Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 400: The Battles of Khalkhin Gol and the Nomohan Incident

Episode Date: February 9, 2026

In this WWII Prequel, the Empire of Japan and the Soviet Union fight over the Mongolian border, a stretch of lifeless steppe with no cover, trees, or established supply lines. In what has been dubbed a "border conflict" tens of thousands of men, thousands of trucks, and hundreds of tanks are rushed to the frontline that only barely escapes spiraling into a much larger war...at least for a few years. Sources: Edward Drea. Nomohan: Japanese-Soviet Tactical Combat, 1939. Edward Drea. Tradition and Circumstances: The Imperial Japanese Army's Tactical Response to Khalkhin Gol. Glenn Barnett. Russo-Japanese Clash at the Battle of Nomohan. WWII History. May 2005. 4#3 Amnon Sella. Nomohan: Khalkin Gol: The Forgotten War. Journal of Contemporary History (1983) 18#4 Anthony Beevor. The Second World War. Alexi Shishov. Russia and Japan. The history of military conflicts

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Hey, everybody, welcome to the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast, the only history podcast. I'm Joe, and with me is Tom and Nate. Fellas, how are you doing? Well, I got some weightlifting in this morning because I took my child to daycare and she was like, I'm walking today. And I was like, cool, you're walking. You're a big girl now. And then about three steps, she was like, carry me.

So I did a farmer's carry for about a kilometer with 30 pounds or so of child. And yeah, you know, when you can do two arms, it's okay. When you're pushing a stroller and carrying it, then you start getting into the muscle failure zone. And it's like, babe, I love you to death, but like, I'm putting you in the stroller because otherwise, like, you are going to become a kettlebell. Yeah. If you died in Afghanistan, that'd be your crossfit workout. Jesus crap Yeah

Meanwhile I went and did the The worst gym day A.k.a. legs this morning And accidentally put on the wrong underpants In the dark and nearly castrated myself during squats. I feel like they only brings up more questions. I had a freak grappling accident last night. Freak, okay, freak grappling accident

is way too low. of a phrase, you're going to have to give us a lot more context. It was an accident, like a freak accident, or you were grappling with a freak? No, it was just a freak accident. Then I was grappling with a normal guy, I assume. Yeah. I got poked in the eye, which is a, which sucks. It's, it happens.

I wear contact lenses for people who don't know. But I thought my contact lens came out. It did not. It flipped inside itself and under my eyelid. and I did not feel it. So I thought it fell out, finished training, went home with the sleep,

woke up this morning. It had migrated out of my eye and into the corner of my eye, like an eye booker. But it just fell out. And I found it. I'm like, well,

that's a relief, I suppose. See, this is the thing is most problems will solve themselves out because you just never have to do anything. It just be, it'll be fine.

Yeah. Yeah. My eye feels good. Uh, no, no, it seems no lasting damage, so that's good. Joe, the solution here is you need to use contact lenses with a flared base. God damn it. When you're grappling with freaks, use a flared contact. I hate two things that I know what you mean.

And to someone that I train with might listen to this. Like, I can't believe he called me a freak. I didn't call you a freak. Tom called you a freak. I said you were normal. I didn't call you a freak. freak. I was just posing what was the kind of the purpose of the use of the word freak. Well, yeah, exactly. Freak accident whilst grappling. We wanted to specify what kind of accident and what the

usage of the word freak was. And if your friend is offended, we're not, we're not calling it. It's like, to the, the unknown friend of Joseph. We also just implied that Joe is familiar enough with butt plugs plugs to get the joke about the contact lens. And he did get it. So you know what? Like, none of the shit should surprise anybody anymore. Yeah, exactly. Welcome to the only history podcast. The only history podcast ever done. This is what we talk about because this is what history is. If you don't like it, you don't like history.

Fuck you. A freak grappling accent is either something that would specifically happen to you, Joe, or the title of a Detroit House song. It's fair. Yeah. Now, I have no good segue here. Speaking of having things flared so you don't get stuck in them, World War II, I did it.

I didn't do it. I'm going to work with that. I was just thinking you talk to Detroit Technosongs that I was thinking about the song called Want to Drop a House on that bitch. So you know what? Maybe there's something you can segue out of that. Does someone get a house dropped on them?

What is an artillery barrage other than dropping a house on a bitch? There you go. There you go. World War II, we've all heard of it. Your uncle loves it. And the history channel stayed on the air talking about it until they really banked hard on the alien bullshit.

But today we're going to talk about something of World War II sneak peek, a demo that you could download off of blood steam and return. it after a few hours if you didn't like it. Getting the demo disc for World War II from Nintendo Mag in the 1930s. You're just putting it on that like

the fucking 35 millimeter lumiere projector. It's too soon to talk about Lumiere, but only my Expedition 33 heads will understand that. We're talking about a border conflict and probably not a border conflict that you would think of if you think of that term. Because when you think of border conflict, it means like small petty skirmishes rather than a massive blow-up.

You know, recent ones, Cambodia and Thailand, or that weird total war mod that China and India play where they, due to a treaty, could only kill one another with like spears and bats with nails driven into them in the Himalayan mountains, which is a real thing. I've been thinking about doing an episode about that for a long time, but it really doesn't work without visual aids. So I've been skipping it. just expand into the TikTok account that I watch. That's like...

I will never expand it to a TikTok account. Who would win one million red coats or five million Michael Jackson's? Money's on Jackson. Yeah. Yeah. Instead, we're going to talk about the 1939 border conflict between the Empire of Japan and the Soviet Union, which had a larger scale of men, machines, and death than some entire wars that we have talked about, including the last one.

I'm in. This border shit fit is something sometimes called the battles of Culkin-Gull, but the decisive end in Japan is known as the Nomohan incident, where Japan and its kind of funny puppet empire of Manchuko faced off against the Soviet Union and their puppet state, the Mongolian People's Republic. But first, the People's Republic of Context. I'm going to keep doing this, Tom. I'm going to keep doing it until you break.

Obviously, Japan and Russia have been beefing over Imperial Turf for a very long time, decades before the Soviet Union was born, though the beef is still the same if the flag happens to be red, a rising sun, or a tricolor. First, of course, there was the Russo-Japanese War. Go listen to our series on that. And then as the Russian Empire was collapsing into its civil war, Japan invaded Siberia in 1917. One of the many powers to do so, we did a series on that too, based around the American polar bear expedition. Go listen to that. Hey, a podcast is still ad free

if the only ads are for our own podcast. Leave me alone. We're operating on the same system as the BBC. Yeah, except I don't send people to your house to ask if you have a license for that podcast. Lions led by Donkeys has never employed Jimmy Saville. Lions led by donkeys, if we had a radar van, it would actually work.

It wouldn't be just Tom and me cranking that, well, we would be cranked him in a different way, in the back of the van. Joe is fast roping down the side of your building to look through your window to see if you have a TV. You'll be like my mother. The one time that she ever listened to this podcast was like two years ago. It was after we did the live show in the Netherlands. And she's really curious about what exactly I did for a living.

And I figured that episode was decent enough to show my mom. And it was on TV. So it's like better for her, right? So I put on the live show video. and she promptly fell asleep. I assume that is what most people would do in the hypothetical lines of by donkeys radio license podcast slash TV show. If it makes you feel any better, my mom periodically listens to shows of mine,

but she'll lose interest. But then she'll be like, actually, I want to see what Nathan is up to. And she listened to the episode of Trash Future a few years back where we were, myself in November, were riffing on the fact that like there's this whole subculture of American truck owners basically finding ways to say that people who own rival brands of trucks are gay because the only gay people will buy these trucks and that like GMC is gay men's choice and Dodge is dick on gay entertainment. These were things that we found on the internet. But we started

coming up with more and more like abstruse acronyms that we could use. So it was like, what happens if people don't drive American vehicles? What if they drive, I don't know, Japanese trucks? And I immediately was just like, yeah, you're like a Toyota tearing open your oil, twink asshole. What the fuck? Needless to say, I did have a conversation with my mom about, I was like, I promise, this isn't going to harm my future career prospects because I don't have any. So you should just embrace this. I mean, my stepdad read the hooligans of Kandahar and kept insisting my mom would read it or was going to read it at some point. And then he sat down next to he was like, you should be really happy. Your mom's never going to read that book. There's a lot about you jacking off in

there. See, this is why I'm looking that my parents don't know how the internet works. So it's great. My mom asked me because she liked the cloghead songs and she asked me about serious music. She's like, I really hope you're still doing music. I was like, actually I am, but I sent her some of like the demos I had recorded with Saffin for our band, left on red, hard left on red. Fucking no response.

You know what? So shouts out to the moms out there. Shouts out to all the encouragement from the mom. She just sends you back the monkey pissing in its own mouth gift, the pitchfork use. This is the review for Jets get born. Yeah, I remember that. Anyway, Japan towed the world line when they invaded Siberia, saying that they wanted to secure it from those dirty communists for their allies,

the white Russians. But unlike the rest of the world, they actually were just trying to annex it. Siberia, despite having all of the warmth and comfort of a Kasabian family reunion, was one of the most resource-rich places on earth, and Japan wanted to steal it. While Western powers gave up on their anti-Soviet invasion around the same time that World War I was over, though, to be fair, the American government left the Polar Bear expedition there about a year longer than they did too. Japan tried to make their Siberian experiment work all the way up until 1922 when the victorious Bolsheviks could no longer be denied. But in the meantime, it's not as though Japan and the Soviet Union made up and became friends.

