War With A Mate - Episode 39: Gastronauts

Episode Date: August 29, 2025

The starting pistol for Turn Two has been fired! The guys are off, with initiative determined, weather rolled for and the fate of James' Naval Convoy is sealed by a daring mission by Andy's Commonwealth airforce. What's on offer this week is a taste-sensation of former flash games, fascist faux pas and two feverishly fun fellows. It's here, it's now - it's one of the episodes of this podcast.

big clump big day welcome to war with a may to bit of rhyming bit of rapping and this is a wrap, that's a wrap and thanks for listening goodbye do-do-do-do-do-do-do do-do-do-do-do-do sweet, we can pipe this in what do you want to do with the rest of our evening?

go to sleep that's not a bad shout actually I've got some energy might as well do the pod yeah, we could record this one I suppose so we could talk about the campaign for North Africa again

if we have to yeah we're always talking about that so what we've been up to playing the campaign for north africa can you be more specific all right detective so we started turn two of graziani's offensive the six turn practice run that we're doing and we've so far worked through the first little bits and pieces pre-op stage which includes initiative determination which we rolled you had a plus three to the roll i had a plus one yep and it came out ones and twos unfortunately one you're older too but yeah the mod got me there it did which means you have unfortunately got initiative for the entirety of turn two which means every upstage you got to pick who goes first

yes and you picked me for upstage one you picked yourself you smug bastard how dare you yeah but before that we got to do some convoy stuff we did some uh axis naval convoy stuff yes specifically reconnaissance and bombing because i found them this time you did you actually tracked down one of my ships one of my convoys coming along shipping lane two i think it was yes yeah so you went for shipping lane two and because as opposed to last time i sent like one plane to all three yes which has horrible odds yeah so i've just decided until i have way more reconnaissance planes let's just get a more likely hit on one than miss free yeah and because of the distribution of my planes and my short-sightedness i didn't place any planes in a very good tactical position

to be able to have a defensive measure against your bombing run so all i had was the flak which came from my my actual convoy and because i didn't have a huge amount of tonnage going on in the one that you went for it doesn't have many flak points uh the flak for these ships is determined by taking the tonnage by the thousands uh dividing it by the thousands and then that's the the flak points you get so in this instance i had two and a half thousand tonnage which when divided by a thousand to give me two flak points which didn't really offset much of what you were dropping and flak suppression yeah i put six planes on flak which worked out nicely because it's uh for every three planes you reduce a flak point by one yeah so just got that and then i

rolled uh hit them with some torpedoes yeah you drop your torpedoes um i i had no defense against this so when you rolled it was very much up to the mercy of the dice you could have rolled for a result of anything between five and twenty percent i think it's in intervals of five percent so yeah you you ended up rolling the five percent which is good for james meant you only took off five percent of my cargo it's not the worst thing in the world but it does i mean the thing is it's not the worst thing in the world these are huge amounts of resource coming in compared to usual stuff i'm driving around so that five percent is enough to supply a division for an op stage realistically oh when it comes to sort of ammunition possibly or um it at the very least

it supplies a bunch of tow points within a division so it is a material loss for me yeah it's good to know roughly how much that sort of costs you yeah in like because it this shipping part is uh you do it all in tonnage which is different from the supply points so you've got to do you gotta like times it all out yes so fuel is one eighth of a ton so for every turn you get eight fuel points yeah stores are one to one so a ton of stores is one store point and for ammo it's four tons is one ammo point and i distributed because these first two shipping routes the first two convoys i had to plan out at the very start of the game yes so this one that you just went for i planned before we'd started playing anything i scheduled it then which means it was divided up

very equally between the tonnage whereas you'd probably now i imagine way heavier towards ammo so you get less of it per yeah i've redistributed it because i've just done it now as part of that same segment right before you did the recon and bombing i had a plan next turns naval convoy and i've done it very differently i've tried to gear it up so um what i haven't done is put as much tons of fuel because what i do have arriving it's far too much fuel it's a ridiculous amount of fuel i realistically i could burn cairo to the ground with that fuel that's not a great soundbite actually um let's hope nobody tries to get me with that one i think coolsville sucks you just better hope there's not a fire oh god i was still in the summer months you know there is a risk

