Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 124 - Life on a U-Boat was terrible

Episode Date: October 5, 2020

Life aboard a U-boat during WWII was horrible but thankfully short from all the dying. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Correction: During the show Joe says he couldn't find reports of U-Boat crews killing themselves. Someone pointed out it happened at least once in this incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Zschech Sources: Iron Coffins by Herbert Warner https://www.warhistoryonline.com/instant-articles/horrors-of-serving-a-u-boat.html https://warisboring.com/the-high-tech-toilet-that-destroyed-a-submarine/

Hey everybody, Joe here from the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. If you enjoy what we do here on the show and you think it's worth your hard-earned money, you can support the show via Patreon. Just a $1 donation gets you access to bonus episodes, our Discord, and regular episodes before everybody else. If you donate at an elevated level, you get even more bonus content. A digital copy of my book, The Hooligans of Kandahar, and a sticker from our Teespring store. Our show will always be ad-free and is totally supporter-driven. We use that money to pay our bills, buy research materials that make this show possible, and support charities like the Kurdish Red Crescent, the Flint Water Fund, and the Halo Trust. Consider joining the

Legion of the Old Crow today. And now, back to the show. A dance of tradition. Whenever an American vessel leaves port, the crew sings this ancient sea chanty. A one, a two, a three, a four. Hello and welcome to yet another episode of the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe and with me today from an undisclosed location near the grassy knoll is Nick. We're still doing this? Uh, sure near the grassy knoll is Nick. We're still doing this? Sure. The grassy knoll is eternal. Yeah.

So what you're saying is I can't do a Jesse Ventura. Oh, yeah. I got to hear his voice, and then I can get pretty close to it. I know I can. I'm not a comedian, and I'm definitely not an impersonator. Oh, no. God, no. But I know I could do a pretty good one

and Nick I don't know why I'm talking about Jesse Ventura because they were talking about Nazis and that's not a good segue at all oh so what do you know about also like forgive any fuck ups that I say

more than normal because my eyes are currently dilated uh yes and uh your close vision is completely dog shit when your eyes are dilated and the laptop screen is burning my retinas i think there's a term for close vision i don't know. Near sightedness? I say close vision. Up close eye stuff. Yeah. Nick, you're a World War II guy. You're a resident World War II guy. I dabble. What do you know about life in a fucking U-boat?

Not a thing. Is that what we're talking about? We're talking about life in a U-boat world war ii i do have to point out there's because they're like there's u-boats in world war one too uh but like what what what i can say is uh it was a sweaty life it was a bo life very much so and probably more than i have seen hunt for red october you ever seen dust boot? I want to see it, but I don't know. It's been recommended to me by Reign Actors and that just turns me off. It is a

really good movie. Really? It's also a very good book written by an actual U-Boat veteran, which are super rare, and we'll talk about why that's the case. Do they hate themselves? No.

It's like honestly it's hard to explain. It's like, I don't know, probably like being 18, 15 and you run into a veteran of Napoleon's

invasion of Russia. Like, holy shit, some of you made it? You guys exist? Yeah, like we assumed that all of you were dead. Yeah. And so it's bad. In case you're running short on time or whatever and you're running into work while listening to this podcast,

too long, didn't read, a life in a U-boat is real, real bad. Have a good day at work. Yeah. Have a good day at work. Yeah, have a good day at work. Tell me what that's like being gainfully employed. Now, life aboard a submarine still kind of sucks from what I've understood, which is why I like the U.S. Navy suckers people into like six-year-long contracts

because they really only get you for one. Um, and they have to be really long. Um, but we're going to be talking about various different U-boats during world war two. Um,

and instead of talking about all of the different makes and models or whatever, cause there's a few, um, I'm gonna talk in generalities. Uh, I'm not a submarine nerd like at all and pointing out the differences and all the different subs honestly doesn't change the quality of life for most of

these people like most of the changes had nothing to do with the crew life uh quality whatsoever it was almost like now can carry more torpedoes or like now it can go even further underwater yes it it actually just burns sailors for fuel now but like we can go underwater for hours at a time but you know it was almost universally though so it does seem like life in a allied sub like an american sub um in world war two was better but not a whole lot. It was almost universally bad. I'm talking quality of life on board without people shooting at you or trying to blow you up with depth charges or whatever.

The American sub seemed to have a bigger refrigeration system. They actually had a functioning kitchen with a cook on board, which is impressive in comparison to the U-boats, which did not. Yeah. There was cooking on board, but it was like a hot plate situation. And we'll talk a little bit more why that quickly didn't matter.

So obviously life aboard these U-boats was horribly cramped. A normal sub was only about 311 ish feet long. I should point out that the vast majority of this is not meant for people. It's all machinery to keep the U-boat from not

killing you while you're underwater. We'll talk a little bit more about that because it depends mostly on what exactly they're doing, but we'll get there. Now, it's weird because they're called U-boats, like underwater boat rather than submarine because this is going to sound kind of weird here,

but it was pretty much a surface ship that could stay under water for a little while i know that probably sounds really brain dead for me to say because it's a submarine a submarine is a boat that goes underwater um but that's actually not really the case uh it's like a an important differentiator which honestly when i read that at first i have to reread that sentence like what because i'm like yeah of course it's a boat that goes underwater that's like saying a plane is a car that flies yeah yeah like in a 737 is just a commuter train that flies like that makes a lot of sense when you like rip a bong or whatever um so the main reason why i have to kind of point that out is that most people think of like a modern submarine that can stay underwater for a very

very very long time um but world war II subs, especially U-boats, stayed on the surface pretty much 90% of the time. All their combat patrols were carried out on the surface. And submerging underwater was literally only for an ambush attack or when you're running for your life. So it's working. You never stayed underwater for that long. There's a reason for that.

