Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 391 - The US Navy's Flying Aircraft Carriers ft. Dr. Patrick Wyman

Episode Date: December 8, 2025

USE CODE DEC25 TO GET 50% OFF PATREON SUBSCRIPTIONS UNTIL THE END OF THE MONTH https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Joe and Tom are joined by Dr. Patrick Wyman, host of Past Lives and Tides of History to talk about the time the US Navy attempted to deploy flying aircraft carriers, which failed at a rate of 100% Sources: https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/how-airship-became-flying-aircraft-carrier https://nationalsecurityjournal.org/the-u-s-navys-flying-aircraft-carrier-mistake-still-stings/ https://www.military.com/history/navys-short-lived-plan-dominate-skies-flying-aircraft-carriers.html https://www.warhistoryonline.com/instant-articles/the-cursed-uss-akron-class.html https://magazine.atavist.com/2025/american-hindenberg-zeppelin-disaster https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1934/july/loss-akron https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/the-uss-macon/

With the holidays on the horizon, many of us are thinking of those we love, and the perfect gift to bring a smile to their faces. You've tried socks for your dad, novelty mugs for your co-worker, that protein powder that makes you explosively shit yourself for your gym bro. Buying the right gift for the people you care about can be a minefield. And we here at the Lines Led by Donkeys podcast are here to. help. So when your father is struggling with whatever flat-packed bullshit Santa has brought your parents, and your mother is in the kitchen eyeing up a burning turkey and that bottle of gin thinking, next year we're going to my sister's house, your brother is playing with Warhammer and your sister is being cyber-bullied for saying that beans make you gay, why not bring

the whole family together? Bring them together with anecdotes about how given the context of the Algerian War of Independence, your grandfather is likely a war criminal. With 50% off annual subscriptions using code DEC 25 all through December at patreon.com over slash lines led by donkeys, why not give them a gift they'll love? This Christmas, give the gift of history. Hello and welcome to the Lions and Buy Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe and with me is Tom and our returning champion, Dr. Patrick Wyman, host of the show, past lives. Together, we come to you, our dear investors, to pitch you a radical new sport. You've heard of MMA.

You've heard of wrestling. You've heard of Dana White's UFC and the spinoff sport he was inspired by his own personal life to create power slap. Here at Lines of I-Donkeys, we think Dana White didn't go far enough in the pursuit of mangling human bodies

while simultaneously finding legally dubious ways to pay his fighters as little as possible. So, we introduce you to horse fight. One man, one horse, one octagon. You've heard of the double-leg takedown. we've got quad leg takedowns. Are you sick of drug tests? So are we.

That's why we're adopting the same athlete wellness practices as Pride FC. Are you sick of referee stoppages? We didn't even get referees. Are you tired of athletes without a drive to compete, the soul of the warrior and tapping out? Well, I'm pretty sure none of us taught the horses how to do that. Join us for Horse Fight in our first event at the capital of the American Horse on Man Violence,

Enumclaw, Washington. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. It's still too soon, brother. It's still too soon. Oh, no. Oh, no. Well, I suppose Mr. Hans did win that match up. I mean, he definitely lost. I mean, I'm not sure there is a winner in any of that. I don't think anybody came out ahead. Well, depends on your definition. Depends on what kind of head we're talking about, I suppose, at that point. So with regard to this, I do have to preface our conversation by saying I have in fact seen a grown man punch a cow in the face. Famously, one of the founder of Kyokishin Karate, I think it's name's Maso Yama, would fist fight cows. Yeah. Nice thick skull.

You know how hard you have to hit a cow to rattle that tiny little brain in there? Exactly. If you're looking, that is the true challenge of a puncher. And Mongolians traditionally trained by, like, wrestling horses, like, is a feet of strength? So, we also need a time machine here. No, this is like the guys that I see on TikTok who are doing, like, insane martial arts, like the guy who's spraying his hands with dog medicine to harden them. And he can now punch bricks apart.

But I saw a new guy who was turning his fingertips into spears. He has a Home Depot bucket full of beans, dried beans, and he's. He's, like, spearing the bottom of them every day. This motherfucker's punching beads. Yes. In his, like, update videos, he, like, taps his fingertips together, and it actually sounds like you're tapping wood. Okay, so we're arranging our first set of fighters.

I feel like we could find horses from anywhere. You know, unfortunately, because it's 2025 and not, like, 1925, we can't go to, uh, like, the backyard of a Barnum and Bailey circus. Like, hey, you got any horses you're throwing out? Uh, but. What? You say that. And yet, in the 50 great states of the United States of America, I am 100% sure that you could find a state athletic commission that would sanction this. My money would be on Oklahoma. The Oklahoma State Athletic Commission notoriously lax.

Maybe Wyoming. I'm pretty sure they get a horse on their license plate. Yeah. You got a lot of options here. If you wanted to run this in the United States, you wouldn't even have to do the thing that the bare knuckleers would do in the late 19th century, when they would like tow a barge out into the middle of the Hudson or out into international waters or something and have the fight. Not in Donald J. Trump's United States, baby.

We do that on dry land. This sounds like a fucking like Red Dead Redemption 2 side mission where our desire, I don't know, Dutch. I don't know about fighting a horse on that barge in the river. We couldn't save Lenny. Micah's in prison.

This is going to get us to Tahiti. You want me to fight a horse, Dutch? I think we could get license in Vegas. I mean, they did license Jake Paul to fight. I mean, they've licensed Floyd Mayweather for the past 20 years. Yeah, and Jake Paul and Floyd Mayweather are arguably less able to read than a horse. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

If we're doing a literacy challenge between Mr. Ed and Floyd Mayweather, you know who's winning that and it's not Floyd. Mr. Mayweather, can you stomp your fist two times if this says yes or no? a horse versus Floyd Mayweather and still the horse throws the first punch I mean if it was a female horse Floyd would probably win but male horse

now that we've got the Floyd Mayweather illiteracy and domestic violence jumps out of the way yeah he's a real piece of shit isn't it yeah as a former combat sports professional who covered mixed martial arts

in boxing for many years I cannot overstate just how much almost everyone in that industry is a fucking horrible human being. Yep. Like all professional sports, you are going to find a certain percentage of people who suck. Among the fans, among the participants, like, this is how professional sports are, is they attract people who are shitty on some level.

MMA is like, used to be about 5% worse, and now it's about 15% worse, which doesn't sound like that much until you realize how shitty the pool you're drawing from is to start. Like, it's bad. because I love combat sports. I still train in them. And whenever anybody's like, so do you watch the UFC? I'm like, yeah. Like, oh, do you watch this?

Like, yeah. Who do you want to win? I'm like, could they both fucking lose? This episode's coming out in December. But Armand Syrucian, who's an Armenian fighter, just won. I was like, oh, aren't you have him? Like, no, I hate him. He's a terrible person.

His father is an oligarch. I can't say too much because I am liable for lawsuits. but real bad guy, so is his son. Like, I don't want anything to fucking do with these people. I like doing it and then leaving. Like, I have no friends with the people I train with. Because I don't want to know about them outside of the gym. It's bad.

Like, I've been doing Brazilian jiu-jitsu since, like, the early 2000s. I have met some real big pieces of shit in my life. And as soon as I leave the mats, I don't have their phone numbers. We do not have beers together. I do not socialize with them. there were like I and I trained at a great gym in a great part of in a great part of Los Angeles in so you're already starting from a higher baseline right like it nice gym good people good part of Los Angeles not like you're not diving into the red pill community in that in right there and there were still only like three guys in my like seven years of active training that I ever talked to outside of the gym yeah and it used to be better like you've been doing it long enough to see it has gotten worse, which is insane. Like, it wasn't good to start with. No, it started from a bad place. We started from the bottom and went down,

like, just to get a little Drake in there for us. But Patrick, as much as I wish I could bring you on here to talk about MMA for two hours for my own personal enjoyment. We're talking about a bit of history. Last time you were on the show, we talked about really stupid Japanese firebombs of World War II. It was a bonus episode. So subscribe to the Patreon. It's like 50% off to the end of the month. Go listen to it. I realized I wrote this script before you were coming on the show. It is also about balloons. So this is the universe is telling us something. I don't know what. You're American balloon correspondent. Look, I have been to the Albuquerque balloon fiesta twice, which I think means that I have more balloon expertise

than almost anybody else you could find for this. Yes, that is correct. Yeah, we had to get a Dr. Patrick Wyman, inflation expert on the balloon episode. Okay, you guys are going to laugh at me, but I just did the most dad-coded thing that I've done in the past several years. I purchased a plug-in air compressor,

like a tire inflator for our house, for the garage, because I'm tired of driving to the gas station to do it. So you want to talk about inflation? Yeah, your boy is ready for it. Oh, no. I got the machine and everything. Oh, no.

