Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 231 - The Battle Of Peleliu

Episode Date: October 24, 2022

The US Marines feed thousands of marines into a Japanese meat grinder for no tactical reason before trying to ignore help from the Army to save their pride. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Sources: Sledge, Eugene B. (1990). With the Old Breed: At Peleliu And Okinawa Leckie, Robert, Helmet For My Pillow Anderson, Charles R. Western Pacific. The U.S. Army Campaigns of World War II https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/unnecessary-hell-the-battle-of-peleliu/

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 lions led by donkeys podcast i am joe and with me is liam yay liam yay liam hi joe hi liam i feel like i'm reading off a script already and i'm not uh i haven't had enough coffee this morning uh how are you doing bud oh i'm fucking terrific bud i love that when either of us answer that we aren't sure if we'll answer saying oh i'm fucking great or i'm just i'm just fucking outstanding we were gone by a thread baby yeah let's say neither of us know if we're being serious or if we're just like in a pit of depression but managed to log on to do the podcast oh yeah that's mostly a pit of depression logging on to do the pod i mean let's all be honest with each other yeah is it a pit and i'm asking this as a personal question. Is it a pit if it goes on forever?

Yeah, it's a really big pit, man. Ah, the pit of eternity. You stare into the void and the void stares back. Oh, what? You're going to have depression. You're going to stare back in the void and maybe the void stares back at you, huh? Getting real deep.

Let's talk about La Pelle du Vide, baby. You know what cheers people up liam islands you like islands right you've been to an island been to a couple islands yeah i like islands i i have been to a few islands saw you on an island yeah i like islands in general i i i've told corinne this that i think i'll only ever be happy on miserable little hunks of rock in the North Atlantic Corinne wants to take a vacation somewhere romantic I suggested the Svalbard Islands

and I was shot down like John McCain over Vietnam Is the Svalbard Islands the place that's where the seed vault is or whatever? Yeah, truly That's where you want to go on a vacation to? Yeah, it might be fun.

People often criticize me for never taking vacations. And I think never taking a vacation is better than going to the doomsday seed vault for a vacation. No, it's interesting, man. Fair enough. I'm interested, but also I just watch a YouTube video on it. It's interesting, man. I'm interested, but I just watch a YouTube video on it. I wouldn't go there. Nah, I want to go to the shitty remotest places on Earth.

Go to Montana. Montana's not shitty enough. You have high standards. I like Montana. I don't mind. I respect the place that can elect a horse governor you know uh many people said it's the second result

many people do not respect montana's horse governor i do uh you know this podcast also enjoys islands and we talk about islands quite frequently uh from tarawa uh the pit cairn island everybody loves the pit cairn island uh maybe a little too much it's become a problem um uh if that's if you haven't listened to the pit cairn island joke uh or uh that's a that's an incest joke go listen to the episode it's awful uh and you know people really love the island of pelulue um so much so that thousands never left it we're talking about the battle of pelulue today uh isn't this the the most pointless battle in world war ii basically it was just totally pointless from what i remember uh i wouldn't

know i wouldn't say all of world war ii but certainly the pacific theater okay yeah all right um and uh i know actually a little bit about this right it's the islands like six square miles the japanese fought to the death uh and didn't some general say oh we'll have it in four days and it took like two and a half months yeah pretty much um and it's uh it's pretty great, honestly. Because oftentimes you don't hear the US being the one that did stuff like this. I mean, obviously, we already talked about a few battles. But normally, it's always like the front it was like brutal we were fighting over small specks of dirt in the ocean but like we kind of had to uh because it's just the way that the battles were so like you can see when some when certain battles seem pointless or whatever it's like it was actually important because of this reason or that had an air just the six mile

chunk of coral had an airfield or whatever that's not the fucking case in pillu um there's really no uh anything about even at the time like it wasn't publicized mostly because like oh this looks bad now uh for one of the sources i used for this uh was robert lecky's uh with the old breed um or sorry a helmet for my pillow and uh eugene sledge's book with the old breed they were also used to make the hbo series the pacific which is fucking outstanding and i watched it while i wrote this uh i wrote this episode um and they have an entire episode dedicated to the Battle of Peleliu, and it is fucking awful. It's

the perfect piece of media about it, quite honestly. I have a lot of complaints about Band of Brothers, which, I mean, we did a bonus episode about that forever ago. And the Pacific is better in literally every possible way. If you don't have HBO find a way to pirate it, it's great.

Also, read those books. They're fucking amazing. Absolutely. I hate to breaking news you, but I think I wouldn't bother since this episode doesn't come up for weeks. Oh, never mind. I thought Papuanan had died. I was really excited. He's not dead?

No, he's not dead. I thought he had died. Huh. They were posting about him on Twitter, and I thought, oh, is this finally it? Has he finally kicked the bucket? I was really excited, man. Can't be that lucky. The people we hate the worst live forever.

No, they live forever. And fucking the people we like die at 40 forever. No, they live forever and fucking... The people we like die at 40. Yep. I got six more years. Yeah. Well, all right. Welcome to Lions Live by Donkeys.

I'm Liam, the only host still alive. Yep. That's right. Now, Peleliu Island is a tiny little speck of rocks and coral measuring six miles long and two miles wide. And today it makes up part of the Pacific nation of Palau. However, before that, Palau and the other hundred or so islands that make it up had something about a history of being a hot potato for regional colonialism. It was settled for the first time around the third or second millennia. No, he's really entirely sure when, uh,

by people who probably came from Indonesia and the Philippines. And it, it stayed that way until about the 1500s when the Spanish showed up, which is never a good sign. You never want the Spanish. You never want the Spaniards. Yeah. Uh,

now at the time, this is just during Magellan's around the world voyage and he mapped it, but that meant they were eventually going to come back. And they did about 200 years later. It was eventually made part of the Spanish East Indies and 100 years after that, it was sold to the Germans in 1899.

