Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 405 - The USS Massachusetts, America's Dumbest Battleship

Episode Date: March 16, 2026

PREORDER JOE'S NEW FANTASY NOVEL: https://www.amazon.com/Highlands-Burn-Foundling-Brigade-Saga-ebook/dp/B0GSG5CNXX/ref=sr_1_1?crid=28PYNNVKMAELT&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.vJU8q9bT2skMPocB8TLK3SQaS00llqP5djabrgGlb6PbohI3eXCKx4PBd_estyu1sKcrRFhwYBND4TTpbK29TKTSRPPQXAMm0YtWlJsX-8frRQT5ljLnsOplutHcSx-MyYKJWlUWmYxAem3R0vVpZ8eSLhuzHTNiTAIai0QTTHfC-O75kLfjAbf_0Vq_CjuTDU0Oof4mWclUz3aM9Fx0vCHuzb_9WzwH8c2xEjgOUN8.W_JOGgoCzfIALrWzYBC1ie5Bg9oW9Axq6Ok6Wo3Pv28&dib_tag=se&keywords=the+highlands+burn&qid=1773646095&sprefix=%2Caps%2C211&sr=8-1 SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys In a time before US Naval dominance, the not-quite-yet imperial power decided to modernize its Navy to a level that might enable it to compete with its European counterparts. Instead, they created the USS Massachusetts and the Indiana Class. A battleship that was not a battleship, with guns so large they were more hazardous to the ship itself than any enemy, and so impossible to control the Navy kept crashing it into rocks. There are two battleships named the USS Massachusetts. This is the BB-2. The one that fought in WWII is the BB-59 Sources: Gardiner, Robert; Lambert, Andrew D. (1992). Steam, Steel & Shellfire: The Steam Warship 1815–1905 https://www.al.com/news/mobile/2016/07/diving_the_worst_battleship_ev.html https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2020/june/race-uss-oregon https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/uss-massachusetts-why-worst-us-navy-battleship-ever-210474 https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/the-epic-journey-of-uss-oregon-during-the-spanish-american-war/ https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1901/03/26/117958746.pdf https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1903/08/24/105058393.pdf https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1904/12/16/120273752.pdf https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1911/12/02/104844371.pdf

Hey everyone, it's Joe. If you like what we do here on the show, consider supporting us on Patreon. Just $5 a month gets you access to our entire bonus episode catalog, as well as every regular episode, one full week early. Access to all of our side series that are currently ongoing and our back catalog of those as well. Gets you e-books, audiobooks, first dibs on live show tickets and merchandise when they're available, and also gets you access to our Discord, which has turned into a lovely little community. So go to patreon.com slash lions led by donkeys and join the Legion of the Old Crow today. Hey everyone and welcome to the Lions at By Donkeys podcast, the world's only military history podcast. I'm Joe and with me.

It's Tom and Nate, Nate, it's good to have you back from your mixtape recording. I've insisted at a calling it a mixtape. I don't know why I find it funny. I mean, so people may not be aware of this because I definitely wasn't, but like in the sort of way you conceive of having a record mastered, actually like the mastering is a relatively minor process, but mixing it is a huge process. And that's where like basically all of the sound gets nailed down. I mean, you have the stuff you've recorded. And so we recorded this record in November. It was 11 days or 10 days in studio. And we went up with nine songs. And I was in the same studio for seven days mixing. And let me tell you. I've edited podcasts for a long time. I've edited done music for a while. But when you're in a finely tuned sound room, you know, control room with monitor speakers listening to the same four bar phrase for like 30 minutes straight on repeat, trying to EQ and unfuck like bass harmonics clashing was like it's a different process. But that is absolutely where the sound gets nailed down.

And so just got back from that. It was really great. I'm not a musician. Nobody wants to hear me try to sing. But like similarly when it comes like the writing process, Everyone probably assumes that the actual writing of the book is the hardest part. And editing is like not. You would be so terribly, terribly wrong because there's no greater hell than reading your own book about five times until the point that you haven't memorized. Nate, you are aware of this process intimately now. I have a funny story too about that too because I had a novel manuscript and I remember I shared it with a friend. And part of it included like a short story kind of like in jammed into the manuscript that had been workshoped and revised.

And my friend reads a lot of literary fiction, but like he's not a writer. And he's like, no, you know, like, that segment's great. The whole rest of the book should be like that. And I'm like, yeah, dude, that's the fucking point. You're reading a first draft of everything else. The other thing's been fucking workshopped and revised. Do you think that all the books you love, the writer's like, bazinga, done, and no, whatever changes anything.

And nothing but buckets from the three point line. Yeah, exactly. Just straight up, just throwing this shit over your shoulder, but it's, you know, 100,000 work manuscript. It just lands, gets printed that way. Like, yeah. Revision is essential and it does actually kind of make the thing and the same with mixing, the same with everything. There's a ton of decisions we made where we actually took stuff out

and then brought it back in where it mattered. Yeah, that's kind of the process. And I think a lot of people who don't do creative stuff may not be aware of it. But yeah, as a writer, it sucks. And as a musician, especially like in some songs where it's close to the limit of my range, hearing my fucked up voice over and over and over again, is very, very humbling. We'll put it that way. My personal favorite part of the writing process, again, Nate was involved in the process of my upcoming book, to his regret, I assume. But like, I love getting to a part of like, oh, man, I fucking nail. Like, this paragraph is so good. And like, two editors, like, actually, you should delete this. I'm like, fuck. It's a slog no matter what. But that's just kind of the way

that this process works. Like, you know, maybe there are some people who can just one and done stuff, but like, it's pretty rare. And oftentimes, even if it's good, it could have been better if there was some degree of revision. Like, that's typically the case. It might be very little. Might be a very small amount.

But like, you know, we have to stay on topic and do an episode. But I can think of plenty examples of really, really great works that have some dumb fucking bullshit in them where you're like, bro, that really didn't need to be there. Or ma'am in some cases because we're equal opportunity haters on this podcast. Have you ever read a visit from the Goon Squad by, Jennifer Egan, great book, but there's, at the end, the best we can describe is like, what if babies were on Facebook in the year 2030 with PowerPoints? And it's like, man, what the fuck are you doing?

I read a lot of fantasy and science fiction and almost entirely, obviously, outside of work. And, you know, some of those can become, you know, doorstoppers in length. And virtually all of them could lose 100 pages and be perfectly great. You know what I mean? It is, we had this argument about my book is like, Joe, you should cut some of this out. And I stood firm like, no. I want to be an insufferable asshole. I mean, to be honest with you, Tom knows this intimately as well, because he also has read

Infinite jest in its entirety. It is a good book, but there's about 400 pages that don't need to be there. And it was just like, you could be that guy in 1996 and get away with leaving this stuff in. But like, do you need 100 pages about the fucking strategic war game played on the tennis court called Eschaton? No, you don't fucking need it. Yeah, see, my differing opinion is you do need all of that bullshit.

like I'm currently reading Dostoevsky's demons and I'm like, no, all of the ancillary information is important. I cannot imagine a fate worse than being Dostoevsky's editor other than being Foster's editor. Yeah, Wallace's editor, I mean, I think there's run with it, brother, do what you want to do. He's like, all right, I'm going to have people speak really fucked up wrong French for like 300 pages only in French. I mean, similarly with Dostoevsky, like, that's the thing. I don't know what people are expecting. And I actually genuinely love Dostoevsky. But 90% of Dostoevsky stories is like,

a dude is freaking out, like, annoying the shit out of everyone around him. And so, like, you kind of have to be on the long for the ride for that. I think ketamine helps. I think they were like Dickens stories where like they were published in serial forms. It was like patting the word count

by having these incredibly long scenes. But this is why David Foster Wallace was the human embodiment of that meme of slide over bitch I'm on heroin. Quite literally, yeah. This is why you go the L-Rond hover route, no editing whatsoever, just do every pill the color of the rainbow and get chained to a typewriter. I mean, this is before the Scientology days

where he was doing like the penny pages and I think he broke some kind of record for the most amount of like pulp fiction he wrote. It's all shit. Like it's so bad. Like he wrote so many Pulp Westerns and other shit. And like back in the day, you'd get paid per page or was like by per word.