yeah well hopefully that doesn't come to pass so i've yeah i've distributed that differently i don't need that amount of fuel that's just stupid i mean i'm looking at over 10 000 fuel points so i'm just gonna sit in the tripoli boxes for the most part well i'm gonna i'm gonna have to use it at some point otherwise i can't really afford to waste resource i need to do something with it i guess you're probably freed up another turn or two where you could very minimal fuel yeah i might end up just having to reassign some trucks and then just have extra fuel trucks and that permits for a bit more zipping around i'm not really sure what i'm going to do with all the fuel to be honest i've got a fucking huge surplus of fuel and i don't know what to do with

it i'm only now just kind of panicking a little bit about how badly i've i've distributed my cargo but all in all i haven't lost too much in this bombing run which took us on to stall distribution store expenditure which is my admittedly least favorite part of the game still is it would seem i was expecting it to maybe be a little bit faster than the first time around because we've done it before this is still taking me a little bit longer than i hoped yeah i guess for every three op stages this happens once yes so we'll streamline a bit slower that's a good point yeah we haven't practiced it as much as the water stuff and i've got a lot of things that are moving parts i've had to go back over make sure i've definitely got the right

amount of men make sure i've adjusted all my toe points carry them over from previous sheets i just want to be very sure um and also make sure all of my water has been depleted in the right ways because when we rolled on the weather table turns out this upstage we're having a hot one it's a hot one it is a hot one fits in with the summer month that we're now in which is august um it's one of the summer months it's the last of the summer months by some definitions but yeah i'll give you by some definitions but by the by the calendar it is early fall it's not early for also fall it's what it's called in the room yeah but autumn yeah please no i'm not that's good cash don't let that slip no autumn and anyone else listening i know there's quite a lot of

us listeners please it's autumn it's autumn not fall fall is what the leaves do in all we'll start using the word y'all if you start calling fall autumn that's it it's a bit of give and take come on guys this this has to be a partnership you know we can't just have one side sapping everything from the other we need to do a bit of give and take so we'll give you autumn you've given us y'all i think that's fair so the hot weather is not nice it's not because there are a lot of downsides to it some of which we've only really revisited now because we read over the weather stuff when we first went over the rules but we haven't had to look at hot weather again the only thing i knew for certain was that it affects the water evaporation and fuel evaporation yeah well

you get immediately hit with a five percent which means all my stuff because i don't have jerry cans yet so i burn nine percent per store expenditure and then this is another five so i'm burning 14 percent which for some of my things is a lot because i have too many water trucks already well that's that's the issue with percentage based problems isn't it it's the fact that it is a percentage so if you've got a huge amount of water in a convoy that's a lot of water that's being used up feels bad yeah i can't imagine it's greater byu mine's only six percent base with the extra five percent surcharge so yeah so 11 overall that's not yeah it's not great either but that extra four percent that you're losing is sort of offset to an extent by the fact that this turn the

start of the turn i also have to factor in the pasta point yes everybody's water per toe point is it of infantry it's yeah every toe point that uses a store has to also use up an extra oh so even your tanks or um it's sorry no just infantry sorry so the infantry that use up any infantry that do use up the store also use water yeah so uh otherwise they they lose huge swathes of cohesion because without their pasta they go absolutely mental for some reason seems a little bit like a pointed stereotype i don't think there's much historical accuracy to it based on what the booklet itself says but it's everyone's favorite wacky quirky rule it's the one everyone seems to quote when it comes up and i just want to remind everyone it's not funny it's not a joke

it's actually bothering me it actually ruins part of the play and it's it's not really an enjoyable experience so let's keep talking about that one to a minimum let's talk about the camels instead because that that's a bit more light-hearted it is also no answers there no no answers still they're full of water though camels notoriously are they yeah yeah in the humps you just uh crack them open then you can drink oh delicious or i might be thinking of cactus anything in the desert crack it open have a drink yeah a rock a spider probably war in there yeah there's got to be water and some rocks i mean yeah i would imagine volcanoes are big rocks full of water it's just really hot water yeah it's the red water yeah red water volvic why do you think they call it

volvic water because they scoop it out of the volcano that's right everyone that's that's why they get the the name is from that well done my mind 10 points for everyone who got that at home Quiz section, that's what we should do The war with a mate pub quiz We should do a pub quiz sometime Just see how we do We have, haven't we? We've done one quite a while ago

