Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 131 - USS Indianapolis

Episode Date: November 30, 2020

naval incompetence, sharks, and suicide oh my! Support the show :https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Sources: https://www.history.navy.mil/browse-by-topic/ships/modern-ships/indianapolis.html https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/surviving-sinking-uss-indianapolis https://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/online-reading-room/title-list-alphabetically/s/sinking-ussindianapolis/narrative-of-the-circumstances.html https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-23455951 https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-worst-shark-attack-in-history-25715092/

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. you're gonna need a bigger boat hello and welcome to yet another episode of lines led by donkeys podcast i'm joe with me today as a lot not always but a lot this is franc Francis from Hell of a Way to Die had shocks from those legal shitposts that you read. This is the Thursday night. It's International Men's Day today, so happy International Men's Day to the both of you. Finally, we're getting recognized

three white middle-class men. We just don't get enough recognition in this world, so it's good that somebody recognizes us for once. Dudes rock to you and also to you. I don't get enough recognition in this world. So it's good that somebody recognizes us for once. Dude rock to you and also to you. I don't know how to celebrate this day other than like, I don't know, get drunk and watch football. Like, I don't know what I'm supposed to do here. No, give a helping hand to your fellow man and just, you know, just a light circle jerk.

It's fine. As long as you get to make eye contact. Yeah, just really intense eye contact the entire time. Perfect. And you know what goes great with eye contact and hand jobs? Being in the Navy. Anyway. Being eaten by sharks.

And today we're talking about the USS Indianapolis. Only the second most fucked up thing that come out of Indianapolis after our producer. I'm just kidding. I love you. No, he's not. He's not from Indy. No, he's got my mind. All of Indiana.

All of Indiana is Indianapolis. And I refuse to let anybody prove me otherwise. Yeah. I mean, that's like whenever like says they're from Southeast Michigan, they just default to Detroit. That's the only thing anybody's ever heard of, other than Pontiac, because it has a car named after it. I've been to Pontiac, Michigan. So the reason why we're talking about the Indy today is it is one of the largest losses of life at sea in American history, which has been honored the only way America knows how via Nicolas Cage film. Wait, what's Nicolas Cage film?

Like only the brave or something like that. I did not write it down because I'm a hack and a fraud and I have to look it up. It's on one of the streaming services right now because I saw it. And it's just called USS Indianapolis, I think. Or at the very least, that's the title that they now market it under because whatever it was actually called was so fucking terrible that they just gave up on it. It's called USS Indianapolis Men of Courage. And it came out in 2016.

Oh, my God. Why have we not watched this yet he looks nicholas cage looks so intense as an admiral like did an admiral die on this too like look at him go he's just oh we'll talk about the ad we'll talk about the captain yeah now you said you guys said that this was also brought up in jaws so i guess people who are fans of jaws would also know because you you told me like oh that that i probably heard of it but i i watched jaws when i was five and then i never watched it again because fuck that movie it was scary to me um so i'm glad that we're doing the one about all the people that get eaten by sharks it's gonna be fun for me

i mean it's not like you lived near a fucking ocean dude look you never know they're gonna crawl up your toilet in missouri first off sharks can and have swum up the mississippi river all the way up to alton illinois which is north of me so it is a shark so racist that has to go to the south uh but no like i get into the mostly in the ocean i'm just worried about drowning uh sharks is just like a secondary kind of thing like the ocean yeah as as a midwesterner who didn't really see the ocean uh until they were a teenager like it's just it's so big and vast and full of monsters and we've only mapped five percent of it. So it's just like, I'm just going to stay here in the middle of Missouri forever

and not ever touch an ocean. We got the Jaws soundboard here. Shox was so excited about getting to use this. I've never really lived around the ocean until now, and it's still super intimidating to me because it will fucking kill you. You'll just vanish, and no one will ever see you again. Right.

When you read about it, sometimes it's just like, oh, watch out for the riptide, where you just get pulled out to the ocean and disappear forever. It's like, why is that a thing? Why would I be anywhere near that? I don't go into the ocean beyond my forever. It's like, why is that a thing? Why would I be anywhere near that? Like, I don't go into the ocean beyond like my knees,

anything beyond that. I mean, also it's full of fish, so it's gross, but also I don't want to die. So the ocean is pretty clean, at least where I am. I can't speak to like wherever you've been. You know what,

you know what you got in that, you know what you got in that ocean? You got a lot of fish fucking and pooping. All right. I mean, that's the same thing could be said for where you live. There's not a lot of fucking and pooping going on in anything here. It's cow shit.

I mean, if it does, it happens in a controlled and clean kind of way. It's not just like, oh, poop, and it floats around my face now because my air is my water and my water is my poop. You know, this is discriminatory against people who are really into that kind of thing if that's how you want to live that's fine i'm just saying just don't tell me the ocean is clean when it's full of fish that are fucking and pooping it's time for a good old-fashioned pooping fuck this is the most midwestern train of thought that I think I've ever heard off of Francis. I've been caught in a riptide before, and it's fucking scary. It happened like a month ago, and I was out snorkeling, and I tried swimming back, and I realized I'm not going anywhere.

In fact, I am going backwards. And thankfully, there's someone much more experienced than me with me and they like pointed out that i need to swim like sideways and don't fight the current or you'll die uh so you know i live to podcast another day uh so it's their fault that you have to listen to this no there's definitely uh one of the beaches near where i grew up uh someone used to die about like every summer just from like you know being a dip shit and like getting caught up in the riptide and not realizing what you're supposed to do and just getting like pulled out exhausted themselves and fucking drowning maybe not every year but like at least like every couple years growing up there was like always a tourist

who would die on the beach oh that's that's generally who died there's two kinds of people who die on the beach here that's tourists which we haven't had many recently because you know the world ending and uh us who live here getting drunk and doing dumb shit which you know guilty uh a bunch of like service members and former service members doing dumb shit in the ocean no after drinking that that's that seems pretty far-fetched i definitely don't remember a story from my station about some Marine coming home from boot camp and deciding that he was going to swim to a buoy in the middle of December and having to get rescued

by a bunch of dumb ghosties. Definitely not a thing that ever happened. Speaking of the ocean, the Indy was smooth. I'm not smooth. I don't have a good uh podcasting game uh was a portland class cruiser and it was only like two of its class the other being the portland very uh how'd they name it joe uh i believe it was named after the city of portland which um uh so it was uh the third the third class of a heavy cruiser to be

developed by the after the washington naval treaty of 1922 and earning them the completely pointless nickname of treaty cruisers um the reason for that was it was the treaty was put in place after world war one to stop the any future arms race good thing that worked and it it limited the uk the the US, France, Italy, and Japan by the amount of various different ships, like the tonnage of displacement. And they had to be under 10,000 tons of displacement.

