Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 410 - The Death of PQ-17

Episode Date: April 20, 2026

SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys PREORDER JOE'S BOOK https://www.amazon.com/Highlands-Burn-Foundling-Brigade-Saga-ebook/dp/B0GSG5CNXX/ref=sr_1_1?crid=QWHSPAADI07D&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.uLEY0I7D6t0IC9GWsF7SH1FKEgKqsqTLmV4PQ_lLi-wVUCYgTqIv0BWd9_-x3VzP.xn7v2CqU5MjngXmmSbYvVGsY_fxkvgsz-LA2tkhHHTs&dib_tag=se&keywords=joseph+kassabian&qid=1774247705&s=digital-text&sprefix=%2Cdigital-text%2C176&sr=1-1 SEE US LIVE MAY 29TH IN LONDON: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/lions-led-by-donkeys-podcast-live-in-london-29th-may-tickets-1985443952308 CANT MAKE THE SHOW? WE'RE STREAMING IT! GET YOUR LIVESTREAM TICKETS HERE: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/livestream-lions-led-by-donkeys-podcast-live-in-london-29th-may-2026-tickets-1985444086710 GET SECOND HOME'S DEBUT ALBUM https://secondhomes.bandcamp.com/album/find-a-way-to-hate-it Once upon a time there was a supply convoy called PQ-17, loaded down with tons of supplies and heading to the Soviet Union. Over the course of several days the convoy was destroyed by a combination of terrible intelligence, fear of confrontation with the German Surface Fleet, and a commander with a brain tumor. SOURCES: Beesly, Patrick. Convoy PQ 17: A Study of Intelligence and Decision-Making Bunker, John. Liberty Ships: The Ugly Ducklings of WWII Hague, Arnold. The Allied Convoy System, 1939–1945: Its Organization, Defence and Operation. Milton, Keith. Convoy PQ 17: A Story of Unprecedented Arctic Disaster. Military Heritage. June 2001. Volume 2, no. 6 Lippman, David. 'Convoy is to Scatter.' : Arctic Convoy Disaster. WWII History. Winter 2012. Volume 11, No. 1

Hey everyone, Joe here. Me, Tom, and Nate are all going to be live May 29th in London at the Rich Mix. So get your tickets and come down and see us. It's going to be a great show. We're going to have some new merch, some shirts, some pins, maybe some book stuff because it coincides the launch of my book, The Highlands Burn. And if you can't make it, that's okay. We're going to be live streaming it. Check out our show notes. Make sure you click on the right link for live show and live stream tickets, whichever one you need, and get your tickets now. The Highlands Burn. My debut fantasy novel releases May 29th and is now available for digital pre-order. You can find the link in the show notes wherever it is you're listening to this. Just like this show, this book is a

completely independent production. To the crack of rifles and the acrid stench of sports, we're sorcery, a sudden invasion sweeps through the highlands of the Confederation, and Syatt's peaceful village life breaks with the dawn. A sole survivor amid the smoking ruins of all that he held dear, Siyah must make a choice. Is pursuing revenge against the mercenaries that took everything from him worth becoming one himself? As escape pushes him to the gruff embrace of the foundling brigade, he must learn to tread a path between his need to understand why his people were targeted for destruction and the new responsibilities of his soldiers life. Even as each new encounter with the horrors of battle force him to confront the terrible

cost of his oath. Before long, the shifting fog of war casts old certainties into a haze of doubt, while the stuff of legend seems as clear as day. And Syatt finds himself drawn into a much larger conflict that he could possibly imagine. Hello and welcome to the Lines Web by Donkeys podcast, the only military history podcast the entire history of the world. I'm Joe. With me is Nate. We have yet to release Tom from captivity. Nate, how are you doing? Well, I'm doing great. You know, I found an ethical way to heat my home. It's called Tom is doing burpees in the basement and it's heating the house up. Uh, he's actually,

I live in an apartment building, so he's heating everyone's apartment. He's on the military history podcast of two dudes who used to be in the army. So now we just have to haze him like he's a private. Yeah, exactly. I found inert 155 artillery rounds. I'm like, Like you don't need dumbbells. You have these things. Just making him do weird. I mean, quite frankly, it's, it's very fitting for the host of blood work to be working out with what looks like a gigantic bullet.

Yeah, the whole time we're just pointing a gun at him. Exactly. I have to listen to his own show. Yeah. I have no fun Tom quips, but I am harketing back to you telling me about your upstairs neighbor, which you have dubbed stomposaurus. Oh, yeah. I mean, he's a kid.

But, yeah, stomposaurus rex, stompy. Yeah. I have my own stomposaurus rex now. Not a child, though. My upstairs neighbor just moved in, and this morning at about 637, they, I assume getting ready for work, you know, decided that they needed to do some multiple sprints across the length of their apartment while wearing what sounded like the highest of heels. And I'm normally awake by 7.7.30. That's not exactly how I enjoy waking up, not hating on them. We all got to go to work.

But I now have my own Dutch stompsaurus. as my neighbor. I'm willing to grant Stomposaurus, Geneva edition, a little bit of latitude, because he's literally 11 years old, but it's just one of those things where it's like,

his dad's tall, he's probably going to be tall. And it's like, you haven't realized you're tall yet, even for a little kid. And it's like, I can tell when he comes home from school. Suddenly it's just like people doing

fully soundstage shit for a movie upstairs. Yeah. It's just like, ah, what's up, buddy? You have Lee Stompasaurus directs. I have Stompasorch.

Stompa Shorch. I was going to say, I mean, it's possible they have kids, but also maybe, their adults and they were wearing clogs and they just went sprinting just to see if they could. Yeah, I'm not sure if this morning was specifically the day that we're all Dutch people have to wear clogs. Well, I like the idea of somebody like wearing clogs, but determining whether or not

they can walk on their tippy toes on the clog so it sounds like high heels because they're trying to fuck with you specifically. I would give them credit for that. I have such a strange collection of people that live in my apartment building. My neighbor is an Instagram influencer. my upstairs neighbor is apparently a Dutch traditional dance enthusiast. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's all good. It's all good. Yeah, exactly. No complaints. What would Dutch traditional dance be? I mean, it's like sort of in the, you know, Brugel kind of like peasant festival dancing, or do you just say Dutch traditional dance is crazy frog? Dutch traditional dance is, uh, I mean, it's gabber. Yeah, Hobber, yeah. It's definitely

hard style dancing. I was going to say, if your upstairs neighbor is a hobber enthusiast that it's like, maybe that wasn't sprinting. That was them just, they were actually at, half time because if you're doing 220 beats per minute with your feet, that's going to be hard. Dan once sent me a documentary from the 90s from Dutch TV about Haber and it was like all just mega, like just perma vibes of like 90s, you know, VHS stuff or like late 90s like shitty computers, you know, and like all the production staff on this documentary were named like Yoptenhout and stuff like that. Just gross looking apartment building in Rotterdam. It looks like shit. And you go one of the bedrooms and like the entire wall is taken up by a console.

And they're like, yeah, we're making hobber. Like, it's just, and there's all this footage of people dancing looking like they're, you know, like they're having a seizure. Yep. And it's just like permanently rainy and shitty. And it's like what? And yet it makes me like, damn, I wish I lived in Rotterdam. Now that same apartment in Rotterdam looks just as shitty, but costs 4,000 euros a month.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. See, we know how good we had it. The rent was cheap. So guys named Yop could, you know, buy a console and put it in their bedroom. It's just the tiny. little room for a folding chair. I'm becoming a Dutch returnist, but just to when my rent was affordable.

But we're not talking about how higher rents are today, Nate. We're talking about World War II. It wasn't that long ago where, and rightfully, in my opinion, I was mocked for having a favorite supply route during World War II, specifically the Burma Road. I was going to say, I was thinking that like, you know, American paratroopers falling off course during Market Garden and landing on people's roofs in really quick succession was basically the first Cobber song. Yeah, we're landing

hard style. Exactly. But we're not talking about Burma Road today. Instead, we're going to talk about the Northern Run, as it was known. A stretch of ice cold ocean from Iceland to Russia during World War II and the seemingly endless allied convoys that kept the

Soviet Union afloat after the initial shock of Operation Barbarossa. But specifically, we're going to talk about one convoy when just out everything that could go wrong did go wrong. And that is the death of convoy PQ17. All right. Have you ever heard of this? I have not. No. Invariably, there's like naval lore and it's always just letters and numbers. It's like, oh, it's just like letter, letter, letter, number, number, number. Or like, letter number, number, number. And I'm like, yeah, that's so fucked up. Like, and I don't, I don't, I don't, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not a

prize to the letters and the numbers and the combinations thereof that make this, you know, integral to the history of naval combat in World War II, if you want to call it that. I will say the letters and the numbers completely unimportant. When it comes to the convoys, supply convoys, the first two letters were just the initial of the guy who organized them, and the number is the number of the convoy. But first, we have to talk about the lens-leased agreement of context. In case anybody out there was wondering, when are you guys going to talk about liberty ships. That's pretty much all we're talking about today. Yeah, it's lend lease for context. We give you the context. We don't expect you to pay it back. You know, it's just it's more

a formality. You can pay for it if you like. We have a Patreon. Since I know the majority of people skip through the introduction of our podcast now. We have a Patreon. And if you want to listen to it, then in a sense, you are providing a context for us to tell stories about military history. So when you are paying us, you are paying us back in context for the context lend lease. Yeah. We are the Soviet Union and you are keeping us afloat. We also have a live show coming up May 29. Yeah, that's basically Stalingrad. Yeah, yeah, that will be.