The Germans were only able to hold on to it for a little while because World War I happened and the Pacific Theater of World War I is often not talked about. One day we'll cover more of that. That would be a lot of fun. I'd like to. Yeah. Uh,

the empire of Japan showed up and stole it, uh, and they annexed it in 1914. And this is eventually made official, uh, by the ever so useful and, uh, great organization,

the league of nations. Um, and then there was Japan's now, um, Japan, uh, I don't, I don't really want to say it was not terrible to Palau because it's the

empire of Japan. But in comparison, they were worse in other places, I will say. They colonized parts of it, mostly left it alone because Palau is a hard place to really live in. It's certainly a place if you're not a native and you don't know a certain way of life you're going to have a rough time um for the sake of what we're talking about here on the episode uh pelulu and a few other islands were turned into air bases uh because that's just how japan's colonialism generally worked in this area because they had plans to take over most of the islands in the pacific for quite a while yeah right it was it was a thing that they wanted to do um and uh like they would eventually use these

airstrips to support their attack on the philippines in 1941 after pearl harbor and uh the u.s is entering the world war ii uh and you know that was how things kind of went as the empire of japan steamrolled their way through the allies in the early stages of the war in the pacific however this is we're going to rejoin this story all the way in 1944 uh and things are not looking so great for the empire of japan good uh oh no oh that's so sad is how i feel about that uh yeah world war ii is one of those where i'm openly like yeah like listen i fucking hate nation states but if i'm stuck in one you know it's always very weird whenever you're reading uh someone like michael tracy for instance and he's talking about like how the u.s forced japan into uh to to attack the U S like, Oh yeah. Why did the U S restrict,

uh, oil to Japan? Huh? Maybe go listen to the three part series and fucking man King. Uh, yeah. Yeah. You fucking pieces of shit.

I hate those fucking people, man. It's always that smarmy pseudo intellectualism, bullshit nonsense. It's just like, why won't you debate me? It's like, cause you're not arguing in good faith and you're a terrible person.

And you believe that Kamala Harris trucked you or whatever. There's a good policy that we've adopted on the show and that is not to debate people like that. Don't ever believe your opponents are engaging in good faith. You can't be in that situation.

If you have that argument, you're either an absolutely batshit guy with a sub stack or you're a member of like a japanese nationalist party like there's no there's no other version of that guy maxine waters not camel harris my bad yeah yeah yeah uh you know what i like harris is uh possible i like harris's uh chances in that fight yeah yeah oh yeah a little bit more spry the maxine waters uh you know what i i would pay to see that uh for charity i'm not sure what i have to say here to make this not a crime anyway um now in by 1944 japan had been uh solidly put on

their back foot for months because their stupid plan of bleeding the U.S. and negotiating them to the war was even more unrealistic than it had been in the beginning of the whole thing. Because that plan was never going to fucking work. Even Admiral Yamamoto was like, that's a bad idea. We shouldn't do that. Oh, well, I guess we're doing it anyway. Womp womp. The war was a horrific grind fest of island hopping uh i i think that's that's pretty well known uh oftentimes people say

like people don't know how awful this front was but that's pretty fucking bad yeah that does seem to be one of the the constants whenever you're talking about the Pacific campaign. I mean, I think that's also why when they made HBO's Pacific, they couldn't kind of put rose-tinted glasses on it like they did in the European theater. Like, it's one of my biggest complaints about Band of Brothers. It's like, it looks like a piece of propaganda. Yeah. It's too clean.

But it also has to do with, like, sourcing materials. Oh, yeah. Stephen Ambrose wasn't a historian he was just a fanboy of Dick Winters I've said the same thing about Band of Brothers and I think it's probably my favorite television show ever made I do think as like

okay as like historical record and watching that either of those should be viewed as historical record obviously I thought the Pacific was much more sort of like what war is probably actually closer to than just like dick winners and friends not to mention like they got so many things just basically wrong with band of like how did they fuck up the i knowing that one of the guys they said was dead was still alive yeah he's dead to dick winters so yeah he had been going to uh um easy company reunions for years he i mean he died uh i think in the 60s or the 70s but he was dead by the time they're making the show but like

like steven ambrose's research just is like so uh mr winners is uh he dead yeah all right credit boys i mean that's what i think this is the fundamental difference and obviously this has nothing to do with this episode but i don't care um the fundamental difference you see in how um war is portrayed is and this is also a gross oversimplification, I will admit, is that one of the main sources for Band of Brothers is Dick Winters. And Dick Winters saw himself as this superhero. Dick Winters is a huge fan of Dick Winters. And not to mention, he was a field grade officer. So he kind of had this glory and honor thing, uh,

in viewed into his very life for decades at that point. Well, virtually all the sources for the Pacific are grunts, uh, like Robert, Eugene sledge. Yeah. The,

the guys who were like, I think they were both fucking privates. I, I think one of them retired as a corporal because the Marines were fucking weird back then. And you can't say that like, oh, the attitude's different. They're Marines. It's the closest thing to a cult the US government has. It's just two completely different products.

That's why I said. But yeah, like I said, they did a really good job of showing how awful everything was, specifically with Peleliu. I just watched that episode yesterday. It was pretty good. But yeah, that's one thing that, for all the faults the US education system has, everyone's pretty well aware of how awful the Pacific Front was. Congratulations, you have trench foot. Congratulations, you have heat stroke and you probably have some intense...

And diphtheria. And diphtheria. And some jungle-based mosquito illness. You're a dick, jungle. Now, but even though Japan was on the back foot and was in terminal decline, the tactics and the realities of the front still required the US to feed thousands of soldiers and Marines into a samurai-powered wood chipper in order to close it out, right? Sure. I mean, the US had gotten better at island hopping, especially since our last visit to this topic with the Malifarwa.

However, there's only so much you can do. You only can be so good at amphibious landings when one of the most basic tactics is we're going to run directly into the barrels of machine guns. Hide in jungle is a legitimate tactic.

You can only evolve so much when everyone knows where you're attacking from. You really can't keep anybody guessing. Like, well, we have one beach here. I wonder where they're coming. If only we had Agent Orange. They did have napalm. They used a lot of fucking napalm in the Pacific.

I mean, they didn't use it specifically for destroying plants, mostly because of caves and tunnels and shit. But it also worked for both things. But the U.S. was planning the invasion of the Marianas Islands. And from there, planning their eventual invasion of the Japanese homeland, which of course we know never happened. However, that led to a lot of debate within the ranks of U.S US commanders and politicians about just how exactly one would actually do such a thing. An invasion of the Japanese homeland would be the largest military operation the United States would ever conduct, which is why they chose not to do it. But this generally broke down into two camps, one led by Chesterester nimitz overall fleet commander of the

pacific and famed dickhead asshole general douglas mcarthur uh the closest that any generals ever come to cooing the president general douglas mcarthur uh yeah or the joint chiefs uh during the the bay of pigs fiasco yeah but they listened no the cuban missile crisis not the bay of pigs yeah but like the i think the main like the main difference is i think if if douglas mcarthur was not fired it would have led to something significantly more serious oh yeah no i'll buy that yeah um i firmly believe robert f kennedy basically gathered around the joint chiefs produced a pistol and said any you motherfuckers leave this room and say anything, so on and so forth.