So like these ships would be like 9,999, like something out of Final Fantasy VII. Like it was like literally pointing the most it could possibly be with the ability to slap shit onto it later and then break the treaty, which they did. Um, it also made them like, as I remember,

like really fucking stupid too, because you would get, you know, they would like have to make trade offs. So essentially you could either like put a slap, a bunch of fucking armor on it, or you could slap a bunch of guns on it, but you couldn't really do both.

So you ended up with a lot of like really fucking dumb design ships where it was like you know they was either really top heavy because it was all like all guns and no armor or you know it had a bunch of armor but it like couldn't shoot for shit like just like real like you know real military planning this is the one. It has a lot of guns, no armor. Solid. In case anybody knows where this is going, that ends up fucking it pretty bad. The ship was launched in November of 1931

and commissioned in the same month of the next year. After her sea trials were complete, the Indy kind of just became like a VIP ship for some reason. It was previously designated a flagship and therefore had a few nicer living quarters put on board. So before the start of World War I, it transported the president, FDR, and a few of his cabinet members

wherever they wanted to travel, as well as the Secretary of the Navy on a few occasions. It was pretty much a glorified limo or whatever. It was also pretty quick, as I remember. That was also part of the i think the reason for that yeah and that was one of the reasons why it was picked for the mission that it wouldn't come back from as well uh like it could haul ass for a ship of its size um and the indy was stationed out of pearl harbor uh but it had just been moved up to the johnson atoll

as small atoll which is part of hawaii uh during the pearl harbor attacks and so that's why it did not get sank, because it almost definitely would have, because of the lack of armor. And it completely missed out on the attack. This will go down in history as the last time anybody would ever consider being on the ship lucky. After this, there was not many conflicts

in the Pacific theater that occurred that the Indy was not involved in. She fought the New Guinea campaign, inflicting heavy losses against the Japanese, as well as retaking the Aleut that occurred that the Indy was not involved in. She fought the new Guinea campaign inflicting heavy losses against the Japanese, as well as retaking the Aleutian islands from the Japanese. Um, during one of these engagements,

the Indy came face to face with the Japanese cargo ship, uh, that had been dispatched to reinforce the positions on A2 and Kiska, which is loaded with supplies, but also thousands and thousands of reinforcements. Um, the Indy demanded that the ship surrender because it was an unarmed cargo ship,

to which it refused because it was Japanese, so that it was sank with everybody on board. They did not pull any survivors from that shit. Whoops. Yep. This single-handedly probably ensured the ease of which the islands were taken by American forces as the Japanese losses to hold and resupply the islands

grew too great, and they were largely abandoned. In fact, most American casualties from the operations to retake the Aleutian Islands were from friendly fire and frostbite. Whoopsie. Sometimes it's your own people, you know. Yeah, especially with their

Marines. Actually, I don't know if that's true or not. I can't blame them. It was like a visibility thing and they were told that there's like thousands of japanese soldiers waiting on them so like whatever anything like move they just shoot at it well like as i remember wasn't it something where like they attacked like a day late or something and weren't the japanese able to evacuate pretty much everyone off and uh and like some fog or something yeah there's very little fighting um and the islands um also because like they realized uh the the i mean a small side story but the reason why the americans waited so long to retake them is because they were pointless and like

strategically worthless like it was nothing except hey look we control part of america sort of um so after this the ship was moved moved to Australia, refitted with even more guns, and sent out to battle, taking part in the battles of Tarawa and Makin Islands. Things continued like this for years, and the Indy fought again and again at the Marshalls, the West Carolines, Palalu, and New Guinea.

There, they went to Iwo Jima, the Marianas Islands, and the battle at the Philippine Sea, which became known as the Marianas Turkey Shoot, which pretty much destroyed the Japanese Navy for the rest of the war. Though somehow, through all of this, the ship only dropped

two Japanese planes, which is kind of incredible when you think about how many fucking planes were getting shot out of the air that day. Just not a lot of good gunners on board. know like yeah sometimes you hit sometimes you miss and apparently mostly they miss i think it was one of those situations since like most of the carriers were taken down by american planes this because it was like a big um uh like a naval aviation battle where the rest of the planes that were not those things

just kind of sat back and were like, go planes. Uh, it's, it's the reason why, I don't know, like naval aviators, like there's not a lot of video games made after him nowadays. Cause they'd be super boring.

Uh, but despite, despite this, the ship pretty much charted every allied victory throughout the Pacific. Uh, the ship would be selected to go into what I assume was one last mission before retirement if this was a cop movie. We're getting too old for this shit.

You see, America had been working on a secret weapon of mass destruction in the Manhattan Project. Their efforts at Los Alamos culminated with the Trinity Test on July 16th, 1945. Despite worries that it wouldn't work, the bomb nicknamed The Gadget,

pretty much the same design as Fat Man would be that eventually be dropped on Japan, exploded really, really well. It did its job. A small side note here, I'm not sure why I'm including. People think Robert J. Oppenheimer saw the mushroom cloud of this test, which he had a large part in

creating, and quote the now famous line from the Bhagavad Gita, I have become death, destroyer of worlds. But he didn't actually. He said that later, probably because it sounded cooler. Because it does. What he said watching the explosion was, quote, if the radiance of a

thousand suns were burst into once in the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one. Also a quote from bhagavad-gita and does not flow quite as well i mean i i understand that the your historical perspective joe and i appreciate that but um the hunt for red october taught me differently and uh as this is international men's day and uh we're all just very suburban white men here. I'm going to have to rely on that as the superior source. That's fair. As that had Sean Connery in it

and he is dead now, I believe that makes him right. Yeah, I mean, frankly, how dare you speak ill of the dead, you fucking asshole. He's slapping women in heaven now. Oh, Jesus. Only hours after this test, knowing that the bomb worked, the Indy was loaded

down with half of the world's supply of uranium-235 that existed in human hands at the time, along with the top-secret parts needed to complete the bomb known as Little Boy. The combined material is no bigger than two ice cream freezers, according to one sailor, which I have to admit is a very

strange measurement unit to use. That actually kind of weirdly makes sense, I feel. Yeah, I feel like if maybe it was the cook who was like, oh, I saw those things go by. They look like our freezers. I ate ice cream from them, and now my jaw fell off. What I was going to say, too, I feel like particularly at that point, it was probably one of the few things to keep a crew from killing each other on a ship, particularly on like a long fucking journey is the food.

And so and I feel like I remember that, like, you know, numerous pints of ice cream were definitely a thing that were loaded aboard ships, particularly like back in the day for that reason. Yeah, I mean, like one of the early sayings in like like the british royal navy i think is the 1800s is the only thing that kept the royal navy in line with sodomy rum and the lash ice cream is better than two of the three of those things we're not gonna say which one i really enjoy being whipped i'm kidding um you heard it here first folks and like what's funny is like nobody aboard the ship knew what the fuck was in there other than like the captain um and only vaguely like he wasn't given all the details and two mps with guns were stationed in front of them at all times so like people were making bets about what was in there um but like no i bet nobody was thinking hey i bet it's a bomb

that will literally ruin the world from here on forward. I'm sure somebody said it was a big bomb. Yeah, probably. It's the president's porn collection. It's the pee tape. After that, they were ordered to go as fast as they could to the Isle of Tinian alone. After that, they were ordered to go as fast as they could to the Isle of Tinian alone. She got there on July 26th, offloaded the cargo, and it was loaded aboard a plane that has now gone down as probably being the plane that has killed the most people in history, the Enola Gay.

