Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 370: Operation Frankton

Episode Date: July 6, 2025

The British military, faced with the seemingly insurmountable problem of a heavily defended port, decide that there is nothing that methed out kayak-borne commandos on a suicide mission cannot handle. Sources: CE Lucas Phillips. The Cockleshell Heroes: The Most Courageous and Imaginative Commando Raid of WWII Quentin Rees. Cockleshell Heroes: The Final Witness. Robert Lyman. Operation Suicide: The Remarkable Story of the Cockleshell Raid https://www.historyextra.com/period/second-world-war/cockleshell-heroes-who-what-operation-frankton-ww2/ https://www.historyisnowmagazine.com/blog/2024/10/2/operation-frankton-the-most-daring-raid-of-world-war-2 https://www.cwgc.org/our-work/blog/operation-frankton-the-true-story-of-the-cockleshell-heroes/

Hey everyone, it's Joe. If you like what we do here on the show, consider supporting us on Patreon. Just $5 a month gets you access to our entire bonus episode catalog, as well as every regular episode one full week early. Access to all of our side series that are currently ongoing and our back catalog of those as well. Gets you ebooks, audiobooks, first dibs on live show tickets, and merchandise when they're available. And also gets you access to our Discord, which has turned into a lovely little community. So go to patreon.com slash lions led by donkeys podcast. I'm Joe. With me is Tom and Nate. Fellas, how are you doing?

I'm very happy to be in yet another in a sequence of dungeons that we've spent in this weekend. This is a nice dungeon though. It's a basement, but it's very comfortable. We did our live show yesterday. I did two in the same venue and it was a lovely space. Well, it will be when it's finished. It's currently unfinished.

It's all concrete, basically concrete and dust floor, concrete ceilings. We got to record in a bunker. The acoustics reflect that. The first day there were 300 people in the room and it was 33 degrees outside. That's Celsius for the Americans. So it probably about 90 Fahrenheit. It was about 100 Fahrenheit in there and about 100% humidity. And I think it's going to take me about two weeks to recover. I could see it as like a miasma in the air about a hundred percent humidity. And I think it's going to take me about two weeks to recover. I could see it as like a miasma in the air. Cause I sat in the back of the room during the trash future set. Because I saw the crush of bodies at the front. I was like, absolutely not.

You're just going tactical mode. You're like, I want to be as close to the exit as I can when when shit goes down. I want to be as close to a source of fresh air as possible, and there was none. The stage is looking like a mirage. You can see the air waving. You could. Like, you could see, like, the heat coming off of people and Riley on stage looking like he was dying.

I mean, Riley eventually gave up on his glasses because he could not keep them from entirely fogging the entire time, so, I mean, if that gives you any indication. I'm really happy that ours wasn't that, like, it was, like, five or six degrees cooler when we went on. And the only thing that nearly happened to us was Tom almost falling off the incomplete backstage. Yeah, I like lean back at one side of my chair nearly fell off the stage, but I did very

much enjoy that like shout out to Mooch for providing a space that has the closest thing to podcasting in 1993 in Sarajevo? I mean, I was thinking about it more from the perspective of we've made so many references to like the infinity number of bunkers in Albania and the joke always leads to we should record inside a bunker and now we have. Effectively. But same with me, I was sitting on stage and I heard my chair kind of creaking and I was like, this sounds like the sound a chair makes before it falls apart.

And I'm like, I'm just embracing it. I'm glad that we finally flew the black eagle flag of the back of the podcast and we finally did our Albanian bunker show but it would just happen to be in London. The six hand version of the Albanian eagle handshake. Well I mean at the end of the day you know Gabe's saw greater Albania but that's not what we're talking about today I presume unless you're gonna segue into this being an episode about Albania. No, I figured we're in the UK We should talk a little bit about a certain kind of British guy But I need to preface this with I'm gonna tell you something and I want you to think what it is

All right, British combat kayak that is something that only the British government could come up with in Yeah, like the 1920s. I think it's an incredible idea. I mean I'm trying to think of when they would need kayaks and sort of, you know, riverine insertions like that and I suppose probably World War II era would be my best guess. You got it. Like Burma, New Guinea, things along those lines. You would think that wouldn't you?

Oh no. Are you gonna tell me it's like Algeria or something? It's France. Oh great. Alright. Traveling up the Seine in a kayak. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm going to show these people.

Paddling through the muck of human shit that is the Seine. Yeah. On the moz in a kayak. You know, half of the kayak is filled with wine. It's technically the ballast. But before we get there, we have to talk a little bit about why British commandos rode into battle on kayaks against the German Navy. Obviously, Germany and Japan were allies during World War II, and this is something that for

some reason is often left behind for a lot of people to talk about World War II. And that is the logistical support between the two of them. For some reason, like the popular narrative of World War II, you never really hear how the Germans and the Japanese actually helped one another. It's kind of like thrown in the trash for the ease of listening, I suppose. But by 1942, the Allies were trying to strangle off support, mainly coming from Japan and into other Nazi-occupied parts of Europe in the form of oil and rubber, mostly, loaded onto ships and sailed into Nazi- controlled port of Bordeaux. From there Germany could and did

transport the Japanese Imperial goods to Italy and other parts of their Nazi Empire. This turned the German Navy stationed there into what effectively was the world's most heavily armed blockade runners at the time. We talk about blockade runners normally in the context of like the Confederacy, but yeah, tens of thousands of pounds of materials useful for the fascist war effort made it into Bordeaux per month. And as you can tell that it's 1942 in this story, this is generally known as the era of the Axis beating the living shit out of the Allies, meaning more and more sources for their goods are going to be open as Japan advances across Asia, which in turn are shipped to Germany, and Germany then uses those to

better beat the shit out of the Allies. Germany in turn sent Japan manufacturing equipment, and sometimes entire prototypes stuffed into like submarines and ships. Um, famously they tried to send like a Messerschmitt 262 jet piece by piece. It's like that Johnny Cash song, one piece at a time. You're just like building the world's most Frankenstein's monster jet fighter. You've talked about how you could smuggle a fighter jet and you know, check bags, multiple people taking multiple flights, eventually you reassemble it.

These guys just did it in a submarine. Yeah, yeah, pretty much. This is my emotional support jet turbine. You can't take it away from me. All of the submariners are just like squished against the wall because the turbine is taking up so much space. Yeah, but this is in, you know, the era of commando raids, uh, because we love a good commando raid or as Churchill dubbed it, the concept of combined arms, which means something very different in the modern sense. Uh, we the raid at St. Nazaire, that just happened. And remember, everyone believed, go back in time to when we did that episode,

everyone believed that was a success. Which it kind of was if you squinted really hard. The idea that different branches could work together to conduct either a broad offensive or a surgical strike like a commando raid was kind of new. And even though the British had pulled it off arguably since and at Nazare there's no real doctrine for that kind of thing no real planning method is mostly vibes based throwing up shit to the wall see what sticks which isn't how you should generally run a military yeah vibes based warfare is not a good idea unless

you're like wearing fake knockoff Russian adidas. Like I am currently. Yeah. I mean, I would say obviously like in a desperate situation, you know, the sort of the immediate thing that comes to mind, you know, popularized in the not really great film, Saving Private Ryan is the sticky bomb, that kind of a thing. It's like, you know, small things, okay, make do with what you've got. Great. But the idea of like, you know, looking months, years ahead and how you're planning, procuring stuff.

You're like, hey, let's just see what happens. Yeah. I kind of don't want to be on one of the like, let's see what happens. And they're like, hey, what if we, what if we took big jungle cats and put them in a submarine, sneak them in, cause chaos in the port? Someone's got to be in that submarine with the jungle cats. You know what I mean? Nate, I have some bad news for you, because technically the war we fought in was vibes-based. Yeah.

Yeah. Let him who has not been in the situation to be told you have to wear this microphone that'll tell you where you're getting shot at from, as long as you stay perfectly still and face the same direction after getting shot at. Good news, every time it says you're getting shot at from every direction.