I mean, I think JFK was like, listen, you know what I do in my free time. If you don't back down, I will fuck every single one of your wives. Every single one. Every single one. Everybody in here. I'll fuck your wives. I'll fuck your sisters.

We have to back down. I'll fuck your mom. I'll fuck your sisters. We have to back down. I'll do it. I'll fuck your mom. No, Nimitz was carrying his offensive to the North Pacific while MacArthur was carrying it to the South. And now due to the split, and honestly, because of their personalities, the two of them had very different plans about how the preparation for the eventual invasion of the Japanese home islands should be set up. Nimitz suggested that Okinawa and Taiwan were primary targets for the

next campaign. He thought that they would serve as good staging areas for the home island campaign. Though, even though he also believed that American forces needed to invade mainland China, that American forces needed to invade mainland China. He wanted to support Sheck's National Army, which was doing the majority of the heavy lifting fighting the Japanese in China, and they were not doing so great at it. This plan is kind of nuts because obviously the amount of people

you would need to facilitate an invasion of mainland China is incredible. And the U.S. is like, what? No, absolutely not. I will say this made more sense than MacArthur's eventual bloodlust for China, where he believed that, look, eventually Japan is going to pull out of China to defend the home islands. We're going to have to fight those soldiers eventually. We might as well fight them in China because it would be easier to fight them in China than on the home islands. Which doesn't make it any less absurd, but it does make more sense.

Right? does make more sense right um now macarthur to the surprise of nobody thought the next stepping stone should be the philippines because famously he lost the philippines to japan and he had been thinking about them ever since uh from there the u.s would invade okinawa and then the home islands now despite the philippines not really being that important in the overall plan and macarthur absolutely just wanting revenge for the time that he looked like shit uh we've been in iraq and our shitty are pretty tutsis the second time you know it's well and remember at the time the philippines was a u.s colony so like there's also a lot of politics behind it uh president uh fdr went with macarthur's plan

but almost certainly because it didn't involve a fucking invasion of China. Nimitz really shot for the moon on that one. But we should also point out that in Nimitz's plan, he wanted to ignore the Philippines completely, which really did not work for politicians back home. It was a huge PR thing that the Japanese had taken a US colony rather than just something some Wake Island or whatever. The Philippines was super important to the American experience at the time

and they had been wanting to retake the islands ever since they lost them. This is good for morale, PR, political gain. Of course, strategically, it's fine. Not totally necessary, but sure.

But FDR almost certainly would have the plan because he wanted to recapture the Philippines. And remember, MacArthur had quite a bit of spotlight at the time. Sure. Yeah. Now, MacArthur's plan called for an invasion of Palau, which was a large chain of islands, but you wouldn't have to invade every single one. You're not going to have to invade 100 different islands. Now, there's only a couple islands the Japanese had fortified, specifically the ones with airfields, because just like the Japanese had previously done, he believed that he could use these airfields to support his attack on

the Philippines. And if you didn't take them out, the Japanese would then use them to attack you while you're attacking the Philippines. You would have to take them. Now, an operation like Peleliu and the Palau invasion in general was called Operation Stalemate. That's not inspiring confidence. That's what I'm saying. Honestly, it ended up being prophetic. Imagine sitting down in the briefing room and someone be like

boys got an idea operation stalemate like sitting in the back of the room you slowly raise your hand like how about operation sudden sudden bloodless victory um can we do that no worse worse worse keep going we're all gonna

stay here until we have the shittiest name we can think of. Operation Iraqi Freedom? Good, but you're a bit early. Once upon a time, the U.S. was good at naming military operations. Operation Overlord? That fucking slaps.

And Operation Downfall. Yeah, good. I mean mean not the content of the operation operation just cause is at least funny it it is ironic uh it sounds like uh something that someone would name uh something sarcastic which of course they eventually did with the video game series yeah but yeah everything's been downhill so much fun yeah everything is parachutes it's great or gliders whatever um you ever heard of operation unthinkable that's my favorite yeah that's when uh they're gonna rearm the Nazis against the uh against the Soviets yeah like you can say a lot about Winston Churchill all of it bad uh but you you can't say he wasn't cartoonishly insane

to the point he was funny sometimes. Oh, yeah. Now, despite the name, nobody actually saw the invasion of Peleliu as being a stalemate. The main task of securing the island was given to the 1st Marine Division, a unit that had previously fought at Guadalcanal in New Britain.

So they were hard fucking dudes. These guys were island hopping veterans. They were commanded by General William Rupertus, which is a man whose name sounds vaguely like if a stuffed teddy bear got knighted. And unfortunately, while the Marines within the unit may have been very, very good at their job, Rupertus was not.

I don't know if there's a a a thing about him in the marine corps i don't know a lot of the marines mythos uh because you know guadalcanal is um kind of obviously held up quite high in their in their branch history i don't know if rupertus is i sincerely hope he isn't for reasons that you'll find out um they were one of the Pacific Theater's most seasoned units. And there were also army units involved, which most people don't think of when you think of the Pacific campaign. Because they're also taking Anguara Island, which is very close to Peleliu. There's another airstrip there that they wanted to secure. The army units were mostly newer soldiers. I guess they had taken their time, having apparently got lost on their way to Europe.

The plan was for the Marines to do most of the heavy lifting. People knew Peleliu was going to be the harder island to take, so it was given to the Marines. But the soldiers and another Marine unit would act as reinforcements should anything go wrong on Peleliu. The army's mission to take Anguar Island was secondary. It would only be launched once it was clear that Peleliu was fine. But really what the real point was, was to keep them separated because Rupertus was staunchly against the use of any soldiers to support his marines because he didn't want to share glory with the U.S. Army.

In case anybody thought that this kind of shit died out in the U.S. military before the 1940s, you'd be wrong. Come on, man. Yeah, it's pretty lame. The repercussions of his very, very stupid choices will be a list of a thousand casualties. So good job, dude. Now, command told the Marines they had nothing to worry about and the battle would take at most five days but probably three however the officers who would actually be leading the mission weren't so sure about that yeah i also

would not be so sure about that now Now remember, these guys were not dumb. I mean, well, they are. They're Marines. Sorry, Marines, I have to. But they had seen some shit to know how an ion... You don't need to take that from a tanker who got demoted. Twice. But these guys had seen enough shit to know, like, this seems bad.

