Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - *PREVIEW* The Close Quarters Combat of the USS Buckley

Episode Date: August 13, 2025

This is a preview. For the entire episode support the show on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/136379384?pr=true&cr=true

Today's episode is nothing to do with the United States Army and everything to do with the United States Navy because we're back on our boat shit again. All right. We've talked long enough on this show that if I was to ask you the question, we're talking about World War II era ships, destroyer escorts, destroyers, Uboats, submarines. What do you think that fight looks like between, like, World War II? They're not called escorts. They're called erotic ships. I apologize. destroyer hookers

exotic vessels this is just a rent destroyer when I say I support SWs it means I support shipworkers but what do you think what do you think a fight between a surface ship and a U-boat looks like right death charges torpedoes things like that

we've talked about this before so probably not say hand-to-hand combat right? Probably not no well today we're talking about the U.S. Bucley, where that shit happened. But before we get to why a U-boat and a destroyer escort, that

term is ruined for me now, got into a fist fight, we have to talk about how exactly we got there. And this all is a part of the battle of the Atlantic. What would become the longest battle of World War II?

Roughly, if you want to consider it one large battle. Generally, considered us starting in September 1939, but not being labeled as the Battle of the Atlantic until 1941 and I just realized I did quote fingers on an audio medium I don't know what's going on here guys

the people can tell we can tell yeah yeah and this ran until the end of the war and for a long stretch of that time Nazi U-boats were winning that battle prowling the Atlantic on the hunt for largely transport ships and supply ships

heading for the UK and the Soviet Union in their famous Wolfpack formations. In the early 1940s, the Nazi U-Boat crews were eating so well that they sank over 200 Allied shipping transports in only a couple of months. And the U-boat crews jokingly referred to this as the happy times. And the reason for that is, like, obviously, it felt like they were winning, but also because we did a whole episode a few years ago on how shitty life at a U-boat was. Miserable. This is as close to happiness as they could possibly feel. This feast was not only because of British unpreparedness in the face of a new, much larger U-boat threat that they had faced

in World War I, but also because the Nazis had managed to crack several British naval codes, making hunting for ships much easier in the open ocean, paired with many new U-boat bases on the French coast, making it easier than ever for them to reach out and fuck up the British shit. However, by 1943, things had begun to change. A massive refinement to the convoy system, which we talked about a little bit before, but that is a protected convoy of supply ships, right? Like, rather than just running transport and supply ships over the open ocean, they're going with armed guards, destroyers, battleships, carrier escorts, things like that.

But also as well as long-distance air power and radar advances, which meant that any time a U-boat struck at an allied shipping convoy, there was statistically a high chance that they would also die on the process. Like, once they fired off their torpedo, they were going to get hunted down. So a lot of U-Boats decided that wasn't really worth it, but a lot of them did. The advances in radar also went that U-boats once safe to resurface at day or night to charge their batteries because they ran off of batteries when they were submerged and they could only recharge them in fresh air

when they're on the surface. And now suddenly, they're never safe. Long-range planned following accurate radar readings could hit them day and night so quickly. They wouldn't even have a chance to crash dive to safe. safety. Soon resurfacing at any time was like a game of naval Russian roulette or what the Russian Navy calls being in the Navy. For a second there, I was just like, wait, charge their batteries. And I was like, oh yeah, because they probably had to do it with running engines that they couldn't do underwater. For a second, I was just imagining the solar punk U-boat.

I realized that's not actually what it was. That would be way cooler. It was more, it was more actually accurately described as the grim dark U-boat, which is just a U-boat. Yeah, which is just living a submarine. To be fair, one time we did do an episode on a diesel-powered submarine that could work underwater, and it was horrible. So a battery-powered one was much better. I mean, what we've just discovered is the bisexual U-boat

aka it only eats hot chip, charged a phone, and lie. This fucking U-boat never charging itself. Sitting weird on chairs, I've been told. No, Joe, you shouldn't know that. The things I've learned from this show. Always on Wi-Fi, because their phone's never on. Get a