I think we underperformed I would imagine so It was the pub that was near the first place we lived together Oh yes We did that once I remember that To be fair, that place was it was mostly like a bunch of students that were going there so i feel like some locals but we

definitely did not do well on that quiz yeah i feel like if you're a student you're a bit more geared into an educational mindset and we weren't we were we were just dicking around still are what are you talking about look at what we're doing now we're we're spending our time wisely we're developing a real niche for a quiz oh god imagine if this came up we'd actually do quite badly because it would be like tell us about operation let's give a date for operation compass and i'd be like i can tell you about a guy walking across the desert with like a bullet hole in his neck i've not done the overall thing yet do you guys remember when there was a secret trapdoor pit under the under the rug remember when that happened

if the question is which italian military leader almost died because of a rug In which episode did we have the dogfight over Mersa Matruh? Is that not going to be asked? That's a big question. What are you talking about? I do feel like the fish could... That's pub quiz type knowledge. Oh, the beating of the fish.

Yes. Oh, the beating with the fish, the dried fish. That seems far too niche, by the way. There's no way that would come up in a pub quiz. Unless it is a North African campaign and prelude to North African campaign quiz. Yeah, it might be too specific. For that one to come up,

it would have to be about all of the stuff that led up to every person involved in the North African campaign. Yeah, so that's never going to help. Far too many niche branches. Why am I learning all this useless stuff? I mean, you think that's bad? Remember the rulebook?

That's pretty niche knowledge. Yeah. I wonder how many people have read the rulebook cover to cover. Maybe less than... I think maybe a couple of thousand have read it. Yes, yeah, definitely. i was thinking at least thousands yeah yeah it might be less than like two or three hundred who've

like i'm actually learning this in order to try and sit down and play it yeah i wish we could get the stats on this but there's no way to really do it because it's so far-fetched and silly yeah i've seen a few people playing it at like um there's someone on reddit who we've seen a few times who's doing updates on hex encounter or board game yeah and they seem to be playing it like a sort of a games workshop type uh like gaming like a gaming shop yeah um but i think they're just they're playing a scenario they're playing the desert fox scenario i think yeah which is one of the later scenarios i think it's the second one yeah yeah but uh i guess we're playing a scenario that's true yeah that's a good point and then we're gonna go into the full game uh

when we get around to that i did realize something this week because i was looking up something in the rules to plan something i very rarely encounter something where there's not a googleable answer yes like even when i'm like at work doing like i do coding someone online has had a similar enough problem that you can sort of that it's applicable yes this is maybe the only thing i do where it's like no there's no answers out there for it like there's nowhere to look it's quite a rare feeling to be like no you actually have to figure this out yourself yeah no i get that as well i'll be when i'm trying to get rule clarification my first thing is i'll open up a new tab and then i'll close it down immediately and go well this is useless yeah there's nothing

for me to find online we are the only people who can do this we have to do it ourselves because we've got the rule book yeah so it's either that or we put out a post on some obscure forum and said has anyone played the game before and if so can you help us with this i mean we've got a the god send that is matthew who sends us in emails he's a fellow who's uh playing the game solo and he's he's often sending some corrections of stuff that we've missed or queried some stuff and we've we've tried to give him a little bit of help every now and then when he's asked a question as if we know what we're talking about and it's just so frustrating to not it goes to show the reliance and dependency on search engines yeah it is it's an odd feeling and it shouldn't be

yeah because i remember not having a computer yes me too i was one of the last of my like friends to have like a laptop yeah like i had like a big like chunky computer at my grandma's house so i'd go and like play on that on sundays i'd play uh i play toontown remember that so it's an mmorpg uh all around um toons and uh you have to like throw pies at businessmen uh you know stop all these sticks in the mud from ruining the fun of toontown was this like a mini clip game or like mouse breaker or something no no this was like a full-on like subscription style oh like online multiplayer games the ones i dabbled runescape and then adventure quest people oh god i remember adventure quest that was that was quite bad if i

remember correctly yes even for freely accessible mmos it was quite bad yeah so toontown's kind of like runescape um if you've got a a song in your heart okay it's not just it's not just about the grind it's about this bloodless grinding yeah it's it's got a bit of heart to it i think it's gone now i don't imagine it's still around probably not but they don't last so yes the The search engine problem is a very interesting one to have because, yeah, there's nothing else I can think of where there's a fully formed thing that I'm tackling, which is, in this case, the game.