I'm locking the doors. I'm going to hit the venue with artillery for months. I'll come dressed in his little sailor suit, like the German Marines. We're like, why am I here? Why am I doing this? I'm just here just as the good humor man for the drip. Now, to understand the scale of everything we're going to talk about today, we have to go all the way back to Depression-era America.

So men, pull your pants up way too high and everyone get very, very hungry. Sounds about right. I heard a song recently from the Grand Ole Lopery by a guy named Stringbean Aikman. And it's called Suicide Blues. He was a very tall guy. He was a very, very tall guy. And he would wear very, really, really short pants. So it kind of made it look like his legs were tiny in his chest.

He was a big, goofy tall guy. He was bluegrass musician. And the refrain, the hook for suicide blues is, I'm going to kill myself, oh, lordy me. And when you're talking about the depression, I'm like, yep, it's my song. Drop of the fucking beats. I'm dancing sad style to that. America, which would become known as a logistics and transportation monster within a couple

years, was absolutely not that in 1929. Most of the American merchant Marine was little more than a rusted Hulk Boneyard, crews had little to no work, sailors were forced to leave the field to find something that would pay the bills, and unions and ship owners hated each other even more than what you'd considered normal. Virtually all this was due to the greater depression itself, a lack of money and investment, but also the lack of any real oversight over the maritime industry. We're solidly in the era of the U.S. government slowly figuring out the concepts of industrial and economic economic regulation, something that we will certainly never decide as a bad idea.

No, not ever. And I think one of the things is that I found interesting, having read a number of books about the Great Depression, but specifically there was a series by William Manchester who wrote about basically the Depression and then FDR getting inaugurated and like the, you know, the history of the New Deal. And one of the things that blew my mind about it was that like, You know, back in those days, the president didn't get inaugurated until March. And economy was contracting so bad by 1933. Like, people who had jobs as like public school teachers were like living in parks, eating, you know, eating out of trash cans. Like, I think I want to say something like 30% of America was unemployed.

Like the economy contracted like 15%. Like, if I remember correctly, they actually accelerated the pace of Roosevelt getting inaugurated because they're like, the country's not going to exist in three weeks. It's literally that bad. The main difference between what happened then and what happened when I was growing up is my teacher ate out of a trash can, but only because they were in fact a raccoon. Yeah, yeah. We're at that point now where America has outsourced teaching children to raccoons. That's why we're so good at rubbing our hands together. Actually, that sounds racist.

That's why we're really good at showing up in large numbers and just staring kind of like the January 6th approach. We all show up in huge numbers and then just mill around because we were trained by raccoons. I got really good at climbing trees. Yeah. I bite people and give them rabies, which is great if you ever really want to be afraid of water. Yeah. My one weakness is that if you give me something I want, I'll grab it and hold on to it. I'll refuse to let go, even if it means sitting with my hand in a bear trap while you come and beat the shit out of me and kill me.

So I'm like, no, I want this Game Boy advance. I won't let go. Nate, the raccoon playing his Game Boy Advance up on top of a trailer. Yeah, exactly. infestation under my basement, you know, in my crawl space, raccoons playing Game Boy Advance. I hear those bleeps and bloops all night and day. All they're going to do, you know, when I was a kid, man, raccoons, like, God, like, you go on a picnic or something or, like, go camping and if you don't, if you leave anything out,

like, they just show up and the Europeans think they're adorable. I mean, they are. They are adorable. But they're little bastards. Yeah. And I love when they grab something and they walk on two, you know, on their hind legs. Yeah, they could steal anything like that. And I'll think it's the most adorable thing.

If I had a child, they could steal my newborn child. They'd be like, aw. Oh. You're taking my baby down to the river and washing it for some reason. Hey, the raccoons are probably a better dad than I will be. Jesus Christ. You know what the word for raccoon is in French? No, I do not.

Ratton laverer, washing rat. Fuck, yes. He's a rat who washes things. Nice. That's just ratatooie being manual labor. It's rat cacoonie for fucking everything everywhere all it wants. What's kind of fun here is just the history of the merchant marine because they started off during the Revolutionary War as legal pirates,

privateers, right? Civilians would slap some guns on their ship, go and petition for what was known as a letter of Mark from the Continental Congress, and then just go hunting. They would eventually grow to outnumber the American Revolutionary Navy, which probably doesn't come as that big of a surprise to anybody. And a huge reason as to why FDR began to get concerned over the state of the merchant marine is because they're the main arm of naval logistics, both in war and civilian freight transportation.

It had fallen into such a disrepair that it was becoming a matter of national security. In any time of war or even normal national emergencies, the merchant marines would be needed to transport things. Without them, any future plan or response was doomed. By 1936, with the shadows of war creeping out from Europe, FDR pushed for the Merchant Marine Act, which created the U.S. Maritime Commission, with the main goal of creating and maintaining a merchant marine system that not only could function, but would function whenever and wherever it was needed. Small problem, though, Nate. The merchant marine by this point had been almost entirely gutted by largely just neglect.

FDR knew they would need hundreds of cargo ships, And with the current staffing of just over 50,000 people would need a lot more sailors. And 50,000 people might sound like a lot. But this is sailing in the 30s. Nothing is really automated. Everything is a mix of manual and technical labor. And it's also not the era where you could just have some guys on a ship. They were skilled welders, pipe fitters, mechanics.

Skills that take years to learn. Well, if you want them to do their jobs well, anyway. And the same could be said for shipyards, the places that these cargo ships would come from. The Great Depression had taken an axe to most of this infrastructure. And FDR and his allies were trying to get it running once again, ordering 50 cargo ships in a year, and then 100, then eventually 200. Because like we've talked about on other ship-related episodes, one of the hardest parts about building them is having an already functioning shipyard that has people that know what they're doing inside of it to build that kind of ship. U.S. doesn't have that. They lack the ability and the space as the U.S. Navy is building ships as well.

So all of the actual experienced shipyards are attempting to recreate the U.S. Navy for the coming war. But the same could not be said for cargo ships. This is from Flint Whitlock's article, solid name by the way. Yeah, for real. The Murmansk Run. U.S. shipyards, as a whole, throughout the entire country, had built only two ocean-going cargo ships between, the years 1922 and 1937.

15 years. Yeah. It's not a long time. Or it's not a lot of ships in a very long time, too. That's the kind of level of shipbuilding you'd expect from like a U.S. Naval Yard today. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, that's because they, uh, there's actually a lot of research that goes into building ships that break if they get wet. That's right. So they really, really got to like dial in,

make sure every precision detail is attended to. The U.S. could build aircraft carriers. They could build battleships. But they legitimately, did not know how to build a good ocean-going cargo ship because they simply had barely done it. So soon a delegation of Brits arrived to the U.S., trying to get the U.S. to build ships for them. Remember, while this is happening, the U.K. is already at war. German U-boats are already mauling the British military and civilian fleet,

and they're losing ships much faster than they can replace them. The Brits brought a design with them as well. It was just called simply the ocean-class freighter. This is a dumpy piece of shit that was virtually unchanged for 50 years. It was large. It was slow, but it could carry literally tons of supplies and most importantly, incredibly easy to build. However, rather than have U.S. shipyards build it, which they just couldn't do to the demands

of the U.S. Navy, the Maritime Commissioner Emery Land, which is a wonderful name for the guy in charge of maritime. Emery Land sounds like the character of an early of Scott Fitzgerald novel, quite frankly. A guy named Emery Land leading the Maritime Commission is like the chief of the Air Force being called Stephen Ship. Yeah.

James T. Jeep, Major General commanding U.S. Air Force. I'm just thinking Emery Land is like, yeah, he got a little too wild, you know, having his formation in like, you know, mid-Atlantic upper class society of New York before doing his year abroad and wound up in England and just becoming the

grandfather of Nickland. This guy's F. Scott Stierald writes about this sort of coming of age novel doesn't realize like your piece of shit grandson decides to like take too much acid. We're like, what if I invented the dark philosophy? Oh, God. We're mean to women. Emery Land would have a YouTube channel now. Emeryland decided that rather than just turn the British away or squeeze them into the shipyards

are already quite busy with the U.S. Navy, they would privatize it. They would find private shipbuilders to fill the orders, the U.S. and the Brits British would then get a kickback, pay for this stuff. It was quite a symbiotic relationship. But the US would not yet adopt the ocean-going freighter themselves. Not yet anyway. And this all sounds like it could work on paper, but no American shipping company had any experience building large-scale cargo ships, let alone mass manufacturing of them. So the Brits partnered with, again, the wonderfully named Todd Shipyards. That's the name of the shipyard, not a man, but it sounds like it could be Emery Land's Walleague.

Yeah, Todd Shipyards in charge of all procurement for U.S. Air Force aircraft. Now, despite the name of that company, the Todd Shipyard's company did not actually build ships. They built piers, dams, and locks. And they, in fact, did not own a single shipyard. But they take the deal. They partner with other companies. And since this is the 30s, they're quickly popping up shipyards to handle this new load. Because this is the era of safety's kind of.

of a vibe. We have unending government funding. Let's just build a shipyard in a week. God, this shit's so, the rule so much. Like, the only time I've ever seen the government move fast on doing anything in my lifetime was like when they're like, we've been inaugurated to the new presidency. It's time to do ultra-racism, like immediately 24-7. And they find like, college Republican shuds and forkedang guys to like staff government agencies to be, it's like, imagine that. But instead of like dropping in chuds to be like, I'm going to do anti-DI. It's like, no, can you build me a thousand shipyards? It's like, everyone is like, yeah, man.

