Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 340 - The Battle of Fort Driant

Episode Date: December 2, 2024

Support the show on patreon! https://www.patreon.com/c/lionsledbydonkeys Check out the merch store: https://llbdmerch.com/ Patton sends his soldiers into a tunnel meat grinder, suffering his first and only real defeat as a commander during WWII Sources: Anthony Kemp. The Unknown Battle: Metz John Nelson Rickard. Patton at Bay: the Lorraine Campaign, September to December, 1944 Duane E. Shaffer. Patton’s Lost Battle. Warfare History Network Ryan McLachlan. Battle of Fort Driant – World War II’s Strangest Engagement? War History Online

Hey everybody our merch store is restocked So if you missed any of the live show specific merch and 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 at Bydonkeys podcast. I'm Joe and with me is Tom and Nate. We're in the third army of the United States circa 1944.

George Patton is our commander. All three of us were previously wounded while fighting in the Bokaj when we were graced with a hospital visit from Patton himself. While touring the beds, he walks by Tom and I and immediately orders us to be removed to a different wing of the hospital, deciding that we were not in fact white enough. He eyes Nate with suspicion, knowing he hates him for some reason but can't quite put his finger on it. After escaping the hospital and running into Bernard Montgomery, who was asking a soldier who was walking by if they had a little brother they could

become pen pals with, we finally made it back to our tank. Only to discover we had no fuel due to Eisenhower diverting all of the supplies to an airborne and ground invasion of the Netherlands, which is surely a flat country renowned for good weather so nothing bad could possibly happen. How you guys doing? I'm just imagining Brazilian George Patton. That doesn't make any sense because we were talking about all of this before we started recording.

Yes. Just imagining. No, I'm just laughing at the idea of George, is George Patton. They're landing on the beaches in Normandy and all you hear in the distance is DJ control as well boondah boondah boondah boondah That does remind me of the Brazilian army getting involved in World War II because like the leader of the country said that Brazilian soldier would be fighting in World War II

and snakes could smoke from pipes. So when they ended up getting involved, the patch that they wore was a snake smoking a pipe. I was going to say- Which kind of whips. The Brazilians, you know, prefigured Hideo Kojima by about 40 years. Brazilian Hideo Kojima? That is an incredible just idea I'm rotating in my mind.

I mean, like if the entirety of the Metal Gear universe was set in Brazil, it would be... Look, we say this with respect. Brazil is... I've never been, but it strikes me as a completely insane country. My dad lived there when he was a little kid, and it's only gotten more insane since he lived there. So you know what? We respect Brazil, but we acknowledge that it's just the true chaos zone.

As Tom said, it's basically like glitch AI version of Grand Theft Auto at all times. Nathanael — Being in Brazil is like being on a PvP server. Every Brazilian I've ever met is like the coolest people ever. They're so fucking sound, but they're also insane. Adam — I think that's why Nate and I can extend so much respect to Brazil because as two Americans, we recognize game when we see it. We recognize the complete utter madness because we also have experienced it to some flavor.

Brazil not only gave us Sepultura, but also gave us MC Bin Laden. So you know. That's my new music fact for the day. I have learned that there is in fact a man named MC Bin Laden. My wife's family background is Cape Verdean and Portuguese. And it's just funny because they are not a particularly, like a culture famous for their restraint and they are buttoned up and conservative and kind of, you know, po faced and fusty compared to Brazilians.

Like it's a wild, wild universe. The Lucifer, man, Love talking about the Lucifer. Let's fucking get on it. You know the craziest part about MC Bin Laden is when he dropped two albums at the same time. But MC Bin Laden's died, had his hair dyed in a yin yang. And like his big hit is Bolo Loh, ha ha. That's just like the entire beat is just like a motorbike revving and like DUM DAT DAT DUM DAT DAT underneath it from 2012. I've been on this Baile Fun thing for a long time.

Well unfortunately boys, we're not talking about anything to do with any of that. But you may have got a subtle hint from my intro. We're back on our World War 2 shit and we're solidly back on some Patton shit, and some shit from everybody's least favorite pervert of World War II, Bernard Montgomery. He's playing something of a side character today. However, we're not talking about Market Garden. We'll touch on that when we eventually do a series on it. So put that on the back burner for later to all of our Monty heads.

People get mad. They get mad at us whenever we make fun of him. I know there's some out there because whenever we talk about his weird pen pal love letter thing, they get deeply upset. Yeah, really lesser known specials beside a message to you, Georgie was like really sinister. I understand why it wasn't on the album. So for people who are uninitiated, we'll just tell it really quickly. Bernard Montgomery had this is something that was like relatively suppressed in his

biographies, but was in a kind of what you might describe as like very inappropriate pen pal relationship with a 12 year old boy in a Swiss boarding school in which he basically would write him letters and ask him to like describe taking baths and things along those lines. And it's sort of in the Robert Baden Powell sphere of like, you can't objectively say there's proof that there was any kind of like, you know, abusive contact, but like every other thing about it is sort of like,

it's like, you know, I had no idea that this was exactly what it appeared to be because all the mosaic tiles that completely replicated the image of what it was, there was just missing one. It's pretty bad. Ugh. But also, let's be honest,

he was a dude who was educated in the British system from the upper class background in the late 19th, early 20th century. So this is just like a lot of stuff that was just considered normal back then. I mean, similarly, George Patton, not in the same vein, I don't think there was any indecent stuff

with George Patton, but George Patton was, you can also go back and look at his early sort of juvenileia, apocrypha, and stuff like that. But this guy's insane. This guy was notating his diary at West Point for future biographers. Like, Oh, don't, don't worry, Nate. We're going to get into some deep Patton. All right. Pervertedness in a second. I just want to correct myself. I is not a message to you, Georgie message to you, Bernie. I was thinking of famed Western actor, George Montgomery. My brain is how I've had three coffees already. I'm fucked. Yeah. I was thinking message to you, Georgie, message to you, Bernie. I was thinking of famed Western actor George Montgomery. My brain is, I've had three coffees already. I'm fucked. I was thinking message to you, Rudy, that you were just doing a riff on the song by

the specials. Yeah, that's what I was doing, but I confused when you say that, I feel like you're making a riff on the movie Rudy, but it's a Bernard Montgomery and I hate it. A message to you, Bernie. Stop that nonsing around. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa Instead of any of that, we're going to talk about Patton's lone defeat during World War II. You have to hold. We're talking about the Battle of Fort Draant. I'm assuming maybe Nate has heard of this? I might have. I mean, we'll have to get into the details of it, but it doesn't immediately

ring any bells. All I was thinking was I love the idea that every World War II general has a combat experience equivalent to me at age 13, spending three days of playing Final Fantasy 7 to get to the point where I had achieved Knights of the Round, and then immediately trying to go and fight Emerald Weapon and dying and losing my save game progress. Now, technically, George Patton had once been in the cavalry. He did some chocobo breeding. He may have been into some chocobo shit if he was born in the Faroe Islands. He had to breed the correct chocobo to get to the secret island where you can get knights

of the realm and you can immediately die because it's not strong enough to beat emerald weapon in one go. Now, in order to talk about the Battle of Fort Durian, we have to talk a little bit about just how the allied invasion of France is going at the time. In short, really well. Specifically in the case of the US's third army under General George Patton, who had earned reputation for two things. Well, three things.

Being an absolute asshole to anybody under his command and constantly attacking with aggressive hard charging tactics to the detriment of the men and machines under his command. However, I cannot overstate just how good he was at simply moving forward no matter what. But there is a secret third thing he is known for having a years long affair with his niece. I just got to see everybody's face drop and it was so worth it. Like four northern Europeans last Germanic countries where listeners are like

what? That's illegal. Who cares? Okay, I need to make at least one asterisk to this. She was not underage. She was completely willing, consensual. It was something that he bragged about to his fellow officers and something that his own wife vocally complained about constantly. You know who got the most fuckable cousin? Me.

Yeah, exactly. I'm just imagining somebody doing like trying to brag about that. Like, yo, just call me Dr. Neesefucker because you got no idea what I'm on today. What's so funny to me is that there is a school of historians that have been constantly trying to explain this away for years that it never happened and their explanation, their excuse, I guess you could call it, is actually worse than if he fucked his niece for real. And he almost certainly did. His love letters survived, his diary entries survived, officers like Omar Bradley openly heard him talking about it to the point that they talked about it

Because they thought it was strange, but Historians have said that he made it up to tell his fellow officers So they would think he was like because you know he had an ego. He had this image of himself of this macho Masculine thing and he believed if he talked to everybody else about clapping knees cheeks, that that would add to that, which is so much worse than if he actually did it. That's such a weird, it's just sort of like, alien comes down to earth,

pretends to be a World War II general, has no concept of like how, you know, 1940s masculinity in the army works. And it's just like, say something impressive, say something impressive. Yo, I fucked my brother's kid. And like, it is the same historians that do that were the same ones carrying water

for all of the very, very, very truthful stories of Patton abusing his own soldiers and saying that it wasn't true, or the story that's being told is blown out of proportion. They're just carrying water for him. That he absolutely, like his own nieces letters survive, explaining the love affair. And it wasn't just fucking, they loved one another.

When the war started, he used his connections to, because she was like a Red Cross nurse, or some kind of nurse, I don't remember if she was at the Red Cross or like the army core of nurses, but she was always nearby. Like he went through a lot of effort to make sure she was always within cockshot. Speaker 2 The continuity of history is kind of insane that like, you know, this woman fucked her uncle, general George Patton, and then lived long enough to hear like hungry like the wolf by Duran Duran. Oh, Tom, I got one even better for you.

Her lifespan is safe to assume that either because of having her finger on the pulse of pop culture or having younger relatives, maybe she had her finger in the pulse of a few other things. She was old enough to watch the South Park movie in 1999 featuring the song Uncle Fucker. Yeah. Unfortunately, I do have to tell you that she died in 1946. Oh, for fuck's sake. She didn't get to see the big bopper. She did, but it was a different kind.

