and Torp and Brussels. So that was like their official,

like, you just finally got us. We're not going to push through any further. We're not going to try to fight you. You can just use all these countries that you just went through. Like they took those countries over. It was like they sponged those countries

while they were still pushing. into France. So as they're pushing, I mean, and they're really pushing into France, the entire battle of France lasted six weeks. And it was, to say it was way faster is an understatement. Any and all like pre-war allied thought had no clue that France could fall that quickly. France had like the largest standing military and the most tanks. So they were like, well, even if France getting beat a little bit, they're going to have enough time to stall the forces for us to mobilize. And as much so is that, like, during it was Dunkirk where, like, all of the British Expeditionary Force ended up getting pushed back, Dunkirk is kind of near, like, the Belgium-French border,

and is basically a port city. That's where you have the Battle of Dunkirk, and what was called Operation Dynamo took place between, I think it was May 26th to June 4th. Well, and that was even May 20th, Churchill orders the expeditionary force and everything to start leaving. Yeah. So he knew after 10 days, shit was going real south and they weren't going to be able to win. They were trapped in the north of France. I mean, they were going to get enveloped and the entire thing was going to get wiped out. I got to see this movie Dunkirk, because it sounds pretty awesome.

This whole idea, what it was, May 26th. Yeah, May 26th to June 4th, where essentially 338, more than 338. thousand allied troops during what was called Operation Dynamo. We talked about Dynamo a little bit during the church show. Uh-huh. And you had the entire, like, British Navy, you know, military ships running cover and everything. And what were called the little ships of Dunkirk, basically a bunch of like pleasure craft. I don't think you're getting like a two-person sailing boat, but you're getting like all of these like yachts, tugboats.

They went up and down the River Thames. Any boat that was seaworthy that could get over there. 850 of them. Yeah. Making multiple trips. That's incredible just to think about. Seeing some of that video footage. Dude, 338.

They were able to evacuate 338,000 guys by smaller boats during that time frame. It's completely saved the entire, or not the entire expeditionary force, but a big portion,

I think 60,000 people, 60,000 allies ended up getting taken prisoner because they were ordered to hold out to help protect the rest of the, of them and kind of try to delay the Germans.

Yeah, but May 30th, they had evacuated 120,000 people. How crazy is that you could do that with that many just little civilian boats? While taking fire, I'm sure. But we forgot to talk about how Dunkirk was able to happen. Who was the fellow that was running the Luftwaffe?

Oh, Herman Guring. Yeah, Herman Guring told the H-Man, he said, hey, I kind of want to prove my worth to you. Let's not keep sending the soldiers in to just murder the shit at everybody. Let me take care of it with the Luftwaffe. Let me take the planes in. Let me start cleaning these guys up. It'll be nice, easy for us.

We won't lose any men because this will all be fought from here. The Panzers have already pushed him this far and everything. We've got him isolated. He's like, he wanted the fucking glory. Yeah. That's all he wanted of finishing off the British forces. So, yeah, basically he convinced Hitler to be like, hey, you know, all these cool planes have been, having us a lot of success.

why don't like how cool would it be to like dive bomb the British soldiers and just do that all the time he's like yes fucking do it well like you said it gave him enough time to basically get fucking Dunkirk to happen and a lot of these guys served as like the core of the D-Day landing forces years later because they had military experience and and everything they had served over in France for a little bit so they still knew some of the general area that they were going to be landing in so without these guys and these guys knowledge of essentially what they saw in towns and stuff like that in France. Really thinking about a lot of that D-Day information had to come from these guys. Oh, yeah.

Because they'd recently just been there within the last couple of years. Between that, there were multiple other things that had happened. Blanking on the Canadian kind of a water landing, but they took so much information to build up from D-Day. But this is three, four years before D-Day's happening. and they're already kind of starting to build like we've got to figure out the seaborne shit because that's the only way we're going to make it across. And it was also they rescued a bunch of French forces too.

These guys had been locals in France and still had connections probably in France because you're still going to get the French underground resistance and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, so we hit France signing an armistice on June 22nd. June 24th is a real rough day. Well, let's bounce back real quick because we cannot forget and give him his big due

because after all looks one and done on June 10th, Italy declares war on Britain, France, announces their formal declaration. Basically, Mussolini waits to see how Hitler's invasion of France shapes up. And if it went poorly, he was just kind of, it was like the Homer Simpson thing where he just ducks back into the bush. Instead, he's like, you know what, it's looking good. Fuck it.

I'm at war with France and Great Britain. We need to kind of get this out in the open. just because it's going to keep playing a factor in pretty much every one of these theaters. Benito Mussolini might have been the worst leader. He was the Homer Simpson. Yeah. He just kept,

every time he would walk out into the yard, he'd step on a rake and take it straight to the face. It was just like any time he wanted to, I guess maybe prove his worth. I feel like it was a comical stumble into power. Yeah. Like somehow he just, it was like when Hitler tried to do like the Bear Hall putch,

he just didn't have as many guys as Mussolini had and Mussolini happened to just be doing it at the right time and the right place and the guy was just like I guess you can run the government thing is dude Mussolini wasn't even like

he was the dictator but he was just like the prime minister there was still a king above him and at no point during this thing I'm sure the king was like should we be doing this and he's like quiet you we're gonna do this but they still had a marking

why at no point was the king of Italy not like like, okay, Italian subjects, get him out of here. They did. It was just way too late. But I'm what I'm saying it. First, so apparently did Italy want war as well? I think part of Italy's, and it'll come up when we get down into North Africa, but I think there was a lot of jealousy in Italy towards what the British and French had done in Africa,

as far as colonizing it, because Italy, I think, was in more of a need for some of that. You, yeah, I think you hit it perfectly on the head. So Italy at this point, Italy wasn't one of those like, they used to have the Roman Empire. Yeah, they used to span the Mediterranean and everything like that, but now Italy was small. It had shrunk over the years, I mean, carved up and everything. And Italy saw all these colonies and all this shit. And so Italy was like, hey, we need to reestablish this Roman Empire. Yeah.

And so that's going to be one of the key. reasons why they are so involved in North Africa, is they're trying to establish just control of the Mediterranean. And then you also have, I had no idea. Apparently they had some stuff going on in Ethiopia. Oh, yeah. So Ethiopia is one of the countries that borders the, that's not the Red Sea, but it's right. It's Mediterranean, isn't it? It's whatever leads into the Suez Canal from, like, the Indian Ocean.

It was one of the countries that borders that, like little water tributary that goes in. basically giving them control of certain ports and everything. So they had this business in Ethiopia where they had taken over Ethiopia. Apparently the French were okay with it. They were just like, you're not fucking with us. Just do whatever you want in Ethiopia. So Italy already had kind of a hand in this. So like this Suez Canal is like the lifeblood of like oil coming in from the Middle East.

Big business for Great Britain. Yeah, all this stuff coming in from China and Japan of all the raw goods. Like huge business. And if Italy could control that and then spread its sphere. of influence there, it would control all of that. Unfortunately, they just had a thumb for a dictator that could not figure out. Him making it out of the royal castle on days would shock me. It seems like he was such a blundering idiot.

So, yeah. And it's only going to get worse. Yeah. It's going to get like three stooges type fucking ridiculous, it seems like. So they declare war, like you said, the French surrender on June 22nd, 19, 40. June 24th is a disgustingly bad day. So is that the day that they sign it?

Yep. So real quick, all of France essentially wasn't really under Nazi occupation. There was the southern portion of France, so Paris is more northern. So about half of France, the southern half, was under control of what was basically the Vichy. The Vichy government? The Vichy government, which essentially had agreed to non-assisting. with any other countries and would back Hitler, right? I think if they were to be tested, they would help out.

Yes. So they were allowed essentially to forego German occupation and kind of like, but don't fuck with us because we can just march right in and do what we did to the rest of France. Yeah. Hitler's, I feel like this was probably the biggest moment of the war for Hitler. He has a lot of weird things that he stumbles into that are great. But that June 24th, they marched to the exact train car. where Germany had surrendered World War I?

So it was the location, was the forest of, it's not, it's compien. I don't know, sorry, I'm not great at French, but I think he had the railway car brought there because like it was the same place, but I don't know that railway car was there as like a monument.

It might have been. Yeah. But yeah, basically had the French sign their surrender the same place that the German Empire had to sign the Treaty of Versailles and its surrender. And what did he do after it?

He celebrated, didn't he? Didn't he take the tour? He blew it up. Oh, I do know that he took the tour of Paris and was taking pictures of himself in front of all the monuments. Just basically is like a remembrance of saying we lost to you guys before,

but I'm going to go ahead and take a picture in front of all your shit. He blew the motherfucking thing up like a day or two later. and as far as like we haven't touched on this yet but we got to talk about the the purvitin the fucking that's the meth

the meth build that they gave during the blitzkrie and everything yeah it's kind of a fitting name yeah so yeah the blitzkrieg was also so successful because you were having these armored and you know armor columns and troops they were able to cover these vast distances

very quickly well how do you not get tired You just fucking give all your soldiers meth or this purvitin stuff. And guess what? They're alert and ready to go and march all night. I don't know if it was strictly meth, but it was just an amphetamine, wasn't it? It was meth. And then apparently the American troops really liked amphetamines too. Those were speed.

Amphetamines played a... I think in the Pacific speed was big. I can see that. I can see that because you wouldn't want to sleep. Not only that, but we had... baseball players taking Greenies back at that time too and Greenies were just amphetamines. So it had permeated our culture enough

to where the sports athletes were taking it. I'm sure it was probably like Ted Williams coming back from World War II and he's like, hey guys, we use this shit over there they're called Greenies, they're awesome. You can stay awake for an entire baseball game. So after this whole French thing goes down, Molotov, the foreign political minister,

whatever, for Russia, freaking makes it congratulations to Hitler. And in this speech and congratulations, congratulations he's like the Nazi war machine is powered by Soviet fuel the bullet cases that were fired into British soldiers were cast in Soviet metal like they're just basically like Britain's hearing this and I understand that you have to get past all this shit for like alliances eventually and everything but like Britain's like what the fuck are you talking about man like you're supposed to be part of like this deal of like keeping this guy in check you guys had a

non-aggression pact. You guys weren't supposed to be best friends. Yes, and you're not supposed to be bragging about like fucking your bullet casings, you know, being used to kill our soldiers. So before we go any further, bathroom break. Okay. Well, hey there, all you sexy high historians, how are you guys doing?

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And back to the show. All right. And we are back. So they don't waste any time because like in June 19 or sorry, in July of 1940, they're already planning Operation C-Line the Nazis are. An Operation C-Lion is like the folly of what, Caesar is the folly of Napoleon. Like basically Operation C-Lion is to cross the English Channel to be able to get boots on the ground in Great Britain. It's been the fall of many a leader trying to take over this island that, excuse me, their Navy is the Tits, right? They were the supreme. Complete naval supremat. They were the premier naval power in the entire world, which makes complete sense because you are on an island.

Yeah, they had to train that way to be able to still exist. Exactly. Like, yeah, the Spanish had a huge, Arna Mottah, but they also were connected to mainland Europe. There was land for me. They were just on a peninsula. They can walk back to mainland Europe. You can park a boat anywhere around Great Britain. So they had naval superiority.

And again, boats take a long time to build. The other thing about boats is a ton of materials to build. So the German Navy, the Kriegs Marine, doesn't have really anything on par numbers-wise with Great Britain as far as the Navy goes. Also... Their battleships were called pocket battleships. Is that right? Yeah, pocket battleships. that were just basically like large cruisers

because they were building pocket battleships because during the Treaty of Versailles and the rearmament what they were allowed to have it put a restriction on tonnage for what they could have or what type of ships, capital ships. Or I guess a battleship is a capital ship they couldn't have any capital ships. Well, and I think during the appeasement too,

they went to Great Britain and said, can we build up a little bit of a navy? And they're like, no. What about like 30% or 35% of the tonnage? We should have that 35% of your Navy. It's only 35% and then part of the Navy. And then part of the appeasement was like, fine, 35%. And they started building U-boats and all that kind of shit.

Yeah, well, they are 35% and immediate were like 75% and just went nuts. So you also have Great Britain, which has the RAF, the Royal Air Force. So they still have air superiority over Britain. In fact, part of the reason that the Dunkirk evacuation was so successful is because it was so close to mainland Britain. At some point during the English Channel, it's what, between 16 and 20 miles separate? You can see across it. You can see the White Cliffs of Dover from certain parts of France. So you were able to have spit fires and hurricanes, the RAF fighters, come over to provide air cover against the German fighters and bombers that were trying to bomb all the soldiers at Dunkirk.

