Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 171 - The Soviet Axe Berserkers of World War II

Episode Date: August 30, 2021

Sources: https://www.warhistoryonline.com/world-war-ii/ivan-pavlovich-soviet-soldier.html?chrome=1 https://www.rbth.com/history/326983-5-soviet-superheroes-in-ww-2 https://www.warhistoryonline.com/instant-articles/russian-rambo-of-wwii.html?chrome=1 Support the show www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys

Hello, and welcome to yet another episode of the Lines Up by Donkeys podcast. I am here with Francis and Shox. What's up, guys? It's another, it's just a beautiful Wednesday evening. Yeah, it's terribly humid and hot here, so I'm just inside as I have been for the last 18 months. It's great. We've had a tropical storm pass through and it knocked over all of my plants,

which were mostly dead anyway, because I can't grow shit, but I will rebuild. I plan on, you know, picking myself up by my bootstraps and killing more succulents. We just had a... As a brief aside, so we just had a hurricane pass through here except it didn't oh yeah yeah i forget about that it hung a

a sharp left and like instead just pummeled new york for like two days that's one does yeah and so i got a uh i got a dm from uh someone down in rh Island. And it was just a picture of a single chair, like plaster chair knocked over from like a garden set. And it just said, Tropical Storm Henry, we will rebuild. I saw that same thing when I was living in Washington State because we got hit by an earthquake. And it was nothing. It was just big enough to register on the Richter scale or whatever.

Yeah. On seismographs, rather. And someone posted a picture of an October Starbucks cup that says, We will rebuild. Now, Liam is in California on his union-mandated vacation. Union who has been brought to my attention by the Discord for people who are unaware, about two years ago,

three years ago at this point, during the Soviet-Afghan War series, we coined a joke that started with the Jalalabad dick-sucking Union. Due to recent events, the Union has had to move from Jalalabad. Union headquarters have violently relocated to Tajikistan.

We are now the Panjshir Valley dick-sucking union. We did that so we don't actually have to change our signage. There's a J in Panjshir. Now... change our signage there's a j in pan cheer um now uh so we have something of a tradition on this podcast, and that is dunking on the poor Soviet military. And we've probably done more than any other particular nation, Russia in particular, because the Soviets, and then we also talked about the Russian Empire more than once. Just Russia in general. We've probably talked about them and their bad decisions probably more than anybody else actually come to think of it

too because of the Russo-Japanese war series you did Imperial Russia as well yeah we did Imperial Russia there and also when Napoleon invaded you've done PMC Russia too with the Wagner episode yeah yeah see all flavors of Russia

and you know if something's getting fucked up somewhere there's probably a russian involved somewhere like just not that the russian did anything but just that's their luck just a nepal neapolitan ice cream but every flavor is shit yeah we we we had a we have a a fucking uh old pit for a for a true pothead. We used to call things pralines and dick. I forgot about that. It's pralines and dick. And, you know, in my defense, the U.S. is rapidly catching up

to them in episode count, as is, I don't know, the Ottoman Empire I'm working on. Now, there's a lot of reasons for this. One is low-hanging fruit, and the other is I'm Armenian, and I hold a grudge to see the last entry, the Ottoman Empire I'm working on. Now, there's a lot of reasons for this. One is low-hanging fruit, and the other is I'm Armenian, and I hold a grudge to see the last entry in the Ottoman Empire. Fucking sue me. I never said the show was fair.

I just enjoy researching things. And every once in a while, I catch a brain worm I can't get rid of. Not to mention, outside of big campaign-wide series, things like Operation Bigration, or the entire Battle of Stalingrad or the Battle of Berlin, it's kind of hard to find bite-sized things that can fit into an hour when it comes to Soviet military history because they don't actually have that much military history. Yeah, as it turns out, most of the bite-sized things are currently buried in zinc coffins throughout the course of Russia. Just bulldozed into trenches up and down the lines outside of St. Petersburg. Yeah, exactly. Or buried in a forest in Poland. See, we bust on the Russians and the Soviet military because it's nice to know that somebody had it worse than you, like, by a long shot.

Because, like, you know, you think about our war, like our war and Joe, I know you would like actually did real war, but for, for a large chunk of, I also lost, I don't know. Like,

well, I know, but like, I'm just saying that our war had a lot more like burger Kings and, uh, start subway places and, uh, things.

And, you know, they had any time in the Russian military. From my experience, even researching history, a nation goes to war very much in its own skin. The US goes to war and it brings chain restaurants with it because that's our culture. The Soviet military brought misery with it because that's our culture.

The Soviet military brought misery with it because it's Russian culture. We brought shitty cigarettes, vodka that'll turn you blind and depression. That's right. That is also mostly a lot of post-Soviet culture. We're working on it. That's also pretty much my plans

for the winter, this coming winter, to be honest. And, you know, I... And since so much Soviet military history is in World War II, I don't want to, like... I'm never going to do a World War II series. It'd be insane. And I

don't feel like just doing, like, 18 different episodes in a row all about World War II. I desperately try to space these things out. For my own sanity and yours, we all like different flavors, all of them dysentery. Now, if you really want to go back to the days of what it sounds like for me to just cram a whole bunch of shit into an hour and cut out just like 80% of it, go back and listen to our first 10 episodes. It's real bad, and there's a reason why I've revisited most of those things.

Now, it doesn't mean I won't eventually talk about Songred or Begration or Berlin. I plan on talking about all of those things eventually. But we don't want to accidentally sound like a uh an angry boomer dad who just like picked up a couple steven ambrose books and watched you know band of brothers while blind stinking drunk right right i mean like i i don't have to visit kids on the

weekends yet so like i don't want to like pretend that yet you know um i like to do stories justice and unfortunately the flip side of that is there's a ton of fucking other stories that are too short to cover an hour so i figured today would be like i don't know a soviet roundup episode um all the things that fit in a particular category and that is killing Nazis with axes. So this is something that happened frequently. So what you're telling me is all of these goofy axe throwing bars that are around now, they have use? Absolutely not. No. like that uh the simpsons episode where like it you know once um you know once uh comrade uh biden declares the soviet republic of america uh they're all gonna flip open and axe-wielding soviet

soldiers are gonna come out they're gonna hit the button yeah yeah it's gonna be like uh it's gonna be the sequel to red dawn that's red dawn already had a sequel i thought it was like a reboot it was real bad uh i mean i can only consider that a sequel because of how bad it was. If that's a reboot, it's like... I don't know. What do you consider a reboot that kills something deader than it's ever been before? I guess any of the new Rockies or Rambos, I suppose. I don't know.