So he would just. crank it the fuck out. You could get like a mortgage off of some dog shit fucking cowboy novel. Yeah. Those days are never coming back. So the last couple of episodes we did boys, Nate, you miss them. But they were downers to say the least. How many did I miss?

I thought only missed one. You missed two. It's coming out of your paycheck. Yeah. Overachiever ass always recording. He's like, I'm just going to do more and more recordings all the time. Eventually we're just going to this podcast is just going to be us like just

live streaming our descent into madness. Yeah. That is how all podcasts eventually end. And yeah, they weren't exactly lighthearted stuff. So I thought today we would do something that I love, you guys love, everybody loves. We're going to talk about a big dumb boat. I love big dumb boats. Everybody loves a big dumb boat.

The funniest thing in the world is a boat that breaks when it gets wet. Close. Um, well, kind of. We're not going to talk about just any boat, but quite possibly the worst warship the U.S. has ever constructed because I figured since. we talked about for the last two weeks, the U.S. using its military force to commit genocide, how dumb that military force actually is. I should also point out this is the worst warship the U.S. has ever constructed so far. We all saw those weird Trump battleship plans.

One of his aides forded out of some AI program. The sky is the limit when your budget is unlimited. I truly believe that the U.S. will create something that is worse than what we're going to talk about today. Yeah, I mean, Trump has this tendency to want some. something because it looks cooler. Like, you know, one dying brain cell remembers something that he thought looked cool when he was young. And so, like, that's why we're going to wind up having galleons in, like, 2035.

Like, the world would be a safer place if the U.S. Navy was replaced by wooden galleons. America's going to war with the Mexican cartels on a Spanish galleon. Meanwhile, the Mexican cartels have autonomously developed a nuke. Exactly. It's like, well, I mean, yeah, this does, this is going to intimidate them in the sense that it does look like the Neenian. the Pinta and the Santa Maria, but they've developed a nuclear armed walking battle tank called Metal Gear, so Mexican Metal Gear. That is just a tequila gondom. Yeah, that's been done.

Today we're going to talk about the USS Massachusetts, America's first modern battleship. The story of the USS Massachusetts begins in largely 1889. When the voices in D.C. were beginning to argue in favor of an American fleet that might actually be able to project power beyond the shores of the country. This is the first American case of the concept known as fleet in being. A fleet and being is an idea that you can kind of construct a ship or a group of ships that simply by existing are so threatening that they control the enemy without ever leaving port.

In fact, you don't want your fleet in being to go into combat because then you might lose one or two of them, right? Fleet in being is just an at the driving ass name. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Seizor Bixler's Zavala, like, just hitting the crack pipe and just writing in Marker Fleet in beating on the song title idea board. Yeah, it's extremely difficult.

I serve bravely on the USS one-arm scissor. Can you imagine being the fucking telegraph operator between boats in the early modern era of naval vessels and, like, trying to signal that you like a movement command to the USS Rolodex propaganda? just so hard to communicate between USS one arm scissor and USS the shape of Punk to come So rather than like send your fleet in being out into combat The point is that they're so threatening that the enemy always has to plan for their deployment

And as a result they keep their best ships back Ready for them thus denying sea access and exerting control over the enemy's battle plans Without ever really doing anything The best example of this that most people are probably aware of is the German and British high seas fleets during World War I, who spent the majority of the war just kind of stared at each other down, fearing that engagement would equal losing some of their dreadnoughts and whatnot. And you didn't want to lose, not to mention dreadlots were a prestige thing. Losing one would be bad for them. And then, you know, they finally did run into

each other during the Battle of Jutland. We'll eventually talk about that later. But that is probably the best example that people are aware of. In the late 1800s, the U.S. had never done this. They'd never really been a naval power. They haven't been a military power really at all. And they had never even come close to being on par with European counterparts. But that's what they were trying to become with this meeting chaired by the Secretary of the Navy, Benjamin Tracy in 1889.

A fun fact about Tracy, he do absolutely nothing about the Navy whatsoever. And we know this because he had served as a U.S. Union General during the Civil War. Also, he had been a lawyer and defended Henry Ward Beecher. Frederick Beecher's uncle from our last episode, when Henry Beecher, a famed abolitionist minister, got charged criminally with adultery because it was the 1800s. Beecher was found not guilty,

but it is weird that somehow the last three episodes are connected due to this guy's questionable fucking. You ever knowed so hard you invent the U.S. Navy? Only once. You don't know what you're doing this entire episode. I realize I'm just going to give it up right now that God knows the U.S. deploys its newfound navy to combat a European enemy. They will have, in fact, engaged a transatlantic foe.

Sorry, I'm going to start, I'm going to be pulling out the driving song titles. Tom, I thought you would get that one. I do get it. You just annoyed? All right. I'm probably the biggest at the driving fan on this podcast. Brother, I got out of a fucking Napster when I was 16 and burned it to CD and bang that shit nonstop.

So did I. I love that. brother who dragged me to one of my first concerts. Like, I had no idea who they were. You saw them live? Yeah. You motherfucker. That's so cool. Detroit music scene. Maybe everybody stops there. I'll stop derailing, but we'll got to talk about that later. I have no idea. Nate, Joe secretly has more cred than us. It's like, oh, so at the drive-in smoked weed with black dahlia murder back in the day. Like, that's easy. They're from the same town as me. And my brother was a drug dealer. That's just an alley hoop. You're just the equivalent if Brian Starrs was

a crackhead in the 2000s. I've got like the twin polls of this kind of thing in the sense that I did actually see the microphones live in person in the 2000s, but also I hung out with static X on their tour bus. Anyway, Tracy, along with the president at the time, Benjamin Harrison, were proponents of this new concept as like

the new Navy, as they called it. Decades had passed since the end of the Civil War. And in that same time frame, America had not only began to look outward, but the Navy they did have had largely been allowed to fall into a state of disrepair. One could argue that America had more important things to pay for than a Navy. One could argue the same thing today, but hey, what do I know?

Rather than try to fix this rusted shit bucket collection that the Navy still had kicking around, it was thought that something entirely new would be needed in the pre-dreadnought era. The first of these were the plans for the USS Maine and the USS Texas. That were finished three years before this. Now, the main is probably the most well-known ship for dying in American history, along with possibly the Edmund Fitzgerald, but that might just be the Michigander and me coming out. Yeah, you're supposed to remember the Maine,

just like you're supposed to never forget 9-11. Unfortunately, we failed at both missions at this point. Yeah, I only remember like 9-10 and 9-12, but nothing really happened in the middle. Yeah, yeah, I mean, um, the main was the causes belly for the Spanish-American War, right? Yeah, yeah. We did a series on the Spanish-American War,

while back. So more on that. Go listen to the plug. Remember, it's not an ad if it's us talking about our own show. Yeah, just go listen to our show. That's what we do. We just tell you like, hey, do you want to get this dumbass joke that we don't explain? Go back and listen to this episode. That's right. You love that. But the main and by extension, its sister, the USS Texas were armored cruisers. You couldn't call them battleships. It wasn't really a thing yet. Just about the most advanced ship that the U.S. could hypothetically produce when they were ordered in the 1880s. In response for similar armored cruisers being launched by South American powers, which obviously the U.S. could not stand for.

Armored Cruisers was also Tom at age 19 with a jean jacket. Had like infinity buttons on it. Fuck you. It's Tom's battle jacket. I was never a battle jacket guy. I'm going to say that much. I knew a few in my day. I don't know.