I get so fucking jacked up when you start talking about names of these things. About the planes? Names of airplanes are so cool. Here's the other thing too is the Germans, they just were like the Measure Schmidt B-109. It was just like... The guy that created it, they just gave him the name. Yeah, plus anything. I mean, and of course, like, the spitfire,

it was like the submarine spit fire and the hawker hurricane. Yeah, the hawker hurricane. I don't know why that gets me so horned up, but whenever I start hearing you talk dirty about that thing. Yeah. A little P-51 Mustang. Somebody had a corvette.

A little Liberator. Not the names, just what they were called. That was it, that's what it was. The Liberator? There was the B-24 Liberate. I'm trying to remember. There was, there's so many different ones, like the Statafortress.

that one was the big silver one that dropped like the annulgay and then what was the one that the British belt that there was I'll figure it out The Hawker I think is my favorite But so Operation C-Lion Basically called that

The Nazis had to have air superiority Over both England and the English Channel And the British Isles And the British Isles So this is when in July 1940 There's some debate on when it ended But July 1940 to May 1941 essentially is the Battle of Britain.

There are portions of the Battle of Britain in which a lot more happens during that time frame. But the Battle of Britain is basically when the British are just bombed. Because in order to pacify and remove their capability to make war, the Nazis are just sending out to bombers to bomb factories, airfields, any points of military interest, naval shipyards, anything that has to do with their ability to make war. And along with that, along with the bombings, it was just kind of like a literal game of battleship in the English Channel between German U-boats

and British Royal Navy boats. It was September 14th, this carrier, the Ark Royal, ended up sniffing out a U-boat in battle. And basically they started dropping depth charges. and once that U-boat had to surface, they took all 39 of the crew prisoner. And then, like, a week later, it was September 26th, the German media put out that the Ark Royal was sunk.

So they're trying to push, like, even these battles that they're losing on the water, the Nazi propaganda machines still like, well, I mean, we sunk them, we got all those guys back. I'm sure that crew was never seen again. So what's there to say that you can't, say, oh, well, we sunk their battleship, too. You're controlling all the flow of media into your country.

And your, in your citizenry thinks that even when shit's going bad, it was the same thing that happened during World War I. Even when shit was going bad, they were losing it, all that kind of shit. It was everything's hunky-dory, ladies and gentlemen, don't worry about it, we're doing great. And so much of that changes during the Battle of Britain. The Battle of Britain changes the way I think that the German people saw the war. Gurring, I think, said he needed between like three to five days. to completely make the RAF a non-issue.

Well, and they started, like you were saying, hitting those industrial parts, but they just bombed the shit out of every RAF airfield. Yeah. Trying to take them out, because if they can take them out, they get free rein over everything else. Here's the thing, too,

is a lot of these places in order to spread them out. I don't know if, okay, so like the first part of the movie, Pearl Harbor, horrible movie, but just as a point of reference, the place where Ben Affleck is like stationed, where he's flying out of, it's essentially just a large manor or a state

that has a lot of open grass that they turn into these makeshift runways. These fighters don't have to take off a concrete runway. They can land on grass runways as long as they're level. As long as flat, basically. Exactly. And so what they would do is you would have all of these locations. You have no shortage of these estates and everything over Great Britain. What you probably do have a shortage of during this war,

you have all of these rich British people that are going over to Canada to live to be safe. Yeah. They don't want to be a part of this. And they're like, we're just going to use your estates to house all of their fighter pilots. Like, fucking sweet. So you would have groups where you would maybe have like 10 or 15

or maybe 20 planes and all the pilots housed to this. And then you would have radio communication, telephone lines. And they would know how close are you to this sector? This is your sector. When we call you up, they would scramble the fighters. And so you don't have these huge airports where you're launching hundreds of fighters. you're launching 10 fighters here, 15, and you're all gathering, you know, to meet the enemy.

Yeah. So, you know, to hit these places. And also the big advantage is that when the German military was doing their buildup, you remember how they had to use their airplanes as like commercial airlines? Yeah. That was the way to hide it. It was flight clubs for pilots. Yep.

Mm-hmm. Well, they're using these planes as their bombers. These bombers don't have a very heavy bombing capacity. Yeah, there's a lot of them, but they're not really, they don't have like a true, like, four-engine bomber like the United States and, like, the Brits had. Well, because they weren't built for it. They were supposed to be disguised as passenger planes. Well, now... You could knock some shit out.

You could attach some weapons to it, but other than that, it wasn't streamlined for... You didn't have anything looking like a fighter taking people across the country. Size-wise, people are like, why do you have this plane that requires so many engines but doesn't have a lot of seats? because it was meant to carry a ton of bombs that are, you know, smaller and everything. Germans must be bigger people. Exactly. So during the Battle of Britain, basically, you have other little things that are occurring. You have what's called the Blitz.

And this is where Britain is bombed. Oh, and I should add this. At some point during this Battle of Britain, a Nazi plane bombs London. August 15th. August 15th. August 15th. Walter Rubensorff was he was headed out to bomb it was an airfield that was further out from the outskirts of London but he had gotten his signals mixed up and bombed an airfield that was

very much perveton huh too much pervinton yeah you think that's what it was he had too much meth in we're going to London he couldn't wait till they got over London to drop it nine to London so he bombs an airfield that is in like suburbia of London course when you're bombing something like an airfield, you're not just hitting the airfield, you're hitting everywhere else around it. So as soon as that happens, it's been ratcheted up a lot because there was something that Hitler put in place, I believe it was called Article 17, saying the only time that they would be able to bomb basically like residential areas was going to be as a measure of recourse for the

attacks being put on them. So Hitler's like, I'm the only one that can tell you guys to hit humans. civilian areas civilians yes and now it's been he's definitely okay with hitting humans yeah probably but now it's been ratcheted up because

that order has gone in the wind because rubensdorfer decided to accidentally bomb London so the whole air air force principle that like Churchill and all of them believed in was the bomber will always get through

I didn't weirdly enough I didn't understand that how it was intended until literally, I think, just this week. He didn't mean it in a sense of the enemy bomber will always get through. He used it for reasoning why they should have such a large strategic bombing fleet because their bomber will always get through. Fighters won't always get through.

These types of planes won't always get through. The bomber will always get through. So because of that, the RAF had built and developed like a large British, like strategic bombing fleet. and the one that I was trying to think of the name was the Avro Lancaster and it was like a four-engine just huge beast of a plane and it's what they used is like their primary long-range bomber. This was the one that could get to like Berlin.

The Afro or the Avro? Avro. Avro Lancaster. So back and forth during the Battle of Britain while the Nazis are bombing Britain, Britain's like, fuck you then, we're going to do the same thing. And they start bombing strategic Nazi targets, like in the Rhineland, all the industrial complexes, things like that. So it's going back and forth until this dude bombs London.

And then Churchill's like, game on, bitch. And it was like the very next night. They sent 81 R.AF bombers to London or to Berlin to just smash all the industrial sites that they could. And of course, just like bombing an airfield, these industrial sites were in Berlin. So you're hitting people's houses. Mm-hmm. Oh, yeah. You're launching from such an... It's not like you're coming in low. I mean, like, I can see the building launch.

You are so high that you basically have, you know, you have your bombardier who's down below the cockpit looking down through the scope, trying to adjust it, telling the pilot a little to your left, up a little down. Like, you're trying to give these microscopic bands. And basically, when you see that thing in an area of your scope, you're just like release bombs and then just... It's a, you know, it's a matter of numbers, not quantity, not quality. Well, and not to mention if you ever see video of a bomber dropping bombs back then,

it just looks like there's two dudes just hucking bombs out of the, out of the whole. They fall and they start to drift to the side and back and forth. Nothing's accurate. But there's so many bombers in these waves coming in that they're covering such a huge, you know, huge portions of these targets. So in retaliation during the Blitz, which took place, I think, September 7th, or started on September 7th and 1940, 56 out of the next 57 days, London was bombed. And all 57 nights consecutively.

Yeah. I can't imagine. Some cool shit that I learned about this. Just doing this research. You know that goofy-ass spin-off saying, keep calm and carry on? Yeah. I guess that was something that Winston Churchill had coined all the way back then and somehow it just got brought up like 10 or 15 years ago.

It got co-opted. and got... Yeah, it's like eat, pray, love, or some shit like that. That was cool. It was expected that the royal family was going to head over to Canada for obvious reasons of protection.

And it was Queen Elizabeth's parents. They're bombers. I mean, they got bombed in places. Here's the thing, too. So you would think, like... And the RAF is doing incredible. There's just so many bombers that, I mean, from a comparison standpoint,

they're definitely giving better than they're getting. Yeah. So they're killing, you know, they're shooting down more enemy planes than, you know, their fighters are getting shot down. Here's the big kicker. When, like,

fighters would come over with the Nazi bombers, but because they were flying over the English Channel and their range wasn't as good, they could only stay and kind of, and protect the bombers and, you know, take on the fighters a limited amount of time before they had to high-tailed back to France where they were launching off the coast of occupied France.

REF guys could stay up there for a while fighting. They didn't have to worry about saving gas or anything because they could just land. They're dropping right below themselves. Here's the other thing too. German gets shot down anywhere over the English Channel or England. You're not getting that guy back as a pilot. Any of these REF guys having to bail out or getting shot down, they're back in a new plane. As long as the landing's soft, they can go back up.

And so even now, you're going to kind of start to see that there is an attrition to some of the tactics that the Nazis are doing. and it's going to be, it's going to get even worse. But what you're seeing here is you're not really seeing the fact that, yeah, you're launching, you know, all of these bombing raids, but you, oh, and the Germans also think that they're inflicting a lot more damage on the ARIF. Like their pilots are coming back and overinflating their numbers for kills. Yeah. While at the same time, they think to production of British aircraft is way lower than it actually is.

Like, things were being built, like, on farms. Like, you would have all these parts come into, like, what would look like a dairy farm and underneath all of the covers, they'd be assembling like spitfires and shit. Like the whole country was just on war footing. The big, big part of it, I think we both agree on it, is the focus on trying to get back

at London for the bombings in Berlin to just focus on the cities. It allowed all of those airfields to be rebuilt at a lot faster pace. Yes. And it just allowed all those RIF pilots just enough rest to be able to come come back and really start whooping or to start training yeah to refill their ranks you you were

that was a really good point that like it had they been hammering the raf and continued to do that they might not have been wiped out but their ability to defend would have been diminished i mean you can only take so much damage and everything them giving them that break allowed the pilots to recuperate their aircraft numbers to be rebuilt stuff to be repaired and then new pilots to be trained by experienced pilots, being able to do training missions and things like that. You can focus on training instead of just sending them up into battle every time. And that way when you do end up having to get into this shit again, you have more competent pilots all the way around. So, I mean, the big thing that Churchill comes out and says, you know, with the RAF, it got, you know,

this was something that was for months and as long as it was happening, if you would go see a movie in the States, this would be on the new reels. The Battle of Britain, you know, rages in the skies over London. and it would be shown the planes and all the white tails, you know, all the contrails and all that kind of stuff, you would see highlights of this, so it got national attention, which kind of seems weird to say about a war, but when it's in the media and worldwide media,

obviously something crazy is going on. Yeah. And that was what Churchill was describing as, you know, the speech never have so much been owed to so few. I was just a hell of an order. I'm really glad we did an episode on him before this. oh yeah definitely he just he was kind of the the soul of the british resistance it's like you were kind of asking me like man like these people to to hold out especially when you were like imagine you know you're six days in and you're like man they've fucking bombed us the last six days and then you're like 12 days and you're like are so they're not stopping like how long can this thing go on 25 days and you're like so it it can't stop apparently it doesn't have to stop just every day day you wake up in that train station and you put another mark on the wall of like 15, 20 days straight.