Uh, I believe they just call those Soviet submarines and it's cause they're still on the bottom of the ocean. Nailed it. That one's been underwater since 1986. Keep it up boys. Uh, there's a,

there's a reason why they didn't stay underwater that long, and it's mostly a technological thing. These things were powered by a diesel engine while it was surfaced. And while it was surfaced, the diesel engine would recharge a lead acid battery, like a lot of them,

like a whole array of batteries, that would then be switched over to power them while they're underwater thus draining the battery so you could only stay below the surface as long as batteries could keep the sub alive this could be around 24 hours or 80 nautical miles whichever came first barring any horrible mechanical problems which there were so many of those, Nick. Just so many awful mechanical problems. Yeah, I've seen movies where there's bidding out of pipes and people are just closing faucets.

Honestly, they're like, why? Okay, so keep that in mind later on. Why having seawater inside a submarine other than the fact that, okay, now we're going to sink and we can't control it. There's actually a lot of other things of why that's bad. And we'll talk about that later. Yes, seawater inside your boat, bad. Like I always say, this podcast covers the hard topics.

So something bad would really, really happen if, say, that seawater that's rushing in through pipes or whatever came in contact with those batteries that were keeping you alive while you're underwater. Right. Lead acid batteries combined with seawater creates chlorine gas. Oh. They're fucking gassing themselves. Yeah. I mean, if anything, if anybody's ever hit the Nazis with an Uno reverse card, that's it.

Yeah. Locking them in an enclosed tube and then gassing them. Like, fucking the Poseidon is like, got you good, fucker. Yeah. Like, also, that was a huge problem even when it was above the surface because you know leaks

happened and whatnot um but yeah if if water got in the battery compartment they were absolutely fucked uh which will become important later on uh because we're gonna go over what honestly is probably the dumbest sinking in u-boat history and that's gonna be an important part of it now these things are 311 feet ish long i hope a dude was just like carrying a glass of water and tripped i'm gonna need you to think dumber also you don't drink seawater you'll die just like a regular glass of water oh so the salt is an important part of why it doesn't work anyway well maybe you wanted some salt in it who knows i have a sore tooth and i need to gargle this salt water right next to these batteries i made oh um now for like

this tube being full of machinery with batteries that could possibly fire chlorine gas at you and being fueled by diesel fuel like you assume there's like i don't know some like decent speed right like these things can get up and move like how fat how fast do you see these things going let's see 10 miles per hour you're close eight eight miles an hour while submerged that's not bad that's like world war one tank speed right there that's that's faster than i can go underwater that yeah you know it's it's not faster than michael phelps can go underwater so take that you boats michael phelps american ingenuity seven foot tall freak of nature that runs on Doritos and weed smoke.

Now, just for a little comparison, I do this mostly for myself because I know everything about submarines. A modern nuclear-powered sub. And there's a listener who continually complains about how I say the word nuclear. How do you say it? I'm not going to fix it now. Nuclear. What's wrong with that? Whereas Homer Simpson, I don't know, as Homer Simpson says, nuclear.

It's pronounced nuclear. I don't see the issue. I don't know. I was curious about how these World War II era subs compared to modern day subs. A modern day nuclear sub can stay underwater for months with the longest underwater patrol going for 111 days by a British submarine in the,

in the 1980s, which sounds like fucking hell on earth. Yeah. Yeah. You're just stuck in a metal tube full of people. You definitely hate by this point. I can only compare being in a sub. It's like,

I don't know, being moist tankers, you know, like, cause like I was, I being in a sub as like, I don't know, being moist tankers. You know, like, because like I was in a tank. So after maybe a week, you're already over everybody's shit. You're over them completely. I can't imagine after 111 days of being locked inside together, this is going to be a murder. I just can't imagine like, oh, let me go take a shower and then walking back out and like, oh, cool, I just got fucking

steamy, all fucking moist again. I will say that's better than the other option that we'll talk about right now. So let's say you got drafted by Nazi Germany and you ended up in the Kriegsmarine, but

had the shit luck of being in a submarine. What kind of life would you like expect to make a long story short, incredibly long stretches of boredom punctuated by moments of hoping death charges don't murder you and the steel tube you now call home. Also everything's small, terrible all the time. Just, just constantly. Also, everything smelled terrible all the time. Just constantly. As we're talking about the U-boat specifically in this episode, we're going to be sticking talking about the German experience. So unfortunately, we have to put ourselves in the shoes of a Nazi.

Okay, so you got drafted. Submarines are obviously technical machines and one wrong move can lead to you and everybody in the sub dying a horrible death being like i don't know explosively decompressed so quickly your blood literally boils in your veins so you'd probably think that the training to get like to understand how to use these fucking things would be intense and only the best sailors become submariners right um no yeah you're right um if anybody thought that was the case um you must be new to the show otherwise we wouldn't be talking about this um so u-boat officers were just navy officers that went through the same training as everybody else and if chosen for U-boat duties, they would undergo a rigorous 207-hour-long course

to learn how to be an officer on a submarine. I feel like that's not enough time. 207 hours. So by comparison, a hairdresser needs 1,500 hours of school before they can be licensed in some states. Your submarine commander has less training than a hairdresser also so do cops nice

as the war went on that training would be decreased what if you had a Kree's marine captain hairdresser on the submarine everybody's just getting shitty Nazi undercuts not him he knows what he likes I'm going to say he's going to get an emo pixie cut and it's going going to say he's going to get an

emo pixie cut. He's going to have frosted tips. I feel like Nazis would have frosted tips. Oh, for sure. This 207 hour long rigorous course would be cut shorter and shorter as the war went on and it became more and more important to

replace all the dead people. Here's your handbook. There's your submarine. Good luck. Here's the keys to the sub. Pulled around front. But I don't know how to drive manual. It's the stick shift sub. I don't know anything about subs.