Simultaneously, while fucking her uncle, George Patton, she had another lover who was a different officer in the army, who she was kind of relegated to being a side piece. He was married, had a wife back home. He had told her a million times over and over and over again, like, I'm leaving my wife for you. And of course he doesn't. So she falls into a depression. Then George Patton dies after the war. She immediately kills herself afterwards. This is the most fucking Lana Del Rey story we've ever told on this show. So again, I I am contending with the

Patton biographers her where there was absolutely more than just fucking going on there There's a deep love affair which I'll let you the dear listeners be the judge if that makes this better or worse I'm not even trying to flippant about it which I'll let you, the dear listeners, be the judge if that makes this better or worse. I'm not even trying to be flippant about it, but I'm just imagining the mentality if you're an army officer having a marriage, having an affair with another woman, which is punishable under UCMJ, and you know that it's the niece of General George Patton, and you're like, well, this is dangerous territory. I don't want Patton, but then Patton finds out and he's furious at you, but not for the reason that you would expect.

But then Patton finds out and he's furious at you, but like not for the reason that you would expect The only person who fucks my niece is me Anyway when it came to pursuit when it came to rapid advances in the face of any and all sense Patton was your guy He didn't care about things like strength of the enemy or his own supply situation. It was all gas, no breaks. And sometimes these all the time kind of implies that he already had a sort of resilience sensibility about him. Maybe yours, but now is the real person. Maybe, maybe he changed his name at Ellis Island. George Paton also sounds like a French.

I'll be honest with you. I'm not a, uh, I'm not a Portuguese speaker. And so I don't really know exactly how you pronounce the, a, the, uh, AO diphthong, but I think it's all, but I'm not sure. Uh, so we'll, we'll find out, you know, Brazilians right in correct my terrible pronunciation. I will say a French George Patton who collaborated with the Nazis is more historically accurate than Brazilian George Pat. Yeah, that was going gonna say, yeah, I mean. Because Patton absolutely would have. He rode his army like he stole it.

And when it finally broke down, well, that was always clearly someone else's fault. We do have to give credit where credit is due, though. This did work for a long time. Did he feel a lot of unnecessary American body bags in the process? Fuck yeah, he did. But nobody cared. was world war two Casualties really did not matter as long as the mission was being accomplished, and it was so all as well I just realized that George Patton was literally living the story of George

But I's book story of the eye in story the eye It's a cousin but like George Patton is just doing this. Look, George Patton was just trying to carry over the proud VMI tradition of incest? I'm just gonna say like your protagonist of the story who is hot tempered and tempestuous eschews tradition and is constantly going on the attack to the chagrin of his superiors but then achieves success but is tormented from the attack to the chagrin of his superiors, but then achieve success, but is tormented from the inside because of a love affair with his niece. This 100% could be a Yukio Mishima novel. All 100%.

If you switch out niece for nephew. Right. I mean, but I keep saying in defense of Mishima. I think we've all found ourselves saying that at least once on this podcast. Not every Yukio Mishima story involves a gay subplot, but it's just, is the indication in the writing that he kind of wants to fuck the male protagonist? Yes. But I'm just saying that I'm thinking about the Sea of Fertility tetralogy, any of this

stuff. It's like George Patton, you just change out some of the cultural markers and you got it. Instead of jerking off to the painting like Mishima did, George Pat would jerk off to like, I don't know, like the army PMCS coming. Exactly. Then she put the eyes, he's like, oh fuck yeah, this looks just like my niece. He's got a terrain map with like the arraignment of forces of the battle of Borodino. And that's what he's fucking doing. The jerk off. Listen, if you think we're being crass, read Confessions He's got a terrain map with like the Arraiment of Forces of the Battle of Borodino and that's

what he's fucking doing. The trick is, listen, if you think we're being crass, read Confessions of a Mask. It's really good. It's really good. It's a great book. It's a deeply fucked up. Patton's looking at like a land map and he just sees the contours of two hills that are very tightly budged.

He's like, looks like my niece's tits. To complete the comparison with Confessions of a Mask, this would have to imply that like, it's the battle of Borodino and he sees the perfect formation and then nuts and then finds out that actually the map was an inaccurate representation of it and so he's just like, he's filled with shame and anger the same way that Yukio Mishima was mad when he found out that Jona Park was a girl. This show is so fucking stupid. There is so many connections. Mishima loved fashion, so did Patton. They hated communists. And look, if you're going to commit seppuku in a fucked

up way for a fucked up political cause, the absolute American version of it is to kill yourself with a car. All right? like the Japanese have swords with specific uses and we love dying in cars. Alright? American Sapuku is crashing the burger car into a tree. Yeah, exactly. Picks up the entire car, just chams it through his abdomen. You have your acolyte drive the Oscar Mayer Weinermobile into you.

Okay, we have to stop. I'm dying. Oh. The point of war is not to die for your country, but instead to kill yourself and nuts simultaneously for yours. You're just fucking James Dean yourself with a fucking Oscar wire me. Look, if you said you want that twink obliterated, you got it. I need a bit. Happy Christmas, everybody. I hope everyone's doing well.

The third army stormed through France, and though a portion of it was badly bogged down fighting the German defenses in Brittany, the rest had kept up a constant unceasing advance, at one point advancing over 280 miles per day. By the end of August, Patton was over Samihel, the same place, ironically, where he had been wounded while fighting in World War I. However, it was there that Patton ran into a little problem called Bernard Montgomery. It was clear that Allied command had a true no-shit invasion of Germany coming, and there were two lines of thought through that. A broad, rapid, sweeping front, which

of course is favored by everyone, specifically Patton, and a smaller narrow front on the ground combined with air drops over the Netherlands, which is of course favored by Montgomery. Mm hmm. I love that George Patton had like the same kind of weird spatial autism that I have, where it whereas like I can go somewhere once and just immediately remember how everything looks. So he's like, Oh, I was here in World War II. I remember shitting behind that bush. I got some German metal in my face over there. Neurodivergent George Patton. He did like horses a lot in tanks, which again, guilty, not the horse part. Horses if you're listening, fuck you.

Fucking my niece under the weighted blanket. Look. He makes the niece do pony play. Like, damn it. I was going to try to bring it back towards historical analysis here about, yeah, like, obviously the thing with getting into Germany is there's this river called the Rhine and you have to cross it and Famously had things gone differently. It's entirely possible

They would have been in Germany before the end of 1944 some other things happened that slowed that down a bit and We're gonna hear about them But yeah, like it really does come down to there. They had a huge amount of momentum. Obviously the Nazis had been Massively massively diminished because of the amount of momentum. Obviously the Nazis had been massively, massively diminished because of the amount of men and material required on the Eastern front, which was, they were losing at this point. Oh God, so much. By the end of 1944, they were not far from the German border in terms of being forced back. And then all of a sudden, all their reserves were being committed to defend France

because we broke through on D-Day. And also we had, at this point, I don't think we were fully done in Italy, but we were pretty far north in Italy relative to where we were in 1943. So yeah, it wasn't going great for them. And so the next question was like, okay, but obviously it's massively defended. How do we get into Germany? And well, Brazilian Bernard Montgomery, Bernardo Montgomery Rao decides to switch it up a little bit. Going down the Rhine on a fucking custom jet ski. Now as always with Montgomery, if you don't know anything about Montgomery, know one thing. Well two things, the weird pen pal thing and this.

He had a tendency to promise everyone the world with all of his plans. If you just gave Bernard Montgomery what he requested, he could end the war in a month. He could open an advance at everybody else. That was impossible. What he promised was the world. And he did the same thing to Eisenhower, insisting the war would be over much, much quicker if his operation, which would become known as Operation Market Garden, succeeded. And to be fair, that was true. But in order to do so, he would need a massive amount of logistical support and all other advances would have to hit the brakes in the meantime. That's because in September 1944, the Allies had run into something of

a gasoline shortage and they didn't have enough to supply both advances at the same time. So until that was fixed, Monty's operation would get everything they had while everyone else would have to wait. Now long story short, Market Garden was a failure for a lot of reasons, which we'll cover in a series at some point in the future because it does deserve a series. But on the American side of things, they all hated this idea. It was bold. It was risky. It forced everyone else to just sit around with their thumb up their ass. And it didn't even matter that all of these units could seriously use some rest, recuperation, and reinforcement after being driven so hard over the last few months.

And of course, generals don't really care about that kind of thing most of the time. But that is what happened. As the Third Army dug in around Metz, they finally got fresh reinforcements for the first time. The constant advances and fighting since D-Day meant that most infantry formations in the third were reduced by like 25 percent. The vehicles were badly in need of replacement and repair all that stuff but Patton thought all of this was bullshit as he sat facing Mets he got madder and madder being forced to do nothing but knowing Patton most likely

he was probably more pissed at the fact that Monty was gonna get the glory for this big operation and not him he thought he would be at the spearhead of some triumphant advance into Germany as at the time the race to Berlin, that being a race between the Soviets and the western allies who could get to the Nazi capital first, was still very much on. Patton saw himself as the bell of the ball. He was going to be the first one into Berlin, and he really didn't like being put on the bench. Furthermore, the gas shortage, the shifted resources, the bad weather, because it's around September in Europe, the weather turns to shit.

All of this allowed the Nazis, opposite to the 3rd Army, Army Group G, to begin reinforcing their own positions. There is also a change in Nazi leadership on the front. Johannes Blazkowicz. Solid fucking name there. He's either the guy who made Gears of War or the character in Gears of War. I was gonna say- Fucking Kamblisinski. Isn't B.J. Blazkowicz the name of your character in Doom?

Fuck yeah that is Wolfenstein. Or is it Doom or Wolfenstein? I can't remember. Wolfenstein. Okay yeah. The guy in Doom? Oh and what was it? Fuck yeah that is Wolfenstein. I can't remember. Wolfenstein. The guy in Doom is just called the Doom Guy. I do have to admit Blazkowicz being the name of the guy from Wolfenstein is weirdly fitting. So Blazkowicz is fired, though it's a minor miracle that he lasted this long because Hitler personally hated his fucking guts.