We should give this company $10 billion. I mean, they just sat in a shipping container, but like notionally, we were supposed to be wearing them. It didn't happen. You experienced what it's like to take damage in Call of Duty. The screen just goes progressively red. I love that concept because it was basically extrapolating from the idea if you put one on a Humvee, for example, and it's like, oh, you're in a convoy and you get sniper fire. It's like, it'll tell you where the shot came from based on the sort of acoustics,

but like slightly more stationary in an armored vehicle than if you're wearing it on your belt. And notionally speaking, it's like, oh, we're taking sniper fire. Stand perfectly still. Don't drop to the ground. Don't take cover. Don't change direction. And then maybe you'll find out where it came from as the computer is just going, but I wonder if I just immediately start deposing. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's like, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep,

beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, the Taliban. So eventually they established what was called the Combined Operations Headquarters and as we have pointed out multiple times I know this was led by eventually Louis Mountbatten. So everybody's favorite first

astronaut. Yeah, Ireland's first astronaut. Set to space by the IRA. Yep. Inside the COHQ as it was called is probably the much more and well-known group the Special Operations Executive or SOE. The COHQ had a litany of other different like committees to pitch ideas for operations, other committees to look at them and decide if they're decent and then they'd be kicked over to a planning committee until everything was eventually approved by the COHQ command staff with final approval being left to astronaut Mountbatten and Prime Minister Churchill personally. It's amazing how often Louis Mountbatten shows up just at random points. And every time his hands are on something, it fails.

Every single time. Like, famously the Dieppe raid. And he never gets in trouble for any of it. Again, I need to point out that he was put in this position because he was a normal officer within the Royal Navy on ships, but he constantly did terribly. All of his professional reviews were subpar, but they couldn't fire him. Louis Manbant famously never had a successful naval expedition. I would argue he had precisely one. The streak just went on unbroken his entire career until

I guess he created a reverse seaplane. Yeah exactly. Now if this sounds like something of like an assembly line of military planning that was the goal like to make it flow you know and Mountbatten's operational goal was to launch one raid or SOE type mission per week. He never quite got there because you know he was busy doing other things to children. Yeah. I mean, allegedly. No, it's not allegedly. He's dead. You can say what you want. Yeah, you can't libel the dead, but I mean like I know that every time they'll ever do an inquiry about you they'll just be like, oh we'll never know.

Because we refuse to make the people who do know testify. Every time they do an inquiry it's like, no, he just really liked hanging out at homes. Yeah, he just really liked specifically hanging out at King Nora boys' home. And it was into this system that Raundel Cecil Palmer, Lord Selburn, was spat into. Spat being the correct term to what you do to a man called Lord Selburn. Lord Selburn was a Tory elected into the Commons, but then his dad died, leaving the family Earldon open, which he then stepped into. Which meant, despite that he'd just get into government and was kind of just a fail son, he immediately became the Minister for Economic Warfare. Dude, was dad dying?

Yeah, yeah, Lord, what is it called? The peerages definitely don't run this way anymore. I was going to say the Ministry for Economic Warfare sounds like an office that the Tories have now, but now it's just directed toward their own people. I mean, one of the things that I've noticed too is like this will happen. You'll hear like somebody loses their seat, you know, in the Commons. And so they immediately get made a Lord and then get put right back into government. It's sort of like if, I don't know, the best way I could describe it is like,

if Joe Lieberman loses his seat in the United States, and so they just turn around and just install him as governor somehow, or install him as the secretary of it. But the level of just cynicism involved, like it was worse then. Well, didn't you know he's the Lord of Delaware? Where the fuck is he from?

There is a Lord of Delaware, but he can't remember his name, so we'll just leave him alone. Keep forgetting he's from Delaware. On top of just becoming a minister he also became the head of the SOE, all the drop of a hat. Now this is all despite him not having a single solitary second of military experience or training and to his credit I have to admit he had a pretty good idea right off the bat. Namely, hey we should do something about all those Nazi blockade runners making it into Bordeaux because this is something that everybody else had kind of just been like, there's no good way we can handle this so we should just ignore it.

At the time he suggested this to COHQ, there was something like 10 German ships at port in Bordeaux offloading their cargo and Intel suggested that there was even more coming in. So Lord Selborn said, you you know we should wait until they all show up and hit them while they're all at port. The problem of course was the Navy said it was far too risky to get close enough to bombard it and the Air Force said there's no way they could bomb the ships at port while also not bombing the shit of the surrounding population of French civilians. To make matters worse due to location and the very heavy defenses in the area, the COHQ thought that any actual land and sea operation to take

out the port would be like D-Day. It would require like 50,000 men and dozens of ships. So no serious thought was ever put into the idea. Yeah, it's never a good time to go camping with 10,000 of your friends and there's never a great time to go to the beach know 10,000 or your friends and there's never a great time to go to the beach with 5,000 or 50,000 of your friends. Yeah history says it's normally not a good thing. Yeah. Enter something called the Combined Operations Development Center under the command of Captain T.A. Hussey. Lucky name alerts non-stop this entire episode although I have to say it is very funny that Mountbatten immediately getting outshone by like a 23 year old named Crispin or whatever

My name is Lord Suburin, this is my dog Michaela I kiss her on the mouth Being outshone by Lord Hussie who is the fucking military version of Quentin Crisp? I mean at the end of the day, it's like I mean, at the end of the day, it's like that person doing 50, you know, 1% above failure is probably better than many of the storied names that we know from this era. Certainly batten higher average than Mountbatten. This was largely a dead office at the time. It was something like, are you guys familiar with the term the rubber room and not by like a psych ward situation?

No. It's kind of a place they send teachers if they can't fire. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think I weirdly like I've heard this used in just from living here in British English a bit, but like, yeah, it doesn't quite mean the exact same thing that we do, but sort of like a like go and be left alone room sort of. Yeah, they can't fire you, but they so they just stick you somewhere. You don't do anything for a really long time. That's like my old maths teacher who at the time I was in school, he was a roaring alcoholic. He's not anymore.

But I remember one morning we had like maths at like 10 in the morning and he came in stinking of drinking puked in the foiling cabinet and then turned around and proceeded to teach the lesson. Most normal Irish high school. Or if you watch Silicon Valley, it's the roof where they just go to collect dividends or whatever. This office had no money, no power, and it really did just seem like the place they stuck operations officers until they found a better place for them.

Maybe as a resume bullet or something. I'm sure there's something officers in the US Army do, but I don't know. I mean, yeah, they saw you in the basically in battalion headquarters or like in the three shot, but I'm just laughing too because I'm like, I love the idea that your military career gets you stationed in the exact same kind Of position is like a mafia guy's girlfriend in like a government job in New Jersey You know, you don't gotta do anything just show up to work on time It was here that major Herbert Hasler was stuck after already being showered with awards for actions in the war so far Since he'd gotten assigned to the development center, all he had done was write a paper about how like a small sabotage team

riding on kayaks could probably easily penetrate a heavily defended harbor if they planted magnetic bombs on the ships within and then got out, completely getting away from any direct combat. We weren't entirely sure who took a look at Hessler's paper first and decided to grab him, but the critter is often given a mount batten. I really don't buy that because he doesn't seem like the kind of guy who's reading weird policy papers floating up from the basement. Well, mmm, uh.

He's reading other weird things floating up from the basement. Yeah, Hassler's kayak sounds like the world's most homophobic riverine expedition It's like you go to like, you know adventure camp and you get yellow Have people just yell homophobic slurs at you non-stop or Hassler's kayak is just a thing that sound bankman freed is terrified The kayak becomes sentient it'll have impossible powers You don't want to subjugate all of us getting subjugated by by my kayak rather I think it wasn't him because Hasler's paper had been submitted a while before and COHQ had already passed on it.

That tells me someone else remembered it existed and that along with Lord Seltburn's whole Bordeaux situation and they remembered the paper and they gave it to Mountbend and then he promptly took credit for it because he also always does that. He always takes credits for good ideas but then when the plan fails it's always someone else's idea. I mean that's just you know if you are in a completely impenetrable position of power with no recourse to your mistakes you just do that.