And there's nowhere to look for it. Like, we've got the game. It's a physical thing. It's designed. It has rules. In theory, you should be able to go, oh, well, someone will have played this before. There's answers to all of these ambiguous sections of the game.

There's just simply not. Which is part of what makes this so unique. That's why we started it. we want to beat the game maybe for the first time it's ever been beaten and it's just yeah it plays psychological games with you but i quite like it it's a fun challenge i like that we have to actually dig and look there is something there's not because normally the thing is shifting out bad information yeah yeah but at this point i'd like something to be like that's wrong but this it's like queued up something else but well the amount of stuff i get now on my like social media

feeds where it's just like a fake ai article and a lot of it i get a lot of stuff about avengers doomsday popping up now where it's just like a an ai generated video of robert downey jr as dr doom yeah and it'll be like oh this this image has just been leaked or this video has just been leaked and it's just so far-fetched and silly and it's just loads of actual people well a combination of actual people and what i presume and hope to be bots just falling forward hook line and sinker and i'm like come on like there's a line if you believe in this what else will you believe like that's insane well boomers can't see the ai thing yeah it does seem to be a lot of that demographic where they're like oh yeah like this is this is cool and it's like what do

you mean it's cool it's unreal yeah i don't know do you mean it's like a cool like recreation of what you think this might be but it's not actually real i hope you don't think it's real it's just deeply concerning the state of the world andy yeah speaking of deeply concerning i guess some of your guys are going hungry for i i take it oh god yes they are so a lot of my garrisons are in a state of extreme hunger because of the the first turn you've actually started attrition on some of the garrisons from what you said i will i will this turn yeah uh because i'm part way through the store expenditure but i've already noted down i think two garrisons that have been without food for the first turn on our without food again so i am in a bit of a pickle because

they don't have any trucks assigned to them which means i have no resources i'm gonna have to get trucks to them and in op stage three i realize um i i really really fucked up my trucking convoys because i did not get them to the places they needed to go with the stores they needed to distribute so the garrisons are going to be suffering for it some of them are not very big garrisons they're two to three toe points some of them oh so they may just sort of evaporate over time yeah by the end of next turn if i don't do something they could well just disappear from the map is it worth it do you think in your head are you thinking is it worth it to sort of have a big expenditure of trucks and re realign your plans around that well or is it worth i wasn't

going to use them anyway yeah i'm just gonna let these guys i'm dancing around with that a little bit in my head because the the garrisons being there i mean part of it's likely due to historical accuracy which i mean the game loves and part of it is like there's got to be a tactical advantage to having them there because they they don't exert a zone of control because of their size I don't think there is a tactical advantage to having them there

I think when the Italians were in Libya they were garrisoning towns with sort of two to three hundred men and then in the pursuit of historical accuracy they go down on the thing because there's a lot of stuff that's not tactically

optimal but both sides are doing yes no you are right i'm yeah i'm just i'm worried that i'm gonna have this mentality let this happen in the scenario and then when we play the full campaign we've got like 20 turns in you push west and i'm like oh fuck there was actually a reason for them to be here so i'm so scared because i don't think it'll be much of an issue and graziani's offensive but I do worry that it'll come to the main campaign and they will play some sort of pivoting role

I guess also with the main campaign if a unit's eliminated it's gone forever yes and you can't like replacement point it back or anything exactly so you do have to be much more careful I guess of like if this goes on turn

like 10 of the actual game I'm missing it for 100 turns yes and i because some of the garrisons are pretty sizable yeah and even they i think they are going to be hungry i think there's a couple of them that are a decent size and so like they've got you're looking at maybe like 10 to 15 tour points yeah so some of them are actually like a sizable force they can exert a zone of control they've got a worthwhile force one that i could even march out to help bolster some units out in the out in the desert or even just keep there to bolster