The new Rambos are good as hell. That's unfair to the new Rockies. The new Rambos are fucking awful. that's unfair to the new rockies the new the new rambos are fucking awful the last one's just a racist home alone it's incredible i know why does he have the tunnels like yes we've never been me and nick had talked about this movie for over an hour and we could never figure out a reason why he hit a tunnel other than the fact that he was also a coyote yeah he uh obviously he just dug ptsd tunnels so he's like i'm gonna have a good freak out honey bye just like go sit that tunnel's like i need a place where i can scream and shoot a gun into a wall i'm just gonna go ahead and build some

ptsd tunnels and go to my screaming tunnel in fairness this would probably help the instance of uh you know uh special forces folks losing their minds and like holding family members hostage so you know you put them in the tunnel and you seal both ends i mean i'm still good with that i mean yeah send them to the angry dome yeah i can say that it's the rambo version of the fucking angry dome so we're to start calling my car. But he still let his daughter have a rave down there for some... Even the daughter's just like, Hey, Dad, can we use your screaming holes?

I mean, it's kind of like how you used to throw a book VFW halls to hold punk shows. Yeah, there you go. All right. Now, to get to the point, I'm going to use the word berserker a whole lot. now like to get to the point I'm going to use the word berserker a whole lot and there's some people that may or may not know what

berserker is other than like a euphemism used for like a shitty sports team or if you're Kevin Smith the best Russian rock band of all time was it uh it was clerks one right yeah the first one Kevin Smith, the best Russian rock band of all time. That was Clerks 1, right? Yeah, the first one. I don't know. His name is fucking Yankee Blue Jeans

or some shit. I'm definitely going to have to make that song the intro now. Nobody's having any fucking idea what I'm talking about. I'm showing my age. I'm pretty sure everybody who listens to you is also old and falling apart just like us but that is not the case yeah we do we do get yelled at by a lot of kids sometimes

and like especially especially like a history show i always assume generally it's cute older white men uh because like i'm attempting to steal the history channel's audience right but then I realized talk about Hitler way more than yeah and also stars for some reason great here we go I'll watch what he's gonna say I'll watch it's too funny

my love for you is like a truck bowser would you like some make me buck bowser you say making fuck yeah man it's just crazy like yeah i i realized immediately that wasn't my demographic because one i would have to talk about hitler to a very uncomfortable extent uh there's a youtube channel for that his name's i think mark felton he talks about hitler all the time look at the comments you know what he's doing i mean yeah but i really can't stress a note please do not go to youtube and start looking up hitler shit because uh

we don't want to accidentally be the red the brown pipeline let's just like let's just hop there before long it all just circles back around to q anon shit um and you know like i that's when i realized that uh that wasn't the case not that like i was aiming for that to be fair that demographic certainly is money they like to spend on stupid shit look at their cars um but you know we are i have discovered we are older than many of our listeners. So talking about Clerks 1, it's some old shit, man. It came out a long time ago. Yeah, but it was already kind of like a cult classic movie

by the time that we were all going through high school. Yeah, yeah, it's fair. And it is like one of the maybe three or four movies that people have a positive memory of a Kevin Smith joint in. That's all gone now. It it's all gone like tears in the rain versus Clerks 3 which is coming out which has got to be like who the fuck is that

audience but I don't know or the pig movie that he made okay so you say that about you say that about Clerks 3 but we're all gonna go see Jackass 4 so absolutely yes there is an audience see Jackass 4. Absolutely, yes. There is an audience for Jackass 4.

The problem is we all saw Clerks 2 and we're like, hmm, that's enough of that. Yeah, exactly. We saw Jackass 2 and we're like, yes, I want to see people hurt their balls more. That's funny. And all of them seem to be having a blast. Meanwhile, it seems like everybody involved in Cler them are just seem to be having a blast meanwhile it seems

like everybody involved in clerks is just trying to get drug money so i mean i mean that's why the first clerks is so good because that's what everybody's doing i mean in fairness like jack s is just about watching like a bunch of you know uh shitty white dudes injure themselves and we were all in the military so that's actually our culture yeah exactly um but like i like i said we do have to talk a little bit about berserkers might be um so makes a little bit of sense now they're normally they consider to come from norse viking culture mythology uh they're well known for fighting some some people say that they fought like they were in a trance state and they couldn't be brought down no matter how much damage was done to them until they were killed.

Now, this is a fury known as Berserker Gang, which sure, sometimes you don't see it printed that way. Other times it's one word. It sounds like a shitty street gang from like a from like the Warriors. Yeah, like 100%. Yeah, I was

going to say that or like they'd fight the tunnel rats in Fallout. Yeah, I mean, either one is, I mean, say it either way to be honest. Tunnel snakes. Yeah, yeah, tunnel snakes, my bad. Literally any Fallout movie in 1970s New York. I mean, it's about, you know, potato patato. Yeah. It's been linked to various things over the years from religious believers worshipping a bear cult to

North mythology where goddess Freya deployed the battle swine which I assume there's 30 to 50 of them see they didn't have AR-15s back then that was their biggest problem yeah that's actually why

the Norse people are wiped out. And it's now just pigs. Nobody is sure, one, that these guys were real. Or two, if they were, how the fuck they managed to pull this off. Because you hear stories that they were fighting everyone around them to the point that they had to dress a particular way. So everybody knew to stay the fuck away from them because they would just everybody don't hang out with those assholes yeah they're they're seals effectively they're not soldiers they're

just a death squad um now uh my favorite theory that in order to provoke people into this frenzy of battle was they were just high and drunk as hell, which just sounds rad. I don't know. If I do a lot of drugs, I just go to sleep. Yeah. See me do it. You're probably not doing like meth or something like that. That's true.

When you say drugs, you mean smoke weed, which is not doing drugs at all. Yeah. Or pop various pills I got from my friends in high school. Yeah. I was never an uppers guy. I figured the best way to beat my depression was to do more downers.