You're so good. You've got your time running into the bomb shelter so fucking dialed in. Yeah. And that's, I can't do it so much. It's literally, these people were surviving in bomb shelters. They were sleeping underground in like the subway stations and subway areas of Great Britain because that was the safety of being below ground. Like that was where you had to sleep with everybody else underground and then during the day you pray to god there wasn't a bombing raid but you go out you do your shit and then you just come back to the exact same spot in the tubes in london for protection they destroyed so many buildings and so like that's the other thing too is every day that you wake up after you've been down there and you just walk out and there was just a building

that was there the next or the day before and it's just smoldering rubble what do you do i don't know be thankful that it wasn't your building yeah i guess just the assault that those people took was just absolutely insane and not to mention you still have everybody getting up the next day and going into those factories and building the new shit

your production is still happening and well apparently like Hitler had seen enough by the end of September because by the end of the month he had suspended not canceled because that would have made him he's like we're just going to put a pin

we're going to put the pin in the sea lion and hold off on that for a little bit Until 1941 was his play. And then they were even, you know, developing and building like barges and landing craft and to try to get soldiers across to have all of that stuff built up. So it's not like they weren't pouring, you know, men and resources into that. It is pretty impressive to be able to win a mental war of attrition with Hitler. The fact that those British people were so stubborn that they held out against like the most stubborn man in history.

Yeah, but like really just like boil it down and think about it. So Guring thinks without really knowing what the fucking. he's talking about about like their strengths and everything. We're going to be through this in like max five days. And then your months in and they're still not giving in. And Hitler's like, well, what's going on? He's like, I didn't know what I was talking about. He's like, there's never been a war like this.

Turns out this is the longest five days in the history of days. And Hitler's like, well, now I'm fucking embarrassed. So we're suspending the fucking plan. Now I have to go back to the table and I got to tell everybody that my calculations were wrong. Gurin gets away. He's like one of the few people that can get away with stuff. Because like if that had been someone else and like had been like, yeah, five days, start putting all this manpower and resources into gathering all of these guys. And then it ends up having to be suspended.

That person's usually dead. That person gets hauled out by the fucking Gestapo. Yeah. They're just strength and tenacity to be able to last as long as they did. And then sort of come back stronger. And we talked about some of this and we're going to be getting into Barbarossa and the Eastern Front. into the Soviet Union here in a second. But when these troops come back

and start taking over these swaths of land against Germans, they, I don't think, are very... They're basically handing out receipts. Yeah. As far as when they come back and they're on the offensive, they're not sparing a lot of lives. It's revenge. Yep. Yeah.

It's just fucking call it what it is. What do you have to say that that revenge isn't justified when you just were awoken every single night, and stayed away for 58 straight nights. I can not want to hear about it or not agree with it, but I can't say it's not just like, I don't know. I can't say that. You're not wrong when you say that it was justified.

And Barbarossa. Well, before we get to Barbarossa in October on the 28th, that same year in 1940, Italy invades Greece. He's like, I'm not really, and this whole time too, while like Hitler's doing this stuff, Mussolini's basically telling him like, we're still building up our four. We're still building up our forces.

We're not ready to fully help you as far as all of our soldiers. And it was like, that's fine. I need like half a million workers. And he's like, ah, I can send you workers. We got workers. It's going to slow down our production. It's going to slow down our production, but as long as I'm helping and as long as I'm a part of it. I think it was what?

1939, he flat out told him. He's like, hey, I'm here morally for you. I got your back. But if you want me to put any boots on the ground, it's going to take a while. Yes. And then he asked him for a bunch of shit, too. He's like, I need a lot more gas, a lot more steel. He's like, I need this, I need that.

Hitler's like, I'll send you what I fucking can. He's like, please just keep supporting me in the media and supporting me morally or some shit. How are you like a fascist ruler that? Pen pal. Yeah, dude, how are you a fascist ruler that doesn't have a good enough army built up to be able to help? Just send thoughts and prayers. And that's where we see this tremendous botch job that they did on Greece that Papa Hitler had to come and clean up himself. he's like oh he's like but since I can't help you

I do have enough to try to take over Greece and Greece is going to be great for us we're going to control you know the entire that entire Gulf area we're going to control just more of the Mediterranean we'll get more oil in he gets down there can't keep it up to finish and then the Nazis have to end up coming in and helping him yeah I I don't know if that debate rages of

Italian over Greek people As far as that goes, like, who's better? Well, here's the thing, too, is I don't think it was like, I think basically what happened is the Nazis looked at the map and looked at it real quick. So you have Austria that they're in right now. What's between them and Greece? It's got to be like the Caspian Sea or something like that.

It's Yugoslavia. Oh, I think you're talking about the waterway. Because the waterway was really important, too. Yes. So they actually use that also as an excuse me, like, well, we'll come help you in Greece, but in order to get to Greece, we got to go through Yugoslavia. So they just take over and invade Yugoslavia. And then I think they end up invading Crete too. Oh, they invaded Crete afterwards because that was the big deal, was once the Greeks

went ahead and pushed the Italians out and the Germans came down, the Germans pushed them all the way out of Greece to where they had to retreat down to Crete. And Crete was actually the one and only time that the Germans used where you dropped people out of planes with paramilitary? Paratroopers. Yeah. It was the only time

that they dropped them in because Hitler was concerned at the rate that they were being killed as they were being dropped out of the planes. So that was the one time that they had used paratroopers was to get into Crete and they still ended up winning

and taking over Crete. But it was the one... Falsham Yager, I think is what they called the paratroopers. Could be. But yeah, that was the one time that they were used was to get into Crete

and Hitler didn't like the way that they were just being shot as they were floating down, so he put him into it. We'll land him a different time, man. We prove it works. That's the thing. We saw what happened, and Hitler was like,

this is too much for us. We're like, fuck it. We'll strap some dummies with some parachutes and send them out. Maybe they'll get shot at it. So in December 1940 to February 1941, this is finally where you're going to see the allies start to actually hit back. So this is Operation Compass.

and this is kind of where all of the there's shit happening so much between now and the time of like the Normandy landings that it's insane and so we're you know as soon as December of 1940 allies are in North Africa

and I think they've defeated and pushed like Italy out of North Africa or kind of forcing them out at that point because then that's when you get Irwin Rommel in February 41 Operation Sunflower. Grab board three. And with Operation Sunflower,

that's where you get the German, what they call the German Africa Corps. Spelled A-F-R-I-K-A. That had to be a K-K-K-K. Oh, no, because that wasn't a thing back then. No, it wasn't a thing. But you get Erwin Rommel, who... The Desert Fox.

The Desert Fox. The fucking bad-ass nickname. So, at this point, because Italy had been in control at this point, Germany was able to go ahead and take advantage of them having control the Mediterranean getting all of the oil that was coming from the Middle East and you know being supplied that way well because of the allies coming in and starting to force them back they're starting to take back control in North Africa and also kind of over what would you consider that at the Middle East? Yeah, Middle East Mediterranean sort of and essentially when Italy showed up down there they showed up in Libya and that's got all the North Africa stuff on it but when they showed up in Libya They really wanted to push over into Egypt because they needed control of that Suez Canal. They really, really like the stuff that Egypt had.

And so as they were coming over from Libya, they got to a place that was called, what was it? El Al-L-L-A-Mean. No, it was city barina. Borena. It was a town over in Egypt. So they crossed over, they had gone through Libya, and they were just basically following the coastline as they get over to there. Once they get over into Barini,

that was when the forces of the Americans and the forces of the British, and then the British colonies, there were Indian troops that were there too. And they're just like, hey, you guys have come too far. This really isn't going to work out well for you. You need to go back. And the Italians thought they were hot shit. And the Americans just came and swept them all the way back along the coastline through Barini.

They had pushed them all the way back into Libya. That's right, because the British do take control the Suez Canal. Yep. Yep. They had gone through and swept them all the way back to their starting point, which I believe was Benghazi in Libya. and February 6th, 1941, the fall of Benghazi brought Irwin R. R. R. Rommel, the desert fox,

down to help the German forces. It was just another mess that they had to clean up that was Italy. And it's so shocking that it just had to keep fucking happening this way to where Italy would go in there. And they were probably decent at like causing a ruckus. But in order for them to be able to keep an evening, thing, they always needed Big Brother to show up and clean up their mess. And I don't know what Mussolini was doing as far as trying to guide his guys, but they just were never prepared. It was like

they were never ready to get into the fight that they just kept getting themselves into. I feel like, so like with the strategy, and you're like, well, why wouldn't you just build up your forces and do the Normandy landing much earlier than this? It's so close. You know, that's the closest spot to Britain. That was also the most expected spot for it to happen. And at this point, you also have the building up with like the Atlantic wall. So the Atlantic wall starts getting built as soon as, you know, the Nazis have taken over these areas. And you had such, you know, you have such a long time between an assault that is kind of outside of like little small, like special operations, assaults and missions. You don't have a full assault going on between Britain and France. It's

basically just bombing each other back and forth and doing that kind of shit. So they're like, We got to try to find a way into attack Germany. So they're like, okay, well, what we can do is we're secure here on Britain. We have a staging area. Yep. Why don't we have a second staging area? Because then we can open a two front war coming up through what Churchill called the soft underbelly of Europe, which was like southern France, Italy and all that. So it wasn't just about kind of like trying to deny resources like oil and all that kind of stuff.

It was strategic in that manner. But it was also about opening up that second front. and it doesn't take long for Hitler to be in control of Europe that he's pretty much conquered as far west as he can go he's not going to conquer Spain he has an agreement with Franco and everything he's taken France they built some like they don't waste any time like converting France for war either the portion they control they built like crazy I don't know have you ever watched Nazi megastructures no you'll get fucking caught up in

for like a week straight. It basically shows you all the building projects that they did as part of World War II. Like Hitler's like Wolfslayer bunker, dude, the amount of concrete that they used, they built some crazy submarine pins in France where they can bring in the U-boats to resupply, where they were protected from air raids. Like the roofs are like 40 feet of thick concrete. Jesus Christ. But it's just nuts.

But like they're building all this as fast as they can. My point on that being is that they've already gone to the Atlantic on that side. So Hitler's like, what's a question? called Leibendrop? Uh, yes, Leibnchrob. He starts to hear Leibentrop again. Uh, what is it? Uh, Leibintraba.

Living space. Living space. He's like, I can't go further this way. And his attention gets drawn back over toward Soviet Union. Well, keep Leibandrop in your head because that's going to be something that I feel is, I don't know, I want to get your take on it. So as Chris alluded to earlier back on the Eastern Front, just a little rewind. just a little rewind

they show up the Soviets show up into Finland November 30th 1939 for this winter war that happens Finland just whipped the Soviets back all the way until March 12th 1940 when a peace treaty is signed

like Chris said they took 9% of Finland when they were looking for 100 it was like the worst let's make a deal ever yeah and once Hitler sees that and realizes like hey we can't really fuck with Great Britain

They're pretty solid. We're not going to be able to really penetrate them. But Soviets, the guys that we have the non-aggression pact with, that thing that I signed and we made a real big deal about it, they're pretty weak. They just got beat by the fins. So I wonder if we need to spread this Lieben-Trop idea. They got a lot of land up there.

That's where he originally was going to develop it. That's why he took over Poland. That was his plan the entire time. It's in mind conf. Like, I feel like when he does the, these things of like making the non-aggression with the Soviets, playing nice with the event, everything. They think that he's changed his game plan and he's come around to a different way of

thinking. No, he's still trying to get to that same goal. He just didn't spell out the entire playbook. He basically needed to wait until he had the Soviets because he couldn't have just come right out against them because then they would have, he would have been fighting too many fronts at that point. Yeah. It just the whole idea of him always staying on plan A

was something that really I don't know man plan A was just always in his mind and he was never willing to change up. Plan A had like to get to B had like micro plans within it. Yeah, yep. Like it wasn't just like his plan wasn't just you know become the dictator and then take over part of the Soviet Union. I'm sure like he was asked about that by fucking stone

been like hey in your book and he's like yeah man he's like I wrote that years ago he's like mean you're good right and in reality that was just part of the play in order to get to the same ending he could just change out the middle of the book and that's really what he did because he knew that the Soviets were going to be somebody

they wanted to take on and then once he sees the poor showing of the Red Army in Finland he's like but we might as well just start working he's like why am I paying these guys for all the gas and resources that I'm getting when they seem like it would be very easy to just take all this shit from them. Those can still be mine, yeah. And all we have to do is sneak over the border. I'm going to send

one troop down to, I believe it was the Lowlands to start working on oil. And the caucuses, I think. I'm going to send another group to start to establish the farmland and to start clearing that area out so we can start getting some seed down. And then I'm going to send another area at kind of, was it Leningrad that they said? started around. I believe they worked through Leningrad before they got to Stalingrad. Yeah, but they went for Moscow first. So Operation Barbarossa

was the Nazi invasion, opening the eastern front of the Soviet Union. Now, because the United States wasn't in it, not a lot gets covered as far as the invasion and how long they were actually at war with the Soviet Union. So basically from 1941,

June 22nd, That's when the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany are at war. So for the majority of the war for fucking, you know, four years, they're at war with each other. It's the largest invasion in recorded history. I think three million. Yep. Three million German troops invaded the Soviet Union. There were several like prongs of the attack, but basically the initial and largest thrust is there like we're just fucking high-telling it from Moscow.