Hey, hey, babe. The most people in history so far. So far. You're right. I apologize, future listeners of this podcast who are listening to it from their bombed-out shell hole that used to be, I don't know, Honolulu. I'm just saying, we got 42 days left in this year, so... Yeah, goddamn. Every one of those 42 days is going to be dumber than the one before it. So after this, the Indy was sent to Guam and then ordered to head towards the island of Leyte around 1200 miles away to finally join

up with the U.S. Navy Task Force 95 commanded by Vice Admiral Jesse Oldendorf. The whole time, the Indy's been alone, which is really, really rare. The commander of the Indy, Captain Charles McVeigh, was worried about making such a long trip alone through what had just previously been a war zone. Not to mention, That's not safe at all. All of this has been incredibly unsafe. And I need to point out here that McVeigh has been not comfortable with any of this.

But he was worried about Japanese submarine movements for very obvious reasons. And there's a good reason that he was worried. Big cruisers like the Indy did not have sonar because they're normally part of task force or they would be like a destroyer or a smaller ship that did have sonar that would be traveling with it. That meant that the ship would be blind to any possible submarines unless they could see them with their naked eye. Which is not a great way to look for submarines.

Plus also the other thing too is I imagine that based on the speeds that the Indy was going, even if they had had sonar, wouldn't have made a big fuck of a difference. Yeah, because they're going as fast as this fucking ship would go. Yeah, they're like going flank all the way across the fucking Pacific, like from point to point to point to point. Yeah. So McVeigh, being a decent naval naval commander asked if he could have any escorts and he asked of the tactical situation of the area like you know when was the last time you know

a Japanese sub was spotted he was told quote things are very quiet by a Commodore James Carter the commander of the Pacific Fleet's advanced headquarters and he said the Japanese are quote on their last legs and there's nothing to worry about there is a problem commodore carter is lying to his fucking face uh there had been a

uh a destroyer sank the uss underhill off the coast of the philippines just a few days before by a japanese sub and mcveigh was not told about this at all also also you know uh we're talking about the japanese like even if it is backed into a corner the japanese were not like the type to be like oh well we better surrender i guess like yeah there's a sub out there it's gonna sink some american chips motherfucker like they didn't want to find them all also not for nothing but i mean like you literally just delivered a bomb to i mean you know i'm not like you know uh endorsing the the atomic bomb it was the only thing that was prevented a large scale invasion the islands theory because that's been pretty heavily discredited but

regardless like you're delivering a bomb to you know nuke the fucking home island because like literally the you know japan is not giving up at that point right like that's you know maybe maybe this is this is not a nation that's going to give up real quick no like all of tokyo has been firebombed and they're still like yeah we got this yeah um and uh when it left uh when the indy when Indy left towards Leyte nobody would ever see the ship again because Commodore Carter fucking sucks at his job and so does the Navy because on July 30th

the Indy was struck twice under starboard side by Japanese torpedoes fired from the sub I-58 commanded by Mochisura Hashimoto quite possibly the only good naval commander in this entire story and we'll talk a little bit more about him later on um now hashimoto had seen the ship hours before um it was huge and easy to see on the horizon because uh as it was noted it was a pretty lit up night so like he's like hey

look a ship like from like however many fucking hours away it's probably like you know like a full moon or some fucking shit yeah um and the ship was all by itself uh so all he had to do is get in the right position and the indie would just float directly into his line of fire as he saw it through its periscope which he said is all he had to do he didn't even have to because it's it's pitch blackout like it's dark uh and like there dark. There's watchmen on board looking for subs, but really, what the fuck are they going to see in the middle of the night? I mean, not a lot.

Not enough. Yeah, not enough. Not a sub, I'll tell you that. Not this sub, at least. The damage from the explosions was immediately known to be fatal to the ship. Furthermore, the ship began violently leaning over after it had been hit due to wartime modifications to

her guns, which has made the entire ship entirely too top-heavy. That was an MRAP. We hit a goddamn ocean-born IED. Are there rollover drills for an entire battleship? Yeah, you just die. Yeah, it's not great,

let me tell you. Now, the Indy was crewed by 1195 sailors when it went down and 300 were unable to get off the ship or killed by the explosion outright the rest bailed out into the sea but because of how fast everything happened very few sailors had time to grab their life vests and virtually none of the ship's life rafts made out into the water. Only a couple did. So, Joe, just so you're clear, you're saying that... More or less. I'm just throwing it out there. Perfect.

One of the reasons that not a lot of life-saving materials uh made it out into the water is because the ship's interior communication systems like they had a telephone system on board had been completely taken out of commission by the blasts so when the abandoned ship order was given it was only given locally um so one of the charges we'll talk about later was that mcveigh did not order the ship to be abandoned on time, which has proven to be not true. Like his second in command was like, hey, we should probably abandon ship. And he held off until a few minutes later and is like, yeah, fuck it. Let's get the fuck out of here.

The problem was they could not pass the order. There was no communication systems within the ship. Like intra communications were all fucked. Yeah. You don't have the one MC to just be able to like yell at everybody. Yeah. This meant that sailors saw, oh shit,

it's too late. We have to jump in. They did not have time to get their hands on a life, a life preserver or a raft. It was like someone noted that people were standing watch all the way up until the water was coming up at them. Like, oh, I guess we got to go to the water. Still looking for a sub. Is there a sub down there and below my waist here?

Yeah, right. A few sailors who did manage to grab life vests looked over the edge of the ship and saw that most of the people in the water did not have life vests uh so navy procedure called for you to throw your life vest into the water and then jump in after it i don't know if that's still the case uh one guy seaman second class don mccall said that he thought if he tossed his into the water someone would just steal it so he dove in wearing it and

i guess there's a good reason that you don't do this is that when you hit the wire they'll shoot right back up into your face uh because it because it knocked him the fuck out yeah i mean it's like particularly the old life s like i don't you know i mean that was not something i ever fucking did but like the old ones were essentially just like cork and a fucking you know fabric package yeah and it's gonna stop you and you're probably jumping a good like 15 feet so you're hitting that with some velocity like there's a good chance you could just rip yourself right out of it if it's if you're high enough yeah exactly and uh like you had the life vests which we all know and then there was life belts which were significantly shittier which some people had um it was like a two-point harness yeah you might do it and you might be

upside down and then you're fucked. Yeah, it's not a great time. I can't say that happened for sure, but out of 900 people going into the water, we can say it probably happened at least once or twice of people throwing it on upside down and drowning themselves. But around 900 people made it off the