Previously Blazkowicz had been the commander of German forces in occupied Poland and normally, this is where I list a very long string of war crimes they committed, but not in this case. He was left out of the loop of the larger Nazi plan for Poland because he kept ordering SS men to be shot for their crimes against Polish Jews and civilians. His orders were always personally cancelled by Adolf Hitler and after he compiled more and more cases against the SS, all of which were thrown out, he came to realize that he might not know something at play here. He finally attempted to prosecute the SS for race mixing, a crime he thought they might actually care about, but that was also thrown

out. Eventually he was fired, transferred to a minor desk position in northern France, and wasn't given another meaningful position until just before D-Day. During his time as an occupational authority in France, he constantly attempted to prosecute his own soldiers for crimes they were committing against the French, but again, each time they were dismissed by superior officers. Furthermore, Hitler made sure he was never promoted, making him one of the few generals ever during WWII on the Nazi side to never once get promoted since the start of the war. Even when all of the other ones were dying in the Soviet Union, he never got promoted. God, how hated do you have to be to be this guy?

It's kind of impressive he didn't find himself in prison at some point. After the war was over, he was charged by the high command criminal court for having two German deserters shot, a crime that both the allied prosecution and allied judges and his defense team told him not to worry about because it was sure to be dismissed. He was even told that he was like the kind of German they were looking for for post-war Germany. He could be lionized in some kind of way for not liking Hitler, for going against Nazi

rules. But instead, he got up, sprinted past his prison guards, and jumped out of the balcony of his window, dying on impact. To this day, nobody's entirely sure why he did it, other than some kind of shame for being part of the Nazi war machine. And to that I say, good. Good. Fine. Such a deep German energy that even as a Nazi, you're like, they are not following the rules. Right. But the thing about trying to prosecute them for race mixing was the ultimate rules-based attempt at controlling the SS, which tells you how out of the loop this guy

was. Yeah, yeah. The death squad simply aren't being held accountable. They're not filling out the paperwork? I shed zero tears for a dead Nazi. Fuck him. Anyway, replacing him in command of Army Group G would be a guy named Hermann Balk, another career officer who interestingly enough was not known for his loyalty to the concepts of Nazism.

Rather, he was a career officer who didn't really care who was in charge as long as he got to wear his uniform and do little soldier things. Which fun fact, still makes him a Nazi. He was considered one of the best and brightest in Germany at the time, so much so that after World War I when the German Empire shit itself and died and its military was gutted into the vastly downsized Weimar army, he was handpicked to be only one of 4,000 officers the new military retained. So he's a sycophant and he's good at his job, which is a really bad

combination. Yeah, no kidding. If you want to learn more about how all these fucking Nazis ended up in the German state post war, listen to the series on the red army faction. I talk about it a lot. He was talented in more ways than one. Of course he was a good officer as far as any officers good, Nate. I meanding. We love you. But he was really, really good at maneuvering within the Third Reich. He knew the kind of officer that Hitler liked, so he simply became it. He never took the blame for anything, which is something that Hitler was famous for. He never said anything was impossible, which Hitler hated.

Like if you were someone to point out the practicalities of why a particular battle plan wouldn't work, Hitler could fire you. So if Balk was given a job that was just straight-up impossible, he'd be like, yeah I can do that. And then when it failed, he'd be like, it's Franz's fault. And he always went on the attack, which is something Hitler liked. I mean there's a reason why Hitler named so many thing Storm X or Storm Y. He liked the way it looked and the way it felt. So he did that. He was effectively the Nazi version of Patton as much as Patton himself was already kind of the Nazi version of Patton. Yeah. Yeah. Patton routinely said shit so fucked up it's virtually

indistinguishable from something that might come out of the mouth of an SS commander. Yeah there's a certain level of like being a massive, like bigot and horrible person that is, I suppose, in the social mores of the time. But yeah, Patton was just like far beyond that. He was a bit, a bit much. What's interesting, you know, is that there are comparisons to be made with people like Churchill, for example, who were steadfastly anti-nazi but then as soon as the war was over or that not you know the Nazis were defeated it was sort of like all

right now we need to rearm Germany so we can go invade the Soviet Union level. Ironically a plan called Operation Unthinkable. Yeah a hat on a hat there with the operation name. Yeah just a little yeah they always say that they were completely randomly generated operation names back then but you know what? uh, uh I think that one's not so random the hard part about using AI generated operation names is none of the fingers turn out, right? Yeah, RIP, Churchill. You would have loved chat GPT Just now I'm just thinking about operation gothic serpent, but that's a story for a different day The hard part is getting this snake to wear eyeliner Yeah, it's very disappointing when you hear about

Operation Gothic Serpent and you think it's gonna be something completely badass and it's like, oh no, it's just Mogadishu in 1993, fuck. Followed up by the lesser known Operation Where the Holes At. Operation Skank Lizard. Anyway, Balt came up with a new plan for German defenses around Metz.

Rather than fleeing all the way to the Siegfried Line, which was the original plan, he would dig in in and around the rivers and force the Americans to fight for them tooth and nail making them pay for every single inch. However, by the end of September, Markigarn had failed and the supply line problems continued. Patton requested hundreds of thousands of gallons of fuel for his vehicles, which was honestly only enough for a couple days or a couple weeks of movement for him, and got virtually nothing. So the idea was to use this period for rest and training, specifically to train new and old soldiers alike and how to assault fortifications in the case that the army was sent to seize Metz. Because fun fact, back then the army did not train soldiers

close quarters combat or urban warfare at all. Because the way that battle plans generally worked is cities were to be bypassed whenever necessary. Don't get in street to street fighting because we knew then as we know now, it's a meat grinder, it's pointless, you hemorrhage too many people. Generally the army would surround cities until the Germans would just red- Can you imagine if you were like 80 years old in Metz at the time and like when you were a kid, it was the scene of battles during the Franco-Prussian war and then like World War I happens. And then also you switch citizenship numerous times and now this shit is happening.

It's just like, I'm really, I just can imagine just like crotchety old French Alsatian guy just being like could you guys just please fucking stop already? I Only could fit so many new stamps on my passport. I'm trying to eat this watery soup for my lunch. Please leave me alone Can you just like become anabaptists and get it over with please? I'm terrified of the moon. It's like this guy's already married his nieces. OK, you know what? Fucking y'all are just the same as the guys from Munster. Just do it. Whatever.

Kind of like Nate just alluded to, the city was so easily defended. It had never fallen to a direct assault in hundreds of years. It had fallen during the Franco-Prussian War, but after months of siege. So like, attacking Metz directly was kind of thought as the dumbest possible idea. They started training American shinobi. It's just like, they're there with a grappling hook dressed as a ninja. Hey, we have American Ninja Warrior, alright? We're already halfway there. I'm just thinking that area of the Rhine, like around Metz, is not too far,

if I remember correctly, from where there's a castle that Louis Ferdinand Céline holed up in at the end of the war, because imagine being such a fascist novelist that you have to hide out fucking with the president of France. Like, so he winds up in basically a castle near the Rhine. So you know what, there's something about it that just attracts bad things.

We're just saying there's a portal to hell and it's somewhere near Strasbourg, and you know what? Like there's something about it that just attracts bad things. We're just saying there's a portal to hell and it's somewhere near Strasbourg. And you know what? The vibes are seriously off. The city is ringed with forts, each of which could support the other with artillery fire. Each fort was supported by an underground network of tunnels that concealed and protected supply lines, routes of reinforcement to forward positions like trenches, pillboxes, and ambush points. Each fort was effectively an entire complex defensive network

supported by other multiple complex defensive networks. They were ringed with forests to better protect themselves and there was a massive 60-foot dry moat, which every source I read about this, called it a dry moat. I call that a trench. If there's not water in it, I don't know how it's a moat. There's not even any alligators in this bitch. You're describing the sort of interlocking defense network and all I can think of is how is Patton going to approach this? And it's weird, the handshake overlap between George Patton's approach to attacking defendant positions and the name of a post-punk band from Chicago,

and it's Meat Wave. We once made a joke that Yukio Mishima had a limit break that just said nut. George Patton has a limit break that's just him machine gutting folded up American flags at the enemy. I mean, Meat Wave could be George Patton has a limit break that's just him machine gunning folded up American flags at the enemy I mean Meat Wave could be George Patton's limit break Let's be perfectly honest here. Yeah, they just you know it must I was once again

It must suck to be the 80 year old guy in Mets It must also suck to be an American born in the 20s. It's just like hey apparently your job is to die Oh, you missed World War two. Did? Don't worry we got another hot track dropping in five years. Y'all over here kimchi? You're gonna love it. Now in between all this it's strung up with barbed wire, land mines, and just because that wasn't all bad enough, all of this is on high points, hills, hundreds of feet above all of the approaches. Now as it stands in this moment of time the American plan was to effectively ignore these forts, flank around Metz, and do what everyone else has always done throughout history,

put it under siege in a double envelopment. In order to do this, American forces would need to throw some bridges over the Moselle River, and as they did so, they found that Fort Duriant, one of Metz's forts, had 155mm cannons that could very easily reach them and began blowing them up. So Patton began to think of a plan to attack and seize Fort Duriant, considered the linchpin of the entire fort system around Metz. This is despite the fact his boss, General Omar Bradley, had told him, don't do that. Also, don't even move on the Moselle yet. Patton had already ignored him once by moving on the Moselle,

so he didn't really care too much about Bradley's orders. By my word, by God as my witness, I will create the opposite day version of the guns of Navarone where everything goes badly and the weather is shit. He was literally ordered to remain in place in a defensive posture, waiting for resupply, training his men and making repairs. Patton did not care, so he gave orders to Major General Walton Walker to begin making plans for an operation to take Fort Draen. And he did, naming it Operation Thunderbolt. I assume because Patton really liked two of those right next to each other on his collar.