And then talking to each other like, what the fuck is a shipyard? It's full on like Sim City with infinity money. Just dropping shipyards. It's like, wait, isn't there supposed to school is a shipyard. It's actually like you go to school in a shipyard, you go to daycare in a shipyard, like, we're going to build future archologies

and it's just shipyards inside of them. They also a lot of waters where the boats can go. Like, we have so many liberty ships. A hundred percent. Like, you hear these stories. like, oh man, wow. Remember when the government did stuff? It's like, well, it does do a lot of stuff now, but it's just racism. That's the thing that always bothers me. It isn't the fact that the government's turbo racist. These people back then, oh, it was way more racist. Yeah, the new deal is

insanely racist. Yeah. You know what I mean? But they also like- same administration that create concentration camps for Japanese Americans. Yes. But you know what? They pulled their pants up to their eyebrows and immediately started shooting out ships like the world has never seen. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, they designed social security specifically to exclude black people. like because of the way you could substantiate your work was designed around back in those days when 90% of America's black population lived in the South. Like basically they found ways to make sure that you, you know, that that kind of work wouldn't be documentable and therefore wouldn't be eligible for Social Security. Don't get me wrong. I don't think it was fucking paradise.

No, it was dog shit. It was horrible. But there is something to be said about the fact that it's like, yeah, you know, you've got like a cheat code in Civilization 6. You can just like fucking, you know, it's like, oh, you, you create, as you spawned a great person, they could just make the three gorgeous damn appear overnight. That's kind of what it sounds like when you talk about this era. By 1941, the U.S. government dumped hundreds of millions of dollars

into a shipbuilding program, still targeting their huge shipping weaknesses. Commissioner Land, seeing the growing losses of the British, realized that if the U.S. did get dragged into the war, they would require a lot more ships than anyone had previously thought. Commissioner Land versus Land Commissioner.

There's a lot of name alert. Oh, there's going to be more later on. Hell yeah. So he officially adopted the British design. designated the EC2 for emergency cargo, two, with the only real change being the American design switching from a coal engine to a gas one. And that's how we got the iconic Liberty Ship. The government quickly hoovered up civilian shipyards as well as built new ones to crank out these new Liberty ships, keeping the experienced already existing shipyards building warships and leaving the new ones

to slap Liberty ships together. And as far as ships went, Liberty ships fucked. fucking sucked. This was both due to design, which made them slow and hard to control, and really nothing inside left for a crew comfort. And due to the fact that these new shipyards staffed by men who really didn't know what they were doing were putting these things together, the very basics of sea worthiness and safety quickly went out the window for the sake of speed. Yeah. I did like the Sim City cheat code, but I would not want to go to sea in a ship made out of Legos by a guy who maybe heard of a ship once. So,

he saw it on paper. It's fine. Yeah. Works every time. Yeah, it's like the concept of tracing someone, like someone's art in art class, but you have to build a ship by just looking at one of the distance.

I'm just imagining it's just like, yeah, EC2 stands for extremely cramped two. We already do what extremely cramped was like because we, we sleep in box cars and sing hobo songs, but they've invented extremely cramped too, and it's called a boat. We've invented the hobo bindle.

of ships. That kind of implies that the ship has a crane on the back, holding a gigantic bag that's full of other ships. Actually, Nate, this is where I get to tell you, hold that thought. Hell yeah. Though still over time, a process was developed to get around all of these weaknesses

in the system. Better shipyards have built prefabricated pieces, pre-assemble them, and then ship them to other shipyards, which would that in turn weld them together to create the final ship. And anybody who is familiar with ships even a little bit

is probably asking, wait, they welded this ship together. That sounds like a bad idea. And it is. Normally ships are riveted together because it's much stronger. But welding was chosen because it was faster. It didn't require as much skill.

But the thing about it is is that most these people also are like, wait, you can melt metal together? What the fuck? I didn't know that. I thought everything was made out of ship lap. That everything was made out of old barrels because that's what I wear.

I'm wearing my old barrel to the old barrel factory to build the ship that it's also a large barrel. What is a ship, but a huge barrel that wears you? See, this is where Exhibits Great Grandfather came in. Yeah, yeah. You like wearing a barrel. So you can be old-timey while you old-time. Most of the time, almost 70% of a Liberty ship came to a shipyard prefabricated. This not only made ships safer, but,

also made so a shipyard could construct a single ship from beginning to end in about a month. But that wasn't a rule. Some shipyards went much faster with the fastest Liberty ship being built from beginning to end in four days. And let me tell you, I would not want to fucking be on that ship. Yeah, I have a feeling that I would be very uncomfortable if I got to be on, you know, Fisher Price, my first welder station, the boat, and had to take it out to sea, because I feel like America's famously industrial capacity and military strategy and procurement pretty good at learning from mistakes and correcting. I'd say a lot of America's story when it comes to stuff like military, you know, arms, equipment, et cetera is one of learning from mistakes and correcting. But there has

to be the initial mistake period. Yeah. It's like, you know, what is it? Operation Torch or whatever, where it's like, hey, all of our tanks and tank destroyers are, like, comically tall. They're basically like moving guard towers and the Germans just blow them the fuck up. Everyone keeps dying. Stuff like that. And you'd be like, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, we are in rolling death traps, aren't we? And it's sort of like, you get on this boat, you're like, sweet. We're finally fucking, you know, doing the logistics fight, taking it to the enemy. And they're like, this boat's really leaky. And it looks like it was made in a hurry. And why is every single one of my crewmates named Sullivan?

Yeah, you never want your personal military experience to end up in a file called Lessons Learned. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Center for Watery Grave Lessons Learned. Yeah, or as I like to call it for my military experience, the Center for Tactical Whoopsie Doodles. Yeah, yeah, you know, but they'll be like actually, never mind the fact that that thing was a piece of shit and was destined to fail. One of those sailors had an old-timey 1940s. iPod headphones in when he drowned. So he had a gramophone playing when he drowned.

So actually it's distracted midshipman. Yeah, that's right. I don't know if actually midshipman's like cadets. I don't know anything about boats. I don't know anything about the Navy. Midshipman is people in the Naval Academy. Yeah, it's like cadets, isn't it? Yeah, darn.

Yeah, I didn't want to say semen because I'm 14. But I guess it's sailors. Sailors being distracted by gramophones. That's why they drowned and not. We built a ship in four days and we have no idea what a ship is. with the ships came the merchant marines that would be on them and the U.S. Navy contingent that would go along with them, known as the Naval Armed Guard, says what it does on the tin.

As the Liberty ships were also armed, obviously these were smaller debt guns to fire at U-boats and anti-aircraft guns, only to be used in as a form of last ditch self-defense, as everybody was aware that a Liberty ship would lose any fight it found itself in. And the U.S. is aware just how bad duties in these ships were going to be. and in the Merchant Marine at large. But simultaneously, they really didn't want to siphon away recruit from the Navy. So once the war got going, pretty much anybody who could still physically work on a ship

but was disqualified from the Navy for one reason or another, would still be allowed to work in the Merchant Marine. This specifically meant they got rid of age cap for sailors in both directions. You could be as old as 16 and as young as 16. That's always a great and healthy range to be all together doing something. Yep, nothing bad could come from this. And on top of that, merchant Marines actually got paid better than any branch of the military. Not a lot, mind you, but still paid better, though this did come with fun caveats.

And this made people the Navy fucking hate them. They accused the merchant Marines of dodging the draft or being cowards. But statistically, being in the merchant Marines became the most dangerous job for, any American sailor during the war. And remember, these guys are technically civilians. So they would be paid like civilians. That meant they only got their heightened pay while they were at sea. The second the ship hit the shore or sank, their pay stopped. It's a lot of paychecks not going to every single solid and family in America. That's unfortunate. Wow. They don't have an SGLI for you went to see in a barrel. Eventually, from my understanding, the merchant

Marines pay and benefits scale has gotten much better. But at least during World War II, the second your ship stopped shipping, your pay stopped. So while you were in port offloading cargo, you weren't getting paid for that. You were paid specifically for sailing. If you were not sailing, whether onshore or floating in the water because your ship got blown out from under you, pay stopped from the date of the ship sinking. So, boat is a binary state. Yes. You're either boat or not boat, but not boat.

The enemy gets a vote in making you not boat, and you don't get paid when the switch is flipped to not boat. That is correct. And if you're doing stevedore, they're like, well, that's what we pay you for? You're not boat right now. Yeah, that's not boat. So basically, like being a flight attendant.

Exactly. Yeah, actually, it's depressingly accurate. Yeah. Let's talk about how these ships ended up getting clapped, by the way. Now, everyone is aware of the Lens Lease Act. So there's really no need to go into that. And if you don't, well, you require things that this podcast cannot provide you. But before the U.S. was openly in the war, they were a neutral power, sending a never-ending convoy of ships to the UK, which the Germans, arguably rightfully, consider them a legal target of war at sea because they're supplying their enemy.