Instead, Japan saw a weak neighbor, dysfunctional and barely. able to reconquer parts of the Russian Empire that had attempted to break away during the Civil War. Some of those places had done it successfully, albeit temporarily. Then, as the 20s turned in the 30s, Japan sparks a false flag and conquers Manchuria, renaming it Manchuka. Now, I have to admit, as anybody who's been listening to this show for a while, at a special to you two guys, you know that Manchuka was a strange fixation that I have up in the weird world of World War statelets? One day, I am going to do a... series about it, mostly for myself and you're all just going to have to suffer with me,

which is honestly how the show works anyway. Until I take over, make you learn about soup violence, projectiles made of soup, weird British guys who you really don't want to dig into their personal lives, so on and so forth. Hold that soup thought. Really? Yeah. Weirdly, soup does come up here in the strangest way possible.

Yeah, it's because Japan, you know, they failed to invade Siberia because they hadn't yet invented Uniclo heat tech. So I was like, okay, how else do we keep ourselves warm? Just soup maxing? Just like pockets full of soup. Yeah, they're trying to invent a samovar for soup. It's like this song, Pockets Full of Sunshine, but it's just soup. It could be like the guy with the Chingdao beer inflatable jacket where you drink the beer

out of the jacket, but it's just soup keeps you warm. I would wear that. I'd fuck with that. Yeah. For sure. I know what I'm doing after this. But to make a long story short, Manchuka was largely a slave state. conquered by Japan through their racial, political ideology that Asian land, not controlled by the

Japanese, needed to be taken, and then it kind of sort of redistributed to the lower poor from Japan's inner islands. The majority Manchu people, as well as the Koreans, were to be pressed into slavery to make the whole operation work. Japan was in control of everything, but they installed a puppet emperor, Poo-Yi, the last emperor of China, who, to make a very long story short, I swear is just a really weird little psycho. He's a very interesting guy to say the least. I swear I'm forcing myself to save this for some series in the future. Manchuka would also end up as a landing spot for a lot of Russians at the end of the Russian Civil War.

A lot of these guys would have been white Russians, otherwise known as those guys who fought the Bolsheviks rather than the thing that Lobowski drank. And they knew that things were about to get real, real ugly for them, so they fled. Yeah, it's like, you know, Yerevan after 2022. Yeah, except those guys were less evil. Like, the poor dudes escaping being mobilized. I'm totally fine with. If it was just like wave after wave of Russian fascists, that'd be a little different.

They mostly with the Georgia. So many Russians moved to the city of Harbin. So many, in fact, that the Japanese began to call it the Moscow of the East. Harbin's still that way. Harbin's got a huge, huge Russian population. I mean, this is where they come from. Yep, yep. Fascinating city.

And apparently they have an ice sculpture festival because it's fucking freezing all the goddamn time. There's or they might as well. Hey, you got to work with what you got to work with. You know, it'd be weird if they had like beach time in Harbin. And the Japanese in general thought these Russians were trustworthy as far as being non-Japanese went. Most of them were white Russians, if I'm not mistaken, correct? Like they've led to the Soviet government. Yeah.

And, you know, Japan's political ideas. ideology was just as racist as the Nazis. We wouldn't do this more on our Nanking series specifically, but as far as a non-Japanese race goes, they considered Russians about as good as it got, but specifically these ones, because they knew without the Japanese state, they were going to get pulled apart like slow pork in some basement somewhere. But also definitely do not look at any of the wood carving or woodblock prints, the Ukioe of the Russians, because they, I don't know how to describe other than Snow Demon. I'm bringing that back

as an anti-Russian slur. I mean, I would make the joke, but we've talked in detail about some of the propaganda art where is a sort of like... Oh, yeah, especially the Russo-Japanese War series, which is we went into in-depth exploration on hentai.

Yeah. Because that's what this show's about. Not every Russian there was a hardcore white Russian hoping to, you know, form the government the provisional Russian government, whatever that was going to look like

if the Bolsheviks ever existed. Some were just Nazis. And this include the Russian fascist party who not only worked to the Japanese government with the help of the Nazis eventually, but they also funneled Russians they saw as politically unfavorable directly into the hands of Unit 731.

Jesus. Yeah. That's fucked. That's just a word in some numbers unless you know anything about it. And then you're like, uh, it sounds like it could be a nightclub. Which I suppose it kind of was.

Oh. Well, it makes you feel any better. I was trying to not go off topic in the way that I always go off topic. And then I was like, am I remembering correctly the thing we talked about with Japanese artwork in the Russ or Japanese war? And I did, I was in fact correct with what I remember. But also it's very funny because the tags on Wikimedia Commons for that image. One of them is in French and it's Omo Eritizma.

So there we have it. And another turn of, let's say, strange events. Japan politically had nothing against Jewish people, but famously both the Soviet state and the Nazis did. Though to be clear here, I'm not saying that they were the same in that. I'm not insane. But at the same time, throughout the 20s and 30s, the Soviet Union was not a great place to be if you happen to be Jewish. So the Japanese in Manchuko attempted to convince Jews to move there because the Japanese believed in a lot of the propaganda coming out of Europe about Jewish people. that they're really good at business and banking.

So they're like, fuck yeah, we need some of those here. Fuck sake. We're flipping racial and like prejudicial stereotypes on its head. How can we always come out on top? Remember that the Japanese are intensely racist. Their politics in the empire of Japan are based around race science, but, you know, for them. And they sort of believing the Nazis, the so much like, damn, these guys sound pretty useful.

Also, I'll give you, in far western China, there are or have been some small communities of Central Asian Jews. Yeah, of course. There are not in Japan or Korea. And so there's no contact, certainly not at this time, with Jewish communities with Judaism outside of, like we're describing what they're reading.

And there's a similar phenomenon in Korea where there's like business success stories of the Talmud, where they're like, we're going to interpret the Talmud so you can learn about how to be good. business like the Jews and it's like this is really uncomfortable. The Talmud is the OG the art of the deal. And like the Japanese invited all the Jewish guys in

and they you know move in thinking that like hey the Japanese people aren't the kind of anti-Semitic that we really need to worry about at this point so this is good but then they end up moving in alongside the Russian fascist party and white Russians who immediately begin discriminated against them

to the utter confusion of the Japanese because the Japanese is like but y'all look the same. What is the problem? The Japanese are posting like help wanted posters, but they're using illustrations from a French magazine called Le Pidophile Resist. Weirdly, under that, in English

was Irish need not apply. They learn from what happened to Hong Christ. On the Soviet side of things, outer Mongolia was under the control of China, then the Republic of China. When the Russian Revolution kicks off. We've actually talked about this before, again,

during our series on one of the most insane men we've ever talked about it, arguably, has ever lived. Baron von Ungernsternberg, the white Russian who declared himself a con and attempted to fight the Mongolian Bolshevik revolutionaries, and created a rehab program for his men who got addicted to opium by having them be attacked by wolves. I mean, listen, if it works, it works. It's hard to get off the dope. Look, I'm just saying I don't agree with his processes. Eventually, with Soviet help and recognition, the Mongolian revolutionaries are victorious, and then solidly fall within the Soviet sphere. Though Mongolia never officially becomes part of the Soviet Union,

they're about as close as you could get without becoming an SSR. Anyway, now the Empire of Japan, Mongolia, and the Soviet Union share a very, very loosely defined border. The Japanese, by extension, the Manchuko government, insists that the border, border between Mongolia and themselves with a Culk River, while Mongolia and the USSR thought it was about 16 miles or so to the east. It did not take long for the Japanese and Mongolian troops to begin shooting at one another, and most of these were pretty small in scale. A lot of it was also Manchurian soldiers, very, very squad-level type skirmishes. But by 1936, there had been over 30 gunfights at the border. But Mongolia wasn't stupid, and not to mention, they had a big brother to turn to

for help. And they sign a mutual assistance pack with the Soviet Union that same year, which allow either country to defend the other if they were attacked by a third nation. The Japanese then infamously joined the anti-commontern pack, allying with Nazi Germany. Soon Soviet troops on the command of Vasili Bulker moved into what was now called the Far Eastern Military District, whose army was given the official title of Special Red Banner, Far Eastern Army, because we know how the Soviets love to do that kind of shit. Bloyker was a marshal of the Soviet Union who had earned the nickname Red Napoleon

thanks to his previous successful campaigns. He's not the only Russian to get this nickname. He's just, it's just something to get to point out. I assume maybe it's because he also didn't like his wife to wash before they had sex. Or maybe his horse was also hit the chest by a cannonball in a Ridley Scott film. Another important thing here is it's 1937 and the Great Purge is taking hold of the Soviet Union. Most importantly for the context of this episode, the Soviet military. We've talked about this before in depth during both of our series on Kursk and the Winter War,

but Stalin and Leverenti Beria arrested, tortured, and murdered, quite possibly hundreds of thousands of people, specifically in the Soviet military. Obviously, they did a lot more of that to a lot of other people. And it didn't take much to end up in their sights. Someone would get arrested for not towing the party line or something very, very slight. They would get tortured. They would in turn denounce someone to make the pain stop, so on and so forth. forth down the line. Other people would name drop other people they had personal beefs and petty

grievances with. Before you know it, the Soviet military has been fucking gutted. I'm not going to go into depth here because again, we've already done it. But to best explain how the purges affect the military, it was like feeding your best and brightest into a meat grinder, and it hit technical jobs the hardest, leaving those who managed to escape the slaughter terrified of sticking out for fear of their name ending up on a list somewhere. The gaps left by the purges were filled with people considered politically loyal rather than militarily competent. Even if they were military officers, they were then promoted well above their capability to fill these gaps. However, over the same time period, Marshal Blojker was pretty much allowed to command with a lot more freedom than you would expect someone being a field marshal within this purges would be.