They knew one of the first rules of an ion hopping campaign in an amphibious landing is you outnumber the enemy at minimum three to one. The Marines were landing on paper, 28,000 men, and they knew the Japanese had at least 10,000. And that looks good on paper. But Marine legend Chesty Poehler kind of pointed out to people that those numbers, that three to one ratio, are supposed to be fighting men, frontline grunts. And they were counting thousands and thousands of people who were not like cooks, supply dudes, artillery. Oh, no.

There's actually only 9,000 riflemen that would be landing on the island. Yeah. Yeah, it's not good. I will say my favorite thing about Chesty Puller is that when a flamethrower was demonstrated to him for the first time, he is to have quoted, I don't know if this is apocryphal or not, but where do you put the bayonet?

I've heard that story too, and it is the most Chesty Puller thing he could have said. Also, I love the idea his nickname was Chesty. I'm not going to look into why that's the case. I'm just going to assume everybody's like, that guy has nice tits. Joe, Chesty Puller was what you might call a baddie. Yeah, he was what the kids would call thick with two Cs.

Yeah. I don't think you have five Navy Crossese it's true i do not um yeah yeah um but yeah like he pointed all this out like and you know his very old-timey uh hard man voice and uh macarthur blew off poller's worries uh because macarthur is a huge dickhead and also apparently bad at math yeah macarthur's a fucking asshole. It turned out the Marines were going to need all those extramen because the Japanese soldiers on the island had spent the last several years turning

all six miles into Peleliu into a goddamn fortress. There had been a foundational change in Japanese defensive tactics at the time. This change as ordered by Hideki Tojo was called Fukaku. It discarded away the idea of actually winning battles against the United States, which

sure. I mean, oftentimes, especially like Tarawa and others, and they're like, oh, they fought to the death. Well, yeah, of course they did. You're on an island. You're not exactly going to retreat. There's nowhere else to go, man. It's fight to the death

or drown, and I ain't drowning. Yeah, but with the idea of Fukaku, it's like, we're losing the battles. It's fine. These islands are meant to be lost. They're not the home islands. Who cares? Sure. The idea was...

We got tons of islands. Don't worry about it. They really did. The idea was to adopt defense and depth tactics across the entirety of every island they controlled. And the goal was to get the American invasion forces onto the island and grind them into nothing. The idea was to drag the US into a war of attrition that caused losses so awful that the government would see how many men were they were losing to tiny specks of dirt that nobody had ever heard of and then like the idea of invading the home islands were a

nightmare so they'd settle for negotiating peace which counterpoint counterpoint he was kind of right though right come find out where i where come find out why our healthcare isn't free. But I'm not, I'm not, you do not in fact have to hand it to Hideki Tojo. I'm not handing it to Tojo. However, he was kind of right. The idea of invading the home islands was a nightmare to the U S.

So they didn't do it. However, would you care to explain to the assembled crowd how the United States government managed to avoid an amphibious invasion of Japan Joe yeah I would like to see like Tojo but like well that's not what I meant

fat boy goes off in the distance Tojo's like does anybody else taste burning? What's happening? Now, the Japanese would use natural features to their advantage by constructing pillboxes and bunkers amid coral ridges and rocky

outcroppings. The island also had a natural cave system under mountains. The term mountains is used often. They're only like 500 feet high it was big hills uh but there's a natural tunnel system under the island and they expanded it uh and these were so large they could literally hide a thousand soldiers in them at a time fucking nuts uh which of course had become a huge problem uh like famously in uh hbo specific uh a guy goes

into a tunnel to take a shit in a very very secured part of the island only to be charged by a guy with a samurai sword uh which is a true thing that happened uh it's in i believe it's in sledge's book um now pelulu is part of what the Japanese called the absolute defense zone or the last ditch protective cordon guarding the home islands, which meant that under those orders that not a single position could be abandoned. Every position was to be fought over to the death. Nothing was to be like every single inch was a last stand. Right. Okay. Now, General Sade Inoue, a name I'm sure I completely nailed, was overall commander of the Palau defense.

But Peleliu itself was on the command of Colonel Kinio Nakagawa. Because there's, again, 100 hundred fucking islands one guy can't command all this but Nakagawa knew what kind of mission he got when he got orders to defend Peleliu because when he left he told his wife bye I'll never be seeing you again later dude

have a good marry a good man have good children I will see you later I'm gonna go die in a tunnel bye and nakagawa was a veteran of nan king so oh yeah yeah the area where the marines were landing in the southwest was mostly open uh and only covered in some sure like shrubbery you know a nice a nice shrubbery uh but the rest of the island was kind of a nightmare um it was train was awful uh but uh nakagawa knew that defending the beachhead uh was largely pointless because it was so open he knew that they would lose it quite quickly however that didn't mean shit it didn't mean he wasn't gonna

defend it because every inch was to be a fortress so he sent one of his least experienced units down to hold the beach and do as much damage as they possibly could which is kind of incredible when you see exactly uh how well they did at that when you realize that they were his worst soldiers um the key to his entire defense was the oh boy umur brogo mountains uh like i said it was good i nailed it uh i speak fluent peluluan um it's not a language but like the i use the term mountains very loosely here because like i said the highest one was only 500 feet um they were but all of these mountains uh hills everyone to call them were incredibly rugged uh super rough everything is covered in coral um really thick brush it there's

crisscrossing ravines draws and a metric shit ton of natural cave systems the terrain is a nightmare so even though things are not very high realistically you've put a couple thousand feet of uh altitude on it and i don't know if it'd make it any worse uh it's just it's not a good place to fight a battle and because the japanese controlled the only high spot on the island uh they could see the entire island from the second the marines landed uh now the the japanese had spent a lot of time expanding that cave system they blew out so much space under the mountains that they could like all of their command structure was underground um and they also had most of their artillery

hidden within it so that meant when the navy conducted its normal pre-invasion island blinking bombardment with naval guns and bombers, it really didn't do anything. And on top of that, when the US did aerial recon on the island, they couldn't see shit. Everything was underground. And the true nightmare terrain of the island, that being the coral mountains and hills, were all covered with jungle before the bombardment. So recon pilots simply didn't see it. They actually reported them as like nice rolling green hills. Oh.