Well, when you hear three million, you think that that's just such an expansive. amount of people. I want to say their line that they sent through was like 2,000 miles long. The front was enormous. Yeah. Because they had to essentially cover

because as you like, if you're looking at a map or anything, which this is useful if you guys have the ability to look at a map while we're talking, it makes a lot of sense. As you're marching into Russia, it gets wider.

Yep. And so the front gets larger. Weirdly enough that I didn't really think about this, most of the major Russian cities are in the eastern portion or in the western portion of Russia. Yeah. I don't know what the fuck's all the way across.

I don't even know if I could name you a city that way. Siberia. I thought Siberia was like the northern part too. I think it's like north. Yeah. So you have basically areas that are close. You have Leningrad, which is kind of up in the north as you get into Russia. You have Stalingrad, which is further in the south.

And then kind of in the middle as you're working your way up, kind of in an easterly or, yeah, easterly direction. That's when you're having to march to Moscow. And so that's essentially what this plan is, is we're going to march into Moscow. we're going to go ahead and cut off the head of the Soviet leadership, and now we're going to have our leaving shop. This will be our living space, and then we'll be good. And remember how I used to call the Soviet people like savages and like intramens and like subhumans and everything?

That still all applies. They're all still communists. They're all still communists. So now we get our chance. We're done playing nice. The facade is over. Just there, which I think in the beginning, it seems like they probably were not wrong.

because the Soviets were weak. They did not have their shit together, and the Germans would just blast through, which is great. The thing that I feel like we talk about in every war episode, but it somehow isn't like the main driving factor that we ever think of why people lost, is they can move so fast on this Blitzkrieg,

but their supply lines have to be able to catch up where they're going to be. It's going to be a bunch of unforeseen, but should have been very easily seen factors. And you know I love me some war numbers. I love the strategy of it all and everything like that. So kind of just getting back for Barbarossa because it's going to have its own episode. So it's going to be light what we cover on.

It's just going to be certain key events. Then we're going to just gloss over it because we got more war to cover. So bloodiest, like, active, because you have this basically what's called the Axis-Sovia War within World War II becomes the bloodiest in world history. 30 million dead on the east.

Eastern Front. It saw more land combat than any of the other theaters combined. Just the sheer size of the area. Yes. And the amount of people. They're seriously just shipping people. Once they get to needing more Soviet soldiers, all that land we just talked about, not known what the fuck it is, they're just pulling people in from there to serve. Thrown rifles in their hands. Get out there and don't turn around because we're going to shoot you if you do. Yeah, that. We'll get to that. Yeah, okay. So the night of the invasion, this guy, his name was Marshall Temashenko. He comes in. to play kind of in and out of this. And then Georgi Zukov.

Zukov is like a major Russian general throughout this whole thing. Are those the two dudes that have the battle in Berlin to take the Rostadt? They end up meeting in Berlin because one was supposed to end up, oh, yeah. The ones that Stalin plays against each other? Yes. Okay. Yeah, we'll get to that. Because he sports Zukov, I think.

So they basically send the night of the invasion. They send out an announcement to all of the Soviet soldiers and they say, do not do anything to response to provocation, you are not to take any actions directly without like direct explicit from like, or from Moscow. Well, not to step on that, but something that we missed

going into Poland was part of the provocation to come into Poland was they had taken, the Germans had taken I think it was like 10 or 15 people out of the prison camps and they dressed them up in Nazi gear

and then they killed them right along the border. Like a German radio station? Yes. Or something like that. And they had reported that these German soldiers were fired upon by Poland

and by the Polish forces and that was the provocation for them to go into Poland. So I'm sure that Stalin seeing that game that was just played like, hey, I'm sure they might be coming but we can't have anything look like there was provocation.

I know you guys are hot, but don't fire on anybody. until you're ready. Yeah, he might have suspected a little bit, but had he suspected it even to a serious degree, he'd have a lot more forces on that front. Yeah, I think so. Because they were met, the 3 million were met by not a smaller,

not too much smaller of a number of Soviet troops, were they? Yeah, they just weren't ready, though. So you didn't just have, so it was basically the Soviets, not just against the Nazis, but what you had as far as that combined force, the Axis force, you had the majority Germans, you had a bunch of Italians, you had

Hungarians, Romanians, and Finnish people. All these people that, as much as they hate the fucking Nazis that just took them over, they hate the Russians even more. And I'm sure a bunch of them were conscripted and being like, guess what? One of the advantages now that you're part of the Nazi empire is, you get a fight for us in the Eastern Front. Yay. They didn't give the Italians any ammo, probably, for their own safety. They had Spanish support too.

I don't think manpower, but they had material support from Spain. Yeah, Franco was just paying back the bill for the Spanish. Civil War. So, like you're saying, the invasion flaws, they just take so much fucking land and move so quickly through this. First of all, they're having to spread out, but the main thrust is going toward Moscow. They basically get to a point where, just from a mileage perspective here, so they've been really successful when they're not going like really long distances. Like, here's an example. Berlin to Paris, 656 miles. Still a pretty significant distance, but not super far away from German territory. That's Berlin. That's not even the border with Germany.

Well, and going through all of the fighting to get there, I think it was like less than nine months. Yeah. Then you have Berlin to Vienna, Austria, where they first go in. It's only 423 miles away from Berlin, not even the border of Germany. Then you have Berlin to Warsaw and Poland, 356 miles. To get to Moscow, Berlin to Moscow is 1,136.9. I'll round it up 1,137 miles. So you're going almost. double the distance that you had to march into Paris and have that logistics. So I don't think that part of their mindset was able to anticipate, first of all, how quickly they would outrun their supply lines because they get all the way within, I think, sight of Moscow to where they can see the Kremlin, the domes, and basically the invasion

force stalls. But what would have happened when they got it to Moscow? Oh, it would have been guerrilla warfare. No, they wouldn't have found anybody. Oh, that's right. It did. That's right. Because they moved all the industrial and everything around Moscow and the Kremlin. They moved it west.

So they did end up sending a force. I remember we talked about this, didn't we? They did send a force into Moscow and run around. And then someone lit fires and tried to trap them in there, right? Yeah, but there was nobody really to trap besides, unfortunately, the civilians that were there. Well, and here's the thing, too. All the entire way that they're marching into Russia, you know, usually you'd march into countries, like in Dunkirk, when they had to evacuate all the British expeditionary forces.

they had to leave all of their equipment. They trucks, tanks, guns, all that kind of stuff. Russia's like, no motherfuckers, scorched earth. They're literally destroying everything between them and Moscow as the German. There's no equipment for them to use. They're flooding fields. They're tearing up roads. They're basically making this as difficult as fucking humanly possible.

And just hearing some of this stuff, the Russian people, fucking scary. Yeah, oh yeah. Just as far as like a hearty fucking people. God damn. You live that long in the cold. going to do something to you. There was the amount of military personnel that didn't really have a problem with seating land and evacuating, running away from the German army coming up.

What was Stalin's plan to stop that? Oh, well, we get to that with Stalingrad. Oh, that didn't happen until then? I thought it had happened before that. There probably was, but Stalingrad is one of the huge examples of it. Okay. It's not one step backward or something like that, not one step backward. But two days after Barbarossa actually starts, oh, sorry, not two days after, two days after the invasion force stals, Hitler actually gets some news that really actually raises his spirits.

He hears that the Japanese have bombed the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. If you want to pause the episode here, if you're not completely familiar with it, pause now. Go back, listen to Pearl Harbor episode, and you're back. So this is what ends up getting America into the war And at this point I believe is it within a couple days They declare war America declares war on Japan

The very next day The very next day Germany declares war on the United States Yeah did you know that the United States Was not the first country To declare war against Japan The British had hadn't they They had declared war nine hours earlier because the news that reached Great Britain

and the time difference was enough to allow Churchill to get out there nine hours before Roosevelt gave his speech. And so Churchill had snuck in and declared war on Japan even before America had. He looked like the ultimate fucking wingman. Yeah, he looked like, hey, they fucking just hit as we're staggering backwards. He's the guy that jumped in in the middle of the fight and punched the guy that punched you.

Yeah, he wanted to be in there. He's like, I got you. I got you, buddy. How brilliant is that when you're trying to court America into the war, and then once it finally touches America, you're the first one in to declare war. Be like, hey, man, if you even want to take a couple days, that's cool. I just want you to know we're here already. So during Barbarossa, there was also the Siege of Leningrad

where he'd sent the force up there. Siege of Leningrad ends up lasting almost like, it ends up being almost like three years. It's a total of, oh, hold on. Is that 800? Yep, 872 days. So while everything else is going on in Europe during the course of the whole war, there's this siege of Leningrad and basically Hitler gave him instructions to exterminate,

wipe Leningrad because it's named after Lennon. There's this weird symbolism that Hitler thinks that's what's going to apply to Stalingrad. He's going to take the namesake city of Stalin. It's going to be this huge demoralizing thing, which it probably would have been. Probably. So it was blocked off and bombed. And just as far as Leningrad, this is all I'm going to say about it, ended up being about 1 million civilian dead.

800,000 starved. Just because of like they surrounded the city and didn't let anything in. Insane. So in summer, again, stuff's going to kind of as winter happens and everything, basically everything slows down on the eastern front. German Nazis there are basically just trying to regroup

and survive and get their splight lines. There's really no offensive going on. And the Russians are smart enough to know, well, first of all, you don't start a land war in Asia. And then secondly, you don't fucking launch an offensive during the winter time. Unless you're like the Mongolians or whoever it was that ended up winning over there. That's true.

But that one thing that I feel like, like Hitler was very well trained, I think, in this idea of the Blitzkrieg. But the natural enemy of the Blitzkrieg... I don't even think well trained. I think he just like, it worked a couple of times. It was novel. It was something new that nobody else had really seen. It had always worked and it was like the ace in the hole. Yeah.

Why can't just Blitzkrieg, Blitzkrieg? Well, we can't just Blitzkrieg for a thousand fucking miles. You can? To a certain extent, if you're able to keep those supply lines up. No, you can't. And we're going to discuss why you can't. We won't. But the natural enemy to the Blitzkrieg is going to be close combat fighting.

And the biggest issue that he runs into with Leningrad and then eventually in Stalingrad is he sends the Luftwaffe in to just bomb the hell out of the city. Now, that seems like it would be an effective technique to then swoop in and start clearing out. But all you did was create rubble to where you have to go through and clear these places room by room. And you can't run a blitzkrieg when you have to go and do that. When your tanks can't even get down the streets, it's all marching. You're clearing house to house. Exactly.

So you're like, it's a product of your own success. And it's their house. Exactly. Yeah. So you can be walking down these streets and they have these sniper positions up all over the city to where they're picking people off left and right now they're not taking out entire flanks there's a movie called in it have enemy at the gates have you seen it it's got jude law and re finds in it i'm not sure if the casting is great and everything but the story is of this guy named vizili

zite seven he's a sniper during the stallingrad okay battle of stallingrad and basically just like he's picking off german they get credit for picking off german officers and all this kind of stuff but basically with stallingrad prior to that you basically have in the summer of 42 it starts kicking back up, the thaw happens, they can start. Because in the spring, stuff is still so wet, muddy. You can't move armor and stuff. So you have to wait until it kind of dries up. So the Nazi offensive, they're like, okay,

Moscow didn't work out, I guess. Let's actually go secure some oils. So they actually head for the Caucasus, which are kind of in southern Russia. The Lowlands, probably. Yeah, kind of like, I think the Caucasus, isn't that region kind of around the Black Sea? Could be.

I think is what it is. So he's like, we need oil for the war effort and everything. the while they're doing this the soviets launched like an offensive and almost like catch their flank and almost end up like destroying them and so Hitler's like well shit if we're just going to be going for the caucuses we might get flanked again let's go ahead and draw their attention so he splits the forces and he's like party you're going to take stalingrad that's the crown jewel the rest of you're going to the caucuses so august 42 um on the 23rd actually is the official start date of the battle of stolengrad and And basically the justification for it other than being like a token of Joseph Stalin is that it basically allows them to, it's a transportation hub because it's right there kind of near the Black Sea or it's on a big river. And it has, oh, where was it? It's like a transportation hub as well. It gives a lot of like unmolested access to the caucuses and everything for them to move oil. But part of the city backs up to the river.

