Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 339 - The Great Panjandrum

Episode Date: November 25, 2024

Check out the merch store: https://llbdmerch.com/ A British engineer attempts to create a weapon for breaching the Atlantic wall. He does not succeed. Sources: Brian Johnson. The Secret War. https://www.wired.com/2015/01/well-didnt-work-rolling-rocket-bomb-designed-kill-nazis-almost-killed-dog-instead/ https://www.military.com/video/operations-and-strategy/second-world-war/the-great-panjandrum-scares-a-dog/1123500263001 https://allthatsinteresting.com/panjandrum

Hey everybody, our merch store is restocked. So if you missed any of the live shows, specific merch, at wherever date that we went to and you couldn't make it to, it's all on our merch store, LLBDMerch.com. So get your orders in while they last. We only have certain sizes and certain numbers and whichever one it happens to be. So if you want something, get your order in. Once again, that is LLBDMerch.com and the link will also Led by Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe with me is Tom and Nate. I'm not going to punish anybody with my comedic stylings of a cold opening today. Fellas, how are you doing? I'm doing great. I'm enjoying a, I went to the gym this morning cause I'm working from

home and I very much enjoyed seeing the people doing what has now been termed the winter arc, which is people in the gym wearing hoodies and scaling all the time. Hmm. I mean, I live in the Netherlands, so like people in the gym are always wearing hoodies. I mean, it's very Midwest coded to me. Yeah. A lot of Europe is continental. Europe is, I would say also wearing hoodies and scowling is also like what you do in London in July. But I'm having a different morning. My daughter's a bit grumpy, a bit waking up screaming. She's almost 14 months, so this is normal. It's nothing bad. It's just baby toddler stuff. But because it's like half term, midway through the school term vacations here. That's when they've picked

to do a bunch of roadworks that's changing stuff up on the tram lines on the side of Geneva where I'm going to take her to childcare in the morning. And so there's a regional commuter train that's a stop right by where I drop her off. So that's pretty convenient. But one thing that I've noticed, especially when you're on the commuter trains, somewhat on the trams, but certainly the commuter trains. And I wanted to know, because in London, I just never saw this and I don't know if it's like this in the Netherlands, but something about the French speaking part of Switzerland and or this part of France and maybe France in general, they fucking love electric razor

scooters that you own and carry around with you and you fold and what, and people you'll be on the train, it'd be one thing, but you go to the bike storage part of the train, there ain't any bikes in there, but there's like 40 people with their fucking scooters. And I just have never, because in London you have the Lime scooters that you rent, but I feel like-

No, we don't have that here. The problem with the scooters in, well, two things that makes me laugh about. Number one, this is not a big city at all. I remember one time having to get from the outer suburbs, not that far from the French border, to get to downtown to do a viewing. And I was like, shit, are we going to be stuck in traffic? And my friend gave me a ride and it was 18 minutes. This is not a big city. But also, I think the thing that's funny is that there are bike lanes and there is kind of a bike sharing thing here hilariously called donkey Republic

Well, and I strongly disagree with that because as everybody knows who works for the show, this is not a Republic. It's a donk tatership Yet donk on this but the ocracy is from theocracy the religion of the dog our current scourge here The Netherlands is I don't know if anybody has these anywhere else in Europe But any Dutch listeners will know is the dreaded fat bike now for people who don't know a fat bike is An electric bicycle that has like fat wheels on it. Oh, yeah, generally speaking for my experience I also have an electric bicycle go its cap that like 20 kilometers an hour Generally speaking wherever anybody buys the fat bikes from, they'll also take that regulator off and make it so they don't necessarily have to even pedal. So they go ripping down the bike lanes. It's also a scourge, quote unquote, because they're

more popular with the younger crowd. So you got the like these goddamn youth synergy pile the top it but I will say they go fast as shit to the point they absolutely should not be on a bike lane and children should not be using them. In London like you see them a lot with like delivery drivers who are on bikes but every time there's a news report about someone people's phones getting stolen it's always those bikes. And similar, similar. Yeah. I would see those a lot with delivery drivers around East London. Like if we ordered delivery food, like a guy would pull up with a bike with tires that like basically look like they

would be better suited on a moped or dirt bike. But they're smooth tires typically, or at least, you know, they're not like, they're not like mega treaded tires the way that dirt bikes would be. I see those here, a part of where I go where you have to the pedestrian crossing crosses like a major greenway thoroughfare for bike lanes. And people are very good, way better than the UK here about not fucking around. They'll slow or they'll go around, but I've never worried I'm going to get hit. But I see people going pretty fast on electric bikes, but I haven't seen the fully whipping work thing.

Oh dude, those things go fast. I once saw a YouTube video where a British guy had basically built his own e-bike using some kind of electric motor that could go really fast. He took it out early in the morning on the road and it got up to 70 miles an hour and he was wearing a GoPro and he revs it and he's never revved it fully before and he does and he just goes, fucking hell. Just shredding down this country road. I also have one other story about this, about the incongruity of living in continental Europe, especially in Geneva where I think those people have a lot of associations of what it would

and would not be culturally. The other day, Sunday, it was actually really sunny and nice because it's been rainy here. And when you open the window of your fourth floor apartment in Geneva, in Junction, like in an area that's pretty popular, there's lots of restaurants and stuff, you have a stereotypical impression of the sort of European slash French cafe. What do you think you're going to hear? Well, I opened it up and some skaters had gone by wearing a backpack boombox playing bands that make her dance by Juicy J and specifically the little Wayne verse. So I opened the window

to get some air and I hear, what's your real name and not just strip a name. And I was just like, time is a flat circle. The world is small. But pardon me, wanted to be like, you're right. Those cheeks are clapping and she ain't using hands. To underline how the fat bike menace is becoming such a thing in the Netherlands, obviously I don't give a single fuck about it. I use a bicycle lane every single day. I don't see the issue. I guess there is an issue with children getting their hands on them and going way too fast. Yeah, it would be pretty dangerous I think. But there is serious talks at the government level about restrictions and monitoring and police are checking these things

now. Well, they're supposed to have governors on them. The electric motors are supposed to, because in Britain, I bought an electric bike and the Mala electric motor that it's got can go faster, but it's got a governor on it. It's like 26 kilometers an hour, or I want to say 15 or 16 miles an hour because that's the way... That's the limit in Britain. But yeah, like you definitely... I would say that living in New York 10 years ago, you saw people just shredding on electric bikes that like they must have either never had

governors to begin with or had them removed. But yeah, I mean, like at the end of the day, if someone's riding a bike fast as hell and collides with the pedestrian, like even if it's a regular bike, like a carbon fiber racing bike, you can absolutely kill the person. It happens a lot. Nobody here wears a helmet. The only people that wears a helmet here, you can tell are tourists. So yeah, there's...

And emergency rooms have said, yeah, most of their people coming in because of bicycle accidents are all riding fat bikes. I don't know how much of that, like statistically that's true. I do think a lot of it has to do with like a youth panic related situation. But like, yeah. But fellas, we have a podcast to do. And over the last couple of weeks, we've been doing a series. So in a series, a lot of people have died.

We've had to talk about pretty grim slavery related things. So I figured we would talk about something that is lighthearted. It's more of a relaxed episode, you know, and it's going to take us back to our favorite topic. No, not Chinese cults where people think that they're the brother of Jesus Christ and they fight demons with a sword, but British people. Oh no. Oh no.

Are we doing British people brackets good or British people brackets bad or British people brackets very bad? I'm going to go British people brackets World War 2 insanity. Cause nothing in this particular episode is inherently bad. We're talking about something called the Great Panjandrum. Have you ever heard of that before? Uh, no, but I'm excited to see is it like commandos covered in sheep shit level insanity or what's it gonna be? Okay, okay. We're entering solidly into that, you know, era of World War II where people were trying to develop weapons by throwing shit to the wall and seeing what sticks. And we've talked a lot about that on this show over the years.