As we learned in the Uganda series that well-trained technical soldiers are a commodity worth protecting. So if you just promote Johnny Dipshit to a role that he's not suited to, it kind of creates problems. Hey, that's Yvonne Dipshitovich. Every Soviet soldier between the period of 1919, 1946. His resume was kind of unimpeachable, but that didn't really mean that people under him were safe. His military district itself was purged harder than anywhere else within the Red Army, with four times as many officers and soldiers being purged, you know, given the old 9mm pension plan than any other command. No matter how good a commander is, and Bloiker was as good as it got

for the Soviets at the time, you can't kill his entire organizational structure under him and expect anything good to come of it. Bloyker's command was eviscerated. His logistical support structure was dismantled, and by 1938, it led to systemic failure of virtually everything within the Far Eastern District. Soldiers had no food, no winter clothing, again, in Siberia, and ammo was low. Morale was even lower, and nobody could do anything to fix it, because if they showed a little bit too much initiative, they might get shot in the face. Yeah, they don't have the soup tech jacket yet. They wanted to invent it so hard, but, you know, they're like, if I put too much hot soup in my winter jacket, some other dip shit is going to shoot me and then claim my soup jacket is

kind of revolutionary. He's going to shoot you and that starts sucking the hole in the pocket. He's like, I'm starving. I need the sustenance. It should be pointed out here that Bloyker is not innocent. He took part in these purges. He served on the tribunals that put many of his own officers and men to death. He absolutely had a role in all of this shit going pear-shaped, though he's just a symptom of the greater illness. It was not uncommon for the men doing the purges, namely the killers of the NKVD, to go on themselves to get purged. One of those men was Genrique Lushkov. Lushkov rode the train of different secret police names the Soviet had from the Cheka until now,

leaving a trail of corpses in his wake, including many from the Far East District. There was rumors that he was even investigating Boyker himself. But as a Ukrainian Jewish guy, it was only a matter of time before his turn to get thrown in a base. So Lojkhov, being an NKVD man, generally knew when the bell was going to toll for him. He knew what the orders looked like for people who are being recalled to get clapped. So in 1938, when he was given orders to return to Moscow for quote, new work, he knew he was fucked. Ah, yeah.

So he ran back to his office, pocketed as much paperwork as he could, and ran across the border to Manchuko defecting to the side of the Japanese. I don't talk about this later on, but he survives largely until the end of the war by being a Japanese stooge and then gets executed. But he buys himself a couple extra years. He divulges the extent of the impacts that the purges had on the army to the Japanese, specifically telling them that the Far East Command was in dire straits and they were a pretty easy target. Around the same time, the Soviet forces moved in and dug into the Changfukang Hills near the Korean border, which at the time, obviously Korea is occupied by Japan.

Japan insists that this was their side of the border, and as was their doctrine at the time, and it was their doctrine all the way up through World War I, they would launch an infantry night attack on the hills. This completely surprised the Soviets, and the Soviets weren't entirely sure how to respond to it. So they did what they did best, bombarded the hills with artillery. Though their efforts were really disjointed, they hadn't quite ironed out all the kinks of using artillery and aircraft to support their infantry, Not to mention even if they did, most of the guys that knew how to do it had probably been shot in the face at this point. So the Soviets sent an infantry to reclaim the hill. They do so without any tanks or artillery support, which leads them to get shot to pieces.

These piecemeal attempts to retake the hills continue for two weeks and were only brought to an end through diplomacy, at which point the Japanese forces withdrew and the Soviets reoccupied the hills. This entire episode is intensely embarrassing for the Soviets because they had been kicked. in the fucking teeth. Thousands had died on both sides, but the majority of the losses were Soviet, including dozens of tanks. The Soviet government investigation

pointed out that all of these failures of the Far East Command were solely the fault of Bloiker. He's arrested by the NKVD, shoved into a basement, and was ripped apart by a torture named Lev Schwartzman, who eventually beats him to death. Jesus.

This will not be the only time this torturer comes up in this episode somehow. After this, Command of the Firetner, Far East District falls to Grigory Stern on May of 1938. Stern, also Ukrainian Jewish guy, and cut his teeth during the revolution as a commissar. He eventually travels to Spain as part of the Soviet mission to the Spanish Civil War. Since this was the era that the Soviet army thought traditional rank systems were counter-revolutionary, Stern was given the rank of Command Arms second rank, roughly equivalent to Colonel General,

the Soviet rank that would come after it. the third highest rank in the army. The army itself was reconstituted and renamed as the first red banner army, because that will wash the failure off. And for the Japanese, their invasion of China was grinding onwards. But the situation on the Mongolian border hadn't changed. Nothing had been ironed out. The borders had still not been agreed on.

So on May 14, 1939, a Mongolian border patrol was spotted by the Manchurian scouting teams as the Mongolians were grazing their horses. The Manchurians opened fire, the Mongolians run away, and the next day, a much larger Mongolian force pulled up into the same area, bringing with them some field guns and began digging in. The Manchurians panic, call the Japanese for help, the Japanese sent some planes overhead and discovered that the Soviet Eastern Army was already there and helping the Mongolians.

So the decision was made to kick them out. The Japanese thought very little of the Soviets and even less of the Mongolians. However, in Tokyo, they were slightly more practical. Whether the Soviets were weak or not, the vast majority of the Japanese army and the military at large was already committed to fighting in China. Starting some shit with the Soviets around the same time seemed like a pretty bad idea.

Specifically, Emperor Hirohito himself thought a war with the Soviets was a bad idea, very stupid, and at best would have to wait. That brings us to the Japanese military stationed in Manchuria, the Kuantang Army, a common super villain of our show. Guys you hate to see showing up.

I'm sure this is not going to have any horrible, horrible consequences for any civilians. Surprisingly not in this episode. Yeah, this is the rare part where the Quantong army had to fight people that could shoot back. I was like, you know, Quantong army building fucking trebueshs and throwing babies at the Soviets. Don't worry, one of them will eventually become Prime Minister of Japan. The Kuantang army was, in short, playing the game for itself. It routinely ignored the government in Tokyo, did whatever wanted, and knew as long as they were successful, they would get away with it and be called heroes. This was kind of their tactic was the government tells them not to do something.

They go and do it and are successful. In order to save face, the government has to just like clap and say, look at our glorious heroes conquering shit for the empire of Japan and the emperor, despite the fact they had just, directly disobeyed the emperor. Deep down, there's like, listen, you pieces of shit. Like, you just wait for the opportunity when you guys don't get what you want. Because, like, we're all about saving some face here, but like, I am making a list. I am writing in a book. I'm using red ink because I'm pissed as hell. If you guys eventually fail, we're going to kill you so hard.

But as long as you keep succeeding, we'll just keep promoting your officers up to be prime minister like Hideki Tojo. Which is what happened. The entire Mukden incident, the false. flag that led to them conquering Manchari for good was one of those ideas of just kind of going out on their own. They were freebooting for the Japanese government. And the man who led them through all that was Hadeki Tojo. And by 1939, thanks to largely to the Kuong Thong army and being on the right side of the very factual realities of imperial Japanese government was rising high. He wasn't

prime minister yet, but he was in the war office. He was getting close. He got that Japanese military grind set. He's like, one day I will be prime minister. Yeah, he's got that dog in him. And that dog is much like the ones that lurk outside most off licenses going to mall a child. Yeah, it's just, I mean, there's a certain kind of like enterprising crackhead logic to all of this. I know it's not a one-to-one comparison, but when you talk about this, it's just sort of like, the guy that once he's clean can take a bag of potato chips and make it into a pizza, but he's definitely not clean right now. He's like, what if he started a fucking war with Ventura? You know what I mean? Like, kind of a just one degree removed from out of control chaos kind of feeling here.

It works until it doesn't. Much like heroin. Yeah. If Tojo just would have been doing heroin, none of this would have happened. How do you know he wasn't? It's fair. Tojo and largely his entire army faction of the imperial government were hyper aggressive. And I mean that even in the context of Japanese imperialism. He was especially aggressive in the doctor. during a Hokku Shinran or the Project of Northern Expansion, which proposed that Japan should control all of Siberia, as was the man who was in command of the Kuantong army at the time we're talking about, his personal ally,

Kintichi Ueda. Uyta, fun fact, had one of his legs blown off by a Korean independence activist named Jung Bing Gil while Ua was stationed in Shanghai, but unfortunately survived the blast. Like, are we talking below the knee or at the hip? It was like below the knee. But, you know, it's kind of surprising that he got ripped to shred.

Like the guy standing directly next to him died. It was just one of those situations that he won the game of angles. Yes, game of angles is now going to be burned into mind on this show going forward. I mean, by that logic, Hitler also kind of won the game of angles with the July 20th. Yeah, exactly. Well, that was the game of angles and a particularly heavy built table. Yeah, exactly. who would win

master of the game of angles or one large block of wood. Yep. You know, if the Nazis simply staffed the wolf's layer with IKEA, none of this would have happened. Yeah, if Erwin Rommel

just been a little more neurodivergent, he would have fucking calculated those angles better. Erwin Rommel had nothing to do with the July 20th plot. Am I wrong? He was just blamed for it. I guess I always thought

that there was some degree of like tacit approval of it despite not being completely involved, but I could be completely wrong. Yeah, he wasn't involved in July 20th plot that it was almost entirely von Stauffenberg and the general Berlin cloister of anti-Hitler activists. But I don't want to say the term anti-Hitler, because they're all very pro-Hitler until they change their mind. They're like, what can we do? What can we need to cover this up? Find a guy who's kind of good at his job. Make sure he dies. We will not need him.

Find me a guy that can be played by Tom Cruise in 50 years. This implies Berwyn Rommel was a white samurai who was hooked on sake. That implies von Stauffenberg was a samurai. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Get your Nazi samurai's correct. I'm not a World War II uncle. We are the only history podcast, but unlike the history channel, we're not designed for and by World War II uncles.

No. Well, I am technically an uncle now. So that happened for about nine years. Yeah. Shit, I've been an uncle as long as this show's been on there. I've always been a World War II uncle. Fuck. Some of us have always been uncles.