defenses along the west so those ones i'm like well i do need to feed them but the ones where it's like one or two tour points or even like maybe five tour points to be honest i'm like is it really worth doing that or is it more worthwhile marching them off and they just meet up with a truck oh so they leave with no supplies they leave with um because they can't without trucks yeah and then you just like move them their cpa towards where a truck's gonna go past yes so to try and intercept the route of a truck so then the truck isn't getting taken too far off course and then that way i'm not having to redirect my whole convoy for an offstage that's it i hadn't thought about like because i've got some guys at mercer matru who don't have

trucks they're like a garrison i hadn't thought about like i'll just march them over to trucks or a division that has trucks yes but the division doesn't have to pick them up they can't do a i mean i'd be if i was on the ground and a commander was like you're gonna walk for two days into the desert the trucks will get you i promise i'm really fragging my commander but good thing is that you don't have to worry about that because in in a an actual sized game where you've got five players on each team you might have a bit of pushback where the guy who's in charge of distributing soldiers and movement and then someone else says oh by the way you're gonna have to march them here if you want resources you'd probably be like fuck no i want to look

after my man you're gonna have to move the trucks but instead it's all your fault if it goes wrong which is probably an argument that happened it must have at one point in the game like yeah there must have been like well no i these supplies are more important for my pet project oh yeah there'll have been all sorts of friction now that we've seen sort of firsthand how limited the resources are i think there must have been argument people will have died over it as well there will have been instances where people have died out there because of poor logistics oh yeah it's just a scary thought that you know this this stuff that we sort of wax about lyrical and joke on with in the game it's like wow this just fucking killed people yeah and i wonder how

many deaths can be attributed to somebody doing essentially what we're doing with the game moving a piece around be like it's going to go here and then a truck misses people by like 10 miles and they they starve or they they go thirsty and get lost well the example the guys who walked after that the long range desert group guys the plane saw them drop something it hit a hard bit of ground and all the liquid oh god yeah i forgot about that it's though you can get unlucky in a very granular way during a war because that's even worse because that was like they've dropped it there and the thing is the the pilot will have no idea what's just happened you'll be heading back like oh i saw them i dropped the supplies we'll expect them and then they'll get back to

base in like a month's time and they'll just start strangling the guy who was flying the plane why did you drop it there so it's so many small domino effects i mean we've talked about this at length with the history segments all these small things these knock-on effects that result in huge changes it's crazy and that's what i'm worried the garrisons will do if i let them die i'm concerned it ends up having a big pivotal role that they could have had like history voice from youtube videos is like and that was his great mistake as the garrisons were there when the push came yeah it's like if only there was a hundred men in just slow them down for one upstage yes that's it that's all i needed or or you know if you have to take them prisoner and then they

end up draining your resource that's a tactic i would like to try and employ i'm going to try and overwhelm you with prisoners so that you just have to drain all of your resources feeding my men well there's so many prisoners in this war so far there's only been two instances not an hour yeah now it's the actual war it's it's like hundreds of thousands of people on both sides going back and forth i'm interested to see how many of that uh scale of prisoners actually translates into this game yeah because so far we've had one one full turn and we've only had i think two instances of prisoners captured yeah because you ran away from me uh coward yes yeah yeah no sorry tactical retreat yeah no no no you can't convince me of that i will always look down

upon you until it's convenient for me not to when i make a retreat well you can look down on me while i knock you off your plinth and kill you with the seventh that still exists nothing can knock me off my plinth andy i'm bolded into my plinth i've got a seat belt that holds me in i'm strapped on and i'm holding on as well with a white knuckle grip well you're gonna have to leave it because another problem of hot weather and bad transition wow smooth metaphor that i didn't realize until it's double water expenditure for everything oh sorry yes we were talking about the hot weather uh yeah so um yes it is um so not only is it the case that we have to evaporate a shit ton more stuff we also have to use twice the amount of water for anybody who uses water

yeah in this off stage which is all infantry and then if you want to do something with a vehicle yeah yeah so so that's great we also can't um is it the case you uh you need to give water rations if you're doing construction uh yes yeah so we've done doing any construction a minute but this won't be the off stage to start because there's just well on the upside i guess what we can do is just gear up our convoys send them over maybe they'll travel a little bit further and drop off the water that won't be a problem will it andy no no no no unless of course the hot weather also means that the breakdown table is adjusted so vehicles break down more often during hot weather that would be terrible wouldn't it that