Yeah, is there an automatic sub and a manual sub? I assume it's all like the Flintstones and there's just ports at the bottom of it like sailors kicking yeah oh so let's say you weren't an officer and let's be honest nobody in here is going to be an officer so you're

enlisted you can look forward to between 4 and 20 days of training on what what on training alright don't suck in the between four and 20 days of training. On what? What on training? It was depending on... All right, don't suck in the battery fucking gas. I feel like there's not really much.

Torpedoes go out, not in. Remember that. Actually, funny side note. That was a problem for American subs. What? Yeah. They came out with a magnetic torpedo or something like that and um one time

they fired it and it zipped back around and blew themselves up which is just some wily coyote ass shit that's fucking awesome uh so how long your training was was depending on what exactly your job was aboard the sub there's's technicians. That was their job was to actually do mechanic technician type stuff to keep the sub going. They'd undergo the longest amount of training, which, mind you, is still only 20 days.

Like the guy who's working on your diesel engine that will or will not murder you if it's worked on wrong. Solid two and a half weeks. Nice. Uh, and then there was semen. Um,

their job was to do like shitty unskilled labor jobs. Like Houston watch man, decked guns, manually Lorded, uh, loaded torpedoes, uh, plus other like shitty manual labor positions,

like cleaning, uh, like stocking food and cooking. Cause it sucked on the captain's toes. If he was into that sort of thing, um, like they didn't have a specific cook. So it was also the Siemens job to like cook.

And like, if it was their job to fire deck guns, um, stuff like that. Um, okay. So neither you nor your commander really knows what you're doing or what a submarine is. That sucks. So we're going to talk about your new life a bit.

The size of the crew that you'd be working with was dependent on the kind of sub you were on. It could be anywhere from 20 to 50 people in the largest U-boat. What? Yeah. on. It could be anywhere from 20 to 50 people in the largest U-boat. And the amount of space you had to work with when it came to living and working on board the sub was universally cramped. It did not matter what boat you were in. Even though the biggest U-boat was the size of a Boeing

767, it was packed with machinery that kept it functioning and floating and not killing you, leaving little room for the people inside of it. It's like that robot chicken episode where it has transformers. And there's people. There's no room for people as

they transform and crush everybody. That's honestly for sure. There's no fucking way somebody's going to survive inside a transformer when it transforms. No, you're just being turned into Optimus Prime grease. Not good grease. No, because it has bones in it.

I got a Nike caught in my gear. Yeah. So the bunks that you'd be living in were squeezed in. The child above just caught in your gears. Honestly, that's the best thing that could happen to him. Him and Megan Fox just get churned into jelly. Oh.

The bunks that you were living on were squeezed into wherever they could fit. This included along the engine and torpedoes. But don't worry, you won't be spending a lot of time in those bunks anyway. You'd be working around the clock in four to six hour shifts if you were a technician, or eight if you're a seaman. That downtime wasn't set aside

for sleep either. There's other chores that you had to do other than your set duty job. So like, you know, cooking, cleaning, you know, bitch work effectively. You had to do those when you weren't doing your actual job. And that was a continuous cycle. So eight hours on, eight hours off, eight hours on, eight hours off. Forever. The U-boat's still at the bottom of the sea. They're still working. And there wasn't enough bunks to go around because of how small the insides were.

So it didn't matter how many people were awake or asleep. There wasn't enough bunks anyway. The only private bunk belonged to the captain, which was separated by everybody else by a sheet. Yeah, this meant everybody else slept out in a hot bunk situation. Are you familiar with hot bunking? I don't think I want to know. It sounds gross.

It's like hot couch guy. So hot bunking is the practice of you share bunks with a rotating cast of people, all of whom, and you as well, are absolutely chock full of lice and other skin disorders because that happened all the time. And there's almost no way to treat any kind of medical problem if you caught one while you're on patrol. So the bunk that you're sleeping on, almost as soon as it's your turn to get up and go to work, the guy coming off work is crashing into it right after you. It's like sitting on a hot toilet seat. Oh, okay.

Someone was just here. Sometimes that's the best toilet seat when you're out in the field, when it's cold. As long as you don't think about it too much. Yeah. All you got to do is be like, hey, it's warm. Yeah. So how long would some of these patrols last? How long would you be cycling forever, climbing into a lice-infested bunk that you shared with three other people?

So assuming nothing bad happened and you died, you could be at sea for six months. Ugh. During that time, I hope you don't enjoy showering because you wouldn't be doing any of that. Don't need it. So space, as we talked about already, was at a premium.

Fresh water, it turns out, takes up a ton of space. And that same space could be used for something that could prolong the patrol, say like diesel fuel, allowing the sub to stay out for a much longer amount of time. As the Nazis' main goal during the Battle of the Atlantic was to hunt, destroy shipping and strangle supplies

going towards Europe and at one point the UK, the longer the patrol was, the better. So that meant that almost every patrol switched out half of their drinking water with diesel fuel. This meant fresh water was strictly rationed for drinking only. And even then, it was very limited to the point that everybody was pretty much always slightly dehydrated. I would hope for my Yugo to get hit by a fucking death charge. This is the part where I get to say, wait,

it gets worse. Also, I'd be hoping for death about three days into this journey. The subs were not climate controlled whatsoever. And you can imagine how much water you would want to drink in a hot metal tube full of churning machinery and people.

Especially when you're hot bunking. The air was a mixture of hydraulic fluid, diesel fumes, shit, piss, and body odor. Oh, fuck. You've swam in the ocean, right? Yeah. You know how your skin feels awful

after it's super dry and bugs you if you don't shower off all the salt? No. Well, it dries your skin out really bad and can cause rashes. Especially for prolonged exposure. You can't bathe in seawater. It fucks your skin up.