So in order to talk about, okay, before people get mad at me, they're not technically balloons and they're not technically blimps. We're talking about deridibles. I get it. Whatever. But I know the idea of fucked up American weapons programs that burn through piles of cash and human meat is nothing new. It is 2025.

After all, the United States at its very core is mostly air. aircraft carriers and a bootleg Gucci belt at this point. Every program burns through money, but normally at the end of the day, there's something tangible that comes out of the end of that pipeline. I mean, like,

the Osprey still exists after all. It kills significantly less people that it used to so far. But, you know, like, at the end of these incredibly fucked up weapons, systems, uh, development cycles, we don't really have a weapon, right? It doesn't normally have 100% fail rate, right?

Right. Well, today, we're going to talk about something that has a distinctly 100% fail rate. Joe, I don't think we've ever talked about any sort of weaponry or invention that has worked on this show. Well, aside from the M16. Well, the M16 worked. We talked about the show show, the French machine gun for World War I, which still worked, had a really bad reputation. Oftentimes killed its operators. But, you know, rarely does every single thing that this fact is the hypothetical. factor we're talking about. Rarely does every single

thing they make fail? This is one of those cases. Yeah, everything exists on a spectrum between like the M-16 and the panjandrum. Yeah, like the panjandrum failed, but it was experimental. Right? Like, it was, it was never fielded. This

was not only fielded, it became like the backbone of the American Navy's tactics at the time and most importantly 100% of them failed. And that's because we're talking about Flying aircraft carriers. Oh my God.

Yes. Blimp-based aircraft carriers. Okay. So I don't want to derail the momentum real quick, but I just have a quick callback question about French infantry armaments of the First World War era. Were they all designed to kill their operators? Because you look at a Hotchkiss or a LaBelle, which is 30 years old by the start of the war, right? Like, was the French mandate coming down from the armaments board to try to provide,

weapons that would kill their operators. We must invent a gun that kills its operator so I can go and fuck his wife afterwards. I mean, I feel like it's a perfect encapsulation of France in general because who hates the French more than the French? Oh, Jesus God. Oh, that's true. Oh, God. That one hits.

Oh, that hits. Like, Armenians are taking notes about this. Like, I really wish we could build our own weapons to kill ourselves because this is a really good idea. Have you ever considered national self-hatred as the defining principle in arms design? I mean, that is, if the EU had a national anthem, I don't know, they might. I feel like that's probably it. If you look at some of their more current weapons designs and new conscription programs. Except for the MG3, still going strong. Still going strong. They just had to re-badge it somewhat. Well, to be fair, there were some fairly negative associations with a weapon system.

It's got a PR problem, you know? You know what doesn't have a PR problem? The AK-47. Can't think of a single one. Can't think of a single thing that's ever gone wrong with that weapon. Nope. It has never been used for anything bad ever.

No, it's just like the T-55, the Toyota pickup truck. Yeah. Large bits of plastic explosives shoved into drums and the trunks of cars. Tom. Yeah.

You say, Hi, Lux. I hear affordable Toyota pickup truck. Nothing else. Listen, there was a long time when a swatch's greatest customers were people from Northern Ireland so Oh, Christ

actually I do have to say shout out, we did a live show a couple months ago in Glasgow and one of our fans gave me a sticker. It has a picture of our favorite Northern Irish

astronaut. Lord Mountbatten. Yeah, Lord Mountbatten being blown up by his yacht with a bomb planted by the IRA, so. Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. That's right. And that brings us to deridibles. Well, I mean, they also fly. And oftentimes crash down to the grounds, just like Lord Mountbatten.

Yeah, just like all those small pieces of Lord Mountbatten. Yeah. Oh, yeah, they're rigid, lighter than aircraft that we all really want to call blimps, but they're not actually blips. This also means we need to move in time to the 1930s in the United States during the peak of lighter than air concepts. The easy answer as to why this became. so popular is, well, it's the 1930s. Airplanes were not exactly wonderful. Long-distance flight

was hardly possible. And when it was, it wasn't exactly commercial. Flying from the United States to Europe was very difficult. It was wildly expensive, uncomfortable, unsafe, and loud. And before those became normal, like the Graf Zeppelin of Germany was already flying people back and forth across the ocean. And this is not affordable either. This is for rich people, but it was an option. And this is very important. Aesthetically, airships look cool as hell, and people knew it. There was commemorative plates in pins for people to buy for their favorite airship. There was like an airship fandom. The newspapers followed the Graf Seppelin's progress as it went on journeys, like it was a celebrity or the first rocket to the moon or something. The Empire State Building

had a mast at the top of it for airships to more and a huge. huge gangplank to unload passengers directly into the building, which I have to say sounds about the most terrifying thing possible for everyone involved. Also, baller idea, though. Yeah. Absolutely baller idea. As you were talking about airplane travel in the 1930s, I realized I recently watched Raiders of the Lost Ark for the first time with my kids. And the most unrealistic part of Raiders of the Lost Ark is not anything supernatural. It's the ease of Indiana Jones his air travel at the beginning of the movie where he's just getting on a plane and going

from point A to point B like, man, do you know what air travel looked like in 1936? It wasn't that. That's how the Indiana Jones film actually end is him dying by crashing into a mountain because nobody had radar yet. Things would have been so different with dirigible and I just

can't stop thinking about the idea of 1930s 9-11. It just bounces right off. Just very slowly bumps into the building and that goes backwards. the fucking 1930s al-Qaeda gave the empire stable a tactical bonk and then just floated through the city

you're just the empire staple like you just see the blimp coming very very slowly towards you and the bakers hello my baby hello my darling hello my ragtime gal you know what it is it's the it's the scene from the first Austin Powers movie where he's driving the steamroller

toward the lone guard in the hallway that's trying to do 9-11 with a rigid airship a whole deck full of flappers dancing as they look on in terror I'm gonna just like leaned out the window and like thrown a sharp rock out and taking it down pushed out with a stick

one spear and the game's over when it comes to the military side of things obviously airships have been around for a while they're used heavily in World War I as spotter craft calling an artillery, calling and planes. Sometimes they dropped bombs. They created easily one of my

favorite things as a counter to that though. The concept of a balloon buster or fighter pilots whose job it was to try to shoot them down in their shitty biplanes held together with dip spit and wood glue. Shooting incendiary

bullets out of a highly flammable aircraft at a thing that explodes very big when you shoot incendiary bullets into it. Dudes have never rocked harder. No, the more efficient way they could have done this is like, have a guy whose job it is to be at Ellis Island and pick out guys with the most Norman physiognomy. I was like, you're going to be a long bowman and you have just have to be on the roof all the time. You're on blimp watch. Looking for the dude with the really weird long and like wide forearm. Like, we're not asking why that happens. Duning hasn't been invented yet, but boy, do we have a job for you. You're looking at for a guy whose name is like Mick McCona. Murphy who has an arm like Hellboy.