I can't confirm nor deny their cruising capabilities. I'm just dressed like Al Pacino and Cruik. cruising, beating the shit out of people at hardcore gigs, doing poppers and just like jerking around. William Freakins in the corner for some reason. I love the idea you do poppers

so it doesn't hurt as much when you get hit in the head in the pit. These are self-defense poppers. The armored cruiser of the 1880s is best thought of as like the fighters of the fleet. Long range, decent sized guns, enough armor to

slug it out with anything on the water. the largest supply of poppers the world has ever seen things like that. Actually, speaking of poppers in the pit, I think it was like two years ago or so, there was like this Reddit controversy because someone got hit so hard in a pit of turnstile, they shit themselves. It was just all this stuff of like, who shit themselves at the turnstalk gig. There's also the famous picture of the Australian guy pissing into his own mouth at a trash talk gig. This is why I don't go to hardcore shows with you, Tom. It's just wild to me to be

because it's like you typically would expect on this show that if we talk about something that's going to really gross you out, it's going to be like the horrors of combat. And it's like, no, it's about this stuff, but like the brain damage is the exact same. There is a mystery shitter at one show I went to, but this is like 2012. So there wasn't like, you know, it wasn't going to go viral or anything. But I went to Warptor because, of course, it was Warped Tour and Pontiac. And I think I've told the story before. They put it outside the palace of Auburn Hills and not in the palace, which is, where the Detroit Pistons played, but the parking lot, which was asphalt in July. But it had the normal, like, problems that any large scale show has not enough water, not enough toilets or whatever. And someone just absolutely shat a monster onto the concrete

next to the porter bodies. And it just starts sizzling. I'm pretty sure you could probably flip it and get a good sear on it. It was hot at the warp tour. creating human fajitas. All right. All right. I'm literally entering the depression now so we can just fucking stay on topic. God damn it.

But the problem was America wasn't really ready for this kind of ship. American industry had never built anything like it before. So it took years the combined power of American manufacturing capabilities

to churn out armored nickel steel. And then if that wasn't bad enough, the drawing room that held the only copy of the main's finished blueprints caught on fire. Whoops. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like as much as we might have weird bursts of nostalgia for the all analog age. Like when this happened, you were really fucked.

Like there was no, uh, you know, jamming it in rice and letting it dry out kind of thing. I'm jamming my entire burning building in this bowl of rice. It's not going out. My rice is now burned. Exactly. This is the world's most fucked up todding. By the time the Maine and the Texas were finished from start to end, the process had taken nine years, which I know doesn't seem like a lot in the context of today's weapon development cycle,

but at the 1880s, that's about five years overdue. And by the time they were finally commissioned and introduced to the U.S. Navy, they were already obsolete. Its armor was no longer strong enough to absorb modern blasts. Its guns were no longer powerful enough to fight enemies and be going against, and it was not nearly fast enough to keep up with other cruisers. So the Navy went back to the drawing board and decided that, you know what? We haven't learned anything from this. In the meeting, the plan for the new Navy rapidly grew to include 10 long range, what they called

first-rate battleships to fill the fleet in being rule, as well as 25 short-range battleships to protect American waters should the main fleet actually need to leave and do something. These are further broken down to subgroups like Rams, which were still a thing back then, torpedo boats, armored cruisers. but by the end of the day, the proposed new Navy's budget would be more than the combined cost of the U.S. Navy entirely over the course of the last 15 years. I love mission creep. And if this was complete, because spoiler it wasn't, it would have been like the largest Navy in the world. We've created the sea, Gustav.

That would be a better idea. That was the first thing that came to mind when you said like the point was to have something so intimidating. you never had to leave port. And it's like, my brain immediately goes, like, what if you built a ship that was like miles long and had one big gun? And it's like, obviously, you know, logistics. Also, if you fired that ship, it would just immediately capsized. But like, yeah, I was thinking, you know, surely we could, you could do better than this.

Surely you could build the Gustav. You could build a boat that's actually two boats that's like straddled each other. You know, like there's got to be ways in which you can do this instead of just building what sounds like a prototype that just took way too long. back in the day when like it should have taken a lot less time. And also back in the day when everyone had like more religious education. So you know those guys were getting dunked on nonstop. Like Hey man, Noah built a boat that saved humanity in like fucking a month.

What the hell's your problem? Why can't all of the factories in the entire United States created up armored steel for this one boat? Also, weirdly, we have this bill to approve something called the floating goose off or it's America, the 1800s. So it's name's probably like the seaborne reginald. Yeah, guys, like, can you build this thing already? Like, get more steel and also like, help me collect up a male and female pair of every species in America. We're building the American art.

That was just what Henry Ford wanted to do. Yeah, half of them in their own segregated neighborhood. When adjusted for inflation, the cost of this new Navy would be about $6 billion, which is a massive price tag for the U.S. military back in the day. And in case you're wondering how much of the Davies budget is today, over $200 billion. because money isn't real. Yeah, they were inventing the Pentagon, but they had to start with smaller shape,

with fewer-sided shape. So this is kind of the triangle era of defense industrial hellhole. It's going to keep adding more. Yeah, the thing that caused the Civil War was actually someone attempted to pitch the circle. And they got really upset over the lack of corners. Congress, it turned out,

was not super happy with this plan on top of the insane cost. That's because the official stance of the U.S. at the time was explicitly isolation. Yeah, like, that's the thing that I think that people may not realize is that like the U.S. had plenty of space to do internal imperialism and colonization. And so like in terms of being an international presence like this and projecting force, like that was not really like globally, that was not really America's MO in the 19th century. It became it towards the very, very

tell-led. We grew up. We grew into it. You know, the boat that sucked got sank and then we wound up taking over the Philippines. We're like, wait, we can take over stuff past the Pacific coast. And people just let us keep it. This is great. Fuck. Yeah, exactly. This is why the, uh, the Americans forced a magy restoration because they looked over at Japan and just said, he just like me for real. Not enough suits. That was actually what the samurai telegraphed Abraham Lincoln about. Yeah. They frequently criticize European powers for imperialism. Again, this is very funny and dark. Would you remember what America is doing in the West at the time? Also like the fucking Mexican-American war. Like, yeah. That whole Texas thing. Like, yeah. Just. purging Native Americans from their lands? Like, yeah, come on. It's different when the lands connected to it, obviously, says a smart man in D.C. in 1889 or whatever.

Obviously, any need for a fleet like the one proposed could only be for offensive purposes. Remember, the era of the U.S. military we're talking about outside of the Civil War is not really something the government ever really spent a ton of money on. ideologically, at its foundation, the U.S. was against a massively strong military. They were very suspicious of a strong army and only a navy that could be for like shore defense and protecting trade routes. That was it. So Tracy, in order to win over Congress, said the ships that he wanted to build were so powerful, he didn't actually need 35, like the plan originally called for.

Instead, he'd only need 12. He almost certainly knew that this was also not going to be accepted. Like this was, he was negotiating and started with a wildly high number that he could easily cut back and still get what he wanted. Also, he made the plan a little bit more palatable by cutting costs elsewhere in the Navy. Like he said he'd give the Navy's old Civil War era ships to state militias, which were not only still a thing, but still had a Navy. But these ships were fucking worthless. These were like the Civil War ironclads and monitors that were just floating around gathering rust and costing a total. of money to sit around and do nothing.

So, pouting them off on the states was actually objected to by the states. Like, we don't want those pieces of shit. The plan itself was further paired back with an approval for only three ships. These would be the first modern battleships of the U.S. Navy. And this one is for you, Nate. They would be called the Indiana class. Oh, great. How do we build an entire class of battleships that an inch of copper wire inside?

Yeah, the battleships, they're developed with the stated assumption that the ocean conditions they will face are only that tiny little corner of Lake Michigan that technically belongs to Indiana. They actually can't function anywhere else they may just dissolve like fucking, yeah, like, I don't know, like wafers and water. We actually have to point out that we don't recognize your claim over that corner of Lake Michigan. You're a dentist for the Indiana dunes for the Michigan dunes actually. Yeah, exactly. I don't recognize Indiana's right to exist. It's all Michigan. Yeah, I mean, probably better off if that was the case, quite frankly.