War isn't good, long story short, but one thing it is good for is, unfortunately, technological advancement. A lot of the things that we use in everyday life jumped forward drastically in time and development due to human innovation during war, because nothing motivates humans to create something new and effective. Quite like turning one another into chunky marinara sauce. It's like how, I suppose the invention or design of the Jerry can was like this revolutionary thing of like how to store and transport fuel in a stable and safe, but also mass volumes, was perfected by the Nazis and then stolen by a British spy who then stole a can and

drove it to Egypt and then got it to America where they were like, holy shit, this is the best thing ever. I love that they had to do that for a fuel can. But like, what do you think about it? It's like, what is like during World War Two, one of the biggest problems like, oh, we have to fuel all this shit with this highly explosive material. We're not going to put it in barrels anymore. You do the same thing you do with the finest of wines. You put it in bags. I'm just imagining the Brits being like the extremely boarding school trauma officers being like, well, no, it's obviously more efficient to just have a bunch of privates jumping on

this bag to squeeze it out. That's, I mean, like, why would you do it any other way? Okay. Fair enough, Nate, but we both kind of did that, didn't we? At one point. You mean fuel blivets? Yeah. Fuel blivet is effectively a giant... Was it rubber or something? Yeah. Bag full of fuel. Blivet is an interesting word. I don't think anyone uses that word outside of the US Army. But a blivet is basically... It's a 500 gallon rubber container with attachment points on

it so it can be either tied down onto a truck or it can be hoisted by a helicopter. And so one of your standard sling load things that you learn, because it's one of the things that's going to be the most... You have water blivets and fuel blivets and they're marked in different colors. I can't remember what they are exactly. If you want to be really fun about it, they occasionally get mixed up and a whole bunch of soldiers get sick. Oh no. So basically the idea is you can tandem rig two of these together to be picked up by a

Chinook. I can't remember if that's too heavy for a UH-60 Blackhawk. I have no idea. I know they were just putting their combat outpost. That's the thing. One of the things in Afghanistan that I saw was, for example, they would basically take water blivets that... It wasn't that they were damaged or they were unusable, but they were reaching the end of their service life. And they would actually sling load them onto a structure that people had built out on a combat outpost onto the roof of it because you could then basically have that be a water blivet hooked up to a drainage thing and it could become a shower.

Yeah. We had one of those as well. Because gravity fed kind of thing. The reason why I brought it up is like the pumps would break on it all the time. We only had a fuel blivet. We didn't have a water blivet. We lived off of copious amounts of bottled water. And the pump for the fuel blivet would break constantly. So when we brought our vehicles back from Amounted Patrol, which wasn't that often, we had to refuel them. We would put the nozzle in, and then a whole bunch of us would have to stand on it and just kind of like mash our feet like, you know, old timey mashing grapes for wine and hoping fuel would come out.

Refueling your MRAP the way that you squeeze the last bit of toothpaste out of it too. And it took forever. I'm just looking at the like fuel blivets and this picture that I sent into our group chat. It just looks like, oh, it's the fuel testicles of the helicopter. Yeah. JP8 comes from the balls. Well, I mean, that answers my question as regards whether or not a UH 60 can lift two at a time. Those don't look full, but I could have already been drained. It's the post fuel clarity. Like your would you refuel? She keeps sucking? Exactly, there's a lot of things that we use that we're using right now that have their you know Genesis in conflict, you know plastics computers the concepts of nuclear power

Revolutionary new medical treatments Velcro shit like that. Oh is in a full SS uniform right now while he's recording It's fine. It was my grandfather's. Well, you know, radar, antibiotics. I mean antibiotics were invented beforehand, but the use of them for this sort of thing. Yeah, similar to things like, you know, the concepts of nuclear energy. People do it existed beforehand in theory, but if it wasn't for a war and endless amounts of government dollars, you know? I mean, Leonardo da Vinci hypothesized the helicopter, although it was more like a big turning screw in between his sort of like interstitial notes drawings

of just absolutely drooling hot twinks. Yeah, that's how he invented the helicopter. He's like, now look, when I spin my dick and balls. I was gonna say, when I sit on this and spin, I want to levitate. Bring me the twink bliver. Leonardo da Vinci invented meat spin. I mean, can you imagine if we could have like an error in which animated GIFs and Leonardo

da Vinci existed at the same time? Can you imagine the level of detail he would do to like the fine art animated GIF illustration of the guy from the Phillips CDI counterfeit Zelda game pointing to a button saying slur a word. Da Vinci painting scenes from BME Pain Olympics at the Sistine Chapel. But yeah, Da Vinci solely did that prototype of a helicopter sketch so he could invent the Twink blivers. What I'm saying is basically it took war to make the dream amongst the Twinks real that you could spin a thing so hard it flew. And in fairness, helicopters, helicopters as people

commonly say shouldn't exist because they're an affront to God. It's a monument to man's hubris. I love helicopters and I find them to be their absolute marvels. But yes, if something goes wrong like there's no glide path, there's just a downward spiral. There's a direct path to the ground where you die. It's the machine that kills you. Well, I don't know if you know this, but the first Medevac helicopter was, I think it was a Bell or something.

It was in Korea. Yeah. It was this skeleton looking thing. It was basically like, it looked like what we'd call in America an erector set, like the sort of like little frames things to build structures out of, exposed kind of almost like, looks like scaffolding to make the tail. And it had like a almost like spherical, a cockpit. And they just strap you onto the side? They strap you into like basically the fucking erector set frame, cold as shit in Korea, famously not a cold place.

And you'd fly like, yeah, it's, I can't remember what the model number was, but yeah, I mean, that's where the stuff comes from. So you're right. I do have to say one more thing about the Twink Blivet. Well, that kind of implies that you've just got a big bag full of container, a bag full of you threw them all in. And it's like like the famous like NCO insult was really go eat a bag of dicks. And it's like it does exist and it can be so you just have a whole bunch of soldiers like myself jump on of twinks in the Blivit, it's efficiency that the US army can get behind. But this implies that twinks are of such tactical importance that you need to load them up for

sling load and have them be delivered to a place where they couldn't come by normal passenger aircraft. Nate, if this show has taught me anything, it is the tactical importance of twinks to warfare. Like, normally it's sort of like, it's not written explicitly into the, is a sort of the logistics plan here. You definitely don't want to go into Baron von Stoibin's fucking tent after 8pm. He would have a twink blivet.

Yeah. If they had, if he could understand helicopters, he absolutely would be like sling load me in some twinks. You know, what's really funny is I don't think a lot of our listeners are probably so like straight up like guy driving to his engineering job that they probably don't know the origin of the word twink or what it actually means even in the year of our Lord 2024. Do you guys know the actual etymological origin of the word? I don't know.

I vaguely but go on. I don't know. I don't know why I'm agreeing to this, but please tell me. Twinkies, the snack, the hostess Twinkie. Does it have something to do with that? Why? Because it's golden brown and full of cream is one. You can feel a little gross on that one. And number two, because it has no fucking nutritional value.

Because the idea of being a Twink is you're a moron. You're a hot young gay dude and you're an idiot. And you're very skinny. So Twink and a Himbo is kind of the same. No, not really, because himbo doesn't necessarily imply that you're gay, whereas Twink, like the origin of the term invariably is young gay guy. Joe, I'm really happy

that in a lot of situations of the show, you guys act as a conduit for the audience when I'm explaining history, and now for the dumb straight audience, which I am a part of, I get to act as their conduit. What's also very- Joe, you are a himbo. Yeah, that way.

