Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 276 - The Life and Death of the Submarine Surcouf

Episode Date: September 11, 2023

A badly designed submarine becomes the face of the french navy while accidently doing everything it can to convince people that the crew might be nazi agents. Support the show! https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Sources: William H. Langenberg. The Mysterious Disappearance of the Bizarre Surcouf Christopher Miskimon. Seizure of the Surcouf https://www.royalmarineshistory.com/post/seizure-of-the-surcouf-operation-catapult https://www.theday.com/local-news/20161119/french-subs-visit-to-new-london-launched-conspiracy-theory/

Hey everybody, Joe here from the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast, but I guess you probably already knew that. If you like what we do here on the show, consider supporting us on Patreon at www.patreon.com slash lionsledbydonkeys. Just $5 per month gets you every regular episode early, access to our community discord, a digital copy of my book, The Hooligans of Kandahar, as well as its audio book read by me, and over five years of bonus content. By supporting the show, you support us and allow us to keep our show as it has always been ad-free. Thank you for listening, and I hope you enjoy the show. Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. I am Jetlagged Joe, and with me is kinda similarly Jetlagged Tom.

Yeah, we're in different situations. You had a long-haul flight, and I just had to fly four times in a single week. That sounds preferable to a 20-hour journey that I did. I am. Okay, I'm not one to get jet lagged often um i'm really not it might be because i'm getting older this is impacting me so much i am 35 now um or it could be because i changed like i was in a almost a 20 hour time difference. Uh, like almost as like 18 or something hours. Um, cause I actually went on a vacation and,

those things that people keep telling me that I need, um, not only listeners, my own family and, and, uh, and the agent that I have, my literary agent,

which is interesting because she told me that I needed a vacation while I currently owe her a book. So that tells you how things are going. But yeah, I'm so fucking jet lagged. Yesterday, I was hitting a wall. So I'm going to take a short hour, hour and a half to our nap. So I can get through a normal bedtime for me, which isn't still that normal. It's still like midnight, 1am for me.

Normally you put on your, your nightcap and your nightgown. You have your candle carry the candle. Yeah. You go hung. Snooze new me, me, me,

me, me, me, me, me, me. Good hung shoes. Um,

I did not send an alarm, uh, cause I forgot and I promptly woke up at midnight. So I have been up since midnight. We're recording at 2.30 p.m. Eurovon time. I don't feel bad yet. I know it's coming. But it does feel like I have been awake for a very long time before work.

The mind juice is flowing like meanwhile i flew home to ireland for my cousin's wedding then flew home for my brother's birthday last weekend so four flights in a week and i have figured out that like flying from gatwick fine i can get there in an hour stansted takes two hours because i have to go to liverpool street but the train is really nice so i was like you know i'll get a little bit of work done stansted airport has the worst vibes out of any airport i have flown through in the past like couple of years i i i hope and pray that you fly through uh akeisha now moldova when you come to Armenia. Lots of wet sandwiches there.

Wet sandwiches, people just out of nowhere assaulting one another. So Stansted Airport, for anyone who isn't familiar with it, the security... So I have this thing where I pay for the FastPass ticket every time I go to the airport because being in a queue in security stresses me out so much. I hate being in the airport so much. It's so, like, overwhelming.

Good news, we don't have any. But always pay for it. So, you know, you skip most of the queues. It costs an extra five quid each way. I think it's worth it. Get to Stan's dead I was like, oh Fast Track is over there, so I go over and I'm like

oh maybe this is like Gatwick where there'll literally be no one in the queue, just walk up, dump my bags, I'm through in two minutes. That was my experience in Gatwick as well. Yeah no, there's 70 people in the Fast Track queue it's a Saturday afternoon, well Saturday morning morning going into lunchtime

it's full of families with kids and i know people like give out about kids being on like flights and everything was like you know what it's not the kids fault airports are stressful for kids give the kids a break anybody who thinks kids in airports are any worse than anyone else in airports everybody in an airport is a crying baby yeah so this queue is 70 people there's like for some reason people in airports lose all of their mental faculties and they're there like didn't know i needed to take the liquids out and they're like there and they leave their belt on and all this shit like if i if my girlfriend would not berate me for wearing crocs to the airport i would wear crocs to the airport do you not have to take those off no because they're just plastic i mean i wore sandals uh going through the airport because i'm disgusting

they don't make you take off your shoes here with socks or without socks without socks um it was it's just simply too hot here at the moment um it is almost 90 degrees so you went dogs out on the plane well the thing is is like it was my first flight was very short and then like actually my second flight they supplied uh everybody with socks it was quite nice uh but how disgusting is the country you're flying out where they give everyone complimentary socks guitar Qatar, we're looking at you. Say what you will about that horrible slave state. Wonderful airline. But

they don't make you take your shoes off when you go through security here. Just like they don't in a lot of European airports. But it's always hit and miss. I went to Cyprus not too long ago because it there's very few like really nice places you could fly non-stop from yurvan because like we're kind of in like a travel black hole you always need like three or four layovers to

get somewhere you want to go but cyprus is a direct flight uh because you know greece and us also have direct flights but i have yet to go there other than for a layover. But, like, Cyprus made me take my fucking shoes off and I was wearing sandals. I was, like, just pointing down at my sandals, like, bro, come on. Don't make me pitter-patter across your airport floor with my bare feet. Your sandals are made of Semtex. Now, if I was flying through the United States, I would not wear sandals because I know they're making me take my shit off. Yeah. But like,

come on, man. It's Cyprus. We know you don't care about anything that much. You're Greeks. Yeah, you're gonna try and bomb Mindfreak because you're an anti-porn activist. Is that where they're located? I mean, it's a tax shelter, so it doesn't surprise me.

Yeah, so when you get through security and stansted there is like a mile long duty free and then you get to where all the food is and where you're meant to wait i'd never been to stansted before walk out it's literally a circle all the restaurants are in a ring and there is just hundreds of people in the middle sitting down welcome to the restaurant dome literally and the only place you can get a seat is in weatherspoons so it's like okay i'm flying right now they're not going to tell you what gate to go to until like five milliseconds before the plane's meant to take off a plane that is always fucking late there's a very you know first world problem that my flight is late but whatever

um and i was just there got leon which is the most dog shit fast food because it's meant to be healthy but it's just i've never even heard of that it's like oh we butterflied a chicken breast and like barely cooked it just like cooked it enough so it's like not gonna kill you health food here is shawarma i don't know what to tell you yeah but like got my food got through flew over gran on the other on the way back went through knock airport now knock airport famous for knock shrine where an apparition of the virgin mary appeared like decades ago So it's a pilgrimage site now. But also they have an airport that is so small. I have seen bus stations bigger than it.