My brain kind of wandered more towards mid-20th century name alert. You know, you've got Walton Walker, Mark Clark, Omar Bradley. Like, you've just got some really, really good ones out there. And all the Operation names are either like the names of like an ACDC song or a Kurt Vonnegut novel. Well, yeah, I mean, Operation Overlord still sounds sick as hell. Most of the names in World War II were very, very cool, especially for what comes afterwards, you know?

Operation names truly peaked in World War II, in my opinion. Years ago, I read the whole series, what is it? Army at Dawn, Day of Battle, and Guns at Last Light. And I remember reading about, yeah, you know, the Allied invasion of, what is it? Army at Dawn, Day of Battle, and Guns at Last Light. And I remember reading about, yeah, the Allied invasion of, what is it? Torch was North Africa, I think? Things like that. They had some pretty sick names, but it's embarrassing now because I realized there's just so many details that I've forgotten. My personal favorite operation name ever was the CIA's operation in Albania called Operation Obopus.

Can't be taught. We've talked about it before on the show. It's absolutely magnificent. The CIA operation in Communist Albania is genuinely one of the funniest, like not on the wall of heroes because it's the fucking foggy bottom or whatever, because it's like the world's worst KD ratio.

It's just like zero K, 100 D D take the ratio and apply it forever. That's why I, that's why I love like the general conception of the CIA where most of their operations end like obo pus and not like the show Homeland. Yeah. The fucking like small domino, big domino of operation, obo pulses, CIA is in Albania, big dominoes, me in EE trying to get a new SIM card and five drunk Albanian guys come in and try to racially abuse someone who works there. Ugh, that's called Operation Obo Pus 3. Now Operation Thunderbolt would be a combined arms ground air assault that called for a

amassing of close air support in the form of medium bombers armed with thousands of pounds of bombs in napalm. After the bombers did their job, the forts would be hit with artillery. Then of course infantry and armor would be sent in to finish the job with air support hanging by just in case they were needed. Two other officers, Leroy Irwin and Charlesuley helped the planning and they all agree that this air attack combined with the artillery meant that they would only need a couple hundred soldiers on the ground to secure the ruins of Fort Draaet. And I know what you're thinking because I said those words aloud that that is not what

happens. Congratulations, you're a listener of the show. Whenever anybody says air support or artillery support will render these defenses pointless You know exactly what happens next don't really see a lot of Pointlessness rendering taking place and waiting it's in the render queue, but it's not happening We're about to see the fucking limit break me wave and then the consequence afterwards as human kimchi the consequence afterwards as human kimchi. Now two things happen immediately that kneecap the operation. The 12th Army group said look we can give you air support but we can't commit to a long-term operation because they have

other ongoing operations and since remember Pad is not supposed to be planning this nobody around him set aside any extra Army Air Corps groups for his support. So by kind of, I don't know, wildcat striking an Army operation, he's bleeding support away from everyone else. So the 12th group says, we only can give you so much on a day-to-day basis, what we can spare effectively. Patton's had so much success sneaking behind closed doors to do a thing that's socially disapproved of. He just thinks it's always going to work. And then of course the weather turns to shit as it tends to do in France in September. Cloudy,

which is bad for air support and rainy, which is bad for everyone. I'm just going to say, I'm not that far from this area and yeah, it is pretty shocking how it goes from pretty much endlessly sunny and warm in August to just sort of like, Oh, it's cloudy all the time now and it's raining. That's one of the things that continues to surprise me like about market garden is someone took a look at the Netherlands, like great place for an airborne operation, throw them into the wind and rain. Fuck them. Now everyone decided, you know what? This isn't such a big deal.

We can still work with these limited amount of bombers because we have all this artillery. This was supported by the fact that army intelligence said that the Germans defending the fort would be teenagers or old men drawn from the reserves, like the deep reserves. So they would be pushovers. Well about that, the Germans inside Fort Draant were not the young and old. Well, some of them were young, but you couldn't call them pushovers. They were drawn from the local officer's candidate school. The young ones were, meaning they were die hard, died in the wool, fucking fervent Nazis at this point.

And they weren't young enough for Montgomery to be interested in them. Yeah. That's why he didn't take the lead on this point. They weren't young enough for Montgomery to be interested in them. That's why he didn't take the lead on this one. Exactly. He's like, Patton, you can go down there and get your skull absolutely cloven and twain by Gunter Grass. That's a deep cut for German literature appreciators. I'm just going to say Gunter Grass, famous for being youth conscript in the Wehrmacht and then it comes out later that actually know he volunteered for the fucking Waffen SS. SS yeesh and then these kids were supported by a group of veterans from the 17th SS Panzer grid adears so just about the worst people that could be manning these defenses if you're attacking them people supported by

ideology and other people supported by experience not a good combination all of these guys if they weren't fervent Nazis, were hardened combat veterans from a combination of the Eastern Front and Normandy. They have seen some shit. Jesus, probably the worst two groups to go up against. Yeah, these guys could have an artillery shell blow up directly in front of them and tear their arm off, look down and be like, still better than Stalingrad. Yeah.

It's fine. I haven't even had to eat my friends yet. Yeah. It's like the Germans were losing because they were numerically outnumbered and exhausted and the supply lines were extended really far. But that doesn't mean that in situations where the terrain or the sort of order of battle circumstances favor them, they wouldn't do well.

They did lose and I'm not by no means saying like, oh, because they were good. That's been the consensus of historians now that like all of the major figures of World War II, especially from the British side have died. But like at the end of the day, you can't get past the fact that like they were actually well-trained.

They were well-trained. And they were also better than, certainly better than the British and better than the Americans at reorganizing units into effective units. They had a lot of experience doing it. Oh, they sure fucking did, yes. Yeah. It's relevant because we're talking about Alsace

and there's actually an Alsatian guy named Guy Seger who wrote a book called The Forgotten Soldier about because he was Alsatian, he wound up being drafted into the German army and fighting on the Eastern Front. I don't think he was at Stalingrad, but he was close to it. He was in one of the units nearby and then experienced the entire retreat from the Eastern front. And a significant part of the story he tells is being put into reconstitution units and

basically going into spillover battalions that then get reconstituted and sent out. They were doing that. They didn't stop doing that. And so- They had been doing that. They didn't stop doing that. And so like... They'd been doing that for years at this point. Obviously there's the penal battalion side of things, but then there's also just like regular soldiers who show up. You would be killed if you tried to run away in a disorganized way. You had to show up, present your papers, and then get put into a reconstitution unit. Yeah. Deserters were shot. I mean, that is one of the things that Blazkowicz was charged

with, was shooting deserters. So this is one of those things where like, I'm not patting them on the back in any way, but like, if you look at the situation at the time, it's easy to look, you know, it's kind of like general trend that follows post D-Day and be like, oh, well, you know, like what are their holdouts? You know, they're not going to, not going to last very long. It's like, well, no, they, the two things that really affected them were obviously the numerical superiority of the Soviet army and then also extended supply lines in the Eastern front. That's not a problem in Metz. No, I mean, it is not hard to see why a group of at minimum decently well-trained, ideologically motivated soldiers would be one hell of a speed bump when they're put behind the very well-built defenses. At that point, the

logistical superiority of the attackers is no longer that much of a strength. Because at the end of the day, you still have to get into that fort somehow and kill those soldiers, which is very hard to do. For better or worse, and like it's fucked up across the board, but like these guys aren't like being expected to defend to the last man to die for Hitler's dream to fucking like extirpate the slav. Like they're literally defending the border of Germany. That's going to change the calculus. Of course. I mean, you have the, the hardcore Nazis of the SS Panzer Grenadiers and the officers candidate school kids supported by

again that like they're defending their they're going to soon be defending their own country, which is not something any of them ever saw doing I'm sure but like on top of the wealth of experience that the Grenadiers have in not only gross horrific war crimes, but fighting the Soviet military. And then more importantly than that, in the context of this episode, defensive warfare during the retreat. They have so much more experience than the American soldiers that they're about to fight. And also, as you pointed out, some of these people who also have experience fighting post-D-Day against the Americans and the Brits.

Yeah. They've been doing this for years. Yeah. I'll leave you with this note, which I found very interesting before we go back to the, to the plot of this episode, which is that John Keegan, the British military historian actually made the point that he stopped writing about Market Garden until basically all of the major figures had died. Cause he's like, it's so fucking irritating dealing with them

and their desire to combat the truth, basically. Like, and so this is a similar phenomenon here that you have the weight of historiography and the big national narratives, but you don't understand the context of why 20-year-old American conscript is going up against something that's going to get them killed in a situation where timeline-wise you'd think that wouldn't be the case because if you let yourself fall into this belief that like, Oh yeah, you know, they were, they were done and dusted. They were beaten by that point.