I'm not dumb. I'm not even particularly friendly. I think I still think that, OK, I am kind of a dumbass. You're you could be to your friends, to people that you know, you could be absolutely like there are moments when you are absolutely unbelievably brilliant. And there's also moments like when you're like, how do I plug in USB cable where you can kind of be a big friendly dumbass? And in those moments, I definitely think himbo might apply, but twink never would behind the scenes of the podcast when I could not get the printer to work.

Tom is the only person in here young enough to be a twink and Tom's non-fatically not as well because twink death is age 30. Gay death is also age 30. But I mean, that's a whole different social problem, but that's why the word could never be, I don't think used interchangeably. Like no one would look at you and say twink unless they're really old or they have like a six foot three Armenian bodybuilder fetish. But the himbo, I definitely think could implode. Everybody loves their twinks incredibly hairy and Jack. Cause see that's emphatically true is another thing too, is that I've made this point before,

like this is one of the things where it might be too spicy for the podcast, but like, there is a kind of like weird sort of fetishization in gay culture that you will encounter sometimes. And it's like, are you trying to replicate your fellow middle school boy classmates that you wanted to fuck when you were 14? Or the dads of your friends that you wanted to fuck when you were 14? And so it's either direction, either you're like almost androgynously young and skinny, or you're just like those AI generated muscle bad ass that you get for like diet programs and weightlifting programs where like the muscles on the back stop looking like muscles and look like a turtle shell instead.

Jack Santa Claus. A lot of people do. They absolutely do. Congrats on the sex, Jack Santa Claus, if you're listening. Well imagine like the horny fantasy implications of like an old a friendly old bed who just shows up in your house once a year It's like, you know But like exactly something like I want to fuck him Okay, okay to bring it back to military history

We need to move away from an animal base the categorization of gay men and move to ship based I want to I want to see a sloop. I want to see what's a frigate. Yeah. Like, Oh man, look at that. Okay. I guess cruiser already works. But then someone's listening to this broadcast on their way to their engineering job and they're like, God damn it. This needs to be relevant. Why are you talking about gay shit when we supposed to be talking about the British military? That's the same thing. Like we were saying a long, long time ago,

before we weaponized Twinks, for example, aircraft went from being a couple of planks of wood and some canvas to people strapping weapons on them to people strapping jet engines on them within a couple decades, all the while while planes were kind of more of a danger to people inside of them than outside of them until we really perfected the concept of carpet bombing. However, not every invention made during wartime is a revolution that changes human lives for the better or even worse. Instead, sometimes they're just moonshots that occasionally and literally blow up in someone's face.

One thing that I do find funny though is that the modern airplane jet, even before jet aircraft, if you look at the inside of a World War II propeller engine bomber aircraft or cargo aircraft, while a lot of stuff has massively advanced this thing, it's been 80 odd years, the fundamentals are still pretty similar to what we use nowadays. Whereas you go back two decades, three decades prior to this, World War I, a guy was basically hanging out of the Wright Brothers plane throwing a comical cartoon bomb at people. I love that it started dog fighting started because someone fired a rifle at someone else while they're flying by one another.

Yeah. It genuinely is like, it's one step above what if they combined Battle Royale with the Red Bull hang glider guys? Like the wingsuit guys were pulling guns and throwing like ACME bombs at each other. Now that would get me to watch that Red Bull shit. Wingsuit jousting, I'm sold. Dropping fat boy from the fucking Wright Brothers plane. Just a guy on the wings holding it up. A guy in a singlet with one strap

cause he has to be able to fucking lift it. I will say this about the wingsuit thing, because everyone was like, man, so amazing. It was in the early days of GoPro videos like this helmet cam. It's so cool. Look at this. And I watched the video and in the helmet cam footage of the amazing GoPro or, you know, Red Bull wingsuit flight, one of the wingsuit people just crashes dead. It's just like, as you're going by, like, yep, dead body. That guy died. And I'm just like, it's a wingsuit. It's like they die all the time.

I, yeah, I think I'll just play Pilot Wing 64 and not do this shit. Baby's accidental first internet snuff film. Now, that brings us to today's topic, the great Panjandrum, otherwise known as that time that Wile E. Coyote worked for the British during World War 2. The Panjandrum was a giant, rocket-powered, explosive wheel of death meant to punch through the Nazi Empire's Atlantic wall and open the way for tanks and infantry.

Instead, it didn't do either of those things. I looked up, like, I didn't look up what this thing was, I just up a picture of it and like this is a Dark Souls worn ass weapon. The way I thought of it was it's a weapon that the orcs would use in Warhammer 40k. However, before we get to that point we have to explain why exactly the British were so desperate that they thought that this might be worth a shot. Which brings us to the year 1943, an era that British listeners might know better as that time your country is desperate to return to for some reason. Yeah, like I think we need, aside from the weird return stuff, I think we need to expand our imagination for weaponry. I'm tired of

rectangular based weapons. We need to bring in like more shapes. Like I have invented the square bomb. It works for shit, but representation is important. Wouldn't it be a cube bomb? Like dropping a 2D bomb? 2D. It's 2D. It sticks to the ground. We're entering other dimensions of combat. We're going to be fighting time next in the fifth dimension. The British Ministry of Defense has cut the budget so much they've been reduced down to pixels. The history of defense has cut the budget so much they've been reduced down to pixels. AUSTERITY HAS AFFECTED OUR DIMENSIONAL COMBAT. By 1943, World War II is not exactly a fast-moving kinetic thing in the Western European front. We've talked a bit before about Germany's Atlantic Wall and how and why the Nazis had

thrown it up over the course of years, fearing an invasion from the allied forces across the English Channel. The wall was much stronger in some places rather than others, but it covered an area of various strength, sizes stretching from Norway to the Spanish border. Though I should point out that this wall was pretty fucking porous for a lot of very obvious practical reasons. Building a continental wide defensive system is pretty taxing on men and materiel, and Germany, it turns out, didn't have enough

of either of those things because they're very stupid and decided to pick a fight with the entire world. Not to mention there's only so many different spots that were actually good enough for a possible seaborne invasion. So things are made easier for them by simply focusing on these spots over others. These spots namely Normandy, Calais and the beaches in the Western Netherlands, which if you like many people come to the Netherlands beach area for tourism You can still see the bunkers there today. Famously, obviously you can in Normandy too, but Is that why loads of Germans love holidaying on that beach? Reminder. Yeah, they're like, I actually have like metal detectors out there trying to find their

grandfather's medals. I think I've told this joke before is I live in an apartment building that was built closely after World War Two and it replaced the building that the Germans destroyed to open up the area that they thought they might have to defend in the case of a seaborne landing and most of my neighbors are German. They found the one place in Europe that's probably more pro being naked all the time than Germany. And so that's why they're like, the weather's terrible, but I'm going to the beach there. I will be naked.

That is true. They're always naked on the beach and they're always going in the water, regardless of the weather, which is impressive because it is cold as fuck here sometimes. There's a whole thing in German culture called Freikörperkultur, which is a free body culture basically and it's just FKK or FKK. And it's just basically it's nudism, but it's like nudist resorts, nudism, lifestyle stuff. And like, yeah, it's not as popular as it used to be, but in like the 70s, 80s, 90s, it was a huge thing. Big tourist stuff, family tourism, alone tourism, old people tourism, relatively young single people tourism. It was like, no, we're just going to go to... It's not like an orgy. It's just, we're always naked. I walked my puppy down the beach the other day. And the other day, it was maybe 10 degrees

and raining. And I just stumbled upon six naked Germans in the water. I was like, you do whatever you want, but it's fucking cold. They don't have raccoons in Europe. But if you want to have like a concept of a raccoon infestation, it's just naked Germans showing up. It's like once one gets in, that's just all of them are going to be there. I can get to chase them out with a. I can tell because all their camper vans will appear in my parking lot. Yes, yes, yes.