Also, I do have to say a guy in a wooden, mostly wooden biplane firing incendiary bullets at a very explosive blimp is the first time that Freebird has ever been used as natural background music for anything. Now, the results

of the military use of airships was a bit hit and miss. But it was telling that in the interwar period, that being after World War I, but before World War two, most countries kind of dropped the idea. However, the U.S. did not. And it made some sense, at least in the context of the time. After World War I, the U.S. and Japan were pretty much already chomping at the bit to start shit with one another, owing to the fact that Japan was

expanding into the Pacific, and so was the U.S. Both of them saw it as their backyards, they didn't want other empires fucking around, and also, the U.S. had already helped Japan take over a lot of these territories during the war against the Russians and then again as allies in World War I. So in an era before radar, long-distance scouting planes, and large, reliable submarine fleets, the U.S. would need to find a way to patrol and monitor the vast Pacific Ocean Empire it then controlled. Airships, in comparison to say a sea ship, the sentence this doesn't really work, a boat, were at least on paper a much better idea. Airships. ships were cheaper, they were easier and faster to build, and were only crewed by 20 or so

people. Meaning, depending on their size, they could easily and quickly fix this gap that they have, because hitting the go button on the factories that crank out ships, that takes a while. Even back in the day, the U.S. would take several months to a year to crank out a decent warship. Now it's several decades to a century, but they needed something in the short term so they can keep an eye on the Japanese. Enter the airships. The first rigid airship the U.S. produced was built in 1923 based on

an early captured German Zeppelin design. Its rigid frame was made out of hardened aluminum, which is something that was called Duraloom with a fabric covering made out of cotton. As was common for the time, the cotton ship sack was attached to the frame

with a combination of sewing, lacquer, and tape. Yeah, I'm going to call it right here. I don't think covering a flying ship with cotton is the best idea. Just tape it into place. It'll be fine. I mean, there are so many things that we could say right at this point about why this is a bad idea or why there could be some issues here, but we don't need to because it's going to get worse and we know that. It does. This has a, I will say it has a body count, but not as high

as you probably think. Are we getting into Bonnie Blue territory? the US army enlist the help of Levi Strauss to make the airships. The hardest part is sewing the world's largest ass pocket on the side of it. I mean, when you said the word ship sack, uh, that, uh, I mean, that took me places. It took me a lot of places. Who out there lacquering their ship sack? I love that somehow this podcast currently has two historians. on it, and the term ship sack has been used continuously.

And it's going to be through the rest of the episode. I think we can promise that right now. 100%. This U.S. version of the airship was the first one to be filled with helium, because before this, the choice was hydrogen. Now, that is normally, when we keep making jokes about being highly explosive, that is why helium is much safer, but helium is the downside of at the time being extremely rare and very, very, very expensive.

It also wasn't as good at lifting things. So the U.S. was thinking about safety. This will be the last time they do that. But they were thinking about safety at this current moment. It's just really annoying when the guys assembling the ships keep doing like 1930s versions of whippets. I was like, yeah, the ship has come along really good. Have you been, have you been sipping the hell of you? No, boss.

Yeah, the U.S. Navy's airship fleet is, uh, Culturally British. You might be wondering how is the air helium, before someone gets mad at me, how is the helium held inside aforementioned ship sack? Well, we have sacks within the sack. We have sackception. These were out of cattle intestine. So yeah, it's a combination of cutting edge technology and straight up barbarian shit. I love this era of technology. because you have people like, we want cutting edge airships,

but also somehow we're still using fucking intestines to keep the helium gas in place. Yeah, I mean, like, if you can't use, like, cutting edge helium plus what amounts to basically haggis as the delivery system for it, really that you wouldn't be in the 1920s and 1930s.

Yep. And in case anybody's wondering, are Ohio heads, uh, who are listening for two things. I hate you. Uh, you are from Ohio.

I have to hate you. It's, it's, it's not up to me. Um, and two, all this is made by Goodyear. Uh, this is good year all the way down. We got Babendum on helium talk talking like this. And for long time listeners, the show, I've told this story before. Uh, there's a dominoes down the street from my house and maybe like two years ago before they made it harder to buy whippets.

All of the drivers had electric scooters to deliver the pizzas and they would sit on the wall behind the dominoes doing whippets for. hours. Yeah, they were training to become U.S. Navy airship pilots through immersion training. Yeah, so they are just like having a real continuity of history. And I remember seeing a guy go into the store, pick up the pizzas, come around to his bike, get handed a balloon by one of his friends, put it in his mouth and get on the bike and drive down the street with the balloon flapping out of his mouth. God save the queen. I mean, that's, if that isn't the cultural essence of delivery driver culture, I don't know what is. I mean, like, they really, really just fucking nailed

it with that image right there. When I was delivering pizzas, I was mostly just smoking mad amounts of weed and nearly killing myself because at the time, uh, being high in driving was a thought of being much of a problem. I was also 15. So like, forgive me, uh, greater Detroit area. Now we know that you're not supposed to drive high. That was not clear, uh, in those days. I just want our listeners to know that. Yeah. What would become known as the USS Shenandoah was absolutely fucking massive. It was over 200 meters long, weighed over 30,000 kilos, and it was so large that the rigid beams had to be constructed in Philly, loaded up and transport to Lakehurst, New Jersey, to be put together because that was the only place with a hangar big enough to fit it. And on

September 4th, 1923, several hundred Navymen had to pull the ship out of the hangar and the first American-built airship and first helium airship in the world took flight. This ended up falling under the command of the Navy most because the Air Force didn't exist yet. It was a ship. It wasn't dudes and boots, therefore, Navy

territory. It only had a crew of 25. It was planned to be armed with machine guns and bombs should it ever actively be deployed. And from there, it went about its trial tests to see if the thing actually worked. And in general, it

did. But they did find some small issues. Namely, we already talked to how big this thing is. The U.S. has no equipment whatsoever to move this thing around. And remember, it's 90% cotton sack. So you can't exactly use heavy machinery around it. You'll fuck it up. So to get it in and out of the hangar, it pretty much just relies on hundreds of ground personnel physically pushing and pulling it into place with ropes. This obviously is not great. Dudes just smack it off of things constantly, which causes damage. So they come up with another idea.

We'll just build a mooring point for it outside the hangar. That way, we don't have to park it. We can just leave it outside. Again, this is 90% sack of cotton. You can't just leave it outside. Windstorms take it. It gets torn to shit. It gets smashed.

against its mooring constantly and has to be repaired virtually every day. Yeah, we're creating the airship of Theseus. How bad of a job would that be? Like, look, I was a soldier. 99% of what your job is is shit you did not sign up for.

But I don't know if any of my complaints ever comes remotely close to enlisting in the Navy and being a guy that pushes and pulls a blimp into place as your job. Like, I thought I'd be on a boat at minimum. Yeah, I mean, the real violation of the join the Navy see the world thing. Like that really, really some false advertising there. Yeah. Like in Lakehurst, New Jersey,

where you're just bouncing off the outside of a rigid airship. Actually, Patrick, this is where I get to say, hold that thought for a bit. There will be men bouncing off the outside of an airship at some point of this episode. After it was repaired, the U.S. Navy took the airship on trips over major American cities to show off. But also, most importantly, this is a new thing. They need to train the crews and the officers. I mean, if it was up to me, I don't know if I'd pick large American cities to fly this thing over on training missions. But I wasn't in the Navy in the 30s. It worked. Nobody died, at least not yet. The Shenandoah turned into more of a training aircraft for these new officers and men. And with even more training missions, the airship and its crew

barely left the eastern United States. So it was decided for a more extensive trading mission. It should fly across the United States and come back. And it did. It was really fast in doing this. This only took 19 days, which is quite fast for back in the day. It was very impressive. And it only reinforced the idea that this is the future of military aviation. Then the US Navy began expanding their fleet with the commissioning of the USS Los Angeles, which was actually built by a German company as a form of war reparations for the U.S. So you can assume the quality on that one was pretty great. I like to imagine a different present

where airships and blimps took over instead of planes and Obama could have dron stricken less people because they took so long to travel. There would be significantly less war crimes in the world if we were restricted to balloon-based technologies. Yeah. You just have an entire border region of, Russians and Ukrainians flying blimps at each other? I'm not a pacifist.

However, I believe that if you really want to use military force, you have to really fucking mean it. And if you're going to send a fleet of slow moving dirigible at someone, you have to be pretty goddamn mad. And also, it reduces the level of technology to if your like

weird uncle is angry enough, he could still build it in the backyard. And if that's not the essence of the Second Amendment, I don't know what is. God damn right. I have this armed dirigible floating above my house in case the ATF comes to take my other dirigible.