I mean, look, what's going to happen in a few, you know, in a little while, which we'll cover at some point at the battle of Austin where it's called like the German stalling. You've talked about the Hercan forest before we've done a series of fossil, the American historian, his entire platoon, basically his platoon sergeant, all his squad leaders were killed. He was previously wounded on March 31st, 1945. I think a lot of us do with how Americans, and maybe this is a British thing as well, I don't know how British people learn about World War II, but Americans are taught that after D-Day, it was just rolling up a carpet effectively in the West. Like, yep, done and dusted all the way to Berlin, baby. All done. Oh, the Battle of the Bulge,

boohoo, nuts, et cetera. Yeah, exactly. And even the Battle of the Bulge was a heroic victory held on by the overly chiseled jawline with just the right amount of stubble of an American soldier, biting a Panther tank in half with his solid denture or whatever. It's like when we talked about the Hurricane Forest, even we were shocked. It's like, no, we were still sending kids into meat grinders when the war was over. The war is decided, but the Germans are still defending because of course they are. And every time, if you're an attacker attacking well thought out defensive position, defended

by anyone even half competent who knows what they're doing, you're going to have a bad fucking time. We've never once talked about one of these situations on this show where it's like, yeah, they just rolled right over him. No, doesn't happen. Never happens. And all of this is made worse by surprise surprise even worse intelligence. A massive American intelligence failure because they had no

idea the expansiveness of Fort Durant. The forts, the pillboxes, the trenches, the ambush positions, all of which were connected by a series of tunnels. They didn't know about that. They didn't know about anything. The way that the ambush positions and tunnels were laid out in front of Fort Durant meant that Germans could literally pop out of the ground, like Vietnam War style, so you can think of how it looks in your head, and shoot American soldiers in the back while they're advancing or ambush them while they're withdrawing. They don't know any of this. But there's one last detail that Patton and Walker agreed on fully because they completely believe the American intelligence

report had zero flaws. And that is they should use untested infantry with no combat experience because it would be good on the job training assaulting a fortified position. I feel like even retreating lieutenant played by Jimmy Fallon in Band of Brothers could have told you this was a bad idea. I forgot Jimmy Fallon was in Band of Brothers. He's like a supply guy with a retreating and he's telling basically the you know easy company guys about like hey watch out fucking this shit's rolling in really bad you know bad. Oh fuck I do remember that. that. Fallon in my mind's eye. It was Chris Kattan, which would have been fine. You cannot fuck with the tactical bingo.

Yeah. Now, the showy garage on that one, it could have been Jimmy Kimmel, too. Like, there's so many like guys it could have been. But yeah, it was Jimmy Fallon, a legion of Jimmy's on top of that. They didn't even so much as bother to send scouts ahead on the ground, nor did they know what the fort and its defences even looked like just in general, rather than a good old fashioned eye fucking from afar. So rather than having the advantage in virtually everything, which American forces could easily pull over the Germans in any battle at this point of the war. They had actually stacked the deck against themselves, kind of on purpose,

and then blindfolded it. On September 27th, 1944, the bombing of Fort Durant began using P-47s. They had to go through hails of Nazi anti-aircraft fire and hit it left, right, and center, scored multiple direct hits, and then pulled away. Then the artillery comes. Then there's another big thing missing here. If you're using a huge wave of aerial bombardment as a precursor to an infantry assault, one thing you should probably do, and this isn't me like, I don't know, you call Monday morning quarterbacking or whatever, mostly because we're recording on a Tuesday, but because this is just how things work,

is afterwards you send aerial reconnaissance over after the fact to a battle damage assessment to see if it worked. Do we need to send the bombers in again? They didn't do that. Nobody did anything to make sure if the air attack or the artillery bombardment did anything. Walker sends in the ground forces.

Perhaps we shouldn't treat the main character from Into the Wild, the guy who called himself Alexander Supertramp, as such an oddity in American culture because the idea of like, I'm gonna create Terra incognita by burning the map and blindfolding myself apparently seems to be a very American approach to warfare among other things.

Americans charging across no man's land, hiding inside of an abandoned bus and accidentally killing themselves by eating potato seeds. Eating the berry that kills you because you're like, you know what? These sea rations are bad. I want to spice it up a little. I want to live dangerously. I'm sick of jalapeno cheese spread. They wouldn't have eaten jalapeno cheese spread because they would have said something racist about it. Can you imagine how fucking bland? Especially Patton. I bet you those rations were sucking real bad, man. The defenders let them advance, crawling up and down the dry moat, climbing over the barbed wire, and then as they were entering the minefield, they opened fire on them. It's only now American soldiers see two things.

The bombardment had done absolutely nothing, and Fort Durian was a fucking monster. Guns of all sizes, calibers, and positions all opened fire on them at once. It's just like when you're holding the long sight line outside I think it's bomb plant A in dust. It's just like oh yeah it's just like one you're holding the long sight line outside, I think it's bomb plant a in dust. It's just like, oh yeah, it's just like one by one. Boom. Hit him in an op, hit him in an op, hit him in an op. Yeah.

They, and they were trying to bunny hop to get away from the machine gun fire. You're just doing knife tricks, trying to dodge the bullets. You're climbing up out of the mode over the fucking barbed wire. There's just a guy bunny hopping, doing knife tricks tricks running around Get a gut shot and falling down someone screams a medic. Someone runs over it. You're dying You're holding your intestines inside and you you pick yourself up up to the medic. So you're like fucking hackers Somehow you're still being called slurs in Russian I'm gonna take a different approach for comparing this to gaming that like you this is basically you think you're taking these guys in for like a level on rails explaining the mechanics of the game, like tutorial mode on age of empires or something

like that. And instead you wind up on like against like 99 level 99 fucking veterans of girl defender, like tower defense game, except also you're attacking Mont Saint Michel. Like it's just like like novelty oversized vertical Fortification and like every single one of these people is just doing the weird bullet hell fucking Instagram ad games We're like a gorilla hits you in the ass with a baseball bat and you go flying and knock out a million of them like But the girl is a Nazi. The girl is a Nazi too. you for some reason this game 100% exists on Steam I mean Cynthia will often snip things that she sees on Instagram and send it to me

Just like the most bizarre game ads that she gets like absolutely that and like level 99 mafia boss We're like at level one. You're naked in the street It's like oh so this game is set in Britain the American attack shattered on impact with soldiers falling back into cover only discover the ambush points German soldiers began popping out of the ground and shooting them as they hid behind like trees or rocks Throwing grenades at them and then ducking back away into the tunnel system before Americans could figure out Just what the fuck was going on and this went on for hours before the order was finally given to withdraw. You're just trying to fight fucking Nazi digger. I don't know why that's killing me so much. The idea that you send these guys in and they said that the terrain is worse than you thought,

the defenses are worse than you thought, The defenses are worse than you thought. The defenders are worse than you thought. They apparently have the ability to play whack a mole that kills you. And then it takes you a couple of hours. Like maybe this is a bad idea. Like once again, this is what I describe as the real life version of when like the gate, like an RPG is open ended. And so like they can't necessarily lock off a level, but they have to create like the sort of, you know, this is not a place of honor sort of like physical indications that you should not do this level right now

that you have to do something else first. Yeah. I'm built different. I'll just jump over. Exactly. RIP to your niece, but I'm built different. As always, like a riff comes on the show and I just immediately Google it just to see if it exists. So I Google diglet in a Nazi uniform. No, no, no, no, no, don't do this. The poor Diglett. Reddit, I haven't clicked on the link, is like my favorite Halloween costume I've done so far. And the second result is, is it problematic to say the Nazi uniform

looks cool? Reddit posted on the 26th of February, 2020. I mean, look, that's probably not the worst example of like Nazi sympathizer Pokemon fan art. I'm just saying like I can only... It exists. I mean Mewtwo is effectively a Nazi experiment. Well, I mean... If we're gonna go into lore here, which I don't want to. Pikachu literally has lightning bolt stuff. Like there's already an association. Problematic.

Problematic. Why did Ash's grandparents move to Argentina? Exactly, I was gonna say like... I was getting a lot of questions about my cosplay and I had to explain like no it's Hitmonchamp as Yukio Mishima Ash was actually really disappointed that his his mentor Ernst Röhm disappeared. They could never explain Nobody knows what professor oak was doing during the war this led to a meeting between Patton and Omar Bradley, not Professor Oak. Which is prob- now this exchange is probably one of the stranger meetings I've read between a subordinate and a superior.

Patton told Bradley he was doing recon by fire rather than a full operation in an attempt to take the fort. Patton saw he was lying to his face and said quote, For God's sake, George, lay off. I promise you'll get your chance. When we get going again, you can have far easier pinch out of the Mets and take it from behind. Why bloody your nose with this pecking campaign? Patton then looked him in the eye and said quote, We're doing it to blood the new divisions. For people who don't know what that means,

it means throwing fresh soldiers into combat to give them experience for no reason. Now remember Bradley knows Pat is lying to his face. Pat knows Bradley knows he's lying to his face and then they just kind of continue. Omar Bradley got all his teeth knocked out in a car accident when he was young so he had like a big metal mouth like I would not want to lie to that man's face. Like jaws? He would pull on jaws from James Bond your ass. Fucking incredible which means terrible character to use in Colden Eye. God damn my fucking CEO was sending me into diet meds while he's smiling at me with his fucking grail.

Everybody has to listen to Omar Bradley or he'll just tear your arm off at the The CEO was sending me into diet meds while he's smiling at me with his fucking grail. Everybody has to listen to Omar Bradley or I'll just tear your arm off at the shoulder with one bite of his iron maw. This implies Omar Bradley exists in the same universe as the Space Marine shooting lasers. Moon Wrecker is a weird movie, we'll just leave it at that. Bradley in his biography said that he still thought the whole thing was stupid, but didn't demand that Patton stop attacking, mostly because he was worried about pissing off Patton, which is a strange relationship between a superior and his subordinate, which tells me Bradley couldn't control his own subordinate.

It seems very, very strange to imagine being like the parents of a child, like an American soldier who died and you're reading the biography of their commander, the autobiography, and it's like he's basically talking about the guy who got your kid killed. Sort of like, you know, he's sort of the Tommy the errant pinball wizard and I really didn't want to stop him when he was on a winning run. That's just like, I think I'd be a little bit a little irritated, a little, a little, a little miffed, a little cheesed off. Yeah. Why did my son die? Oh, you see, despite the fact he went through basic training before being deployed to Europe our old-brained Idiot former cavalry commander turned tank commander

Believe that your son needed to be shot at in order to be a better soldier No, he didn't train him on assaulting fortified positions before doing so despite the fact We explicitly told him to do that, you know, it's like on-the-job training like being a milk delivery guy He'll figure it out eventually. Anyway, we're sorry for your son disobeys orders. We shoot him. If this guy disobeys orders, we basically are like, let's make a bad ass movie with George C Scott about him. Yeah. Let's turn them into a, the great tanker in the sky, which is what they called him when I was in tank school at Fort Knox. This is one of those moments where being a knowing anything about Frank Zappa would help you

to make a joke here because I feel like a better name would be like, yeah, you gotta do it for the great tanker in the sky or go by his real name, Sir George Pomponese. Patton met with the rest of his generals and abandoning the attack wasn't even a topic of discussion until Patton's aides kind of gently brought up, why don't we stick to the original double-envelopment plan and forget the forts? Patton insisted, quote, we have to put our hands on the plow. We must finish the job. I'm going to compare this to a thing that's very close to all of our hearts. If I have six brand new Lost Mary, 6,000 hit vapes, and one of them breaks. I'm kind of annoyed, but it's not a big deal.