ship and into the water and they found themselves stranded 280 miles away from the from the nearest land uh but they didn't just find themselves bobbing up and down in seawater which does suck but instead it was a disgusting slicker of seawater oil and fuel that all been dumped from the dying ship this flooded people's airways and you couldn't just cough it up like water like if you're like if you inhale water you can cough it up uh it sticks to your insides so instead dozens or maybe even hundreds of people found themselves stuck in the water and swallowing oil until they died yeah however this might sound weird the mood of the men once they hit the water

and you know they didn't know how many people were dead quite yet uh was pretty high uh because normally if your ship goes down um you know that you send an sos out which they did it was by a wart officer named leonard wood not that one uh who stayed on the ship as it went down, repeatedly sending out SOS calls, an effort that cost him his life. So they knew that at least three SOS calls went out. So the sailors knew it was only a matter of time before someone would come and save them. Also, it was considered kind of common and was considered a cool thing,

law of the sea type deal, that when an enemy sub sank somebody, like a ship or a cargo ship even a warship they rendered aid to the sailors um that made it into the water assuming that they were stranded and no longer in the fight it's kind of like taking care of a wounded soldier assuming they're no longer fighting you take care of them legally yeah unless you're eddie gallagher and it's also just like a you know like kind of like as you uh as you introed in you know because the sea is gonna fucking kill you

anyway there's like a fair amount of like well we're both kind of uh you know floating around on this thing that is probably possibly gonna like murder us at some point or another so uh i don't know here's a life preserver and a sandwich. Yeah, exactly. And it was even in World War II, this is not uncommon for this to happen. Even for a nation such as Japan, who in World War II was seemingly in a race with Nazi Germany, so you could rack up the most war crimes in the shortest amount of time. This didn't mean that they would rescue them, as space upon submarines was obviously very limited. But it meant that they would throw food, throw food water life rafts and other things out to stranded crews sometimes they'd even fire up flares and stuff like that someone might see them

before they fucked off and got out of there um other other times medical aid was rendered to the wounded who might have made it off the ship um and some like they would also give the people left in the water um like a compass point like towards the nearest land and tell them like hey go that way so they might have to save themselves also like you know not for nothing but if you're gonna like sink somewhere getting sunk in the south pacific is not the worst because at least you know if you're like sinking and you're floating around a water that you know is around 70 degrees or so like you have a fairly good chance of actually surviving for a long period of time versus you

know the best case scenario, if you end up in the water in the North Atlantic in winter, you have maybe five minutes. I have some really bad news for the first thing that you said there. That is not true. We'll find out why. So this was something of a regulation to save people.

And it ended in Germany with the Laconia Order, which also ended in a war crimes conviction. After a German sub was attacked by Allied planes during the Laconia incident, where German sailors were throwing supplies to the stranded crew and men of a British troop ship. To be fair, and to the credit of U-boats, the order went largely ignored. Because they knew eventually it was going to be their turn to be stranded in the water and they wanted the allies to help them. So for the most part, U-boats kept doing that. It seems Navy really

has it kind of, you know, like, hey, we're, like, you know, the army will just execute you because we're dicks, but the Navy is at least like you were good, like you guys crewed that ship really well and we sank it and no hard feelings you know here have some have some aid we'll see it we'll we'll see you next time we'll rematch again when you build another one and then we'll just shoot at

each other forever especially u-boats um we did an episode on those before and they largely were the least politicized branch of the german military even the kriegsmarine mostly because their lives were so miserable political officers didn't want to go fucking near them uh which is a weird way to escape nazism like you know like das boot they openly shit talk the government and and hitler and there's like firsthand accounts that absolutely happen and officers didn't care. That's like the only place you're going to get away with that. So like the idea that they completely ignore this order by Carl Donitz, who was then convicted for war crimes about it, like hardly shocking that they would ignore that. So it was less common for Japanese crews

to aid their victims at sea. And when you look at their general treatment of POWs and humanity in general during the Second World War, that's hardly shocking. But it did happen. The destroyer Akizushi was commanded by Officer Sansaku Kudo, and he ordered his men to rescue over 400 British and American sailors who were left to die in the Java Sea. So these things did happen.

It was mostly a problem of logistics for the japanese in 1945 simply put by the end of the war the japanese supply system had been completely and totally fucked um a lot of their far-flung outposts resorted to cannibalism uh in one case almost ending up eating george hw. Bush. Ah, man. So close. He was in a bomber or a plane, and his plane went down. It wasn't even like a torpedo bomber or something like that?

Something like that, and the crew bailed out. He floated one way, the rest of his crew floated the others, and everybody else in his crew got fucking eaten by Japanese soldiers. So close, Imperial Japan. So close. It's always like that.

Hitler fought in World War I and it's like, if he'd have been 20 meters over, he would have never had another World War II. There's actually a very well-publicized account of him nearly being killed by a British soldier while he was retreating, but the soldier decided not to shoot him because it was dishonorable. Thanks, buddy. And that soldier, Boris Johnson's great-great-grandfather.

Boris Johnson's great-great-grandfather. So there's a good chance that the crews of the I-58 probably just did not have any extra food. There's probably a good chance they did not have any food themselves. So Hashimoto did not end up being such a bad guy, and we'll talk about that a little bit later, and he left the soldiers in the water. By his own admission,

he assumed that the Americans would be on their way to rescue the sailors. And as afraid of he stuck around, he would just make himself a target. And remember, this is 1945. The Allies in the Pacific had complete naval and air supremacy. This is a very reasonable fear for him to have for the sailors under his command. Right. It is absolutely be like, they run everything we got a lucky shot we better get out of here because they're the the cavalry's on the way like that's absolutely what i would assume

too yeah and not to mention this is the first and only time hashimoto sank anybody like um he had been out in missions beforehand and each time he had to abandon them because he was about to get sank or like he had to fucking dodge it or something like the rough waters fucked up his torpedoes this is the only time he ever successfully launched an attack and to be fair it fucking ate him alive but we'll talk about that a little bit later um but the allies would not be coming in fact nobody would have any idea that the indy went down for four days because a plane just happened to accidentally fly over the area and spot hundreds of men in the water so that begs the question how in the fuck did a navy lose an entire cruiser in the middle of a war and was

supposed to be peaceful seas jo Joe, Joe, come on. You and I have been in the army long enough to see all kinds of shit fall off the books that you're just like, how do you lose a Humvee? I don't know. We just did. I want you to picture the dumbest way

you think that this would happen and then accept that it's even dumber than that because it's not only incompetence because of course part of it's incompetence, but it's also just dumb policies. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, Joe. Not my army. Joe, dumb policies in the United States military, and I just... Okay, fair enough. I can't accept that.