I can think of a recourse but it's not coming for several decades. But lying in wait off the Irish coast, some recourse. My, my life isn't some recourse. Either way, soon afterwards, the world's first yacht astronaut then set for Hassler to talk to him about this kayak paper that he wrote. However, Hassler's plan required a kind of boat or kayak that simply did not exist. It was supposed to be foldable and rubberized with canvas sides and a hard bottom, able to carry heavy equipment without collapsing, and a flat rigid bottom so it could be in shallow water. And the reason why it'd be

folded up and things of that nature is because it'd need to fit inside of a submarine. Bro, I was just trying to invent the fucking combat crocs. I mean, just part of me is like, why can't you just put like a trailer on the back of a submarine? What if you gave a submarine to a redneck, he's going to find out a way to carry his kids in the back. The rednecks into submarine slide over, I'm on air with it. Put a camper top on the submarine. It's all right. It won't affect the buoyancy at all. But you know, Hassler's like, okay, well, I'll just find a way to build them. He contracted that to a local woodworker to start building them and thus was born the cockle Mark II.

The reason why it's a Mark II is because he tried to build a Mark I and it failed. So we're on a part two. Surprised by it. Do you know how the first one failed? It collapsed in the middle. Yeah. Because he wanted something foldable and light, but rigid on the bottom where you can carry bombs and stuff and it turned out that that's harder than you think to have but he would also need to staff the boats and

man the cockles the Royal Marine boom patrol detachment was formed this is sometimes said where the Royal like a special boat service comes from okay but at the time they're the boom patrol like like booms, like buoys, like, yeah, but it sounds really cool. If you think of it in the American English way, I heard there's a large father and son duo from New Jersey who were very excited about this. And there is also a small fat child from Miami who is also involved. Yeah. There's a reason why there's actually a statue in Trafalgar Square for the Rizler who was killed during World War II. Doing the sad boom at his funeral. Not all people know the IRA killed Lord Mountbatten because they wanted to save the Rizler. I'm still just thinking tonight, I'm just like, yeah, the boom patrol sounds like someone tried

to make like a counterfeit of anger boys in the United States With that the royal marines put out an announcement They're looking for men to volunteer for a new special service, but they couldn't tell them Anything other than they were looking for men that were quote indifferent to personal safety and quote without strong family ties Did they not say anything about you should be able to swim? Nope. No, there were several people they had to teach how to swim when they showed up. Soldier, we hear you're a loser. Get in. We hear you hate life and have no family ties.

You're indifferent to personal safety. Get in loser, we're going kayaking. This is just how Nerve fucking recruited the kids for the Evangelion project. Are you suicidal? I mean, it's just, yeah, I guess it's like, yeah, I'm so indifferent to life. I never learned how to swim. You're the man for this. But I would want to know how to swim if they were going to put me in the folding kayak personally. Hassler himself wanted men who were unmarried, a combination of street smart and book smart.

And what he described as, quote, scallywags. I mean, this is going to sound really fucked up. And I'm not trying to make this in this in a glib way but like I'm sure Mountbatten knows how to find people like that. I mean we are recording in SoHo. I'm sure you're like hmm we need some some book smart street smart young Scallywags who are indifferent to personal safety and Lord Bimutbatten would be like I call that Tuesday. Let me call my friend Fagin. Hassler has to continuously remind his boss like sir they have to be 17 or older. In his words he wanted Oxford educated street fighting

pirates which is a vibe I suppose. This is the era where that guy exists to be fair. Yeah but I mean at the end of the day it's just sort of like invariably it's going to be like oh we've drowned 15 guys named Crispin yet again. Let's dip into our role of guys named Hoyt. All my Crispin's gone. I mean it's unfortunately it's a little bit it's been too long and hot of a weekend for me to remember other sort of stereotypical posh names in British English. Horatio. I feel like that one's that's Holden. No. Lieutenant Holdenen blood feast of Oxford. I mean there's your your Hugo's your crisp ins your Quentin's your There's a one that all of those sort of like guardian columnists always love to use is like an example of some go by like ta

Perhaps no, I mean like password test It's one of those things where it's like I kind of purged all this knowledge from my brain since leaving the UK So it's like I guess it's not coming back. You're just instead of knowing about like a Ibex migration pattern collecting weird diseases They have a ton of volunteers Unfortunately, none of any history of boats or even swimming the reason for this is that men with any background with those Have already been pulled into the UK's various special units for boatsmen or swimmers or the Navy. So HASSOR would have to create them from nothing. Many of the men had no idea how to swim so their

sergeant major, nicknamed Bungie, just kept taking them out on the boat. They'll make Bungie! Get on the boats! Get on the Bungie boat! Just all these people talk like Morris Johnson. I mean like I'm surely they could find like disciplinary records from Oxford and find people who were, you know, who were a sanction for narrowboat based perversion. And they'd be like, these are all your guys right here. But this is like, um, I remember my dad told me cause he used to live in the UK in the eighties and it was obviously a time where being Irish wasn't a very popular thing. There's a reason there's no bins on the Northern side of the Jubilee line. But he was

working with these guys, these English guys, and he was like fascinated with like, oh you know like they're all so like prim and proper and he realized they're very posh. But one of them invited him for a weekend in his family's home, in the Hull counties. It was like a manor house and he met this guy's little brother who's a guy called blubs who wore a cape because he had been elected head boy at school and his first action was to bring back the that the head boy had to wear a cape I mean and the reason he told me the stories were watching the news and Jason and Jacob Reese Maug was on TV and my dad goes oh he looks like blbs and i was like who?

he looks like he'd wear a cape i don't know much about british politics i don't know much about jacob reese mogg but he does look like a guy who owns a cape yes there was the thing where jacob reese mogg has always been a tory even since he was like 12 and he was interviewed on tv when he was 12 basically being like you know i'm i want to study austrian economics or something like whatever that kind of i really want to make the train suck. Everything should be back on the gold standard, but he doesn't look that different now that he did when he was 12. Like genuinely in affect, the weird woodenness.

Also the fact that he's not even that old. He was 12 in like 1981. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's so weird. Like Jacob Reismog and all the members of Blur are the same age. Blur and Blob. I like posters of like Morrissey Oasis and he just had daguerreotypes of Friedrich

Leieck. Well I mean in 1981 it probably would have been like the Human League or something like that. Printouts of incredibly anti-Semitic French literature. Yeah, obviously Jacob Rees-Mogg, I like a different Human League and it's just like early days eugenicist texts. So Sergeant Major Bungie would take all

these guys out into a boat that didn't notice him and just throw them into the water until they figured it out which is how my dad taught me how to swim. I do not recommend it. It made me afraid of water until I was like 16. It's like we said before Armenians are hydrophobic. It's like we all have rabies. We're all built like hedgehogs. You're not supposed to leave the ground or you're not supposed to enter bodies of water either, I guess. We're supposed to just walk up mountains forever. Yeah. The problem is when it came to the boat aspect

is Hassler wasn't exactly a boat guy either. And the boat they were training on, remember, had never been used before. So there's no expert in this field. So everyone was just kind of learning on the job and then winging it. And this worked better than you'd think It was hardly foolproof though. This is an entry from Hassler's diary in July 24th

1943 quote the new troops almost drowned themselves again They didn't live in Royal Marine barracks either but rather they just kind of lived in a small coastal village hot couching across people's houses and Rather they just kind of lived in a small coastal village, hot couching across people's houses. And because of their training, one officer and one soldier per kayak, that meant there was no real officer or enlisted man difference. They all had the same jobs. All of their training was exactly the same. And some of the officers in the first batch of volunteers withdrew from training because they just couldn't put up with having to live alongside an enlisted person? Uh, that's no comment.

I mean like, I think back in those days it was just, particularly in the UK, but I think also in the US it was just a lot more like explicitly like, oh no, this is officer business. You have your officer's mess, you have your officer's club, you have all this stuff. A lot of that's gone away. It was never as bad in America. No. Especially the, well the Navy was always bad. The Navy's still weird about it, yeah.