Well, the river being in natural defense, essentially the Soviets can basically stage and hold people on the other side of the river and keep moving people into the city enough so that we're going to do Stalin grad on its own. But at one point, during this entire thing, about half the year that it happened, the Nazis actually pushed them back to just 10% of the city. And it was the area that was a strip of land like along the river. And so as the Luftwaffe was, you know, bombing them and strafing barges and everything, they would just be moving more soldiers into the city. and would just be like you're talking about the human waves being sent out, where they would send them out in charges, and then machine guns would be set up behind the charge to where if anyone turned to run,

they would be machine gun by their own people. Their own people. And in some situations, there weren't even enough rifles to go around. So they would hand a guy, a rifle loaded, hand the next guy ammo, and is like, if he falls, pick up his rifle and fight. And this is just something that they end up doing,

repeatedly during Stalingrad. There's just so many things and I think that first winter was sort of the time when Stalin got his shit together. I think he started realizing that they could keep building. They got to call people in,

time to resupply and everything. He knew how to play the winter right for him. They also knew, I think, at that point because of trying to move around during the winter, once the Nazis got where they were, he would then know where they were. And he could just move them. He's like, well,

they're not going to be moving from Stalingrad for a while so I can just, and that's what he ends up doing during Operation Uranus. Which I want to say, part of me thinks that Stalin is like, I'm coming for that ass. So I'm calling it Operation Uranus because it was one of the Roman gods or what bullshit. Yeah, Uranus was probably the guy that discovered the planet. He's like, this is where I'm going.

It's in Uranus, Hitler. So it was a pincor move, basically coming wide around both sides of Stalingrad, coming around the back, and then squeezing what was the entire 6th Army. Pins are basically like you're running a pair of pliers. Exactly. Or like calipers. They have kind of, because you're coming around the back and you're pinceing. Yeah.

So the guy that's in charge of the 6th Army is like, hey, I think we can punch through the lines and make a breakout and try to save most of the 6th Army. And Hitler's like, no, you're going to fucking hunker down. I'm not giving up what we've taken of Stolngrad and you're going to go ahead and fight to the last man. and do you know what he fucking did to make sure that this guy followed orders

he's like I'm also going to promote you to field marshal and the reason he did that is because in the history of the German Empire no field marshal had ever surrendered and he knew by making that guy field marshal he wouldn't want to be the first field marshal that ever surrendered just pure pressure to him into not surrendering

well as a result of this Operation Barbosa about 750 to 870 Oh sorry, this is just from this portion at Stalingrad. 750,000 casualties. The Soviet casualties at Stalingrad About

1.1 million? Yeah, that's also factoring in all the civilians. Mm-hmm. So a certainly high amount. If you're looking to give any sort of win where the people die,

that Pinser move that surrounded the Sixth Army, That took 265,000 soldiers hostage. Prisoner. Prisoner. And only 6,000 of the 265,000 made it back to Germany. Yeah. That's what...

Just, mass graves, work camps to death, Siberia, work in the munitions factor. Take your fucking pick your poison of how they died. Like, what is that though? Is that like 2% of the 265 even? Probably less. Yeah. maybe two. That's,

the other, here's the other, I guess, silver lining, if you want to call it that. This was essentially the last actual, like,

this was the beginning, the beginning of the end was going into fucking Russia anyway, but this is at this point when they've had such a major loss that they have to

start pulling back toward the German territory. And, yeah, such a big part of the reason why they were so successful was once they

had the 6th Army surrounded and they had that many soldiers within their grasp, the attempts to resupply them were all going to have to be air drops. And Goring was like, we can do it. We can do it. And the people that were actually the logistics people are like, dude, you know this army needs. And I think it was something crazy. It was like 2,000 tons of supplies per day. And like, we don't have enough planes to carry even remote. We can do like 500. So they started pulling bombers off too. Well, bombers aren't going to be able to hold as much weight as a cargo They were also dropping supplies to like the Germans

too or to the fucking Russians too Oh because the Russians were picking them off No because the planes coming in They were still getting under fire by anti-aircraft fire They weren't always able to it They had to stay high enough to drop supplies and to not get hit They were dropping them like wind picks up Carry supplies so not even all these supplies

Are getting to the Nazis So yeah if you can't resupply with food or even weaponry You're just basically never going to be able to punch through that hole It was like a red German wave that they just could never fight their way out of, or a red Soviet wave. So in May of 43, and we'll go back and kind of touch on this maybe a little bit more, but May 43 is the date in which the Axis are actually pushed out. So like the Germans and the Italians are pushed out of North Africa and are pushed back essentially to like Sicily and to like the Italian land.

We got to talk a little bit more about. We will. I'm just touching on that because I want to get out of the Soviet Union first before we kind of bounce back a little bit. So July 5th to August 23rd is pretty much the last, like, major engagement between the Soviet forces, the Russians, and the Nazis. It's the battle of Kursk. And this had to have been so fucking crazy. It's the largest tank battle that's ever taken place. And was basically, like I said, the last major Nazi offensive on the Eastern Front. 3,000 German tanks get taken out.

Or sorry, the Germans had like, I think around 3,000 tanks. The Soviet had 10,000 tanks. Jesus. And, I mean, oh, sorry. Germany three, the Soviets had 7,000 for a total of 10,000 tanks during this battle. That took place about a month and a half. And on the eastern front, essentially...

That's just so many things that they just built being lost in one fight, one battle. While Stalingar was happening, how you were saying how the Russians were able to move so much of their manufacturing stuff, all they're doing is fucking building these. I think they're like T-34 tanks

and whatever. And these things were built to operate essentially in the fucking Soviet Union so you know that they were fucking reliable. But yeah, on, and I mean,

on the Eastern Front, 8 million Red Army troops died. And then the Axis on the Eastern Front during this engagement, 6 million. That's fucking nuts, man. Yeah, and to say... 14 million.

To say that the side who lost more lost is sort of, it's, I swear to God, in every war that we do, it's the same shit. Because as long as you can keep throwing, how did the North went against the South in the Civil War? Yeah. We just had more people. How did we?

And a little bit more advancement, which, again, the Russians, that's kind of along the same lines, a little bit more advanced stuff. Yeah, but it's just so much of those things that the mass supply of people always kind of seems to overcome. And even though they took that many more losses,

they still are just pulling troops out of their asses. It's just crazy how many people they have at their... I guess when you're a communist and you control all that shit, like you're pretty onto it. All right. Well, we're going to head back to Africa for you. Kick-ass. Like, they're pushing them back.

They're headed back into Egypt. They're basically clearing all this land super duper quick. They're moving toward, essentially, like where the Suez Canal is. They're trying to capture that area. Yeah, and they moved them all the way back to a town that you mentioned earlier, El Alameen. and the fortifications inside or outside of El Alamein were pretty brutal. They really made sure that they had built up a line that by the time the Nazis got there,

it was just going to be impenetrable, so much so that they actually had two battles of El Al-Amin. El Al-A-A-Mine was such a big success for the Allies against the Axis that it pushed them all the way back to them landing in, I don't remember what it was called. Algiers? Because I know they push him back past like, is it Tobruk? Yes, yes, that's right.

Tobruk, I believe, was their big holdout. Well, they ended up, where they ended up having to leave Africa from is they chased them all the way back into Tunisia and then to Tunis, which is on the coast. So basically, if you're looking at the Mediterranean, Tunisia, the little part of it that goes up in Tunis, is almost directly across, like just to the right of it, or I guess to the east of it is Sicily, almost directly across. So as soon as they get pushed out, and it's like North Africa is just like, it's a tug of war back and forth the entire time.

Like the Allies will take ground, Rom will take ground, allies will take more ground. And this is where Eisenhower actually is in the beginning as well. Eisenhower and Patton, right? Yeah. So to the future president and a guy that's looked at with great military, respect. The guy that's going to be the Supreme Allied commander once everything

is all said and done is down there cutting his teeth. And we don't, that's kind of the whole thing that has me so tied up in Africa and why I really more interested to do the episodes on it is because it's just something that we did never really hear about. North Africa was kind of felt like an afterthought.

Like you knew that they had to, the allies had to get up into Italy and start making a move up towards Germany that way. Yeah, you couldn't just bypass it and then get hit in the back with all these forces from there. You had to take it and then start crunching in on Europe. And they just don't, it doesn't feel like you get a lot of shine. It's always kind of like an afterthought to be like, oh yeah, and there was some fighting

down in North Africa. But for the most part, like you say, it was such a tug of war. It was all the early allied stuff was down in Africa. That's where that's, that's essentially what allowed Normandy to happen as well, is they still had to pull all these resources down because it was an active invasion going on down in Italy and Sicily that we're going to get to. So the Nazis or the Axis forces down there end up surrendering on May 13th, 1943. So the African campaign is literally like two to three years.

Yeah. And 275 of those Nazis or Axis end up becoming prisoners of war. And like I said, they go from Tunis over to Sicily. And they still control essentially Nazi occupied Europe is still considered Sicily and then right next to it, Italy. And then going back up still into France and all that area. Sicily is literally just a big island right off the boot. So that's where we're going to get to the invasion of Sicily, which takes place July 9th to August 17th.

So fast, dude. So fast they took through Sicily. It was like they ran their own Blitzkrieg on Sicily. Yeah, they surrender in Africa on May 13th, and they're like, okay, let's plan something for what, like two months? So they still have, and at this point, they have pretty much major control of the Mediterranean. Yeah.

So they're able to bring in, and additional shipping and stuff like that, additional supplies and soldiers. I just am so surprised, and maybe not so, because all we've done is shit on Mussolini when it comes to talking about the Italian forces. But the fact that,

and granted Sicily is not massively huge, but July 9th to August 17th, like that's all that it took for them to clear an entire island of Italian fascists. Operation Husky, yeah. It was an amphibious assault, basically again they took it to gain almost complete control over the Mediterranean except for Italy itself but it would allow them to start landing in a huge staging area to launch an actual assault on Italy

it was an airborne and sea landing so the night before the invasion of the operation Husky invasion they dropped paratroopers behind enemy lines to like secure key points and kind of cause disruption and basically at this point once you know all of a sudden done on August 17th, the Nazi and Italian troops were forced to evacuate to Italy. So in just a very short span of time, North Africa has been taken. There's now a staging area for an assault on Italy. And September 3rd, we go from May 13th to September 3rd. This is already the invasion.

This isn't even counting when it was planned, how long it had been planning. And this also shows you, man, like this stuff wasn't just thought of. You know, after they take... It wasn't like, now let's start planning for Italy. It was like, this stuff has already been planned to where all of these ducks have to fall in a row. It's just the next plan up. It's already a folder. Dossier's saying, and it's just like, what's next?

Invasion is Italy. So May 13th from the close of the African theater. Yeah, but at the same time, the plan to invade Italy was already in play by this, because they're already having to logistically send men down, build up troops and everything and kind of figure out what they're going to do. The other very, very necessary part of this was our biggest ally in the Soviet Union, Yosef Stalin, kept looking back...

Comrade Stalin. Yeah, Commerant Stalin. Kept looking back at Roosevelt and Churchill. He's like, hey, fellas, I'm pretty much fighting this shit by myself up here. Is there any way that you guys can maybe open up a second theater so you can take a little heat off me? Hey, hey, hey, motherfucker. Whose gas was it?

that the fucking Nazis were using when they invaded in France and the bullet casings. And what about that Polish area you currently occupy right now? Hey, man. We would like to start my three-part apology by saying I was wrong about Hitler. We'd like to start a second front, but unfortunately you gave the Germans all your oil instead of giving it to us. We don't have any gas. Wow, sure would be nice if, you know, you hadn't given them such a large front over on your side. You know, maybe rain them in a little bit.

Yeah, but it did open up a legitimate. legitimate second front in, I guess you would call it Europe, but just on the other side where they're going to have to start pulling. And I think probably right around then was when things started going south because that's what August or September 3rd, things probably started to get a little cold up in Russia. So maybe that was a little turning point for them too. Well, big development that happens before that on July 25th, that's, that's Mussolini by by day. Musilini gets a voted no confidence in Prime Minister Mussolini he's arrested

on July 25th so before they've even, the allies have even stepped foot in Italy, Italy proper I guess what you would say the actual landmass, he's out. The war got too close. It got too close to the homeland

and the king called that no confidence order. I do, do you have anything about how Mussolini ended? I think we should. I like the way that it ended. Yeah. You think we should hold it off until his episode? Let's hold it off for the Mussolini episode.