So you go in and like before you go to true security, there is like there's a restaurant upstairs where you can go. And like I actually sat down, got some food, did some work for an hour. This place has a pool table and like a bar. I have to ask for the listeners. Did you buy 800 cigarettes again? No, I did not. I'm planning on quitting smoking and I am trying to deplete my reserves. So instead of buying cigarettes, I bought half a kilo of smoked salmon, some brown

soda bread and cheese. I'm about positive life choices on this podcast. Did you truly quit smoking if you're going with the smoked salmon, Tom? Yeah, I'm just, you know, I'm, you know, I'm boofing smoked salmon to get something. You know, they actually smoke the salmon by just locking it into a cube full of marble red smoke. something you know they actually smoke the salmon by just locking it into a cube full of marble red smoke there's just there's loads of eastern european lorry drivers smoking l and m reds just locked in a room we call this the caucasian special baby but uh yeah so i was like not gonna

buy cigarettes i do want to quit so and also smoked salmon in the uk is dog shit and this was like wild caught smoked salmon it was you know half a kilo so i was like the majority of a side the brown bread that they have over here is kind of shit and the cheese is kind of dog shit as well so i was like you know what i'm gonna bring a little piece of home with me brought a half kilo of uncut pure smoke to see going to the bathroom on the plane in the like 15 minutes of the flight from ireland to the uk where the plane is actually horizontal and just like snorting lines of smoked salmon it's called doing a pacific northwest line uh speaking of things that go underwater uh tom we still have a podcast to do um we've had two weeks off so we don't know what we're doing

anymore we also talked for like an hour before recording to be fair 15 minutes of that were audio issues. That's true. We here on this show, we love submarines. Not the way other people do. They are, in short, a crazy weapons platform that you have to also be slightly crazy to want to be in. And when things go wrong with them, woo boy, do they go wrong. Also, famously, mid-2010s

internet meme Ken Bone once called pregnant women human submarines. I forgot about him. Thanks for that. You know, normally I expect you to be the young guy in the group and inflict some weird TikTok and Nate and I.

Not for you to inflict our weird internet histories back onto ourselves. But see, this is, you know, I was exposed to the internet at way too young an age, and the way that I store information is, you know, stuff like birthdays,

what I had for breakfast this morning, doesn't matter. Ken Bone, I can tell you exactly how spherical his head is. He looks like a substitute English teacher. That's a good thing or a bad thing, but he looks like it. Now, submarines, the machine one, at least once upon a time, were at the forefront of crazy naval weapon design. From their very concept at the beginning,

they reminded me a lot of a war machine that a child or something would draw on a trapper keeper. And development over the... Wait, was I the only person who ever drew weapons in their folder at school? Yeah. I drew weird tanks and shit, none of which would ever feasibly function.

You're going up to your CO when you're you were deployed said look at this tank i drew can we make this fuck you i was in grade school you're you're stealing a francis's bit of being obsessed with technicals well except you were six yeah um actually i do you know what I drew on my notebooks? Armalite rifles? No, I take offense to that. I, I made up my own Mortal Kombat characters. Oh, I a hundred percent did that. Yeah.

So I was like, oh, what if, you know, Sub-Zero was made of metal or like, what if Scorpion? I don't know. Wouldn't he just be a refrigerator fuck you i'm not even proud of that one i'm just happy seeing your face get disappointed in me oh this show is already off the rails and i we were i thought we were going to do a different episode today so i have a very special drop that is being saved for a different episode that says RIP blank blank so just wait for that episode. Don't ruin it

they have to deal with that when the time comes now development of submarines over the years have like really hardly strayed from what they've always kind of looked like it's a metal tube with miserable people crammed inside. Of course my favorite of these is the CSS Hunley, the

Confederate submarine that never once killed a single Union man, but continued to murder every single crew that ever stepped inside of it. After that is probably the wild Japanese I-400, the last and most successful of the submarine aircraft carrier concept.

How does that work? Now, I use the term successful in the situation as a low bar um like they they were huge this is a problem it's like it has to be big enough to store a fucking airplane in so it was the largest non-nuclear armed submarine ever built but it was so badly designed it could hardly be controlled on the surface and it was so hard for pilots to find and reboard the submarine that it became common practice to ditch your plane into the sea or act

as a kamikaze rather than try to land back onto it I mean it's kind of like intentional design on the Japanese part but like this sounds like an idea that you'd have when you're 16 and like either like huffing paint through a sock or like smoking dirt weed with your friends like

dude what if submarines had planes in them and they could take off underwater yeah I mean there's a reason a lot of people played with this idea but the Japanese they really went for it which they should have done less of in

the 40s today we're not talking about these wonderfully for it, which they should have done less of in the 40s. Though today, we're not talking about these wonderfully stupid machines. We're talking about a French design, which is your first problem, that may as well have been designed by three different people at the same time, all of whom never once spoke to one another in the process. This is the French monstrosity known as the Surcoff. And, of course, the fate of it. For starters, there was another type of submarine that was very popular back in the day, specifically during World War I, the submarine cruiser.

These are one of those, we've talked about this before, an evolutionary dead end in the world of military design. And it was eventually abandoned. They were effectively what would happen if a submarine and a surface cruiser, that being a cruiser with turrets and things like that, fucked and had a really stupid baby.

They would be a submarine that could dive under the water, but be armed with a cruiser's turret and cannons. These were born by the German Empire during World War I to act as commerce raiders and were so successful at the time that pretty much every naval power in the world began toying with them in one way or another. However, after World War I, most nations dumped the idea of this cruiser submarine for a few different reasons. for a few different reasons.