The Americans had no idea what they were walking into. And the Japanese knew it. They knew what they were doing. So when the Navy did roll up and do their bombardment, their pre-show game, not a single Japanese gun fired back because the Japanese knew they have no idea that we're in these caves. They have no idea

what we have. So they didn't fire a single counter battery. And they could have probably damaged quite a few ships because they got quite close to do that. But they didn't want to give anything away. This led the Americans to believe that their bombardment had been so perfect that all Japanese artillery had been eliminated. Admiral Jesse Oldendorf, who was watching the islands get shelled via binoculars, joked that he was going to run out of targets soon. Now, Chesty Puller's unit landed on the left flank of the beach to protect another unit that was at the center

that was assigned to push inland and capture the airfield which was of course the main goal here other units landed across the beach everybody landed around 8.32am on September 15th 1944 and to their credit only two minutes behind schedule which is I think the most on time any unit's ever been in the history of this show. Congratulations, boys.

The first wave was made up of armored amphibious tractors, or LVATs. They were armed with 75mm cannons and flamethrowers, and obviously their mission was quite obvious why they went first. After they landed, the landing craft hit the beaches the same kind of lvts that we had talked about during battle of tarawa an absolutely terrible design it's very weird that the marines kept using these though to be fair this time nobody got stuck on any coral uh or low tides because i guess somebody actually decided to look up the title map this time around.

Now, and one of the only times during this battle where the Marines would get lucky, a massive minefield that had been laid by the Japanese, which would have wreaked fucking havoc on them, had been taken out by the naval bombardment. And these were not just regular landmines, but actually repurposed aircraft bombs, which would have just liquefied the LVTs and everybody on the beach. But that's the last time that the Marines will be lucky here. When the landing craft crawled onto the beaches and got within range of the Japanese guns, so far, they had not been shooting. But they waited for them to get really, really close. And then they opened fire.

The beach was immediately turned into a fucking charnel house. Within just 10 minutes, 60 landing craft were destroyed and hundreds of men have been turned into a beach brand chunky sauce. Yeah. Like a chesty pullers vehicle took a direct hit, which would have killed him immediately. But the shell did not explode though it did smash his entire communication section which is bad when you're the commander of a beach and I mean he couldn't

talk to anybody anymore on the beaches natural obstacles force the LVTs to have to bunch together which meant hitting them as easy as shooting Marines in an LVT I suppose so many of the landing crafts have been knocked out on the beach,

whether completely destroyed or piling up. They created a traffic jam of burning wrecks and corpses. So the oncoming waves of Marines had to ditch their landing craft, and because of the design, they literally have to throw themselves over the side. Don't want that.

And then try running ashore and running did work slightly better than the slow moving vehicles until they ran into something that for some reason nobody saw a 30 foot sheer wall made out of coral you gotta be fucking kidding

for some reason that was not in any aerial recon it wasn't on any maps it was giant. Also, how do you miss a 30-foot coral wall? Real talk. It had been hollowed out and turned into a fortification.

And worse than that, because nobody knew it was there, nobody had anything to climb over it. Inside the wall, the Japanese had dug themselves in. Behind was effectively a maze of tunnels.

And their gun points, their firing ports, were only so large to point out the end of a barrel. So shooting back at them was virtually impossible. The Marines end up calling this position the Point. And it probably killed more Marines than anything else on the island. Jesus fuck.

Now, this went on for a very long time. People knew that we cannot advance unless we take the point. But we can't take the point because we can't get around it. This was solved by pure luck. Pure luck and one private with one hell of a grenade shot. Now, the point central position has a 25mm gun. And like everything else, it is seated so that it was really hard to get anything in there like you're not going to shoot through the coral um airstrikes

were not accurate enough you know it's 1944 there's a laser guided bombs here um they had already survived hours of bombardment you're not getting through this natural barrier uh someone known only as corporal anderson fired a rifle grenade oh oh yes i remember doing that yes yes i did do that yeah that there was it was corporal leo manderson he's a highlander he never dies back in back in yeah i uh it was a weird time for me actually just wolverine but without any of the powers yeah yeah yeah the grenade hit the barrel of the 25 millimeter cannon bounced off the rim of the firing port circled around like a basketball and then landed inside blowing up and killing everybody i did that as an extra bonus

the grenade ledge detonated the grenade blast detonated the 25 millimeter ammunition, which then spread throughout the entire point, blowing out dozens of other firing ports and buying the Marines enough time to actually flank around and take the point. So this one corporal with a Jesus shot. It was me. Yes. Yes. Yes. I remember it now. It's not fair because occasionally there'll be people from history that have like normal last names like Anderson or Horton or whatever.

People that work on this show like, oh, you're never going to hear like, oh, historical Kasabian. It's not a thing. Unless it's Nancy Kasabian. We're not related. Oh, Joe. Yeah, that's fine it's fine i'm not i'm not sad oh yeah jesus shot with a hand grenade takes out the front line defense that that has to be the most amount of people a hand grenade has ever killed yeah also can you

imagine that just like nailing that shot like not even having time to admire your handiwork i mean that but also imagine firing a hand grenade. Something that, if you've never seen a real hand grenade go off, they're quite disappointing. Not very cool at all. And then after you do that, a whole fucking fortification explodes. You're just like, I meant to do that.

That's what I was trying to do. You're taking a drag for your cigarettes. You're like, get the next one too. Fucking nailed it. However, taking the point, put that unit that did it, Company K, out ahead of everybody else as the sun began to set.

Soon the Japanese would be flinging themselves against the point, trying desperately to retake it and keep the Marines on the beach. Company K was stranded out and fighting them alone. Nobody could get out to them, and it stayed that way for 30 hours. Not like that.

By the time the sun came up, Company K's 235 men had been reduced to 78, only 18 of whom were unwounded. But the point held. At the end of the first day, the Marines had managed to hold on to a whole whopping thin two-mile stretch of beach and absolutely nothing else. Probably several

hundred people are dead by now. Now, by day two, the Marines' center push had finally got to the island's prize, the airfield. The entire way, the Marines had rented dugouts, pillboxes, and tunnel entrances. In a lot of cases, they would walk by an area, thinking it was secure, only for 100 Japanese soldiers to pop out from some unknown cave and attack them from behind. There was another enemy sneaking around on both sides, though we know specifically on the American

side, and they were losing this fight quite thoroughly. The heat. Peleliu was a tropical island with temperatures that quickly shot up to 115 degrees in the shade. You can have me. Oh, oh, ah. No. Nope.

You can have me. You can have me, man. I ain't doing that. Don't forget the humidity. That was like 90%. Right. You are sweating. Oh, but don't worry. The U.S. is good at one thing, right?