Okay, fair enough. But it's dumber than the dumb policies you're probably envisioning. Just hear me out. Pacific Command had told Vice Admiral Oldendorf and Admiral McCormick to expect the Indianapolis for a 10-day training session in the Philippines. McVeigh received the orders correctly, McVeigh being the captain of the Indy, but Oldendorf and McCormick did not. McCormick's staff had incorrectly decoded the communications, knew they did,

but then did not ask for a retransmission, assuming they got it. So the Admiral knew that... It's close enough. Yeah, I mean, this tracks, to be honest. This is where I get to tell you it gets worse. So the Admiral knew that the Indianapolis was headed to the Philippines, but not for what? While Admiral Oldendorf had no idea when it was actually supposed to show up.

This is a problem when you understand that the Navy's policies for tracking ships of a certain size. policies for tracking ships of a certain size. You would assume that the Indy was supposed to use a radio check to tell Pacific Command where they were, what their coordinates were at any given time, at least on a daily basis, right? You got to check. Yeah, you got checkpoints. You got to check in at the checkpoints. You would be wrong.

Instead, ships of that size were tracked using estimations and predictions. This meant unless McVeigh told them otherwise, they would just assume everything was fine and normal. But you're probably saying, Joe, but they sent an SOS. We'll get there. It was then reported as arriving on time in Leyte by the guy in charge of tracking ships in the Philippine Sea frontier, which is like the command area, by one Lieutenant Stuart B. Gibson. Yes, a lieutenant was in charge of this.

Well, there's your problem. That meant while the sailors were now fighting for their lives in the ocean, according to the tracking board, the Indy was actually perfectly fine and safe in Leyte. However, Gibson actually saw in the port that there's no Indianapolis here. There's no fucking ship and that should be enough.

So he just assumed it was running late and because nobody said anything, right? Like, well, McVeigh never called ahead and said that there's any problems. So he assumed it was just running behind, marked it as arrived on the board, and then left work.

Hey, I mean, you know. And this wasn't even a contractor. I expect that out of a contractor. Not only was this a commissioned naval officer, the war is still going on. It's not the beginning. They know what they're doing by now. But you're saying it's a commissioned naval officer.

It's a lieutenant, you know? So, I mean, it's like sort of a commissioned naval officer. So if that doesn't sound dumb enough, here it is in the Navy's own words from the history.navy.mills narrative, the circumstances of the sinking. This is a long quote. Her estimated position was plotted out each day on the board. This is a long quote. Leyte. This was the routine method of handling the plot of combatant vessels. Since, in accordance with the orders and standards throughout the western Pacific area, the Pacific Ocean areas, and the Atlantic,

the arrival of the combatant vessel was not reported. Vessels of this class were assumed to have arrived at their destinations on the date and approximate time scheduled, in the absence of information to the contrary. So, they didn't have like a fucking like e4 out there just like on some like rip rap just like with a set of binoculars just like

looking i just assumed that like eventually the captain will show up in here and be like hi we're here i don't know now it says unlike i do that this error was noticed and acted upon, but that is hardly believable when you understand Lieutenant Gibson and literally every single person above him in his chain of command, we're given a letter of reprimand. Um, also this would have, if this was the case, the sinking would have been noticed within 12 hours.

It was not a little bit of a naval revisionism on their part to make themselves look slightly less shitty. So I've already said that chief Leonard would again, not that one. Cause that Leonard wood is, is a bastard. And this one was actually very good at his job. Uh,

sent out several SOS signals. Shouldn't this have alerted Gibson that in fact, something had changed. Like the ship is fucking sinking. Shouldn't have someone noticed that and responded in kind on the board does anybody want to take a guess on how of each of these three different signals went unanswered because they both went

all three of them went unanswered in different equally dumb ways oh I'm gonna say one at least one whoever was supposed to be listening to it was out of the room. Okay. And like taking a shit or something.

I'm going to say one is they believed that it was fake. Like it was fake news coming through. Okay. Through the wires. You're getting warm. Okay. And I don't know. Kerry, you got any stats i mean here let me let

me see i'm thinking one was considered like either like a test or like a drill or like not real uh you know like in some way shape or form um i'm thinking one one maybe they heard but like they didn't actually like uh they didn't actually write down because they weren't sure what they heard and they didn't want to be wrong. And I don't know, the third one. I don't know. What do you got, Joe? Yeah, I don't know. What do you got? I'm actually shocked you didn't guess one of these.

Okay, so first of all, I should point out that Navy publicly said that no distress signal was ever received from the Indianapolis. However, declassified reports say all three were received by three different stations and all of them were ignored. One station commander was drunk. All right, cool. Another had ordered his men not to bother him while he was sleeping. So when they got the distress signal, they ignored it so they didn't get yelled at again. Cool. And the third thought it was a Japanese trap

and told his men to ignore it. Fuck. Worse still, 16 hours after the Indy had gone down, the Navy had decoded a Japanese transmission from Hashimoto that confirmed the subhead sink, a cruiser-sized ship in the exact same area that the Indy should have been in when it sent that SOS,

but still nobody did anything. Wasn't it like they were like, was like one of the things where they were afraid that like the Japanese would figure out that they were decoding signals? I mean, that could have been part of it, but I think at this point, everybody pretty much knew. Yeah, that could have been part of it, but I think at this point, everybody pretty much knew. Yeah, that's right. So while the Navy sat around and did less than fuck all, 900 or so men stranded at the sea began to die. For many of them, the simple act of surviving required near superhuman efforts of strength and endurance. Seaman First Class Lyle Omenhofer said, quote, I looked down at myself. I noticed I was covered in this oil. And the first instinct is get away from it. Because if it catches on fire,

you're really in trouble. The first impulse is to swim away. So I swam away. And this is a little after midnight when we went down. And then by probably about five or six o'clock in the morning, I was still swimming swimming i didn't have anything i didn't even have a life jacket i was swimming for five and a half hours i would be fucking dead i would be dead absolutely no way that i could stay anywhere for five hours like that no i can't tread water for 10 minutes five fucking hours you know like some people say like you never know what's what you're gonna do until you put in that situation which i have some experience with uh myself but if i was putting

that situation i would 100 be dead there's no way that that coin is being flipped where i pull my ass through the water for five and a half fucking hours i'm dead fucking dead yeah i mean like the the standard thing like if you end up in the water is to be like essentially use whatever flotation device you have to like float in your back because like actually treading water takes a shit ton of fucking effort and calories and it's like not something that you should normally do like if you can at all help it what did he what did he eventually grab that he could stop swimming uh a lot of people so they ended up like circling what few life rafts they had um and a lot of people were like afloat on wreckage

um and you know at this enough people would eventually die that there'd be some life to go around as well um so yeah bonus there yep uh hand me down uh now remember how i said at first everybody was hopeful that wore off pretty god damn quickly uh so the men hit the water a little after midnight and a few hours later the sun came up this is this is where shock said at least they went

down the south pacific well they were straight in the middle of the pacific ocean with no shelter and the reflective ocean all around them oh yeah one guy said quote it was like having your head in the middle of a mirror with the sun beating down on you it was the hottest many of them been throughout their life and they were forced to tread water to stay alive men began going mad from heat while others dehydrated and without anything else began to drink seawater and lose their minds.