would be a terrible piece of attention to detail it's making me scared about moving my arm at divisions well andy i've got terrible news oh that's exactly what happens oh fuck yeah so vehicles on the breakdown table that you roll on um it shifted one column to the right which is negative the bad direction the bad direction the right is the bad direction so it means that vehicles are much more likely to break down bearing in mind a lot of tanks are already adjusted two columns to the right anyway so you're looking at an adjustment of three columns to the right so if you move a tank during this off stage there's a very good chance some of them will break down yeah which is just deplorable it's horrible i i'm scared to move my tanks andy's when i am which is a big

problem because i was really i really wanted to get those armored divisions moving this turn you know i might just try and force you into a position where you need to move quite far away with the seventh armored division so they break down by a bit there's no tanks left just gonna get them stuck out in the middle of nowhere and then i'm gonna capture them and use them in an upstage where it's a bit cooler i do i would like to get some capture doing i do i think i've got two guns of yours uh yes which i need to refit and get moving um i need to also keep an eye on how far away my breakdown um broken down trucks and stuff are because some of those i need to start planning whether or not i'm gonna have them brought back

to the front lines or keep them up in Tobruk. Yeah. There's a lot of stuff on its way to Tobruk from the middle of the map. Oh, the breakdown. All the broken down stuff. Loads of tanks. Well, loads of trucks sometimes.

Is it 8 CBA or 10? It's very little. I think it's an even number. I think it's either 6 or 8. You're crawling. It's like 3 hexes. 3 hexes on clear the best terrain yeah so it's not going to be very easy to get them back by the time they

get back i'm like i'm just gonna have to play it by ear see where you are yeah take it from there but we're yeah we're going to be seeing out the pre-op stage stuff and then when water distribution sorted out then we're eyeing up some air combat some air missions yes do you know what you're doing in theory uh no oh okay not gonna lie no i don't have a very solid plan at the minute for aircraft i've got a broad plan for this turn overall but the fact you're going first i'm just trying to figure out what the best move is with my aircraft because i yeah i know exactly what i'm doing great that's bad news for me yeah don't like that at all not one jot i will admit I caught a little bug for the game last week.

I got the map out when we weren't going to play and had a look. Oh, you nerd. I know, it's bad. You big loser. That's not fair. I can't do that. You're not allowed to get the map out without me.

Okay. Extra tactician type. Right, I'm allowed to come into your house when you're at work from now on, and I get to look at the map at my leisure. I'll get you a key cut. Just popping around to look at the map. i guess i can't complain i'm allowed to now squatters rides baby yeah that's that's pretty

pretty bad news for me if you're spending time looking at the map because you're so excited to do air stuff no i'm not happy with that i'm also i'm excited to get my boats into play oh for fuck's sake i have no idea how effective they will be but i've been excited about them for a while where i'm gonna pull all my men away from the coast i'm not having this that's fine no it's not for god's sake why is war so hard I don't like this it feels like every upstage and every turn there's just a new thing

for me to worry about it's opposition stage operation stage you're the opposition I don't like you anymore you know I do like I like the people who listen better than I like you that's fair

they're not actively trying to stop you doing things no usually it's words of encouragement or some fun facts and information so we're going to have a little look at that now we're going to see what you guys have been sending in the mailbox is on the quiet side at the moment so if anyone does want to send anything in we'll probably get to it fairly soon

but for the time being we have an email in from a second time mailer this one comes from Ethan who says hello Andy and James since I last sent in a dispatch I have been doing my best to remain subtle, humble and brave

well thank you, I'm glad somebody is because Andy's not being very very subtle at the moment it's very brave of you to look at the map when i'm on here it's astounding that both they've already reached turn two so quickly and how has it taken more than half a year to reach turn two are thoughts in my mind so congratulations and commiserations for getting this far uh i feel the same way they are also thoughts i have in parallel in my head yeah when we were talking earlier i've mentioned uh i looked through my log of activity and i'd said that the schferzen garrison that you captured early on it was in april that's when you did that