Logistics. So, of course, there is a robust supply system in place to make sure water got to the front line. And there was a robust supply system in place to make sure water got to the front line. And there was. This isn't a sarcastic comment, but the US forgot to supply their soldiers with water. That's what the Japanese actually did. But the Marines were resupplied with water after the first day.

And it was delivered in repurposed oil drums that had oil in them so they could not drink the water. Oh, that fucking brilliant, boys. Well done. Yeah, you can't do that. So during

I think it's like the first four days, nobody has water. Oh, God. It may have actually been longer than the four days. It's a problem that lingers. Yeah. The United States military hates water. Ask the Navy.

Yeah. God, yeah, they do. Now, by the time they had fought their way to the airfield, the Marines were mostly half dead from heat exhaustion and heat stroke because they had been killed by thousands of bullets filling the air. And as they limped up to the edge of the airfield, they hoped that the Japanese may have fallen back, but they certainly did not.

As they got to the edge, thousands of Japanese soldiers charged across the airfield. And this wasn't some mindless bonsai charge. This was men and tanks supported by mortar fire. So thankfully for the Marines, Japanese tanks were not really much of a threat. Yeah. You could just sort of toss a

rock or something and it'll probably stop it dead. You could poke your fingers at the side like papier-mâché. These were type 95 HAGO tanks. If you've never seen one in person, they are tiny. Oh dear god, are they small. Oh yeah, they're real small. They're no

armor, very small weapons. And the Marines are supported by M4A2 Shermans, not to mention all of the artillery you could ever want. And obviously, there's a lot of criticism of Shermans. Most of it is actually not that based in history. And people, I don't know. However, Sherman is going to beat a Hago 10 times out of 10. I don't know a tank that the hago would defeat

uh it might it might beat a horse i'm not sure uh it would be able to fuck up a bob simple tank uh or maybe the uh i i even like the uh the the the bulldozer the the apocalypse bulldozer guy from california he might be able to take out a hago tank with this yeah yeah the bulldozer guy from California, he might be able to take out a Hogo tank with this fucking guy. So as soon as that happened, the Japanese charge was broken because, you know, artillery and tanks will do that. And,

but after that, it was the Marines turn. I mean, they had to charge across the open airfield. It's literally the only thing you can do. It's an open airfield. So the Marines took off across the airfield as well. All wonder only thing you can do. It's an open airfield. So the Marines took off across the airfield as well, all while under sniper motor and machine gun fire.

And the advance was awful. The only cover in the airfield is blown up planes, which are not cover because airplanes are notoriously thin and lightweight because they have to be. So it was real bad. But the Marines eventually succeeded, leaving what had to be thousands of dead bodies across the airfield for both sides just intertwined at that point. Somehow, this is one of the few overt Marine victories in the first two days of the battle.

And honestly, it's probably the last one. The rest of this is just grinding siege. By day three, the Marines had already suffered 1,236 casualties. Remember, by now, they should have taken the whole island, according to old Rupertus.

And they had not. Oh, and then it gets worse. It began to rain. Now, this sounds like it might be a relief. Now, this sounds like it might be a relief. Yeah, this sounds like this might be a relief. It's really hot. It's awfully humid. Rain sounds like it could be.

Not to mention, they don't have fucking water, right? They're like, oh, thank God. We finally have moisture. However, it's like 120 degrees. They're in a jungle. When the water hits the jungle floor, it just turns to steam. They got a surprise

steam bath, which is not a nice fit. It's miserable. Men began dropping from heat exhaustion and stroke to the point that frontline units that hadn't been mangled by the Japanese still found themselves losing a lot of their strength.

And a couple of people, of course, drank the tainted oil water out of desperation, which is a really good way to shit out the majority of your insides. Oh, yeah. If you feel like you're dehydrated now, just wait until you have the oil shit. Yeah, I used

to be an oil bed, by which I drank the tainted oil out there on a pillow. And now I don't see so good no more. Yeah, it was a rough neck. My ass neck was rough. Oh, man. Let me drink your butt oil. Oh, God.

Now, Chesty Poehler warned General Rupertus that things were not going great. Don't drink the oil water. At this point, if I was a Marine, if I drink the oil water, I'll get to go to a hospital, shit. I'll get out of here early. I'll get the fuck off Peleliu. But he warned General Rupertus that things were not going good. And the General's only real orders were, quote, maintain momentum. Oh, boy.

Okay. Rupertus was under the idea that the offensive was going fine. and the general's only real orders were, quote, maintain momentum. Oh, boy. Okay. Rupertus was under the idea that the offensive was going fine, and instead of sending in the army as reinforcements, and because he believed that Peleliu was being taken, he ordered them to begin their invasion of Angwar, despite the fact that the Marines really needed reinforcements. There's like four dudes left. Yeah, it's four dudes,

and they're all mostly oil on the inside now. They'll never catch me alive. They've been shot three times by the Japanese. It helps the oil get out. All my bleeding is internal. I don't get the big deal. That's where the blood is supposed to be. It's fine. It's where it's supposed to go.

Remember, he didn't want to share any glory with the army. And even then, when Angwar was secured pretty quickly and without any problem, he then't want to share any glory with the army. And even then, when Angwar was secured pretty quickly and without any problem, he then refused to send them to Peleliu to reinforce the Marines. I didn't want to care. However,

that still meant that the Marines on the island had to find people somewhere to fight. However, that meant that Marines on the island still had to find people somewhere and put them into the fight since their terrible general would not to do that soon anybody who wasn't already

dead or dying from heat stroke oil consumption or bullet wounds was pressed into frontline duty to make up for the losses engineers cooks administrative paper pushers yeah he died on Peleli uh they were all given a rifle and and ordered like all right go that way every marina rifleman let's go boys and this is my one criticism of hbo's uh uh episode on pellaloo uh for the pacific is that they even broke segregation rules at at the time black people

were not allowed to serve in combat roles. And then they were used as truck drivers, cooks, whatever. And when the officer's like, we need you guys to grab a rifle and come with us, virtually all of the sports units, which are staffed mainly by black men, emptied the fuck out to volunteer to go and fight, and the Marines let them. So it turns out you can temporarily defeat racism the u.s military with the proper application of heat stroke and mass casualties yeah that that isn't really shown in the show at all um but i mean it could have been that the two marines they used as a perspective simply didn't see it because they were low ranking that's the only thing i can think of. Finally, the airfield was secured by September 23rd. And within minutes,