Yeah, I really feel like we should. You're going to have to listen to the Mussolini episode to find out how what ends up happened to him. I promise it's worth it. Yep, you'll be head over heels when you figure out what happened to him. So September 3rd, time to take back Italy. So the Allied invasion of Italy, September 3rd, 43, was the opening of the second front. And they landed at a place called the mainlanding.

I mean, there were a few different ones, was at Salerno. And so if you're looking at a map of Italy, Salerno is basically directly north of Sicily. And a couple other places they landed. There's a tiny little gap. I'm not sure what it's called, but it's between Sicily and the little peninsula that comes off Italy. Part of the troops landed there. And then there was also landing a little bit further to the east. So there was a three-point landing.

And basically when they got there, southern Italy, is, you know, completely in allied control. It was called Operation Avalanche, I think, was the invasion. And by October of 43, southern Italy is completely under allied control. Up to where these Germans have established basically like, what, like six different defensive lines, like the Gustav Line and a bunch of other ones. The Gustav Line was like one of three, I think, that they had in the same area. That went from like coast to coast, like around.

And when I say lines, it's defensive fortifications, but also probably, like rivers, mountain ranges, stuff like that, that's hard to choke points. You have to move your... Natural kind of issues for them. But it's just so funny how the Germans started this whole thing, just walking through areas. And then as the Americans and the allies

start pushing up through Italy, very much the same. Like, they're just walking through these areas and taking them. There's still fights and there's still gunfire and all that kind of stuff. But it was just like Italy was so unprepared, even though the fighting was so...

close to protect anything that they had. So if you're looking like at a clock, if basically between like the 1 o'clock and like the 5 o'clock, maybe 6 o'clock, all that's starting to shrink in back toward Germany. So that's what's getting pushed up right now. So as they control this now,

this is again in like September or sorry, October of 43. So D-Day doesn't happen until June of 44. So the Italian campaign, it doesn't really stall or anything like that. It's just like, if you're looking at Italy, you know, it's pretty skinny. So like these defensive lines are taking time to get through.

It's basically the last, it's the last defensive area before you're up through Italy and into like Germany. Yeah, you're getting close on that way. Part of the reason the Gustav line was really big was it pushed them into something that you wouldn't think about was a big deal, much like Russian winters were a big deal. Italian winters, it just rains. So as it's raining and it's washing out any of your roads or anything like that, as you're trying to move troops and you're trying to move any sort of tanks or anything like that, any sort of big amy machine.

Anything heavy. Yeah, you're not able to move over it because you have just basically mud that's going to stop you from your advances. So it was probably still a really nice winter, but it was a situation where they pulled up to the Gustav. line and once that winter hit and really pounded them with as much water and rain and everything as they got they weren't able to really move in to fight the goose off line the gustaf line had a couple very interesting things too there was a i think it was called the casino um it was like a fort it was a fortress but it was a monastery it was a casino mona casino there was a battle called the monta casino might have been it yeah and it was just basically a beautiful stronghold on

top of this mountain range to where they had the high ground, the Germans had the high ground, and they could go ahead and clear it out. And it finally broke when they were able to send, I'm sure, R.A.F. was the main air support. This combination. Just bombed the living shit out of Monte Cassino and sort of cleared the way. But the Gustav line, I think, was fairly, they had these massive rail guns that would be able to fire. I don't know if that's where the Gustav gun comes from. I think that might have been.

So that's the name, but a Gustav, I think, is like someone in German. I thought it was World War I where they had the big Gustav guns. That's, that's in World War II. Oh, was it? World War II, yeah. Okay, so maybe Gustav line. These things are useless. Yeah.

But it was a situation where once they finally broke through the Gustav line, it was they just kept running into the shit left and right. And a big issue was once they broke through the Gustav line, there was actually a, I forgot what the mission was. Maybe you'll remember it. They sort of did like we did during the Korean War where we snuck up past the line in the water. And then as we landed there, we took over a port city.

So as the Gustav line was finally broken through, the forces that were in the port city had a choice to either move up towards Rome and occupy Rome or to cut across Italy and take all the retreating lines off of the Gustav line from the Germans. Well, they decided to go over and occupy Italy. Italy had been evacuated. Or Rome. Yeah, Rome had been evacuated at that point. So instead of being able to take all these Germans hostage, they allowed them to retreat from the Gustav lineup to, I think the Gothic line was next?

Something like that. But at the same time, from a strategic, you know, you're essentially controlling, you're now in control of Italy. You are, but... I don't think it would have taken much to... But maybe they didn't know the strength of, you know, the forces that were holding them. It still could have been a pretty, you know, a battle or something like that.

I just think at that point I'm not sure why they didn't try to close off those pockets to try to kind of like encircle them or anything like that they might not have landed enough guys to take out that many to take on that big of an army because again this was I think Rommel was still in the picture of helping to go and oversee this stuff after he gave up in North Africa

so during this time as well like we said there's going to be a whole like almost a year leading up after the invasion of Italy up to D-Day and this is all just basically build up. There's still strategic bombing going on. It's being handled by day by the United States Air Force. And then at night, the Brits have it

fucking down for nighttime bombing. So we're constantly bombing places in France, Germany, any of these strongholds trying to kind of soften this up. And that's all it was. This was just like body blows. This was, we weren't going for a knockout, but as many times as we could

hit them in the liver or the ribs or anything like that to soften that area. Anything to weaken, anything to weaken morale and to weaken, you know, their ability to make war. And at the same time, when we talked about during the D-Day in Operation Overlord, you know, this had been in play for a long time because they had to build up so much equipment and manpower. At the same time, we got Operation. Is it Fortitude going on with all of the misdirection everything? So go back and listen to that because we're getting ready to talk about D-Day.

Just glance over it. But so we have the build-up to Overlord. And on June 4th of 44, that's when the Allies make it to Rome. So that's the operation. So I feel like they coincided these to almost like also be part of a fain, being like the allies now have Rome. They're getting ready to march on us up this direction to try to pull resources away from the Atlantic side with this operation.

Because of course, there's communication going on between the allies. Yeah. There was something sort of funny that happens before the end of the German surrender in Italy. But they finally passed through. It was called Operation Olive that broke finally through the Gothic line. And once they broke through there, it was basically to get up into northern Italy. And there were two towns. The two towns escaped me.

What's the one in Italy that starts with the V? Vienna. Vienna. Isn't that Austria? Or there are two of them? Venice. Venice. Venice.

One of them was Venice. The other one was another town. And Churchill was like, hey, let's go. let's take these areas. We need to get these areas. And basically, it was Great Britain and Churchill asking to go up and start clearing those areas because they had eyes to continue occupation after World War II. And the Americans are like, oh, man, we know what you're doing here. Oh, this is the Lawrence of Arabia thing where he had the, um, I can't remember what the, not the sultan son or it might have been the sultan son. I can't remember what they called him. But he was like, if you get up to this area, it's going to give you a better bargaining chip against the British. Yeah, he was sneaky fucking goddamn limy bastards Very greedy wanting to get up in that area

Because he had a good amount of feelings At the same time I'm not gonna say that he's been fighting this war the longest So Winnie, whatever you need, baby It just makes me laugh because to think about Like we're basically over the hump To knowing that this is gonna end And it's gonna end in allied favor

So Churchill is Even though that's happening And I don't know if this was after Dita they finally broke through because the German surrender in Italy wasn't until April 29th in 1945, which I think was the total. That's when essentially the last hostile forces. Okay. So because they had them pushed up like further.

And there were also soldiers in Italy fighting in Germany. Yeah. And all that area in like Eastern Front and shit. It was really just like finally we're going to win this, but I'd like to have some extra shit after we win. If the people overthrew Mussolene, the fact the king is just like, yeah, we're good. We're done. like I don't I don't get that fucking part well he's still even after he kicked him out they still had like an Italian civil war oh that's true so so we come to the big day June 6th 1944 if you don't know what this is pause this go back and listen to the 2d day episodes you'll thank yourself

Normandy France 180,000 allied troops make it ashore that day and we hit Omaha we hit gold we hit Utah we hit Juno and we hit sword and after establishing a foothold, basically on mainland Europe, there's a six-week build-up that takes place before. And basically during the operation, you know, if you've gone back and listened to the episode, you already listened to it. So during the operation, it was to establish essentially not only a beachhead, but then also kind of a protected area surrounding it to where they could use what are called the Bullberry Harbors to bring in enough equipment. Again, you're going to starve your army if you don't have the logistical support. we just talked about that in the Soviet Union. So for six weeks, they basically build up.

And then Operation Cobra is unleashed. Yes. Yeah, there you go. Operation Cobra is the breakout of Normandy. And there was some debate between some of the Allied command. They're like, well, do we want to do a narrow thrust? And one of them's like, I want to do a big, fat thrust. And they just couldn't decide what type of thrust they're going to do.

So I think they ended up going with a broad one. and I think Montgomery is the one that wanted the narrow one and I want to say Eisenhower and one of the other American commanders were like, no, let's do a broad front. It allows us to slowly but surely push them back and, you know. Montgomery's wife you think was lying to him

about the kind of thrust you liked. Probably. Is that what it was? I hear a lot of women prefer a narrow thrust. I'll introduce you to Mrs. Pepperfield after the game, Mrs. Montgomery after the game. So part of the reason why they had that kind of amount of guys to break out was

it just completely blows me away that by the end of June they had landed 875,000 troops in France. Yeah, at that point, too, you have air superiority above Normandy, at least, so you can't get bombed in everything. And not only that, but then you have basically the Navy that is just shuttling back and forth to protect against U-boats and any surface ships, and you have a highway

of boats that are just going back and forth, bringing anything and everything, because you're going to have to start from this small pocket. And it wasn't like a gradual shutdown. It was just from June 6th to the end of June. They just basically wholeheartedly ran shit. I think it was like mid-August, I think because coinciding with Operation Cobra,

they launched Operation Dragoon, which fucking cool name. Yeah. Like, just, come on. Sounds like some pirate shit. Yeah. Who got to name these? Did they submit for them?

And they're like, ah, it's Dragoon. Who got it? He's a bot smoker. So this was the invasion of South France. And the Vichy, I think, were still in power at this point, or I don't know if they saw the writing on the wall. But I do know when they invaded South France,

there was some fighting with French soldiers. And at one point earlier in the war, remember, didn't they have to bomb the French fleet that was at Vichy France to keep the Nazis from getting it? Because they're like, hey, sail it over to friendly waters. And they're like, we cannot. We want our boats here. Yeah, so was it Churchill that just called them to sink everything over there?

Just bomb the shit out of them. It's rough to bomb an ally. It's rough to bomb somebody that you fought with. But unfortunately, well, maybe fortunately, seeing what the Russians did as far as scorched earth to not leave shit for the Germans to take a hold of, Winston Churchill had to do the same thing. He didn't need those French boats falling into German hands because... Oh, of course. You would say that the French were a far superior name.

If you're not going to fight and you're not going to help us by denying the ability for them to fight, like, what the fuck are you doing? But as far as that goes, the French Navy was definitely stronger than the German Navy. Like, those boats would have been a massive upgrade probably for the Germans. For amounts, like battleships and stuff, yeah, I'm sure. And I mean, at this point, too, in the war, I think you had probably lost, like, I know the Turpitz was somewhere up in Norway and, like, some of the Fjords. That was like, they made two huge battleships. The Bismarck and the Terpits, there were sister ships. Bismarck went out on its maiden voyage.

quick base. So like they would have to do this thing where they built them on the Rhine and then sail them up and into like the British Sea and everything, the North Sea. And they would have to make the channel run or go all the way around Britain. And then they would be able to hunt the merchant ships. First time the Bismarck was out, it ends up sinking like a prestigious, like, well-known like British battleship. But then it gets hunted by like a whole bunch of the other ones that damage it. Yeah, you put yourself on the radar immediately. Oh yeah, but it's its first voyage. And they end up end up having to they sink it. So pretty fucking cool.

But so the Turpitz is like the last big battleship they have. It's hiding up somewhere in Norway. And at this point, too, once Dragoon happens, you have three armies in France. You have the one that was coming up from the south. And then two separate armies essentially under, I think, Montgomery. And then maybe Eisenhower was, I can't remember the American commanders. I think we talked about them in the D-Day episode. I'm not sure if we discussed that.