You thought the killdozer was cool. Just wait until you see the fucking blimp I've got going in the backyard. The dirigible onk is such a powerful energy. I mean, harnessing levels of undiagnosed autism we never knew existed. Then in 1925,

as the Shenandoas flying over Ohio, it sailed directly into a storm. The crew fought against a storm for about 30 minutes, but the rigid frame of the airship was torn into three different parts, throwing them across the hellscape that is Ohio. And somehow, this did not kill everybody on board. It killed a lot of them, but a lot of people also walked away. It did attract a credit of several thousand locals

who just rocked up to the crash site began looting everything, to include looting the corpses of the dead crew. again just for clarification's purposes this was in Ohio yes I want to be sure we got

yes because they hadn't they hadn't invented catalytic converters yet so they're cutting the cotton off for their jeans my airship crashes into

the Ohioan countryside my legs are shattered because the shit that's been literally glued together failed on me the 1930s

proto Juggalo creating the world's first pair of Jinkos out of blimp fabric my legs are twisted in every direction and some asshole runs up to me

and starts running me for my fucking shoes. But the crash of this airship did not mean the U.S. was done with the concept. Remember, it's still quite early in this whole weaponized aviation era for the United States. The era is full of fuck it, we ball. And when it came to attempting

to throw things together and then simultaneously throw them into the sky to see what would hang on, this isn't going to slow them down. The U.S. shrugged and said, okay, well, we still have the USS Los Angeles as a concept. We still love airships. Maybe we just don't, you know, fly them directly to a storm next time. But just scouting airships, which is what they were planned to be for, had inherent weaknesses.

It needed to be more than just a floating sack of substance staring down at the terrain below. As everybody learned in World War I, airships were useful, but they were literally sitting ducks to any enemy weapon system. plane, large cabal and machine gun, you name it. And not to mention, at this point, aircraft carriers were a thing. The idea that this thing operating over the Pacific Ocean would come across enemy fighter planes was very real. It was a very real threat to it. The same Japanese fleet that the airships were meant to be spying on would be able to deploy

things to kill it very quickly. Enter the coolest concept that American military history has ever stepped into. The Flying Aircraft Carrier. U.S. Navy went back to the drawing board and found a previously developed concept, first pitched by the British a few years before in 1917. In the British design, an airship would take off with a few smaller aircraft attached underneath of it, then once in flight, the airship could deploy them. But, most importantly, it would not be able to recover them. The planes would not be able to land back at the airship, which, yeah, this process sounds insanely dangerous and

hard to do, but the U.S. didn't like that, because remember, their goals to be doing this over the Pacific Ocean, it would have to be able to recover these planes. With that idea in mind, the U.S. ordered the Akron class airship, designed once again by Goodyear, with the

partnership from the German Zeppelin company, again, as a form of war reparations. This is the point where I have to ask, Patrick, in your expertise as a person who is an expert in the kind of pre-modern era, were we living in a unique time of stupid ideas for weapons at this point?

Were we continually devolving? Okay. So one of the interesting things, in my opinion, about the development of weapons systems in history is that you get long periods of time where things are more or less set, and then you get these periods of insane experimentation where people are just throwing shit at the wall and seeing what works. So my particular favorite one is the Hellenistic period. So this is after the death of Alexander the Great when all of his generals are fighting over control of his empire.

And this is one of those times when people are just trying shit because all of the sudden you have a half dozen kings who have more money than God. And because they've just looted the entire Persian empire and they're just going to spend all the money fighting each other. So they do things like develop ships with siege towers attached to them. So you can go straight up to the seawall of a city and off comes your invioms. army. But like, brother, you think that's seaworthy? Can you stick a tower on top of a, on top of a ship with five tiered banks of wars and think that that's going to work real well? And so the Hellenistic period is full of things like this. The period after the invention of gunpowder is another one where people are trying stupid shit. Like Henry the 8 and the English built this entire

series of coastal defenses, these big round cannon towers to defend the shoreline, immediately obsolete because they didn't bother to go and talk to any of the people who were doing like cutting edge military engineering in Italy or the Balkans or any of the places where people are actually building things to resist gunfire. They just didn't do that. So they spent a huge amount of money building all of these fortresses that were immediately wrong. Like not didn't even get as much use out of them as the Maginot line. Like that's the so yes. So that's very common. When you get these periods where there's this intense technological competition, like people try the dumbest shit imaginable.

I, okay, I have an idea for you, Patrick. Investors, I hope you're listening. Let's take a stupid obsolete turret, put it on a stupid obsolete dirigible, and also put planes on it. Yeah, I love it. Whatever happens, it's going to be hilarious. Yeah, and look, like, when you're developing a weapon system, you have two mandates, right? First of all, make something that works.

Second, if it doesn't work, it needs to be funny. Yeah. Those are, those, that's all you, that's all you need to do. Like, if you fail and it's not funny, then that's just tragic and nobody wants that. It's the same rule that comes with building a Warhammer Tabletop Army. The rule of cool. Do you lose all the time? Does this not function?

Okay, fine. But does it look cool as shit while it's dying? Mm-hmm. Simple. I mean, yeah, you just explained the concept of a thousand sons army right there. Like, it's going to look awesome. Are they going to win anything? No, probably not.

See, she's not with them today, but it is going to look cool. Compared to other airships, the Akron class would need to be bigger in every conceivable way. Because not only would there need to be men there to man the ship, but also the men needed to work and launch the planes, the pilots, the crew would need to be larger than any other airship, meaning compartments on board would need to be bigger to house them all. And before the plan even left the drawing room table, they came up with a flying ship that people, would be able to live on four weeks or months at a time. That also meant that the eight onboard engines would have to move it once it was airborne with the goal of going so fast that could clear the entire United States in just two days.

You can see that we're having a bit of classic mission creep here. No, it needs to be bigger. Now it needs to be faster. That needs to be bigger and faster. Like, well, you can have one or the other. Who would have thought that the spruce goose was not the dumbest flying thing of this era? Like, that's really incredible. I just truly, truly remarkable things happening here in the great state of Ohio.

Look, I have to begrudgingly respect Ohio a little bit for this one, or at least the Goodyear company. As you can see, things are getting a bit weird. Something you'd expect to be pitched is a fever dream and then die before anybody actually started welding shit together. But no, in 1929, two Akron class airships began construction, the USS Akron and the USS Macon, weirdly named after Georgia instead of somewhere in Ohio. And while that was going on, the Curtis Aircraft Company began modifying a fighter plane to fit the plan,

it would be taking off and returning to the airship from a trapeze system. What it boiled down to was a crane would hook the aircraft from effectively a little ring on top of the aircraft. Bring it down below the airship where it would be able to then turn its engines on to full flight speed, lift itself off the hook and hope it doesn't crash. because it needed to be lowered below it before it turned over because again, it's the late 20s, early 30s. Aircraft are wildly unsafe. And if one of them malfunctioned even slightly,

the entire airship would explode. So if it explodes, you explode down there. And then to land, the pilot of the parasite fighter aircraft, as they are sometimes known, would have to line up that ring perfectly with a hook. And to do so, remember, they would have to be flying alongside a moving airship,

throttle the aircraft down to pretty much stall speed, and then line it up perfectly or they die. Every single alternative here is either the thing works or everybody dies. Yes, that is correct. I don't think that's a great operating principle. There's also an added risk here where before... Another one. It's nothing but added risk, to be completely honest.

The original plan was to lower the aircraft down without the pilot inside, but then they'd have to climb down in quite a precarious ladder situation below the airship, where a strong gust of wind would just snatch them into the current, and they would slow down the deployment time of the plane. So men began riding in the plane on the winch, which meant if at any point the witch failed, they would just plummet to earth in their plane that was not turned on. Margin for error, death. Yes. Margin for error. Death. Step three. Margin for error.

Death. Like, just everything is death. Every single step here involves, like, just looking death in the face and giving a big old smoocheroony. And I will say, by far, the most dangerous part of this entire aircraft, nobody died during this process somehow. What? Yeah. This is not the thing that killed anybody. That is, I don't believe you.