It's like, you know, we talked about before when you're a kid and it's like, oh, you can be into like ninjas or knights or pirates. Once you hit 21, you either get given a World War II book, a book about antiquity or like a book about Operation Gladiow. And that World War II book could lead you in a lot of different directions. There's a second coming of age ceremony as an American when you're 40 where you may or may not be given a book about the civil war. That's true. Joe knows this very well. Thankfully, I dodge that. Yeah. I'm not a civil war. forehead at all. I never studied American history beyond high school. I majored in European military history. Yeah, I got the Cliff's notes version of American history and if you write racism is the answer

to every test question, you're always right. Yep, you're always right unless you're in school at which case we're wrong. Now, despite the government and the emperor himself saying fighting the Soviets was stupid, the Kuantang army knew that thanks their previous successes and Tojo being on the upswing,

they figured they'd be fine if they pulled the trigger. But going forward, it is important to remember that the Japanese think the Soviets are not a threat at all, thanks to their previous history fighting them. And because of their guiding ideology that was so racist, it kind of demanded that they think everybody was less than. So Lieutenant Colonel Azuma Yaozo and a force of around 200 men was sent to kick the Soviets and Mongolians off of their hill. As soon as they advanced, the Soviets bailed. The Japanese, thinking they had routed the enemy, gave chase. But the entire thing was actually a trap. As the Soviets withdrew and the Japanese advanced, a combined Soviet-Mongolian force closed in on

their flanks and surrounded them. Yauzo was able to escape, but only after losing around half of his mint. Rather than teach the Japanese a lesson, maybe that the Soviets are going to bring a little bit more smoke than they prepared for. This incident only galvanized the Kuantang army into further action. Because now, they had been embarrassed. So, the Japanese began to pour more soldiers, more tanks, more aircraft into the area. And the Soviets in turn sent a new corps commander, the best bout machine Georgi Zhukov. It was his job to go into the area and make an assessment. Zhukov had been called to Moscow for a promotion, but owing to the general horrors of the purge, he was pretty certain he was being recalled to be executed by the

NKVD, but was pleasantly surprised he was only being sent to Siberia. I mean, it is interesting sometimes you're like, oh, it's just that. I thought I was going to die. I mean, I still got on the train. Oh, thank God. I'm doing to Mongolia. I don't know what the American version of that is like being in the U.S. military and be like, oh, thank God of being sent to.

Not Alaska, because Alaska is not the worst place you could set. You could be sent. You could be sent to like Fort Hood, brag. I mean, Fort Hood was the worst place I ever went to. I might prefer to be shot by the American NKVD than go back to Fort Hood. I mean, I think I told you that when I quit Special Forces in the middle of the training, pipeline that my punishment was my choices were Fort Hood, Fort Bliss, Fort Riley, or Korea, and I took Korea. But you, Joe, realize, of those four choices, they're all bad.

Yeah. I'd rather go to Korea. Yeah. Yeah. Texas, Texas, Kansas, or Korea. It's like, at least Korea is something different. I've been to Kansas. I've been to Texas. Yeah. You know what? So, at least I didn't get sent to Siberia. Although, okay, if you sent me to Siberia for like, Korea's pretty close. Yeah. Yeah. But if you sent me Siberia for like a month, I'd be like, like, this is pretty cool. If you sent me to Siberia 15 years, I'd be like, I kind of don't like this. Yeah. The only thing I know about Fort Riley is it was always part of the pipeline where tankers could go. And it was of all of the stories that I ever heard, it was the place that I absolutely knew I did not want to go. And then they sent me to Fort Hood and I was like, could it be that bad? It's not here.

I've only ever heard bad things about it, about that part of Kansas at that base. But, you know, I think desperate times call for desperate measures. I am interested, though, in the mentality in Walton, but yeah, you know, got to go back and check in at the office. I think they're going to shoot me, But yeah, you know, day in the life. He just packs his suitcase, kisses his wife goodbye. And he's like, well, it's been good. Yeah, I'll get back to you. Let me, if I don't come home, they took me in a basement room to shop me, just FYI.

Yeah. Hold my calls, please. During this buildup, the air war broke out over the border and the Japanese immediately dominated it. Again, we talked about this during our Winter War and Kursk series, but Stalin's purges hit some branches of the Soviet military harder than others. And it devastated the Eastern District's Air Force. wiping out a ton of qualified pilots.

Newer pilots had very little time to train, no real experience, and their Mongolian allies had been given pilot training speed runs by the Soviet advisors, made them kind of more of a threat to themselves and the Japanese whenever they took flight. None that was made better by the fact that Soviet fighter planes at the time were in short, dog shit. They were mainly using the I-6 and I-15 fighter planes. The I-6 is a fixed-gear biplane and was out of date by the time it rolled off the factory floor. And the I-15 was better.

It wasn't a biplane, at least. And it could retract its landing gear. But owing to its strange dimensions and weirdly small size, it was incredibly hard to control. I'm kind of loving the idea of a fixed-gear biplane. It's like when you land, you have to keep your feet moving with the wheels. It doesn't have any brakes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I went to the Flintstones Flight Academy. Also, the engine was a Soviet-licensed copy. of an American engine, but due to kind of bad manufacturing or flaws or whatever, it would spray engine oil directly into the pilot's canopy, which was open. And I'm not a pilot, but I do believe that is less than ideal flying conditions. Yeah, I guess there's something to be said for you do what you can with what you've got, but when you're flying an open air biplane and it's just given you a little squirt of oil periodically, or more than periods,

periodically. I feel as though, like, I'm showing rare restraint here that I'm not going into some kind of sex metaphor, but like, there's just something deeply uncomfortable about it. I mean, oil's gross. Like, it's, it's oil. I think everybody can applaud the fact we make the obvious sex joke here. All right. It's growing as a team. It's a fuck. It's straight up, it's straight up Santorum flights. But you know what? Like what I was going to say, go ahead, Tom, the pilot experience of a trying to headbutter squid. That's a good one. That's a good one. You see, you got poetic with it. You created kind of like a, like some nice imagery there. It wasn't immediately X-rated. I was trying to do the same. But then I pat myself on the back and Joe's like,

no, Nate, I want you to. I want you to say the thing. That's what I said. We all made it. We made it like five seconds. That's longer than we normally make it. But I'm just saying, everybody should be happy with that. Take out all of these the obvious jokes to be made. Like, there's something deeply uncomfortably of it like, yeah. Oh, God. You know, you know what? Fuck it. I have to say this. Even if like, I'm breaking my own rule. It's like, uh, uh, yeah, it's, um, it's, um, um, we're, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, We got the flight roster. It's your turn to go up in the squirder again.

Painting money shot onto the side of my plane before I take flight. Maybe the plane's engine was just deeply empathetic. He was definitely deeply compassionate to the pilot. And it was like, well, I need oil. Maybe you also need oil. Yes. Yeah. You look awfully seized up there, Mr. Pilot.

Ugh. You look very tense. This will lubricate you. You need to be lubricated, Mr. Pilot. So you're getting it like a non-consensual air. massage from a plane. Hey, you said non-consensual, not me. Maybe the pilot, the engine have a weird relationship.

You fucking driven heavy machinery. Do you think that you would be like, hey, dude, do you know what I think you would love right now? I could have coated in oil whenever I feel like it. If any vehicle would do that, it would be the strangely humanized M1 Abrams, which loves to shoot fluids on you at every possible angle. Yeah, I guess it's just like, that's a detail. The detail of it would randomly spray engine oil.

into the pilot's cockpit, which was open. Like, it's draining future cancer symptoms. Like, it's just... On the bright side, most of these pilots would survive long enough to develop cancer. Oh. Problem solved. Problem solved right there. Exactly.

Yeah. That's what you call proper VA healthcare. You don't have to worry about the cancer. We'll kill you before you get that far. Yeah. No, yeah. No one can declare it a super fun site if no one's alive. That's right. No, but like, maybe the oil is, you know, the plane is thinking, like, oh, we're from.

flying at night. I'm going to spray you with oil. You're dark. Your pale Soviet skin is reflective. This is camouflage. We're both camouflaged right now. We have become one. So this is the, instead of it being the Soviet copy of an American engine, the Soviet copy of a Dutch engine. There's also another problem with the plane due to the weird size and the the shape of the wings to mount the machine guns on its wings where they replaced. They had to mount the machine guns upside down. Now, this could only be thought of by people who didn't understand how guns work because this is going to cause any belt fed gun to jam constantly, which it did. Like mounted upside down, but in the correct, like mounted on the

bottom side of the wings, but right side up. That can be done. Upside down, baby. But completely upside down. No. We've developed a plane that hates you. An incredibly fuckered it's gone and off solution. So for people who aren't familiar with this stuff, belt-fed machine guns and these kinds of larger caliber machine guns that you would be using, they're kind of like, they're not airtight per se. They're not like very tightly machined because there's simply so much shit happening in them with their firing. There's so much concussion, so much powder, so much like recoil in backwards force.

If you wired them that type, if you machined them that tight, they would jam way too much. They already jam enough as is. And so like, there's a degree to which the openness of them. you know, like the feed tray cover holding in the rounds, but like they're kind of loose in there even when they're seated. Like there's so much that it needs to be right side up and like gravity give you a little bit of a, you know, a pat on the back there. But also like planes are moving fast and they're vibrating a lot. And all of this has made better when everything is really, really cold. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And because stuff like, you know, you have to

lubricate guns. You have to, you know, they need to be oiled. Otherwise like like the sort of metal scraping-y shit built-up stuff. Like, you'd rather have all that gunpowder residue hitting oil versus just, like, hitting dry metal because it's not going to cake as dryly and then start blocking it. And so it's just like, you need something that's at least in some way conceived of as machine

gun on a plane and not, what if we took a, like, a machine gun that you'd hand to a guy and put it upside down on a plane. You're going to put that shit upside down, problem so. Yeah, the oil is the soup for the plane. The Japanese fielded the K-27, which was given the nickname,

the Nate. What? I assume because it's painted bright red. The Nate. The Nate. Yeah. Everybody climb in the Nate. I actually kind of would prefer you didn't do that.