If I just sleep 20 hours a day, then that's 20 hours a day. I'm not sad. That's right. And kids, if you're listening, it doesn't work. Don't do it. Turns out having depression for dinner every night is actually not a long-term solution. Yeah. And the one thing I didn't try, it turns out having depression for dinner every night is actually not a long term solution

the one thing I didn't try which is apparently the prevailing idea is other than possibly just getting blind drunk is that they would eat nightshade which is a poison which would induce hysteria and hallucinations

and then someone just pushed them in the right direction. I will have to eat nightshade and get back to you guys. Uh, anyway, the weird, the lines of my donkeys podcast has been on an eight month long hiatus as I rot in my office. Well,

new Patreon goal. Uh, you know, if you get it up to, uh, you know, uh, 3000 subscribers a month,

uh, you know, Joe has enjoy eating nightshade. Yeah, that's true. The Bosnian war criminal, but instead of a shot glass, it's like a little leaf. Let's get me the next live stream is all of us just doing shots of chewing on nightshade.

Yeah, it's like caught. You just chew it up a bit and spit out the residue and then you just melt your face off and die. Yeah, but I'd be the asshole who goes out and brings in a tomato and says technically it's nightshade god damn it fucking nobody likes that guy technically it's a fruit um now i wanted to point all that out because we're talking about berserker adjacent stuff a lot uh and maybe there are some people who didn't know those guys were based on anything other than dumb graphic tees or something. I don't know.

Now, the one thing that you want to make sure you do is after you go on YouTube and Google or search for information about Hitler for a while, make sure you then look up Norse mythology because it'll really just make everything better. You'll really figure out where all the runes came from. Now, this brings us to our first story the tale of the heroic soviet cook ivan pavlovich seretta the only man i've ever heard of who capture a tank while using an axe uh now ivan was i'm gonna breeze right past that because if we discuss it it doesn't make any more sense than when i tell the story um i'm going to go out and say that like this is a soviet cook needs like a skills tab now uh because both guys we're talking about today are cooks at some point uh i don't know if there's something different going on in soviet cook class i mean every i mean a good portion of the cooks that I ever knew were like fucking nuts. So that kind of checks out, to be honest.

Yeah. Yeah. Both other veteran part-time hosts of this show were cooks or are cooks. So that tracks. Not counting Liam, of course, he's a civilian. Now, Ivan was born on July 1st, 1919, and what would be today krematorsk ukraine a city i am sure i pronounced correctly uh which was then part of the soviet union kind of like many people uh in ukraine at the time ivan and his family were desperately poor a lot of this is because ukraine

had just sat through a horrible civil war on top of which was already turned into a field of war crimes, made worse by a world war, which is again made worse by several different layers of mismanagement, nobody really giving a shit about them for several generations, and, you know, eventually a genocide.

Because of this, his family moved around as often as they could, working on other farms for food and the occasional roof over their heads. They were, you know, tenant farming. But worse? Because it is Russia after all. Right. And nobody has any food or money.

So, like, you have to bust your ass on these fields to get paid very little or nothing and then hopefully get a meal and a roof over your head. Eventually, he was able to go to school for going college and instead choosing to go to a technical school where he ended up in the Donetsk Food Training Center, a place where nothing bad would ever happen again, where he learned how to become a cook.

Ivan didn't really care or want to do this job. It seems to be the only school he was able to get into. He graduated school and began looking for work in other fields as one does. If he was me, he would simply start a podcast. He just writes a book about how shitty his time in the military was and starts a podcast. His book would be way better than mine. We should find the guy who who's the guy that uh the russian guy who wrote about the um his experience in the both chechnyan wars uh oh yeah um god damn his name's gonna escape me now

he's had a weird life yeah he should have a podcast he moved to ukraine and faked his own death for a while nice yeah um you can't do that in america man i want to live in a place where you can fucking get away this is what they took from you why can't i live in a country where like if if a man just wants to start over he can just fake his own death and go you know move to arizona i feel like one of the things that we missed growing up and I feel like the post-Reagan era particularly, when they started cracking down on immigration and other shit like that. Because it used to be...

You read about con men in the 1920s just constantly moving to a different town. I'm like, yeah, now my name's Larry. And I'm here to, I don't know, sell you a fucking Model T Ford. It'll be fine just give me all the money now and i promise when i come back i'll uh i'll i'll make sure that i

deliver it to you and then just like rinse and repeat first goes the uh aircraft controllers union then goes the ability to fake your own death it's unfortunate i think a lot of people are saying that to be honest many people are saying this i to be honest. Many people are saying this. I hear it more and more every day. I think it should be a constitutional right to be able to fake your death at least once every 15 years. It's like going bankrupt. You can file bankruptcy and you got seven years to get it off

of your credit report. Well, that's what we're going to do instead of... When I come to power, that's what we're going to do instead of bankruptcy. Because the trick is you get all your debts erased, but also your entire history and you have to start anew. Yeah. And you... You have to really want it at that point. You have to rush and roulette onto a ship that takes you somewhere else.

Not that we don't have a better form of travel, but you have to get really old-timey. You get nailed into a cardboard Ac acme box loaded up on a fucking steamship and dropped off somewhere at which point you have to go down a street and you get to a guy that will give you a crumpled up piece of paper that will have your new identity on it i mean i've often said that there's one thing we're really missing in the modern era and it's not enough ships of the damned uh transiting forever on the forbidding waves of the unforgiving sea as you recount the various

sins of your life to the other damned passers. Yeah, I was going to fake my own death, and I talked to the guy, Hank, the name guy, and he gave me identity in Toledo, Ohio, and I just mulliganed that shit and i became a podcaster um now i've been like many of us once he got into like the military or once he graduated

from university or technical school he really realized he may have fucked up uh so he began looking for other jobs um he grad unfortunately for him, he graduated in November of 1939 and got drafted into the Red Army that same month. And he was unhappy to find out he would also be made a cook. Now, this wasn't like a policy or anything

in the Red Army to try to give you a job that was close to your civilian job. He just has bad luck. The vast majority of people... I think you could say that about anybody in the red army anybody who gets drafted at any point of history oh you were you were an 18 year old male in russia in 1942 damn that sucks bro oh you lost a leg to polio oh Oh, you're so lucky. Yeah. Now, there was situations where if you happened to be a mechanic or you worked on tractors on farms that you would get folded into tanks and stuff. But the cook-to-cook pipeline was not... It's not like you needed fucking skills.

You're going to boil shit in water and feed it to people and probably get them sick. It's virtually the same job cooks have now uh now he got stationed with the 91st tank regiment uh and you know began to sit around and cook shitty soviet army food whatever that was uh for a couple years and he got out uh and then operation barbarossa happened and he got redrafted again as a cook. Now that second time

almost certainly because, well, you already know how to do this job. I'm guessing on that. I don't know. Maybe he has really, really bad luck. Now Operation Barbarossa sent 3 million or so Germans and affiliated Nazis streaming across the border where the Red Army rapidly began to get its ass kicked and fall apart. Now, this Red Army would eventually turn itself around, you know, famously.