They look they love they love love camper van so much. Taking the, uh, the gambit of quality of loads of naked German show up your eater in for really, really fun time. Or you're just not going to be able to park your car in your car park. I know which one those situations is for me. And I have a very, very fun time. No, I'm just kidding. It's a pain in the ass to try to park my car. Oh, my favorite part is when they're like trying to figure out how to pay for parking

because the parking things are only in Dutch. And my Dutch is good enough to navigate it. Also I don't have to pay for parking because I have a municipal pass. And they're like, is it really 50 euros for half the day? I was like, yeah. But if you go down the street, it's only 20 euros. Here's my secret. It's not 20 euros. It's also 50 euros. I just want you to go somewhere else. They're like this naked man on the beach. Looks like he rolled around on the floor of a barbershop. Excuse me.

Well, I mean, you think that the Germans would be at this point wise to the eternally wily Dutch person giving them incorrect information because that's basically like a truism throughout the history of the low. And all all my neighbors We've come to a silent agreement to all tell them that Because like we all have to pay for municipal parking to park in our own parking lot in our apartment building But our we don't have private spots, right? Like if there's no spots you still can't park even though you paid for it Mm-hmm. We have a low level like a low intensity conflict going on with German tourists

I just imagine the level of just like riven internally by like Competing impulses how painful it must be for Germans like on one hand I'm denying other Germans the right to be naked everywhere on the other hand It's my fucking parking spot a culture that perfected like in the 90s I can recall that they had like the trash police that would go through your trash to make sure that you weren't throwing away shit they need to have those here I'm sure I'm sure you do yeah but hand-having I'm talking about you yeah if any hand-having or listening I have nothing bad to say about you please don't give me a fine yeah I mean I swear

to God they called them mood put it's I when I was a kid literally trash police so you know maybe they're still called that gotta obey the bin star Z yeah the Atlantic wall consisted of concrete reinforced bunkers pillboxes trenches sea walls obstacles that would hypothetically wreak havoc on any invasion force had come near them not to mention the Germans had learned from the Japanese experience in the island hopping campaigns that a defense in depth is not a good way to go. The Germans believe that stopping any invader would be on the beach, not through successive layers of protection. Kill them on the beach because once they get a foothold in, you're fucked. And historically, that is pretty

much true. A few examples notwithstanding, hence the wall. And we've all seen a very important documentary about this, Saving Private Ryan. Yeah. Defense in depth. Good when you are Russia, not when you are Island or the Ottoman Empire against the British stopped up on the beach. I was really confused by like the extended scenes in Saving Private Ryan, where they took the bunkers and all the Germans were naked. Like, I was like, they were just on holiday. Like one of my favorite little Easter eggs in that film, which is not really an Easter egg anymore because it's 2024. Everybody's heard about it. But after they stormed the beach, there's a group of people that try to surrender and they're speaking to them and they just gun them down. And like, what did he say? He's like, look, I've lost for supper. They weren't speaking German. I believe they're speaking like Belarusian or Latvian or something.

And they're saying we were conscripted. Please don't shoot us. So that's not fun. Moving on. Of course, none of building this wall is a secret. The looming defenses of the Atlantic Wall were at the forefront of everyone as they planned for a possible invasion that would require them to tackle so-called Fortress Europe. Enter, and I'm honest with you, this is a solid name here,

in the realm of British names, the Directorate of Miscellaneous Weapons Development. Some Thomas Pynchon shit here, seriously. You're gonna be like, oh yeah, we found this guy who gets an erection every time a V2 rocket gets launched and we've made him the fucking like research psychic actually part of the plot of gravity's rainbow. There is this like idea, like, um, everybody knows all these little miscellaneous departments we've talked about. This one's name was actually miscellaneous. I like it.

They're not the guys you'd expect to make weapons for James Bond exactly, but they're like the guys who would make stuff for the dudes who went to say, I don't know, James Bond Community College. Well, I mean, think about it. It's 1943. So anybody over the age of 40, which in leadership positions at this time, you got to assume there's going to be a lot of these people, grew up in the era when they were children. The only way a human being could fly was a hot air balloon. And then now you've got the kind of aviation we're talking about during the Battle of Britain and stuff like that. So they have, I feel like that's a particular generation of people who are willing to suspend

disbelief. It's like, yeah, this may look like what if you got a hamster wheel, gave it spikes and sharp teeth and had it be rocket powered. That sounds insane. But to these guys, like, Hey, it might work. It might literally be the way we get to the moon. Dumber things we've done have worked. I mean, we accidentally invented a tank. Some shit grew in a vat overnight and now it cures disease. Now it doesn't burn when I pee anymore, Reginald. We've gotten reports out of Japan that they have created this spinning battle

hedgehog. How do we replicate it? Exactly. So that's how we finance the wars. We get the spinning Japanese spinning battle hedgehog and hit the Germans until gold rings come out. Nobody has talked about what Sonic was doing during World War II. I think we have a good note. We have a good idea of what Knuckles is doing. Dr. Eggman formerly worked in unit 731. Eggman dropped the honorific Vaughn from his name.

Dr. Vaughn Eggman. Dr. Robotnik actually just determined it was safer for him to use like the Russian language version of his name when actually it's like, you know, something extraordinarily Prussian, just extremely Werner von Braun shit. The name Dr. Robotnik tells me that he had to flee to the United States and worked on the Manhattan Project. Sonic was frozen under the ice like Captain America and had to be defrosted to defeat Dr. Von Robotnik. Knowing all the problems these walls and bunkers would give them, the British Navy told this directorate, put all your weird heads together and come up with a weapon that could be launched from a seaborne landing craft,

blow through a 10 foot high, seven foot thick seawall, and open a path for any invading force. Also, it kinda needs to be self-controlled because we can't put any teams on the ground. Figuring this out would fall onto the shoulders of this directorate's head engineer, Neville Schuett. Schuett was an interesting guy to be at the head of this table of dudes meant to develop

new weapons because he trained as a tail gunner in the early stages of World War I, but was refused a commission due to having, of all things, a stutter. Because that seems to be a real disability when you're trying to shoot down an enemy plane from your plane that looks like it was designed by a board kid on a trapper keeper. Extreme Sandhurst energy is like can't get commissioned because you've a stutter. Yeah. I mean, to be honest with you, I knew a guy who had a stutter in the army.

I believe that's still disqualifying in the US army with, without all the surge limitations and everything. He wound up eventually graduating from ranger school, but like a lot of the ranger school cadre went up getting fucking substantial EO complaints because they flat out just like more or less failed him because they were making fun of him for having a stutter. Yeah. That's what it mostly comes down to. I mean, communication is important and everything, but like a lot of disqualifying factors in the military, both back then and today are more old timey than anything else. Like obviously there's physical disabilities that you can have that immediately disqualify you for service, but like there's some things that are just kind of like, really? That still? I mean, like as someone who does have a mild speech impediment that I have done a lot of

work on to get rid of, which is weird because I talk for a living now. If you're a British soldier during World War II, it doesn't have the heft if someone is shouting at you, retract your foreskin. Also, like this is World War I. This guy's never going to have to talk on a radio. At most he's going to be writing a letter and attaching it to a fucking pigeon. Does the pigeon have a stutter? Why does it matter? Anyway, afterwards he got into aeronautical engineering, which remember the years we're talking about here, it's a field that existed mostly in vibes back then. And then he got working on, of all things, airships. He did this until World War II started, and then he volunteered for a commission in the

British Reserve Navy. This is a body that mostly just patrolled the immediate coasts of the UK. Sort of like Dad's Navy, basically. Kind of, and he assumed he'd be getting a desk job. This is due to his stutter, which previously disqualified him from a commission, as well as the fact he is not a trained naval engineer. He's not a trained naval anything. He described himself as, quote, nothing but an elderly yachtsman.