Climb in the Nate. It's a two-man crew. Stop reading my mind. Despite this being designed around the same time as the Soviet planes, it was better in every possible way. It was faster. It handled better. The Nate handles magnificently.

Yeah, many people have said that, you know? And there was just more Nates. And all of this was made worse for the Soviets because Japanese pilots before they started getting fed into the woodchipper known as the Pacific War were some of the best in the world at piloting Nates. I mean, I was like, God, I wish I had more Nates around. It's like, yeah, you say that when it's performing magnificently. but when it's texting you one in the morning,

like, I had an idea for a musical. You're like, actually, I think I need less mates. I was going to say the problem with the Nate is that every bombing run takes an extra 10 minutes because you got to go look at some interesting trees over there. To get around all the Soviet pilots after getting their teeth kicked in, abandoned dog fighting and did their best to run away from the Japanese Nates, running instead to support the ground forces.

I promise I'll be the last time I did that. It's so fucking plenty. He can tell me that it's like Nate or something like that. Like, how is Nate? Nate. I'm going with Nate. It's spelled the exact same. I don't give a shit. It's Nate. Man, you know what? Okay, cool. I guess I've always been part and parcel of the Japanese World War II experience. Didn't realize that was the case. Yep. And fleeing in terror at the sound of multiple Japanese nates. Yeah, I would too. I love the idea of a Japanese guy riding Nate through the sky chasing Russians. But the Russian pilots,

would run away from the Nates and instead use their planes to support ground forces. And then Zhukov personally goes to Yilan Batar, the capital of Mongolia. And he discovers that virtually no preparations have been made for the war whatsoever, because at this point, the Soviet Union

is pretty convinced this is going to spiral out of control. Soviet officers had not even gone to the front line. They weren't even entirely sure where it was on the map. There's no communication lines to them. And seemingly, nobody there thought that any of that was important. And despite there being a heavy rail capability in the area, little to nothing had been

done to supply the soldiers at the front. And since officers hadn't gone there at all, nobody was even sure what the front line looked like, how the soldiers had prepared it, any of that. Zhukov was the first to go look for himself. You're fucking joking. Yeah, don't worry. I'm a divisional commander, which is an email job. I don't actually have to go into the office. In short, it was the perfect image of no man's land. It was the Mongolian step. A single stream supplied his troops with drinking water. It was summer, so it was brutally hot during the day and damn near freezing at night.

Even the slightest rain turned everything into a muddy hell, and when things weren't wet, they were insanely dusty. Swarms of mosquitoes made sickness just a fact of life within the ranks, and the only hill in the area. on the west bank of the Culk River gave a dominating view of the Japanese, but for whatever reason, nobody had bothered to do anything with it. Zhukov told Moscow that it was clear that the Japanese meant to conquer Mongolia and Siberia along with it, and to counter that, he would need tens of thousands more men, hundreds of tanks, and more experienced pilots be delivered from the Western military districts to counter them. Stalin surprisingly agreed to all this without really any kind of argument,

and soon the men and machines that he requested were loaded up on the Trans-Siberian Railroad and shipped in his direction in a very, very long trip, obviously. The Soviet pilots arrived, a lot of them veterans of the Spanish Civil War, and had yet to be eaten by the NKVD machine and promptly put a stop to Japanese air superiority and the haunting specter of the Nate. Last time, last time I promised. You what kills me is that you've been sitting on this this entire time, And you managed to completely stoneface it all the way from the start of the script,

all the times that we were intervening and stuff. And then it's like, you're like, no, you didn't give away a single fucking hint, man. You want to drop something like, it's like if nobody knew anything about the, you know, the metamorphosis, the Kafka novel. And I was just talking about it. I'm like, oh yeah, there's this guy who just turned into a bug. And his name is Joseph K. And then I was like, drop that shit on you.

Like, nobody's business. Nobody even had any idea it was happening. You telling me there's a goddamn plane named after me or I'm named after plane somehow. now. You know it's coming in the same way that you could hear the zeros because you can just hear the faint and ever-increasing volume of the sound of Wolf Parade playing. Maybe your dad was just a huge fan of the Japanese Empire and you never know. Your real name isn't even Nathaniel. He's like, no, it's Nate. My name is Nathan, but in fourth grade there was another Nathan who was way more fixated on

the idea that he needed to be Nathan and there couldn't. We didn't want to be Nathan A and Nathan B because that sounded stupid. So I was like, fine. People who called me Nate before I can be Nate. And then that's just been my name ever since I was 10. You opened a history book and it magically turned to a late 30s Japanese imperial plane called a Nate. You're like, I've got an idea.

Yeah, exactly. I'm 10 years old, I read the book, your destiny is to be full of Japanese guys. I'm like, what does that mean? You're in primary school, just reenacting Jet Lees, the one with another child. Yeah, that can come out yet. I was in primary school. I was 10 in 1994. If you've watched the one, you know it's always, it's always been happening.

There's always other ones of you need to kill and absorb their powers. By July, Japan was going on the offensive, launching huge night attacks on the eastern side of the river, throwing up a pontoon bridge and attempting to advance on the Soviet artillery, established on the west side. Zhukov, however, had not received all of his reinforcements yet. He had only gotten the tanks and armored cars. The infantry was still packed,

assumingly very miserable in a train car summer between him and Moscow. As was common for the time, most officers and most doctrine of the war saw tanks the same as they had during World War I. They had a limited job supporting infantry advances and little to nothing else. Zhukov himself was a former tank officer. He saw modern tanks as being able to form their own brigades and launch their own assaults without infantry because infantry now moves slower than tanks, which was not really the case in World War I.

A tank in World War I moved about five mile an hour. You could pass it at a brisk jog, but nowadays the tanks were faster. Now working with infantry slowed them down, he thought a full-on, all-tank advance would be much faster, much more aggressive. They could burst through enemy lines and just keep going directly into the enemy rear,

while infantry could then exploit the holes created by an armor attack. And the step was pretty much the perfect place to try that tactic out on large scale. The Japanese had notoriously bad tanks, and they always would throughout all of World War II. And it wasn't like Zhukov had much of a choice, as his infantry just hadn't arrived yet. So as the Japanese advance,

Zhukov deployed, in his own words, 150 tanks and 150 armored cars to counterattack them. The tanks were mostly the standard Soviet, and Tom, this is for you, BT model. Yes. Yes, death stranding. getting dragged into the oil. And the oils being sprayed in your face

by the plane. Yes. Now the BT was by no means the legendary T-34, but as a perfectly serviceable tank in this theater, had a solid cannon that could chew through Japanese tanks and had slanted front armor, meaning it was decently protected from

incoming tank rounds, at least from the front. Anywhere else you're fucked. There's also something of a design flaw in it, and I'm trying not to go in any holes here, any tank holes. But the way that the BT armor was slanted meant that if it hit perfectly,

incoming tank rounds hit perfectly, it creates something called a shot trap, which is where the turret meets the hole, you don't want to get hit there, right? So the way that the armor was slanted, sometimes it would deflect enemy tank rounds directly into your turret ring and you die. Aim for the big red spot for massive damage.

Look, every once in a while, technological advances have some shitty beginnings. The Soviet armored counterattack drove the Japanese back, at least at first. The first Japanese push had no armor support, so teams of Japanese soldiers decided to figure it out on their own in what amounted to be suicide squads charging against Soviet tanks armed with fire bombs to try to chuck them at the engine compartment. This worked shockingly well due to a design flaw in these BTs that Zhukov had brought. And that was they were powered by gasoline engines with no thought given to fire safety.

Just regular gas. Gasoline is significantly more flammable than say diesel, which is what most vehicles at the type are fueled with for this exact reason. So I'm not an engine head, but obviously there's diesel engines. As I understand it, like gasoline engines tend to be a little bit higher maintenance. depending on the octane or the fuel burned, they can burn cleaner. I know there's some additional advantages to the kinds of engines. That's why aviation fuel is 100 octane gasoline and not diesel.

However, diesel burns but doesn't explode in the same way that gasoline does. Yeah, and these, they explode. The BTs go up and fireballs. But obviously the casualties the Japanese took engaging in what amounted to be hand-to-hand combat with a tank. were staggering. The only saving grace the Japanese found was in the rain because it churned everything to mud, which slowed the tanks down, which allowed their surprise suicide anti-tank attacks to be much more successful because the tanks couldn't move in that mess. And even with all

of this, the Japanese held on for three days before their supply situation broke down because it's pretty hard to supply a forward attack on foot with a single pontoon bridge. Finally, they broke and retreated back across the river. Fighting continued in the the Japanese were introduced to Stalin's favorite guy, Grigory Kulik, the chief of Soviet artillery. The Soviets pounded the Japanese position with artillery constantly, unbroken for days at a time. The Japanese soldiers in their positions found that the sandy soil that they were dug into was pretty goddamn worthless for protection against such a bombardment.

They hadn't been issued with anything to reinforce the sides of their trenches or foxholes, as Japanese doctrine at the time was to simply harvest it, from where they happened to be, and there wasn't a tree for miles around. They brought their own artillery up to try to fire a counter barrage, but found the Soviet guns had much better range, and their heavy rail support meant that the Soviets never ran out of ammunition. The final mile, let's say, of the Soviet logistics, was filled with Mongolian camel and horse riders trucking that shit over,

though the Soviets did have one massive flaw in their supply network, manufacturing quality. It was awful. it resulted in a lot of their artillery shell simply not exploding. Duds buried themselves in the sand, which forced Japanese soldiers to run out, dig them up and throw them as far as they could away

for fear that the next incoming ground would set them off. What a terrible, terrible job to be assigned. It's like, yeah, you know, private Yamamoto run over there and grab the shell and throw it as hard as you can away from us. This is how you get Japanese Tom Brady. You know, he's going to go up there, grab the artillery shell and just perfect spiral, clear across the river. He's got to kiss the shell first before he throws it. Yeah, pick the shell up, kiss it on the lips.