it's fucking august now it's nearly september um so it goes on to say uh hearing you mention uh denunzio that it is denunzio yeah gabrielle denunzio yes in episode 37 reminded me of an episode of the excellent podcast no guards no mares who went over his leadership of the town of fiume yeah yeah nice nailed it uh in croatia which is now rejecter my pronunciation is shot sorry um and given his actions consulting the stars on a starless night is very much in character for him if he had become second is it ducie duche duche oh my god yeah the deuce the deuce instead of mussolini history would have been much weirder but it wouldn't greatly affect italy's contribution to the second world war your most subtle humble and brave of servants

aethon well thank you very much for dropping that in aethon the the the parallel duality thought of congratulations and commiserations we feel that as well so i'm glad it's bleeding through to everyone who's listening as well and i i went and listened uh this saw this and went and listened to that episode about D'Annunzio it's completely batshit crazy and very entertaining

I think when he says it wouldn't greatly affect their contribution to the Second World War but it would make it weirder that is absolutely correct yeah you'd mentioned a little bit about that I suppose since we know that it's something to dip into I guess we'll not get too spoilery for the history

I don't know if they'll ever have a history segment because they're not Denunzio, he's not actually involved in anything too closely, he's just a weird guy that exists when all this is happening We like weird guys though, they crop up We'll get to them

It's a good suggestion to look into more, because he is he's a bizarre man Yeah, we love hearing about the bizarre folk, and it's not the only piece of mail that we have who mentions a recommendation of a

strange fellow, I believe uh yeah so thanks to aphid and we've got this one in from elliot uh hello no doxing please oh we can't promise that i'm a listener in north carolina but i'm british just wanted to say i'm enjoying the podcast the suggestion for a history segment uh i think could be good is admiral cunningham aka abc ah is that where they got the alphabet from that is yeah sort of pioneered that uh he was in charge of the royal navy in the mediterranean and he had a pretty interesting war um bit of a teaser i guess for the uh history segment after balbo uh it'll be this guy oh nice you've locked in with that one then uh yes i've started reading his autobiography of course of

course god you you go heavy with the the research it's it's always it's always paid off though yeah this is a he'll be fun as well uh yeah well thank you for the suggestion we'll uh we'll we'll by the sounds of it definitely be getting into that in the next few weeks um do you also have their address there andy so we can read it out i'll put it in the show description good idea address yeah social security that kind of thing yes good idea well we'll probably also have a national insurance number because of they're british so we can probably put that up as well We can dox them on two continents. Ah, perfect.

Dual citizenship and the woes of having it. Well, if anyone would like to send an email, and we promise not to dox, we always bleep those errors and we don't actively seek national insurance numbers. But hey, if you want to send it along, it's a fun fact. We'll see how close our national insurance numbers are.

Yeah, we'll file it away somewhere. You give your information to the government anyway. We're nicer than the government. we make a lovely podcast for you the government doesn't do shit so if there is anything you'd like to send over whether it's a question about the game comment about anything that we're doing or anything in general to be honest i mean some of the stuff we read out it's tangentially related to best at times but love to hear it though we absolutely love to hear it so anything you want to send over info at war with a mate.co.uk is the email address and you can also send a web form

on the website which is warwithamate.co.uk and our instagram is war with a mate got all these different channels and platforms so you pick your flavor of communication and we'll sup it up look forward to hearing from you but with that out of the way and with some inspiration for history i suppose we better tackle a little bit more of what we've currently got going indeed so how's history looking today andy weird of course i'd hope for nothing less i'm just gonna get what did you think was gonna be the next step in balbo's life here i'll be honest based on the other characters we've had in in the history segments and also this guy being particularly weird it sounds like his life's kind of went off the rails a little bit now it doesn't really sound

like there's much else he can accomplish in the immediate i know how his story ends but i mean i don't know what happens in between i guess we'll find out he's enlisted now isn't he and uh he's involved in the air force uh yes he's just been paid minister of the air force so he's now involved in there and at some point he dies you're there in in the air so there's gonna be some stuff in between that so i'll start the quote it's a pretty simple one i believe the future of italy is in the guy quote balbo balbo talk about foreshadowing buddy so just to give some context to try and some of this makes sense uh so this is november 1926 the wright brothers first fight flight is december 17th 1903 okay so we've not had a whole lot of aviation going on no it's about 20 years