They were expensive, and after blowing up Europe with the weight of a generation of young men's blood, most people were cutting the budgets of the military, not investing more into it. And technology for surface ships like regular cruisers, aircraft carriers, and not to mention technology

for just regular submarines, were getting much better, so you didn't need this weird Frankenstein thing in the ocean, because it's like one of those kinds of, like, the jack of all trades master of nothing, except being the jack of this trade meant you still sucked at both of them

Yeah, like, I can imagine the French well, like, we're glossing over the one problem that, like, this was designed by French people you know, the French people gave us you know, Brigitte Bardot they gave us people you know, the French people gave us Brigitte Bardot they gave us, you know, Kreps they gave us Serge Gainsbourg really cool stuff

but like, I can imagine them in the design stage, they're there with like how will we make this submarine it is a cylindrical shape that will go under the water let us get a baguette to model it out, we will hollow out the baguette and put little men inside.

It will look like a big baguette. We will have sticks of hammer bear and brie to symbolize the turrets. Nothing can go wrong. I would like to think that they came up with this idea because someone dumped their grocery, like their stereotypical grocery bag as they unicycled back from the supermarket.

And like a single baguette fell into a puddle. And he was like, mother of God, I have an idea. It's just a single guy smoking. What if we imagine the baguette and we put it in the sea and the sea is a woman. Is this not beautiful? No, I have to go consult my three mistresses and my wife about this. My mistress, she likes this idea. She says

I am a new guide board. It is a truly exceptional idea. Now that we've lost all of our French listeners. Now the one country who decided to ignore this dumping of the cruiser submarine idea was France who continued to develop submarines with a very specific goal

of making them commerce writers, just like the German empire had during world war one. I mean, like France has a big problem with giving stuff up, like, you know, institutional racism against Algerians, submarines.

They can't give up parts of their culture, Tom. Submarines, smoking, infidelity, and hating Algerians, all very French things. My grandfather has logged into the podcast. We say this as Niger and Mali are likely about to go to war over some French shit. There was an added bonus of a treaty loophole working in France's favor as they developed this thing. Now, everybody involved, most of the Western powers have signed the Washington Naval Treaty that most of these countries signed after World War I. It restricted the displacement of the guns and size of the ship that they happen to be building.

Virtually every kind of naval vessel other than submarines. So, unable to build massive cruisers like everybody wanted to, France decided nobody said we can't put a cruiser on top of a submarine. I love just massive

military infrastructure being built based around a fucking loophole. That's right right baby france got to work building a cartoonishly large submarine cruiser it was armed with a twin gun turret each of them being 203 millimeters which were the same they're the same guns a heavy cruiser would carry and they're gonna just put boop right on top of a submarine is this shit gonna be operated by fucking asterix and Obelisk? Like, what the fuck?

This is the most French shit ever. It's like, it doesn't matter. It'll work. Weirdly enough, it also carried a seaplane at the back of it because these guns were so fucking massive and without the stability of a cruiser, they would require a seaplane to help them aim. This is just like, only the french could build this shit like this is like we don't need to build this stuff anymore

and this is emblematic of you know a post-colonial country trying to figure out what the fuck do we do after we have raided half the world and our entire economy is based on implementing a fiat currency in fucking central africa so we have like all this they also control southeast asia still this is still like world war two has not happened yet but it's like there is like there is no need for france of all countries to build this oh it gets dumber um now they were worried that the seaplane wouldn't do such a good job so they originally came up with an idea for like a telescoping platform to come from the top of the sub for that would raise 50 feet in the air with a guy would be sitting on top of it to help. Again, this is a submarine on the surface armed with these heavy cruiser cannons

and then a guy effectively on a flagpole helping them guide it in. And the only thing that stopped them from actually implementing the giant telescoping guy pole was like, he's probably going to fall off. We probably shouldn't do that uh so they didn't they wanted to build like a napoleonic crow's nest on a fucking submarine yes um and remember this is a fucking submarine like it's of course also a cruiser uh but so it'd still carry torpedoes

right the torpedoes could not be fired while the sub was underwater i have so many questions none of which i feel i want answered like you know full well that like if they had that telescopic crow's nest some like you know i don't know private first class would be up there jerking it like most of the time i mean that goes without saying my my favorite part of the the possible giant guy on a pole design is with the cruisers cannons fired you just get like flung off of it by the recoil yeah like how how exactly were the guns aimed by the seaplane this is something that like they like they would like spot for it like uh they would tell tell them how to bring the cannons back on target. Oh, okay.

But we'll get into more as to why there's more problems at Handra than using a seaplane for aiming. I thought it was like, oh, they used the turning force of the plane to act like a rudder on it. Instead, they're playing battleship. Pretty much, yeah. It's more of a battleship situation. Now, construction of the Surkof began in 1927,

and it was commissioned in May of 1935. This was a long time for ship development back then, and the reason for that is it kept being extended because it went into kind of like a Pentagon Wars type of developmental hell. People kept adding things, taking them away, and arguing over why those things had been added or taken away, leading to them being put back and then going through the same cycle for years at a time.

Just sitting there submitting a document with my changes for the submarine, and just like one of the headings is a section sexual now when complete the circo which was named for a infamous french pirate which admittedly is the coolest thing about the submarine that's pretty cool was the largest submarine in the world it was 3404 tons 350 feet long and a range of 10 000 n nautical miles, and would be crewed by 120 men. You really don't want to try and build anything that starts with

the biggest blank in the world, because there is such a high chance you're fucked. Especially in the 20s. Now, after commissioning, the sub was for Sainte-Abreste, which was a French sub base with access to the Atlantic and things were

let's say they were revealed that everything was riddled with problems the ship was huge and its cannons made it top heavy as fuck so that meant when it got into rough seas it would just get the shit rocked out of it

like even in like the concept of rough seas it would just get the shit rocked out of it like even in like the concept of rough seas obviously like big swells whatever but even in like half of what a normal sailor would consider rough seas was enough to like paralyze the surcof it rolled and pitched so violently that it could only fire its guns, at least accurately, if they were timed perfectly to fire in between waves hitting the sub, which meant they had to post an additional guy to like on the surface of the sub when it was going to fire to watch out for waves. Like,

and now go fire now. What the fuck? Like, at what point do you just quit while you're ahead? And, if the seas were too rough, which pretty much means any kind of chop at all, they could not fire the cannons over the sides of the sub for fear that the sub would just start barrel rolling over and over and over again

like something out of a fucking acme cartoon it's like that video like so many people sent me this video because i have a brand and it's a dude like in a canoe holding a pint of guinness that like rolls the canoe completely over without like spilling much of the guinness it's like that but if the canoe rolls over the guinness gets spilled but instead of guinness spilling much of the Guinness. It's like that, but if the canoe rolls over, the Guinness gets spilled. But instead of Guinness spilling, 120 Frenchmen die. Now, it was hypothetically a fast ship.