I mean, what the fuck? You think I'm going to defend that? Christ, dude. The class suddenly found itself being promoted because the Indiana class was originally meant for that coastal defense category. Yeah, defending the Indiana Dunes and nowhere else. Yeah, defending the dudes. Rather than that of the first rate battleship, it was now going to be.

So the plans go ahead with no changes in its design. The deal also proved nine other ships for down the road, with each costing about $240 million when adjusted for inflation per ship, which is still a pretty big deal if you look at how much things cost nowadays. But also remember, there's like no real technology involved here. Everything is steam driven and cranks and shit. So things tend to be cheaper. But the Indiana class would include three ships, Indiana, the Oregon, and of course, the topic

of today's episode, the Massachusetts. Did later be numbered BB1 through three? Because they're the first American battleships recognized in the register. I love that the U.S. Navy has deigned to build the first non-homeroid ship, the USS Massachusetts. Built entirely out of stolen copper. The USS Massachusetts is an Indiana class battleship

is going to make a lot of dudes with Celtic tattoos fucking furious. Gentlemen, may I present to you, the most racist battleship we've ever created? But like I said, the Indiana class is meant to fill the role of a coastal defense ship and the original larger plan. Because of this role, they were not large. Well, not large when you think of a battleship anyway. And they also had virtually no free board.

And by that I mean they were small and the distance between the waters level and the deck of the ship was very, very little. That is because outside the main and the Texas, which obviously did not go great. The only semi-modern ships the U.S. had any experience building were Civil War era monitor ships. We did an episode on those a while back, but to make a very long story short, they were very low to the water. No freeboard to speak of. And they sat low in the water, which is fine. Because remember, these are supposed to be coastal defense ships.

It's the same thing with the monitors. Since they were originally to be like not an open. ocean going ship. It wasn't thought to be an issue. They'd go down rivers, close to the shore. They weren't going to have to deal with a lot of weather. So no problem. This will be a problem later, but we're

going to have to stick a pit in that for now. What the Indiana class did have were guns and an absolute fuckload of them. Four 13-inch guns and two batteries, which were the largest guns in the world at the time. Yes.

Seaboard goose stuff. They did it. They didn't say they were going to do it, but they did it anyway. Each gun weighed 136,000 pounds. Fuck! And fired shells that weighed over a thousand pounds a piece. Okay. I bet reloading that sucked.

Yeah. I mean, they had like giant swing arms in shit. But remember, the ship itself is not very big. So all of the internal mechanisms of the ship, other than the guns, are insanely cramped. Joining them were six-inch guns. More evidence as to how this was a design come up with by a bunch of guys who are not engineers and only had a loose understanding of how ships worked and never bothered to consult people who actually did. The plan originally called for the Indiana class to have several rapid-firing five-inch guns. But America didn't actually

know how to build those yet. It was something that several European countries had, And someone's like, it would be really cool if we had those. And America's shipbuilders just kind of shrugged and said, you know, we haven't unlocked that tech tree yet. So when the planners were informed of that, they instead went with six inch guns, which were larger. This will be a problem later on. With all of this came the armor over the guns casements as well as the belt armor or the armor along the water line of the ship. All of this was heavy, but have no worries. They did save some money and wait by leaving the bottom of the ship, complete.

and totally unarmored, something that will become an issue later on. Yeah, I can imagine not having any armored underpants for your ship is not good. This is the ship version of just hanging dong. Yeah, exactly. Tactical Donald ducking. So you know what that means. By the time that things were finally sketched out, submitted, brought the shipyards, the ship's displacement, its weight.

had ballooned to being 25% heavier than originally intended, and therefore 25% more than any engineer had planned for. And since we're talking about this, you already know that no other part of the planned was changed in order to accommodate all of that additional weight. The USS Massachusetts was ordered in 1890 and was launched three years later, but no sea trials could take place until 1896, because the ship's guns and armor plating, so taxed American manufacturing capability, at the time when it came to nickel steel. It just kind of bogged everything down and created a national shortage.

So was this thing just like hanging out for three years? It was in the shipyard. Yeah. There. I love that they were put into the position of a very unique position of we know exactly that how this is going to happen, but we're going to do it anyway. The main had just happened.

Right. And they're like, uh, certainly we won't run out of steel a second, third, fourth, and fifth time. But finally all of the guns and armor were installed, and it sailed out triumphantly. Just so we could further reinforce how ridiculously over the top the ship's firepower was. This is from a Philadelphia newspaper reporting on the launch that detailed the full armament of the Massachusetts. Quote, between the turrets for the 13-inch guns, there is a superstructure in which are placed the 6-inch guns and above, and upon the deck erected thereon are placed 8-inch guns.

A battery of six pounders is arraigned along the top of the hammock birthing and bridge. One pounders are placed two forward and two aft, one on either side of the birthing deck. And the tops of the double-topped military mass are four Gatling guns. Yes, Richard Gatling finally got his cash. There are also six torpedo tubes, one pow, one stern, and four broadside two on either side. Why are there Gatling guns? They are trying to build, you know, 1890s metal gear wrecks.

It's like they were trying to make up for the fact that they're missing 20 other ships that they originally planned for by creating the most orc-ass weapon in American history. A child would draw this other trapper keeper will not paying attention in class. Or maybe that was just me. I don't know. I don't know. Like I was thinking this is next to like, you know, obviously this is logistically impossible to have fire ships that are constantly on fire at all times.

This is basically the next best thing to that. Like it's just just slapping dumbass. guns onto everything. Yeah, the Gatling guns are so weird to me because air power is not a concern yet. Like, these aren't like ad hoc anti-aircraft guns. Like that's not something that anybody was thinking about. So at some point, the dudes, is like one of the things that's going to keep coming up and you should know that this whole ship, this whole class is created by committee by Tracy and other

politicians. At no point do they consult engineers during the construction of it until it's time to start welding shit together. Right. So I like to think that one of them's like, Gatling guns would be cool and like, fuck yeah, Gatling guns and they just scribble them onto the top. The lead designer just suffered from a autistic semantic literalism and he said, oh, you have to design a gunship. And he was like, oh, so it's more guns and ship. Okay, cool. All right. Why don't we duct tape a sword to it? It's a gunship in the sense that it's a ship made entirely out of guns. Yeah, we're just welding guns together to create the bow and stern.

Yeah, this is a ship designed by a nine year old. Yeah. Like when I was nine, I was designing my own mortal combat characters in class. Yeah. I'm not paying attention. Joe was drawing this shit. When I was night, I was designed. Well, actually, I was slightly older, so this is more embarrassing. But I've been about 10 or 11 designing my

own version of Magitech armor from FF6 except it could fly. So like, I absolutely understand the fucking brainwave. That powers this. Congratulations. You are over qualified for the U.S. Department of the Navy circuit of the 1800s and today. Hell yeah.

And you know, with that much DACA comes problems. The guns, just on their own, weighed one million pounds. That is a ludicrous number that if you had made that up, I would not be surprised. The engine required another million pounds of coal. But this is normal ship stuff, right? Battleships, even in the pre-dreadnought era, were heavy as hell. Most navies get around this with the concepts of counterweights. Now counterweights can be flooded seawater, concrete lead, whatever.

Anything the ship uses to counter the weight of the ship itself, like the guns moving, the ammo moving, min and supplies and fuel. So that way the ship remains controllable, stable, and largely usable. Fellas, would it surprise you to know that the U.S. Massachusetts and the entire Indiana class lacked any counterweights whatsoever? As it's sinking, you just see in the distance you're going to counter that way. All the guys run over to the right side of the ship and start jumping up and down. Why does it not surprise me?

I don't know. There's something about it's just simply not surprising. It's like, oh, it's going to suck. It's going to be ridiculous. The entire ship is balanced on a deck-based trampolines. Okay, we need to get the fattest guy. Go over to that corner, start jumping on the trampoline. Gentlemen, who here listens to Crowbar?