But the Army in the US was always like, officers and enlisted people are all pretty much the same treated. They used to have more like explicit institution things for officers and those have all gone away. But my impression, I have obviously no experience with the British military, but like my impression from friends who were in

is that like now it's still very much. I can imagine the weird class system of the UK carries perfectly into the military. Yeah, yeah. I mean, like, every officer's named Jaunty and every Sergeant Major is named Bazgaz or whatever. Bungie. Bungie. Well, the Bungie, those kinds of nicknames, like, kind of indicate way more of a sort of fanciness, you know, like...

This is Sergeant Major Bungie. This is my peer, First Sergeant Big Balls. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just like, yeah, everyone's like the Bungie or Floppers or something like that. They all have these goofy nicknames. That is 100% real. The First Sergeant Big Balls. By September, the men had been training for months, and they still pretty much sucked at their job. It turns out that training a bunch of non-semen

in seamanship, nighttime navigation, and long distance rowing takes a lot of time, significantly more than a couple months. It probably doesn't help that you're doing it in those collapsible shipping container things. You know what I mean? You know the boxes, you have the palletized boxes you can fold up.

What if we put a little bit of caulk sealing on those and you try to row them like a boat? I imagine if you had a regular boat, learning the fundamentals would probably be easier. The hassler with the little fold, like the burns and the spruce goose is like, get in. It's a shitty foldable cloth boat's moose bow yeah I mean I feel like all of this feels as though it's just being set up for failure also where is it that they're

there what part of the UK is that they're training in I believe in the southern UK at this point they move around a bit but yeah I'm just imagining them off like the Cornish coast famous for great weather all the time they do complain about bad weather constantly but Hassler has a good point like well you know where we're going the weather's also gonna be shit. Yeah. Because I should put out the mission they eventually get happens in the winter. Yeah and like this one the Bay of Biscay or whatever that's that area's kind of yeah you know where time is pretty pretty garbage so. Though Hassler and others are pushing for a real mission for these guys

anyway with one officer saying quote provided it's a job that does not require very good navigation or seamanship, I think they're fine. It doesn't require any of the skills you normally would expect for a guy on a boat. These boat guys are really, you know, we should probably have a car based mission. Yeah, I mean like also, but it sounds like based on how they're going to deploy them and use them, it's like a, you know, squadron or detachment size element of Tom Hanks floating on the what is it like? Detritus portagion that washes up on the island and in survivor or what is it? Not just cast away cast away survivor would be a funnier combination there, but no it cast away

Yeah, it's just like these don't even really sound like boats They just sound like things you cling to and hope that you drift to land. So we're in agreement he fucked that volleyball right? I've never seen it. You've never seen it? No. He's trapped on island with a volleyball that became his best friend for like years. They're friends with benefits. I haven't seen like loads of real I've never seen up until relatively recently I'd never seen

gladiator I've never seen the godfather. Here's the thing about castaway right in a lot a lot of ways, it's not a bad movie. It gets pretty goofy at the end in terms of the way that kind of resolves the plot. The plane crash scene is genuinely one of the freakiest plane crashes I've ever seen in a film, like it's terrifying. Like it's basically implied that somebody,

it's filmed in 2000, so this is pre-chargeable vapes, but someone didn't mark lithium batteries correctly and that causes an explosion on the plane during a storm. And you kind of see it from the perspective of like, but like one of the pilots trying to help Tom Hanks' character then gets thrown up against him and breaks his neck and it's really violent. And then like you see through the cockpit of like,

just oh fuck, we're heading straight into the ocean. Like it's genuinely terrifying. And I don't know, it's like weird to think like, oh yeah, but then it's also this heartwarming movie about man falls in love with a lot of people My opinion is he claps volleyball cheeks. He also does dental surgery on himself with a ice skate. I think yeah Now you have to have the NHS to do that Now Hassler was aware of the previous Bordeaux plan Which had been given the name operation? Franklin and he pushed for that to be his boys first mission another important part of this operation as well the water and

The importance of tides the phases of the moon, you know all that shit that you learn in school That sounds pretty science fiction when you think about it for more than a few seconds Mm-hmm any plan would need to be you know nestled into that sweet spot of spring tides when the water rises higher than normal and the strength of tides both coming in and out of the Grand Estuary was at its highest. The benefit of course is that the phase of the new moon also makes it pitch dark. So easier to hide a kayak board assault team. But one presumes that given the level of defense put up here by the Germans that like they're also aware of the concept of tides

Yes Like a big overlap of like this is probably when some shit's gonna happen 100% Yeah, we call this the Inchon landings except the people who were should have been aware of this were like that'll never happen Yeah, couldn't be us It was considered a very hard thing to plan in such a small timeline and varying a very very heavily defended and well-prepared enemy and target. Hassler sat down, jotted out a detailed plan in a couple hours and turned in his proposal. This plan involved using that tide window, drop in three kayaks from a mothership which was gonna be, at first it's thought to be a plane but then they switched to be a

submarine and Hassler thought that that should work. Two men in each kayak at the mouth of the river in pitch darkness. They would paddle from the estuary into Bordeaux, a trip that would take four nights, lay charges on the eight boats harbored there, blow them and then paddle all the way back out. Now remember the British military only thought this would take tens of thousands of men and then the Hassler just scribbled up a plan that said no I'll do it with six. You know I appreciate the audacity and the pure pigheadedness. Yeah. It's obviously going to work. Flawlessly. COHQ and pretty much everyone else saw tons of problems with

this plan right from the beginning. For starters, 6 men and 3 kayaks, a comically small force to use. The men had never deployed the kayaks in the open ocean from a submarine before either, and paddling for what would be over a week would require some level of human endurance that nobody was entirely sure even existed. Yeah. The over a week part is what's gotten me. Like the rest of them like, yeah, you could probably train for this, but I didn't realize that it was going to be like, you know, the person crossing the ocean in a kayak record.

Yeah. Basically. Yeah, pretty much. It's like we're going to launch from a place the Germans will never expect Greenland Hassler didn't see any of this as a problem He thought the small force would be hard to detect but large enough to carry the amount of explosives they would need and as for The endurance well his men by all accounts were already freakishly in shape because that was the one kind of training they had been doing Constantly so he figured if anybody could pull it off, it should be them.

Mountbatten quickly approved the plan, noting that it was highly unlikely that any of the men would survive and told Hassler that, and he said, you should probably tell your men. He was like, nah. I mean, not surprised they recruited from like private schools because they're like, oh, you know, like we need the best rowers in the country. We need the best suicidal rowers in the country. We need jaunty, in the country. We need the best suicidal rowers in the country. We need jaunty

blobs big balls It should come as no surprise that Mountbatten loved the plan if there's two things Mountbatten loved is suicidal commando missions And you know the secret second other thing I don't want to get to one note with the with the Mountbatten jokes, but it's like hmm It's they're not gonna come back most likely. It's like, probably good. I don't really want them testifying 20 years from now. Exactly. Well, another thing about Lord Mountbatten is that he's generally quite beloved in India. Huh? Cause he was the last governor general, right? Vice Roy. Or vice Roy for partition. Yeah. That's why the, uh, the gray joke in the Simpsons is I haven't cried like that since Lord Mountbatten gave Inje back to the Punjabs It's such a big credible joke so

Mountbatten did have one complaint though. He said three kayaks is not nearly enough. He wanted six. That's it Okay With approval in hand Hassler kicked them in straining into overdrive knowing that he couldn't make up for their complete lack of skill when it Came to the sea and said he kept making them row harder and harder for hours upon hours a day, assuming the only thing that keeps them alive was being the most gacked out juiced at the gills soldiers the world had ever seen up to that point. Oh, and by the way, they're constantly taking meth. They're on meth. They're eating like a Castlevania style roast chicken. They're all lats. I just love the idea of like, yeah, how do you provision these guys to, you know, fuel

them for a week? And it's exactly what you've just described. It's just like, you just have, you know, a barrel full of roast chickens, just hold it in one hand, you know, you can literally get a fork attached to the ore, just keep it in place. Each stroke of the ore, you just take a bite. Roast chickens, pints of milk. Like sacks of Dexys.

What the training would do is they would literally row all day until the men were completely exhausted. And then they would take meth and then row again until they're completely exhausted. And then they would be able to stop. The more and more I learn about World War II, it's just the more I know that everyone was on meth. Pretty much, yeah.