That's what I say when I'm getting a stop for running drugs from the Caribbean. I'm nothing but an elderly yachtsman. That's like Jimmy Jimmy Buffett's alibi. I mean, if it works. So, of course, that means the British Navy immediately put him in charge of mine sweepers and sub hunters off the coast of England, despite having no knowledge of boating outside of, again, piloting a small yacht.

He was terrified of ever having to give orders in combat because he had no idea what he's doing, nor did the Royal Navy bother to give him any additional training. Thankfully for him and I assume his crews, the Brits eventually asked him about his engineering background and he was lifted out of the possibility of having a direct combat command and then put in charge of the directorate. Um, Joe, I don't know if you have anything in the script about any of the other projects that the Department of Miscellaneous Weapons Development had. I didn't go too far into the rest of the directorate, but there's a lot of them. I just want to read you a very choice sentence that is very funny for us and our listeners. A scheme to camouflage bodies of water used as navigation markers by bombers was undertaken

by a group named the Kentucky Minstrels. Oh boy. It involved spreading coal dust from a ship ironically named HMS Purcell. The scheme failed due to the actions of the wind and tides but it did produce some confusion when the coal covered waters were mistaken for tarmac in the blackout. I love the idea they try to conquer the concept of the sea with racism. They're doing water based svartepeet. I mean I'm just thinking that we talked about this on the Boar War episode recently, but

like, you know, when you basically roll a snowball down a snowy hill and it gets so big, it fucks everything up. And then it costs all the animals to run around in circles and your enemies start shooting at the moon for some reason. Like when you spread so much coal dust, trying to put the ocean in blackface, and then people start trying to land plants on it. Like that's basically doing the snowball pandemonium thing on yourself. To hear me out, this is coming back to the Boer War series. The British, they saw the moon's reflection in the sea and they're terrified of the celestial moon Turk. And they had to carpet the sea with coal dust so his smiling face wouldn't reflect off of the channel waters

This was a thing like it's a reference to one of the episodes where someone was like they thought there was some Ruler or some leader was so deranged that he thought that like he could see a guy Yeah, it was the Anabaptist rebellion in the Munster Rebellion They thought that the moon was had a Turkish man's face on it for some reason the moon Turk I'm just remembered friends of the show Rory blanks cartoon about like the sort of man in the moon and Getting hit in the face of the rocket be like fuck you. Why would you do that to me? Guess what? You think you're looking at my face. It's actually my ass. It's sometimes my balls Maybe the moon Turk was just showing his goat seat the whole time. That's on stage during all like

protracted wars, everyone just either tries to curry the favour or anger Poseidon. And the Brits were like, what if Poseidon was Dutch? The Dutch government was in exile at this time. So, you know, who knows? Basically they wanted to disguise things by putting coal dust in the water. And then they also wanted to make what basically looks like an accessory that you would get in a role playing game. Basically like full on Castlevania Symphony of the Night level. Like your whip gets so advanced that it sends an exploding wheel. This is like what if Ted Kaczynski was given like a child's playset.

Now, shoot was told that the specific job of the weapon that they were coming up with would be to blow openings for advancing tanks. So he had to calculate how much explosives would I need to use to punch a hole big enough through these seawalls that we think they're this big, right? He came up with needing 1000 kilos of explosives directly into the beachhead. And such a large amount of explosives could obviously not be carried by hand. Any team carrying some kind of crew serve device on the beach would almost certainly be killed. Hence, he decided the need for this weapon would have to be self-guided.

And somehow he fell on this idea, like I said before, something that the orcs from Warhammer 40k would use. A giant rocket-powered suicide wheel bomb. This just feels like something that you have to shoot the red glowing center of in Contra. 100%. Yeah, this is something that the enemy sends at you and you have to shoot the red glowing center of in contra. A hundred percent. Yeah. This is something that the enemy sends at you and you have to like, you know, shoot the glowing red orb or duck under it somehow in a quick time event. I will say this because you said that, you know, it's okay in this episode, in the pre-show

discussion to go off on little tangents. I was just, before we move on, talking about insane plans that didn't come to fruition. Obviously the channel tunnel now exists, but it's a thing that has been hypothesized forever, you know, in European history. And I once saw an illustration of someone's idea of their concept of what would be the channel tunnel, but in like the 18th century, and it was basically, and they had drawn like an elevation, like an architectural elevation of what this concept would look like, basically like air shafts every such and such a distance, but it was basically a road and they would have horse carriages and they would have lantern, basically candelabra lanterns every

10 meters or 20 meters. And when you look at this elevation, it just looks like a guy in the 18th century conceived of Castlevania. It's so dead on looks like Castlevania. It's uncanny. I love using the channel tunnel and having do a quick platforming run to get there Exactly, if you don't get to Calais before the Sun goes down It says what a horrible night to have a curse and then demons just come around. They're called British people I'm like every 50 meters. There's just a block that if you hate just a full rotisserie chicken comes out Yeah, I forgot about that. I respect British cuisine. What is the channel tunnel but a miserable pile of secrets? So Schutt and his team welded together two 10-foot wheels that were joined in the middle

by a large cylinder. The wheels on either side of the cylinder would be powered by cordite rockets, using the cylinder in the middle to be the bomb carrying portion and these would fling themselves clear of the landing craft it would move so fast to be able to skip across water and then it would deliver the bomb right on target of course you can't really aim it so the idea was like you point the landing craft in the general vicinity and you let it fly kind of like if people remember the story of Nate and I talking about our time in military training where I dead

reckoned my way across a land navigation course. You just point it in the direction and let it fly. Here's the thing that's getting me though. So the idea is if this is going to be fired from a landing craft, but it's also going to carry a thousand kilos of explosives. So 2200 odd pounds of explosives. To me, the idea that you can get it going fast enough to skip a cross water when it's that heavy from a dead stop inside a boat. This seems like the kind of thing that you, by hook or by crook, you can find a way to fire from the air. It's like, I was just going

to shoot its own plane down, but it'll be worth it. I promise. Yeah. Like, because I just can't imagine you can accelerate this thing enough before it gets off the landing craft, unless the idea is that it's going to be fired from the landing craft once the landing craft has hit the beach, which at that point, it kind of obviates it skipping across water. It's going to be in a little bit of, I mean, I understand where you're coming from that this whole idea sounds very stupid and that's because it is. It's like, what if ACME got general dynamics funding? This is more or less contemporaneous with the Battle of Anzio where they did learn that if things are really heavy,

they sink in the water, namely guys with 90 pound rucksacks. Well, at the end of the day, if you do that, you know, when you send all these dudes ashore and you don't know that in fact, Min Singh, you have two things. One, they'll either defeat the Italians or you'll have less infantry. Either one's kind of a plus. Shots fired at infantry. Fuck you guys. The Allied invasion of Sicily, which is sort of like, you know, at the end of the day, we do need to capture this island, but we also really don't like paratroopers. So what if we just shoot down our own plane? God, you know, everybody says God loves paratroopers. I mean, evidence says otherwise, but like,

this is just like something that bit of backstory. Um, fireworks are like really popular in Ireland around Halloween. Like you'll just hear them being set off for like a week beforehand. As of the time of recording this weekend, I think you and Nate, Joe are going to have like veterans nightmare because it's like bonfires everywhere, fireworks going off like every 30 seconds in Belfast. Oh, I'm fine. It hasn't really bothered me. The biggest thing is to know that in advance because what does get me is if I'm not expecting it and like I'm wearing headphones because like typically

with explosions from fireworks, you hear a little bit of stuff before it goes off and you know what it is. But if you're walking down the street with noise canceling headphones and the shit just fucking explodes, that's maybe a little less good. I'll put it that way. Fireworks are technically illegal in the Republic of Ireland, but what happens is like loads of people go up North around Halloween and like buy them, but the other way you can get them. Funny story. We would do the same thing in Michigan. Fireworks that leave the

ground are illegal in Michigan, but legal in Ohio. So we would drive down to Ohio, buy them and drive them back. Same with Indiana. There's some things that are illegal in Indiana that are legal in Kentucky and so on. This is going to sound like parody, but there is a big competition in Ireland called the plowing match, which is loads of farmers come together and see who can play with the best field. But like there's loads of like market stalls and like there's like dog shows, stuff like that. But it's great to go to as a kid because you can just buy fireworks at it. So we would buy fireworks and just be like throwing them

at each other, buy roaming candles and like stand a hundred feet apart and just aim them at each other like we're dueling. See, that's a difference between me and you. I'm a field head. I'm plow-pilled. I love to see them at work. I would just say that it is very funny you'd bring up fireworks because when you were describing the propulsion mechanism of the great pangandrum, to me, I was like, this sounds like me and my friends age 13 13, piling bottle rockets on top of each other to create the thing that will become the opening paragraph of the story entitled, How I Lost My Eye.