Yes. And not to mention, they are armed. But air power of the day could hardly fly over the ships during. the entire trip to the UK. This created a large cover gap, as it became known, in the middle of the Atlantic that would take ships days to get through. And once there, German U-boats could easily prey on the ships in their infamous wolf packs, as Hitler and the Nazis came to the conclusion that the best way to defeat the UK was

to strangle it off. Then in June of 1941, the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union. And for many reasons that we have gone into before on this show, the Nazis thought this be very easy. But one reason we hadn't talked about before is, unlike the U.K., the Nazis figured that the U.S. would not help the Soviets at all. Sure, they might complain about the war, but they doubted they were going to unleash the naval zerg rush of liberty ships in the general direction of the Soviet Union. But as the Red Army got its teeth kicked in, Stalin turned to the U.S. and the U.K. for assistance. And Churchill and the British immediately agreed. FTR was a little on the fence, but was able to

be sold on the fact that keeping the Soviets in the war benefited the UK, obviously. Correct me if I'm wrong, but then also wouldn't the transit being made for a lot of these be, I guess you talked about the ice route going over Iceland from the North Atlantic. Because I was thinking in my mind, I'm like, Soviets also have, you know, the whole Pacific Asian part of the Soviet Union where the Germans didn't get to. But that the U.S. at the time, as I understand it, I can't imagine that, you know, a massive, massive bulk of the U.S. is shipping capacity would have been on the Pacific side. New.

So, right. And not to mention, due to how the convoy system worked, they would need to link up with the UK, the Royal Navy. Like, they need a stopover point somewhere in the middle, which in this case would be Iceland, to organize convoys. So going the Atlantic route ended up being the best way. There also is this country comprised of a number of islands, but three main islands known as Japan that is kind of nearby if you go that way to get to Far East Russia.

Yeah, and they're about to be very unhappy with the United States. Famously so. Soon thousands of tons of supplies would be loaded up onto Liberty ships, ferried over to Iceland. Iceland would act as a waypoint, a naval truck stop, if you will. You had huge stockpiles of shit in Iceland that could be then moved around onto other ships. Convoys themselves could be organized and then make the final run across some of the most dangerous waters in the world to one of two Soviet Arctic ports, Archangel or Murmansk.

It'd be pretty dangerous to stack stuff that high in Iceland. I mean, the wind's really strong. Just blowing shit over knocking them. I mean, I've seen videos. A friend of mine was stationed there for a long time. He's like, we did indoor PT most of the time not due to the cold, but because the wind is like a hundred miles an hour. Yeah.

Yeah. It's not great. There's a reason why not that many people live there. Let's land some fucking planes there. I mean, we'll say that if you're confident you're not going to die, it must be sick as hell to land a plane with that kind of wind. I've been to Iceland. I love it. It's certainly not for everybody. I've never been. I've just, Ari's dad is from there. He spent some time there when he was a kid. And he's like, I don't want to use the wrong Scandinavian slur for the Scandinavians.

But his take is that it's basically everyone thinks that it's like, you know, magical elves. And it's really just like, it's just rednecks on ATV's Nordic edition. What is interesting here is despite Stalin needing help, he gave literally nothing to help in this operation. Yeah, go, queen. Give us nothing. Even as British and American losses climbed with every single convoy, Stalin decided the Soviets couldn't give air cover or armed escorts. And they wouldn't even let the British establish a command center in the ports that they were operating out of to better organize the convoy's defenses.

So like the argument could be made. Of course, the Soviets didn't have a lot to give at that point. But they actively worked against them as well by not allowing the British to put up a command center at the ports they were operating out of. They're basically going like, you know, the Portuguese flow. trading emissions and Nagasaki level of like you are not allowed to fucking touch the mainly. You're not allowed to touch ground here. If you do, you might give us your weird, your weird allied powers, cooties.

I don't know. The second you stop boating, the second you stop boating, not only do you not get paid, we will shoot you. I will say that like, you understand that Stalin famously very, very paranoid, but also like, it's not as if the United States and the United Kingdom hadn't tried to fuck with the Soviet Union a lot. And so I imagine, too, that like even in this state of emergency they were in, there's an extent which he's like, yeah, but let them set up a base. They're going to do pervert shit.

And also they're going to, you know, probably. Well, I feel like Stalin was pretty comfortable with pervert shit. Would you realize who he employed? Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's that. It's different when Barry it does it. He's Georgian. I don't want British pervert shit around here. And what's interesting here is Stalin knew that he didn't have to give anything either.

Everybody in play here is aware that they're only working together because they need each other. They all fucking hate each other. famously so. Stalin knows that they need to keep him afloat to keep the UK afloat so he could do the slay queen give them nothing. Yeah. And he would still get an endless supply of liberty ship

showing up in Murmansk. It didn't matter. The first northern run convoys made it by the end of August 1942, an operation soon ramped up afterwards. With a promise from the UK and the US that the Soviets would get a supply run just about every week, they never quite

made their tonnage goals, but they did supply an absolute fuck ton of war supplies to the Soviet Union. By December, the Nazis began deploying U-boats and other naval resources to counter them, namely the battleship Turpitz, the sister ship of the Bismarck. Turpitz was joined by the Sharnhorst, the Giesinau, heavy cruises like the Prince Eugene, which is the least intimidating ship name I've ever heard of my life, and the Admiral Shear, all of which would be based out of Norway. I'm sorry, you cannot be intimidating and your name be Eugene. It's impossible.

I'm Prince Eugene to name people gave me. I'm not a prince. My name isn't actually Eugene. They just said, what's the least intimidating name we can give a guy? They're making fun of me because I fell asleep at the bar one time. So now I just be called Prince Eugene for the rest of my life. And I know people who have listened to the show is like, what about Eugene Ballard, the coolest man who's ever existed? And I say that Eugene Ballard had to be even cooler than he normally would have been to offset the fact his name is Eugene. Though after a few setbacks, namely, losing the Bismarck and then the turpets getting lost in a snowstorm and nearly being blown up by British carrier-based torpedo bombers, as well as a critical shortage of fuel oil. Hitler ordered that none of his heavy ships of the surface fleet go chasing after a convoy without knowing exactly where the British aircraft carriers were. So generally, the U-boats would act as scouts, find the convoys, alert the surface ships, and then they would attack together if they could, but over time famously this would almost entirely be left to the U-boats and shore-based Nazi planes. Because in case anybody was wondering, they never had a functional aircraft carrier.

But depending on the convoy, U-boats were eaten good. The convoys were never of a uniform size, but could be as many as 10 cargo ships, could be 20 or 30, protected by as few as three warships, though this could be more or less on either side. It would be pretty easy for a wolf pack, normally three U-boats, to go around picking ships off. And that was even accounting for just how dangerous the Arctic was on its own if the Nazis didn't show up at all. For example, it wasn't uncommon for an entire convoy to get stalled, turned around, or delayed because of ships running into icebergs. Yep, a little bit of environmental story telling up there. You know, it's just a...

The whole environment has PVP selected on. They have God mode. It's called Infinite Ice. You have boat made by a guy who is doing his best to learn what a boat is. But they got hit with the Eternal Shiva summon. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, unfortunately, it's like, it's like consuming your seed stock during a famine. They ate the last Esper in 1931. So America couldn't have Ifrit to, you know, do ice break or shit for them. That was effectively what the Manhattan Project was, is rediscovering it. Yeah, exactly.

summon it for it. Oppenheimer was a summoner. Oppenheimer with a beltful of rare material as an interesting concept. Someone called Killian Murphy. That is because as Nazi air cover got more and more effective at U-boat groups were again, picking them off, including what nicknamed

the ice devils claimed more than the warships did. The convoys were forced to travel further and further north to get around these things, risking running into more and more ice and being more damage with every trip. And life and service on these ships was awful. You can look up pictures of what the Northern Run looked like. Decks of these ships would be completely iced over. Sailors in more clothing than you ever thought a sailor could possibly wear risked their lives every time they

simply went outside. The ships themselves were just not built to handle the Arctic. They cracked, they broke, they failed at almost every turn. And when you look at how some of the ships looked in the middle of the runs, it looked like a super villain ice cavern from an RPG more than a boat. You can't even see the boat anymore. EC2 can also stand for

extremely cold, too. Everybody knows the sequel is much worse. There's actually like an indicator that it's an exponent. It's extremely, extremely cold squared. After doing this for several convoys, the British lost more and more cruisers

than the escorts, which could not be easily or quickly replaced. So the order was given that Convoys would go without cruisers embedded within them and said they'd be held back in case the Nazi surface ships made an appearance. Now, when it came to the U-boats, you're on your own. I'm thinking like, I presume just about everything that could be made out of metal is probably made out of metal on these boats. Yeah. Which would imply that every time that you sit down to use the toilet, you effectively get the tongue stuck to the light pole scene from Christmas story.

Probably. I bet you it really, really sucked to go to the bathroom on these boats. I feel like a lot of people were hovering. They did the old stand on the seat and squat thing. This is how Min first figured out how to pee standing up. Before this, we all sat down. Many people don't know this. Yeah, exactly.

You have to thank the extremely cold squared for this. You know, now we're able to do an ambulatory piss. We only learn through hardship. But you know, necessity is the mother of all invention. And when you're really cold, you have to pee like I do, and that is running up and down the hallway. I'm confused how this would work, but you know what?

I believe in you, Joe. The whole world is my toilet. Before somebody gets mad at me, yes, the inside of the Liberty ships were heated. But the second you went outside, horrible, horrible Arctic winds. I didn't assume they weren't heated, but I feel like the heating system might not be able to tolerate or compete with snowmiser from fucking the year without Santa Claus. And the fact that, like, the weather is as extreme as it can possibly get. It was hit and miss. I mean, these are Liberty ships.