It was powered by diesel engines. But the engines themselves constantly broke down, and it had this weird design flaw that would occasionally just flood the inside of the sub with unburnt diesel fumes. Oh, the turret, right? The cornerstone of the cruiser submarine.

It had a pretty big problem. It wasn't watertight, which is a problem when you're a submarine. So every time they submerged, it just sprayed water into the sub. So every time they submerged, it just sprayed water into the sub. This is very emblematic of the difference between Central European design and functional design in the Soviet Union. In that stuff in the Soviet Union, it was simple, kind of worked, but it worked in all conditions. I will say this is not a fair comparison make what you're talking about soviet submarines oh no i'm not talking about like soviet submarines you're we know we now go live to the bottom of the atlantic ocean for a comment but i i mean like you know

you think about this like things that have to be used at this scale need to be simplistic, functional, and, you know, resistant to failure. Well, I mean, also, like, this is just a fucking awful design. Like, there's no reason that this should have made it beyond, A, the design stage, and B, testing. testing. This just goes to prove my point that I've said pretty consistently is that humankind does not need to go that deep under the water. And they certainly don't need a turret

on top of it. Now, that's coming from me, a proponent of putting turrets on everything. Baby, turret. Pickup truck, turret. Stray dog, give it a turret. Submarines, no. No turrets.e draws the line of turning everything into a gundam or a technical at submarine yes yes the french should have built a gundam in 1927 that's my that's my take a french gundam is a terrible idea oh i have some bad news for you

it exists what there's a french gundam so let me introduce you to my personal favorite gundam series because of how stupid it is g gundam now g gundam quite possibly the most racist gundam series ever created what does the g stand for gendarmerie. It was like this Gundam International Tournament where every country would be represented by a Gundam, which included Mexico Gundam, which wore a sombrero, I swear to God, and Gundam Rose,

which was France. Yeah. I am currently typing in Mexican Gundam. There was Neo-Japan, Neo-America, Neo-Russia, Neo-France, um yeah i am currently typing in mexican gundam there was neo japan neo america neo russia neo france neo everything um joe do you know what the actual name of the mexican gundam is no gf 13 049 nm tequila Gundam. See, France got off easy on this, so they just called it Gundam Rose, which is bullshit.

It's piloted by Georges Dessand, and he has quite possibly the most anime hair ever created. I mean, to be fair, the Gundam kinda has that Napoleon drip. I'm not gonna lie, it's kinda cool. It would be cooler if the Gundam had his hand fused to the inside of a petticoat the entire time so you only had to fight one-handed but yeah so there was in

fact a french gundam now uh also the surcof took several minutes longer to actually surface than a normal submarine which is a problem because remember it could only use any of its weapons while it surfaced it also lacks any kind of radar whatsoever um so it could be surfacing directly into a shit storm and had no idea so france falls in 1940 spoiler alert in case nobody knew how world war ii started now the circov took no part in the battle of fr. At the time, many elements of the French military were pretty much split down the middle. Some ran and stayed with the Allied side of the war effort, forming the core of the Free French Forces. Others did not. Some said, well, it looks like we have a way out of this war and just went home.

Others turned to the Nazi puppet government of France, known as vichy france vichy generals doing donuts outside of the french riviera in the sarcophagus just roll over and catch on fire ripping shitties if you tried to rip shitties of the sarcophagus it would be a suicidal effort it cannot turn that sharply that actually could have been a decent defense strategy of the southern coast of France. You're just like, the turning circle is

so wide that it's just like swinging a fly swatter around in a circle. They'll never see it coming. Now, this is further complicated by the French former English allies really not wanting the new Vichy France military to have a navy and Vichy France desperately

trying to cling on to what navy it previously had. The Surcoff found itself directly in the middle of all of this because it was at port in England at Davenport. Is it Davenport or Davenport? I don't know. Davenport. I'm going to go Davenport. I'm going to go to Daven. When France

surrendered. However, preparations had already been done inside the sub to try to stop any British attempt to steal it. Its torpedoes had been disarmed, and all of its hatches, minus one, were locked. At the one unlocked hatch, the submarine's captain, Paul Martin, had posted two armed guards. Martin's orders were not to start shooting should the British come over to the ship or whatever, but rather the second they saw the Brits coming, he was to sink the sub. The watchmen would be like, the British are coming, the British are coming,

and then they would scupper the sub in the channel. Now, it's because they had standing orders to not surrender their sub. It wasn't because they were necessarily loyal to the Vichy French. It's kind of foggy here. It seems that loyalty within the sub were cut down the middle.

Not so much that they were fascists or anything, but because it was kind of their government, so they weren't really sure which government to listen to. But on July 3rd, 1940, Martin got orders from the Vichy French government to sink the sub. And as Martin prepared the men for this duty, it turned out the British had plans of their own. That same day, they enacted their plan to seize all the

French ships from British ports, with each of them suddenly facing a boarding party of armed Marines. Though weirdly, only some of them actually carried guns, mainly their officers who had pistols. Because the British figured that the regular French sailor harbored no loyalties to the Vichy government and expected little, if any, resistance. So the majority of the boarding parties were armed with wooden clubs. I love when we encounter soldiers armed with clubs. But before we go ahead, I want to bring it back to Gundam because I found two very interesting things. One, there is a class of Gundam called the Irish Class Gundam.