But if I'm like, hey, you know what would be really funny? If I dropped all six of them into a river to see what happened, I might be kind of irritated. And if they were vapes you guys wanted as well, you were counting on me to bring them, you'd be pretty mad at me. So I feel like when you're hemorrhaging combat power like this, that is needed for the Allied invasion of Germany, which has still not yet happened, to just be like, oh no, no, this is a useful training situation as it's just like full on precursor to hamburger hill event horizon shit happening right now. It feels as though, I guess the point I'm making is I'm really taken aback by the degree

to which they are treating him with kid gloves when he is both overtly disobeying orders, lying to his superior and hemorrhaging combat power that they need. Yeah, it's, it's incredible to me. And to be fair, the blooding new soldiers thing was not an out of character thing for a lot of generals of the era. Um, but still, I mean, it's so antithetical to the, the actual continued operations of a military, but also just stupid on face value.

Yeah, it's sort of like American, what is it, devdokshina or whatever it is, like the thing the Russians do with the- Ah, the rule of the grandfathers, yes. They beat up conscripts to the point that you like permanently cripple them and they can't be in the military anymore. Yeah, makes them a man when they can't walk right anymore. Everybody knows you're a better soldier once both of your knees are blown blown out. Right, Nate? Right, anybody else who's ever done a contract in the military?

There's just swaths of Russian men who walk who are walking around like John Wayne after their CL beat the shit out of them. Yeah, I mean, amongst worst things. We've talked about, I'm going to try to say dot off Sheena. I'm sure it's mispronounced. Yeah, I don't know how to say it correctly. But we talked about it at length during our Soviet Afghan war series and there's just straight up murders going on with the ideas like, no, it helps unit cohesion. Actually, those guys are all squatting because they're doing physio, trying to fix their

backs. Yeah, exactly. Hazing, real bad for lower back health. Walker came up with a new tactic. It involved something called snakes. No, not the basket full of snakes from the Ryukyu Kingdom episode, though that would be really cool. Rather, snakes were long tubes of explosives pushed forward by modified bulldozer tanks.

And while they're putting all that together, the tanks would now be loaded with high explosive concrete penetrating shells, something they didn't have the first time because they just assumed they wouldn't need them. And in the time it took to do all of this, the infantry would take a couple days to learn how to attack a fortified position, which amounts to them, you know,

you call it what, glass house training or something like that. Yeah, yeah, typically, yeah, kind of. You make the outline of something on grass you basically make the floor plan of a building with white tape and create like the idea of rooms and doors and stuff to practice people's positioning and things like that yeah yeah they did that but for attacking trenches and stuff which i mean it would be kind of is it would be kind of frustrating to be the trainee going through that training and then like mount doom is just right in the background where like all of your friends have died. You know what I mean?

Like maybe done this glass house before also, uh, it's missing the important part of trench warfare is what to do when you're inside the trench Mmm, just getting there is only part of it and then okay We've gotten into the trench you have Nazi Mount Doom looming over us in the background We have no forts to practice this on, so I guess we'll all just go fuck ourselves. Yeah, I wouldn't worry about that bulldozer breaking down our house. I threw a couple of corn nuts at it and they pinged off it, so it's been reduced. It's no longer an obstacle. And if you thought that this would make things better, well, generally speaking, you'd be

right. Though, when you add some homemade bombs being dragged into place by bulldozer tanks, shit tend to get a little weird. And as soon as the attack started, these snakes began to break off from their carriages as Germans opened fire on the tanks. Because they saw these bulldozer tanks leading the charge and went, yeah, we should probably shoot at those first. They should have deployed the panjandrum. Exactly. Just unleash it towards the fort. It should have deployed the Panjandrum. Exactly. Just unleash it towards the fort. It wouldn't do anything, but it'd be fun. You gotta have some fun with it.

One can presume that the people who designed this and also created the sort of echelon for this attack in the same universe as the Contra games went on to design the enemy apparatuses that have the big red glowing thing you shoot at. Ha ha ha. So these snakes began breaking off from the carriages like I said. And remember they're advancing uphill, which now means you have soldiers running for their

lives away from German fire as well as random snake bombs, which are now rolling down the hill towards them, totally untethered and armed. I also want to reiterate this for the listener. The entire time this is happening, Omar Bradley is giving patent instructions that say, go around it. Yeah, don't do that. Please stop doing that. This isn't breakwarp manner, like, oh, this is a machine gun position and it'll take out unsuspecting columns. We have to take it out. Like this is a huge fortified position. The approach for the advance that they're looking at here, it says go around it because the juice isn't worth the squeeze to use the colloquialism

here. However, apparently Patton loves the meat juice that comes out of a meat wave. So you know what? I have to have my succulent meat juice. Slurping down the meat juice and the meat wave. Another part of the plan was to bring up combat engineers who were supposed to be equipped with enough explosives to blow through German pillboxes. Just slap them on the front, blow them apart, right? Hopefully, maybe if they don't crack them open, it'll mess them up to the point the infantry can climb inside and finish the job.

The combat engineers fight through barbed wire trenches and tunnels in order to plant their bombs, only discover after they go off they didn't do fucking anything to the German defenses as they retreated to grab more explosives and hit them again Germans popped out of the tunnels in front of them and we got a replay of the Nazi Diglett moment from a few moments before. I think if I was a heretofore successful Sapper school graduate I would be very very frustrated if I discovered the Wehrmacht had cast reflect on their pill boxes I mean, would it be reflect? I you're right reflect is the one for magic barriers with physical damage Yeah, I don't know

I guess that implies whether or not you think explosions are magic right in if you have an opinion on the the taxonomy of You know of explosive weapons in the Final Fantasy universe. I believe they count as magic I don't know because there's an item you can get in Final Fantasy 7. There's just hand grenade. Oh, yeah, you're right Okay, that is a barrier. Yeah, exactly. They cast barrier on it instead glad we One thing that we will always agree upon is that there is a maxed out material involved in every historical battle We don't know what material it is out material involved in every historical battle. We don't know what material it is, but fuck this is just the scene from Final Fantasy seven where you have to defend the Phoenix

Hill from the Shinra troops except in this case the Nazis are defending the Phoenix material. I don't know. My only FF7 observation I was going to make is everyone thinks they're going to be Sephiroth but far more people wind up being Palmer and just getting hit by a truck. So you know what? Choose your battles wisely. A lot of guys are bigs and wedge of the situation just getting blown up and never spoken about ever again. However, despite these failures, the ground attack goes on for hours. Bravo company continues to fight their way forward, creating just enough of a gap for more soldiers to push through. Then night falls.

The Americans hold their ground through the night as Nazis keep seemingly magically appearing in front, behind and besides them and opening fire with machine guns, or knocking out their tanks with point blank fire from Panzerfausts. This is where American soldiers do what American soldiers honestly do best Completely ignore any battle plan and just start doing whatever the fuck they want They start doing action movie shit in order to force the attack forward Robert Holman a private first-class Grabs a explosive charge from a dead engineer runs forward on his own directly towards the machine gun bunker climbs on top of it and

runs forward on his own, directly towards the machine gun bunker, climbs on top of it, and shoves it through a gap in the concrete. Then he runs away, the bunker blowing sky high behind him as he went, and we can all assume this man did not look back at the explosion. It's like a fucking John Woo movie. This shit is happening everywhere. Once they're bogged down, every American soldier starts doing what we were literally just joking about, starts playing Call of Duty. This guy's running, throwing knives at the spawn point for the Germans.

Fucking spawn campers. The Germans observed, and I think Rick Atkinson in his books talked about this a lot, specifically in North Africa in World War II, but elsewhere, which is that the Germans didn't really deviate from doctrine, but they were very, very well trained on it. And Americans, their degree of training on doctrine was spotty at best. But one thing that Americans did do well was adapt quickly and figure out stuff that works. And you see this throughout history with the American military.

It's just that you kind of don't want to be the first echelon of the meat wave because you're the thing we learn to adapt from after you die. The nice term for this on the PowerPoint slide is adaptive wave. I love being a human AAR bullet in the improve column. But I yearn to be a bullet point in the center for lessons learned. Yeah, exactly. The center for Attacking Mount Doom Lessons Learned. This began to happen more and more as soldiers realized the only way they were going to take the bunkers was that if they did it by hand.