But the opening stages of Operation Barbarossa had casualty numbers that would have been apocalyptic for anyone who was not the Soviet military. one who was not the Soviet military. The Soviet command and control organizational structure completely paralyzed and broke down, mostly due to mismanagement, but also because of disruptive German attacks and a shit radio system that barely functioned. This left pretty much every layer of Soviet military

leadership confused and disorganized. It didn't help that Stalin didn't believe it was actually happening for several hours and locked himself in his office like a weepy bitch. Now, for the first couple of months, the Nazi advance was pretty much unstoppable and the Soviets suffered hundreds of

thousands of killed, wounded, and even more than that captured. At one point, half a million soldiers surrendered all at once at the fall of Kiev in September. There is no situation on Earth outside of the uh in this particular time we're losing a half million people would have been anything like well boys it's been good

we gotta fold now um now the surrender of key would eventually lead to the babayar massacre one of the worst massacres in human history probably will never be uh you know eclipsed everybody knock on wood on that one it is 2021 um now eventually parts of the red army repositioned behind the divina river in latvia which is where ivan found himself in august of 1941 despite the constant complaints to superior that he wanted to be an infantryman or artillery or tanks literally anything other than being a cook he was still in the kitchens uh i'm going to assume that he had the horrible luck of being the reliable guy like anybody who's been the military knows what it's like being the the reliable one right like yeah you're the guy who ends up doing everything you end up doing everybody's fucking

job what as you said like you know most people who were appointed cooks were not actually like probably didn't have any actual food training no of course i imagine like being the one guy who could make food that had some flavor and wouldn't immediately kill everyone in the in your unit probably was like you know up there on his like enlisted review yeah like when he ate when when you ate at Ivan's chow hall your poop was solid for the first time in weeks like this guy didn't

give me a foodborne illness what the fuck yeah you're not like you know not shitting out my intestines like everyone is currently taking the fucking horse antiviral shit is doing apparently.

Ivan's going to end up ivermectin with his food. They might actually have worms though. Do you know what rope worms are? I know what you're talking about, but I'm saying the Soviet or the Red Army, some of them might actually have worms. The percentage

is certainly higher than zero at this point i mean if there is one thing i've learned from studying war it's that at no point in history until about the 70s was it really a good idea to have a large amount of people camping out together um because all it turns out all anybody ever did would just spread their literal shit across one another until everybody died of disease. Like, really the first time. Which actually makes it all the more surprising that the German military was ever successful. It's because they're German.

They're economic. They pooped in a hole. I don't know. Well, because their rivals were the fucking Soviets. I mean, come on. Well, no, they're used to it because they just uh they were all pooping on each other so just kind of you know built up immunity over time that's what that's where all the the crazy german scat porn comes from this

world war ii they they were ahead of the curve and instead of dying of i don't know dysentery which they did do they just froze to death instead got around that. I can't die of a disease. I froze to death. Checkmate. Worms. Freezing to death to own the worms. Now, during this time, Ivan was tending to his kitchen when the liaison officer came up to him.

He had a large group of soldiers getting ready to eat and stuff um and the liaison officer warned everyone around that they all needed to get to the front because reinforcements were gonna bust through and uh the german reinforcements and they were threatening to encircle them which continued to happen uh the germans were just encircling uh soviet military units into pockets and then slowly strangling them off or destroying them or forcing them to surrender which honestly the soviets should be able to deal with because this had just happened to them in finland uh but you know they didn't um not ivan though he would have

to stay behind and keep making soup of some kind i'm sure it's some kind of soup um i've been bitched and moaned and stayed behind like a good uh cook and made dinner alone now after a while thankfully uh he saw that his unit was returning and that's when he saw two tanks as he stood there wondering how many more people he would need to feed he realized these were not soviet tanks they were german uh now he was a you know not an idiot and he realized wow i'm fucked uh so he hid behind the flaps of his cook tent hoping nobody would see him now one of the tanks kept driving seeing an empty camp you know and wanted to see what was beyond that but the other tank stayed behind that tank crew assuming the like they assumed the uh the camp was empty because like literally only ivan was in the camp so they're like hey look i smell food and they

climbed out looking around they left their weapons in the tank which is just dumb as hell uh even if you think the camp is clear like i don't know't know, bring a rifle, a pistol, whatever. I, I, I mean, look, I know we were trained different. I cannot imagine at any point in a war zone, not having a gun within the fucking grabbing distance at any point,

especially the fucking Eastern front of world war two. Again, the Germans are stick. Have something. The Germans were only so good because they were going up against the soviets i mean you're you're really not wrong um not not in such a sweeping victorious uh thing in the in the opening uh of barbaros anyone with a brain between their fucking ears would have seen this coming because they were warned about it actually

right before operation barbarossa started a german deserter ran across soviet lines and warned them about it and then they just shot him wasn't there the also the uh the spy ring too like yeah there was there was no shortage of information telling the soviets what was coming see stalin was just convinced they were friends uh and they were they were trading a lot of oil to the nazis and it was coming see stalin was just convinced they were friends uh and they were they were trading a lot of oil to the nazis and it was in their best interest they continued doing that um as well as like steel and stuff like that turns out don't do that don't trust nazis folks um now top tip top yeah top tip of this episode nazis bad um now uh i even saw four of them walking around unarmed he's like kind of like my odds

here which is certainly more than what i would think uh but i haven't had a a rifle that he hadn't used in quite some time uh but he also knew that if he fired it he would alert other people right uh so he grabbed a wood uh damn i was hoping he would go for like a comedic like frying pan or a ladle so he grabbed a wooden axe that he used for splitting wood to make fires right uh and ran at them screaming and yelling like the borscht berserker uh the germans hearing a hearing a dude screaming in russian i feel like would be a bigger uh bigger giveaway than just firing a rifle in a war zone but you know maybe i'm wrong on that one yeah i don't know i'm starting to think ivan was uh you know everybody's a fight or flight response ivan's

response was was very heavily tilted to one side uh to without any and all rational thought because he had a firearm and he chose an axe. Even his firearm had more than four bullets in it. Now, it could have been unloaded and he just never thought to grab ammo because he had never seen combat up until this point. So, like, who knows? Or he could have just thought that he was really

fucking tired of being a cook and he was just ready for death. He's Russian. He embraced the darkness and ran as close as he could to death. He's Russian. He embraced the darkness and ran as close as he could to death. Another top tip from this episode. Embrace death. To be Russian is to always have Simon and Garfunkel's Hello Darkness, my