They have their problems. Some heat would be better than others. though the convoys themselves would be defended by destroyers, mine sweepers, armed trawlers, but also easily one of my favorite inventions that ever happened at sea in World War II. The Cam or the Catapult Aircraft Merchantman. This is the ship with the Bindle. Oh, see, there I was being like, I wish Tom was here because we could start doing a riff about a Smith song and say some boats are warmer than others.

But now I want to know about the catapult, Vindle, Crane, sci-fi, hobo cannon, whatever it is you're going to tell me. This is quite literally a DIY aircraft carrier. This would be a merchant ship slapped together to act as a escort carrier with planes launched from a

very short rocket-powered catapult. Okay. Kims are meant to be a stopgap until there could be enough aircraft carriers to go around to act as escorts. But hey, if you can fire a plane off of something, good enough, right? So you're effectively saying they were

doing a rocket jump of sorts. Yes, that's exactly what they're doing. But notice how I said, fire, not recover, because... There's nowhere for them to land. That is correct. So how the fuck does that work? Are they sea planes? You crash into the sea and then someone picks you up.

I feel as though there may be some efficiencies we could address here, some potential process bottlenecks when one considers the amount of time required to build a plan. plane that flies and also learn to fly a plane. I mean, I guess you don't have to land. So in a way it's handshake between this and like the least successful graduates of the South Florida School of Aviation. But like, well, you only have to actually, I would say these guys are slightly more qualified than them because they have to be able to take off. They simply don't have to land, which means they're more akin to being like a Japanese fighter pilot in 1945. I am really taken aback by the one single use only plane. Just crumple it up and throw it away.

What would happen is they would only be launched during times of need, like actual U-boat attack. They would fly around, drop whatever they had until they ran out of fuel, and the pilot would bail out as close as they could to a ship that could pick them up. In the Arctic Ocean. Yeah, it's less than ideal day. I'll tell you a quick story, and I'll abbreviate it. I went rafting in Alaska once, like whitewater rafting, wearing a wetsuit and warm clothes underneath it was August, but doesn't matter in Alaska the waters.

for like 32.5, 33 degrees. It's all, you know, glacier melt. And at the end, when we got to the recovery point, they're like, if you want, you guys can like float. If you want to just jump off the boat. And then so I did. I was like, sick. I'm floating.

And then like, about a minute in. I'm like, fuck. There's a hole in my wetsuit. Shit. There's a fucking hole. Like, my feet are getting. I can't really feel my feet. I kind of concerned that my feet might be going hypothermic here.

What the fuck is happening? I'm wearing shoes on top of my wetsuit. And then I'm like, shit. Fuck. fuck. So we're going to go with like survival. Like, just like make sure like you're not exhausting yourself.

Like get there as quickly as possible. Don't panic. Just get there. I get off. There's no hole in my fucking wet suit. Just cold. It's just got cold feet. Yeah.

Just got cold feet. And that's, that's just a couple of minutes. Yep. It's less than ideal. Yeah. They try not to use them unless they absolutely had to. They put them in like a big rubber suit like the thing or something.

I mean, Jesus Christ. Like how do they keep these guys from not? Because I mean, you got hypothermic. You'll drown. Like you can't swim. Yeah.

it'll cause your muscles to lock up and like, yeah, I guess they had big, big water wings. Later on, as the cams were developed, seaplanes were used, but that brought up other issues of like winching the plane back onto the ship. Sure. The cam was just one of my favorite dumb weapons I've ever heard. So basically it's like anything to prevent binary state of not boat, even if it means single use only plane. That's correct. A boat, not boat is the most powerful dynamic the world has ever seen. To this day, everything is either boat or not boat.

It's like a single-use plane. And I don't know if you're aware of this, but you pilot, your legs are now single-use too. Because by the time you get off this motherfucker, they're probably going to be amputated. Now, the first convoy staff like this got bombed and torpedoed over the course of several days, losing nine ships, which sounds bad, and I'm sure it is if you happen to be on the convoy. But ships were still making it through. The supplies were still getting to the Soviets, which was the point of all of this. You might kill some of us, but you can't kill all of us.

Do you think they cross-loaded supplies because you wouldn't want like, oh, we got one boat full of, I don't know, baby formula, but no bullets? You know what I mean? Or one boat full of bullets but no guns? Or one boat full of tires, but no cars? Actually, fun fact. It was more of a first come first serve of who is loading what at the port. There was no real safe or unsafe loading.

it was just cram as much shit on there as you can. So you could have ammunition with clothes. You could have tanks with food. It was just everything all at once all the time. Cool. Cool. Yeah. This is like,

all right, one out of eight ships in the convoy made it. Unfortunately, the U.S. has decided the Soviet Union needs a tactical resupply of knick-knacks. Yeah, that's correct. We've brought you,

unfortunately, the only cargo ship full of 10 million precious moments, figurines. So it's, Yeah, it's cutesy, super deformed Joseph Stalin. We've brought you a Leverentie barrier bobblehead from Bertic. Yeah, yeah, yeah, because we got you a little, little guns. You pull the trigger, a flag comes out and says bang.

Now, the Nazis knew this as much as the Allies did. They knew the only way to turn off the logistic system was to kill so many of them, maybe an entire convoy, that the Allies would decide it's just not worth it anymore. So the Nazis decided the only way to do this would be send in their surface fleet, regardless of the crippling fuel shortage. And in case you're wondering, U-Boats, use. diesel. Their surface ships use fuel oil. The Nazis had plenty of diesel, at least for now, but not a lot of fuel oil. So it would require the entire logistical system of the Navy to transfer

all of their available fuel oil to the northern naval bases to prepare for what would become known as Operation Knights move. Night's move as a knight like a piece in a chessboard. Yeah. Not Operation Night moves like Bob Seeger. I like it your way better. Me too. I'm also laughing. at this because they're like, oh, we have to inflict such great losses on the U.S. and on the allies that they'll give up. But it's like, I'm sorry, but for all of your worship of a cult of heroic death under fascism, you do not crave death as much as the average American. I'm sorry. Every single one of those guys, whether or not they're sinking or whether or not they are boat or not status, whether or not they are alive, not alive status. The only song they're singing is,

I'm going to kill myself a lord in me. Yeah, as long as you give your average American in the 30s and 40s. A decent paycheck. Like, yeah, we'll totally sail this boat directly into the nightmare mall. Yeah, yeah, I'll totally die. Fuck it, yeah. Hell yeah.

This plan was developed by Nazi Grand Admiral and Commander-in-Chief of the Navy Eric Rader. He delivered this plan to Hitler, who immediately turned the idea down and fucking hated it. Hitler was terrified of losing his heavy ships while also simultaneously hating them

for being a huge waste of resources. Even though their very existence, was his fault of the first place. He had built pretty much all of these as a little prestige project. He believed that Nazis needed a powerful modern navy and then put more and more restrictions on their use. We already talked about the aircraft carrier one. But he over time also told Raider not to use them

even against British battleships for fear of losing one of his own. To Raider, this meant that the Navy, the Kriegsmarine, was effectively useless. Something that Hitler agreed on. He actually would later tell a future naval commander, quote, On land, I am a hero. On sea, I am a coward, which is not something you'd expect Hitler to say. No, I mean, but relatable, I guess.

I don't like being on the water. I mean, it's beautiful that I don't trust the ocean. Sorry. No, man, I'm Armenian. I'm not meant to be in a boat. I swam competitively, but the first time I went swimming in the open ocean on the east coast of the island of Hawaii. also that was like the first rock of land for thousands of miles and felt the current. I was like, you fuck this, fuck this.

Oh my God. Fuck this shit. No, no, no, no. Never. Not for me. I'm not a fan. I like the ocean. I like being on the ocean.

It terrifies me. As it should. As it should, honestly. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Don't ever tempt King Neptune. He loves to show up and just do some freelance hating. You really don't want to mess with that.

And also the Arctic, the Arctic having been in Alaska. The Arctic's really cold and it's scary. So you do ocean plus Arctic. You never want to be at the end of the decision-making process of if you're boat or not-boat. No, and also you never want to be at like the perfect overlap of all of like the potential causes of not-boat Venn diagram. You'll rapidly become not-boat. Hitler eventually relented and gave Rader his operation with one major caveat that the battleships could only be deployed with air support. Again, the Nazis do not have an aircraft carrier.

So that meant that they would have to operate close to the Norwegian coasts where they could deploy their own air cover from their shores. That brings us to the unfortunate star of our show. Convoy PQ 17. Given such name, like I said in the beginning, P and Q were the initials of the man who organized a convoy, and 17 being the number of that specific convoy. The convoy fell under the command of Commodore Jack Dowdy and consisted of 34 cargo ships. This is a mixture of Liberty ships and pretty much any other freighter that they still had that was seen. worthy. Then came the protection that the convoy was going to get, which came in three forms.

There's the close escort group under the command of Jack Broome. This is a combination of mine sweepers, arm trawlers, destroyers, corvettes, two submarines, and one cam with its single plane. Behind them, there's distant cover group under Admiral Lewis Hamilton. These were heavy cruisers, which include the first American warships to take part in the convoy missions. with one of the sailors on board of one of those American ships, the USS Mayrant, being FDR's son. It feels like a lot of things being put together to make this vaguely ominous even at the outset. You're not wrong. And that's something that the merchant marines themselves would pick up on?

Because even behind all of that, very far away was another body of ships known as the home fleet, under command of Admiral John Tavi. His mission was much bigger than just the Atlantic convoys. His fleet included aircraft carriers and battleships, all the things you'd expect to see in a naval fleet. But his main mission was containing the German surface fleet to the Arctic, so it couldn't break out into the Atlantic. As the cowboys began getting ready to go, this amount of military force made the merchant Marines pretty nervous because they're like, what do they know that we don't? Yeah. The short answer to that is nothing. The long answer is they were worried about the deployment of the German surface fleet.