None of the explosives were working, air support never showed up because the weather turned on them again, and actual snakes may have been more useful than the bomb snakes the combat engineers had. Joe, I don't know if you have the detail here if this is a question that we can get an answer on but is there some explanation as to why the explosives were so ineffective? It was just the construction of the fort was too good. It was like reinforced concrete upon reinforced concrete and you know the combat engineer charges they were built weren't shape charges so against reinforced concrete it just like pissing on a wall you know unless you're packing that much explosives if it's not a shape charge it's not gonna get through this shit so soldiers begin finding the

slits for machine gun holes firing firing ports, small doors, chucking explosives through those or grenades through those because they had finally gotten close enough to be able to do that by crawling over the meat wave that fell in front of them. Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, yeah, I mean it's just, which probably explains why the the air bombardment didn't do anything either. Yeah, cool. I mean they did get a couple of direct shots, but also napalm wasn't going to do anything to these constructions. A lot of it has to do with when the most devastating parts of an artillery

bombardment getting hit with an airstrike, especially in the era where wet bombs were just big and dumb and powerful rather than being directed was the concussive force of them. And the Germans could just duck down into the tunnel network. They didn't get their shit smattered from the inside out by the concussive wave of the bomb. So they just hide in the tunnels when the bombardment was over they'd come back up to the surface. And this is where the Americans discover the tunnel network. They break their way into a bunker and realize they're looking down into a tunnel shaft that just continues to go

down rather than like a cross into the fort. It's very frustrating when you discover that the German defenders of Metz have a half man half bull son that they've put inside a labyrinth and you're the virgin sacrifice because they know you've never gotten laid. Captain Harry Anderson of Bravo Company was the first one to discover the tunnel network. And, you know, you could just assume what he looks like in World War Two media, you know, his helmet tilted ever so slightly to the side. A cigarette in his mouth, Tommy gun in one hand. He just dives into the fucking tunnel, shooting and throwing hand

grenades the entire way. The Germans shoot back. They chuck his hand grenades the entire way. The Germans shoot back, they chuck his own grenades back at him, this creates a literal fucking game of hot potato that Anderson manages to survive, blowing up several Nazis and forcing others to surrender. Then Private Holman strikes again, like parkour ninjas his way up a bunker, gets to the top, kicks open a ventilation shaft and just starts making it rain grenades on the inside. American chinovay they learned the way of the ninja.

He's you know the Italian American guy from fucking Brooklyn who learned how to do this because he could climb up you know four or five story tenement buildings because he might see a flash of boob and now it's like whoa you can get a medal for this you can save your buddy's life for this he's like I would prefer to see boob and now it's like, well, you can get a medal for this. You can save your buddy's life for this. He's like, I would prefer to see boob, but I'll take it. Hey, oh, I learned this from a guy in Okinawa. I had a climb for war. Hey, I can move around multiple theaters across the entire world. This shit don't make any fucking sense.

I told those gobble gool inside this bunker. I was in Okinawa. I'm in the Marine Corps. What the fuck am I doing here? Unfortunately, Holman does eventually get turned into a puddle of Gabagool. He does not survive this battle It's very funny that yeah, because his name is Holman, but he's apparently he's probably from like Trying to think of where the German areas of Manhattan were back in those with Manhattan not Brooklyn, you know He would have been like yeah, he was from Washington Heights or something like that ancestral gab I was thinking though when you describe the character the caricature that it's like

Yeah, it sounds like the kind of thing you would see described in like an Ernie pile column or something like that. Ancestral Gabigool. I was thinking though, when you described the caricature that it's like, yeah, it sounds like the kind of thing you would see described in like an Ernie Pyle column or something like that about, you know, this, the sort of plucky American private who, yeah, went off to, you know, invent parkour. I learned this in the war. It's like how karate got brought to the US by occupation forces in Japan. It's like, that's how parkour came up. Cause some guys survived a battle in France one time.

But then it's also funny because it's like, he comes back and he's unemployed after the war and he gets, he gets, he gets hired by the local lobster, Tony beer shit to fucking break into banks, break, break into fucking money counting places by climbing up the walls. Yeah. I was thinking about this too. Cause I just, I think it was, may have been actually Ernie pile, but it might've been Rick Atkinson's book talking about this kind of approach in Italy where they literally figured out the easiest way to do mine clearance was to have a guy ride on the hood of a Jeep and just point a fucking Beretta at them when they saw mines, just shoot them.

Like American problem solving at its best. The only way this would have been any better would be if the training aids for the soldiers to learn how to shoot a gun from the hood of the car at the mine was to compare it to a burger. In other places, Americans assaulted into bunkers and found more tunnels with the entryway barred by reinforced steel doors, leading some to try to wire up their own explosives to them and blow them apart, succeeding in collapsing the bunker on top of their heads. Others brought up acetylene cutting torches to try and get inside, only to find the Germans had actually piled up

just like a whole bunch of trash on the other side of the door, so they cut through the door, find like their like shit buckets, scrap metal, whatever else piled up there, and the Germans are waiting on the other side of their garbage barrier to shoot through them as the Americans are trying desperately to throw all the trash out of the tunnel. Yeah, I mean, I'm not going to lie. The Fortnite phase with this battle sounds a lot more fun than the initial one. The German just building a fort as he jumps through the sky. Asymmetrical warfare. One side is playing no build and the other is just like grafting shit into the sky.

American squads fought through all of that, finding more and more reinforced doors as they went further and further into the tunnel network. Each time they would stop, start the long process of trying to cut through them with their torches. However, as they got deeper, there were fewer ventilation shafts. So they discovered in real time that if you use one of these cutting torches in an enclosed space, it rapidly fills them with poisonous gas. Something they did not know until nearly passing out. They were forced to retreat, grab their gas masks and went back into the cutting.

I have to say though, endless series of interlocking sealed doors, trash piles, random assortments of things, below ground, a guy named Blazkowicz is involved. We've just invented Wolfenstein. This is just Wolfenstein. I didn't realize it was describing an actual historical moment, which implies fucking mecha robot Hitler is going to be at the center. It all comes back to lines led by robots.

They were really confused because even though some of them had been trained in like basic German phrases, they didn't understand why people kept saying, Mein Leben! In another case, the Americans said, fuck it, and planted a 60 pound charge and won the internal doors, blowing it. It succeeded in taking the door out, but also succeeded in pushing a cloud of toxic fumes through the entire tunnel network, forcing Americans and German soldiers alike to stop what they're doing and rush to the machine gun firing ports and rifle firing ports to try and get fresh

air. You're just outside the bunker and all you see is through the fucking firing port a series of lips. Sometimes the Americans and Germans ended up at the same hole so they'd get a gulp of fresh air that promptly continued killing one another? Once again, Hideo Kojima. This is just one echelon below fighting the level boss who is a fat guy on rollerblades who can only be attacked when he takes a break to eat a hamburger.

In other cases, so like when this bomb goes off, other people don't have any machine guns slits near them to breathe out of, so they're forced to run outside directly into a German artillery bombardment, which then they're, they're forced to like have a choice. Do I stand outside in fresh air in the artillery bombardment or do I go back into the poison hole? So like, but when does the guy who's covered in bees show up? This is the point where it started, like all I can think of it. It's like a wicker man I was gonna say, like, this is the point where it started, like, all I can think of is- Is this like a Wicker Man situation? Exactly. It's like, at this point, like, you're just, everyone's expecting them to just come

out and yell, End Ex, because, like, it's just getting dumber and dumber. Tom, in the US Army, when you're doing training simulations, basically, like, End Ex is end exercise, and it's like, so the simulation's over. It's like, when it gets, either you've succeeded or it's gotten so fucking stupid that you just have to stop and start over again. And it's just sort of like, when you're at the point where you're like, like incinerated trash fumes are causing everyone to expect you and you're running basically over and having a meat cute at the same fucking machine gun port with the German soldiers or you run outside and it's just like, Oh, we've invented wall of flame and it's hitting you.

That to me is like, all right, index. The Germans and Americans rushed to the machine gun slit. They pucker their lips to try to get air from the same hole and what? Their lips meet in the middle? I was going to say Hideo Kojima, one circle of the Venn diagram, Yukio Mishima, another one, Wattpad comments, another one. Now despite crazy stories like this, the American attack continues to get more and more disorganized as lines get more and more blurred. Germans keep popping up, Americans were randomly running

screaming armed with cutting torches into a tunnel network, the parkour bombers kept getting shot at by their own men, and nobody knew where anyone was anymore. Of all of the video game comparisons we've made about this battle, the most realistic one is they're playing real life team Fortress. Yeah. I mean, all that has to happen now is someone has to get head snide with a crossbow and it's just like a German frantically trying to build a Gatling gun turret in the corner. Instead of pulling out more reinforcements were sent in, including engineers and flamethrower

soldiers to deal with the tunnels. Now most of these men did not make it far, since most people do if they saw a flamethrower guy running into battle to immediately kill him or shoot the flamethrower and blow them up. Listen, whether it's his battler or his niece, George Patton does not pull out. You beat me to it, honestly. I wanted it so hard to make that joke. Being a flamethrower soldier is the closest equivalent you can have to having your entire

body be built out of the glowing red thing you shoot at. This had been going on for days at this point. It is now October 5th. A lot of the fight had simply moved underground into the Fort complex itself. Some of the battles going on in the trenches and pillboxes as well, but that just left the American tanks to sit around on the outside not doing anything and German soldiers to continue Nazi digleting out of holes and hitting them with Panzerfausts. They really should have called index at this point since the whole point of this would

be a training exercise. This is basically like you're an NTC but your command sergeant major has bipolar disorder. It's just endless. Once again, that like 80 year old French guy who's held up eating his thin soup is just like happy. He's like, at least they're underground now. I can have my thin soup in peace. This is Pat looking through his fucking field glasses and seeing soldiers cartwheeling back and forth, throwing grenades, screaming and running from poison gas kissing one another. The second coming is happening right now. Jesus is here throwing arty sims at everyone. Like it's just, it's all going very, very badly.

Patton lowers his field glasses. It's going perfectly according to plan. If that wasn't bad enough, Bulk ordered the other forts in the area to now begin bombing Fort Draon itself, since it was now crawling with Americans. Somehow the situation had gone so badly that now the safest place for Americans to be was underground fighting a tunnel battle with Nazis at point-blank range with cutting torches, grenades, and pistols. We're using the war tactics of the mole people now. Tathagal mulling.

Mole maxing. Power mole. God damn it. We've learned from the Morlocks. We have a military liaison from wherever Diglett's from. He's taught us much. The Diglett military attache to Pat. This is like the opposite day underground version of the raid.