old friend, playing in the background no matter what you're doing. The Germans, who had, remember, gotten out of the tanks without their weapons ran as fast as they could back to the tank locking themselves inside there is like internal hatch locks and stuff ivan gave chase climbing onto the tank and out of the way of the internally mounted machine guns um smart smart yeah now those are normally uh like there'll be some on the top tank commanders

hatch which obviously they can't use because they've locked themselves inside and if you stand on the turret of a tank there's no way for that tank to attack you uh it's like it's like a really bad super uh villain weakness that you've seen like a mario game well it's kind of yeah it's it's the universe of a turtle on its back. Yeah, exactly. Um, now the Germans fired wildly in every direction, uh, assuming they might be able to wing him, not knowing he was standing directly on top. They didn't fire like the main cannon because that would have been kind of

overkill. Um, instead safe and on top of the turret, I even began to rain blows down onto the exposed barrels of the machine gun with his ax until he warped and bent from the impact. Then the Germans realized they'd pissed off a vengeful god of army cooking, attempted to drive away.

So Ivan smashed his axe against the viewing ports of the tank until they all broke, completely blinding the tank. This guy has already done more than I ever would in this kind of situation. And he just keeps going. This is this is berserker mode, I suppose. Yep.

Would he grab an axe and break portholes? Like this is a guy that grabbed an axe, looked at a tank and be like, I like my odds. Like, incredible. Ivan then realized he did have a bit of a problem if these guys grabbed their sidearms and came out at him he would be fucked because there was there was weapons inside the tank now he could like line up outside the hatch and try to ax them in the face one by one as they came out but they could just shoot him uh so he decided if these guys would fall for a bit of a ruse he called out loudly in german that

his comrades were nearby and then yelled out in in russian which there was a bit of like uh you know they understood a bit of russian um he yelled out to his comrades in russian to bring him anti tank grenades despite the fact there were no comrades or anti-tank grenades anywhere around him and the germans would probably know that I don't know he's doing the I'm just laughing with all of my friends now Ivan

in German demanded the people inside the tank surrendered or they would all be blown up they agreed and then they he made them come out one by one and he tied them around the turret of the tank and as they came out one at a time he like tied them and then made the next then

tied the next guy up behind him so they never like until they were all tied up they had they didn't notice that he was alone wait how did he know German was it just like because he was like in he'd grown up in ukraine and there was like enough fuckery at that point of his life that like he just like picked up some german along

the way i have no idea um i i assume that uh there was a fair amount of german and russian phrases learned from both sides um to try to yell at people and get them to do what you wanted and stuff. I imagine there probably was too. I just figured it would be more like the key Greek and Turkish phrases that they learned to call each other the bastard sons of a goat. Yeah. Kind of.

Maybe he was just... He picked up a little bit more. I know he picked up more of German than I ever did any other language. Motherfucker's doing Duolingo while he's peeling beads to make borscht. Yeah, maybe we could have been better stewards of our war and learned more in Pashtun how to say, you know,

fuck you and I don't know. I learned a fair amount. Not that, you know, it didn't matter. We still lost. Weird. The entire war actually was lost entirely pivoting on the fact that Joe still had terrible pronunciation in Pashto.

I have terrible pronunciation in Armenian, man. Get in line. Terrible pronunciation in English. Fuck you. I will hear nothing from the St. Louis crowd, okay? Now, hey, look, there's a reason why I picked making a podcast that didn't require me to say a bunch of things in French and German or ye olde English or any of that nonsense. It's easy.

You just plow through it incorrectly and don't bother correcting yourself because no one will forgive you anyway. because no one will forgive you anyway um yeah so at this point he has them all tied up and outside the tank and tied to the turret like to the to the hatch itself and they're all just like sitting there like i assume pissed off children with like their arms crossed like i can't believe we fell for this also not to mention like all of these guys die um that that's that's that's the unwritten line of this entire story because they're german pows in soviet uh captivity these guys got got got by a cook and they all died in captivity particularly that early on like that early on in the war too i would imagine statistically they did not survive um so yeah ivan really had the last laugh of this one now uh after this his unit came back uh they had fought off the german encirclement and uh they

must have been incredibly confused to see a german tank parked in the cap uh in in the camp alongside a german tank crew and then ivan calmly in his kitchen making food uh because he went back to work knowing everybody come back hungry that's you know what he is a good cook fuck it you know what i'm i'm glad he he embraced it and was just like well yeah i'm done like you know in in in the american army if you did something like that if you did some crazy shit like everything that you just said but it was you know private joe snuffy at least a distinguished cross of some kind or a silver star i'm not gonna say medal of honor but you get some stuff from it and this guy is just like you know the the the soviet uh humbleness as well just like well time to go back to to to making food yeah uh to be fair this finally got him what he wanted he was transferred

to a scout unit um and he he continued what seemed to be a blood feud against tanks um a couple weeks later while out in a scouting mission he came across a german infantry platoon uh for people underway that's about 30 to 45 guys, depending on the era, unit, and amount of attrition they've suffered. Supported by a single tank and decided where anyone else would have pulled back for reinforcements. He had a fucking score to settle. So he crawled up to the tank and chucked a grenade into its open hatch, killing its crew. Then jumped onto the tank commander's mounted machine gun and began firing on the Germans who were sitting out in the field eating. He killed about a dozen people, the rest surrendered to

him. Finally, this got him commissioned to an officer and awarded the hero of the Soviet Union an Order of Lenin. Because there's more tanks out there, Ivan never rested, fighting through the Battle of Leningrad and Moscow before finally getting hurt and writing out the rest of the war in a hospital.

That is the anti-tank axe. So, Joe, for any possible future Ivans, and we'll keep this within the realm of OPSEC, if I were to attack an M1 Abrams tank with an axe,

where would you suggest I swing first? Wherever you can be far enough away to safely fire a tow missile. But what if I get on top of it? I would just stay inside. I mean, you can lock the hatch. I got an axe and a mission statement, brother. I'm coming in. Just drive away.

I mean, that's one of the things like he damaged the viewport so the driver couldn't see. I'm remembering my time driving a tank. I couldn't fucking see anything anyway. It's a tank. Just drive. You'll probably be okay.