This is kind of similar to something my friends and I would do where we would strap a bunch of bottle rockets to action figures to see if we get them to take flight. Though to shoot, this whole thing made obvious sense. They would be hitting the target. The Navy told them to and putting nobody in harm's way while they did it. In theory, this is perfect. Now they would just have to test this thing to see if this perfect idea was practical. And this is where nothing works. Rockets and rocket science in 1943 was, let's say, in its early

stages of life and is earlier still when it came to Using them in a guided weapon system. So of course To make up for the lack of quality rockets shoot decided quantity has a quality all of its own The Panjandrum would have 70 fucking rockets on it split up on either Side and remember because this is a two-sided thing they would all need to fire at exactly the same time to propel the wheel forward and in one direction simultaneously but that's okay that's that's very very hard but that is what testing is for and to test said rocket

powered death wheel, they went out to Devon Beach and loaded it up in a landing craft to set it off. But small side note here, the town that they used to fire it off at was called Westward Ho. And that wasn't me just being excited about the name. The town's legal name includes an exclamation point

at the end. And I had to look into this more because it seemed very stupid to me. I mean, I'm just really glad that they didn't decide to go a little north across the water and back to land into Wales because you'd then be trying to pronounce those town names. It's really easy to pronounce Welsh. You just have to slice your own throat open first and then you just gurgle. I mean, I'm just laughing too because it's like we thought we were in the future when they invented the the SV bid, but these guys have the the fucking sip with the the sea was seaborne hamster wheel IED. Exactly. I had to go further because I needed

to know more about this weird town name. And it turns out they chose them Westward Ho from a book published in the 1800s set in a nearby town, not that town, and they thought giving it that name would be good for tourism. And because I'm stupid, I had to go further. There's only one other town in the world that has an exclamation point in its legal name, Saint Louis du Ha Ha in Quebec. Though there's two exclamation points, one after each ha, which means once again, the British have lost the arms race. I literally can't put an apostrophe in my name, filling out online forms.

And these cons have exclamation points. Imagine trying to order off like Amazon or something like, we cannot accept this. No illegal characters. You have to memorize the like Unicode substitutions. It's like fucking percent sign five, seven Z for each one. I'm also just thinking about this too, because Westward Ho named that's basically remember when we talked about this in draft riots about like random guys who had like, like guy named like Fernando would the Senator whose mom just liked to book a lot. And that's maybe like imagining having a town called like Khaleesi,

Ohio or something like that. All of the kids like imagining having a town called like Khaleesi, Ohio or something like that. Or all of the kids running around these days with the name Khaleesi. But I mean, but also a promotional thing. But then I was like, yeah, Game of Thrones, Iowa. But then I remember- That happened. I used to live in New Mexico and there is a- Truth or Consequences. Truth or Consequences. Yeah. Because there's a town named after the 50s game show, Truth

or Consequences. And on the weather map, it'll be T or C, but yeah, a hundred percent truth or consequences. New Mexico is a real place. Now remember before my brain started bleeding around dumb town names and shit, they were going to test out the Panjandrum. They're developing a weapon during world war two, which of course means it's supposed to be a secret. You don't want the Nazis sniffing around, figuring out what you're cooking up to throw out their wall. They didn't want to fire it off and shiver me timbers dorsal. So they went to Westward Ho, Devon.

We can't let the Nazis find out about the murder hedgehog. They transport the panjandrum there in the middle of the night to try to keep secrecy so nobody can see them do it. But the problem is, Westward Ho was, I'm going to keep doing it, was a tourism spot. I was just imagining trying to get a 1940s British person to conceive of Sonic the hedgehog. I'd be like, imagine a really fast head. Draw me a picture of a really fast hedgehog that acquires a ton of gold rings and they produce the most anti-semitic thing you've ever seen.

Like the guys are just setting up to test this and it's just like British pathos. There's like our boys in the war effort are on the beach They're testing a new weapon and it's just like the fat ass geezer there with like Polly liquor on his chest Yeah, it's a wheel that kills you boys Okay fun fact that video does exist you can watch it on YouTube Oh fuck off Westward ho is a tourism spot the whole tactic of a secret Westward Ho is a tourism spot. The whole tactic of a secret testing doesn't work. If it- that would be like I'm gonna test the world's newest drone in Waikiki on a Tuesday. Everybody is there and once they see like the MOD is dicking around with this weird wheel thing,

crowds begin to gather. I am watching the footage of this test. How the fuck did they think this would work? Okay, so Shoot and the director knew that they have created something that is incredibly dangerous. The cylinder in the middle is not full of thousands of kilos of explosives, it's full of sand, but they have 70 rockets all firing directly towards a crowd of tourists and they look around and go, well well maybe you guys should leave. Nobody leaves of course, they don't force anybody to leave, and they just decide to roll with it. I am watching this footage, there is people that are walking their dog on the beach like

20 feet away from this thing fucking spinning out. Everybody's sitting and waiting, holding their breath, their gollywog still firmly on their jam, shoot fired off the panjandrum, and it worked for about 10 seconds. It raced out of the landing craft and actually made it to the beach, but the nature of the weapon design itself was wildly unpredictable. It had rockets in both wheels, so on one side the rocket stopped working perfectly in sync for only a few seconds and then others began to sputter and die and one side kept flaring on ahead which meant before long it began to flip wildly out of control across the beach directly towards the tourists but before it could turn this into a massacre it got stuck in the sand

But they load the damn thing back up with rockets try it again had the same results before it could turn this into a massacre, it got stuck in the sand. But they load the damn thing back up with rockets, try it again, had the same result. Shoot, watching from nearby came to a conclusion. Two wheels isn't enough to keep it stable, and I need more rockets. So this is supposed to be a secret weapon, but I mean, like, obviously... There's cameras rolling, there's crowds of British tourists watching. They took it on the the British seaside You know English seaside town to test out the secret weapon

I guess maybe they were like well, there's actually a nudist resort in Devon. So all the German spies are definitely gonna be there so I Have my secret camera in my pee hole every time I squeeze my balls that takes a picture Yeah, exactly you got to get rotted for VD beforehand so you get the aperture open It's a tactical sounding. What gets me about it is wouldn't you want it to be? I mean, there are coastal Britain is a big island. There are beaches people don't go to. You are the government. You are the, you know, part of the ministry of defense during the war. Like you could transport this thing up to like anywhere somewhere in the Scottish coast or like the Northeast, like not a beach, not a, not a,

Maybe you don't even try it on a beach first. Just try it on ground and see if it works. No need to make a spectacle out of it, but they're like, nah, flig it at the tourists. Maybe this is actually like the inflatable invasion army, you know, in Dover that was supposed to fake the Germans out into thinking that like they were going to invade a Calais because it's the closest point in the English channel because you're just like, well, yeah, if you do it that way, like maybe shoot didn't know this entire time that he was being used as a deception. Okay. So fun fact that is a theory behind it, that this weapon was so stupid and that

it could never have been serious. But if that's the case, shoot still sure didn't fucking know it. Honestly, like fucking great commission. If you don't really want to fight the wars, like, okay, just go and do like engineer play time. Just like make some shit. Maybe it works. It probably won't, but like just fucking get out of here. Yeah. It's like we have enough eccentric people in our military, you know, who have technical training, but clearly can't actually help the war effort. We basically decided to make you into like 1940s Dr. Wily from Mega Man and send you off to do things, but do it as publicly as possible. Or it's like a guy that I want, I used to watch he'd play like Kerbal Space Program. And it was just like, I want to make the worst rocket possible. And it's just like this.