I withhold comment. That appears in the mobile suit Zeta Gundam. But even better, there is a main protagonist in one of the Gundam series called Char Aznable, who was inspired by Armenian-ian french singer and songwriter charles and as never so you know irish and armenians officially in the gundam universe charles as the war is uh legitimately one of the most famous french singers of all time uh they they recently put him in the french pantheon yeah there you go you know we're bringing it back yeah so you know I wonder if

there is a Gundam inspired by the Sarkoth it is I don't want to spoil the ending yet oh god does it turn into a Gundam it's a transformer yay so 60 mostly clubbed armed

marines and fellow submariners from the british ship the the thames approached the surcof telling the french to surrender and they barged their way on board only one minute after martin had ordered the sub to be destroyed so it's probably the case that the the british had intercepted the orders to do so. The British ordered all the French into one room, and most of them listened. Though, some resisted in the same way as an upset toddler, by laying on the ground and refusing to move and going limp, forcing the British to have to drag them along. The French crew was so compliant

that when one British officer dropped his pistol on the ground, a French sailor helpfully bent down, picked it back up, and handed it to him. Polite. Though eventually, a small faction of the crew decided that they needed to keep destroying the sub, as those were their last standing orders. And one of them

lunged for the electrical panel, only to have a British marine slam him in the face with a club and told to cut it out. He was trying to do a Frank Grimes on it. That Grimesy always going for the electrical panel. This was enough

for the Brits to order all the French officers off the sub to make sure they didn't try to order anyone else to do something stupid. All but one of them listened and the lone officer scampered off into his room and refused to leave. Then a British officer ordered one of them listened, and the lone officer scampered off into his room and refused to leave. Then, a British officer ordered one of his men to shoot a French officer, though this was almost certainly a bluff, because he gave the order in French.

He was trying to scare them and be like, we mean business! And the British soldier was soldiers like you fucking what mate speak fucking english you think i'm gonna fucking understand that baguette mantra oh hey matt you have a license for that submarine um now the problem is the french officers again so so compliant and the british thought there's not going to be any problems they hadn't even been disarmed so they're all still carrying pistols on their hips and now they're like oh god they're going to kill us so one of the french officers worried they are all about to be executed drew his own sidearm and shot the commanding british marine in the neck he starts doing like

john woo max pain moves he's doing bullet time you know he's like john wick he's like sliding along the ground shooting people the problem is when the marines hit the french dog first now this led to a confused panicked firefight in a single cramped room of the sub with all of the officers only a few inches from one another as they panicked to blast their pistols in the air at point-blank range. Like, firing a gun inside a submarine does not seem like a good idea. I would like to think it's just like an Acme cartoon. It just bounces around in circles, like, going through their hats. Now, the French officers won their son gun battle three brits

were killed and one frenchman the sub-second command emile crescent who uh like had nothing to do with the shooting other than he happened to be in the room like it seems like only two of the frenchmen opened fire the the original, and the crew's doctor. Now, Emile Crescent told the man who started the shooting, quote, I believe you are very wrong to have done that. You think he's right to fucking shoot inside a submarine? You fucking cunt. Thank you very much, Mansour Emile, for that cutting wit.

Why the fuck are you shooting inside a fucking pub and queen now weirdly like the the officers controlled like one room of the sub the frenchman and like the brits controlled the rest of it so they had this like weird mexican standoff for a few minutes and that's when the french realized how badly they had fucked up. The French officers surrendered to the rest of the boring party. And somewhat surprisingly, the Brits took this rather well. The man who started the shooting was released back to France quickly afterwards. Yep.

And now the Surkhof was solidly in the control of the British. The British originally just wanted to trash the goddamn thing. A study that they conducted on the sub showed it to be wildly unsafe and completely useless in modern combat operations, probably due to the fact that it was a submarine that could barely submerge and a cruiser that could barely fire its guns. However, Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French Movement, demanded the sub remain in use in the Free French forces as it was a symbol of, quote, French greatness, as it was the largest sub in the world. Oh, fuck

off, Charles de Gaulle. Fucking sick of you and your shit airport. Apparently, French greatness means something very flashy but entirely useless. I mean, that's accurate. Yeah. However, the Brits were facing a manpower shortage because they were like, okay, we have to keep the Gaul happy, right?

So like, we'll keep the sub in the service. But they were facing a manpower shortage. After they seized the sub, they allowed anybody who did not want to remain serving in the Navy to just go back to France. did not want to remain serving in the Navy to just go back to France. And about most of the crew said like, yeah, the Navy fucking sucks. I'm gonna go

back home. It's not like they were like, no, we want to go serve the Vichy French. They're like, we'd rather not serve anybody, please. Thank you. Bye. They're gonna go back and start French Grown style. Now this also include the commander Martin. So the sub found itself without a commander

and were over 100 men short. So they ordered the new commander Pierre Ortoli to staff the sub with other members of the Free French Navy who are already in England. Small problem neither Ortoli nor virtually any of the

men recruited to join the crew of the surcof were submariners they had no training on subs what they certainly did not have training on the surcof which was a nightmare of a sub to try to function right yeah it's like you know learning to drive you know a car that's like an automatic it has you know a nice zero to 60 comfortable seats and then like trying to drive a suzuki jimny with like three wheels and no gear stick and if you brake incorrectly it catches on fire and explodes yeah so like a suzuki jimny in november of 1940 this captain and his new crew went to train for the first time off the coast of Scotland. It turned out sitting around for eight months was really bad for the submarine,

and on-the-job training with a whole bunch of random sailors on a sub that virtually nobody knew how to use, let alone a complicated one like the Surcof, was not a good policy to have. After less than two weeks, the Royal Navy ordered them to go back to port for fear they'd accidentally kill themselves because they kept running into other ships constantly. This only reinforced what Royal Navy Vice Admiral Max Horton thought. This thing is useless and we shouldn't be using it. But he was given orders by Churchill to make de Gaulle happy and to find a job for this goddamn submarine. So, the sub was sent to Canada to escort supply convoys.

Though the sub required multiple repairs, both because the crew had no idea how to maintain it, and also because even the best case scenario, the sub was terribly unreliable and a hard-to-use pile of garbage. Then, Ortoli broke the barrier between incompetence and being an asshole by refusing to allow his crew to leave the sub while at port for any reason. For months, they remained on what had effectively become a floating prison. They'd have to live and

sleep on board for fear that they would just disappear. Imagine how much that thing fucking stank. I mean, I feel like at a a base level all submarines smell like a like a locker room in high school yeah like i know there is a couple of submariners who listen to this show you know both current and former let us know what they smell like or like is it balls they just smell like balls? No, I would say less balls, more feet. Because you have to wear, like, you know, boots.