Drive until you hit something and then you know when you hit something you know uh turn yeah like it's not uh just turn until you don't see things until you're not hitting something anymore i mean that's also how uh you know the the uh uss john mccain navigated but they did so a little bit less successfully. I mean, that's also how most people go down H1 here in Honolulu. So, I mean, it's like some people just need to take a lesson from history and run with it.

Now, our next story is also in Ukraine. It brings us to Kharkov in a small village of Charkov, where Dmitry Charkov. Yeah, it's well known for its wheat. I don't know. Probably. Right now, it's probably known for its radiation and

war crimes, but I mean, you know. Yeah, fair. I mean, the last guy went to school in Donetsk. So, like. Right. Oh, fuck. This is where Dimitri Ovarchenko was born sometime in 1919 as well to a mother and father who were both carpenters.

Now, when he was born, his village was occupied by soldiers of the German Empire who ruled Ukraine in such a brutal way. It would take, I don't know, like it would make the next couple years or decades of their life seem tame by comparison, which is something that only someone in Ukraine can say. German forces stole everything that wasn't nailed down, including women and children, and killed pretty much on a whim. Dimitri's mom was so worried about the Germans coming for his son that he lived most of his early few months

and years of his life hidden in a cellar, unable to speak. So that certainly probably impacted him later. That's also known as austrian elementary school oh god the germans are just trying to introduce him to austrian culture yeah i mean it was just it was just a simulation really yeah governor general joseph fritzel was in the mix um then the war ended and ukraine only had you know a civil war and eventual Russian invasions to worry about. And then the aforementioned famine-induced genocide.

Dmitry and everyone else had a rough life. After all this, Dmitry and his family stay in the same village. And he worked mostly with his dad. Dmitry is described pretty much everywhere as a quote simple country boy you'll let you uh fill in what that means to you um he was a himbo uh he was he he went to school for five hours once driving a lifted carriage like he went to the local uh village school for five classes which i think is about a day and a half of school before just failing out and quitting uh he never went to school like he made his living in doing odd jobs mostly carpentry and chopping wood and harvesting hay

this dude was not fucking small like if you've ever had to harvest hay or like chop wood to actually make fire that shit's exhausting there's a lot of there's a lot of throwing of heavy stuff going on yeah i had a uh girlfriend in high school whose parents had like horses and like other barnyard animals and shit and helped them load hay once which uh i did because i was an asshole and like 14 years old with like my mohawk and like doc martens and like my t-shirt and like, I don't know, fucking like cargo pants. It was like 2002 and it was not a good time. Not a good time.

Just skank dancing as you're throwing hay. Yeah, it's fucking picking up changes. I'm like, you know, throwing bows while throwing hay. Like this guy was, like I said, bows while throwing hay. This guy was, like I said, a simple country boy. He was incredibly large and strong, but just dumb as a

sack of shit, by all accounts. Failed out of school a day and a half. I've actually never seen it be said more than one place that he was functionally illiterate, which fine, I guess. But, you know, by 1941, like most Soviet men, he was drafted. He was shoved into the 176th Infantry Division, serving in a machine gun company. Now, just hours of being at the front, he like, I don't know,

half a million other people were immediately wounded and knocked unconscious. He caught some shrapnel, nothing super serious while fighting in Moldova. He was sent to a hospital. He eventually recovered

and was sent back to the front. But his time away from his machine gun company was pretty short. But when he got back, people realized he wasn't quite right. He was now sporting a TBI and remember, couldn't read. Perfect. So they're like, you know what?

Fucking enlisted soldier of the year right here. So you know what? They're like, we got a job for you. Here's a pickup truck. Oh, yeah. So you know what? They're like, we got a job for you. Here's a pickup truck. Oh yeah, no, the guy with a fucking head injury who already doesn't know how to read. Yeah, no, let's see him put it in H. I'm sure it'll be fucking gold.

So he was given a truck to ferry supplies to the front line. Now, most of these supplies were hay for horses and wood for chopping up for fires or shoring up fences. And I do have to point out here, almost every source I found about Dmitry's life is some horribly translated website. Like, even the stuff from Ukrainian historians was not translated well. So, like, it's a bit rough uh and i do have to point out there's some disconnect if he was driving a truck or a horse cart uh because i see it like mentioned both kinds of ways i think he was driving a truck because i see you call a truck

more often um and that is funnier uh because he you know tbi and he can't read weird that a guy who was functionally illiterate didn't leave a better written record behind him he tried to write a memoir but nobody could read it if there's one thing that we have learned it's that somebody who's functionally illiterate can drive a pickup truck and that means they can do some fucking war yeah a recoilless rifle in the back of that thing, man, and you've got a war machine. I mean, I'm still just imagining it like Charlie Kelly's diary from

It's Always Sunny. It's just a picture book. You have to read it, Charlie. Nobody can read this. Yeah, I mean, depending on if you're Ukrainian, you know what he actually did. I don't know. I'm going with a truck because it's funnier.

But this is the opening few weeks of Barbarossa. So the front line was completely unstable. And at any given point, you could find yourself running into hordes of Nazi soldiers. Like the line was very fluid. This is made worse by, like i pointed out before terrible communication networks between various soviet unions and almost no maps being distributed

down to a company level uh so like nobody had any fucking idea where they were what do you need to what do you need to see where you're at look i can't do land nav anyway so fuck it well you also weren't infantry so you don't got nothing to worry about, Francis. Eventually, his truck was called to be loaded up with ammo and ran out to the front.

This required him to also load up hay and wood, covering it all up with a waterproof tarp because it was an open back truck to protect it from the rain. And he secured the tarp down with a axe to weigh it down to call foreshadowing oh good good we gave uh we gave lenny a fucking truck full of ammo and an axe let's see how this one fucking turns out it'll be good for everybody he also had a gun uh but at no point does he try to use it i don't know like i know we're only talking about two of several million soviet soldiers but both of them were at one point given a choice between using a gun and an axe like go with the axe you can't really go berserker with a gun because berserker you got to hit something and i mean as sturdy as the ak-47 is you know you said what this is world war ii so this is pre-AK. Just a little, yeah.

As sturdy as the SKS or the Mosin-Nagant that you probably have is, it's so much like more, I don't know, if you're going to swing something, you want it to be an axe. I mean, you could certainly upend a Nagant and use it as a club. Because a bolt-action rifle is just a club with a barrel on it. Really? Yeah. But, you know, he he was pulling over and trying to figure out where the hell he was.

He's remember he didn't have a map and he couldn't read the street signs. He didn't even learn it. Like you could you at least pick stuff up like how to read a street sign. Say what you will about the Afghan National Army, but they at least had a literacy program. Now, while he was pulled over trying to figure out what was going on, two German trucks pulled up, each carrying soldiers.