Oh, boy. So you get one army that's going to kind of push through, like, the coast and kind of head back up toward, like, what is it, Belgium and Holland. What was it, Belgium, Holland? In Luxembourg. Oh, the Netherlands. Yeah, the Netherlands in Luxembourg. So going to kind of go up that way. You then have another army that's going down to liberate Paris.

So after Degroon takes place August 15th, 10 days later, the Nautsum. he surrender Paris and France. Despite Hitler, telling the commander who was in charge in Paris and France that he was not to surrender, that he was to burn Paris down and destroy it. If I can't have it.

How bum would you be if we didn't, I guess maybe not super bum, because it's not that big of a deal to us over here, but if they fucking knock down the Eiffel Tower, that would have been pretty shitty. I'm telling you right now, the guy that was in charge of France had that happened,

he's sitting there and he's like, I know I'm going to get captured. And he's like, frankly, at this point, this is the better alternative. Because the writing's on the wall, we're going to lose. They've mowed, since Southern France was invaded,

10 days later, I'm having to surrender here. All he's thinking is, if I fuck up enough, I'm getting either the firing squad or something. He's like, I just, I'm not going to fuck anything else up. I'm at least going to have something I could say,

I peacefully surrender this place. The crazy man back and Berlin. He told me to destroy it. I didn't do shit. You're less likely to die by surrendering than going back to the old people. So the allies at this point are just advancing across France. So fast, in fact, toward the German-held area, Sigfried Line is what basically was the German version of the Maginot Line. Okay.

Part of the Atlantic Wall Defense and everything, and I think they built a little earlier, it was the same kind of thing except facing from Germany out toward like France and everything. So would you say like the Sigfried line had like the Maginot line was like it's Roy? Yes. Sigfried and. And just tigers roamed the area between. So you get what's called the Red Ball Express. And the Red Ball Express is-

Holy shit, that sounds awesome. It's basically the supply line because at this time it's still early enough after Normandy that they haven't captured like Kelle or a big port. Yeah. All the supplies are still coming through Normandy. So basically, same thing that happened in Russia, like the Army's outrunning its supply lines. And the Red Ball Express got to the point. They knew what the breaking point is when the trucks were using more gas to get there.

And they were having to use the gas they were transporting. And they would run out gas. So they were handing off, like, I got like eight gallons for you. Makes sense. We can get another 200 yards up the road. By the time they got there, there wasn't anything left to supply. Yeah. So they stalled to Siegfried line.

and at some point in Belgium they capture the port of Antwerp and so once they're able to capture the port I'm sure it got fucking trash by the Nazis they have to demine the waters and do all that kind of shit once they get that because Belgium they're up by that line already

you can see right there they're up by Germany they're able to resupply much closer so they kind of are at this point like okay we need to kind of build up again and once we've captured this port and supplies can get flowing the next step is to cross the Rhine

which was like the natural defensive border to get into like Germany proper. And so on like September 17th through the 27th basically they threw this operation was called Operation Market Garden and what they thought they could do is

they could paratroop or paratroop or paratropes sounds good. An airborne operation and they would drop them into the Netherlands and they would capture these towns of Einhoven. I think it's, I'm going to pronounce this wrong, Nijiman, N-I-J-E-N,

E-G-E-N, sorry to all of our Dutch listeners out there, and Arnhem. And basically, these were bridges over the Rhine that they could then, you know, capture, and it was supposed to coincide with, like, a thrust by, like, the British Armour Division to push through

the Nazi lines and then help secure these bridgeheads. And as far as, like, airborne troops involved, it was larger than D-Day. Really? Yeah. God damn. So unfortunately what it ended up happening though

is during this they were able to actually capture like seven of the eight objectives but the British Airborne, the first airborne I think they were unable to link up like with the British armor at Arnhem and the Battle of Arnhem ended up taking place and it ended up becoming a stalemate where the Germans still held that area so they basically weren't able to get like as much or even, I don't know if they were able to get over the right at all.

Because it gave the Germans a place to then push back through to move into the other areas. Well, and that, okay. And at the same time, everything we've done up to this point since D-Day, the push, it's all been going pretty, you know, unless we're out running our own supplies, we're kind of just moving across. And so each of these operations, until one fails, they all sound like their fucking home runs. Do you think this stalemate might have been the reason that there was confidence in this whole bulge that we're coming up on?

I think it was the last... But you think maybe like, hey, we got a stalemate here. We didn't seed any ground. Maybe this bulge thing will work? Yeah, I mean, I think because they held there, they were looking to... And if you think about it,

they were heading through the Ardennes. Yeah. They were trying to basically do the same thing they did when they invaded France and then basically come around behind and then split left, split right? And pretty much split the armies right in half. Yeah.

Right down the middle. Well, we kind of saw that, hey, maybe there's a... weakness here in the Ardennes, and so we should have some people stationed there. And the whole thing with the Battle of the Bulge, so December 16th and 44, so we're in winter now, dead German winter. We got Operation Watch on the Rhine. This is the German counteroffensive. This is pretty much the last time they'll ever make an offensive action in this war. And you get basically this huge German push of armor and troops through the Ardennes to split the ally armies. And the Battle of the Bulge,

was when thin parts of the allied line, basically when you look at it in a picture, you have a straight line across, and then you had this huge bulge that goes back in the middle to where this main armored thrust

of the German military came through, but never actually broke out. There were just like strategic retreats and everything of moving the line back as they were coming out of them. So that's why they called the Battle of the Bulge. Used to maybe think it was something else. Well, we're talking a lot of thrust and a lot of bulges.

Thrust through the bulge? Yeah. It just, like you said, this was kind of like Hitler's last gas. Like he, I don't know why he thought that this would have worked, and I guess it sort of makes sense. It was pretty effective, too. I mean, a few things change, a few lines don't hold, and we could be talking about, like, prolonging the war even. Not a war winning or more changing, but it can definitely prolong it longer. I mean, this operation, the watch on the Rhine,

the Germans didn't get pushed back to the original starting point of the line until January 25th of 45. So, I mean, it took them like a month and 10 days for this whole operation to kind of work its way out. Well, and Hitler's whole belief, which I do think, like you say, it was just more of like a time measure than like a winner, but he wanted to cut out this port of Antwerp because that would split where the allies were coming in.

and it would basically stop the flow from them coming in right at Antwerp. But also, he was hoping that if he won it, he could force, by some sort in his fucked up mind, he thought that this could force, yeah, a peace treaty with the allies. Like it could cause enough of a stalemate, like we don't have, like, access to get other places in France through both the butthole and the mouth. Yeah, dude, like, it just, it was a crazy thought to have that even that peace would be. He had been like, and that's the thing too, like, did we, we didn't really discuss like, because we talked about him so much over the last couple episodes, but he's throughout this whole thing as stuff starts going poorly, he gets crazier and fucking crazier. And there's an assassination, a ton of assassination attempts. We're going to have to do an entire episode on just like the list of assassination.

And how close so many people came. Yeah. How fucking lucky he was. They actually hit a bomb underneath the conference table during one of their meetings. At the Wolf's Lair. Oh, was it the wolf slayer? Okay. And that bomb blew up and it wasn't close enough to Hitler to kill him,

but it killed like three or four different people that were around the table. The bomb exploded. Like the table was thicker than they anticipated and it like shielded part of the blast. So, but he's getting crazier at this point. He's not spending a lot of time during the actual war, even in Berlin. He spends most of his time at the Berghoff in Birchus Garden. Himmler, his little butt buddy, his little assistant or whoever. I can't remember what he.

ends up being. Yeah. But he and, um, did you ever hear the Eagles Nest? Wasn't that the area above it that he didn't like knowing because it was too high? Exactly. But it had like a gold-plated elevator going up and everything. And he would take like dignitaries or like high range and people he wanted to impress up there. But he was spending a lot of time this and he's as the war starts, you know, closing in, he then goes back to Berlin to where he can be like in the bunker and everything. But he's just being fed a cocktail. of so many fucking drugs that he's just slowly slipping into like fucking insanity. And he knows that he's losing,

but like you get enough fucking coke in you and everything. You get up or down and you're just like, yes, no, yes, yeah. That's what makes me wonder when they say that he had Parkinson's. Did he really have Parkinson's or was it just so much cocaine that he couldn't? I'm willing to bank on the ladder. Yeah, I just. So I thought you'd like this.

In the same month of January in 1945, Operation Blackcock goes down. So we got bulges, throw us some black cocks? So Operation Blackcock, this is official. Basically is a mission to, I think, like clear a German bridge over the Roar River, and it's actually successful.

And on February 23rd, because they're able to get across this, 280,000 Nazi prisoners are taken in the Battle of the Rhineland. By late March, So basically a month later, when they're preparing to cross the Rhine, the Rhine River, they've captured 1,300 access prisoners. So, I mean, there's not a lot left between them and Berlin. It's just land.

What did we end up doing with the German POWs? Do you know? Like paperclip to a small... We're talking about millions that we've taken, though. I do you honest answer they were probably a bunch of them were mistreated but in comparison to the Japanese holding POWs and the Russians holding POWs and the Germans holding I think I'll say this there are a lot more stories about these guys turning themselves in than about allies turning themselves over to Japanese and Russian or like German troops do you think though when the war was over Eventually we just let them go back to Germany and Italy. Really? Yes. Okay.

I mean, that's... I mean, there was literally like an entire... When we talk about the Nuremberg trials, it's not going to be just about that. It's going to be about everything that took place after it, about how they found out about people scouring through the records about war crimes, all that kind of stuff. But I'd like to talk a little bit about, like, what was it like for like a common enlisted guy that was just like... I just like... I was told the fight, and so I have to fight. This is my home.

Like, I legitimately didn't know all this other shit. was going on. Like we were told this information. Like, you got to understand when stuff started going bad and no information was coming, you know, from the outside, aside from like the awesome leaflet drops that they would do. Like, you guys are losing, turn on the furor and all that kind of shit that they used to do. But yeah, when you're only being told that things are going well and everything, like, I don't know. That's a type of mind control.

You just still got to, there has to be, and I think this is where we differ on it because I fully believe the fact that there were SS death squads that were rolling behind some of these troops. They had to know that there was some bad shit going on. I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that it's even, you know, a majority. You know, I believe a majority probably had to some degree heard about talk through the military about all these places and everything like that. But it's, you can't have a population with that many people serving or being conscripted and not be a decent representation of the actual population. And up until the Nazis seized power and actually grabbed it and didn't give anyone else the option,

remember, man, there was still like 45% of the vote for more of like the left. Yeah. Like social Democrats and all that kind of stuff. So I mean, a lot of these, and I'm not saying a lot when I say a majority, but there was a large portion of people that I don't believe really supported it and that just didn't have the option to leave. Like it's, you know, to leave a family and all that kind of stuff. there were probably plenty of them that did.

Yeah. But there were also ones from around the world that came back to fight. And at the same point, too, along those lines that just kind of shocked me in doing this research. But after the Battle of the Bulge happens and after the Germans basically give up, they remained, I think it was until January 6th or something like that, odd day. Churchill told Stalin to start pushing the offensive with the Eastern Front because he wanted him to mush Germany basically

and along the way the Red Army was the one that actually started liberating the concentration camps and as the Red Army went to the press was like hey they have these camps of people that they're killing and working to death because they're running into their own people first too the media is saying well the war is still going on that's not that big of a deal.

We would rather cover the war than these concentration camps. So these just dastardly just, I can't even think of enough words to talk about, have terrible these places were. If we get going on it, we're not going to get off of it. Yeah. But that again, like, we can't even do that justice in an episode just from a conversational point about that. We're going to attempt it at some point.

But, yeah, that's, I tried to kind of steer away from that. I mentioned about, like, Auschwitz, like, Dachau was open, like, pretty early on. I think it was the first. But I mean, yeah, this stuff was going on during the entire time, but this would be a, we don't have enough time to touch on that. Just the fact that it fell to like second fiddle behind the wars and so yeah. Yes. But there had been so many at that point, too, do you think that you'd seen so many atrocities just happening in front of you that you're just like, this is just, yeah, I got to put this on the back burner because we got to stop this before more this is happening. Well, and maybe we've just talked about so much bad shit and we've been on such a situation.

heater that maybe we don't want to bring the populace down by talking about these places. That too. We're just making justifications for them fucking up, not reporting this earlier. So sometime kind of between February and March, they're working on crossing the Rhine. The Rhine essentially is a larger river. So you can't just like, you know, Germany still has an Air Force. Yeah, we have, you know, more air superiority. But you can't build barges.