So, like, you have dudes like, okay, gonna, like, clock out, go lie in my bunk and, like, try and get, like, an hour's sleep while no one looks at me masturbating. And they're all hot bunking, so they're sharing the same bunks. Yeah, so the bunks smell... It's in the metal. Like, you know, at some point, feet overwhelm, like the smell of sweaty feet

overwhelm everything. That is true. Yeah. It probably just smells like an untreated foot went in there and exploded. Yeah, like think about when you, you know, were deployed.

Hot sweaty tent, aside from like the smell of taint, did it just smell like feet? Mostly, yeah. There you go. Feet rule everything around me. Oh, God. It's like that song Cake, but only feet. Feet rule everything around me. Toes get the money.

Dollar dollar bills, y'all. I hate it. I'm leaving not screaming. My neighbors are going to think of being murdered, and they're going to be like, finally. Now, being trapped on the sub, despite being horrifically depressing and demoralizing for the crew,

began a rumor within the Royal Navy. The crew of the Surkaf were all free death row prisoners. Or, the more common rumor was that the men all harbored Vichy loyalties and were so dangerous they shouldn't be allowed on land or they'd desert and turn to spies.

Sounds like Wagner Submarine. Kind of. dangerous they shouldn't be allowed on land or they'd desert and turn to spies so it's like wagner submarine kind of uh and like this rumor became so pervasive that it was it it penetrated being a rumor to just being a commonly held belief within the entire royal navy and to be fair the circof would work overtime trying to convince everybody this was true. Everyone in the Royal Navy quickly grew to hate the sub for real or imaginary reasons. So much so that during its first convoy escort

mission, it was ordered by the rest of the convoy to stay far away from the rest of them because they were just worried about it either being so incompetent it might run into them or closet Nazis and might shoot at them. And eventually they were just worried about it either being so incompetent it might run into them or closet Nazis and might shoot at them. And eventually they were ordered to just fuck off back to the Devonport Naval Yard.

They hadn't done anything wrong actually this time. But of course as soon as the sub got to the docks they were attacked for the first time by a German aircraft. One man was killed and another six were wounded. And despite this, Ortoli still refused to allow any of them to leave the sub, again, for any reason.

If they needed medical treatment, the doctor on board the sub had to give it to them. Stuff like that. How has there not been a movie made about this? I don't know. Because it's not like black and white and told from the perspective of a pigeon or something i don't understand french cinema um it's it's no battleship potemkin yeah say that

now the men were not only pissed but incredibly depressed to the point of like being catatonic at some points horton was still being pressed by churchill to find a job for this stupid fucking sub. And so Horton decided, you know what? Go to Bermuda and escort convoys there. This turned out to be a very bad idea. The sub immediately had three electrical fires, which the crew were barely able to contain because they didn't know how. Right after that, there was a fire in the gear room that nearly caused the entire sub to be lost.

Then at one point, Captain Ortoli ordered the sub to dive, ignoring the fact he had completely forgotten to close all of the hatches of the sub, and mind you, there were warning lights and stuff for this. He ignored those warning lights, which caused seawater to rush into

the engine compartment now salt water mixing with a diesel engine creates chlorine gas which quickly floods the inside of the sub causing the men to have to resurface the submarine and then crawl out onto the surface of like the top of the sub to air it out because it just turned into a tube of poison. This somehow didn't kill anybody, but they were able to make it back from Bermuda by the end of July.

And at this point, the sub is mostly ruined. At this stage, it just seems like, you know when people try and burn their house down for the insurance money, except they're throwing Molotov cocktails through the front window, and it's just going straight through the sitting room, through the kitchen, out the kitchen window, and landing in the backyard.

Like, they're just completely failing at destroying this thing. This is like trying to burn down your house for insurance money while you're still inside. You're sitting down on the toilet, and you're lighting a match, just, like, throwing it at the pool of petrol on the ground. Now, the sub was, like I said, it was completely ruined at this point. Either from the crew living in it around the clock, mold had grown on the inside of it.

Well, look, if the chlorine gas doesn't kill you, the black mold is going to do it. I'm more shocked the chlorine gas didn't take the mold out. You know? Yeah, actually. You're right right maybe it just made it stronger mutated mold the mold has veins now it's like that one episode of cowboy bebop yes yeah well it's been left in the freezer too long the sentient mold is roaming the submarine but uh you know the u.s who's not yet in the war said they would take the sub in and do a complete overhaul free of charge uh to the french and british governments the free french

government i should say as soon as the americans took the sub in for repairs they learned that the whole thing had been such a rickety shit box held together with mostly duct tape and depressed frenchmen that it would cost more to fix than its entire original construction. Some cost fallacy. The US did it. It took three months. Ortoli was fired and replaced with a new captain named Blazon.

And it turned out he was actually worse at his job than Ortoli was. Imagine being the engineers working on those repairs. Like, it just like, you'd feel like you know when you i'd say you definitely felt it in the army and i felt it in jobs that i've done where you're like given something to do that you know is bullshit and not gonna work and it's just like

a complete you know um exercise in futility and it's like this thing is gonna break apart as soon as it touches water again why am I welding panels on it there's a like a US subcontractor that at the dock yards is like wrenching out a burnt chlorine gas mold infested piece at the end just like they have a whole goddamn mine crammed up

in here nothing but cigarette butts and baguettes holding this thing together fucking Frank Sabaka is going on like there's fucking mold throughout it you know why are we putting a bag in the water now Blazon was a bit of an idiot now okay some of this

is not his fault after the subs repairs were completed this sub was sent to Canada and on its way the Surcof fired her guns for the first time in anger small problem though it shouldn't have and on its way, the Surkov fired her guns for the first time in anger. Small problem, though. It shouldn't have.