You keep going lower and lower into ground to fight new Indonesian Kung Fu bosses. Captain Jack Gary remembered, quote, the situation is critical. A couple more barrages or another counter attack and we're sunk. We have no men. Our equipment is shot and we just can't go. The enemy is infiltrated and pinned what we are down here. We cannot advance. The enemy are just butchering these troops until we have nothing left to hold with." Again, instead of pulling out, more reinforcements were poured in as

companies B and G were relieved and had after having lost about half of their men in and around the fort. By the 6th, Patton was understanding finally that not only was this battle completely and totally unwinnable, but not worth the cost perhaps. However, he still refused to call it off. Instead he just kept dumping more and more men into the fort as the tunnel warfare inside only got worse and worse. I feel like we're absolutely mole maxed out now. No more maxing. Yeah. Mole maxed.

Germans were now counter mining into the tunnels held by Americans setting off their own charges and blowing the walls down, crushing entire squads of men trapping them feet underground. The Americans countered with their own mining, though the various waves of reinforcements hadn't brought their gas masks, and seemingly the Germans weren't carrying any at all, so the entire thing devolved into a confusing mess of men trying to blow one another up while vomiting and going blind From the fumes from each other's bombs. Hey in the land of the blind the mole man is king You know, I was gonna make a reference to the 2015 meatwave album delusion moon, but now I'm like, you know what?

It's gone beyond that. I think you should go back to their their debut album, which is just called brother This led to multiple occasions of people just getting lost. They could have been blinded or turned around but the underground is virtually pitch black as well. One corporal named Wilkerson, a messenger, got lost and accidentally gassed before he realized where he was going. He ended up standing in the went to the hospital and he was so mad that he went to the hospital and he was so mad that he went to the hospital and he was so mad that he went to the hospital and he was so mad that he went to the hospital and he was so mad that he went to the hospital and he was so mad that he went to the hospital and he was so mad that he went to the hospital

and he was so mad that he went to the hospital and he was so mad that he went to the hospital and he was so mad that he went to the hospital and he was so maders up a different tunnel before anybody thought to capture or kill him. This is just straight- Sorry, didn't mean to interrupt! This is basically Inglourious Bastards. This is tower defense Inglourious Bastards. American positions within the fort, the ones that they actually managed to hold, were rapidly running out of food, ammo, and water as the battle curled on into the middle of October. Jesus Christ. Finally, Patton decided, quote, I think the show is going sour. We might have to pull out.

First time he's ever said that. I was just thinking about like Patton, obviously, this is multi-week affair at this point. So Patton obviously is not, you know, he's getting his updates and stuff and doing staff meetings and all things generals do, but certainly he's got to be sleeping at some point. He's got to have some personal time at some point. I am just imagining Patton sending a verbatim quote of Napoleon's letter to Josephine be like, I'll be there in four days. Don't wash. Yeah, probably. I just, the smell of the tunnel glass from gas reminds me of you, my love. I think for me that it's just like every one of us has a situation in our life where you've kind of gone off on something, you know, you weren't supposed to do or you're taking a

big chance, taking a big risk with something. And normally you want to hope that it works out. You've made a good decision. And it's like, uh, when you, you, you, you've deviated from the planet and you've created underground underground tunnel you know meat juice gas few mole people fucking like in glorious bastard slash zombie movie like you'd like to think this guy's like okay what do I do to rectify this but instead he's like just keep pushing George Patton standing in front of the mirror like Eminem and lose yourself trying to get hyped up but it's just soldiers dying behind him as he's listening to the fucking beat.

I did send my troops down to that tunnel to get killed. I did fuck my niece. But I know something about you. You went to Cranbrook. That's a private school. That's a private school! Ugh. God, I just, it's one of those things where I understand now why biographers and the sort

of like general, you know, like, history books for your dad kind of approach to American military storytelling have just completely written this one out. general, you know, like history books for your dad kind of approach to American military storytelling have just completely written this one out. It's not very well known, I'll say. Patton certainly doesn't write about it often. But by October 13th, the last Americans, or at least the last ones anybody knew where they were, pulled out of Fort Draen. But because everything was so chaotic and disorganized, small pockets of

men were left behind, wounded or not, to fall into the hands of the Germans, many of which were executed. Well done, Patton. In the end, 64 Americans were dead, but nearly a thousand were wounded. Absolutely nothing- oh we have no idea how many of the Germans lost, legitimately not a clue. It's not thought to be very high. Absolutely nothing was gained and Fort Durant would not fall until you guessed it, Metz had been enveloped and it could be put under siege and taken from behind, which is what everybody had been telling Patton since the very beginning. By World War II, US Army, MTO, you've effectively lost two battalions, either killed or mostly wounded and only to go and do the thing that everyone told you to do in the first place

But also you you lied to your boss all metal teeth Yeah, general Omar jaws Bradley and yeah, he'd never gotten any trouble for it. I mean, it's Pat and he never got in trouble for anything Really? It just kept on keep it on the end Patton's a dick. That's the moral of the story We should we need to arm the mole people. That's what I'm taking away from this because the Nazis are hiding underground in tunnels. The Nazis have Diglets. We need mole people. Fringe internet conspiracy theory people who are anti-seatbelt because they're like, if we have seatbelts then people like Patton might survive.

Hyperborea is real. The Nazis are under the ground and Diglett has legs. Diglett has legs. We need to arm the more locks. Also, that's not Diglett's mouth. That's his nose. Oh, okay. Anyway, that's a podcast, fellas. We do a thing on this podcast called questions from the Legion. If you'd like to ask us a question from the Legion, you could support the show on Patreon, ask us your question on Patreon or in our Discord, which you'll also have access to and we'll answer on the air. And today's question actually already has my answer on the previous episode. What is your favorite meme of the year so far? We're in December now, so we're coming close to the end.

I don't know if what I'm seeing is necessarily, uh, I guess for this year SB, if you saw for me, it's it's it's it's a hundred percent. It's the martial law department calling you and you can either accept or accept mine. We talked about during the, the Boer war series and it has to be the cuckstool. Yeah. The cuckstool on the Dutch NS trains. Someone shit on it. And so said someone poop and churn up the cuckstool. I would say that, I mean, there's one that I saw that it's very, very old, but because I, I now that I live in a French speaking country, I encounter more French speaking French language memes online. And there's, there's one that I, the best way I could describe it is it's like it's obviously

One of those same kind of horrible Instagram game ads But it's like it like a dating sim game or something like that And it has a woman making a very confused face in like the worst possible French It basically says I'm gonna try to translate so it connotes the bad grammar of it Basically, it's just like you keep yourself calm or A or B go ape shit. But like, I don't know, there's something about that expression. And I was like, you know what? I wish there was an analog in English I could share this with because I liked that. But yeah, mosh a lot department, man. That one, uh, the first time I saw that I lost my mind. It was so

good. Um, I need to pull it up. Uh, I'll actually, I'll actually just play it into the microphone cause it's so good. It's a guy called cool man van. Who's this Australian guy who wears this like creased white shirt, a bowler hat and just says shit like this. I'm tired of hearing you lame say I ain't with it. Telling me I ain't got motion. I went to your hood and they don't know you.

Embarrassing. As a matter of fact, I am pushing pin. I don't know you. Embarrassing. Embarrassing. As a matter of fact, I am pushing, Pidgey. That's pushing powder down my musket so I may smite another arm. With a switch and a beam on my blender, boss, your hood's off site. Read it and weep. It's just so good. I knew about Dracula Flow, but I think that going back and watching Dracula Flow again, and I think the one about all my diamonds from the most horrible possible circumstances

Audemars PGA worth the entire GDP of Yemen like some of these is they just stick with me forever I'm a dog. I'm biting the fart bubbles in the bag We smoking simbiles. We smoking runs Top shelf sauce I fucked up my circadian rhythm Rhythm I'm taking Jordanian Jimmy's. I'm on those Broward County tic-tacs I would say one other thing Joe is that there was a video that went viral the guy who's like a like a scooter driver in London with like half of like a ball of clava partially pulled down like a like a Protective mask talking about like yeah, you know

I just the more faith in God you have, the more you love chicks. I just love chicks so much. Like it makes you say much all a lot. Like that guy actually wound up being my delivery driver. He came to my place and I was like, he's like, what's up man? I was like, Hey boss, what's up? Tips was bombing man. And then just gave me the food. I was like, wait, it's you. But he was gone before I could, I could be like, I love you in that video. God, like a fart in the wind. Anyway fellas, that is a podcast, but you have other podcasts. Plug those other podcasts. What a Hell of a Way to Dad, podcast about don't join the military and what it's like

being a parent and gardening and cooking a lot. Trash Shoots Your Podcasts about the tech industry and why it's bad and dumb but funny, and also British politics. Kill James Bond, a feminist film podcast that's extremely funny. Uh, listen to all of those. They're great. I love them. Uh, beneath the skin show about tattoo history and glue factory, a comedy show with no theme, but nothing but riffs. But before we go, the best two lines from Dracula flower is my shoot a crack head. He looked like Woody Harrelson And I drink her piss out of another man's balls.

I think my favourite one is the last fuckboy that ran off with the pack got choked out by a pair of Givenchy gloves. The last thing you saw was the price tag. Price tag. Faded into darkness I let the archangels take him. This is the only podcast I host. If you like what we do here consider supporting us on Patreon. You get almost seven years of bonus content every episode early. Ebooks, audiobooks, access to the discord community, first dibs on live show tickets and merch when they're available. Access to our side series, which we have many at this point. And it gets you

a tube of saliva from a soldier who fought in the tunnels of Fort Draon. No, that would be gross, but it could be some trash water mixed with meat juice from the meat wave. There you go. You get one Ziploc baggie full of meat wave. They're actually a good band. Check them out. Also, I'm gonna leave you with this. If you read some of the titles of meat wave songs and sequences, it sounds like you're having a hearing a conversation between two people inside the tunnels in this battle brother sham king sunlight. It's not alright Mystery the truth. I've got ants

Well, thank you everybody boys. Thank you for joining me until next time we've got it