in, we watch the pussy, twerk, be bisexual. Why? This all stems from a post that a guy did in all caps in 2015. And I'm not going to quote it verbatim because he's a black American dude and he uses turns a phrase that white people are not allowed to use. But he basically says that we have an Irish guy. We're good. Women born in the 90s who are basically don't want to have a real relationship and guys over 30 are trying and realize nothing's working because in his opinion, And all they do is, you know, sit around at home, eat hot Cheetos, charge their phone, use the Wi-Fi, because their phone's not on, twerk, be bisexual, lie. And it's just like that entered into the B-B-B-B-B-B-B-A-E-Hat-Hat-Hat-Hatheat hot Cheetos, that became a thing. And as a result, yeah, it became a... The things that I learned on this podcast, if you would ask me, Joe, why in your years of history education at nearly 40 years old, you know that,

according to your bisexual friends, they sit in chairs in a particular kind of way. I would say, I don't know why I know this, but it is something that I know now. Yes, because we occupy the space

between being gay and being straight, so much like in a similar way, we have occupy a space in between standing and sitting. Thank you. All right. Thank you for that. If it makes you feel any better,

I mean, like things that get lodged in your brain that like, unless you were, you were interested in like, for example, basketball enough to know this story or are online enough to know it. I don't know if you ever heard as an aside the story

of the American basketball player, Ty Lawson, who was playing for a team in China and basically got banned for bullshit. But it was he went to a to a club. There was a girl grinding on him and stuff. And he took photos and shared them. I think Instagram stories. And the text of it was Chinese woman got cakes on below. People got so mad at him. So mad at him. They got mega racist. Did they banned him from China for that? All right. So for me, I want to say cakes on the low all the time, but no one's going to get it. We'll figure out away.

Put a pin on that one for later. You got cakes on the low on mind. I have destroy your sex worker on the mind. Well, I mean, in the literal sense of the English language sentence, you could say that when they tucked into their fucking tins of dessert biscuits while at depth in a submarine, they in fact did have cakes on the low. That's a factual sense. what Ty Lawson meant.

I mean, to be fair, who knows what a loathly Submarter would do with two cakes pushed together? The lead vehicle in the convoy is just captained by a guy who looks like Cat Williams. Well, we weirdly bring things to cakes. Another reason for this turnaround was the United States turning on that cheat code known as the industrial manufacturing capability

of the United States during a time of war, specifically a type of war that they're not getting bombed in, right? We've talked about this before, but even before the U.S. was a combatant in World War II, they signed the Lens Lease Act and various other additions on to it with the Soviets and the British largely supporting their war efforts with its massive and most importantly safe industrial base. And I fell into a bit of a wormhole here, so bear with me, specifically regarding the Soviets and the spam. Now, the support was virtually everything from, you know, the beans, the bullets, as the term was, that is clothing, food, everything up to entire warships. But like the United Kingdom and the USSR at the time were struggling quite hard. And specifically the Soviet Union, as Nikita Khrushchev pointed out, the USSR had lost most of what you call their bread baskets of their empire, which is the place where their food

comes from, right? Most of the Caucasus, Ukraine, Eastern Europe. I mean, the opening stages of Operation Barbarossa were largely bad. We did a series about the Battle of Songhander. We talked about that a little bit more in depth. But the Soviets cannot feed their own people. And they could not feed their own army due to these losses. Enter the cured pork shoulder product.

Notice, spam. Special product of pork and ham, I think, or something. It's something. Nobody's entirely sure where the name came from. Hormel doesn't remember or they never wrote it down. It's generally spiced ham. It's generally what people have agreed on. Delicacy in Hawaii and South Korea.

Shit fucking slaps. Oh, it's so good, man. It's terrible for you. It's like instant colon death. but it's really, really good. This is the one population that spam, like nobody had to worry about how unhealthy spam was is like the fighting soldiers of the Soviet Union

because it's like both this or starve. Yeah, I was going to say, their life expectancy is like 21, so here it doesn't matter. I mean, much like spam, the soldiers of the Soviet Union will soon be turned into a homogenized meat product. Yeah, that is true. If you pan, fry them with eggs, it slaps.

But the Soviets actually politely asked Hormel, the company who made spam, like, this shit's kind of gross. to us, could you make this specific Russian pork stew version that is more in tune with Soviet and therefore Russian tastes? And they did.

They churned out. Like, after the Soviet said, like, hey, this shit is kind of gross. Could you make it taste a little bit worse for us? And they Horbell's like, yeah, sure, whatever. Immediately popped up an assembly line for a specific Soviet spam that cranked out a quarter of

a million tons of this shit, like with the flip of a switch.