Blazon had ordered the sub to open fire on a Norwegian oil tanker. Norway, at the time, was neutral. The ship, having no idea what was going on, radioed back that they were under attack by a ship carrying a French flag. Thankfully for the Norwegian ship, however, the Sarkov's deck guns were so wildly inaccurate, they couldn't actually hit anything, even if they wanted to. Now, there was a process,

because people did attack neutral ships frequently during World War II, but there was a process for identifying and warding those neutral ships before you did so. Blazon had no idea about any of those, nor had anybody figured it was important to tell him about those before putting him in command. Now, remember... The Sarkov at this stage has the same shooting accuracy as John Hinckley. It's like a floating stormtrooper from Star Wars. Well, look, at least

John Hinkley hit Ronald Reagan. Yeah, the Surcoff is never going to hit anything. It's 0-1 with John Hinkley. The Surcoff is 0-1 in life. Now, remember, people in the Royal Navy already thought the sub was full of secret Nazis.

Now that it was shooting at neutral ships in Canadian waters while flying a French flag, people only became more suspicious. This might be the first time, and only time, the defense of, I'm not a Nazi, I just suck at my job, would have worked splendidly. I just like the music. I like the iconography. That's why I'm wearing this full SS uniform. You have to separate the art from the artist, even if the art itself sucks. Then the Free French Navy invaded some islands

off the coast of Canada. Now, they shouldn't have done this either. The two islands, Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, were at the mouth of the Saint-Laurents River. They were French territories. However, with the fall of France and the rise of the St. Lawrence River. They were French territories. However, with the fall of France and the rise of the Vichy puppet government, these territories would swear allegiance to either the Free French or the Vichy governments. All the French colonies did this. These two islands had chosen the Vichy side. Now, the Canadian government originally wanted

to invade the islands as well because they were just so goddamn close to Canada. However, they eventually decided against it because they were also very close to the United States, and Canadian government was worried about pissing off the Americans who were not in the war. The US had previously objected to any military operation to retake the islands because it would have brought the war right to the doorstep. So the Canadians were like, they're not really hurting anything you know just leave them so a free french force made up the surcof and three other ships left halifax telling the royal navy that they were simply going on a training mission they then landed 230 men on the islands and took them over in 20 minutes i mean they've got a better uh uh landing record

than you know the mar Marines that took Grenada. I mean, if you're counting helicopters, that's true. This infuriated everyone from the United States to Canada to the British Empire. British Admiral Sir Charles Kennedy Purvis, British name

alert, sent Horn a top-secret message stating that the Surcoff is, quote, of no operational value and is little short of a menace. Furthermore, British intelligence insisted that at least half of the crew were Nazis because nothing else could explain everything that they have done so far. The only person in the Allied forces who seemed to not believe this was Charles de Gaulle, who continued to insist on the usage of the ship to further the French cause and free French prestige. This is just like pure bath salts behavior.

I am calling for a double blind study of what happens to a submarine crew on bath salts. Just load them up full of PCP, lock the hatches, and let them sit underwater for a double-blind study of what happens to a submarine crew on bath salts. Just load them up full of PCP, lock the hatches, and let them sit underwater for a little while. You know what? It'll probably go better than it did on this one. It couldn't do much worse. So the Brits sighed and said, fuck it, we'll send you to Tahiti

to protect Tahiti from any possible Japanese invasion. They thought that, okay, maybe the crew really are half Nazis. At least they wouldn't have to fight the Germans anymore. So maybe they would follow orders for once. The ship departed Bermuda and arrived to Tahiti on February 12th, 1942. Though the damn thing had broken again and only when the submarine's engines and propellers

were working, forcing it to go the whole way on the surface at a snail's pace. And then it vanished without a word. It became a Gundam. It transformed into the Gundam Rose. It had no distress message, no warnings, nothing. People immediately assumed it turned traitor, but in reality, something probably much dumber happened. The prevailing idea is that the Surcoff simply ran into a U.S. freighter and sank.

So the U.S. Thompson Lakes, on the night of February 18th, 1942, reported they had run into something partially submerged and were greeted by an explosion. into something partially submerged and were greeted by an explosion. The freighter was fine, and according to some people aboard the ship, they heard cries for help in the night, which the crew ignored, assuming they were German, which is pretty fucked up,

but the crews acknowledged that these cries were a mixture of French and English, which they still ignored. Or maybe none of this happened at all. The other theory is, sick of the sub shit, the British and the Americans sink the fucking thing on purpose, attaching an explosive to the

hall while it was at port and setting an untimed fuse. In a letter from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to the Director of Naval Intelligence in Washington from March 12th, 1942, said that according to a quote, highly confidential source, the Surkov had been sunk off the island of Martinique

on March 3rd via a time bomb. Or maybe none of that happened either. Oh! Another theory is that the sub was caught working right alongside a German U-boat and was blown up by an American plane, or another sub, or even, my personal favorite, a blimp. Yay! Weaponize, we need to bring back blimps.

Fuck Hindenburg. That was so long ago. And, of course, there's a theory that it was taken by the Bermuda Triangle. I was literally about to say that. Like, could by the Bermuda Triangle. I was literally about to say that. Could have been Bermuda Triangle, could be aliens, you know, who knows. Now, the only theory that has a little bit of evidence is

the logbooks for the 6th US Heavy Bomber Group operating out of Panama. They said they bombed a massive sub on the morning of February 19th, which would have been the day after the freighter had possibly run into it. Though that does beg the question is why would they have bombed it in the first place? But also, according to German records, none of their U-boats were in the area at the time. So who the fuck did they bomb? We have no idea.

The wreck has never been found. And because of that, We have no idea. The wreck has never been found, and because of that, we have no idea what happened. The closest that we've come to finding the wreck was in the fever dreams of one Jacques Cousteau, who claimed that he found the sub in 1967, but when asked for more details about it, he kind of just mumbled

and wandered off without telling anybody. Do not trust anything a Frenchman said in the 60s. And that is how this episode ends. We have no idea, but we all like to believe it turned into Gundam Rose and is living happily ever after dead in space.

I'm pretty sure Gundam Rose dies. I'm not looking into that. Don't fact check me. Oh God, like, you just gotta no country that produced Albert camus could produce you know a submarine or any sort of military artifact that embodied you know the myth of sisyphus you know well i mean the u.s is doing its best with the osprey yeah oh did you see that they flew ospreys over the aviva stadium in Ireland because fucking Notre Dame.

That was a threat. Yeah, Notre Dame and the US Navy had an American football game in Ireland. The Surcoff is an interesting monster because much like many other, like we've talked about a lot of dumb submarines on this show, but like the only thing that comes remotely close to like, how were they still using us is like the Hunley because the Hunley sank several different times, killing the entire crew. And they simply resurfaced it through the dead crew out and replace them.