I don't believe that that could have functioned without everybody dying immediately. I need to reassure both of you. A lot of dudes are going to die for the end of this episode. Okay. That makes me feel better. But none from the planes. And because this is an airship we're talking about, it requires lift to stay airborne, to get airborne to not crash like the last one.

And wait means a lot in this equation. So when the airship took off, it would not be able to. take off with its planes on board. So every time the ship took off or landed, it would have to get rid of all of its planes and then take them back on board. Meaning, regardless, pilots would be doing this insanely dangerous process at least twice. The first of the class would be completed in 1931, and it was the USS Akron. It underwent trials and passed with, like the Shenandoah, a slight accident while attempting

to be put back in its hangar. But the first testing of a live launching and recovery of the fighter planes didn't happen until May of 1932, which did go shockingly well. I'm going to be honest with you, like everybody else, I assume this is going to murder people constantly, but it just didn't. The pilots were really good at this. They called themselves the trapeze swingers, which is kind of cute. After this, it was sent to the West Coast, and this is where things begin to go wrong in the most predictable way possible. The U.S. Navy, like I said, is the home of the airship program. They had a body of trained ground crew to handle the airships and their equipment needed to handle them.

At least they did on the East Coast, where all of this is happening. But once the ships get moved to the West Coast, there's nothing there. There's moors for them to effectively tether themselves to. But there's no trained ground crews, nothing. They didn't move the crews with the ship. They did not. Because the ground crews were huge. The Akron class has a crew of like 100.

but, you know, there's like 400 odd dudes that have to pull this thing into place every time it goes to land. I'm just, I have so many questions, mostly about who was actually issuing orders in the war department at this point in time and what their thought process was. I think their thought process is very similar to our own and that is this idea sounds cool as hell. What could possibly go wrong here? I will say this is a bit of a, this is a bit of a situation where, the invention and the guy who really likes it are going to have a run in. Joe, I have a question. Where on the West Coast was this dirigible move to? Camp Kearney San Diego. Oh, that's interesting. Does anyone here know about the molecular chemistry of helium in high heat?

They're about to discover it in real time, Tom. Yeah. So at Camp Kearney, they didn't have ground crew. They didn't have anything. Instead of mooring equipment, they decided to just use hundreds of regular naval personnel who had never handled an airship before to just muscle the thing to the ground. And Tom already pointed out the main problem here. Keelium gets hot. It floats better to make a very long scientific explanation something that even I can understand because I'm an idiot. So they have an untrained body of dudes on the ground attempting to manhandle this massive air,

the largest ship the U.S. has ever built. to the ground when science and physics are actively working against them and nobody has any idea to include the guys in the airship. The officers in charge, none of them know that like, well, we've been in the sun all day. That might be a problem. Nobody had any idea. For people at home, helium gas expands under heat. And when you put a lot of helium gas in a balloon and put it in San Diego, I'll give you one guess what's about to happen. Well, there's no explosion, but remember how Patrick's had dudes slap it against the side of an airship? That's what we're going to.

So the Akron pulls into the camp, it had spent hours in the sun, and the ship had so much lift that ground crews trying to grab these ropes had no hope of attempting to pull it to the ground. But the ground crew didn't know that. The airship crew didn't know that. And the dudes on the ground held onto the rope anyway as the Akron continued to pull away, ripping several people off of their feet. Now, when this happens,

most dudes let go, right? They fall, you know, a half a foot to the ground or whatever. Some don't. One guy who didn't was pulled into the air for five meters before we let go, crumpling to the earth and shattering his legs. Another two men held on even longer until they got tired and fell to their deaths. And then another man held on long enough for the airship crew to look down, be like, oh, fuck, that dude's still there.

And then hoisted him into the airship. saved his life. It's like the gremlin on the wing of the plane, just the guy like, I like my job, I enjoy my job, I don't like my job that much. I mean, at a certain point, you have no hope but to play the world's most impromptu game of Ninja Warrior.

If you hold on for long enough, your only hope is to continue holding on. I cannot imagine a way I would less rather die. I mean, very few of them than being pulled up into the air by a rope attached to an airship and then realizing that either I hold on or I die, like, that is not how I want to go.

I better hope you've been doing some grip work at the gym. I mean, I have and I feel really good about my grip as a component of my overall strength, but not that good about it. Yeah, I'm not putting my money on this. No, no. I definitely see myself being the guy who holds on just long enough to break my legs. Yeah, yeah. I mean, look, all things considered, that guy got off pretty light.

Yeah. I mean, not as late as the shit. ship, unfortunately. After this, the Akron returned to duty, occasionally crashing into its own hangar and being repaired until April 3rd, 1933. The Akron left its mooring in New England with several VIPs on board,

like the commander of Lakehurst Naval Station, the head of Naval Aeronautics, Admiral William Moffat, the main champion for the airship carrier, and weirdly, the CEO of Mack Trucks. Bad news for all these guys. yeah man was not meant to leave the earth this is why i appreciate armenians inability to be in the sea and in the air we have an air force we were not meant to leave the ground you know look what happened to buddy holly and

the big bopper look what's about to happen to the founder mac trucks are you implying that buddy holly and the big popper ethically armenian i don't yeah i don't know what are italians if not armenians i think i just called him the big popper Well, that's something completely different. As soon as the Akron took off, it flew into fog and bad weather once again, which only got worse as it went. As is being hit with strong winds and rain, it began to violently descend towards the sea below. They tried to drop ballast, they tried everything they could to keep it in the air.

But his tails smashed into the ocean, got dragged along by the engines for a little bit because they still had power. But before long, the entire ship crashed into the sea. It crashed very slowly. I mean, it is a dirigible. Like, it's not going to crash quickly. But, you know, it's not meant to be in water. It's not meant to crash anywhere, but especially at sea. It breaks apart on impact.

And then it kills almost everybody on board. They don't die on impact. Almost everybody drowns. The crash kills 73 men. Only three members of the crew survive, which is still three more than I would assume. It became the most deadly aeronautical disaster in human history up until that point. And if that wasn't bad enough, as they searched for survivors, another Navy blimp crashed killing two more people.

Running a foul of the thick, our fog again, that's about FABG, Patrick. Fogg. I mean, here's what I'm really hearing from this is that the Akron has, the USS Akron has historically been extraordinarily bailed out by the Hindenburg. Yes. Like, if not for the Hindenberg doing what we know the Hindenberg was going to do a few years after that. There would be so many more Akron jokes. And I feel like we have all missed out because of that. The Hindenberg robbed us of proper appreciation of the image of this craft

very slowly crashing into the ocean. It's the Austin Power scene, man. And the thing is, the reason why so many people died on board wasn't from the crash. It was from the drowning. Because despite this being an airship in the service of the U.S. Navy, they had not thought to stock their airships with life jackets at all. The people that survived survived because they just happened to black out on some wreckage. That was it. I have so many questions. Okay, but please tell me that the, that, that the admiral proponent of the project was one of

the deceased. Yep. Every once in a while, we do like to see someone get hoisted by their own pittard. I mean, this is the opposite of hoisted. Or we had dropped by their own pittard, I suppose is the case maybe. This is like when the, what was that stupid scooter thing? The Segway? The inventor of the Segway dying in a Segway accident.

And the only person who thought they were cool was him. The inventor of the derigible dying because of like a Jack and Rose type situation with a subordinate. There's not room on this palace. Except one was an atom roll and the other one was like a Seaman second class. He was like, get the fuck off the flotation device. It just kicks him. look i mean if you knew if you were that guy and you knew that the reason you were in this mess was because of that guy i think you would be i'm taking my shot if i kill the admiral right now

nobody can prove it no uh-uh hey the thing just crashed like get your licks in while you can brother yeah it's weird that 72 people died from drowning and wood from multiple stab wounds Joe, it's another perfect example of our phenomenon of A-Cob, all commissioned officers are bastards. That is correct. Now, that brings us to the USS Macon launched in April of 1933. Only a few weeks after the Akron died.