What is your official naval rate? Oh, I'm a trampolinas second class. That's like, yeah, but the Navy rank system so fucked up that that's like got its own like little like two letter acronym kind of thing for the rank system. It's like TR6 or something like that. Yeah. This meant as soon as it hit the seas for trial, everyone discovered in real time that this fucker was almost entirely uncontrollable owing to weight displacement. That was more vibes based than science. Yeah, Joe, you got it wrong though. Anyone who listens to Crowbar who's in the Navy is not being used as a counterweight or being used as the anchor. Its first captain Frederick Rogers, fun fact, Commodore Matthew Perry's grandson, because that's the era that we're in, also discovered other fun problems that due to its era and by nature of its construction had never been thought of because it's not like they tested any of the ship before they started welding stuff together. For example, if both of its 13-inch batteries turned in the same direction because the ship lacked counterweights, the ship would

dangerously lists to one side to the point that if they happen to be in heavy seas at the time, the ship was in serious risk of capsizing. This is like the never exceed speed on a helicopter where I don't think you can actually do this, but notionally you can actually go so fast it rips the helicopter apart. But that's kind of not supposed to happen on a boat. That only happens when a helicopter is under extreme duress. Yeah, exactly. It's very sad and listening to my playlist.

Well, yeah, it's when helicopters feature, you like start experiencing a moral quandary. like, wait, I have an Armenian passenger and they're not supposed to leave the ground. Time to go down. Yeah, exactly. Return to Earth where you belong. But that's only in rough seas, right? In calm seas, if the big guns were traversed over one side, the ship would still tilt so badly that the barrels would almost touch the water. The deck would be swamped and several other guns would be completely submerged.

The bow is like cotton around like those Chicano like lowriders. I like the idea that you can basically like. rev the boat, but then it like more or less swamps itself. But also like that there's this complex choreography required to keep it from tipping over. That kind of precludes you being able to have what you might describe as like the ability to maneuver things when you need it to like shoot stuff when in naval combat. Quite possibly. Yeah.

I have a life hack, you know, the captain figuring out the only way to control the ship is to just rapidly spin the guns around in circles as fast as possible. in order to stop the boat from capsizing the entire crew or just doing the entire dance sequence from Gaspar Noah's climax. You got to basically spin it around in circles to keep it balanced. And so that's actually before the advent of cars. This is where they invented the term whipping shitties because the boat's a piece of shit.

That's because remember how I said the ship's weapons altogether weighed one million pounds? Well, remember, there's also no counterweights and the two 13-inch batteries accounted for more than a half of that one million pounds. So, that shit be tilting. I imagine the placement was somewhat balanced, but it would be very funny if it weren't.

And so it would be like, you basically get on insane steroids and only do workouts on one arm. Gunnery trials revealed other problems as well. The ship was supposed to have a large arc of fire. And on paper, it did. Now, for people who don't know, an arc of fire in regards to a ship

means that the guns could traverse a certain distance to hit targets. Like, obviously, you can't say traverse the lead gun over the back deck or you'd blow up the fucking command tower, which I call a good start, but is generally not good for naval operations, right? So there's a distinct arc of fire that every gun on a ship has. But in reality, the guns in the Indiana class did not. Due to the ship's superstructure and multiple other guns, I'll just kind of, smashed it there seemingly at random, if the guns went off at certain angles

and every gun had a different angle where this was true, they would damage the weapons next to it or the ship itself. I gotta be real with you. This is extremely funny because it kind of, it's like you've built a ship entirely out of guns,

but to actually point them at things, you have to basically move the ship. Yeah, you got to pivot steer the whole ship. Yeah. Gentlemen, we've invented the first ship that could commit suicide. Well done. also like I imagine naval terms just sound way cooler and more like mysterious if you don't have any

Navy experience or don't know about the subject but to me arc of fire sounds like a rare material so it's just like very very funny that it's actually relatively like banal concept I was going to say arc of fire sounds like some PS1 JRP and the reason why I think is because arc the lad yeah yeah arc of fire it's like why is why is the guy for final fantasy seven with goofy from Disney kingdom Massachusetts Of course, Donald. You should say that word. I do love that, you know, if you're on this ship and you're losing a battle,

you can commit shipuku. The Japanese Imperial Navy studiously taking notes for a couple decades time. Another thing the ship was missing that compounded the issues with weight and complete lack of control was a missing. bilge keel. Now, for non-boat people like, well, us, a bilge keel is that little tail at the back under virtually every ship ever built, right? The keel is pretty key in stabilizing and controlling ships, especially larger ones, which at 10,000 tons, the Massachusetts certainly counts as one. A bilge keel was not an unknown in the late 1800s, not by a long shot, but there's a good

reason why the Massachusetts and the Indiana class did not have a bilge keel. Okay, well, not a good reason, but a reason. The U.S. simply did not have a dry dock large enough to build a ship of the Indiana class size with a bilge keel. And building a new dry dock would just cost too much money. So the Navy just kind of said, fuck it. Your ship is up on blocks now. Put my ship up on blocks because someone stole the village keel. Yeah, I mean like, I don't know how to describe this. It's sort of like, not only we're making this an incredibly unwieldy thing, but it's sort of like, yeah, we kind of

ran out of a tool, so instead of a bicycle, you need to ride a unicycle, which fine if you know how to ride a unicycle, but if you don't, you don't exist to want to be used that for your fucking board commute, you know what I mean? Like, yeah, it's like if I, you know, I was an Abrams crew member, but like if the Abrams rolled off the assembly, like,

due to budget cuts, you could only use the left track to turn. Yeah, exactly. Actually, one side, this this tank just has wheels. let me know how that works out for you. We only could afford the donuts because the, the original ones were flat. Make it work. Also, they're, you know,

manufactured by Firestone of the early 2000s. Yeah. Fuck's sake. Yeah, I feel like Abrams tank is the one vehicle that exploding Firestone tires couldn't flip over. Now with that attitude, Nate, I believe in myself and other half stupid tank crewmen to flip a tank if given,

actually strike that. I did see a tank flip once, but that was mostly the fault of the road. and because nobody could see anything inside those motherfuckers. Now, there's another small problem that inspections of the ship brought to Captain Rogers' attention, namely the belt armor, the tons of armor that helped slow down construction of the ship.

It was installed per design before anybody knew how much the final ship would weigh and, by extension, where it would sit on the water. Because obviously, as the ship gets heavier, it's going to sink further into the water, right? So fully loaded with all of its guns, ammo, coal, bins, supplies, strategic popper supplies. The ship sank so low in the water. It sat so low normally that the

belt armor was fully submerged, making it completely worthless. This meant when in operations, the Indiana class was effectively unarmored. Feels like it's going to be a problem. Like a mild cause for concern. It's not good when your battleship lets your enemies hit it roll. See, I was going to go a different direction and be like, you know, We love the Disney movie, The Little Mermaid in the song Under the Sea, but when your armor is under the sea and therefore not usable, and you're just sort of like, just out there, you're less happy, you're less joyous.

You're not singing like the dancing crab. You're just like, ah, I see I am America's new. What's the right word here? Like, when the US always learns to build stuff better by fucking it up first, but like you have to go through these iterations of like being the guy who's in the tank. this gigantic fucking clown turret that looks like a moving guard tower and then wondering why everyone gets shot.

And it's like, it's the boat equivalent of that. You get to be America's, you know, step one of America's thesis, hypothesis, synthesis, or whatever. We often call that on the show like the military evolutionary dead end.