I believe it was fictive, but I remember reading a book and there was sort of talking about like a, some kind of like air station for the Germans in Antarctica. Like, and it's like, okay, that's fiction, but that could have been a real thing. Like there are all sorts of insane remote places. They did have weather stations all the way up in like Arctic Canada.

I mean, Dashiell Hammett, the author of the Maltese Falcon enlisted because he wanted to fight fascism because he was like a hardline communist. He was in his forties and the army was like, hey, he's too communist. And they sent him to the Aleutian Islands. Like he was literally on ADAC, like 500 miles from Anchorage and like basically the middle of the North Pacific. And then he's like, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to write, I'm going to, I'm going to take over the base

newspaper and then just make it extremely copy. I'm going to take a bunch of meth and become a journalist. I love the forbidden handshake between these guys and Paul Weller in 1977 of being on insane amounts of meth. I mean but here at least you know it's got a purpose I suppose. Not great. Paul Weller wrote going underground. Hey it also has a purpose today how else am I supposed to steal copper wire at a rate that like the cops can't catch me. Yes. Just be completely gacked out. Fast hands.. But you know he needed more precise training as well for the coming explosives and all the other stuff but he couldn't make

it too detailed because then people would catch on that they're training for something because even the men don't know they're training specifically for a mission to blow up ships with magnetic bombs. So instead the never-ending brutal rowing regime, then they would have explosives trainings and that was about it. Meanwhile Hassler and another man, Jock Full name Jock Stewart, were the only two men in the unit fully aware of the entire plan So they had to do all the logistical and tactical planning themselves because they couldn't let anybody else in on it. According to the book Cockle Shell Heroes They did this by doing a fuckload of Benzadrine so they could stay awake for a week at a time

and do all the logistics and planning. I can just imagine someone walking into their like planning mission afterward that looks like the Charlie Kelly like thread map on the wall because they're just so gacked out of their mind. They've got the phonograph player. It's just like, it's just skipping nonstop. They basically invented the velvet underground 30 years early. But like, I'm really fascinated like what type of, outside of like rowing, what training they were doing. Because this is before the popularization of like the use of weights in training. Yeah, they were pretty much just running and rowing. Yeah.

I mean, this is the same thing where like people who were running the marathon in the Olympics were just only training sprints. They just did a lot of sprints. It's like, all right, you've been sprinting for years now go run 26 miles. This is because due to the dependency on the moon and the tides and everything for their mission, the operation would need to be fully planned and launched within a couple of weeks. So they dipped into the benzadrine supply real hard to the point that like in the book, Huckle Shell Heroes,

they're working to literally collapse and then wake up from the floor take more benzadrine and go back to work they're just doing a meth bender yeah a tactical meth bender the submarine task of being the mothership was the HMS tuna commanded by the best name in this episode lieutenant commander dick rakes dick rakes on HMS tuna this is a riff that we would come up with it's just one of those things Lieutenant Commander Dick Rakes. Dick Rakes on HMS Tuna. This is a riff that me and Nate would come up with. It's just one of those things where I know that it's genuine. It's not made up.

She rakes on my dick till I tuna? I mean, I suppose. But also I'm just laughing at like, you know, having this sort of like Alan Vega approach to creativity, but doing military planning instead of, you know, 10 different suicide albums that he put together in the seventies. It's just like, yeah, all right, if it works, I suppose. And from there, they went to Scotland for more training, specifically how to deploy the kayaks from the tuna and then attach magnetic limpet mines to the side of the hulk of a ship. However, none of the other details about the operation or even that there was an operation

at all was given to anyone other than those three people. All of this training came ahead to a large-scale training exercise in November where the men would be deployed from the tuna, paddle towards Margate, attach fake mines, and then paddle back. It was effectively a dry run, right? It would require the men to navigate at night in silence and do all of the stuff they would need to do during the actual attack. It failed miserably. Yeah, I'm shocked.

I'm so surprised, Joe. Every single kayak team got lost. Most of them ended up completely outside the exercise area. One team thought they were following information behind Hassler, only to discover hours later they were following a seagull that was just bobbing in the ocean. He said near Margate, like in off the Kent coast basically. Yeah. I feel like the fact that they're all on Ben to dream has something to do with the fact that someone thought a seagull was a boat winds up in Calais for some reason. Look, when you take enough Dexys, it's kind of hard to focus your eyes.

So like vibrating in their skull, your eyes are just vibrating. It's like that bird. I want to catch it and drink its blood. That bird talking shit. So you're basically, this is 1940s castaways where you're except nobody fucked the seagull Though they did prove one thing they did have the endurance required to pull this off because these guys were lost Paddling aimlessly around the coast for five days, but none of them stopped cool You've invented the world's longest lasting bath toy. Tatsuko bath toy. The only thing that ended them attempting to find the target was someone going over

on a plane and telling them the exercise was over. They never stopped paddling for almost a week. When Mountbatten was informed by Hassel that the exercise was a complete and dismal failure, Mountbatten apparently smiled and said, great great now you know what not to do during the operation imagine the domes you would have after paddling for five days straight on meth but how good is as a pre-workout you know finally on November 30th 1942 the men taking part in the operation thinking they're once again only going out for training were loaded're loaded into the tuna, the hatches were locked and they were formed.

Actually we're going on a real operation and this is what the operation is. By the way we're all probably gonna die. Hassler tells them the route is protected by search lights, machine guns, cannons, armed trawlers, U-boats, not to mention daily air patrols over the area and by the way now that you've been informed of what the mission is, you cannot back out. You're all locked in here with me. During planning, the only thing about the mission that had changed was their exit route. Instead of getting back to the sub, whose captain, Dick Rakes, I will say that name

as many times as I can, informed them there was no fucking way they could safely extract them. If they sat around off the coast. They're definitely getting blown up So now the exfiltration route would be over land into Spain the hodge of all white Britishmen I mean but from Bordeaux that's a bit of a trip Yeah, also none of them had been trying any kind of land navigation skills at all this whole time They were just kind of given maps like, there's Spain. I can't imagine they have packs either.

Nope. Anything? Oh, cool. Nope. Alright. So basically you're gonna just, you're just gonna wander, you're gonna go on a pilgrimage, you're gonna forage your way from, from yeah, Burgundy, all the way down to, I guess the Pyrenees, yeah. The whole idea was, well the French resistance will help us along the way down to I guess the Pyrenees, yeah. The whole idea was, well, the French resistance will help us along the way.

We have some contacts in a specific town that we will get to, and then they will help smuggle us over the border. Again, none of them had practiced any kind of land navigation to get to said village, but we'll get to that point towards the end. They just informed the resistance, like look for the guys who've got these

enormous triangle-shaped torsos. They're the ones who want to rescue. They're very sunburned, they're very wide. It wasn't until December 6 that the tuna actually reached the French coast, which led to a small problem. You know, the mission's a secret, so the RIF does not know about it. So the RIF had just dropped a huge field of sea mines in the exact area that Hassler and his men and the tuna were now sitting in in and they had no idea where exactly the mines were. Were still Hessler would need to figure out where exactly they were, you know, on the boat looking at the coast to match up with

the charts that he had passed out to his men so he could figure out where exactly he was. But the French coast is almost entirely featureless and it was a cloudy night, meaning he couldn't see the stars. The tuna was also four miles from the coast thanks to the sea mines, meaning that not only the commandos have further to paddle, but the radar stations would certainly pick up the tuna and they would have to get the fuck out of there. Hassler and Dick Rates decided fuck it, let's go and order the operation to move ahead anyway. The men began putting the kayaks together and getting them into place, and one of the men accidentally tore a massive hole in the side of one of them, meaning they were now out of the mission.

Somewhat hilariously, Hassler discovered that his men had been stealing chocolate from the submarine and smuggling it onto their kayaks, which is a problem because the weight distribution of the kayaks had been calculated down to the finest detail up until now, and they just thrown all that shit into the wind because they'd stolen chocolate from the Navy. I hate being deployed on my combat kayak with Augustus glue. I like push me. I'm full of chocolate. I love the because I was going to say the exact same thing. It's like, this is what happens when you recruit from Charlie and the chocolate fact. You wind up with situations like that. I mean, the soldiers are experiencing kind of like a situation like the grandparents of the bucket family. they're in the bow.