Now, in total, there's about 50 Nazis staring down at this one very lost Ukrainian guy. Now, he glanced around at his one weapon, a bolt action moz and nagant it's like the short version i think it's a cavalry version and realized that he was probably fucked now while he was trying to figure out what to do next nazis quickly advanced on him and snatched his weapon away and started questioning him asking who he was why he was driving down this road more importantly where were the rest of the soviet army in the area he was and where was he going um not thinking the single truck driver was much of a threat uh dimitri was left alone

unrestrained with the with the like the lieutenant that commanded the unit who spoke bad russian now while they had disarmed him they hadn't looked in the back of the truck and noticed that there was an axe back there uh so it was just within arm's reach of where dimitri happened to be standing being uh questioned by the officer and before the officer knew what happened dimitri grabbed the axe and caved in his skull so quickly he couldn't even yell out for help he then bent down grabbed grabbing the grenades off the officer's belt and ran out from behind his truck and threw them onto the backs of the germans one which were still full of German soldiers. He took three grenades in total before charging out with his ax and hacking any,

anyone left standing after the explosions went off, including any wounded that couldn't crawl away in time. He just, he just went full like inglorious bastards on some people. Yeah. Like if I saw this in an action movie and I didn't read like an actual citation of like the hero of the Soviet Union award, I was like, this is bullshit.

This didn't fucking happen. I'm just trying to imagine like fucking me seeing this happen. Like if I saw somebody on a battlefield doing that, just like, well, time for me to mosey on out of here, guys. Time for me to hit the old dusty

trail. I gotta go we are fighting a member of the avengers it's uh it's time to go now uh not knowing what the fuck was going on and also because they just found another soviet berserker out the middle of the woods and didn't want to anger him any

further anyone that could still run ran for their lives. Not a single shot was fired at Dimitri as he went at his country boy fueled murder spree. I mean, that's about right. I would run away. I don't know what the fuck is going on right here

and I want no part of it, so I'm out. I don't have to outrun him. I just have to outrun Fritz who failed his last PT test. Yeah, motherfucker. I'm have to outrun Fritz who failed his last PT test. Yeah, motherfucker. I'm the one who pencil whipped your two-mile time. Suck my dick. By the time his thirst for blood had subsided, he had killed over 20

people. But that wasn't enough for him, so he sprinted off down the road, catching another officer who was limping from a wound and hacked off his fucking head. Also, too, I can't imagine that these axes were sharp. It could have been. That takes some fucking effort. That's got to be like, you're putting some time, energy, and effort into taking someone's head off with that shit.

Yeah, it's like you assume that it's sharp until you try to use it. You're like, oh like oh fuck i have to hack at this nazi until my arms get tired let's see you're in berserker mode so it's okay yeah singing a she shanty while you do it his life was his love his love was like ticking clock now according to his citation Would you like some head-deemed chop berserk? Now, in his citation for his Hero of the Soviet Union award, he was credited with killing 23 people in the span of only

a few minutes. Now, if that sounds unbelievable, you're not the only person that would not believe it. Hold on to that thought. After he went back to the smoking wreckage piles of corpses that he had left behind he looted them for everything he could find guns maps and papers you know he assumed all of the paper was good because it's not like he could read it and tell what was on it but he

assumed it was all intelligence um and he packed it all back into his truck and then kept on driving back towards his unit now when he got there i assume looking absolutely terrifying coming from head to toe in blood he told his commander what had happened and as you can imagine nobody believed a fucking word he had to say now furthermore i need to point out here being a lowly soldier in 1941 version of the Red Army was stressful to say the least. In the opening weeks and months of the war, executions of soldiers for violating basic rules were very fucking common. And by that point, I mean, they're just not up to the standards of the local political officers. It was very arbitrary in the violence they committed against

their own soldiers. Dimitri had been missing for hours with rumors swirling around that he was dead, captured, or he even deserted or defected over to the Nazis, which also not uncommon. Right? So the first response his command has

was to think this guy was making shit up for being late or being a double agent of some kind. Which, to be fair, possible. Yeah, but this guy has to be soaked in blood. Dimitri, where'd you get all this blood? Found it.

All I can think of is Mad Max where he shows up and it's like, oh, he's bleeding. It's like, that's not his blood. It's the scene from fucking American Psycho where he like shows up and it's like oh he's bleeding it's like that's not his blood like it's the scene from fucking American Psycho where he hacks the guy up with the pieces with an axe and he has to put on like a splash vest first in fairness they also denigrated

Huey Lewis in the news so who's there we to say whether that was good or bad are you a bad guy if you killed Jared Leto with an axe it's a question that we all have to answer. I'm not going to say. Nope, never mind. Nope. Nope, not going to continue that thought.

Now, after reviewing these documents that he brought back with him, the political officer drove to the scene of where Dimitri said the mass axe murder had taken place and confirmed his story, counting 21 dead soldiers and two dead officers. Now, during all of this,

Dimitri was held in the local detachment of the NKVD for three days, facing an almost certain death sentence. Now, for people unaware, the NKVD, bad people to be locked up by. What were they going to lock

him up for uh desertion uh okay so being late yeah he was he was almost certainly gonna catch a a bullet in the back of the neck if the political officer came back and said hey i didn't see any dead bodies uh so i thought i thought i here i am just like oh this is probably article

15 i was like oh no this is soviet union world war ii he's dead yeah and it's it's very desperate points of soviet union world war ii he's dead yeah and it's it's very desperate points of soviet union world war ii like you know in three years or whatever you wouldn't catch a bull in the back head for being drunk and late to work you just like get smacked around a bit but like the opening parts um real real bad uh to be anywhere near this uniform um now thankfully the political officer came back and told everyone like yo I just found a pile of fucking Nazis out there

all of them got axed to death and he was released back to his unit now on November 9th 1941 in a decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR quote for the exemplary performance of the combat tasks of the command at the

front of the fight against the German fascist invaders and showing courage and heroism Dimitri was awarded the title of the hero of the Soviet Union though this did not pull him off the front line or even get him promoted instead he went back to driving a

truck now after a few pauses here and there to drink a bit too much and fist fight a couple ncos who i'm sure never made sure that there wasn't any axes around him at any other point uh yeah he uh he was a bit of a bit of a shithead after this uh because he's like hey i'm the guy that murdered the german platoon with an axe now unfortunately for our axe wielding maniac truck driving country boy Dimitri would not survive the end of the war while fighting in Hungary in 1945

back with his machine gun company he was badly wounded and died of an injury while in hospital a few days later on January 28th 1945 so he almost saw the end of the war but now he's killing

people with an axe in heaven now he's in Valhalla that's how it works Valhalla is for the people who believe in this but also if you go crazy with an axe on some people you also get in so what you're saying is Lizzie Borden is in Valhalla yeah Lizzie Borden

Lizzie Borden is in Valhalla nobody witnessed him though Lizzie berserker yeah he should that's why he should have left one guy one guy alive like that that one dude and just like drag him back and be like no tell him the story about how i killed everybody with this giant axe like you know i mean he's been in the military long enough at this point it's like look i gotta, I got to cover my own ass here. Nobody's going to believe me. So I'm just going to hack your leg off and then we'll kill you later. I'll be back, motherfuckers. Now, that is our stories of the berserkers of the Soviet Union.