But also like that large of a military formation is probably going to a... attract the attention of, you know, aerial naval reconnaissance. And then so, like, the fact that you've got, you know, like, A to Z taxonomy of every possible boat the U.S. Navy's got right behind you probably implies that, like, oh, you know, the wolf pack is a, they're howling at the underwater moon, you know, they're sniffing the underwater scent, so on and so forth. Yeah. There was a feeling that such a large convoy, I mean, 34 cargo ships just on their own, without any of the escorts was certainly going to be hit by something.

The British were really starting to get panicky about the turpets setting sail. And if the turpets fell onto one of these convoys, they'd all fucking die. Just imagining a wolf howl but like underwater, so it's not kind of sounds like gargling. The gargling wolf. Sounds like a really shitty British pub.

Yeah. Oh, yeah, it does, doesn't it? And the convoy started out just badly. Thanks to heavy fog and ice drifts around Iceland, four cargo shifts were so badly damaged they had to turn around. Also because the fog, the convoy's attempts to deceive the Germans by setting out a decoy in a different direction

was completely meaningless because the Germans couldn't even see the decoy. But the weather is an equal opportunity hater in this scenario. As the convoys traveled towards Russia, Lufo Fas scouts flying overhead couldn't see them? So for the first two days, it was as smooth sailing as you could have in the Arctic. But then on July 1st, the convoy was set up by U-boats, which in turn sent word back to the Navy station in Narvik, and soon the Nazi Navy was spitting up to put their operation into effect.

The weather was still not great, but it was clearing up, and U-boats were now shadowing the convoy, broadcasting a location beacon to the lufwaffe, leading them directly to the convoy. And the next day, at 6.30 a.m., Nazi torpedo planes began their attack. The convoy's protections held up, because you don't have to be a war ship to fight off planes if you have enough anti-aircraft guns masked in one area, generally. What is crazy here isn't the actual attack, but the pilots themselves.

These were sea planes, and when a few of the planes got shot down, the pilots of other planes, dodging fire from the escorts, landed in the Arctic waters, grabbed the down crewmen, and man should take off again, all in front of the convoy. I mean, that's

pretty cool, all things considered. Sounds really dangerous as well. Yeah, I think some it has to do with that residual thing of gentlemanly warfare that comes up in World War II from time to time. It's like, well, the pilots are clearly landing to pick up a down to crew and we're not going to shoot at them. Right. Because afterwards, I mean, they're going to fly back to base or whatever. They're not a worry anymore. While the first attack had failed, it was more of a confirmation flight than anything else. The Nazi surface fleet was making its way out of Alton Fjord, which it turns out was not something they were very good at. The Turpitz was

joined by the cruiser Admiral Hipper, as well as four escort destroyers. The small problem was, as they all left Altenfjord, every single one of the escort ships crashed into the rocks. Three of them had to turn back for repairs, and one got completely grounded. So the turpets and the Hipper went on by themselves. However, these ships, the turpets especially, were ones that the British kept a very, very, very close eye on. So after they left Narvik, it didn't take long for the RAF recon flights overhead to notice that they were missing. They in turn alerted the British Sea Lord. Big name alert here.

Yeah, no joke. Jesus, the title also, C-Lord. Like Air Boss on an aircraft carrier. Sir Alfred Dudley Pickman Rogers Pound. Most commonly known as simply Dudley Pound. Lord Pound. Lord Pound.

Wow. He in turn radioed the home fleet commander John Tovey, telling him to close in with the convoy and prepare for the German service fleet. However, this pissed off both Hamilton and Tovey. As while London was giving Tovey orders to move towards the convoy, Pound neglected to tell Hamilton that, and in turn gave Hamilton different orders to move away from the convoy. Also, important to remember here,

in any case where a large-scale naval battle was going to break out against the turpets, Toby was going to be in command of that. And he personally hated Pound. So he got furious because by moving all of these fleets, separately without talking to him. He was making his ability to exert control over the situation impossible if the turpets actually showed up. I also have to say that maybe the listener is feeling the same way that

you're recognizing people who have the same last names as these people, but in modern usage or historical usage. And so you're describing it, referring them only by their surnames, puts me in the weird mental space of it's British actor Russell Tovey getting really, really upset with the poet Ezra Pound, who's also calling Alexander Hamilton the founding father. Yep, that's exactly It's like the village people of weird guys

Meanwhile the commanders of the actual Close-in convoy portions like Dowdy, the commander of the merchant Marines convoy and Broome the Close Escort commander, weren't being told about anything at all. However, thankfully, at least for now for the British, the German fleet would

slam on the brakes a short time later. A U-boat reported to Admiral Ralph Carl's, the Northern Fleet Commander, that the Allies had brought out their battleships and there are several of them in the area, meaning in accordance with Hitler's rules, the turpets could not engage. The thing is, is that this was not true.

The U-boat had seen a destroyer, and for some reason reported it as a battleship. Behind the convoy, the growing train of U-boats kept following them, keeping tabs on the Allied ships, but also waiting. The water was so rough and the fog so thick, they couldn't really launch an attack,

so instead they just kind of followed on behind them. With the U-boats, with a constantly circling Lufa-S scouts, which made sure to stay out of gun range. These scouts became such a normal sight for the convoy that the planes and the ships would occasionally talk to one another. This is from David Lippman's article, Convoy is the scatter.

It is the height of the Arctic summer, with sunset lasting only a couple of minutes. A British destroyer signaled one of the German planes, asking if it could not, quote, circulate in the other direction for a while, you're making us dizzy. The German signaled back, quote, whatever it takes to please an Englishman,

and took up reconnaissance orbit in the, opposite direction. What the fuck, man? And just so you know how much attention PQ17 is getting from the Nazis, you've heard of Lord Haha, right? William Joyce. Yes. Yeah.

Well, for people unaware, he was a infamous Nazi propagandist who is actually an Irish-American. There's layers to this. He made a radio broadcast in English directed at the fleet on July 3rd that he was pretty sure they would pick up. He told them that they would get fireworks on the 4th of July, which seems like a really dumb villain in a movie thing to do to tell him all of our plans.

But he did end up being correct. That's because despite Hitler putting a ton of restrictions on his surface fleet, there were none over the Luftwaffe. So the 5th Air Wing commander Hans Juergen Stumf was sick of waiting for the Navy to be allowed to do their job. As if PQ17 kept going, there's a pretty good chance he'd get out of range for his planes. So early on on the 4th, a flight of torpedo bombers and medium bombers joined forces and tried to attack the convoy.

But weather was so bad that only one managed to get a shot off. That shot, however, managed to absolutely body the Liberty Ship, crisp for Newport, hitting it dead setter and sinking it. The next attack was broken up thanks to bad weather and a squadron getting lost. Then another group of planes didn't want to wait for the other an attack, were beaten back, and then the next group attacked, at which point all of the anti-aircraft guns were already waiting for them. The real reason why this flight didn't do serious damage was just dumb luck.

The destroyer, the USS Wainwright, pulled in close to the convoy because they needed to refuel from one of the ships. So when the next flight of Lufwaffe bombers came, they were parked right in the middle of the bombing path and were able to cut them to pieces. But there is an important thing to know just in case you didn't. Generally, when a Liberty ship got hit, it died. These aren't warships. These aren't the stories of those destroyers or whatever getting hit multiple times.

and struggling on. If a Liberty ship took a direct hit, it was almost certainly going to the bottom. If it survived, it was a minor miracle. Other ships would try to stop and rescue the crews, but the convoy stopped for nothing because stopping meant losing more ships. So if one of the tugboats traveling in the convoy couldn't tow the ship or pull you out of the water very quickly, you were left behind to die. This also goes into the idea of the law of the sea at the time.

Yeah. If a U-boat sank Liberty ship, it was technically on the U-Bode. U-boat to rescue you. And most of the time they did. Really? Yeah. You weren't always pulled into the U-boat. They threw out life rafts or whatever, but it was more common than you'd think.

There are stories of U-boats machine-gunning the crews of Liberty ships, just like there are stories of Allied boat crews doing the same thing, but they are not that frequent. As far as convoys go, this one hadn't been that bad. Losing a few ships or getting a few ships damaged at one point, they need. need to be dragged along by tugboats was just another day at the office for a group of Liberty ships on this supply run. But at 9 a.m. that was about to change. Dudley Pound was still working with the idea that the entire German fleet was barreling towards the convoy. In reality, after attempting to leave and then running into the rocks, and then that false intelligence report

about the battleship being nearby, the entire task force had turned around and returned back to Alton Fjord. In the few hours since, the commander of the task force set around waiting for orders. Admiral Rader himself was also simply sitting around waiting for orders, because despite being the commander of Germany's Navy at the time, he was not allowed to deploy his surface fleet without personal authorization from Hitler. And since British scouts in the air were looking for them over the ocean, due to the last report being that they had set sail, they lost it. They couldn't find it at sea. This made the British believe that they were somewhere at sea, but we don't know where. Fuck, we lost them they must be making for the convoy.