I love the idea that we can only relate this to like playing a video game badly or staying up all night when you're in middle school making like, what if we make the most grotesque like professional wrestler figurine in like WWF raw or something like that. Or it's like a fucking Jack ask is that we strip we man to the great panjandrum. My name is Johnny Knoxville. This is the great panjandrum. And then it flies directly into Steve those balls. What the fuck kind of American accent was that Tom? It's specifically Steve-O like when you sounded like Steve-O that was supposed to be, that was supposed to be Steve-O cause it's just sort of like to me, I don't know. It just, it just drifted off somewhere. It's like, what if Steve-O was played by Franklin Delano Roosevelt?

I'd watch that biopic. The only thing we have to fear is Henry Rollins shitting in the jaw. The only thing we have to fear is Henry Rollins giving you a tattoo the back of a Jeep, dude. This fucking metal, dude. Yeah, exactly. Schuett goes back to the drawing board.

He tinkers in his workshop for another three weeks he slaps more rockets on it and another wheel before bringing it back out to the same beach at which point more people had gathered because they probably told their friends this shit was dumb as fuck last time it's gonna be really dumb this time too okay so to get real like nerdy and physicsy about this, like there's several problems. One, it is like all problems you'd think a trained aeronautical engineer would know. So if there is any sort of force differential between the wheels, it will spin out. If there is the central drum has to be packed so tight to avoid like

material rotating around the central axis creating centrifugal force, which will like make it spin out. Yeah. And that's, that was one of the main things of the entire testing is shoot wanted to try to figure out how to get it to fire simultaneously and stay firing. That was, and uh, you know, another person pointed out like this thing won't work. Every single part of it is a point of failure. Literally every rocket on it is a point of failure. Well, that was the point I was going to make was that I'm not an engineer, but I'm thinking about this in terms of just dealing with stuff that's got fuel sources and propulsion and things.

And it's like, there isn't a central feeder here. It sounds like these are individual rockets. Yes. Every single one is individual, but they all fire from the same trigger. Which to me is just like, there isn't enough precision to make sure that every single one of these things... Burns exactly the same. ...has exactly the same. Yeah. The shoot had no idea. And that was one of the things he's trying to figure out in the tests.

Well, also it's sort of like the Chinese invented gunpowder and they had all sorts of insane weapons and nobody has ever had like a spinning death rocket bomb wheel. It's cool, but like it's only the kind of thing that's going to show up in Leonardo da Vinci's sketchbook in between twinks with enormous hard ons because like it's just not a thing that's going to be practical. I don't know. We do have another test to go. I wonder how it'll end.

It's now January 1944. More and more people within the Navy were paying attention to this experiment. So not only was there a group of mad scientists and bored tourists watching, but now so was the military brass, including photographers and videographers. All the video that exists is from the second test. So Schutt strode out there and prepared his frankenwheel for another go. Much like before, it worked. And you can see its first couple seconds of working on this video. And then everything goes badly. It hits the beach and goes wild. Rockets break off and fly directly towards the crowd of spectators, nearly killing

several of them. Then it veers off course, almost running over the Royal Navy photographer who managed to escape at the last second. Admirals and generals watching nearby had to dive for cover as rockets broke out from the wheel and just started to zip through the air at their heads. Yeah, Neville's shoot isn't famous for this, but he is known as the father of modern military air shows in Europe. God. Then as one wheel lost power, the other one took off going even faster.

It turned and tumbled back out to sea, shooting more rockets out into the air, flying directly head level as it did. Then one of the officers who ducked for cover saw that his dog had run off. The dog broke free from its leash because it began to chase off down the beach trying to catch one of the rockets that was skipping across the sand. The dog just thought he was in the middle of the coolest game of fetch ever. I mean, it does kind of look like a big sideways frisbee. So I was going to say too, at this time, the British controlled India and Hong Kong. And it's like, surely you could have redirected these resources towards trying to recruit

either Ryu or Dalsin, a street fighter to either do a hook Duke in at the Atlantic wall or to do yoga fire at them. Instead, they're just like, what if we give this goofy ass man who really, really loves model trains, the idea of like, what if you, I don't know, had a train axle running rampant, except it had rockets and a bomb inside. What if we gave a guy who was a hobby yachtist thousands of pounds and tasked him with blowing up the Atlantic wall? This is like hiring the beach boys, like you have to win World War II for us. Do you know what? Brian Jones would have done it.

Yeah, I was going to say Dennis Wilson would have done it. He would have drowned. He would have jumped in the water to just Jones would have done it. Yeah, I was gonna say. Dennis Wilson would have... He would have drowned. He would have jumped in the water to just swim over and kill you. Don't send Dennis Wilson to the landing at Normandy. He won't make it to the beach. That's fine, a lot of people didn't. Shoot had to admit that this isn't gonna work. He's created something that is wildly, hilariously unsafe, but most importantly, something that will never make it to the Atlantic wall.

As a Wired article puts it, Shoot had created, quote, the explosive equivalent of a loose garden hose at full power. This is the part of the story where people begin to think, like I already said, that this was all a giant comical failure on purpose. Because they're like, why did anybody think this was going to work? But I need to point out here that shoot has always said that, like, yeah, it was a moon shot. It was it was a long shot. It was very unpractical. But like, you don't know until you know, we're there. Shit is work. You know, it didn't work.

It's not like you spent three years and 10 million pounds working on this. It took him a couple months. It didn't work and he moved on. Yeah. It's like you miss every shot that you don't take. All my losses are lessons. Yeah. Well, I've been in like a reverie state because I've been now imagining the Beach Boys writing a song about the Atlantic wall. And it's just sort of like, well, access wall defenses, the interlock their fields of fire. It's just going to go on even further. Now it's basically becoming a Thomas Pynchon novel. Some people have proposed that the project was part of Operation Fortitude or the British

Deception Plan actively put in place like Nate, you brought up to fool the Nazis into where the allied forces were planning on invading. Fortitude is a massive overarching plan that involved fake military buildups, inflatable tanks, purposefully leaked, incorrect diplomatic papers, dumb weapons experiments, aren't that unthinkable to think they're a part of, especially in the open in front of a crowd of tourists in broad daylight. The thing about it is that certain things like by contrast, in terms of like, okay, operational security is different thing back then compared to now. But think of other things

that were critical to British operational security that they actually did know would work like Enigma or Alan Turing cracking the Enigma code. How many years they went before the Germans... I don't think the Germans ever knew they actually were able to read their intercepts. That kind of a thing. Stuff that was actually secret was kept secret, or at least they tried very hard to, as opposed to this. I mean, it just feels like they must have known that Britain had a ton of German spies

on the island of Great Britain and also in their royal family. And so they did something like basically like, we're going to create 1940s British Truman show. This guy isn't going to know that what he's doing is meant to be a deception op. Here's my opinion on it. I don't think this is a purposeful deception plan. Physical deceptions for fortitude were pretty much immediately disregarded once the Allies realized that the Germans didn't put a lot of work into aerial reconnaissance.