Those are not the only two. I actually found like two other stories. The significantly less details unfortunately um but gentlemen we do something in the show called questions from legion uh if you would like to ask us a question from legion donate to the show slide into the patreon dms uh email me ask me in discord whatever uh and we will answer your largely innocent question on air. I get a lot of deep questions, too. Like, if this would have happened, how different would history look?

That's more of a Q&A thing. Like, you know, for all those in-person Q&As that Joe's been doing for the last two years. Yeah, that's right. In your opinion, what is the worst era of history to live in? And you can't say today, uh,

every era of history before today is, is worse. Like now. And, and of course we're all going to say these as like, you know, straight white men. Um,

so anytime in history, especially American history is great for straight white dudes. Um, I get, I don't know, like, I don't, is great for straight white dudes. I get, I don't know. I don't know, man. I'm Armenian. My era is much different than yours. Yeah.

To be fair. You know what? The era would be any time before they could knock you out for surgery. Because's like my biggest fear is like having to have surgery done and being awake and feeling it the entire time so literally any time before I think like 1875 or something for me let's say you just don't get surgery and you end up like being that guy with the weird twisted limb that just hobbles around. Yeah, I could be that guy too. I mean, it's... Old twisted limb Francis.

I mean, mine's easy. 1915. Not a good time for my people. It's the beginning of the Armenian Genocide for those. Oh, Joe's talking about the Armenian Genocide again. All my people got killed.

Can we get an air horn for that? I'm sorry it's so easy for us straight white men. Hey, man, you're Armenian, but I'm Irish. So same boat, same boat. I mean, I think the worst era for history was prior to 2004 before the Sox won the World Series again. I think we can all agree that's the truly dark times.

Yeah. I can't really say my Irish ancestors came here before the potato famine. So I feel bad even really saying that. So I'm going to go with the Black Death. It's a good call.

Irrespective of you know age uh gender social class whatever else like losing you know a gigantic percentage of your population and just like having people just like just you know having parts of like you know europe in particular, but even throughout the rest of the world, just go back to nature because you've just lost such a high percentage of your population. Seems like a bad time to me. Yeah, that to me does not seem like a good time. So I'm probably going to go with the Black Death. Not my favorite. Seems like it would be bad. Plague masks are cool.

Good aesthetic, bad history. Yeah, good aesthetic. I appreciate that it was kind of the beginning of public health infrastructure from a maritime perspective because they had to quarantine sailors and do other shit. Yeah, and they even had public sanitation stations

so that they... I believe they used vinegar or something. Yeah. Could be wrong about that. So I appreciate something. But yeah, losing an identifiable percentage of your population to a mass death event, that feels pretty not great. Not great. Yeah.

So many people die. They land on the ground to bury them in is never a good sign. Now, like I do have to point out that I'm using the easy cop out thing. My family had not moved to the United States yet. We were very much in Western Armenia in 1915. So like bad stuff. Otherwise, like I was going to say, you know, Black Death is definitely a runner up. I would also say anytime

that you might be around a Mongolian horde. Yeah, that was going to be my second one was probably like I can't imagine that like, you know, having the cons hordes like roll through your town was like a good experience. It's not great.

Anytime there's a death squad and you're not in it. Yeah. Maybe if you there's a death squad and you're not in it yeah maybe if you're in a death squad things are a little bit better for you because you're doing the death squatting instead of being death squatted history is still not kind to you but I understand

there's also the very I mean it's still arguable nobody's 100% certain where the plague came from but most people think it was the Golden Horde that spread it to Europe via the Siege of Kaffa by slinging corpses over the walls. So you could have both.

You could have the Mongols visit you and have the plague. Yeah. I mean, that would be great. Similarly, to go off of France, I mean, there's a large Cambodian population in Lowell, Mass. They're there for a reason. Killing fields, not a great time.

Rwanda in the early 90s. Yugoslavia, just the names of the more recent genocides. Burma, starving to death because of the UK, not a good time. I mean, most of history,

not really great to be a human, to be honest. Depending on where you live at any point in history, it sucks. It'd be cool to be a Roman. You die by the age of 45 by shitting out worms. Yeah, but you could do that

now in America. But then you have a sweet toga and you can go hang out and go to the... Occasionally your emperor sends everyone out to go fight the sea. Go sacrifice a goat

or your child to a god. You're just having a good time. Whoopsie, accidentally created a whole religion. Anyway, anytime that somebody has to face the 300 Spartans, it's the worst time in history, to be the Iranian, or

I'm sorry, the Persian army which defeated them and sacked everything. Is there Armenians there for that? Take that Greece, you motherfuckers uh anyway well i'm sorry would you have time traveling armenians like they're going back in time to fight the uh no they're in the persian empire wow you really gave away joe's screenplay right there armenia is older than rome and they're part of the persian empire so yeah suck it uh

anyway gentlemen thank you uh if you want to hear more about that particular part of the Persian Empire. So, yeah, suck it. Anyway, gentlemen, thank you. If you want to hear more about that particular part of history, donate to the show and listen to History of Armenia. We talked about that. And I guess until next time, always carry an axe on you, just to be safe. You never know when you have to cut up

Nazis with an axe. Hey, you know what, people? Instead of officers going into war with battle swords, do battle axes. That'd be way cooler. Look, they already do that, though. You go to the PX, you go to that goofy-ass fucking No, not those stupid hatchets.

You carry a full-on lumber axe. I'm excited for the 101st Juggalo Battalion in like 50 years. Alright. Later, guys. Whoop whoop, everybody. Whoop whoop.