American aircraft were landing on it pretty much as soon as all the bodies and wreckage got dragged out of the way. However, as secure as it was, it was still within easy range of Japanese guns. So each plane would only land for at minimum as long as they needed to, sometimes as few as a few seconds before taking off, circling back around bombing targets that were so close to the airfield itself that the shrapnel from the bombs they dropped

would then rain down on where they just took off from. The Marines had still yet to start climbing the Japanese positions in the mountains, which at this time had been given the lovely, old-timey nickname of Bloody Nose Ridge. nose ridge oh god as soon as the marines began advancing into the mountains they entered the real expertly designed meat grinder that uh the japanese had prepared for them every inch is another bucker dugout or tunnel and because of the craggy pitted terrain it made

there was no like trails through these places they were simply climbing hand over hand to get over a lot of this stuff. And because of that, it kind of eliminates the idea of normal advancing. So you just had random Marines scrabbling over coral points, running into Japanese

soldiers and having a point blank gun fight or a knife fight as they accidentally came upon one another. And then the Americans brought flamethrowers conducting some of those horrible kind of combat anybody's probably ever has seen. On top of that, planes from the airfield are now hitting the mountains with napalm, knowing it was the only thing they had that might get into the tunnels that

the Americans now fully were now fully aware of. Not that they knew where they all went, but they did know that, like, fuck, we're running into tunnels every 10 feet. And bombs were not damaging them at all. The only answer that they found was to literally drop napalm at every entrance if they didn't have a flamethrower because napalm spreads very entrance if they didn't have a flamethrower because napalm spreads very very

rapidly um throughout the tunnel um it was some of the most brutal fighting that these marines had ever seen and remember many of them were guadalcanal veterans what yeah one man said quote i resigned from the human race we were no longer human beings i fired at anything in front of me friend or foe i had no friends i just wanted to kill oh good that's great yeah well done terrific good job for a core no good good job macarthur who i'm not macarthur the other guy there's there's something uh very wild about hearing because this is something you kind of expect to hear from like a Vietnam veteran. Right. They resigned from the same race. Right. Yeah. I can't

imagine being a good Guadalcanal vet and be like don't wait it gets worse. Yeah like I've seen everything this cannot possibly be worse. Oh god it's worse. Keep digging baby. Yeah. Chesty Puller's unit was advancing in a particularly high part of the mountains Hill 100 which I'm sure

if you've noticed, they're fighting over a random hill with nothing but a number on a map. It's about to be some horrible shit. It's called a prelude. Captain Everett Pope, commander of B Company, was leading the charge up the hill. When I say company, I actually mean about 80 people.

It had originally been 242. That was actually most units on this island. Most of them were like, go get A company. Oh, you mean those 12 guys? Those guys. That's what I said. I'll be right back. Thank you. So when

nobody really knew this when they were attacking Hill 100, that it was flanked by two other hills, both of which were still controlled by the Japanese. And they had angles of fire on them. Oh, no. So when B Company got to the top, they found themselves effectively in the middle of a crossfire. A shooting gallery, yeah. Yeah.

But instead of retreating, Pope dug in and drew pretty much all of the intention of the Japanese in the area, which was his goal. It takes some of the pressure off the rest of the advance. And this went on all day. And then into the night when the sun went down, that's when the Japanese decided to get them the fuck off that hill. They launched unending assaults up at Hill 100, slowly breaking the line down until it collapsed entirely into chaos and hand-to-hand combat. At one point,

a Lieutenant named Francis Burke got his leg impaled by a Japanese bayonet. So he punched the guy into the face to death. Okay. All right. Yeah. Fair enough. Yeah. Another guy,

another guy named Sergeant James McCall McCall nurse, uh, beat one attacker to death with his rifle until it broke in half, which I don't know how you do that. Jesus Christ, man. He then picked up that guy's dead body and chucked it at another attacking enemy soldier, knocking them both off

the side of the hill. How did he? What? No, that's not real. I mean, he did break an M1 Garand in half with another man's skull. He beat a motherfucker with another motherfucker. At some point, you do have to hand it to the Marine Corps, I guess. Yeah.

By the time the sun came up, B Company was completely out of ammo. They were throwing rocks. Don't worry. Don't worry. You have this fucking Sergeant the Hulk. Everything's fine over here thanks for asking give me more japanese corpses to throw at them uh this is a war crime and i said don't worry about it did not here there's no war crime that says you cannot throw a dead body at someone i'm gonna be honest here i don't think the people who who wrote those laws thought that was going to be a thing that happened.

Show me a Geneva convention where it says I cannot do this. At one point, they were throwing rocks at them, and one guy had shot a Japanese officer who had a samurai sword on his belt, picked up the sword, and started slashing at them,

doing his best Tom Cruise impression. What are you supposed to do, man? You're out of ammo. You're going to roll with it at some point. Though eventually, B Company did have to pull back and forfeit the hill because they only had nine men left. I believe Captain

Pope was given the Medal of Honor for that. I also hope that the sergeant was given some kind of honor uh for that i also hope that the sergeant was given um i don't know some kind of human shot yeah yeah uh they did end up retaking the hill two weeks later um but then it was not nearly that bad at this point pretty much everyone in command other than general rupertus i guess knew that the invasion was was not going to plan so rupertus kept telling everyone this whole thing would be over in a couple days no matter what they like hey

why is this happening what's going on Rupert is like yeah don't worry about it five days five days will be fine another another three days will be fine I swear I got I swear bro yeah look I know I said five days I really meant five weeks finally his superior general

Roy Geiger got sick of Rupert is lying to his face and just went to Peleliu himself. And what he saw was like, according to him, when the worst the worst military operations he's ever had a part in is he remarked that the first regiment was a regiment and name only. Like there was nobody left. regiment was a regiment in name only. There was nobody left. It did not take him long to override Rupertus or that the army was going to come in and reinforce the Marines on the island. This actually caused Rupertus

to yell and scream and stomp around like an angry child because apparently he lived in a completely different reality where he hadn't just fed a thousand men to a wood chipper for nothing. The U.S. Army's 81st Division 321st Regimental Combat Team landed

on Peleliu on September 23rd. Yeah, it was September 23rd and the Marine 1st Regiment was withdrawn completely. The Japanese inflicted roughly 1,600 casualties in less than

200 hours. Some battalions of that regiment were worse off than others, of course, with several of them having close to 70% to 80% casualty rates. Jesus. That's bad. Slowly, Geiger would draw the shattered remnants of the entire 1st Marine Division as October went into November and left the rest of the battle to the army. The Japanese were contained. At this point, the Japanese were only in the mountains.