They're all sleeping in one great big bed and I guess if you're going to go with this metaphor then that means that Hassler has to be the character of Rookasalt and just bossing them around in a weird way non-stop. So now they only have five kayaks, ten men in total, weighed down by a strange amount of illicit chocolate and they made their way to the French coast. As soon as they hit the water German searchlights opened up on them and thankfully they couldn't see too clearly from so many miles out. So they skip past that one. But there's another issue. Hassler discovered his compass was broken and he needed to navigate via the North Star alone. Thankfully it's

December in France, a place known for good clear skies. Why wouldn't you check and why wouldn't you bring it back up? I'm sorry. No you could only have one. He dumped everything else for chocolate. My chocolate compass is not working. It's just melting in my hands. Okay I've got to have a Kinder Surprise. Maybe there's a compass inside this. Crack the egg open. Who took a bite out of the north side of my chocolate compass. Augustus, was it you? Nooooo! Is there chocolate all over his mouth? Then Hessler discovered his kayak was leaking so fucking badly that his other crewman, a guy named Sparks, spent his entire time bailing it out while he did all the rowing. Sergeant Wallace, one of the men in the other kayaks, for reasons nobody's entirely sure of,

just began vomiting into the ocean, which is something of a problem during a sneak attack where everyone has to remain silent. You just hear the slight swishing of the water and then, aah! The British are coming. I guess maybe there's like an interaction between that much chocolate and that much dexedrine.

Hey. Only people who've ever happened outside this mission are like people outside a corn shop at 3am. Yeah like famously you should not have an appetite on that much bread. So he's just forcing it down. Thankfully I guess for Hassler Wallace and his kayak simply vanish. They're never heard from again when they pass through a title race at st. Elbin's head so yeah, he's dead So now the kayak forces reduced the four kayaks of eight men

Mm-hmm, they make it to the first landmark a lighthouse at pond de grav which Also meant another title race with five foot swells and roaring rapids Which also meant another title race with five foot swells and roaring rapids. They paddled directly into it, getting smashed around under rocks, but everybody makes it to the other side. But another kayak was damaged to the point it could no longer be used. Everyone is soaked to the bone and beaten up at this point. Because remember it's December. The water is ice fucking cold. It's really cold. Yeah.

Everyone is now beginning to have the beginning stages of hypothermia, which again, they try to counteract by taking more meth. I feel like you could also maybe have given these guys protective gear as well as methamphetamine. They have some protective gear, but like the gear they have is not great. It certainly wasn't a military thing, but just went rafting in Alaska one time. And I remember they were like, you can float down the river to like the exit point, basically, if you want. So we, you know, we were wearing wetsuits

and we were wearing like, they had shoes we could wear on top of the wetsuit, like the foot covers on the wetsuit. And I got in the water and I was like, fuck, there's a hole in my wetsuit. And I'm like, fuck, this is so cold. Cause it's just a glacier melt river. Even in August in Alaska,

it's like one degree above freezing. One pinhole leak is all it takes to become miserable. And I was like, oh my God, like I'm literally gonna lose the ability to move become miserable. And I was like, oh my God, I'm literally gonna lose the ability to move my feet. I have a life jacket on, this is genuinely really dangerous. I get to the landing finally and I'm like, fuck, fuck. And I check, there's no hole.

It was just that cold. It was even with the wetsuit on, it was just that cold. And I was like, yeah, I can't imagine the, I mean, it's not quite freezing, but doing that for hours and hours. Yeah, now do it for days. This left two commandos who were without a kayak now. So they decided to just hang off the back

of the other two kayaks, being towed to a nearby beach and try to escape. I have to ask this question though. You said that the tuna was anchored or stopped four miles off the coast. How is it going to take days if it's four miles? No, that's just to get into that part to begin their operation up the rivers and stuff.

Right, okay, got it, got it, okay. Yeah, so now they have two commandos who are out there without a kayak and they decide to just hang on to the back of the other two kayaks with the idea that they're gonna be towed to a nearby beach and try to escape, right? So now they have three kayaks and six men

and two dangling off the back. And there's another title race coming. and at each race they lost a kayak and this time they have two dude just hanging on to the back of a kayak or they're about to go into rapids and shit. All while the point to grab right house lights them up like new year's fucking eve. But they make it through the title race. These guys somehow managed to hang on to the back of these kayaks but they've been paddling for six hours now. I mean they're on so much meth they're probably holding on to the back of it with their teeth. Their jaws are so clenched. They still hadn't reached a beach to drop the commandos off and now they're completely hypothermic from being submerged in cold water. Hessler knew they'd have

to get them out of the water soon, but another tidal swell took the kayaks and they're so way down with men they couldn't fight against it So at that point Hessler literally looked back at the two guys like you have to go let you have to let go the kayaks You're gonna drag us down and they're go and I don't know if this is true or not But apparently they just went yeah, right and let go and float it off They were still wearing their life vests and they slowly half-dead from hypothermia Floated towards a Nazi hell town of Leverdon. At this point we know what happens because we know what happens at the end of the story. The Germans eventually find

one of the men's dead bodies 70 miles away down the river and the other guy is never seen again. We know from records kept by the Nazis in the aftermath of the war that he was captured and executed by the Gestapo. Which, not important, but is actually a violation of Nazi law. What? He was supposed to be turned over to be interrogated. Oh. That's the reason why the Germans had no idea this commando operation was coming. They had a guy, they just shot him.

I have to kill him, he's not giving over his chocolate. Exactly. Now once they did that, Hassler realized he had another problem. Four small destroyers were anchored at Le Verdon, owing to the fact that there was actually an ongoing inspection by a local Kriegsmarine admiral. Obviously the destroyers would have armed guards and they would probably see the kayaks just floating on by. My thing is that, like, how much ordnance do they even have left if they only have three

kayaks? At what point do you say, oh, we're not going to be effective anymore. We're not going to be able to destroy enough stuff. This is probably when he should have made that decision. OK. Instead, he came up with a master plan. We'll lay all the way down in our kayaks. We'll cover ourselves with this shitty tarp that we have and rumple all up. So we just look like floating garbage and then we'll one by one.

We'll float by the destroyers. This is basically hoping that the naval equivalent of it's just a box. Yeah exactly it's some Kojima shit. The first two kayaks make the trip without any issue one at a time. Then the third never shows back up. No gunshots are heard nothing like that but we know afterwards that they're immediately captured because like they see the first two go by like, oh, that's weird. They see a third of like, all right All right, all right, and they pull him out of the water and Gestapo again pulls him out back and shoots him the face

Again not interrogating them at all or they would have known what was coming Hassler is now down to two kayaks and four men then he finds a place for Zmin to come to shore and rests It's 730 a.m. They've been paddling for 11 hours. Then just as daylight broke, Hessler realized that he thought he had made camp on like kind of like a deserted coastal area, but instead it was right next door to a pier full of local French fishermen. Obviously he has no idea how many of them are collaborators or whatever. So Hessler approaches them knowing that they had already been seen. he addresses them telling them in

French that he's English please don't let the Germans know that you have seen anything. Now here's the weird part. Hassler did speak French pretty well. Mm-hmm. But he had learned French because he knows German and he learned French through his German teacher so he spoke French with a German accent. Nate, would you care to elaborate? Me because I learned German before I learned French and everyone I know who speaks French natively says my French accent sounds like I'm a German so and like the French immediately think this guy's a German like infiltrator a spy because he's speaking French with a German accent Despite the fact he's English no, she will probably regard to the chocolate to date not avec des lettres d'amour

de Lord Mountbatten. Je vous promets. Je ne suis pas dangereux. Je ne suis pas un espion allemand. Je suis zongé. Je te promets. So the fishermen think he's a spy, but this actually works in his favor. They think he's German, so they're not going to go tell the Germans on him. Stupid like a fox. I mean, I will say that doesn't sound like a weird thing the Germans would just pull up, like, let's test what happens with these locals. In this random French fishing village, and see how loyal they are. So they don't bother to report him to the police, but they also stay away from them.