The Macon, like the Akron, was the largest flying object yet constructed in the world and would hold that title for three more years until the Hindenburg launched. The Macon was virtually the same as the Akron in almost every way. It was slightly lighter due to changes in construction, but pretty much the same. By the time the Macon launched, people in the Navy were not entirely sure that they needed it anymore. The main driving force for the very concept of lighter-than-air aircraft and flying aircraft carriers was Admiral Moffat, who had just gotten killed by one. In the year since this project began, new realities of modern warfare had kind of put the giant floating ball of gas and fighter planes back into sitting target territory.

Virtually every time they held a training exercise using the Macon with the rest of the fleet that it was supposed to be working with, it was in training destroyed by enemy fighters or enemy ships before it could do anything in its role as a fleet scouting craft. So tactics changed a little bit. Prior to this, the fighters on board were met for airship protection only, and the airship itself was to do the actual scouting. After a few training exercises, it became clear that if the airship itself was left with an eye shot of an enemy, it would die, no questions asked. So the Navy switched things around.

The airship's entire job would now to be a carrier, sitting as high as it could in the clouds, and sending its aircraft out to be scouts, with the hope of such an elevation would make it unable to be seen or unable to be hit. This worked somewhat, but still virtually everyone in the Navy thought the whole thing was a waste of time and money. The government in the Navy argued about the airship carrier's future and airships in general, something that was not lost on the commander of the Macon, Lieutenant Commander Herbert Wiley had started his careers on normal naval officer back in 1923, and then he volunteered to join the Navy's airship officer program. After this, he remained on the ground crews until he took command of the USS Los Angeles

before being posted to the USS Akron. He was one of the three men to survive that crash. Oh, God. But he still loved the idea. This crash did not dissuade him at all that these things are cool. That's a skill issue right there. If you survive an airship crash, like, that should be a strong message to you that you're not going to get your ass on an airship again. Yeah. Like, you're not going to get two bites at that particular apple.

Most people don't get two bites at that apple at all. Or I look at it another way. Maybe the command is like, well, look, he survived one of them. He surely got going to die on the second one. He knows what not to do. Tom, hold that thought. he was a diehard believer in the airship as a concept and as a reality he loved flying aircraft carriers because the making was one as well and he thought that they were very useful

in modern conflict he's making like fan comms of airships and posting him on old twitter man woulda fucking love to go pro despite being one of only three men still alive to give a very personal lesson as to why he might be wrong he did not learn anything from this. So when he heard that President FDR was planning on maybe axing the program, he decided to undertake an unauthorized mission to convince him otherwise. In 1934, FDR and several members of his cabinet were on board the USS Houston traveling from South America to Hawaii. Now, obviously, since this is a president traveling, knowledge of the location of the ship was considered top secret, though people knew what ship he was traveling on. So Wiley decided he would show everyone

that the Macon could locate a top secret ship without anyone spotting them and show them how wrong they were about his beloved Macon. He unmoored and went to the skies without any authorization whatsoever, high up in the clouds, until he actually did locate the USS Houston. He had managed to do so carefully that none of the president's protective naval picket located the airship carrier hiding in the clouds overhead. Then, as an extra bit of flex, Wiley ordered his crew to drop mailbags full of newspapers over the side aiming for the decks of the Houston to show everybody

where they were. I thought he was going to like to flex, he's going to start doing donuts in the fucking blimp, whipping shitties in the sky. Now thankfully, these very heavy bags full of mail missed the Houston and splashed out into the ocean right next to it because

unbeknownst to Wiley FDR was sitting on deck at the time and very nearly killed him in the most Acme ass way possible. Now, FDR, always a fan of nearly being smashed to death by falling mail, was pretty impressed that Wiley and his crew had managed to pull this whole thing off, though Wiley's superiors were not at all impressed, and he was very nearly court-martialed.

But for now, the airship carrier program would survive, and Wiley wasn't even relieved of command for effectively stealing a dirigible. That was until the USS Macon also crashed. On February 11th, 1935, the Macon was unmoored from its base in Sunnyvale, California, with the goal of joining the Pacific Fleet. The next day, they were flying above Big Sur, and the tail section of the airship simply fell off. Some people say, like, it was strong winds that tore it off,

but an investigation kind of shows that it whoopsie-doodled off the aircraft itself. When it fell off, it sends shrapnel into the section of the ship where it carried the gas sacks and, you know, kept the whole thing floating. This caused a catastrophic but slow leak of the gas and brought the ship inching closer and closer to the Pacific Ocean. Just like with the Akron, it was slow and mostly controlled as it crashed into the water, though this time everybody on board did have a life jacket because the Navy did learn something from the last crash. so instead of having another pile of dead bodies and an even worse air disaster on their hands only two of the 83 people on board died both of the people died because they refused to follow orders

one of whom a radio man named Ernest Daly terrified at the crash ignored orders to remain on board until it hit the water and simply bailed the fuck out of the airship while it was still like 50 meters above the water he hit the water like a goddamn meteor and died on impact The second death was a stewardess, Florentina Caba, who refused to leave the ship because she couldn't swim and was afraid of water.

And so despite wearing a life jacket, she refused to get out of the sinking airship and died. I assume this was despite the fact that the commander Wiley was the only man on board who's been through this before. He's just like, seriously, you should really fucking trust me on this one. I've done this before. Honestly, if you're in that position, do you want to trust the guy? who's been like, oh, no big deal. I've done this before. It's okay.

You're going to cling to some wreckage. We're going to be fine. Like, does that fill you with confidence? If I was on a ship, airship or otherwise, and my new captain had already been on a ship that fucking sank, I would assume there's some weird superstitions around you. We know that sailors are a superstitious bunch to start with. That can't be good.

I assume those superstitions also apply to airships. Yeah. It's still the Navy. Yeah, I mean, I have questions. I do have one. I do have one overarching question, were there Marines on board? Not that I'm aware of. Did these airships have Marines?

Not that I'm aware of that. It was all naval personnel of the airship core. If you wanted to make it even funnier, toss couple Marines on there and you know the humor factor is going to rise. That is true. And so would the amount of drunken incidents on board. Yeah. I mean, look, are you going to find a half-eaten crayon jammed into an essential piece of

machinery? Yes, you are. I do think the Marines would be the guys who invented whippets on board. though. They're like, guys, that's probably true. They're sticking a straw through the cotton under soaking out the helium. Why does the airship keep floating slowly back down to the surface? Maybe it.

I don't know, Captain. What's going wrong? Maybe that's where they went wrong. If they'd had Marines on board, it would have taken someone of that particular caliber to point out the flaw in the core concept. Like, you need to go to that level to find the guy who's like, is this a good? idea? I do think they would have benefited with Marines on board or British delivery guys because as they're, you know, they, the tail ripped off over Big Sur. They're not quite over the

water yet. So let's say like, look, we're going down, but, you know, we still have too much, we too much, we got too much float. We got to get rid of some float. Deploy the guys who suck all the gas out of the ship so we could comfortably land in a farmer's field somewhere, not the fucking ocean. The Marines are going on. up to the air sock and hitting it with like a boba stroll. Yep. I honestly, they could have really saved themselves a lot of trouble had they been that forward thinking.

And that's, and you know, really this, to me, it boils down to a problem in, uh, inter-service coordination. Failure of imagination. Yeah. Like, that's a tragic issue. I cannot imagine how big these airships must have been. They're huge. Because I've seen, like, along the Oregon coast, like around Tillamook, they, a couple of the hangers.

that they kept the much smaller airships that they used for kind of coastal patrol. A couple of those hangers are still around, or at least they were when I was a kid. I don't know if they still, I mean, I suppose that's been 30 years. But some of these hangers were still around. And I remember being shocked by how huge those ones were. And those airships were maybe half the size of the ones we're talking about here. To the point that it's crazy, that it functioned at all. But, I mean, it did until it didn't, I suppose.

and Wiley survived yet again. He survived two flying aircraft carrier crashes. And on this one, he managed to save a man's life afterwards. So like, well, yeah, I mean, he did literally get the guy into the mess.

It was the least he could do. Yeah, that's true. Sorry, I did it again. What's the odds that happens a third time? But imagine how annoying it would be to be him to tell your story to like a guy in a bar. And there's no way the guy's going to believe you.