Yep. Signalman first class, Paul McGinnis had quote, it was so hot. It was miserable. It was like hell. You couldn't wait for the sun to go down. But then when the sun went down,

it was a relief and then it would get cold and you'd start to shiver and people would start to die from hypothermia and you couldn't wait for the sun to come back up again. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, this is like one of the reasons to come back up again yeah yeah i don't know i mean this is like one of the reasons why every time you see like uh you know someone like quote unquote falls off a cruise ship and then they say that they're still looking for them like a day and a

half later like they're they're pretty much fucking cooked oh yeah you're fucked uh you know like there's no like there's no you know they they just i mean you know it's like a uh a term of art you know they suspend the rescue but like no you're yeah you're you're you're wicked dead yeah you're very dead at that point um yeah and yeah like and these are people who are all in the picture of health they're you know teens early 20s fit people who are used to living on a boat so like if anybody could survive being shipwrecked it would be them and then men

start to die from heat stroke and when the sun went down they would die of hypothermia if that wasn't bad enough in case you didn't know the human body really shouldn't just be subjected to seawater for long periods of time. It actually causes your skin to begin to slough off.

And not to mention, this is seawater that is tainted with oil and fuel. So their skin began to burn, blister, and come off from being in the water with the oil and the fuel. Men went blind from the sun, and some began to kill themselves. Others lost their minds so badly they began to hallucinate. An officer said that he saw a ship on the horizon, and he and a group of people just

began swimming for it. There was never any ship on the horizon, and they were never seen again. Others shouted, quote, the Indy is sinking. There's fresh water in the galley. Let's go get it. And they dove for the shipwreck and never came back up. And like a lot of people were. I think I'd rather die in madness than die in knowledge, I guess. But I mean, neither one's a great way to go.

Yeah, it's not the worst option. We're getting there. Other sailors armed with knives and other weapons began to kill each other in blind, delirious rages, thinking they were Japanese soldiers or sea monsters. Others began to fight each other over food and gangs began to form and they tried to break into rations that were being held and distributed by the officers and NCOs, which led to like wrath born fights and shit. And like, it's interesting that most of the people in these gangs all died um and that's not because like uh retribution but it's something that we noticed in my um napoleon invasion of russia series yeah in situations where like everything breaks down and people are fighting for their survival in military situations. It's almost always the people that stay in within the militaries.

Um, like they called it in Napoleon's like rallying around the flag or the standard. Those people had a much higher rate of survival than the people who are like, they're hoarding the food. Let's get it. Almost all those people die. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, that's not like you know when you think about it i mean it's like the you know it's like how the uh galt's gulch people who try to start their own libertarian society ended up failing you know like the the the whole idea of where you're just kind of like in it in it for yourself all the fucking time doesn't actually work no you're not gonna make it libertarianism only works when there's already been a society and then you just decide that you want to leave it like be a libertarian caveman and see how far you fucking get man yeah yeah uh with napoleon's uh forces they found that like the people who stayed in their units and stayed together

were much more likely to share the me the meager resources that they had rather than hoarding it. So while obviously they all came back looking like they just escaped a death camp, but more of them survived. Rather than a whole bunch of idiots knife fighting over a loaf of bread. Yeah, well I mean I know that

Shep from Twitter has been watching all the fucking Doomsday Preppers. I love her threads. Yeah, and so one of the things that she talks about is all these they have

3,000 rounds of ammo and 20 guns around them, but at the same time, they have no way to filter water or like grow crops or like you know do anything the fuck else and i mean it's the same it's the same basic impulse you know you have all these folks who are you know willing to like knife fight you know and like granted like you're also uh in the middle of the fucking ocean don't know that you're ever

gonna get saved and so like there's definitely like mitigating circumstances it's not like this is like your ideology this is just you know you're kind of like bent on survival but i think some of it was like you're being baked in the ocean and you know yeah your your brain your brain's a fucking scrambled egg and like you know you're not like thinking straight but at the same time like you're not going to survive that way i think a lot of it comes down to the people who stayed listening to their officers and NCOs getting rations and stuff like that it's because they still had faith

in the fact that like someone's going to come and get us so like that made them rally around their officers and NCOs while the other people like it's every man for themselves what do you have to look forward to like okay let's say you for themselves. You know, like you're not. What do you have to look forward to?

Like, OK, let's say you do survive an extra day and then the Navy comes. You think all these people are going to forget the time you stabbed the guy over some fucking spam out on the ocean? Like, well, no. And let's be clear here, though. However, the Lions Led by Donkeys party line is that we still do not listen to officers. So I just want to be clear on that particular point. You know, in this situation, I got to stand the officers and the COs. I have to.

Especially, I do stand Captain McVeigh as well. We're getting to that. So this is, I've already said, wait, it gets worse. I get to say it again. Because, and then the sharks found them so would you say so Joe just to be clear would you say that well

he'd been bitten in half below the waist you know the sharks had actually been there from the beginning but the sharks had been drawn by obviously loud noises like explosions and kicking and swimming and obviously the hundreds and hundreds of dead bodies that surrounded them um yeah that'll tend to attract some predators yeah it's like you follow the

checklist of how like how can i be surrounded by sharks uh and you know uh the the dead bodies kept the sharks away from the survivors for the first couple hours and days. But they eventually ran out of those. The sharks eventually busied themselves eating the dead. And according to one sailor, thank God there were so many dead people floating in the area. But those eventually ran out and the sharks turned towards the living. Sailors, knowing the sharks were drawn by blood, abandoned the wounded and dying, trying to separate themselves from them. And like the one books is they quarantine themselves away.

If somebody died of their wounds or was looking particularly bad off, they would just kick them away into the ocean, trying to like draw the sharks away. off they would just kick them away into the ocean trying to like draw the sharks away um they soon learned the sharks were even attracted to opening a can of spam which must have really fucking sucked uh because a few cans had floated up from the wreck and they're like oh fuck yeah we have food and then they cracked up and more sharks showed up so they had to throw away all their meat uh instead of having to go hungry instead of risking a shark attack. And here's arguably the worst part, in my opinion. The water is noted to be crystal fucking clear. This meant at any given time the men could look down and see swarms of sharks just below them.

One person said there was fucking hundreds. 15-20 feet long. Sailors reported being constantly bumped by sharks as they decided which person they were going to pull under next. They were so powerless to stop an attack once it began that they decided sticking together might be the best course of action so they could like... They said that

when someone gets snagged, they would try to hit and slap the water and scream to try to scare away, but it never worked. So they assumed like, if we all band together, we'll look bigger and the sharks will be afraid.

That didn't really work either. That stopped them from losing a couple people every hour to the sharks. They had said like in the middle of the night, things would be deathly silent. Then you just hear someone scream and then they'd be gone. of the night things would be deathly silent then you just hear someone scream and then they'd be gone um it was estimated that of the hundreds to die while being uh waiting to be rescued at least 150 of them were taken by sharks if even a fraction of this number is true it makes it the most deadly shark attack in human history and now a couple days into this

i think you've gotten, you stunned me and me and shocks into silence here. I'm just contemplating that I'm contemplating all of these horrors and just like, I'm going to need to take a horse tranquilizer to go to bed tonight. It's like, it's like every Joe, everything you're describing to me is my worst fear.