Like, this will die off. The Navy once again just kind of shrugged and said, fuck it again. It's very fitting that the Indiana class battleship winds up being a thing that really has no reason to exist. For the next several months, the ship has taken out on trading exercises

where the captain and its crew of 473 men found even more fun things about life aboard the Massachusetts. We've already talked about how incredibly hard it was to control, but another issue, once again, relates to its weight and virtually zero freeboard. In anything other than the most calm seas, the ship got the absolute shit kicked out of it. Because obviously with less freeboard,

it's harder to control, with less freeboard that means any wave just goes straight over the deck meeting the ship is getting rocked back and forth constantly. The very, very, very cramped life aboard the ship rapidly turned to hell on earth with even the most seasoned sailors getting

seasick virtually around the clock. If the ship is rockin' don't come and knocking. That is once again very interesting that they're like, we want to make this thing really powerful and the best way to do that is to make sure that everybody who cruise it is constantly puking their guts out. Keeps the floor slick. You could just

slide from point A to point B. But they also have to remember to not first in different directions at the same time or the ship will just break apart and go to the bottom of the ocean. And it's like, it feels like there's a lot of variables being thrown in here.

You know what I mean? Yeah. A lot of things you have to remember all at once where it's like, and if you fuck it up, then like the way that you learned that you made a mistake is that it full,

if it becomes the fucking pivotal guy getting hit on the propeller scene of Titanic except that's you. Yeah. One mistake. Everybody dies. Yeah. That being said,

the captain and his man. were able to keep the ship together just long enough to get deployed to take part the Spanish-American War. Again, we did a series on that. To make a very long story short, the U.S.S. Spain explodes off the coast of Cuba and February 15, 1898. Spain is blamed for it, but to be completely honest, till this day, nobody's entirely sure what caused the explosion, but it's almost certainly not Spain. But a declaration of war did not come immediately. It would take months of lying and political edging to get America there. The Massachusetts wouldn't be alone in going to war. The two other ships of his class were also being sent as well.

Seemingly, because nobody decided to look at a map first, because in regards to the USS Oregon, we have to talk about that a bit. It has nothing to do with the Massachusetts, but it's such a stupid story. There's no other, there's no better place to talk about it than right now. So the USS Oregon had been built on the west coast in San Francisco and posted to the American Pacific Squadron. And remember, this is an era before the Panama Canal. So its orders to go and fight in Cuba would require that. ship to go all the way around South America and back up again, a trip then cover over 16,000 miles. Also famously terrible weather doing that. Like, it's very difficult to navigate. And really easy

to do at a ship that's hard to navigate in bad and bad weather, right? Yeah, sure. I think this will be awesome. Yeah. Famously, it's like, oh, the ship in any kind of bad weather, it makes everyone so sick they're going to die. Let's go to Cape Horn. That's going to go awesome. All of this while the Spanish were tracking the Oregon as well, uh, they weren't at war. yet, but everybody knew that the Oregon would be used somewhere on the Pacific coast, like people thought that might go to the Philippines and stuff like that. So the Spanish were pretty wary of this ship. Because they didn't know how horrible it was, all the same problems that the Massachusetts

had the Oregon had. That meant order to get there in time for the operations against Spain, a trip that would take over a month, maybe even two and a half. It would have to run at full speed at around 17 miles an hour, which is pretty fast for ship of its size, but it also meant that it was charging through rough seas, its crew constantly violently ill, all while they ran out of drinking water so they could fill the boilers. Oh, sounds unpleasant. The only stops they made were provisions, namely coal, and the U.S. Navy had no coaling stations

around the route they were taking, forcing them to stop in Spanish-speaking countries at a Spanish military or diplomatic presence, who were generally more sympathetic to the Spanish and the ongoing tensions, which would soon turn into war. People did refuse to do business with the Oregon or the U.S. Navy. After all, they did have cash, but it did mean people were going to fuck with them while doing it. For example, off the coast of Chile, a coal boat claimed their large coal bucket was broken,

forcing the crew to use any buckets they had on board to haul up coal by hand, and most of these buckets were, what about it to be like a child sand pail. Sure that was easy? They spent hours loading 800 tons, of coal into their ship. And then if that wasn't bad enough,

the next provisioning ship with their food and water did the same thing. They did use the coal buckets to bring their food up. Yes, they did. Well, you know what? All the fucking healing charcoal, you know, improving whatever it's supposed to do for your liver or whatever. These guys had really, really clean teeth

somehow. I'm so detoxified right now. Everyone's skin is just glowing. Yeah, they're also really mad. Damn it, the fucking charcoal absorbed it. All this heroin's not working anymore. All of this is done by hand by incredibly sick and tired soldiers, so cold dust just covered every inch of the ship and the men by the time they were done, and not to mention all of their food. Great. The crew learns by April 30 of thanks to a dispatch off the coast of Brazil that, hey, by the way, we're at war with Spain and we have been for a week. The crew had been at sea for 42 days at this point.

Afterwards, some Spanish ships that had been trying to track and trail them began hunting them, all while the Oregon is being. being slammed with storms. Eventually after 68 days of travel, dodging Spanish ships and sneaking in and of ports for coal, the Oregon joined the Massachusetts and the Indiana for war. This is where the bad engineering of the USS Massachusetts meets. Somehow, even worse, bad luck, something that will become a trend. The mass would not take part in what would become the most famous naval battle of the war, the Battle of Santiago to Cuba, though it was supposed to.

Even though all the Indiana classes had the same problems, they just seemed to pop up more for the poor Massachusetts. So as it sat off the coast of Cuba, in moderately calm seas, they had to fire its boilers more to stay on target. So it didn't like drift away or get pulled in, meaning they went through more fuel. So they pulled back to Guantanamo Bay to resupply,

and while they were gone, the battle started and then ended. Right? The only combat that USS Massachusetts would ever see was occasionally lobbing a shell towards some Spanish forts. It was pretty much not involved in the war whatsoever, even though it was already there. Afterwards, it was parked at Puerto Rico for what I assume will be a very temporary occupation. Eventually, it was sent to New York in August for some repairs, where she would remain until December. After that, it was finally time to leave port.

But while doing so, owing to the fact that the fucking thing required more luck, and scale to control, it crashed directly into Diamond Reef. And if that isn't making it sound serious enough, five of the ship's compartments were penetrated and flooded, nearly sinking the ship, literally spitting distance from Brooklyn. That's amazing. Remember how the bottom of the ship was unarmored? Wouldn't have happened if it wasn't, you know, Donald Duckin it.

There you have it. It was hauled back to port to undergo three months of repairs, and then was assigned to the Atlantic Fleet before being shoved into the Reserve Fleet in 1900, thanks to a naval officer shortage, which was probably the best thing to happen to the ship, because then it couldn't hurt anybody anymore, but it only remained that way for a couple months before being staffed again. A year later, while the Massachusetts was steaming ground in Pensacola, Florida, it once again ran aground. This time it didn't nearly sink the ship, though. However, the next time the ship had an accident, the crew would not be so lucky. Three years later in January

during gunnery practice, what if its eight-age guns exploded while firing? evaporating nine of its crewmen in the blink of an eye. Yeah, it's trying to commit Shepuku. It's like, put me out of my misery. Kill me. The ship is saying, Oh, my one more, you knew. This was the largest loss of life in the U.S. Navy since the main exploded.

Which is, just think of this recruitment commercial. The U.S. Navy. The biggest threat to the U.S. Navy since the U.S. Navy. Now, once again, after months repaired, scraping the remains of its crewmen out. The ship was set out once again in August the same year. So it's only down for a couple months. The mass was sent to go join an honor guard that included President Teddy Roosevelt

only to once again crash into Iraq this time in Maine. I did find a very funny newspaper report from the time that says the USS Massachusetts was, quote, injured by Iraq, which is a weird way to put that for a ship. Yeah. Yeah, I just, I loved it. I don't know why. It's like, oh, poor ship got hurt. Never mind the 470 dudes inside were like, not again.

Fuck. Because remember, it's only been a couple months. So the crewmen that were on the ship had just survived the turret exploding as well. The U.S.S.S. Massachusetts and Lou Barlow, two things that got harmed by Roth. Damn it. God damn it. After this, it was towed back to Brooklyn for more repairs. However, the most horrifying accident that the Massachusetts would be involved in was yet to come.