And then also he's going to take out a screwdriver and remove some of the powders. So it actually weighs less than normal and then throw it. Yeah, they were hoping for Japanese Tom Brady. They got Japanese Tim Tebow instead. I'm just thinking why it's like you find yourself a situation where like the artillery could actually be a pretty significant, you know, either suppression or actual causing serious combat loss, but instead you're just annoying the living dog shit out of them. Anybody, I like, yeah, like, I haven't been under a true artillery barrage course, not the kind of war that I fought in. But like, it seems like the vast majority of it is just one annoyance

on top of the other, on top of, you know, horrible trauma inflicting and everything. Well, yeah. But like, the Japanese were losing a lot of guys, but it really did seem like the artillery barrages themselves were mostly just sapping the morale, because, they couldn't sleep, they couldn't eat, like the constant vibration of the shelling for days at a time meant that they all got like diarrhea.

Like, it just said like, have you ever shelled someone so hard they shit their pants? And not to mention, remember their trenches are all made out of like unreinforced sand.

So every type of shell detonates even like a kilometer away, the shaking just collapses everything like a shitty sandcastle. You're trying to sit on a like a latrine, a makeshift one with walls around. and a shell hits the ground doesn't explode. All four walls fall down.

You're just sitting there like Lenny and the Simpsons. They were getting to experience like being a crab stuck on a beach while a bunch of toddlers are trying to play, build a castle and just keeps falling. There's a threat of diarrhea. Like it's not a good situation to be in. Like if anybody deserves this,

it's imperial Japanese soldiers. So nobody feel too sorry. No, but there is a part of me that's just like, it's just kind of like the artillery equivalent of spitballs. Because they're supposed to explode. I mean, okay. These kind of size of rounds are typically like 100 pounds each. Like they're going to cause damage. They are going to kill people. It's going to be loud. It's going to be damage. It's going to be disruptive. But like if they explode, like they're supposed to do it's going to do a lot of fucking more. That's all point of artillery.

Imagine being the guy who just gets splatted by the done because it lays directly on your head. Actually, it's probably heavier than 100 pounds because much like the Soviet consumer goods industry where like every lamp weighs 250 kilos. I imagine these shells were just mad heavy because they're just like, well, we have to produce a quota by weight. so one big bullet. I think I had that lamp in one of my apartments at Yoravad, honestly. Getting lenied by the army who has the manufacturing quality of the cyber truck. Now, on July 13th, the Japanese attempted another night assault. They fired 25,000 shells in preparation for it, but met with double that of Russian counter battery,

blasting the attacking Japanese apart. They made gains, but in the way that a World War I offensive makes gains. They grinded themselves down. They lost 5,000 men for the benefit of a few meters. Fuck. Again, border conflict. Lose half a division, three or four really sad poems written. Like, it's average day in World War I.

The Japanese frustrated launched air attacks on Soviet air bases in Siberia, which was seen as a massive escalation because now you're raiding far behind enemy lines into the country. and it threatened to blow this thing up into an outright war to the point that Emperor Hirohito told the Kuantang army to cut that shit out, but said nothing about the rest of their unauthorized, totally not a war, but is actually a war. Just like, hey, hey, hey, hey, whoa,

calm down with the bombing attacks. Send in more Nates, let's get this wrapped up. Yeah, more Nates. Dolcei at DeCore Vest to get oil squirted on you for some reason. Dolce Nate DeCorevess. Shut the fuck up. To quote Emperor Hirohito of the Empire of Japan, get me more Nates. And this whole thing had ground into a 15 kilometer long stalemate down the Holston River,

which is a branch of the larger Culk. This went for months as more and more and more men and machines were brought in. However, what was brought in was wildly different depending on what side you happened to be talking about here. The Soviet railhead, the base of supply, was 780 kilometers away from the front line, or 465 miles. Not exactly close, but they did have heavy rail, which meant they could then use those trains to bring in tons of trucks to cover that last stretch after previously relying on Mongolian meat transport. The Soviets assembled a fleet of over 4,000 trucks to constantly ferry supplies to the front. Those trains also made it easier to keep bringing in more tanks and more men.

and specifically tanks fueled with diesel so they didn't explode anymore from Japanese fire bombs. The Japanese simply lacked this kind of capacity at all, both in rail, motor vehicle transport, availability of armor, and just military mechanization as a whole. The majority of Japanese reinforcements were infantry and they were forced to walk the rest of the way carrying 65 pound packs in 90 degree heat. Yeah. As someone who has done that, I can. can tell you, it fucking sucks. As I understand it, I do not believe that the Japanese had a significant amount of industrial like war production capacity in occupied Manchuria.

Not really. No, everything had to be shipped over from the homeland. And then you're fighting a border conflict with the Soviet Union who basically at this point in their history has like industrial cheat code for infinity money in Sim City. And it's just like, oh, we just built the world's largest steel mill overnight. Yeah, whatever. You know, we'll do it again. And so even if.

the quality isn't there. Like, yeah, there's this the kind of tipping point when it comes to just their ability to respond nonstop. Yeah, the Soviets are spawn camping.

The Japanese Imperial Army was just not mechanized as the way that other armies were, specifically the Soviets, nor would they ever be, because they just didn't see it as important. This was due to difference

in doctrine. Sure. Another part of it was practical. The Japanese Imperial Navy was an oil hog and the Japanese military didn't exactly have a lot of it. This is before the United States cut off the oil supply,

but Japan is never exactly oil wealthy even before that. Resource wealthy, quite frankly. Not at all. I mean, it's one of the reasons why they have this imperial project to Siberia and China and Korea and everything else. It's like they're trying to make up for the fact that Japan doesn't have these things.

So heavily mechanizing their military isn't going to work. Can you imagine how many nates we can build if we can occupy Siberia and harvest all its resources? that's where Nates are born is the harsh tantrum of Siberia. On a long enough timeline, they're trying to build the perfect specimen of me, I guess. Yeah, exactly. Good luck with that. You've heard of perfect cell.

The Japan is trying to build perfect Nate. Oh, well, good luck with that one, guys. So, like, Japan would never have enough of any of the things that they need, while the Soviets, quite literally, have an endless supply. So the Japanese rely on mule, horses, and camel supply trains. eventually, slowly built up a decent number of trucks to aid in that supply transport, but only around 2000. That number might be a little high, but still even around then, 25% of them broke down. And since their supply line was slower and longer, and meant that replacement parts just never

got to them and they were never fixed. Whereas, like, the Soviets can basically just, like, move their character cursor forward and build, like, the quadruple Carl Gustav fucking rail lines anywhere they go. And the Japanese, like, we can absolutely resupply. with a petting zoo. What if we just kept shoving more dudes at it? Like, they have infantry. They have no shortage of infantry, even though the war in China is certainly taking up the vast majority of the resources.

But like, okay, we're going to ship them from Japan or some other place all the way there on a boat. From there, they're going to load onto a train. And then they have to walk 300 miles. Yeah, exactly. It's like, you know, there's an extent to which while they are able to make do with what they've got, even better than horses and mules. is a thing with an engine in wheels or tracks.

It's like a horse could maybe equate four or five guys in terms of carrying capacity. But like, there's a reason they measure these big motherfuckers in horsepower because they're bigger. They're like lots of horses. What if you had a ton of horses all in one thing, but they weren't stomping children and biting your fingers? They were just pulling something forward.

What if you had horsepower, but you didn't have to deal with the horrible personalities of horses? That's why they have Nate power. Yeah, but I mean, like Tom said, that's just taking you on special reconnaissance flights because you heard that there was an interesting looking tree somewhere. You have to put the vape in the fuel, the fuel intake. Japan's about to learn to respect the humble Kamaz truck.

Yeah. Yeah, man. I mean, look, there's a lot of goofy stuff on either side here, but you can see the obvious mismatch forming in terms of like what the overall capabilities are of one side versus the other. And as I said before, one side is basically constantly turning it into the, the final scene of, was it, Tetsuo the Iron Man? And the other ones, they're just sort of like,

what, it's a hundred miles? Dudes can walk that shit. Come on. Yeah. We're tough. I mean, if there's one army that takes part in World War II, that makes how the Soviet tree, their common infantrymen look like good in comparison, it's the Imperial Japanese army, where suffering is part of the doctrine.

We talked about this back in the Nanking episode, where, like, the brutal treatment that the common average Japanese soldier got, possibly had a lot to do. with how brutally they treated POWs and things like that. Like, no, this is how you're treated. This is normal. And on top of the racial ideology on top of it. But as we crawl into August of 1939, Zhukov was massing his men and preparing for a final confrontation.

At this point, he had 70,000 soldiers and at least 500 tanks. The Japanese had at least as many soldiers, but only a fraction of the armor. Command of the Japanese had fallen to Michitaro Kamimatsubara, a man with 34 years in service, who was terminally ill. He didn't know this at the time. He thought he was just dealing with some kind of travel-related sickness.

He was suffering from stomach cancer and would be dead in like 14 months. Whoops. I mean, he's going to fit in well with the guys who are being vibrated so much they shit themselves. Yeah, that was actually early cancer treatment as you just sat slightly off to the left of an artillery barrage and hoped the tumor got shaken loose. Oh. It's like pissing out a kidney sound. Yeah, exactly. That could have something to do with the fact, like he was really tired.