Mmm. So he and his half-dead soldiers, who are still alive, are just left alone as they rest on the shore. Nobody slept that night, probably due to nerves and, you know, coming down from meth. And there's caffeine and chocolate too, you know. Small amounts, but it does count. But then they think they see that, like the next morning they go to take off, right? And they think they see 50 German soldiers marching in their position.

But thankfully for them, it wasn't. They had taken so much meth that they thought that some sticks in the mud were men. So they just start panicking. Due to the meth and the hypothermia, they almost get into a firefight with some sticks. I mean, having gone to ranger school in winter time where it's very dark and very cold, wearing night vision, I have seen people be like, oh, I found the trail and just run off into the woods. Just like, if we weren't basically tied to one another or their stuff wasn't tied to them,

they would have just disappeared forever. So it can definitely happen. I have been very sleep deprived to the point that I thought I saw things. I mean, I can recall having to pull security wearing night vision, having the feeling that the trees were talking to me. There were faces in the trees.

It's insane, it sounds nuts, but you're just so tired. You can't fall asleep or bad things will happen to you, so you have to stay awake, and your brain just starts filling in the gaps. I could've swore I watched a whole field catch on fire in front of me, because I was so asleep before I was looking through night vision goggles and just blinking, trees move trees trees moving

Oh, it looks like fire like why is it really gonna fire? I'm like, oh, no haven't slept in two days I mean when I was doing you're in leadership and in your school Some of the leadership positions are 24 hours and I'd actually done really well, but I was we were in patrol base at night It was almost over but like I thought I had lost my radio and I was like mom so fucked like I'm gonna fail I completely fail. I'm gonna literally like recycle this phase and I was like trooping around the patrol base. Where's the radio? Where's the radio ways? I finally realized because we tie all our stuff down. It was just tied to me Yeah, the brain can do a lot of strange things so they set off they hit some low water tide

And it was like water so nasty It was filled with like sand to the point that they described as a thick ooze It was nasty, it was filled with like sand to the point that they described as a thick ooze. Yeah, yeah. Getting lost in my ooze with my buddies. So they had to get out and drag their kayak through this mess. Something the men were barely capable of doing at this point. But they kept on paddling on the other side of it. And it's noted in the Cockle Shell Heroes that this is where they began to run out of

meth. So they start rationing their benzidrine and their brains are slipping from the cold, they're not eating much, they're not sleeping, they're gacked out. So they start paddling again for another seven hours. And if this sounds like they're making good time, they're actually not. All of the meth-addled paddling in night two was just to make up for their fuckups in night one. And again, they had no sleep, they popped more meth, they got going on night three,

which required scaling a six foot tall mud wall and then dragging the kayaks up the wall behind them. And from there they had to go across dry ground, carrying their boats through some woods and they hid them and that's where they decided to rest. There's only one person who can direct a movie about this incident and it is for an hour. It's the same for an hour. You see You see the demand they are on so much meat and they are stuck on a mud bank

I'm just imagine Germans have to just be able to smell them at this point trying to see yeah See if you if you can maybe find any French civilians that have a supply of math I don't know exactly how you would colloquially translate. Do you party in? Do you take a little man La PNP? How the fuck do you know that? You can thank yourself for that. And they think that they're in like the middle of the woods so again they get some rest and then the sun rises they realize that they are not in fact in the middle of the woods. They have decided to camp out in a sparse strip of trees smack dab in the middle of a French suburb with their boats and everything. It's like being stuck on a roundabout.

That's what it kind of sounds like. Strangely this works to their benefit. For the first time there's like ambient noise so they could like risk having a cigarette and taking a shit which had to be horrible at that point from all the meth. No man, imagine the calm down of waking up on a fucking roundabout in a French suburb. Oh my god. Like, ugh, yeah, horrible. So they get their gear together, they start assembling their mines, they take more meth, they cover their faces in boot polish, and they wait for night to fall before beginning their attack run at the

nearby port. A quick note on those mines though, Limpit mines work on time fuses, which they set off like through like crimping a certain detonator into it, and they set the mines time before their mission because they don't have time to do that shit when they're actually on the water. Yeah, doing all the like the splicing and stuff with the the yeah crimping so they decide that nine hour fuse is good enough They clamp the now live mines between their legs to hold them in place and start paddling to Bordeaux Which only takes another 90 minutes and from there the commando kayakers which remember there's only two kayaks at this point Slowly make their way down the line of ships moored there and

everything was seemingly going according to plan. They begin attaching the magnetic mines to their targets as they went, including attaching two mines to the side of a German Navy frigate, which even, well, it wasn't even supposed to be there, but Hassler's like, well, fuck it, that's a good target, attaches the mines. Weirdly, they get caught while doing this. According to Hassler, a sentry on the ship sees them and points a flashlight directly down at his face. He froze like a deer in the headlights and the sentry didn't yell out or raise alarm. And it's not like he thought that he was like a floating piece of garbage like before, because the guy is just staring at him with the torch in his face and, but isn't moving or doing anything. And Hassler just kind of goes about attaching mines to the ship while the guy is looking at him.

And then he paddles on the guy Follows him with the flashlight as he's paddling but does Nothing. Nobody has any idea why maybe that guy was also sleep fucked up on math he was like Hallucinating CL Commandos again So yeah and then in between ships they do

their garbage trick again of pretending that they're a floating piece of shit and like go on to the next one attach more mines. The kayaks finish placing all of their mines and paddle into the center of the bay where the tide sweeps them down river. According to Hassler they should have been sighted by just about everyone at that point if they would even been bothered to look. And to him this is why he thinks the guys who've gone missing are still alive. Because he's like, well, the Germans aren't stupid. If they would have captured these very obvious commandos just washing up ashore, they certainly would have interrogated him. And after enough torture, they're going to give up. So like the Germans would know we're coming, but nobody does. So he assumes these guys are still alive.

When in reality, the Germans are stupid because they just fucking shot them. In accordance with their plan, they head for shore and the three kayak teams split up and escape over land in a journey of a minimum of 800 miles. Jesus Christ. As they escaped the mines went off, six ships were badly damaged with several sinking due to the damage that the limpet charges had caused. So it sounds like a success right? Well none of the ships were loaded at the time of the explosion, so absolutely no goods were lost. And Bordeaux was so shallow

that the ships sank only a few feet. So the Germans were able to just refloat them a short time later. And to make the entire situation even more fucked up, COHQ had a spy in Bordeaux at the time, planning a sabotage operation that would have weighed into the ships were fully loaded, at which point they would have stuck a timed bomb on board so it exploded in deep water and permanently sank the ships, making them unrecoverable. The two teams were completely unaware of one another, and the two different groups within COHQ were left in the dark of the other's plans, but the Kayak Commando Raid had ruined all the other work that the other team was doing and they had to abandon their operation. There were two ships they planned limpid mines off

that simply never went off and nobody's sure why, and so they just fell off due to like bad magnetic attachment. Weirdly the escape of the surviving crews went shockingly well and dare I say even easy, at least for a time. Hassler and his kayak mate Sparks split up from the other surviving crew, making the other two men, Laver and Mills, like all of them to meet up over the border in Spain. They were supposed to meet up with the French resistance and they were supposed to kind of carry them over. But Hassler and Sparks meets the French resistance. The other two guys cannot make contact, unfortunately unfortunately and Hassler and Sparks make Contact with a French resistance hero named Mary Lindell who pretty much was an expert in smuggling people in and out of Spain

She gets both men over the border with Hassler flown back to the United Kingdom and Sparks being sent over by boat Both men are home by February the other two men Laver and Mills got caught while trying to sneak over the Spanish border without assistance from the French resistance because they could not find them. They got lost. They couldn't find their contact point, whatever. And now normally this wasn't actually much of a problem because remember Spain is technically neutral. And depending on which Spanish border guard you find, they'll just let you pass or you can bribe them. They managed to find the one group of Spanish border guards that arrested them and turn them back over to the Germans.