I was going to say, because that's the only point. You could tell it was fake if you saw it in person, but it was meant to fool aerial reconnaissance. Fortitude involved top-level diplomats, vast spy networks, double agents, an entire fake spy circle controlled by an anti-Nazi Spanish volunteer named Agent Garbo. It was a massive undertaking and it's kind of strange, maybe a little ridiculous to think that a bunch of guys sitting in a room thinking about strapping rockets to a wheel was somehow part of this. It doesn't give away any invasion location or tactic information out at all that the Germans could use. And it's not like Schutt didn't invent weapons that were actively used.

He did. None of them were exactly roaring fucking successes, but he was involved in the actual weapon development. I think it's fun. I think it could be a fun story that, yeah, I invented the ACME wheel to fool the Nazis, but I don't see it as being a part of fortitude, mostly because no official paperwork has ever said that it was. And shoot, seems to think that it wasn't.

And the Directorate of Miscellaneous Weapons did go on to invent a lot of weird shit, but that was kind of their job. Their job was to think so far outside the box that the box is also a wheel strut full of rockets, you know? But look, at least the lasting legacy of this thing is that it inspired an incredible song by Ike and Tina Turner called Proud Mary because big wheels keep on turning and rolling through the river. Well, I mean, this one didn't really keep on turning.

What they needed was they had the wheels, the concept of the wheels. What they didn't realize they needed was crack. The weird spinning wheel thing from the lawnmower man. They need to put a guy in there to pilot. Oh, I have an idea. Hear me out. Ghost of Neville shoot. You've all played twisted metal. Yep. The character Axel is a man standing in between two wheels, guiding them forward. You know what? That's probably the, of all the dumb video game comparisons we've made, that's the most accurate is that like this absolutely seems like a Twisted Metal character. This kind of was a Twisted Metal character. If they took the cylinder out and just put a jacked guy holding the two wheels together, somehow fit some explosives on their suicide

vest, I assume. Yeah. It worked better. I mean, Axel's a shit character from twist of metal, but he's better than the pajandrum. I was going to say in 1940s British beach goers almost became victims of 1940s Carmageddon. It's just that the rocket propulsion was so bad, the worst thing that it was in danger a dog. I mean, it didn't necessarily endanger the dog. The dog was wanting to play fetch with one of the skipping rockets though. It's kind of like when a dog chases a car, it's pretty safe.

It's not going to catch it. Yeah. British guy runs out screaming that dog has 4,000 pounds of Sandhurst education. I mean, if one of the dogs grabbed the rocket and then the rocket was carried by the dog or like made the dog go airborne or something, that's still a more effective weapon than the Panjandrum because then you could just drop rocket dogs on Nazis. It's like a dog with a spin wheel. Nobody knows how we got it, but down does you know how to use it.

Neville Shoot, the father of the Soviet space program. Now, that's a podcast, fellas. We do a thing on this podcast called Questions from the Legion. If you like to ask us a question from the Legion, you can support us on Patreon, along with getting years of bonus content, Discord access, first dibs on merch and live show tickets. You can also ask us a fun question. And today's question is, you guys talk about RPGs all the time. Nate and Joe, you talk about Final Fantasy games where they have like limit breaks or special attacks. What would be your limit break or

special attack? What does it look like? You go first. Again I just finished playing Final Fantasy 7 for a different podcast. I'll be on in the future. But I do think it's very funny that one of the weapons that he has is just a bat with nails in it. Cloud Strife has is just a bat with nails in it. But I do like the idea of when I was in high school, there was, I saw a fight break out between two girls in the cafeteria and one of the girls beat the shit out of the other one simply because they had a brick in their backpack. And I think if like brick in the backpack

is a solid like Detroit flavored limit break, because the other limit break attack is just gun. Yeah. I'm trying to think of what would be the most tied to my personality. And I was going to think of a joke about sort of like over medicated, but I've only been on ADHD meds for you know, a little under two years. So in my mind, I'm thinking about like, what would be the most appropriate to my upbringing and that it's like, and also hearkening back to Final Fantasy seven, the game that brought out the limit break and one of the ways that the character Palmer dies by running across the street and getting hit by a truck is that my limit break and one of the ways that the character Palmer dies by running across the street and

Getting hit by a truck Is that my limit break is just VTEC and a Honda Civic That's how I just hit someone My limit break is hit and run That's how I keep my car insurance rates low I'd say most appropriate for mine is just like I'll just headbutbutt someone. Cause like, yeah, exactly. That's like, I'm so happy because head trauma. You see it. I assume that would be mine, but you know, I, I, I think you do that power justice. I see the difference is, is that I do it for fun.

Who's to say I didn't. Yeah, true. Yeah. Yeah. I'm actually thinking more along the lines of, uh, it's some sort of, Tom's limit break is that like basically like a thrash metal sort of interlude comes over the regular game music and he just gets in the pit and starts spin kicking people. He forces the enemies that get in the pit and probably starts spin kicking and headbutting them and it's when the attacks hits like multiple random damage.

Yeah, I'm doing a Japanese March style compilation to moves. Like I'm doing spin kicks off the ground, you know? Yeah. You get a spin kick and then you get a, an invoice in the mail to repair his 1960s, cavalry boots after he kicked you in the face. It's Omni slash bow with headbutts and spin kicks. Fellas that is another episode of the lions Led by Dunkies podcast. But you have other podcasts. Plug those podcasts. I am the co-host and producer of Trash Future, a podcast about the tech industry being bad and dumb, but mostly bad. I am the co-host and producer of What a Hell of a Way to Dad,

a podcast about being a dad and also why you shouldn't join the military. And I am also the producer of Kill James Bond. And a film podcast, it's extremely funny that I strongly recommend. I'm also in an executive producer role on a new podcast called No Gods, No Mayors with my friend Samson Martirosian who is doing the... Joe introduced me to Sam and Sam's the editor basically doing a podcast about weird mayors. The Armenian nation is slowly taking over the podcasting sphere yet in a long enough timeline every Podcasting will just be associated with Armenians. We have we have Samson on your end We have Anya and our end our tentacles are expanding

Yeah, at a long enough timeline historians would be like yes podcasts You can you can trace the popularity of podcasts as more and more people began to adopt unibrow as a fashion statement We may never get back Western Armenia, but we will have podcasts. Hey, well listen, we'll be able to figure out the first ever carburetor based mixing desk. So yeah. A glue factory a show about a, with no theme, but just riffs. Me and Nate were recently on an ad time of recording speaking with Jeremy vine Jeremy Vine, features some friends over on Trash Future and some other great comedians and Beneath the Skin, a show about the history of everything, told you the history of tattooing. If you want to know about the

history of tattoo prizes or the guy who got sent to a Polish concentration camp during World War II for four years and traded tattoos for bread to survive. Check it out. This is the only show that I do. Thank you for listening. If you like it, you can support us on Patreon where $5 a month gets you access to absolutely everything from every episode early to all of our bonus episodes and bonus series like history of Armenia and our new coupons dispatches. It also gets you, like I said, first dibs on merch, first dibs on live show tickets whenever we are doing live shows. It gets you access to our Discord community. Will Barron And most importantly,

Lines Led by Robots. If you want to hear this show completely unhinged. Jason Bahl So like 5% worse, you get access to everything. And leave us a review on wherever it is that's in the podcast. That helps us immensely when it comes to booking live show venues, which we learned recently. The more good reviews we have, easier is to get venues. So you want us to come to a town near you, leave us a review. Didn't mean for that to rhyme. Again, everybody, thank you so much for listening to us. And until next time, strap rockets to dogs, fire them at British people.