Like all of my worst fears are ocean based. And that's why I'm not in the Navy. Uh, and that is why I don't go into the ocean as I talked about earlier. And I also fucking hate sharks. Um, and also, uh,

being beaten up by a gang, uh, two, just throw that in there too. Uh, sharks are playing the knockout game, right? I could get,

I could get knockout ganged by a sailor in a cork floaty. So yeah. So great. I should have gone with the Holocaust one. I think I would have been chipper after that one. I was so happy when

you started off this episode like, actually I'm terrified of sharks in the ocean. I was like, yes! And see, I'm just here thinking... Here's to swimming with bow-legged women now this is several days into this and shocks i'm sure you know more about this than i do but life jackets have like an expiration date you can't just float them in the water forever well i mean once again particularly back then because like we're just like talking you know like buoyant you know like buoyant materials we're not talking like you know things that are like impervious to water so it should get soaked and you just start to sink yeah like about four days left into it uh their life jackets began to get waterlogged and useless so now people would have to like scrounge up what like uh their life jackets on top of like

other shit to try to keep floating because they would try to rotate through on the few life um life wraps so people were always out there floating um but like soon there was no good life jackets left um after only after four days only 317 men were still alive out of 900 well so at that point you're just saying to you fair Spanish ladies farewell to you ladies of Spain for we've received orders for to sail back to Boston

and so nevermore shall we see you again that laugh that laugh is unsettling um now uh there was a sea plane was the first one to see them and like call up like holy shit there's people in the ocean was it like a pby catalina or something like that something like that and like the pilot was gonna turn around but instead like the water was so clear he saw that people were being attacked by sharks.

So he landed and then began filling his plane with survivors and lashing people to the wings to get them out of the water. But then that made it so he could not fly away. So he just kind of sat there until rescue ships showed up. Well, I mean, good on him. rescue ship showed up well i mean good on him you know yeah i'm glad that it was a seaplane that you know somebody could just uh land and float everybody on top i assume that he had the working radio and then called for radio for help yeah yeah um so these men were all saved um the the at least the last 317 um he's all flippant about it just like yeah so these guys escaped these guys escaped horrible death fuckers it's like one it's like one quarter right like more or less like you know

like one quarter like one fifth something like that yeah i mean you know this this podcast routinely talks about like hundreds of thousands of people dying so like you know let's put them kind of desensitized fuck I have lions led by donkeys brain on me now when these men were all rescued the navy began their investigation because you know goddamn full well they were not going to take fault for any of this shit if they could help

it so before long Captain McVeigh was facing court martial sure why not I mean I'm help it. So, before long, Captain McVeigh was facing court-martial. Sure, why not? I'm shocked. He was charged with two counts. One, failing to order his men to abandon the ship, and one count of hazarding the ship. Now, the first count was

immediately thrown out because other officers who survived, which there were not many, pointed out that, no, he had ordered to abandon the ship, it's just that he lacked any meaningful way to communicate the order uh sometimes your luck is bad when you get hit by fucking torpedoes which leads us to the second charge hazarding the ship uh this charge was based on the fact that they said that captain mcveigh had not been ordering the ship to travel in a zigzag pattern which was Navy policy at the time. But he actually had been for a while.

As his standing orders for the ship were to travel in a zigzag pattern when he safely could. And the ship had just passed through rough seas with limited visibility. So he ordered the ship to instead travel straight ahead. Yeah. Furthermore,

he had some cooperating evidence to this because the courts-martial brought none other than Captain Hashimoto, who survived the war, to testify in defense of the captain. Fuck. Hashimoto helpfully pointed out that, zigzag of pattern or no, the Indy was fucked because he was alone. He couldn't see him. And, like, it was a huge

big deal they flew who was a pow at the time uh all the way to the united states to testify and like hashimoto said that he had been treated like a fellow officer and not a pow so he was like grateful to the americans for that uh but like people really pissed off that they flew him over there but yeah he was like yeah there's nothing he could have done except possibly spot me that would have stopped me from sinking him. Or barring something else that had happened to Hashimoto before, which was a complete torpedo failure. He had attempted to fire torpedoes at a different ship, and they just didn't launch. He said, in my naval experience experience this ship was doomed um like effectively the navy had hazard the ship uh and like in his testimony in his uh his testimony

like he was like i thought it was very strange that the ship was by itself seems like you guys fucked up in a different way and not uh not what you're saying that this guy did right um mcveigh was convicted uh because of course he was uh but then fleet admiral chester nimitz overturned the order and returned him to active service and he retired in 1949 um the u.s now the u.s lost 380 ships during world war ii out of all those ships that were lost, Captain McVeigh was the only captain to be courts-martialed for losing his ship under his command. However, McVeigh's life was fucking

ruined. He personally blamed himself for what happened to the men under his command, even though in reality it was the Navy's fault and it was a war. Things are going to happen. This was made worse by the fact that several families of the dead would call him and leave angry voicemails

or send him letters that said things like, quote, Merry Christmas! Our family's holiday would be a lot merrier if you had not killed my son. Ugh. Yeah. Jesus fuck. Turns out people have always been shitty. You don't need Twitter to send

fucking shit posts. And then his wife died of cancer. So in 1968, he shot himself in his backyard with his old Navy pistol, clutching a small figurine of a sailor that had been given to him when he graduated from the Naval Academy. Jesus fucking dark. I do not want to leave everybody here wanting to do that. So we're going to lighten the blow here a little bit.

This concerns Hashimoto. Now, the war came to a close and he went home. He was disgusted by the war. And, you know, the only ship he ever sank was the Indianapolis. And he had no idea what had ever happened to the Indianapolis until he went to trial and learned about what happened to the sailors that he had sank. You just see him excitedly going, oh, and then marking a one somewhere

for himself. Like, oh, I got one. Probably. He's probably really excited he sank that cruiser because it was one less that he'd have to be fighting. Or at least like, I'm not going to be relieved from command because I haven't sunk anything for the last six

times I've gone out. Right. So after the war, he became a Shinto priest. Fuck. Then he traveled to the US to meet the survivors of the Indianapolis at Pearl Harbor. Once there, he prostrated himself on the ground and said through a translator,

quote, I have come here to pray with you for your shipmates whose death i have caused uh to which the gathering of men helped the old man back to his feet and told him that they forgave him oh that's nice afterwards he assisted the indianapolis survivors in their attempt to exonerate mcveigh um long after the captain had shot himself. This included writing letters to the Senate Armed Service Committee where he said, our people have forgiven each other for what this terrible war and its consequences have caused. Perhaps it's time your people forgave Captain McVeigh for the humiliation of this unjust conviction. Hashimoto died at the age of 91 on 25th October, 2000. Five days later, a bill to posthumously exonerate captain