It's like, oh, yeah, survived like two. original crashes. I saved someone's life and they're like, no, you didn't. It's like that guy who survived the first nuclear blast in Japan traveled home and survived the second one. You know, Wiley's the only man who's standing there rubbing the bridge of his nose knowing exactly what's happening. Yeah. I mean, so I have to ask you, Joe, what happens to this guy later? Please tell me, we know something about his future career. He goes back into normal naval service. Just like nothing

happened. Yeah, he's fine. You can't. Oh. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Imagine you're just, you're serving on some destroyer in an Atlantic convoy and you're chatting the guy up next to you. And he's like, did, did you know I survived two airship crashes? And you're like, why are you even in the Navy still? Shouldn't you be somewhere else?

Like, why are, what are you doing here? Both times I crashed into the water. I'm already on the water now. Like, it can only go downhill from here. Exactly. The cause of the crash was something very. very, very simple, and it was kind of indicative of the entire program. Despite having left its hangar and receiving repairs from a previous accident,

the crew had simply forgotten to correctly install the Macon's tail section. So the second that a strong gust of wind hit it, it just tore right off. The ground crews just were not trained up. Nobody was entirely sure how to keep these things airworthy. And finally, they whoopsie-doodled into the sea. And with that, 100% of the world's... 's fleet of flying airships was dead. They flew less than a combined 100 times.

By the time the Macon died in 1935, its rule as a fleet scout could easily be replaced by flying boats like the Catalina much quicker and cheaper than hypothetically building another airship carrier combo fleet. A board of inquiry was held, chaired by an engineer that came to the conclusion that rigid airship carrier programs was actually quite great and to continue it was in the best interest of the U.S. Navy. The Navy decided, nah, fuck that. We're done with that shit. But they did continue on with rigid airships and they expanded it further than it ever go before. In 1942, the Secretary of the Navy, Ernest King, attempted to resurrect the program, though

this time without the carrier ability. He wanted to employ them as coastal scouting, kind of like the hangars that you saw to look out for U-boats, raiders, things of that nature. To speed up the construction and deployment, he eventually decided that they should just be simple blimps rather than rigid ships, because obviously blimps are easier to build. Goodyear, the only company with the ability to build these blimps quickly went back to the drawing board and then hit the big old blimp go burr button that World War II American manufacturing is famous for. Like all cases of American manufacturing during World War II, they would quickly build more blimps between the year 1942 and 1945 than they had ever built before,

ending the war with a fleet of 154 of the things, armed with weapons like homing torpedoes and death charges. These things ended up being pretty goddamn good at anti-Semarine warfare. The crews grew into the thousands, and only one of them was lost to enemy fire during the war. The blimps of World War II were so effective that U-boats would simply refuse to attack a convoy if they happen to see a blimp overhead. This made those cheap, less advanced, not rigid versions, much more successful than something as cool as a airship carrier. Historian R.K. Smith wrote about them, quote, the rigid airship's military career was short.

It was controversial, ever dramatic, and awesome. I love that, like, we're all sitting here and we all know exactly how fucking stupid this is. And yet at the same time, I don't know if this is a dude. dude's rock thing, but you've got to kind of look at it and be like, that is pretty fucking cool. Dude's be rocking. Terrible idea, but pretty cool. I love it.

I love it in the context of World War II is like, you know, America, the country that is literally harnessing the power of God with the atom and is simultaneously like, what if we had the war balloon again? What if we put the power of God in an air balloon? I've been waiting all episode to try to figure out how to work this in, but that line from ice cubes. It's a good day. I mean, I'm just wondering if the Akron or the Macon, since they were Goodyear blimps, ever read Ice Cube's a Pimp. If only they survived long enough. Any day, I don't have to use my atomic blimp as a good day.

Gotta let the blimp bark. I mean, like... Put some shots in your fitted parentheses blimp. The fact that these like, these blimps actually worked really well during World War II makes it so much funnier that the, the rigid ones just fail dramatically, where it's like, you could just use blips. Like, there is a use case for them. It's not that. Yeah.

Whatever you thought you were doing there, it was not that. Say what you will about the flying aircraft carrier concept. It is truly an incredible feat of technology, but it's an incredible feat of technology that is also very stupid. Like, even if you can pull it off, like I have said multiple times on this show, my opinion, when it comes to historical battle plans, weapons, you know, name is, if it's dumb and it works, it's not dumb. This was dumb. It did not work. Therefore, dumb. That's, that's my foolproof equation. You're probably wondering how long

the lighter than air program of the U.S. military survived. Well, a lot longer than you probably think. You want to take a wild guess? I'm going to say 2013. Kind of, but we'll get there. Okay, my guess is 96. 1962, but you both are close in a different way because veterans of the global war on terror like myself and Nate probably saw blimp while we were deployed. These were called aerostats. These were unmanned blimps anchored above forward operating bases

that were effectively a platform for cameras. And I mean, my last deployment was a very long time ago. but the U.S. military was technically deploying blimps to war zones all the way up until the 2010s. Nowadays, they have been seconded to surprise surprise, CBP, who uses aerostats on the border. And you might see them in the news from time to time because CBP being staffed by fucking idiots has a tendency to let the tethers break and then the aerostat just kind of tears ass through local suburbs fucking shit up. I mean, if that's not the quality of work we've come to expect from our fine border patrol agents, I don't know what is. Yeah.

I guess what I'm saying is the world would be a better place if everyone had to use airships for military purpose. They're perfect. I love them and the world is a worst place without them. The end. I welcome steampunk 9-11. Moving very slowly. Very, very slowly. It's the bonk apocalypse.

Muhammad Otto wearing a top hat and those goggles. Oh, Jesus Christ, no. Just a fucking frock coat. Yeah, you don't have to learn how to land if the blib slowly deflates and you fall to the ground. Well, if it's something we learn from the U.S. Navy, they also didn't really have to learn how to land. I think if there's anything we can look forward to over the next 10 years of, you know, humanity's experience of war, it's that people are going to find equally strong. stupid ways to use drones.

Yeah, for sure. We are about to enter the golden age of guys doing stupid shit with drones and war zones. And I for one, I mean, there's a lot I'm not looking forward to about the future. But that specific aspect is going to be very funny. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if we're going to glean any humor from robotic murder, it's certainly coming that way. Yeah.

It's going to be horrifying, but like all things that are horrifying. If you're broken on the inside like the rest of us are, you can still find a way to laugh at them. we're all looking for silver linings here I do look forward to like some delivery service using drones and someone just skeet shooting someone's deliveroo out of the sky that's gonna be a whole genre of TikTok videos that I for one am very much looking forward to

yeah if FDR nearly got killed with the mailbags you'll just be like standing on your porch and get like your head air rated by a Ben and Jerry's drop from a blimp I mean I know for a fact that I am going to die because a delivery drone drops a box of protein bars on my head. I have seen the future. I know what it holds. That's exactly how I'm going is that I used my local supplement store to ship me a massive thing of protein.

The drone is going to fail. And this 10 kilo bottle of protein is going to cave in my skull. Yep. And all of that for strawberry and cream flavor, which is what I just bought. I mean, look, when you find a good flavor of protein powder, like if you accept the risk of drone related death before this you just had to worry

about shitting out your guts I mean so really you're worried at both ends of the protein delivery spectrum it's kind of like the drone shooting out of its guts directly under your head if you think about it fellas we do a thing on this show called Questions from the Legion

if you'd like to ask us a question you can support the show on Patreon like I said till the end of December all subscriptions are 50% off using the code DEC 25 and you can write into the show. You can enter our Discord which you'll have access to once you

become a supporter. Ask us there. You can attach the message to a blimp and fire it directly at Patrick Wyman's head and we will answer it on the show. And today's question is what is the most stubborn man thing that you do like refusing

to use an umbrella in the rain, not wearing eye goggles during DIY projects, etc. I mean, they already nailed me. I do not use an umbrella. No, never. I live in the Pacific Northwest for a long time. I never use an umbrella.

Now I live in the Netherlands, which is kind of like the Pacific Northwest on steroids when it comes to the rain. Just the hood. Because I don't feel like carrying an umbrella around. If I go into a store and I have a wet-ass umbrella, I have to put in this super little fucking umbrella thing. Knowing me, I'm going to forget that son of a bitch.