Now, I say horrifying because obviously the turret blowing up and killing nine people is quite serious. It's the largest loss of life that Massachusetts is ever going to suffer. But the next year, in December of 1904, while the ship is in harbor at the League Island Naval Yard getting fixed by shipyard boiler workers, a steam gas that exploded while men were working in the fire room. This sent a burst of hot steam through the compartment and scalded three men to death. Oh. Oh. Yeah, they got turned into dumplings.

Yeah, that sounds horrible. Really large soup dumpling in the shape of a human. Yep. This included melting half of a lieutenant's face as well. He survived, though. Now, one of the civilians killed was the wonderfully named Edward Bubb. Because what is an episode from this era without? at least one name alert.

Yeah, early 20th century American names, Edwin Bulb. Edward. John Scrang! Yeah. Gay Lord Hitler. I mean, I'm not even being a dick. This is genuinely like,

names were weird back then. Rest in peace, Edward Bub. You would have loved the, the concept of hydraulic power. Steely Don got the names for all the characters of their songs by just looking back at history. Well, I mean, to shout out our friends over

at Bonta Vista, they do an entire segment where they just list old American names and they're fucking outstanding. After killing more of its men that had ever done an enemy, the Navy decided the Indiana class was badly in need of some modernization.

This included new boilers, so maybe you didn't eat people, some new guns so maybe they didn't explode so often. And it changed from steam power turrets to electric motors. And finally, counterweights and a keel so the ship did almost kill itself when you point its main guns towards the same target.

However, over the next few years, the Navy tried really, really hard not to use the Massachusetts. For example, they kicked it over to the Naval Academy. Not as a trading ship, though, to do this thing called the midship and summer cruise, where they would just,

I mean, it's exactly what it sounds like. It's like a shitty cruise ship for fucking Naval Academy students. So a much of college age kids basically got to ride around in the boat that kills you. Yeah. One of the many boats that kill you. But one of this particular hard to use.

And I mean, it's easier to use now. It has a keel. It's got counterweights. Like, everything that's killing people has been switched out. But the Navy is so terrified of putting this thing back at active service. That's like, no, just take the kids for a trip. Better to keep Indiana at arm's length is what they were saying. Yeah. I mean, I say that now.

Fair enough. And also to other ceremonial rules like traveling to the United Kingdom to fire its guns as it's part of King George's coronation in 1911. I assume that was. a threat. We're going to say the biggest, dumbest ship we have, that also explodes from time to time to honor you. Don't worry, your ancestors will love an exploding ship. Even after millions of more dollars being pumped into it, the Navy hated these things. In 1909, during the Taft administration, George von L. Meyer was appointed secretary of the Navy and charged once again modernizing the U.S.

Navy, you know, since the last attempt only a few years before. The U.S., despite building an overseas empire in the years before, really only succeeded because they'd stomped on the corpse of the dying Spanish Empire. Meyer and others knew that the U.S. Navy was a joke when compared to European counterparts. This is also after the Russo-Japanese War, and Meyer had been the U.S. ambassador to Russia during that time period. So he got something of an up-close look of just how badly the U.S. had fallen behind. Even though the U.S. had helped Japan during the war, as a hope to counter the Russian Pacific expansion, the U.S. is also pretty goddamn certain they'd be fighting Japan for the same reason sooner rather than later. We did a series on this too. Go listen to it. Myers said the U.S.

needed 40 new battleships, and in order to do so, they need to discard all their older ships like the Indiana class amongst them, calling them specifically, quote, obsolete and worthless. Despite the fact they'd been in service for slightly longer than a decade, which is not a long lifetime for a battleship. And so our beloved steam shooting, exploding, flesh-eating boy was decommissioned in 1914. But not for long! Hell yeah, then a thing happened that was like all hands on deck. We need more ships.

World War I starts, and suddenly the US is in desperate need for as many ships as humanly possible. any ship will do. The Massachusetts is pressed back into service as a training ship for gunnery crews, which is admittedly quite brave, before being assigned to Coastwatch duty. But the final nail in the coffin for the Massachusetts was a new ship, the BB 54,

which the Navy also wanted to name Massachusetts, but couldn't because this hunk of ship was still on the active military register, so is decommissioned for a second time in 1919. Their following the long tradition of a Boston Irish people all calling their kids the same name. This is my ship Connor and my other ship Connor.

My four sons named John Murphy. The U.S. Massachusetts finally died in 1921 after being towed out in front of Fort Pickens, Florida, and used as target practice for coastal defense teams. The Navy then tried to sell its sunken wreckage for scrap, but nobody wanted it. So it just kind of sits there to this very, day and has since turned into an artificial reef by nature. Its haul becoming so encrusted by marine life, it no longer is degrading. And it's also sunk at like 26 feet of water.

So it makes it a very popular tourist spot for snorkeling and scuba diving. There was a court case between the state of Florida and the U.S. government with Florida trying to get ownership of it that went on for years and eventually the Florida Supreme Court just kind of gave it to them. Nothing could be more Indiana than you basically go down to Destin for spring break and wind up in a horrible custody battle. This ship is a snowbird. It went south and never came back.

Yeah, Poseidon did a better job of providing armor for the ship than the U.S. Goldramunds. Yeah, true. I made fun of the crab from the Little Mermaid, but it was his team that actually wound up protecting this boat. So rest in peace, USS Massachusetts, you have been far more useful in death than you ever were in life. The end.

Yes. RIP to the homophobic boat. It's named after my home state, or rather the class of ship is named after my home state. And it's like, I have nothing to defend. So the fact that it's like, yeah, the Indiana class battleship forever lives in, you know, in shame. And it's just regarded as a disaster. It's like, yeah. But I mean, also it had to leave Indiana to do something useful, like build something for nature.

So in a way, it's kind of the marine version of Axel Rose. fellas, we do a thing on the show called Questions from the Legion. If you'd like to ask us a question from Legion, you can support the show on Patreon. You can ask us in Patreon DMs or on the Discord that you'll also have access to. You can put it on a boat and then blow it up on accidents and we will answer it on the show. Today's question is, what is the funniest prank you were ever part of, either victim or perpetrator? I can think of one immediately. I need to think of one that isn't a crime.

So I have two. One is military, so it's obviously mean-spirited. And the other ones in my family, which is chaotic neutral. When I was in Afghanistan, I believe this is in my book, Hooligans of Kandahar by the book. But a guy that I didn't particularly like, he always took showers like really late at night to the point. For some reason, it became a joke amongst us.

And it was like, by me like 1 a.m. if we weren't doing night patrols, right? So we thought it'd be really, really funny to get. a bag of flour from the chefs. And by that, I mean, I stole it because they wouldn't give us anything. We then cut the top off of it and then got caught by the cooks. We had to give it back. So we changed our plan to include baby powder. We got a fuck load of baby powder, like so much baby powder.

We filled a bucket full of it. So it took like three or four bottles. Waited for him to walk out of the shower still wet and then just dumped all the baby powder on top of him. And that's not that funny. He just went back in and took another shower. What makes it funny is we had this big camera over our outposts that looked at the edges of the outposts for like infiltration and whatnot.

And the shower exit door was within its view so we could see the whole thing. Like on infrared? No, it was like in normal. It was like normal lighting at the time. You could also watch an infrared or night vision. But the way that the powder hits. hit him. He vanished on camera and it looked so goddamn funny.

My other one was I played a prank on my mother that lasted about five years. And that was when I was in the Army of Chorus as only going home maybe once or twice a year. My mom loves pictures of me specifically, but of all of her children to the point that my mom did put me on the Walmart wall of heroes in the local neighborhood until my friend stole the picture off the wall of the Walmart and ran out. Shouts out to you. But always had tons of pictures of me.