It's important to remember here, though. Pound is sitting in an office in London. He's not with the fleet, nor is he speaking with the people in charge of it. He doesn't speak to a single other commander actually in the convoy about his worry that the surface fleet must be right on top of them. Instead, he's getting scouting reports, which confirmed nothing and were actually wrong to make his decision. I feel like now might be a good time to put out that Dudley Pound was suffering from a terminal brain tumor at the time. Um, this was not a secret. This is something that everybody knew about,

but for some reason did not disqualify him from being this first sea lord. What? Yeah, yep. Oh, it's not sporting to allow this man to be a seaworn. He's put in time. All these years of rum, sodomy in the last, he should be allowed to lead O'Connell is into the Arctic and drown. It's only, it's not cricket to say no.

We must also commission the tumor. First lieutenant brain tumor. Pounds had a message to the convoy. The entire escorting fleet was to withdraw. Then, only a few minutes later, the order came to the convoy to, quote, disperse, make for Russian ports. Then, as convoy commander stood around and confused, not sure what exactly was happening, they got an even more dire order a few minutes later. The last ditch order that any convoy commander ever wanted to get.

The worst thing you could ever hear. It's like if an infantryman hears retreat. And now it is, quote, the convoy is to scatter. Oh, I thought the order was going to be not boat. It's all misspelled, slightly dripping down the page. Like, ah, I see he gave the wireless headset to the tumor.

Yeah, exactly. Well, then the order would be fruitful and multiply, I guess. Spread into your dearest friend. The reason another message had to be sent, only a few minutes after the second one, was thanks to pound fucking up the British naval code, because he had gone into the radio room to send it himself, and then accidentally transmitted the word for disperse rather than scatter, so he had to quickly run back and do it again. This meant now only about halfway to their destination, already spread over a very large area,

and without their train and armed warships watching their back, their cargo ships would be, quite literally, left on their own. The only protection they had was from their very very, close escorts like the armed trawlers, the two submarines, the minesweepers, the corvettes, and the cam, because they were so close to them already that any direction that they run, they're going to be together. The convoy and escort commanders were confused, but also terrified. Pound's urgency in his rapid messaging made them think that the surface fleet must be like seconds away from opening fire on them. But they didn't see anything. Yeah. They're like, what is he freaking out about? They began to message other ships with flights and

signals, trying to figure out what was happening, which only confuses more people because nobody has any idea what's going on. Broom, the commander of the lightest close escort ships, the trawlers, the Corvats, the submarines, signaled the merchant ships to scatter to try to make it to Archangel. Then he turned and tore off in a different direction. Now, the merchant crews assumed that they were charging off into battle, so they cheered as the escorts abandoned them. Okay. All right, great. I should point out here that British sailors and their commanders manning these warships did this believing that they were heading off to fight the surface fleet, even if it was a suicide mission.

Brum and Hamilton charged off attempting to lure a fleet that was not there back towards Tovey and the home fleet, where they might stand a chance against something as strong as the turpets. But failing that, their goal was to die slowing them down to protect the confoy. They did not know the surface fleet was not there. The commanders of the trail of U-boats watched in awe as 30-odd ships in front of them just took off like a fart in the wind. Okay. Not only did these U-boats begin to go in for the kill, but they also radioed back to the fleet saying,

You're not going to believe this shit, but everybody's running in a different direction. It's like the waters were chummed. Yeah, no, geez. Yeah, this is absolute ideal situation, isn't it? Yeah. Target-rich environment. Also, the target is very slow and huge. In response to what was happening, the Luf.

Woffa's fifth air wing canceled all other missions and set every single available plane to attack the scattering convoy, eventually deploying over 200 bombers paired with the Ice Devils U-boat squadron that was already chasing them. The U-boats attacked freely, with the only defense the ships having being smaller deck guns. Within hours of the scatter order being given, six cargo ships were already sent down, including one named the Empire Byron. That one is for you. Nate. All right.

Byron has died once again. The Empire Byron. Whoops. Another, you know, watery grave. Center for watery grave lessons learned. Maybe the ship was also very annoying. Yeah, fair enough. One ship, the SS Paulus Porter, was hit with a torpedo, caught fire.

Its crew bailed out, but then the ship didn't sink. So instead the crew of the U-boat, U-2-55, boarded the ship, took all of their documents they could find, took the ship's flag, then jumped back into their U-Birds, about before finishing it off with another torpedo. Jesus Christ. Back with the British warships, commanders were all screaming at each other at this point. Multiple commanders demanded they turn around and save the merchant convoy when it became clear there's no fucking turpits out here and the convoy is going to die.

But Hamilton pointed out that, look, they've been given orders to scatter. As dumb as it was, there is no convoy anymore. Everybody's going in different directions. They're going to be dispersed over such a large area. it's going to be impossible to go wrangle them all back together now. This is only reinforced when they shot down a German pilot and was dragged aboard one of Hamilton's boats. At that point, they questioned him,

and the pilot's like, Terpitz, what the fuck you guys talking about? No, of course it didn't leave. That boat never goes anywhere. Right. Some of the merchant ships stuck together, massing their limited debt guns, and they managed to catch up with some of the escort ships that were trying to get away.

When one of the merchant ships tried to stick near the HMS, Pesorka for protection. The Pesorca's captain told them to fuck off because they're going to draw too much attention from the lufwaffe and you're going to make me slow down to protect you.

So it like peddle to the metal abandon the fucking Liberty ships behind them knowing that the merchant ship would not be able to keep up with them. That's like the one case of outright abandonment that I can find. Yeah, geez. In every other case when one of the Liberty ships

found an escort, the escort would slow down and protect them. Sure. Yeah. Like yeah, we'll go together. this is the one time that the escort is like, go fuck yourself, buddy. Fuck, I hate doing my job. No.

I hate this ship in particular. Hey, seeing how there was one ship in this convoy called the Azerbaijan, I can understand where the escort ship is coming from. Naming ships is always just so ridiculous, man. How in the fuck? Whatever, you know. This went on for hours. The Luftwaffe circled overhead of bombing and torpedoing ships

mostly caught out on their own, while U-boat circled and what amounted to be a naval feeding frenzy. The merchant sailors on board knew their situation was completely hopeless, and the crew of one of them, the Samuel Chase, saw a U-boat pop out of the water and didn't even try to fight. They immediately abandoned the ship. The U-boat then, confused, did not fire on them. So the sailors, kind of shrugging, climbed out of their lifeboats,

back onto their ship and sailed away. All right. We're going to hit you a defense I call Ghost Riding the Lerner. Liberty ship. The crew of the Alcoa Ranger, acting without orders from its captain, took down their own American flag and ran up the international flag of surrender when planes appeared overhead, trying to save their life. And this did work.

The planes left them alone. Another ship, the Erlston squared the fuck up and started fighting a U-boat with its deck gun, and won only for another U-boat to destroy it. Only once the ships were downed and their crews in the water were other rescue ships from the fleets that had abandoned them, given clearance to try and pick them back up. That's when they found the commander of the merchant fleet, John Dowding, still alive in a life raft,

because his ship had been shot out from under him. Over the course of the attack, throughout the 4th of July, 13 ships would be sent to the bottom. By the 5th, the Turpitz was once again ordered to be ready to move within the hour, but then turned around again, because they saw a Soviet submarine.

We're like, oh no, we've been spotted, turn around, and went back to port. I feel like being crew of the turpets sounds kind of sick. I'm sure I will regret those words learning more about its story at some point. But in this particular mission, it's like, no, I'm not going to do anything. I will say the turpets does not have a great ending to its storyline. Not in this story specifically, just in history in general. But I can't think of a more frustrated crew of sailors of the entire world at this point.

Like, you're on the turpets, the sister ship of the Bismarck. You are on that ship hoping to go and fight a war. but really all you're doing is practicing parallel parking constantly in Norway. Yeah, you're constantly being spun up and being like, all right, get out, do this, you know, hustle move double time. And then it's like, nah, go back to not sleeping. Go back to not boat. By the fifth, the ship's still at sea had grouped together at different points. Because in this general area, there's a lot of really small islands and whatnot.

Some ships were hiding behind them signaling for other ships to come hide with them. Over the time, they make small groups. They're all trying to get to Archangel or Mermansk. One of these groups was soon set upon by six U-boats and waves of bombers and taken out. On July 7th, the captain of the Winston-Salem, a cigarette, I assume that's only made out of cigarettes, said fuck this shit and crashed his ship into a nearby island so as men could run ashore to hide at a lighthouse. I'm sorry, but that rules. Yeah, that dude rocks.

Legend says they're still there for this day. They sleep in one big bed. The lighthouse is now vaguely shoe-shaped. Yeah, that dude rock. There's another absolute awesome dude that rocks. J.A. Gladwell. He ended up becoming the ad hoc commander of five ships. And he came up with the brilliant idea of pulling up behind an iceberg and then sending

him in over the side of the ship to rapidly paint the ship white as fast as possible. No. Oh my fucking God. This like Metal Gear Solid 3 instant camouflage change. Like you're walking in front of a red brick well. So you put on red brick camo. And this worked. This 100% worked. That is so cool.

J.A. Gladwell and his group of ships get to the Mattochkin straight. From there, he can radio Archangel. And he effectively says, look, we've made it this far. If you don't send us help, we're just going to abandon our ships. Doubting was now an Archangel. He sends a few escorts to help them. And when they arrive, now these are British escorts. The same escorts that had just abandoned them.

And now at this point, everybody is very aware that they've been abandoned. The escorts then signal the merchant ships asking if they need help. And these crews are all American. And remember, this happened on the 4th of July as well. So they're very upset at the Brits. And J.A. Gladwell signals back, go to hell. And then he goes to Archangel on his own. Wow.