The Germans gave out this weird soap that you could apply that would try to get the salt off of your body so you could then bathe in seawater. The problem was this soap kind of covered you in a weird oily film.

Ew. Just slippery as fuck all the time, which is very dangerous when you're walking around in a metal tube full of functioning machinery and diesel power and stuff. You could slip and die. Also, it was flammable. I was just about to say, what if

it just so happens that your slick, oiled skin is all of a sudden flammable? But guess what? It fucking is. How could we make this worse? Ah, yes. Let's make it catch on fire. You're just looking at the fucking soap and you're just like all in awe. They're just looking at the fucking soap and you're just like all in awe

and they're just like, but it smells good. It was unscented. Oh, that's even worse. They could at least try to make it smell good. So sailors would just choose not to bathe because bathing in seawater and then using that soap literally turned them into the human torch.

Could you imagine getting engulfed in flames underwater and killing everyone around you at that very moment it's like a like fires aboard ships are like horrible threat which is why like everybody in the Navy on a boat is certified as a firefighter because they're very very big threat now also

you're on fire and underwater and like I'm just like as picturing all these guys like that scene from always sunny where frank becomes a uh a germaphobe and covers himself in hand sanitizer oh yeah and it's just like writhing around in a pile of it um yeah so like people just chose like you know fuck it i'll just stink um so like i was saying is that the the air was like putrid it was foul um it was also the the tubes because uh you know you're submerged in in water and you have hydraulic fluid people are sweating so it was super humid as well and hot uh if you know. If you know about food sanitation and what happens when things are hot and humid, right?

Yeah. Everything slowly but surely gets covered in mold. So thank you for your service on the moldy shit tube. Like one of the jobs that you'd have every day is like cleaning mold off of everything. Oh, that reminds me of my barracks room from our, oh. And like, so like one of your jobs would be cleaning mold off everything and the walls of the sub would sweat. Don't you just hate that? And like, the thing is like when you think about even more of

like what could this sweat be coming from it's literally from you because like one of the things filling the air with humidity is your own sweat right so like you're literally mopping your own reconstituted bo off the walls could you imagine like one day you wake up and you realize your recording room is sweating yeah like if i was locked in this room which by the way i have so much more room than a submariner and the walls were just pulsating in my own shit juices i would hang myself with my laptop and then a dude in the corner is like you want a hot bunk later just switching up okay so like we've been in situations where we couldn't shower for a very long amount of just switching up bugs for no reason.

Okay. So like we've been in situations where we couldn't shower for a very long amount of time, right? Like what's the longest you've been in the field and not be able to shower. I usually try to, I usually find a way. I, my first time you like you wipe yourself off or whatever.

Yeah. I'd make a makeshift shower, but I won't, I wouldn't consider it a shower. So I'd say like three, four weeks. Yeah. And like, I should point out that like baby wiping it is significantly more than what these guys are doing um like and i think the furthest i went was two months uh but i was like cleaning myself in one way with fresh water every day right little bird baths yeah and you could still

change your uniform which like you know changing your socks and your underwear and like your pants like hell yeah i'm good to go right like these so these guys are like cleaned yourself and then you feel lighter oh god you feel agile yeah like i'm ready to take on the world how heavy were they uh all accounts from the surviving u-boat crewman which there's not many uh like makes it sound like at the end of every patrol like they would literally scare away people when they came out because reasons we'll talk about uh one of the things about rationing fresh water means nobody's shaving uh for six months at a time. And I don't know if you've ever had, say, a thick beard,

and it's really hot and humid, but I can tell you from firsthand experience, it only makes you sweat more and makes you feel disgusting because it feels like you can't get your face clean. So like we said, you feel really good after changing a uniform these guys did not have a change of uniform gears and gear and clothes take up space so every sailor was only allowed to bring the clothes on their backs along with a change of socks and underwear oh in three months i'll change my underwear. Can't wait.

Got to turn it inside out. The one luxury on board, because even Nazi Germany realized they stuffed all these poor people into a moldy shit tube, was an incredibly strong deodorant that was used to cover body odor throughout the entire trip. Was it Axe? That's exactly what I thought of. It's like shitty high schoolers just spraying everything down with x but like okay i'm showing my age a little bit here but you remember a long time ago and x body uh body spray commercials oh yeah you gotta do the x yeah you'd spray and then like women would come out of nowhere continuous x you don't stop

these spray forever until the can's empty. But you remember when they would spray and then women would come out because it was attractive or whatever the stupid commercials were. Just now imagine those same commercials, but you just spray the X on you and a crowd of pale, unwashed Nazis with lice just come shambling out of the world like,

yes. We're gonna hot bunk later. Axe, but for Nazis with skinned sinners. It just looks like a fucking zombie movie. It's like the other guys when all the homeless dudes fuck in the Prius.

Thanks for the fuck, Shaq. We will fuck in your car again, sir. Oh, you have a Prius. I do. You might have that problem. I have solidarity with homeless people and I allow them to have sex in my car as much as they want. That's called praxis.

Isn't that called a... What did they say in the movie? It's like a soup... Oh, man. It's a soup kitchen. We're having a soup kitchen. I don't know if it's a soup kitchen. Maybe it was.

I don't remember. So obviously having a bunch of people crammed into a hot metal tube that smells like shit and is covered in mold and sweating your own reconstituted sweat is bad. But what

happens when you get a bunch of people breathing in an enclosed airtight space, Nick, off the top of your head? What do you think could happen? I imagine carbon dioxide. I imagine that'd be an issue. It's a big one. They would need Apollo 13's crew.