And I'm still going to be without an umbrella. So I just have a hood. I hear my father's voice in my head from time to time saying, soft or like my dad my dad passed away this last year and like every once in a while I think I'm doing pretty well in dealing with all of that but every once in a while when something happens where I catch myself doing a thing I just hear his voice soft is somewhere somewhere in my head and like but no I have I have my own stubbornness things mostly carrying things by myself yeah I would say where I'm just like no I like I know it's heavy I'll carry

myself you're going to fuck it up you're going to fuck up my balance you're like that and doing it in passive aggressive ways uh like my my i was with my inlaws over the summer we were down on a beach in san diego and you had to go down a whole bunch of stairs to get down to the beach and they had been they were with their their kids they had been struggling to get this wagon full of shit down the stairs to the beach and on the way up i was so fed up i was so tired i was so mad i'm just like no i'm just going to pick up and i'm going to carry the wagon full of your children's shit up to the top. And that's my stubbornness. I'm just like, I'm going to pick up and I'm going to carry the thing, whatever it is, because this is how I deal with my feelings.

Since Nate's not here, I'm going to steal the officer line and said, Patrick, let me piggyback off that for a second. And my thing is, I still, like, of course, I don't live in the United States anymore. So I don't really have the prototypical. I have to carry all the grocery bags from the car to the house because I don't drive anymore. But I do cycle everywhere. and I have bags on my bike so I can grow grocery shopping. But I still grocery shop like an American, which is a very stupid thing to do. So I carry massively overloaded bags of groceries.

I will shove them into these bags that are not nearly big enough on the side of my bikes. And I'll balance them off my handlebars. And I'm getting the fuck home with these things. And I am fucking inches from dying every time I do this. I have so many like carrying all the shopping but instead I look like I'm playing death stranding walking back from the supermarket because I have like a backpack on my back that's like full to the brim with like eight liters of sparkling water and two boxes of white monster

I'll have two tote bags and like shopping bags and I will refuse to do it any other way well you have to build all the bridges back to your house because the British government sure is I fucking doing it anymore. Yeah, but one for me is like it's a really specifically like my dad and a real Irish dad thing is like I love watching the TV show Grand

Designs where essentially like really posh English people are financially cook-holded by this smarmy architect who like is just goading them throughout these entire building projects because it's like they are always overly

ambitious. They always spend way too much money and fuck it up somehow like a most recent one was a guy who wanted to build the first castle in the UK in over a hundred years. It cost him seven million pounds and he's have to sell

the building to pay it off. Oh my God. I'm watching it as like, loads these really beautiful houses and stuff and I'm just sitting there thinking and I can hear my dad in my own house like, it costs you a fortune to heat that. Oh, that's good. Oh, my God.

I remember when I lived in Galway, so I would stop at the Dunn store on the way back to, on the way back to my apartment after leaving campus. It was like a mile and a half or two mile walk. And I wasn't going back. Like, once I entered my apartment, I was done. I'm not leaving again. So I would just be like 30 pounds of like bottles of soda, just two liters of phanta. everywhere. Like, I had to walk through a, uh, like a, like a traveler's encampment to get back to my it. So I look like a, like a medieval peddler going from town to town, uh, through going through

the traveler encampment, which must have felt like cultural appropriation. They're just standing and they're looking at you like, there goes the American phantom boy again. Oh, I, uh, two travel, a two traveler youth did try to rob me one night when I was walking home drunk. Uh, and I'm like, You are children. Cholpa shaking up a two liter and spring in their face. That would have been better than what I did. I ended up like they, I was, it was Thanksgiving. I was shit-faced.

I'd been with a bunch of Americans. I'm walking home at like two in the morning. I had my iPod out and I'm walking through the traveler encampment. That was the first mistake. And like, yeah, you know, like, do you feel bad about fighting children? I mean, if they're robbing me, no. I mean, there's levels to this, you know. I'm not going to walk down the street and, hey.

maker child, but if that child tries to rob me, like, you have brought yourself up to the adult level. These are ethical questions I've been wrestling with for the past 18 years. Like, this was, this was Thanksgiving of 2007. You just get to shoot lower on the double egg because, you know, they're lower to the ground. I just, I think back to that night and I'm like, that was the most 22 year old thing I've ever done. And, but yeah, but it all started because I'm sure they had spotted me and they knew like, look at this fucking idiot. Like walking through here with his guy. goddamn phantas. Like, of course, we're going to take his iPod. Let's run the phantom boy.

I think, though, like, probably, and I know Joe, you do it, because I've seen you do it. Patrick, I want to know if you do. It's like, really, like, old dad thing that I always know is, like, as guys get older, start doing it more, you see a dog. You got to slap it on the side. You go, that's a sturdy dog. That's a sturdy dog right there. I will contend. I don't do that to strangers dogs, but if I do see a dog,

and I'm with someone, like, hey, look, there's a dog. Without fail. Yeah. I, like, I spot dogs with my children. That's like a thing that we do is we're driving through the city. I'm like, oh, dog. Like, doesn't that look like a good dog? I bet that dog gives good hugs.

Like, that's my, that's how I keep myself entertained here. But, you know, the firm pat on the dog, that's definitely an aging man thing. Like, you're not screeching, you're not pet it. You get it, you get a firm pat. It's like slapping the mulch at the garden center. Yeah. Oh, how else are you going to test the consistency? Yeah.

See, I don't have a. So that one's foreign to me. Oh, see. And I don't do DIY projects. I'm a renter like everybody in Europe. But if I did do DIY projects when I lived in the United States and like everyone else, they were either incredibly fucked up or never finished. And I can guarantee I use no safety equipment. But that has more to do with me really not understanding how power tools work than to do with me being a stubborn man.

I don't know. Look, there's nothing more American than using. power tools that you don't know how to work. That is, if we have a cultural quine, that is it. Yeah. But fellas, I do believe that's a podcast. Patrick, you host a different podcast. Plug that podcast.

I do. Starting December 3rd of the Year of Our Lord 2025, I will have a brand new show out. It is called Past Lives. Every episode is about an ordinary person who lived at some point in the human past. The first season is all about people who experienced slavery at some point in their lives. So we go all the way from ancient Assyria up to the last survivor of the transatlantic slave trade, a woman named Matilda McCrear, who died in 1940. So we are covering about 2,700 years. And my sincere hope is that by the end of it, we'll have a much better understanding for all of the different ways that slavery can impact people's lives, the way it's impacted the global economy, global society, all of that by looking at a whole bunch of different people who experience different aspects of it, that will get a kind of a mosaic portrait.

of the institution as a whole. And we have a Patreon. It's the past lives Patreon. Tons of bonus content on there. We'll have bonus interviews, Q&As. There's a monthly book club. So the Patreon is already live, even though the episodes have not dropped at the time of this recording.

You can get in there right now. Let us know what you want to read for the first month. I'm still making tides of history through April. The episodes are coming out. I don't know if anybody will still be listening to them once the show officially moves to Audible, but I am still making that. And I got a book coming out May 5th, 2026. It's called Lost World,

How Humans Tried, Failed, Succeeded, and Built Our World. So yeah, it's just a few things. Just a few things happen in here. I'm really happy we brought someone on that makes my work schedule a humane. And see, this is why I'm giving up on the five to six year old coaching.

I just, I can't deal with the stress of having a five-year-old look at me blankly anymore. Tom, you host other podcasts. plug those podcasts. Beneath Skin show up with the history of everything told through the history of tattooing. I am the producer of a show called Bloodwork

which is about the economy of violence which hopefully I will send Patrick an invitation to very soon and I also look at my Instagram I post my photos there and my videography work and yeah, I don't know

listen to the Christmas ad that I made. This is still the only show that I host maybe forever maybe not. We'll never know until we do. And maybe by the time this episode comes out, I'll have a different one. But thanks for listening. Support us on Patreon. Like I said, use the code DEC 25 to give 50% off every subscription till the end of December. And leave us review whenever you listen to this.

It helps immensely, especially when it comes to scheduling live shows. Because turns out, they look at that shit. Until next time, crash a blimp. Ha ha ha ha.