They had been contained completely to this slowly shrinking pocket. It was like maybe a thousand square feet of the whole island. And they were now completely surrounded while being bombed around the clock. Of course, still refusing to quit. Now the battle, which was supposed to take five whole days, now creeped into November.

The Japanese had made a surprise reinforcement attempt, which is wild that even partially succeeded. Fifteen ships appeared on the horizon, loaded down with, what is it, conservatively estimated at 10,000 Japanese soldiers? Jesus! I don't even have 10 000 people still laying around and they were just like in barges they weren't even like in protected naval ships yeah they were loaded into transport barges and then just charged towards the island remember like this island is ringed with hundreds of u.s naval vessels hundreds of warships. So they ran a shooting gallery trying to get towards the island. Only 600 soldiers made it to shore.

Of the 10,000? Estimated. It might not be 10,000. 15 ships that are barges. You can pack a lot of soldiers in there. Sure. And of how many soldiers were on those ships, only 600 made it. The rest of them got, surprise, connected to Poseidon's Wi-Fi

at the bottom of the ocean. And by now, the battle, there was no large-scale offensives. There was no real counter-offensives anymore. It turned into a siege with the Japanese tunnel system and their fortifications in the mountains. And the soldiers that were there now and their commanders kind of realized from the rather large collection

of dead Marines all around them, we probably should not assault these mountains. Instead, they slowly moved forward with bulldozers, burying Japanese soldiers alive within their positions. If that didn't work, a flamethrower generally did. And not to mention the large-scale application of napalm uh like if anybody found a tunnel entrance like up ahead through scouting whatever that shit was getting firebombed yeah nobody's entirely sure how many japanese soldiers were buried within

mid-island and they're probably still there today um probably thousands uh that were buried alive by bulldozers because like you know some of these dugouts are big enough to house brigades so they just dumped dirt into them and they suffocated or starved to death or died of thirst

or probably once the light vanished from the tunnel well boys time to eat our grenades alright mass suicide let's do it. Mass suicide on three. One, two, three. Mass suicide! Yeah! By the end of November, the Japanese commander

realized that it's finally over. Like, we're done here. He wrote, our sword is broken and we've finally run out of spears. He ordered his colors to be burned and then committed seppuku. And, uh,

the U S declared the battle finally over November 27th, 73 days after it began. Oh, that was a, that was a long four days, man. However, it wasn't actually over.

They were still Japanese soldiers alive on the island until 1947 yeah that sounds about right lieutenant tatamichi yamaguchi and a band of 26 soldiers appeared out of nowhere in april 1947 finally ready to surrender like they had like there was other holdouts we did an episode on them a while ago yeah yeah that was one of the first episodes i was on yeah they conducted like uh raids and like wanted to continue fighting the war like these guys are just hanging out in a tunnel like hanging out like being dudes being guys yeah uh but yeah they surrendered in 1947 so the battle i guess technically ended in 1947 uh but about a year and a half after the war ended. Remember how I said this entire battle was useless?

Yeah, it was. Nobody used that airfield to support any future attack on the Philippines or anywhere else. It wouldn't be used to support the attack on Okinawa. It was pointless. All of this is for nothing. Peleliu's high casualty rate exceeded all other amphibious operations up to that point in the Pacific War for literally

no reason. History's fun. That is the battle of Peleliu. That's fun. Liam, we do a thing on this show

called Questions from the Legion. I'm going home. I'm going to Peleliu. If you'd like to ask us a Questions from the Legion. I'm going home. I'm going to Peleliu. If you'd like to ask us a question from the Legion, donate to the show. Slide into our messages on Patreon or DM us on Discord. Yeah, DM on Discord. If you talk to me

on Discord, I'll block you. Or get several thousand of your closest friends and invade an island to deliver us a message, though neither of us live in an island at this point. Today's question comes from the Patreon and it is, what is the absolute dumbest thing you admit to being pedantic about? Liam, I feel like you have something to say on this topic.

Oh, yeah. Ready to go. Okay. FBI is not a goddamn acronym. FBI is an initialism. Acronyms make words. Radar is an acronym. Do people call it an acronym?

Laser is an acronym. I thought everybody knew FBI, CIA, NSA. I thought everybody knew those were initials. No. People think the word acronym just means any abbreviation. Interesting. I hate that. I didn't know that.

I told you. I'm not sure what something is very stupid and pedantic about. There's a lot. There's a lot of episodes you won't let me write. That's because I write the episodes. Yeah, well, also the ones I want will never be released. That's because

the ones that you want are just the continuous strings of actionable threats against public officials. name has to edit it it's like reading the fucking unibomber's manifesto it's not like reading the unibomber manifesto um honestly i don't know if i have one i'm nothing really bothers me that much um i might this might be the case where i don't have an answer for this is there any military stuff that pisses you off like misconceptions maybe okay i'll give the obvious answer like not everything with tracks is a tank a tank is an actual vehicle an armored personnel carrier

is not a tank a self-propelled piece of artillery is not a tank uh i mean francis has been doing this bit for fucking years where he just tags me in things it's like a tracked vehicle with a gun on top he's just his tank everybody does it i know it's it doesn't bother me as much as it used to him a little bit doesn't it yeah it does a little bit now back when i was in the military and i was a tank crewman oh my god did that infuriate me but now that i'm in my mid-30s and I realize that nobody really gives a fuck I'm fine with it Liam plug your shows

hey so listen to well there's your problem it's a show about engineering disasters with slides you were going to say military disasters I was listen to the 10,000 losses it's a show about sports disasters also Philadelphia sports I was. Listen to the 10,000 Losses. It's a show about sports disasters. Also knows Philadelphia sports.

Yep. Thank you, everybody, for listening. Listen to Liam's show. Thank you for listening again. If you like what we do, consider supporting us on Patreon. You get all sorts of bonus stuff. If you don't want to support us on Patreon, even though you should,

maybe leave us a review. That's free. Uh, and also, uh, buy, buy my books. Uh,

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Um, leave, leave us five stars on whatever podcasting thing that you use. It helps us a lot with algorithms and also letting people know that they enjoy the show. That's a, it's quite nice. Um,

and until next time, uh, don't invade small islands. Um, I don't think any of you are going to have that problem. Bye. Bye.