We have to put it together with a Fanta can and that pile of gold on the wall. That's the filter. And then we're going to plug it into Gunther's asshole. So eventually the crew would breathe in all the oxygen, which would then be replaced by CO2 as you breathe out. In case anybody was aware, that's how your respiratory system works. You're welcome.

in case anybody was aware that's how your respiratory system works you're welcome uh so normally you start losing your shit when your co2 levels around 2.5 percent in the air that you breathe um you start getting a little loopy and then slowly you know you move downwards until you die uh after about five hours submerged in a u-boat The CO2 levels inside would be already getting close to 2%. This is what is known as not good. The mold starts talking to you? The mold starts growing down your throat. One of us.

Have you watched Ferngully? No. So there's like a sentient glob of oil that is like one of the bad guys. It's just like slithering around and talking about how great pollution is. I just assume that's what the mold is like. But remember, they can technically stay underwater for a day or longer.

So if they had to, like in the case of emergency. So they had an emergency alkaline air purification charge that like they could fire that would clear the air, uh, using, you know, alkaline to neutralize the CO2 as well as 10 bottles of emergency oxygen as a last resort.

These bottles are meant as if a quote, if we don't use these, we will die scenario as one person put it. Oh yes. if we don't use these, we will die scenario, as one person put it. Oh, yes. So what actually happened a lot of the time is U-boat crews were high as fuck from their own CO2

as they tried to run for their lives. Hilariously enough, one of the best ways U-boat crews could tell that their air was running low in oxygen and high in CO2 was because they would have a hard time lighting their cigarettes. That's how. Notice how they were still smoking as they were underwater and burning through oxygen.

Yeah. Oxygen would be so depleted from their environment that matches wouldn't work, which is incredible. And, but apparently matches worked better than lighters. I feel like they probably shouldn't be smoking down there. Yeah. That's what I would say too.

If you're in an enclosed space breathing in recycled oxygen, maybe don't smoke in it. This all sounds really bad, right? It sounds fucking awful. Nick, you're a resident cook expert here.

How do you think they're eating? From all the mold. Not great, right? No, because I remember exactly what my dad used to say whenever I used to find mold on something. He'd be like, it's extra protein. Oh, thanks, Dad. Yeah, that's just poor people. It really is.

Just cut it out. You'll be fine. it out you'll be fine so at first so when the crew was like underway uh they would stuff as much fresh food as they could on board to live off of for the first few weeks of their patrols but remember how i pointed out that there was no refrigeration yeah yeah that parts to become key that sounds stupid let's put fresh produce on this tube of bullshit and and remember how i said that like you're sleeping literally everywhere what what kind of horrible foodborne illnesses i'm literally asking you because i have no idea what kind of horrible foodborne illnesses could be spread say if you just like slept next to like a a raw hawk of ham for weeks at a time because there's literally pictures of this happening

i mean fuck just raw unrefrigerated meat in like dairy and vegetables i don't think they had a lot of fruit but like you know what i'm saying like it's just out i know there's like three of them that i know i can't pronounce but they start with c and i know they're bad all of them will probably kill you e-coli i know that one i got poor guy i know there's like listeria and all that other bullshit so what you're saying is i shouldn't just bunk i shouldn't hot bunk next to a like a slab of beef i wouldn't i wouldn't fuck i imagine fuck, do you think they were sleeping on their food? They're like, hey, we don't have space. Sleep on top of that side meat.

Someone just spooning alongside the cabbage. So, there's a reason why that they would stuff food aboard for the first few weeks of the patrol. And not much past that, they had to eat it first and as fast as they could due to their living conditions the air was full of diesel vapors as well as being

gross and humid and there was only one very small refrigeration unit this meant that any fresh food was immediately spoiled within a couple days why don't they just pack like fucking top ramen i wasn't invented yet. Yeah. The Nazis make a time machine and only jump back for cup noodles. Yeah, they go straight back. Straight back to hell. Anything beyond a couple weeks at most, the fuel and fluid vapors in the air would turn it into literal poison. The bread would sprout mushrooms on it,

which should be noted, is not normal. We've never seen moldy bread before. It's not normally seeded by mushrooms. Look, our sandwich is growing. Our bread is growing into a sandwich. In a couple weeks, it'll be pastrami. Early in the War of U-Boat packing list for the first few weeks had things like fresh

meat, bread, eggs, fruit, vegetables, etc. That's where I found the picture of just huge cuts of meat out of the Flintstones dangling from meat hooks between where men were sleeping. Obviously, that's hilariously unsafe. Some of it is propaganda, but some of it is also true. But by the end of the war, as the realities of material shortage crept up on Nazis, those packing lists shrank considerably. So

you're probably asking, well, that's the first couple weeks. But you said that these went for six months. What happens then? Well, you were fucked. You'd have to survive on canned food. pretty much just sausages just six months of various different flavors of vienna sausages all day i would take the labels off the canned and it'd be a surprise every day what is it it's sausages again fuck though the

kriegsmarie knew that their sailors couldn't survive on canned food alone like it just you'll eventually you'll be nutritional deficiencies and everything will creep up on you or whatever so they issued a flavorless soy filler product called Bratling Spulver to round out

their diet now it was flavorless but it had vitamins and minerals in it so like you don't know you can get scurvy or some shit. But the crews called it diesel food. Because while originally tasteless, after being exposed to the rain and air, it would just taste like diesel fuel. It reminds me of what they fed the people at the back of the train in Snowpiercer. Yes.

Yeah, it's the jelly. But, like, honestly, I'd rather rather eat bugs to be completely honest i mean that might taste better at least it would have a taste true and not like then bear grills to sit next to you like oh this is great bear grills is being on top of it that's how you get the flavor so all of this combined with with what else but extreme psychosis. Eating out of cans and weird globs of diesel engine combined with being locked in a tube with 50 dudes huffing each other's horrible shit gas did not equal good mental health.