And then they are of course executed. Hassler became something of a hero back in the UK as the country is desperate for a win. Like all of these commando operations, right? They're all kind of catastrophic failures most of the time, but they're really cool. Like we could all admit that, right? Like this is really stupid, but it's simultaneously awesome. Mm-hmm. So he becomes a hero, the UK needs a win in the war, so here you go. However, he was never awarded the Victoria Cross. You want to guess why? Stealing the chocolate? No, that would be funny though. No idea. Because his actions are quote quote not in the face of the enemy

meaning it was not considered combat right well so it's really fun as a Britain was desperate for a win it's like well we lowered the elevation of these boats full of like donated powdered milk for war oven orphans exactly two feet in the water and then they recovered them 12 hours later and it's like yeah but it's a win right I mean you you annoyed the Germans a little bit. Yeah. Temporarily. It cost them like $20 at least. Afterwards he becomes a solo sailor racing yachts and shit around the world. To this day there's like a yacht race named after him. I assume because he was so desperate to die on a boat he had to

keep searching for ways to do it after World War II. I mean some of those limpet mines went missing he probably could just found them. Bill Sparks, the only other survivor of the operation, had something of an interesting life afterwards. For starters, his escape route required him to be smuggled into Gibraltar via a boat. And when he got there, he had no proof as to who he was. Because remember, he's in a commando mission.

He's kind of washed up there. So he's arrested and sent to the UK to be investigated as a spy. At which point, he escaped from the cops and ran to his dad's house, who thought he had been fucking dead for weeks. Then he was arrested again, escaped again and ran to COHQ where he like kicked open the door. It's like, will you please get the cops to leave me alone? And COHQ is like, holy shit, you're alive. From there, he goes back to the military service. He fights in Italy and Africa before leaving

the army to become a bus driver in London But he does have a small break of becoming a cop in British Malaya But he does that for like a year he quits it goes back to being a bus driver I assume because he realized he'd really fucked up Yeah, and he's a bus driver until the day dies own critical support for the bus driver Yeah, so guys that is the story of the operation the bus driver. So guys that is the story of the Operation Franklin. How are you feeling about British combat kayaks? The little combat chocolate children? Yeah, I mean I feel as though it would be very very inconvenient to get turned into a blueberry during this

mission. You already have enough stuff going on. No, everyone could then like ride on top of the blueberry. Yeah, you could be like the lifesaver. Go into veterans affairs as a blueberry only to be told it's not service connected. But fellas, we do a thing on the show called Questions from the Legion. If you'd like to ask us a question, support the show on Patreon. Then you can ask us a question on Patreon or our Discord, which you'll have access to. Or you can turn into a blueberry, float over the ocean, ask us in person, and we will answer it on the show. And today's question is, what is your most irrationally hated object, thing, or person?

Ooh. The key being irrational. There has to be no good point for it. Ooh. I was gonna say Bono, but that is completely- Nah, I feel like that's rational. I feel like that's rational. It doesn't have to be a person, it, be a thing, object, place, person. Hmm. You go.

You have so many. I don't have that many. I mean, I wouldn't call them irrational, but like, all right. I just don't like Vampire Weekend. I never have, even from the beginning. And I made this joke because Jack Foreman, who's helped out with editing, used to work at SiriusXM, and I asked him, like, do you guys have like some like under the table deal with promoting everything connected to vampire weekend because any satellite radio station on SiriusXM

If it plays any indie music at all You'll always have that or Ezra Kandig or any of the other people are Ross damn any people from the band I'm like, I've never liked them. I didn't like them in 2008. I definitely don't like them now and Yet it just never and also periodically was like oh, yeah as for candy also like wrote neo Yokio for fucking Netflix and just like cool man like I can never escape the vampire weekend extended universe It's not like a moral thing. I know there were some like sexting underage thing I think with him so like fucking that's bad, but like the band itself whatever if you like that great I don't I'm not like it's like a moral judgment against the music

I just don't like it and it will never go away it's it just feels ubiquitous and unending maybe like Bono I guess. Well no Bono is different because like the argument that like you two suck I don't really care about it's more so like Bono is just such a like obnoxious terrible person. He seems very annoying. Who is like the embodiment of like Western neoliberalism? I mean, he did own like a mall in Lithuania through a shell company. What? Yes, in the Panama Papers it came out

there was like a Stoney or Lithuania or something. There was this like investment vehicle and like it was like through a shell company owned by Bono. I need to go buy shoes from Bono Shoes. The fuck? I think it's like early you two isn't bad is the thing. Like they were a regular band at one point and now they're just kind of a symbol of whatever. The fuck? I think because early U2 isn't bad is the thing. They were a regular band at one point and now they're just kind of a symbol of whatever.

They just show up on your phone uninvited. It's more so a pet peeve than anything and it makes me irrationally angry is like now people don't step aside on the tube platform when the door opens. They start to rush in as soon as the door opens. I mean it also knows that zebra crossings are apparently optional now. Oh yeah. Jesus Christ. on the tube platform when the door opens. They like start to rush in as soon as the door opens. I mean, it also knows that zebra crossings are apparently optional now. Oh yeah, everybody's jaywalking.

Jaywalking is normal here, but like it used to be people would, I mean, cause when you take your driving test, like that's an instant fail if you don't, if someone's tried to cross you, you don't stop. And like people just don't stop anymore. Like zebra crossings are kind of like playing game with your life now.

So. It seems to have been like really in the past, maybe like 18 months that like people have just like collectively decided to stop stepping aside when the doors open and it's just so it makes me so rationally angry. I've experienced that and it's like well you know I would love to make room for you to get on the train if you'd let me get the fuck off of it. I mean in fairness that's also what it's like in New York. It is in the Netherlands as well. Even though our doors are much larger than the ones here and there's still people

Yeah, the New York City subway cars are way bigger than tube. But yeah Oh actually another one is that I think anyone who practices optimal lifting is a complete rube Mmm, I don't even know what it is. It's like I guess I can't be a rube It's science-backed lifting to optimize like muscle tension and hypertrophy But it's like the gains that you make are so minimal that they will not make a difference unless you're a top level. I got one that's irrational.

Some people can pull off the look of chinos or jeans with loafers and white socks, but most people can't. Some people can pull it off. Eric Insena did a really good job of it before he died in a crash, but you know what? Most of you look like you got robbed for your shoes or bowling alley Yeah, I actually like that one a lot mmm Oh scarfs when it's hot outside for men are you doing Personal choice, I don't really Like that's the topic is like I don't know why it bothers me, but it bothers me. It's weird Anthony Bourdain I'm firing shots at you. I

It bothers me, but it bothers me. It's weird Anthony Bourdain. I'm firing shots at you I'm sorry like I some people just don't get as hot or sweat as much I sweat basically like if like my phone Lights up for a split second in my pocket or start sweating and when it's a hot day outside some people just like no I guess their neck is cold like don't I'm a sweater like for sure. I don't get it. I really don't get it I've been again. I know absolutely nothing about fashion. So what? Can't tell whether you're actually wearing Ralph Lauren or US Polo Association. I mean, like I will say that.

Given how people, I mean, Joe, I realize you've been out of the military a long time, but like given how your typical like, oh, wear civilian clothes guys look like, at least you didn't show up in tall white socks and fucking your running shoes from PT. But like, you're fair to say that might actually kind of be a look here now.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that probably is. So I guess that's an episode, but you guys host other podcasts, plug those podcasts. Trash future, what a hell would a dad, lines love I don't, or not lines love I don't, because that's this show, kill James Bond, no gods. Listen to lines love I don't. No gods, no mayors, yeah. Like, can you tell it's hot? It's been a long weekend.

Beneath Skin, the show about the history of everything told through the history of tattooing, and also you can buy my books on beneath the skin shop.com both photography and art books. This is the only show that I host so thank you for listening to it consider supporting us in patreon just five dollars gets you absolutely everything it gets you years and years of bonus content every episode early discord access ebooks audiobooks a vial of Augustus Gloop's blood all of this and more first dibs on merch and live show tickets. Top patreon too you get the piece of chocolate that turns you into a blueberry. Yeah.

Actually wasn't it a pill? Yeah. Man that's dangerous these guys are on pills all the time. You might accidentally take that one. Until next time, take meth, blow up the turban navy.