I assume with the guys who had just thrown the dead crew out. And there was many times along the way they can be like guys maybe we shouldn't you know it's like an it's like a mid-80s ladder still being used as a taxi in bucharest that still goes like 140 kilometers an hour through the city fuck yeah bro but bro. But like, I just don't understand how it lasted. Charles de Gaulle, through sheer force of will, made sure these 120 men would die. If they are going to die, they are going to die in the most French way,

and that is lost at sea. I would like to, like, of all of these possible endings, I would, I honestly think the most likely outcome is that it was accidentally bombed by the United States, uh, by the,

by us bomber group, because like it's communication systems hardly ever worked. It had no radar. It probably had no way to actually talk to the bombers. It could have been lost because it got lost all the time. And like, they noted that they blew up a really big submarine and, and the Germans who,

you know, the, the German U-boat records are pretty meticulously kept. Like they know even today, you can look where German U-boats were at any particular day of the week for years. They had nothing in the area, but the old, there's only one very big sub in the area and it

was the stracove somehow it like it's the perfect ending because i don't actually believe that the sub was like vichy sympathizers really but for everyone to believe it and then it just be murdered on accident by a u.s bomber is the perfect ending to this story. Yeah. I mean, but also it could have just run into something and fucking died. Cause it did that a lot too. Yeah. It could have just, you know, sank.

Like it's also really interesting that they've never found it because that tells me that everybody hates this thing so much. Nobody cares to look for it. Yeah. Because think of it, this is like the prestige vessel of the free french forces put in that place by charles de gaulle not through any credit of its own crew or submarine and it's a pretty famous wreck like the disappearance of the surcof is pretty well

known in military history but like nah we're not gonna go look for it yeah fuck it alright just leave it so that is the French submarine the Surcove and Tom we do a thing on this podcast called questions from the Legion if you'd like to ask us a question from the Legion donate to the show ask us on Patreon or the Discord or attach it to a French submarine

and send it towards Tahiti and we will never get that question today's question is actually quite interesting i'm actually i've actually been asked this multiple times over the years i've never answered it what does your family think about your career choice oh they just don't understand it at all like does any member of your family listen to your shows like not a single one that's the sweet spot i recently a few months ago i had to go back to michigan for a funeral and i was unfortunately informed that several members of my family

listened to this podcast um my mom thankfully cannot listen to it because the i told her that yes i do a podcast for a living and she's like what's that? I'm like it's kinda like being on radio and she was like okay that is the extent of her knowledge yeah like god my mother would have no idea how to even access a podcast my dad listens to like some news podcasts and some sports ones

like they listen to the first couple of episodes of my own show but like no one listens to anything that i do which is great because i get to go home once every six months they ask oh how's work and i'm like yeah it's grand that's it i have found it's easier because like also like podcasts aren't super popular here either so like when i tell people like i do a podcast for a living they're like look at me like like a the fuck do you mean you do make a podcast for a living?

So I've simply resorted to telling people I'm a historian. It's easier. But like as for my family, like I know my mom doesn't listen to it. I'm sure my stepdad doesn't listen to it. I've been told my brother-in-law listens to it. So to Joe's brother-in-law. Yeah. But I don't think any of them really know i i think they

probably tell like not i don't go back to michigan very often but i feel like if somebody asks my mom what does your son do for a living i don't know if she knows how to answer that question my my family definitely don't because like I suppose it's like because I work so much in the background of like shows that like it's kind of hard like you could just say it's like oh yeah I like host a show about military history and people are like oh okay

mine is like way more nebulous so it's like yeah I like edit podcasts and I like design and distribute merch and I like do, design and distribute merch, and I, like, do all this, like, business stuff. So I just either tell people, if someone's over 40, I say,

I work in radio, brand. If they're, like, under 40, I was like, oh, yeah, I work in, like, audio content. And then it's just immediately understood, I don't want to talk to people about what I do for a living because it's boring you know well there's also that double-edged sword right we have one of those jobs well not you you're like you work in audio production that's like an actual job title that pretty much everybody's

remotely familiar with yeah um i have two jobs that when you tell someone that what they are like oh so you're unemployed like i'm a writer i'm an author i host a podcast they're like so you don't have a job like i get why people believe like i i don't know like the it's it's it's always kind of funny to me because it's like i i mean my books have done very well and the podcast is very well but i'm not going to argue with somebody like no it's really a job because like i'm not going to convince you of that i'm sorry that i'm not smelting iron in a factory. Just tell people you're a plumber. Then, you know, it's easier. Yeah, what do you do for a living?

I'm a coal miner, even though I live nowhere near a coal mine. There's no coal mines in Armenia. Tom, thank you for joining me today. It has been a cool two weeks off. It's nice to get back on the mic and, uh, plug your shows. Uh,

listen to beneath skin show about the history of everything told through the history of tattooing. It's, you know, a much more general history show. Kind of like how this show is about military history, but it's about all the dumb shit, military history,

uh, our shows, like all the interesting ways that tattooing intersects with history but also stuff that's going on currently we have an episode that will have come out by the time this episode comes out that talks about like evolutionary psychology in tattooing so like people are arguing that like oh did we evolve the practice of tattooing because it communicates some sort of like biological thing or are they just like cool pictures to put on your body so if something like that sounds interesting to you check out beneath

the skin on all platforms and checks out on instagram yeah if you did a show about dumb things in tattoo history it would just be called joe's left arm um but listen to his shows and this is the only show that I host. But you can also check out my books if you like military science fiction or one true story from military history that I wrote. If you like those topics, you can find them anywhere you find books. And if you like what we do here on the show, consider supporting us on Patreon. $5 gets you years worth of bonus content, three bonus episodes a month, access to the Hooligans of Kandar audiobook, which is still coming out, the ebook, which you can get access to our Discord, every episode we make early, and various other fun things that do not involve attaching a turret to a submarine. So in closing again, since we've had three closings now,

one of my favorite professional wrestlers ever recently died, Bray Wyatt, or his real name, Wyndham Rotunda. So in honor of him, if you see me again, run.