People began snapping after weeks or months of rarely seeing outside and violently attacking one another were very common. Still other people would just stare aimlessly at the wall for hours, lost in thought, side and violently attacking one another were very common. Still, other people would just stare aimlessly at the wall for hours, lost in thought, or completely snapped and gone. Hey, Mold. Me again.

Dear Mold, I write you and you still ain't calling. Some commanders organized chess matches to try to make people focus on something that wasn't a horrible depression. Imagine being the guy that loses all the time though. Yeah.

And eventually the Nazis installed like a record player on the boat. But like, you can only imagine how many records you could bring. It's like the same three records for six fucking months. What do you guys want to listen to? I have baby by Justin Bieber, WAP by Cardi B, and

Rocket Man by Elton John. Fuck. Play the same song. I brought Nickelback's Greatest Hits Volumes 1-3. And that's when the suicides skyrocket. Actually, speaking of which, suicides were apparently

not common at all. Really? Morale was high. I couldn't find a single... I don't know. I don't think so. But like... Yeah, I couldn't find a single written report

of a Nazi U-boat crewman killing themselves. So with all this, your most basic needs as a human are being met in the most nightmarish way possible. What happens if you say you have to take a shit? I mean, you've been eating a ton of canned food, breathing in diesel fumes constantly. Probably equals some weird, like, lower intestinal problems, right? I imagine.

So there's two toilets on most U-boats. Unfortunately, one of those toilets was always used as store supply. What? Yeah, so like until all the supplies were used in that toilet, you couldn't use it. Here's our problem. We put an extra toilet on here. Better turn it into a closet, which

to be fair, sounds like something any military would do because they hate you. So that means everybody only had one toilet to work with. But you can still shit, right? Kind of. U-boats had functional toilets, but only at certain times. They were pressed for space and did not want to store any waste on subs. In comparison, the U.S. subs had a completely internal waste collection system.

So take a dump flush it it would be sucked into like a storage container to be emptied out later where some dude would be waiting and it was absolutely some poor bastard's job to fucking like get the the wipey out that clogs the toilet or whatever um the germans didn't want to build a container system for that because remember they're already using half their water supply for diesel fuel and instead they came out with like a way to fire it into the ocean but this is the 1940s

so things didn't work out great it was a manual operated pump that the shitter would have to use after shitting the shitty I'm not sure so you poopitter would have to use after shitting. The shitty? I'm not sure. So you'd poop and you'd have to pump it. You'd slowly pump the contents of the toilet into the ocean.

But because this is manual, it only works at low pressures. Meaning it could only be used when you're at or near the surface. If the crew was submerged, it couldn't and wouldn't be used. Meaning everybody had to just shit into a pile. But what normally happens is emergencies or diseases aside, people just wouldn't use the bathroom. Then that's mostly because when you're underwater that deep, you're running for your life or ambushing.

Really not the time to try to fucking cut a turd off. So, like, hold it. Now... It's like the back of the fucking bus where the shitter is. Everybody knows, eh, don't shit back there, but I still do.

Yeah, I've done it. I've 100% done it. Yeah. As the war dragged on and allied technology to hunt these subs got better, German subs spent more and more time underwater, trying to stay hidden or running for their lives. All they had to do was follow the shit trail. Well, that's

the problem. That meant more and more people couldn't take a shit because they were in high pressure waters so their pump system wouldn't work. Exactly. Undetectable. That was the Allies' plan. If we keep them underwater, the Nazis will just burst

because they'll never be able to take a dump enter the type 7c submarine in a toilet so high tech in this age of submarine warfare it literally required a specially trained toilet technician in order to operate it correctly

imagine that MLS it was the Rube Goldberg project of taking a shit um so it yeah like what did i get picked for am i a tank crewman am i in a battleship am i in a submarine you're the toilet guy damn it toilet guy i'm toilet technician third class nice to meet you you know how the navy has different insignia on their ranks where you got the prop this one's it's just a guy popping a squat taking a shit

so this new system directed human waste through a series of chambers into a pressurized airlock the contraption would then blast it into the sea with compressed air, sort of like a shit torpedo. Did they use it in combat? But this meant

that it could be fired, the shit torpedo, that is, while deep underwater. A specialist on each submarine received training on proper toilet operating procedures. Because the reason for this was there was an exact order of opening and closing the valves to ensure that the system flowed in the correct direction. Because the Germans either didn't think about or did not care enough

because there was no safety mechanism in place in case if you did this incorrectly. Meaning if you did it wrong, the toilet would flush it in reverse and flood the submarine with water and shit. So this guy has to flush it every time? Yes. Imagine if he's fucking dead asleep and you try to fucking take a shit.

That's exactly, you'd have to wake him up. I would hate that fucking job. You got all these dudes that need to take a shit after eating's exactly, you'd have to wake him up. I would hate that fucking job. You got all these dudes that need to take a shit after eating Vienna sausages the past week. And this brings us to the case of U1206. The shittiest of them all. The time that a guy

who did not use the toilet technician killed a couple people while taking his shit. Oh, fuck. So it's the shitiest of them all. Yeah, the U-1206 is one of these super shitter subs. After undergoing trials, it was given over to the command of 27-year-old

Adolf Karl Schlitt. That's right. His last name is Schlitt. Schlitt. And he killed some people with his shit. I'm not proud of that rhyme. Now, that's the first combat patrols on April of 1945, damn near the end of the war. Schlitt and his submarine were eight days

into their first combat patrol of the war. And the submarine lurked 200 feet... Morale was high. Morale and contents of his bowels were high. The submarine lurked 200 feet beneath the surface of the North Sea when Commander Schlitt decided he had to take a dump. Looking around, he saw the boat's resident toilet specialist was busy on one of his other jobs.