was passed by the u.s congress and signed by president bill clinton we uh we certainly do love to apologize 50 years later that's right america america's real good at that just like has enough time passed that like people will feel better about it but also nobody really gives a fuck yeah that's fine well I mean in fairness it is usually significantly delayed but is also very insufficient when it happens

so I mean I think that makes up for it yeah it sucks because like he's obviously was scapegoated but like it's it's always kind of shocking to me when like you know like hashimoto literally went out of his way uh he he turned into like the most pacifist pacifist who's ever pacifisted uh you know like dedicated his life to like begging for forgiveness

for like the one like he's he's he constantly talked about for the misery that i've caused like you sink one ship bro like you know your admirals which many of whom were you know hung or killed themselves like deserve this like he was just you know a line officer and it's oh it's always interesting watching um how veterans of other wars you know wars that we consider like the good ones granted he was you a Japanese officer at the time, so not their good one. How they've always squared things with themselves and how they've become

vehemently anti-war. And even going so far as to face the crew of the Indianapolis is incredible to me. That guy cast you into the water to be eaten by sharks. Joe, does he have a podcast? He is dead, so no.

There you have it. That's how we deal with it. We just have podcasts. He should have gotten a podcast. He missed the wave. It was unfortunate. He almost could have made Joe Rogan show if he stuck around a few more years. Whoa, you sank a whole ship what was that like Jamie

pull up ship dicks pull up the weird Japanese ship porn so guys we have a little thing on the show called questions from the Legion Joe tell me more I've never heard about it before so that is when you ask us a small but funny

or important question that we can answer to end the show on possibly a high note not always uh this one is not one of those times so uh user marcus from the discord if you would like to ask us a question uh you can sign into our dms on patreon or ask us in the Discord for one whole dollar. Ask, what is one local political issue you are really into but does not get the mainstream attention you think it deserves?

I honestly can't answer this question as I have just moved here and the only local political problem we have is the coronavirus that I am aware of. So I'll leave this one to you too uh you know our uh in st louis north city is just such an absolute hole and like it's it is the there's a ghetto of st louis it's uh it's north side and there there's just been so much fuckery up there with people who buy the empty lots and then do nothing with them um we've got uh the nga the government building is trying to go in down

there but like also some parts of north city are like really really nice so it's just a weird like all the the entirety of of the north side like the history of it and like where it is and like how it continues to get fucked over in local politics is just a, it's just absolutely wild to me. And like just, you know, the projects that we used to have in St. Louis and like how under like a majority African-American community, there's like nuclear waste. And there's just like, they're not going to clean it up there's no point to it but also there's an underground fire that might get to it at some point in time there's a lot of fucked up things going on is what i'm saying in st louis a wild underground fire has appeared you know so and and every once in a while somebody's just like will like read something about st louis like offhandedly. And they're just like, Jesus Christ,

did you know about this? Like, yeah, man, that's just, it's everything here. Everything's insane. It's a beautiful city, but goddamn. So that's what I would go with, I guess. I guess the local political issue that, I guess I'm from Detroit, so I'll use that one. That ties in really well to that

as most people are aware of who Mike Illich was, he's dead now, but he's the guy who owned Little Caesars. He owns the Detroit Red Wings. He's an absolute fucking massive titan of landowning in the city. And he's been doing shit like that since before any of us were born.

Now it's all controlled by his family but um he buys up very large tracts of land and then just sits on them um and like turns them into parking lots or like he'll buy up um uh like turn of the century historical buildings and then fucking demolish them saying that he's putting like apartments and then there'll just be a parking lot um he's just sitting on them and like he's a fucking bastard that's why i've like i'm a die-hard detroit red wings fan but it's fucking begrudgingly because he's a fucking ghoul and the world's better off without him shock's your turn i'm surprised it wasn't the robocop statue no that shit slaps right i mean that's fucking awesome um i don't know i mean the there's a lot of like options i probably could choose i mean one of one of them that uh

is kind of near and dear and sadly to my heart is uh the rank choice voting referendum and uh the the ballot question in massachusetts recently uh was defeated. And that was really unfortunate because that was actually, that was probably the proudest vote that I made of the last November election because I was really looking forward to ranked choice voting. And similarly, like another one that got defeated not too long ago was safe staffing for nurses, which was another one that was like really close and like something that i really cared about that ended up getting defeated because of a a lot of fucking money that got

poured into the race by uh um health care companies and uh you know nursing and like other companies um so i mean that that is also terrible and i mean the other one that right now is stalled is any after the demonstrations and, you know, the, you know, the protesting of the summer, you know, all chance of police reform is essentially stopped in the Massachusetts legislature right now, which is like really fucking disgraceful because we have a super, you know, the Democrats have a super majority in the fucking legislature in Massachusetts, despite Charlie Baker. And there's still no real effort to actually achieve any sort of and like any sort of actual like, you know, police reform at any level right now. But with all that said, the one that I would probably go with is, you know, kind of similar as, as you know, to what Francis said was affordable housing. I mean, I think that's something that like, you know, in,

in Massachusetts, I mean, Massachusetts is like, you know, it's not readily as well known, but alongside New York and maybe the Bay area is one of the most unaffordable areas to live in the entire fucking country. Yo,

Honolulu says, hi. Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, Honolulu, I mean, Seattle um you know i mean

there's definitely other places too that are just like wicked fucking unaffordable and are not places that like any normal human being can like actually afford to buy a place to live and like not just rent for their entire lives yeah and it's really fucking you know it's it's it's fucking awful that like that's the case and it's you know it's something that doesn't get any you know any exposure when it does get exposure you get uh you know folks asking you why you you're not in favor of uh you know denser developments but it's just for like fucking luxury condos that right all look all look the same and end up as like you know mixed use developments and

neighborhoods they used to love that have you know a fucking spin studio and a juice bar downstairs and uh you know a bunch of condos upstairs that all have like you know uh marble kitchens and you know whatever the fuck else and uh you know that's not an actual way that you should structure society so that'd be that that'll be my real answer right there is affordable housing yeah that's that's something real bad here um like fucking have a disney resort that that's its own city but you know there's no fucking affordable housing cool on the beach yeah that's unfortunately a lot of people have no choice uh but then honolulu pd PD comes and kicks you off because you're scaring the tourists.

Yeah. I mean, I mean, same here, but you're in fucking Boston and, you know, November and December, which is even more grim.

Yeah. So that's a great way to end this horribly depressing episode. Now, this is where I like, thank you guys for coming on. And I would like to say next time it won't be as depressing, but we both know that's not true. But thanks for letting me put you through this horrible mental crisis.

It's great. Nick needs time off from this because he's a poor boy and has been dealing with this for almost three years. We have to take the burden off of Nick's brain. PTSD by proxy. He has a union-mandated mental health break every other week.

Thanks, guys. It's always great. Until next time, don't be in the Navy. Yup.