I obviously, if you've been listening long enough, you know how I feel weird about that kind of thing. And I thought it'd be funny if I slowly replace the pictures of me with Photoshop pictures of dinosaurs, specifically like a dinosaur over my head. Like in military uniform, in my school pictures, whatever. And every time I went home, I would replace one more picture with the dinosaur Joe picture, right?

I did this like three, four, five times over the course of, then I forgot about it. And then, uh, like five years later, I get a very angry phone call from my mother. Why are there fucking pictures of dinosaurs all over my wall? I had completely forgotten about it.

And I was like, oh, shit. I don't, I don't know. Maybe I asked Mark, like my brother. I blamed him and hung up. Um, I have one. So I learned to read at like a really young age. There's context for this. So, like, yeah, I was, like, reading, like, comics and, like, books, like, really kind of young. Also, for context of this story, I, up until I think I was maybe, like, maybe 10 or 11, had to share a room with my brother.

So, like, I would always want to stay up reading at night. And, of course, my brother being, like, eight years older than me, was like, fuck you, turn off the light, I want to go to sleep. So, uh, this went on for ages. And I was like, no, I want to read my comics. And we ended up, like, beating each other up. Bear of mind, I'm like maybe eight at this time. He's 16. So that night, I'm sitting there.

I'm reading like a comic book or whatever. And then I wait for him to go to sleep. And then I go downstairs, get a bucket, fill it with water, go back upstairs and throw the bucket of water on him in his bed while he's asleep. And then turn on the light and like sit in bed. He's like, what the fuck? Why am I so wet? And I'm like, I don't know.

My parents bring this up all the time. Nice. I have one from the Army, which is I, we were getting ready to step out on a convoy, but like we were, it was going to be a little bit of time. We were in the vehicle. I was in a, I had an LMTV, like a frag three LMTV. So like not super up armored, but up armored enough that they considered it safe. And we had fuel tanks in the back because we'd go fill up diesel tanks at the main base

and bring them back to our outpost so we could fill up the generators. And I was trying to get seated in the middle seat. I was with my, one of my soldiers with the driver. And then my NCIC was the T. And I was just there as well, do an officer. shit, basically. And I grabbed what I thought was a handle to kind of seat myself up. Now, I wasn't wearing my helmet. And it was actually the prop bar to keep the turret lid open. And I pulled it out of its, like, retainer by mistake, and brought it down right in my face. And it hit me on the

forehead and just immediately started spurting blood everywhere. It looked really bad, but it was actually a minor. I mean, the head injury part, I kind of, I did have some issues with that for a while. But the fuck is, the actual cut was quite minor. It was like one stitch. But it looked bad. I mean, like the immediately pulled open the field dressing and like, you know, I looked like Vietnam photo, just huge, bloody. bandage on my head. So anyway, we were getting ready to leave a couple of weeks later and we were doing like a farewell ceremony. And then my NCO I see it, my soldiers were kind of like giggling. I'm like, what? They're like, are we, then they're like, oh, we have another part of the

ceremony. And they're like made a fake purple heart for me. They had drawn with crayon, like a purple heart. And they had actually written a citation. And it was like, you know, the adib during tactical engaged with the enemy, uh, incoming fire caused piece of metal to land directly in Lieutenant Bethay's five head. And like, it was actually like really detailed fucking thing. And I was like, you best. Like, it was really good. Like, the narrative was extremely funny. The other prank, when I was a kid, when I lived in New Mexico,

I was almost 12 when we moved to Indiana. I have an older brother. He's two and a half years older than me. And we had my buddy Osher, who was like, not quite a year older than me, but he was a great ahead of me. And like, I mean, he was, he was the oldest of three and I'm the youngest of two. So he was kind of like, Mike, my older brother, middle brother for a long time. And he and my brother would sometimes do the thing that you do when you have three siblings,

especially when it's, you know, three boys of, we're going to play a prank on the youngest one, or the most gullible one. And so their prank that they played on me was convincing me that there was a secret level in Donkey Kong country called a Wada-da that you could only access by jumping down this one spot in a level. Now, this would cause you to die. And I kept, they're like, no, you just got to do it.

They got to push these buttons. And they kept doing it. And I was like, this is bullshit. And they're like, no, no, no. Seriously, it's really cool. There's like all these like bonus level things. And then Osher finally kind of gave up the game. He was like, yeah.

And 100% when you get it, it plays this song. and goes, Awada-da-da-da. Hey, everybody, it's Wada-da-da. And me at like 11, I was like, oh, you're fucking with me. And they're like, yeah, dude, you've been doing this for two hours.

So, yeah. I have one more. And it's when I'm the victim, since everybody has, everybody's had a victim one. I was stationed at Fort Knox at the time. I desperately wanted to get out of Fort Knox, right? Anybody who's been stationed there or has lived in the state of Kentucky

will empathize with me. And my commander, Good guy at the time. Obviously, he had nothing to do with this. And this is before you got, like, orders sent to, like, your email, your military email. Like, your commander got told, and then they told you. Calls me into his office. He's like, Joe, good news.

You got orders. I was like, oh, thank fucking God. Where am I going? Anywhere but Fort Hood. And he's like, it's Fort Hood. And I was like, oh, I was like, I was fucking pissed. And I was good enough with my commander at the time. I could say all kinds of unprofessional things and he wouldn't give a shit in his office, right?

And he's like, oh, I'm just kidding, dude, it's not Forthood. Oh, thank God. And did he get, he let me get really, really relaxed. And like, I sat down and I was like really exciting. He's like, I'm just kidding, dude, it is Fort Hood. I was like, fuck. He wasn't kidding that time. And then I ended up going to Fort Hood for the worst years of my life.

Yeah, famously great. Killen, Texas. famously a great place. Forehood's the only place that could possibly make me miss Fort Knox. like not deployment. God, it was fucking horrible. But that's a podcast, folks. You guys host other podcasts.

Plug those podcasts. Hell of weighty, dad, trash shooter, Kiljames Bond, no mares. I'm involved in capacity. I'm in a band. We're putting out an album.

We were calling ourselves second homes. That might still be the name, but there may be a possibility if the guy from guided by voices giving us a name, bestowing a name on us. Shake, Robart,

a Pilar, Aldeatoni might give us a name. So if that happens, then I'll change the name. but otherwise it's second homes. We'll find out. Being in a band is fun and nice, but sometimes you do have to be sure

on the name, I suppose. Inshallah, you email Robert Pollard when he's had 40 beers. That's apparently the time to text him. He can't even seize. It's like, yeah.

Yeah, Dan told us that that's how they got the name Divine fits, which they couldn't agree on a name. And Britt Daniel, some of the names he wanted to work out of not good. And so they, Sam, their drummer just texted Robert Pollard. He was Super Bowl Sunday.

He was like, he's going to be hammered as fuck. He gave them like 15 names. And Divine Fist was one of them. Yeah, it's a shame that penis flytrap has already taken. I wouldn't want my name. Sorry. Like a funny band name is funny once.

And then when it becomes the thing you have to use all the time, it's not funny anymore. So, yeah, we'll see. But I actually liked second homes, but Saf got a little because he's British, he's like, people are going to think we're talking about the MP's second home scandal. I'm like, okay. We'll find a new name then. That's okay. That does make it kind of funnier.

Maybe. I don't know. I don't care about anything British. I'm sorry. I'm bass that. I'm above that. I'm Swiss now. I'm something.

Oh, listen to Beneath'skin show about the history of everything and listen to Bloodwork the show about the economy of violence where by the time this comes out a part one, two and possibly three of four of the history of the AK-47 will be out.

Listen to Bloodwork, post pictures of guns. This is the only show that I host to read listening to it. So thank you for that. Consider supporting us on Patreon. You get everything we've ever done for five bucks. there's tears below that

with different stuff leave us review and wherever you listen to podcasts I have a book coming out I don't know at the time of recording if it's going to be available for pre-order quite yet but if it is you probably already heard the ad at the beginning of the show

so until next time rest in peace Edward Bub his name is Edward Bubb