But apparently this particular dump could not wait. So he decided he could fuck it, I'll figure out the toilet myself. Schlitt took his dump and attempted to get the toilet to work but couldn't. So he called over an engineer, the engine mechanic, who was not the toilet mechanic, to help him.

With the two of them fucking with this piece of machinery at the same time, they succeeded in doing exactly what they should not have done and sent gallons of highly pressurized shit water in the wrong direction and shooting back into the submarine. They then panicked and attempted to fix this. Only then did Schlitt decide

it was a good time to go maybe find that toilet guy the Navy gave him. But by then, it was way too late. Seawater was flooding in through the toilet and began pooling into the engine room, submerging the batteries. This caused them to create chlorine gas

mixed with shit. Locking the Nazis in enclosed space and gassing them. They call that ironic justice. Now, Schlitt was faced with two options. Stay

submerged and die, either from drowning or choking on chlorine gas, or immediately surface to try to get some fresh air. He did what any other human would do in this situation, ordered the sub to surface. The crew blew the ballast tanks, which helps the submarine

rapidly surface, and even fired their torpedoes in an attempt to improve the flooded vessel's buoyancy so they could surface more rapidly. What happened next is chronicled in Schlitt's own report on the incident. Quote, at this point in time, the British planes and patrols discovered us.

Like, imagine Schlitt's like, man, I've already fucked up my first command this could possibly get worse and the back audience here god save the queen fuck the planes immediately turned and began firing on the

submarine and they weren't prepared to defend themselves in any way because remember their lungs were just rapidly melting from chlorine gas exposure and they were't prepared to defend themselves in any way because, remember, their lungs were just rapidly melting from chlorine gas exposure, and they were trying to not die rather than man the guns. Schlitt attempted to escape, but quickly sustained so much damage that became impossible.

And because of his shit mishap, they could no longer submerge because of all the chlorine gas. Faced with capture or death, Schlitt ordered his sub to be sank and the sailors on board their life rafts to surrender themselves to the British forces. Now, normally it's custom for sailors to turn around and provide food and water to enemy sailors

as they attempt to pick them up. But as the U-1206 was harassed by planes and not ships, it would take a while for a boat to show up and grab them. As the crew floated around, they were battered by heavy seas, and at one point when the rafts overturned off the coast of Scotland, killing three people. Fuck. Eventually, the sailors were picked up by a British ship, and Schlitt survived captivity and lived on until 2009.

But he will forever be known as the U-boat captain who killed more people with a shit than a torpedo. His own bid. He killed three people by taking a shit. What's probably more interesting, because I know I've been calling them interchangeably Nazis and Germans at this point is that the U-boat branch of the Kriegsmarine

according to the book Iron Coffins were the least politicized branch of the German military a good reason for that is everyone involved in operation knew how likely they were to die so fervent loyalty to Hitler really didn't matter all that much in the beginning political officers were a common thing they were to die. So fervent loyalty to Hitler really didn't matter all that much.

In the beginning, political officers were a common thing aboard these U-boats, but as the war went on and their casualty rates quite literally skyrocketed, they stopped doing that. They're like, look, I'm all about this Nazi stuff,

but I am not going on that U-boat. Yeah, I'm not about that underwater life. You hear about Schlitzboot? I don't feel like dying because that guy needs to take a dump. Now, obviously, it was common for officers and men to be part of the Nazi party, but that didn't really matter when you realized that you had to be a member of the Nazi party to do virtually anything in German society at the time, to include just going to college. With the political officers gone, naval officers really didn't care about enforcing political roles because they had a

fucking job to do open criticism of the war and even hitler was commonplace and went unpunished something that would quite literally get you shot almost anywhere else um and their officers were operating under the idea that it doesn't really fucking matter. Why does it not fucking matter? Because U-boats were literally so dangerous that nobody cared. The Nazis just kind of put their hands up and said, you know what? This one's all you. Now, I've brought up how dangerous these boats were quite a few times.

So we should probably look at the raw numbers and just see how dangerous they were. And that's actually a very good reason as to why there's not many firsthand accounts of U-boat crews. An average crewman had a life expectancy of 60 days. Oh. Now, if you think about it, it is very rare for a crew member of a submarine to die individually. Normally your whole crew dies. So that meant most crews had the life expectancy of 60 days.

Your whole crew dies. So that meant most crews had the life expectancy of 60 days. Surviving your first full six-month patrol was considered incredibly rare. And you get to go home after that, right? No. Oh. Absolutely not. And of most of the boats sent out, of most of the boats sent out,

of all the boats sent out, 70% would never return. Fuck. 70% casualty rate. That is awful. By the end of the war, out of the 40,000 or so U-boat crewmen who had served, less than 10,000 survived. This meant that being a U-boat crewman was the single most dangerous job in all of World War II, regardless of what side you were on. Yeah. And there's very, very few

first-hand accounts. Das Boot is a good one, as is Iron Coffins. But there's not a whole lot out there. I don't know why I just imagined them all getting issued parachutes before they got in their U-boat. I need you to explain that one a bit.

I don't know. I just had this weird thing. Like, here you go. Here's your parachute. For what? Eh, you know. It's so when you wrap it around yourself, your corpse might float back to the surface. Easy retrieval.