They'll get straved and bombed. They still have artillery on the other side. You got to find bridges that are intact. So they actually find one. failed to blow up what's known as the Ludendorf Bridge in Ramajun. What does that name sound familiar? Ludendorf was the guy that allowed Hitler. He was the soldier.

Oh, Eric Ludendorf. Yes. Okay, the general. The general. Yes, yes, yes. Because the coup and everything. Yeah. Even with the coup, the guy got a bridge.

Yeah, I fucking, okay, that makes sense. So in on. I tried to push some of that Hitler stuff out. On March 23rd and 45, Operation Plunder, it was the largest airborne invasion or operation in history called Operation Varsity and basically they were just going to land a shit ton of paratroopers on the other side of the Rhine try to cause chaos and havoc and then basically try to push over some bridges and so they were going to cross it like this place called Wessel, this place called Reese

and then also I think they were going to try to cross at Ramajun where the Lundorf bridge was and so it ends up working they're able to get across the Rhine with this Operation Varsity and Operation Plunder. And Eisenhower and Bradley, they basically, there's this river called the Elb, and it separates another portion of Germany. And it's not like super far from Berlin, but it's still west of Berlin.

And they're like, let's hold up for a second. Like, we've already marched this far and everything. I think they got some information from Allied, you know, command that, because what you're talking to Churchill is like, hey, start fucking pushing toward Berlin to fucking Stalin. Well, Stalin was like, yeah, dude, already started actually. Exactly.

Good news for you. I think at that point they were like, listen, if we get on this other side of Berlin or the closer we get to Berlin, the more losses we're going to be taking on our side. He apparently doesn't have a fucking problem with that. Well, part of the reason why it happened the way that it did too was they had basically already drawn up how Berlin was going to be separated. And that's where we get East Berlin and West Berlin and the Berlin Wall. And so the Americans knew that East Berlin was just going to be the Red

Red Armies, they were going to take it. And it just so happens that most of the shit is in the east as far as like the Reichstag and the chancery. All the like were the actual like Yeah. What's it called the chancery? Yeah, the chancery and like the Brandon Birdgate and all that shit. So as far as

that goes, the Americans, the allies were almost ready to encircle on the western side because they knew that that was the side they were going to occupy afterwards. I think the other thing too is they realized that like at this point, man, the the writing's on the wall. Stolen has like, I'm not saying that, like, we didn't have revenge on our mind about all this stuff,

but at least we had the foresight. Like, Stalin was just blind with, like, revenge. Yeah, he was a one-track mind. Yeah, so, and when we talk about the Battle of Berlin, it's going to be very evident what he wanted to do. But, and the entire way, the Soviet army is literally like, just like, like, uh, like the fucking Mongolians coming back through toward Berlin, they're fucking raping and killing fucking everything.

And basically is retribution for what the German. did when they were marching toward I don't I'm not gonna have a comment on it until we do the fucking Battle of Berlin yeah like I say I mean I can't sort of fault them for okay I'm gonna tell you right now the women that were getting raped weren't the ones they may have had sons and husbands and everything but they weren't the ones that were firing for at least the majority weren't firing they may have been making shit for war

but no neither were all those Russian women and children that were killed. I'm not saying one excuses the other. I don't agree with the fucking... I'm not agreeing with the Nazis either, man. Yeah, no, and I for an eye makes the world blind. I get that, but at the same time, I'm not going to say I understand it. I don't care if they killed the other soldiers and everything, but no. So, Red Army's marching on Berlin, April 16th.

That's when the Battle of Berlin starts. And basically, the way I look at it from the Allied side of it, too, once the Battle of Berlin starts is the Russians keep pushing closer and closer in, all the troops that were watching on the or on the western side that were supposed to cover against the allies, all those guys are getting pulled because the immediate threat is the Red Army. And then guess what happens?

Once the Red Army has the city, allies walk in, they're like, so this is what section we're going to take, and that section also isn't destroyed, and they're not having to fight anyone for it. So, I mean, it makes sense. This is the number that I told you that I had to rewind and listen to a couple

times because they just really didn't understand it. So, when the Germans advanced into Russia they had a line of 3 million for all of the area of Russia where they were going to branch out and make this line thousands of miles long

the Red Army was built 2.3 million deep to take one city oh yeah I don't know what the population of Berlin was at the time I'm willing to bet it was probably more than the population of Berlin

I don't know Berlin was the third or fourth largest city. You don't think people got the fuck out of there, though? Oh, I'm pretty sure, but at some point, you can only get the fuck out so far until you're running into fucking allied troops. And you better be hoping that you're heading if you're evacuating, you would

Yeah, you want to be evacuating to the fucking west. It's true. Yeah. Just like all those fucking soldiers or all those scientists and shit from paperclip, they didn't fucking want to run it. They got captured by the Red Army. They didn't fucking go into their hands like they did with the Allies.

So, not going to cover a lot on the Battle of Berlin, just going to say that the artillery barrage and alone that was just leveled against this city was just you could tell that it was just so personal for fucking Stalin.

Because he also, like Stalin was the one that made to look like the idiot. Like, oh, you were buddies with this guy and then he turned around and just dicked you down in front of the world. What do we got this was April 16th, 1945? So in

May Okay August 12th is the closest that they have Berlin's population was 2.8 million in August 12th of 1945 So April it would have still been more But that's I mean you're so close to almost even numbers with civilian

Depending on me died Doing all this and everything like I don't I didn't have those figures and everything But so as this is going on Just as a little hint of what happened. April 27th, Mussolini, something happens to him. He's still under arrest,

but he gets captured by somebody. Caught by the ankles, he'd say almost. He was trying to escape for Switzerland with a German battalion. And his mistress. And he gets found out. And that's where we're going to end it for him, but he gets caught by some people

that he really doesn't want to get caught by. So we'll find out about that later. April 30th. So we are like 14 days into the Battle of Berlin. We would be remiss to mention April 20th because that is the age man's birthday. And that was actually the same day that the Red Army started shelling Berlin City Center. Oh, that's right. So I don't know if you would call that a birthday present.

I don't know if they knew each other's birthdays. They're shelling like the government complex. Yeah. Yeah. So basically. Was that the last time that he was seen outside when he was talking to like the Hitler youth and everything? He walked around that day. He handed out medals to the Hitler youth that were involved in the.

war as children. Yes. Because that was how desperate they were for people. That's why we can't get into the Battle of Berlin because that in itself, like who got conscripted and who was fighting and how they were fighting. Hold another episode. Yes. But one of their other moves was they decided to try to flood the city, basically so all

of the tanks and everything couldn't get through. Yeah, all the area, there was like an area outside the city called the Something Heights. It was like an artillery position that could hold them off for a while. It got taken. and then they tried to flood all like the lowlands around it to make basically the artillery that they were going to bring into fire against them like immovable as well as the tanks. They still found a way.

Yeah, it just delayed the inevitable of them getting through. So we're going to run into April 29th, which is the same day that the, I believe the Reichstag was taken. But the H-Man makes an honest woman out of Ava Brown after she's tried to kill herself multiple times for him. He knows that he's not long for this world, but whatever weird fucked up afterlife, I think Hitler believed in. Maybe he thought he was doing something good.

Ava had been with him through this whole war campaign of highs and then mostly lows. So maybe he did a valiant thing in a, in basically like the wuss out bunker, like the pussy. No, not the right word. Pussies are strong. The give up bunker, basically. The den of sin, you would say, because all they were doing down there was getting high on drugs and trying to realize that the end was so inevitable. Yeah, he was down there with fucking gerbils.

I think Goring tried to make an escape. We'll cover that a little bit more. He ends up getting his come up in during the escape attempt. Um, fucking Gerbils is down there. His wife fucking ends up poisoning their six kids and then they kill themselves. Crazy. So yeah, hell of the honeymoon that he has. So April 29th, he does marry Eva Braun, Eva Brown,

Eve brawn, whatever. And then next day, he can only take one day of marriage. Being married for one day is enough to, this guy's been in a war for the last, you know, six years losing a good portion of it. And one day married to Eva just drives him over the edge. Maybe. And he ends up shooting himself. Did he shoot her first or did she shoot herself or did she take poison?

I think she took poison, but I would probably assume he shot her so he could make his escape maybe. Yeah. Potentially, there could be another episode in the catalog about what may have happened to Hitler. Yep. It happened to other Nazis. It's conspiracies, but I think he died the bunker, maybe. Who knows? Go listen to the other episode.

But, yeah, so their bodies are brought up into the Reich Chancellory Garden, lit on fire. And at that point, I think... They were cremated with lighter fluid. Yeah. That's not really cremation. That's just a light cinch. Oh, that's a botch job. That's a botch job.

And it's, I think, within the same day is when the Russian soldiers end up taking that area. It might have been the next day. May 2nd, the Reich Chancellery got captured. Okay. And that was the surrender of the city day. Okay. So that's when they come upon, like, the body and whatever happens to the skull. Still thought it, I think it was on Stalin's desk for the longest time.

Could have been. Hopefully, or a skull. they had some bones. We know that. Yep. So as far as the end of it, from where it goes from here, is you have the Carl Donuts. Did you mention Carl? Was Carl Donuts the man that was taken over?

Yeah, so Carl Donuts, Hitler announces Carl Donuts. I don't, the fact that I haven't, we haven't mentioned Carl Donuts at this point. You've got to be Carl with a K, right? It is Carl with the K. Okay. Yeah, I'm not sure if Hitler really had a lot of high-ranking guys around him, but Carl Donuts is named as the name is. the leader. And that was put in like his last will and testament too, was that his power was

going to be. So he basically unconditionally surrenders to the Allies May 8th, 1945, which, man, what took so long? I'm sure this was when they were hammering out the details of what was going to be taken over by who. That's true. That's true. And then on June 5th, not taking a lot more time, Berlin Declaration is signed, thus splitting Germany into East West. After this is when we get into all of the after stuff including the lead-up and the

Nuremberg trials. Yeah. Concentration camps after this point are being in the process of being liberated. All of this is being found out about the Holocaust and everything. Allies have come upon camps. So... We might do some more shit on the actual

end with Japan and all that kind of stuff. Oh, we'll do a Pacific Theater. Yeah, the Pacific Theater will... with Japan, but as far as the sort of European theater and almost the main theater, this is where it comes to an end. As far as the fighting, everything that happens on after it is certainly worthy of multiple episodes

in and of themselves. But I mean, as far as just like, I don't know, man, it's so weird to think about not having grown up in a world where war has been, or in our area where war has been, something that like physically affects you and everything

it's it's kind of weird to think that there was like and it didn't affect our well it did you know with Hawaii and everything like that but like an entire section of the world was just at one point just in an enormous war zone what we consider a continent was a war zone now like the whole thing the whole damn thing like when you look at like

what territory like the Nazi Germany controlled or the access controlled bringing in like on you know the Japanese side how much of China they were in control of and everything

you look at that and you're just like oh shit like that's a fucking lot of area well yeah and even then we talked about

some of sort of these numbers as far as it comes with just how many people were in the world war let's get to it here oh my God how many boards do you have

four we had four Ford's for this episodes. It wasn't quite the Hitler, but it definitely was a lot. But, yeah, as far as the Allied side goes, just the certain, I mean, the amount of people, the soldiers involved total, 13.6 million for the Germans on the axis, 4 million for the Italians, 6 million of the Japanese, then the Allied side, you have 16 million U.S. soldiers, 6 million from Great Britain

34 million from the Soviets Over 126 million people were mobilized In all of World War II That's not and that's not even taking into account How many more millions are you going to add to that That were contributing to the war effort Through factories building all that kind of shit When the entire world was mobilized for this

And I think part of it really gets overlooked Just because of the main ally powers We had a million Australians Show up in World War II 1.1 million Canadians. And for all of our Dublin listeners, there were 50,000 Irish Americans

that fought in the war. So just an absolute crazy amount of people. When we talk about World War, this encapsulates fucking everybody. You're talking about people from Australia. South America was a part of this.

It touched pretty much, I think, every continent besides Antarctica. In Antarctica, Hitler had eyes on creating a super bunker down there. So even that was a little bit of part of it. Tell me about that later. Yeah, we'll talk about that conspiracy.

All right. Actually, that's going to be part of the, because I wanted to talk about the Hitler bunker thing, because there's so many of them built over Europe that we can include this into the super bunker. All right, excellent. All right, you got anything else? No, no.

World War II was fun. All right, guys. Thanks again for joining us, and we'll catch you next week. Please. All right, ladies and gentlemen, thanks for joining us for another episode. If you like what you heard, hit that subscribe and like button. Follow us.

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