A lot of reports say he barely left his command office, you know, on account of he was dying. That may have had something to do with how he didn't see the Soviets as possibly planning for an attack. Though a lot of that credit goes to Zhukov. Soviets were conducting pretty clear probing attacks throughout August. And Kamatsubara thought that every time the Japanese forced them back, so therefore there's nothing to worry about that these probing. attacks were the best that the Soviets can do. And Japanese scouting

should have picked up on the massing of Soviet forces, but Zhukov made sure to only reinforce the front line at night, tanks were only to be moved into position during specified periods of time. And when they moved, he ordered all the transport trucks in the area to rip off

their mufflers and rev their engines to drown out the sound of tanks. And when that wasn't enough, loud speakers were installed to blare out fake construction. noise day a night, leading to the Japanese to believe they were actually constructing massive defensive works rather than preparing for an offensive. I'm sorry, but this rules. Like, okay, these guys suck. Don't get me wrong. But like, okay, you can unironically say that the Soviet

Union or the good guys in this conflict in this specific instance here, fuck's sake. But also, like, I realize the Soviet army, there's a lot to not commend about it, but like, this rules. I'm sorry. Yeah. And Zhukov did a lot of this during the Battle of Kersk as well to prepare for that. Like, he was really, really good. misdirection and camouflaging huge industrial military operations. But to be fair for the Japanese, like they are at a very big tactical disadvantage because it's hard to, you know, understand orders when they sound like, oh, like a death rattle. Yeah, I'm starting to think that my guy in command dying might be the reason we're not doing

well. Maybe he was no longer in command. His body had been taken over by the tumor. Does you think that everywhere that he went, he made the Dark Souls? pain noise. Oh. He showed up to war at one HP. You really don't want that.

You really don't want your general to show up with his health meter glowing red. To reinforce all this as well, Soviet soldiers were never told about any offensive, but rather to prepare for the fight behind their lines to fight a defensive battle. In case one of them was captured or tried to defect or whatever, they would be worthless list of Japanese intelligence. They would have nothing to tell them. Other than like, I don't know, we get some sick sound systems over there, though. Exactly.

We've invented Soviet dance hall. This is actually how hard bass was invented. Exactly. It's like there might be, there might be a defensive posture. There's no offensive posture, but there absolutely is a sound clash. Finally, Japanese aerial reconnaissance picked up on this massive movement of men and material and ran back to Kamatsubara to tell him, yo, there's a lot of, shit over there. But the Japanese recon planes didn't have cameras. So Kamatsubara just had to go off

of the word of the pilots. And he didn't believe them thinking that they were exaggerating. Like the Soviets can't possibly do that. Mind you, all of this is happening while Japanese positions are getting absolutely plastered with artillery day and night. He's just ignoring the fact that the Soviets might be up to something. I realize that we're in the late 1930s and that like Military aviation has been around long enough that there's going to have been a science. There's going to have been a doctrine established about how one conducts aerial reconnaissance, reports that there's going to be training involved. But there's a part of me that finds this very, very funny to imagine that, like,

guys are having to describe from memory little squitly dots on the ground. They're like, well, I saw some green blurs and some brown blurs, a couple little gray squares. You know what I mean? Like, it's just something patently absurd about this. It's like, how many men did you see? Fuckload. Thank you. Thank you, scout.

I saw tactical fuckload. Also, I love the idea that despite the fact military reconnaissance planes have been around for years at this point and they don't have cameras, but they do have all of that train that you've talked about and that all can be defeated by just like one general going, no-uh. I don't believe you.

Prove it. But don't prove it to me. I can't get out of bed. You put me on a plane. Do you have any idea how bad it's going to start smelling up in this thing? Give me my beloved date. I need my name. Nate.

Finally on August 20th, Zhukov launched his attack. It opened with an even heavier artillery barrage than ever before. Tanks and armored cars race around the Japanese flanks, thanks to the Emperor's orders. The Soviets now had total air superiority over the Nates. And would conduct the first ever fighter-bomber offensive in Soviet aeronautical history. Japanese soldiers were quickly cut off, and because of the terrible terrain, they were hardly able to reinforce their position with anything better than bits of wood for disassembled ammo crates, so their positions fell apart quite quickly.

Their artillery bombardment severed field wires so they couldn't communicate with one another, and buried men alive as their trenches collapsed under the bombardment. From the very beginning, every Japanese position was pretty much on their own. It didn't take long for the Japanese main force to be surrounded and broke apart, but that didn't mean it was smooth sailing for the Soviets. almost every single one of these isolated Japanese pockets fought to the death. This forced many Soviet infantrymen to have to charge in

and fight them at bayonet point, discovering that is just about the last place you want to fight a Japanese soldier. Japanese soldiers had a weird amount of time dedicated to bayonet fighting in their basic combat training. It's not a place you want to find yourself. But your average Soviet conscripts is probably aware that the Japanese have this thing for swords.

Yeah, they're big swords guys. That's not exactly like, you know, you know, a hidden secret of cultural, cultural anthropology. Yeah. They're kind of like, you know, into sharp things, into stuff that points, you know. They're all the weird knife kid you knew from high school.

It's like the last thing you want is like, oh, we've got them cornered. Every single one of them is flipping a butterfly knife. Yeah, they're eating an apple using only a butterfly knife. These guys seem intimidating. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, they've got a, they're revving their edges really loud.

They've got a pack of cigarettes shoved up their sleep. for some reason. Oh yeah, you caught yourself right there, didn't you, fucker? Yeah,

Jesus. They got a pack of cigarettes shoved up there. Oh, I mean, stuck, placed strategically

in a location. We've just come up with an idea for a musical called Eastside story. But each group was slowly but

surely being overwhelmed in four days of fighting. Some Japanese soldier managed to break out and get away,

but most of their positions were slowly ground down by sheer weight of numbers and men and material. By August 31st, the Japanese had mostly abandoned their position on the Mongolian side of the river.

Losing 20,000 men. Fuck. 75% of their forces in the region. Yeah. Again, border conflict. Just an average, unremarkable day. The Soviets achieved their goals as well, but they also lose about as many men with some reports saying it was even more, 30,000.

And they won the largest tank battle since World War. World War I in the process. This is almost certainly not where this story would have ended if it existed in a vacuum. But in August, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, Japan's ally, signed their non-aggression pact, isolating Japan against the Soviet Union. Japan and the powerful Kuantang army didn't want the realities of this battle to get out either, so it's kind of in their best interest to drop it. The Soviets were supposed to be far below them, racially, politically everything, so

this can never be allowed to happen. The Soviets, in turn, didn't want to tie up all their forces against Japan, as the same agreement with the Nazis, infamously greenlighted the Soviet Union's invasion of parts of Poland, the Baltics, and Finland, all of which were considered, obviously, much more important than some dusty-ass step on the other side of the world. So despite the seeming like the start of a massive war,

because it absolutely would have been, all of it would need to be sidelined because it was better for everyone involved to simply throw their hands up and move on. That's what they did, at least for a couple of years. Japan and the Soviet Union played nice throughout 99% of World War II and signed a neutrality pact in 1941. Japan even sent delegates to attend the Red Square Victory Parade on June 24th, 1945,

to celebrate the defeat of their own Nazi ally in one of the most awkward photos you can ever see. Because then it was August, I think early August, 1945 right before the U.S. dropped the atomic bombs that the Soviet Union invaded like the northernmost points of Japan. They invaded Manchuria.

Yeah. And that's why like that is a super awkward picture to look at of those Japanese delegates at that Victory Day parade because a little over a month later the Soviet Union invaded them. Hey guys. We do have a lot more tanks now. We've been tank maxing in the last six years.

You guys, if we if you thought we whooped your ass a couple years ago, you're in for a rude fucking awakening. Remember how I said we talk about the torturer again? Lev Schwartzman? Well, here we are. Gregory Stern, despite serving under Zhukov, was considered a major part of the success of the operation.

He was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union for his efforts. He would go on to serve during the Winter War, not as well, and would run directly into the next wave of Stalinist purges in 1940. He was arrested by the NKVD in June 7, 1941, having been denounced by a different officer under torture, and ended up in a chair in front of Swartzman. Swartzman tortured him for days until Stern confessed to being part of a Trotskyet's plot against Stalin since the 30s, which he wasn't, and then a Nazi agent when the Nazi invasion kicked off while he was in captivity.

He was eventually taking out back and shot. But if there's a bright spot to any of this, is that Swartzman's time would come too. Not until 1951, though. When Stalin caught up in his newest wave of paranoia, claim there's a Jewish plot against him, which should be known as the doctor's plot. He were to round up of Jews serving within the state apparatus and some outside of it as well. Swartzman was among them. It was his turn to get tortured and confess to a bunch of shit that wasn't real. Though his confession is honestly a treat. He claims that he ran a gay Zionist terrorist organization, but was only turned that

way because his aunt cooked him a Zionist soup which poisoned his mind and turned him against the communist cause. Yes. I told you to come back to soup. I told you we get the soup. Okay. But before he could get executed, Stalin died. And Lovrenti Beria offered him a deal.

If he admitted to extracting false confessions under torture, all the other shit would get dropped and he would just have to serve a short time in prison. He agreed. And then Beria himself was arrested and executed. leaving sportsmen still in prison on his original charges. The Soviet government now fully aware of all of the things that put him in prison being completely made up, looked at one another, and decided, well, we should probably shoot this motherfucker anyway just to be safe.

So they did in 1955. The end. Oh, God. Occasionally, someone gets what they're coming. It just takes, you know, a few years. I feel like I've been blindsided numerous times. in this episode. Gay Zionist soup,

plane named after me or me named after a plane. The eternal question. We have to rotate the Nate plane in our mind. Fellas, you ever been vibrated so hard you got diarrhea.

Like, there's a lot going on here, man. Well, I hope everybody enjoyed the battles of the culk and goal and the no mohan incident. But fellas,

we do a thing on this show called Questions from the Legion. If you support the show on Patreon, you can ask us a question, either Patreon or Discord or you can attach to an artillery shell, fire it directly

at us with enough vigorous energy to make a shit our pants and we'll answer it on air. Today's question is, what is the worst apartment you've ever lived in? I feel like between the three of us, we got some gems, boys. Oh, I lived in a flat that I shared with my friend

that my bedroom was the size of a coffin and the entire apartment was probably actually smaller than the studio you are sitting in right now, Joe. I've definitely lived in apartment smaller than this. Not shittier, though. I think this is fine.