Now, I don't know about you, Nick, but for me, as someone who's not a World War II scholar, but more flutes around the periphery as a nerd, you don't hear much about the Kriegsmarine. No. And when you do, it's like the Wolfpack. They had these Wolfpack

attacks. They strangled continental Europe of supplies. They're an integral part of the Battle of Britain to try to strangle off the British Isles. But honestly, I think a serious argument can be made that the Kriegsman was the most useless branch of the German military in World War II. And I think a lot of these casualties were,

that's just how war goes. Like when you start losing, your casualties will increase. But most of it is the Kriegsmarine had very little regard for their own sailors. Everyone in Germany by the late stage of the war, especially in 1945, like when our poor boy Schlitt killed his sub

with an epic dump, knew the war was lost. And that went doubly so for the crews of the U-boats. Remember, their job was to strangle off supplies, but that didn't really matter anymore when the enemy was literally inside of Germany. Their mission was pointless. There's no way you're sitting in that U-boat

with shit up to your ankle thinking you're going to win the war. No, no, not at all. And the thing is, like, you could think, sitting in that U-boat with shit up to your ankle thinking you're going to win the war? No. No, not at all. And the thing is, you could think we could use these literal thousands of people in better ways. I understand by this point, they're literally holding on to Berlin by their guts or whatever, but nothing is to be gained by sending out a sub mission at this point but they were doing it all the way until the end of the world like there was subs that surrendered in the atlantic ocean because they were still out shooting uh they're sinking

transport vessels it's insane completely pointless um not only was their mission pointless but it's fucking suicidal uh the german codes have been cracked a long time before, and Allied ships had new sonar and radar technology that made U-boats a little more than death traps, and hunting and killing them became like shooting men trapped inside of a U-boat. And that is where Colonel Donitz comes in, the commander of the Kriegsmarine during the war, and eventually the only other ruler of Nazi Germany other than Hitler himself. Because remember, after Hitler killed himself,

Karl Donitz was appointed the new chancellor of Nazi Germany in the North before he surrendered as well. But he kept sending out men on missions, fully knowing that they were probably all going to die and their mission was impossible but history remembers donuts is like pretty much like uh like gudarian or a few others is like one of the good commanders you know he wasn't like he was a nazi nazi he was just a good military commander. One that's patently ridiculous. He literally was the commander-in-chief of Germany

for a couple weeks. It's also just not true. He's literally a war criminal that spent 10 years in prison after the war. Also, his U-boat reputation is almost entirely built on early successes in the war.

If you remember early on in the war, when the US was the arsenal of democracy, we're going to send freedom ships or liberty, they call them liberty ships. And one of their tactics is like, we will just outnumber the U-boats. And they were unprotected, unescorted supply ships. So the U-boats had a fucking field day.

And one of the most dangerous jobs to have in the American military during the war was to be a merchant marine because you were just getting your shit hammered in by U-boats constantly but this eventually changed when these liberty ships were escorted and almost as soon as that happened, you both were pointless. Um, like the, the whole vaunted Wolfpack tactic is pretty much blitzkrieg in that it's

empty war propaganda that people fell for and still talk about. Um, but as soon as reality, uh, was confronted and the Kriegsmarine learned that there were now fighting Navy's capable of fighting back, they became the worst branch of the entire German military and a military full of branches that got their asses kicked.

They only excelled at attacking unarmed, unescorted and unsuspecting cargo ships. And the Kriegsmarine as a whole never really registered a victory against the allies in a peer-on-peer conflict, which is impressive when it comes to literally the Navy of world power. Like, can you think of any triumphant German military victories of the Navy in World War II? There's a reason for that. I mean, the same goes for World War I. like they just they built a navy then didn't really want to use it because they realized the british navy was much more powerful and they would just get their fucking teeth kicked in

which is kind of hilarious because they're right across the channel let's just not show up to game day yeah it's i'm taking my battleship and going home so nick how do you feel now about your your service in a U-boat. It sounds fucking awful. You wouldn't pick it? I would totally be the toilet engineer, though. That would be my job. Guaranteed. What do you think the ASVAB score is for the guy who's the toilet technician?

Spell your name. How do you feel about pooping in toilets? I feel pretty good about it, actually. You're hired. I see you spelled your name wrong. So go ahead and go on to the toilet technician school. How do you feel about being a cook? Yeah.

I like food. That'll work. So, Nick, we do a thing on this show called Questions from the Legion. And I literally don't know of a better question that could be asked for an episode quite like this, which is, what do you think is the worst job in military history? Oh, well, don't you say. We were just talking about one. U-Boats fucking register.

U-Boats definitely, some Mariners in general, definitely one of the worst in World War II. It's hard to measure anything against it because I can't think of any other job where like, yeah, 70% of you are going to die. Yeah, I can't think of any right now. Kamikazes, I guess, but that's kind of the point. Yeah.

That's in the job title. Imagine being a kamikaze and still only having a 70% success rate. Yeah. The one guy that just keeps coming back, like, I don't know, it just doesn't work out. There was that one guy that kept coming back and they eventually just shot him. Yeah. That's real bad. Maybe a medic from, like, I i don't know the 1800s because i mean your job is awful

but most of that terribleness is impressed on someone else because you're sawing their limbs off yeah there's ghosts in your blood you have too much blood in your body turns out yeah your whole your whole body lousy with poltergeists and lead. The humor is all wrong. I think one of the worst is probably like Drummer Boy too. It's like you're literally a child soldier and you don't have a weapon. Unless they sharpen the end of their drumstick. Like, so I get to list. If there's any Drummer Boys listening, give us feedback.

I don't know if the U.S. Army goes back to like, you know, all this coin and modern warfare didn't really pan out for us. So we're going to go back to Von Steuben's Blue Book. And we're going to start recruiting drummer boys again. Like 13, because a lot of them are like 13 14 15 years old that would fucking suck so bad oh man like uh so what's my weapon oh your weapon is those sick beats uh just drumming and playing i don't know and imagine sucking then you got two sides hating you you're like a shitty drummer boy, so they just throw you out in the middle.

Well, Nick, thank you for stopping by and hearing about how awful your life would be if you happened to be a submariner in World War II. Yeah, it sounds like bullshit. Until next time, everyone, don't serve in a German U-boat during world war ii you know what don't flush your toilet don't flush your toilet without proper professional hold your shit until the next episode see you next time later