Slowly more and more escorts were sent in as the Nazi attack died off, with most of the ships still afloat being crammed with survivors from the ones that had gone down. Like the cam is still afloat and its deck is just, full of dudes who had been pulled out of the water. Nobody had any idea how many ships were still floating out there, or if there were any at this point. It wouldn't be until July 24th that all of the surviving ships were accounted for. 20 days. Jesus.

Yeah. By the end, out of the merchant convoy of 34 ships, 23 were sunk. It's not good. It's pretty bad. That's pretty close to... I think that is two-thirds. Yeah, it's real bad. 153 sailors were killed

but hundreds of thousands of tons of supplies were lost including thousands of trucks several hundred tanks enough small arms and ammo for somewhere between 50 and 100,000 men thousands of tons of food and ammunition the Nazis had at sea caused the single highest battle loss

of American tanks in the entire war wow virtually every side of the allies just pointed the finger at one another. This is your fault. This is your fault. The Soviets were confused as to why such a scatter order was ever given. The U.S. was pissed at the U.K. for everything that had happened.

But the U.S. and U.K. were both pissed off with the Soviets for literally sending no help at all. And then the Soviets were like, oh, well, water under the bridge, when's the next convoy coming? At which point, everybody got pissed at them again. Yeah. Yeah, I think I would too. This turned into a personal and political beef between Dudley Pound and everyone at every other level of the nation's navies at play. At one point, when he and his Soviet counterpart had a meeting, they had to be physically separated, which is a fight I would fucking pay any amount of money to see. These translators, like, so are you saying something about taking you to Poundown?

But the British would have to blame someone for this. And if you're thinking it's going to be Dudley Pound, the brain. brain tumor-addled idiot who retreated at the simple idea of a ship existing. You would, of course, be wrong. They put the blame on Hamilton. Hamilton, who, of course, doesn't deserve any of this. I'm not defending him in any stretch of the imagination. He is an officer, after all.

But he was just following the orders given to him by pound, his absolute superior. Yeah. But I should point out, Hamilton himself was not really. punished in any meaningful way either. Nobody would be punished for this. In closing, we do have a few things. Despite the German Surface Navy being pretty much unused thanks to Hitler,

their turpits did do its job. It managed to defeat an entire convoy by just kind of being around. Doing the old Goghurt commercial of slowly moving back and forth. It's basically the, I load every single person I see on the street, look at that asshole and it's just normal guy. It's like, I'm

terrified at every boat that I think the German surface fleet. Look at that horrible monster. It's just the turp it's being normal. Just park there. Dude, sleep on the deck. Oh, God, run away. And this also brings us to a very strange ending here.

And a guy we've talked about before on the show, British crypted and my personal Waluigi, David Irving, a famed Holocaust denier. Yeah, I know you're talking about. Yeah. For people who are unaware, he is a guy who tried to sue someone for libel for calling him a Holocaust denier. And over the course of several years, he was proven to be just that.

And his reputation was ruined. Now pretty much only neo-Nazis give him money. Rumor is he's died a couple of times, but he keeps coming back. But this is before any of that happened. But also I should point out, because it's very funny, David Irving once paid a man to smuggle broken bits of Auschwitz gas chamber out of Poland by concealing it in his dirty underwear. We talked about this on an episode several years ago.

I fucking hate this guy. He has personally called me a dickhead. But anyway, David Irving wrote a book on PQ17. And for whatever reason, he personally blamed Broom for everything that happened. Broom, in turn, sued him, pointing out that he was full of shit. And while Irving was trying to get that book published, every single historian that the publishers that he was trying to work through who went over the book, said, this is pretty much a step-by-step guide and how to libel someone. And he published it anyway. Irving was then sued, lost the case, which is

hardly shocking, really knowing who he is. It's just really funny that it happened twice. Yeah. Yeah. The end. There you have it. Any moment I have to shit on David Irving, I'm going to take. That is a layup. I'm hitting 10 times out of 10. You lose a libel case in the UK. It's so expensive. My God. Yeah. Well, fuck that dude. You know. The second one, the more famous one against Penguin is the one that truly bankrupted him and made it so people wouldn't touch him anymore. But this happened before all that. And he was found guilty of libel. And people were still fucking with him. But yeah, David Irving, I'll be your enemy until you finally die. The end. Prepare to rest in piss. The end. When he dies, another gender neutral bathroom will open in the

United Kingdom and I look forward to visiting it. Yeah, running up and down the hallway and pissing apparently. That's right. You got to hit every corner, Nate. But before we go on to our questions from the Legion, we have a live show on May 29th. We will also be streaming it. So check out the show notes. You'll have links to both of them.

Get the tickets you want. And my book, The Highlands Burn, is available for a digital pre-order. Comes out the same day as the live show. So pre-order the book. It's a good book. a good book and there's links in the show notes to pre-ordered it now. And most importantly, just like this podcast, it's an independent production. Uh, so support us by getting the book. And we do a thing on this show. Go questions from the Legion. Support the show on Patreon.

Any level, you can ask us a question on Patreon messages. Use the channel that we have in the Discord, which will also have access to. Ask us a question. We'll answer it on the show. Today's question is, has there ever been a fandom that was so weird or toxic to to you that it drove you out of whatever you were being a fan of. Look, I feel like I should have an answer here. I am involved in a lot of things that famously can have weird fans. The answer is no. It's really easy to be a fan of something just on your own.

You don't have to engage with weirdos. If there is something you like, it could be a band or a TV show, it could be Warhammer, whatever. And the online people, because this is always like the toxic fandom is almost always people online, right? You have the extra level of anonymity and not the threat of violence for being a fucking psycho. But you can just ignore them. You don't have to engage with them. And from my personal experience of hobbies in person, everybody's been delightful from Trench Crusade to Warhammer 40K, both in the United States, in the UK and in the Netherlands. I understand that everybody's experience will vary. But like, you can still just enjoy things on your own. You don't

have to engage with weirdos about it. I will admit it's kind of weird to even talk about this because of the reputation and beyond it now, but obviously, when the first season of Rick and Morty came out, I thought it was very funny and very clever. I know there's some weird, bad behavior on the creator's part,

and then also, like, some of the dynamic. For sure. But the second season, I found to be less funny, so I was kind of already on the way out with it. But the fandom became so intensely, unbearably annoying online, and then making online real. that I feel a little bit weird even admitting that I was a fan.

But yeah, in 2014, I remember watching it with a friend of me. Like, this is genuinely very funny. And if you've read sci-fi and fantasy, there's so much sort of like, you don't need to know it to get the plot of the cartoon, but like it makes it funnier. I was impressed by how funny it was. I think Rick and Morty's like the golden example of that happening. I'd also say, too, that something I find interesting is I would probably engage with

more fandom stuff. I kind of deplore things because there's so much material about it in terms of like historical record with Depeche Mode because I'm a huge fan of the band. But Depeche Mode's fan base, when you think about when they became popular, is squarely in like the youngest of boomers and Gen Xers. And the level of weird fan behavior that I see involving anything about them, obsessive fan behavior to the point where like, I think it's made the surviving members of the band or former members of the band very wary of engaging with the fandom outside of like official channels.

It's ubiquitous. Like, they're quite intense and it does, for lack of a better word, kind of shipper behavior. Like there's constant sort of like, I hate Alan Wilder. I love Alan Wilder. Or they should do this or they should do that. And like, it's very, very, very strange. And I'm a, I, I just like their music a lot. I mean, I'm a little too young to have really, like, I mean, I didn't experience it

the same way as people who were like, you know, were in high school in America in the late 80s, for example. But like, their album violated. is considered their best. I think it's a pretty fair assessment. That came out when I was five. My brother and I actually bought it on CD when we were allowed. We got given some money and we could buy a CD when I was six. So I'd been listening to that record on and off, but regularly since I was six years old. I love, I love their music. But their fandom, wow. I think it's like, maybe it's because I'm, you know, obviously I create this podcast and I'm an author. But I feel like

a fan of something could, if I'm already a fan of something, I should. point out. Like, if I'm being introduced to a piece of media by someone who is just intensely off-putting, I'm probably not likely to check it out. That's true. But, like, if I'm already a fan of something and I meet someone who is in whatever way toxic or off-putting or weird, which has happened in every single thing that I'm a fan of, whether it be music or movies or tabletop, whatever. Like, that's the person that creates that or the thing that I'm a fan of, they can't control what that person does. No, of course not. That's a podcast. But Nate, I believe we've casted a pod.

We have. You host and work on many other podcasts. Plug those other podcasts. Yeah, so I am, of course, the co-host of Trash Future and producer Trash Future, as well as Kill James Bond. What a Hell of Way to Dad. I am involved in the executive capacity with no gods, no mayors. Those are all good shows.

You should listen to them. I'm in a band called Second Homes. We have an album called Find a Way to Hate It. It's going to come out soon. It's been mastered. We're just finishing the last bits of kind of assets and artwork and such before it goes out on band. camp. So that should be out in a couple of weeks, hopefully. And knock on wood, sometime towards

the end of this year, we should be performing some shows in the UK as well. Hell yeah. In London and probably also in Glasgow, but we'll see. This is still the only show that I host. You like it for us on Patreon. Pre-order my book. The link is in the show notes. Check out our live show and live stream on May 29th. Get your tickets. It's going to be an awesome show. The venue's awesome. We're going to have new merch. It's going to be a new episode. It's going to be a new episode. episode. I look forward to it. So I hope to see you guys there. And until next time, uh, never trust a sea lord. Never let never trust Lord pound. Promote the sea lord's tumor.