I also lived in another flat that was in the basement of a Georgian building and I had a shower in the corner of my room but no ventilation. So I didn't realize mold was a thing. I would just like shower in there, open the window. I would smoke cigarettes and bed,

shit like that. And it was just horrible. It was freezing cold. Yeah. And then at one stage, our boiler exploded. Because we didn't have keys to the upstairs because it was just like completely vacant. We couldn't shut off the water. So they had to rip all the carpet up.

So we're walking around on bare concrete for like eight months. That sucks. I guess the question that I'd have to ask is like, barracks don't count. No, I figured it. And I would say military housing probably wouldn't count. either. No, you can't because it's just like awful. The most falling apart apartment I've ever lived in was probably I lived in a like a shared townhouse rental when I was in college with four

other guys. And I had my room was 10 feet by, I think it was either 10 feet by 9 feet or 10 feet by 11 feet. I can't quite remember. I had a like a not single mattress like a double mattress, but not a pretty big one. And there was enough room in there. There was a little clock, a little walking closet, it, but I basically had enough room to put my bed and then like a desk shelf thing where I could put my computer and I could work. But there was basically no room in there. And that place had, yeah, fucked up drains, fucked up heating, really drafty, insanely expensive to keep heated in the winter. Everything was kind of falling apart. I stayed in an apartment for a while in Korea that had at one point had air conditioning, but they took the air conditioning unit out and it left a big

hole in the wall, which is I didn't realize until later is a like a big red bullseye for a magical insect known as the Asian giant hornet. I got woken up by one of those, I mean, a bee the size of your hand, had to chase it out, basically dressed up in like quarantine gear and was chasing it out with a broom. I said it fucked up apartment complex for about a year in Alaska that had,

um, the management were so cheap and they had a dumpster and they only paid to get it like emptied every two weeks. And in the summertime, like people had been moving out and there was so much trash that like, all the trash overfilled and then like, sure, the waste removal people would empty the dumpster,

they wouldn't pick up any of the excess. So then that would then refill the dumpster. And so by the next two weeks, it would just get full. And then someone parked a fucked up, smashed out car there, just left it. And then somebody set it on fire. And it just kept getting worse. There was a hornet infestation in one of the buildings during the summer. And I remember you woken up and it was like this weird slapping noise.

And I came outside. It was a bunch of little kids who were like, oh, yeah, we want to get rid of the bees. And they were like trying to throw. I want to say it was like pieces like pieces of plastic toys or something like at the bees nest to knock it down. And I was like, boys, you do realize what's going to happen if you knock this hornet's nest down, right? And then I went back and closed the window, even though I, we didn't have air conditioning because it was Alaska. I don't know, man. In New York, I lived in an apartment that had, uh, the, all the kitchen cabinets had been installed

with the guy basically used like the same kind of anchors you'd used to hang up a picture frame into a hollow wall. And it fell on me one day and completely broke everything in my house. I mean, like everything. And I was practically naked because I was about to take a shower. and I was just grabbing something to put it in the microwave so it would be warm when I got out of the shower. And all I remember is I opened up the cabinet door and then suddenly everything was falling down on me. And just shit raining everywhere. I had like broken glass in my feet. I got hit on the head by my rice cooker.

Like it was bad. Really bad. So I mean, I've kind of run the full gamut. I don't know. But in terms of that college apartment was disgusting. The complex in Alaska was just grimy. And then I don't know. Like if you want to live, you can live really cheaply in Korea if you live in cheap apartments,

but they are going to be like the grimyest spaces you've ever been in. And so, yeah, I don't know. I guess it's really a question of like, what is the metric by which you're saying worst? Because I lived in a place that I liked a lot, my first solo place in college, but it was fucking ancient. And like,

it was kind of like a carved away apartment inside a bigger house. And if like you use too much of electricity, it would flip the breakers and have to go to the neighbors and ask to go into their basement and flip the breakers, which were like, like jazz age switches. You know what I mean? Like just absolutely.

Yeah. So I mean, I guess I guess it really just depends on what it is that bothers you about an apartment because I've probably experienced it. The first apartment I had in Killeen outside of Fort Hood, which is never a good part to begin with. It was obviously like someone's converted detached garage into a house. The layout was incredibly weird and but rent was like $300 a month. So I was like sign me the fuck up. That was a thing back there. You could actually have a cheap apartment. And one day I was laying in bed and something stung.

me on the foot. Uh-oh. And I'm like, well, that's weird. Maybe I thought it was like a nightmare or something, but I sit up and I pull back the covers, there's a fucking scorpion. Oh, my God. Like a little tiny square. Like, not anything that's going to cause you any real damage or anything, but like still

for a dude from Michigan seeing a scorpion, it freaked me the fuck out. I panicked. I killed the scorpion. And while doing so, I tripped, fell out of bed. And like, my ass went through the drywall. And that's what I discovered that inside the wall, because this place is also very cold in the winter and had no heat for some reason. Again, $300 a month, whatever. And I found that the walls were insulated with crumpled up newspaper. And after my ass went through the drywall, I was

greeted by what I could best describe as a tidal wave of scorpions. I was going to say, I figured that there wouldn't be the first scorpion. And I grabbed my dog under my arm and fucking screamed and ran out of the house. And I just like called my land. And I just like called my land. landlord who of course didn't pick up the phone. I called an exterminator company. They came and got rid of all the scorpions. But yeah, I end up living there for like two more years. What if the scorpions are part of the insulation? Exactly. They may have been. They may have been. But yeah, crumpled up newspapers and scorpion. I'll leave you with a funny story. So I lived in New Mexico for three years when I was a little kid. I was like eight when we moved

there and I was 11 when we left to move to Indiana. And we didn't have air conditioning. I mean, It's hot as fuck there, but it's dry. And it would be pretty uncommon back in those days for a house in New Mexico to have air conditioning. And in the summer, it got hot as hell. But I mean, you know, you had a fan or whatever. And I was off school. I would have been maybe 10, but maybe, yeah, I would have been 10. And I was playing Super Nintendo and it was hotter than fuck.

So I was just like not wearing any clothes besides like a pair of like briefs because like, why would you wear clothes or, you know, off school? Who cares? And sitting on the floor playing Final Fantasy or something. And then I feel something on my leg and like, oh, it's a, it's an ant, I just brush it off or whatever. And keep playing. Feel another thing.

I'm like, fucking ant. Brush it off. Then I feel another thing, slightly bigger ant, look down. It is a giant desert southwest centipede on my load. And I scream as loud as I've ever screamed. And I jump up and I run until my brother and we don't know what to do. And my brother grabs a kitchen knife. And I grab a wrench and we fight this thing like it's a soul's game boss.

And it gets in the corner and rear the, up its tail and start swinging at us every time that we approach it with like its fucking like tail fangs like it's got those like the stingers. And we finally managed to cut it into pieces and we put it into like a plastic bag and fill it up full of water and drop it in the trash outside. And then I come back like to tell my mom when she comes from work, I told her about it and open up the trash and the thing was still moving in pieces inside the water inside the fucking bat. And I was just like, I didn't realize that such horrors were just waiting right outside my door. And so it's like, you know what? Sometimes inside your wall.

Yeah. Sometimes, I was like, Desert Southwest has some fauna that you don't want to fuck with. Scorpions, big centipedes, tarantulas, tarantula hawks,

like the world's stingingest bee. That kind of thing. People shouldn't live there. Yeah, it's bad place. I'm just surprised at how many stories you have that involved. You essentially having ants on your feet. I,

ants in your feet. Japanese men inside you while you're flying through the air. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I mean, I guess my mom would be like, why were you,

why were you sitting on the floor? you know, in your underwear with no other clothes on playing video games. I'm like, because it's hot and we have a tile floor. It's cool and it feels nice. She's like, well, I guess centipedes feel the same way. At a long enough timeline, you will also be able to sit in your underwear and play video games. But fellas, that's a podcast. It actually meant to point this out in the beginning, but this is our 400th episode.

Oh, hooray. Oh, shit. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's more once you kind of bonuses and stuff. But like, this is our 400th mainline episode of this fucking podcast. I put a big ass note in the script to bring this up at the very beginning. But here I am an hour and 45 minutes later and I have just remembered. But yeah, 400 episodes.

So thank you everybody for that. If you'd like to support us, we have a Patreon. $5 a month gets you absolutely everything. Regular episodes early. All of our bonus content, Discord access, first dibs on live show tickets and merch. not any merch with Nate as a plane on it yet. Oh. But these guys host other podcasts.

Plug those other podcasts. Yeah, so I am the co-host and or producer of What a Hell of Ways a Dad, Trash Future, Kill J Spond, and I also help out a bit with No Gods, no Mayors. And I am a member of a band called Second Homes, and we are having an album come out sometime in the spring.

So check all those out. The band doesn't have stuff on socials yet, but it will soon. It's just I don't feel like putting stuff out until we have something to offer. So when the time comes, believe me, I'm going to England to mix this record next month. It is going to come out. But I have nothing to share it just yet. Listen to Bloodwork, a show about the economy of violence or beneath the skin, a show about the history of everything. Told through the history of tattoos. And until next time, rotate slowly.

Nate, that is a plane in your head. Don't. You must rotate. Just think of it as me. Just think of it as me, but I hold my arms out and I fly. I don't think of like an answer. You flap your arm really fast as a Japanese guy riding you. Don't think of an anthropomorphic plane that looks like me because that's going to be sexual somehow.

And I don't like that. No. Think of, uh, think of like, you know, it's like planes, but, you know, from Pixar's cars, but it's Nate. And there's a Japanese man inside of him. Think about that. It's not weird. It's military history. It's not weird.

Or they're like the planes from Thomas the tank engine. It's never weird.