uh it's italy's first airline which had one route which was between italy uh between rome and turkey i believe it was easy jet wasn't it yeah this is the first one first airline yeah aereo espresso italia uh that's founded in december 1923 it begins its first flights in august 1926 so around the time just before he takes it their first commercial flight happens oh perfect uh and one more uh fun well a couple more uh no one has flown from the united states to hawaii at this point okay so that's just the general state of uh aircraft is very much it's very new it's very exciting to everyone uh and italy doesn't have an air force at this point mussolini puts mussolini puts um balbo in charge as the undersecretary uh mussolini

remains as the interim minister but basically balbo is in charge of the whole air force okay uh this is kind of a win-win for Mussolini because on one hand Balbo's great at getting attention for stuff and being a big showman yeah but the air force is not really a priority at that point so his thinking is I put Balbo in here he either does a good job and I get an air force and a bunch of propaganda or my rival like fails very publicly yes which i suppose one of those does happen yeah so all the planes you're gonna have uh they're like air superiority you have in the game at the start of this is because of like his work over the next few years oh well i caught myself nearly saying thank you to him um i'll not do that yeah that's seems like a bad one uh

Also, the thing that's exciting to them is the Air Force is young and being created now. This also happened in Nazi Germany. Because they were building these things from the ground up under a fascist regime, they were, like, the most fascist created in that mold branch of the military. Okay.

So I think for both of them it went Air Force, most fascist, then Army, then Navy. um how does by what metric are the the most fascist like the most loyal like oh right okay most members of like the party oh our members right okay yeah um because it's this new thing and also they're building it so they're just like we're gonna put our people in it oh i guess that makes sense yeah uh so balbo does his flight training the next year uh he'd always dreamed of flying he tried to leave during world war one to fly uh now he gets to have his go in his plane and he also creates the city of air in rome which is the like headquarters of this new

air force and the resource center he also creates the high-speed experimental department which is based on armand denunzio's old private seaplane plane base okay a lot of uh intertwining tales then yeah this department's given immense resources to win something called the schneider cup which is a seaplane race that's happening annually at this point release the schneider cup yeah so he has a slightly different view of the air force than a lot of people because at this time aviate has become global celebrities like amelie airheart but the guys who do like the first crossings of oceans or like the first time to fly a plane to every these guys are like public figures newspapers will be like oh this guy didn't get to take off because the weather was bad that

would be like international news oh okay so that real big superstars real big celebrities which is why it's such a good propaganda tool but at the same time balbo wants he finds these these guys annoying essentially because they become really famous and then it's like oh we have to cater these guys so his thing is i'm gonna do formation flying so most of this is like one plane will go and do stuff his is like i'm gonna get like 50 planes to fly in formation to do a bunch of stuff oh okay right um to sort of diffuse the praise so only he gets it really yeah he's the he's the um the conductor of the orchestra yeah and all this works extremely well uh the first one is a long range multi-leg flight of the western mediterranean like up france spain around the coast of africa

okay and they'll arrive and there'll be like thousands of people waiting to see the planes come in it's like the beatles yeah like these guys are astronauts almost like i'm trying to think of a comparison but it's like because at this time this is even before like guy gets a suit on to fly a plane like 50s thing yes this is like guys getting on planes it's like oh wow these are explorers of this new thing yeah they're pioneers of a new mode of transportation so they do the western mediterranean and the following year in june uh they do the eastern mediterranean one of the guys who's doing this is a guy called general de pin and pinendo um who was promoted following both flights and also did a bunch of flights of his own uh to the point

there's like small monuments of him all over the world as like a aeronaut okay but two months after this second tour um balbo starts exploiting rumors about this guy because he's a potential rival of course uh and asked him to account for funding of the trips he'd carried out being like you've probably laundered money he's trying to al capone him yeah uh so dipendo doesn't want to take this lying down uh so he sends a letter to mussolini like criticizing all this like overly spectacular propaganda stuff at the expense of like a functioning air force um mussolini fires him because he's like that's what i want this guy doesn't get it so unlike mussolini's resignation bluff this time he does it and mostly is yeah get out this is all about propaganda what are you

talking about that's really backfired for the guy all of these have mainly been around land like around the mediterranean um but barbara's next idea is he's gonna sail across the atlantic and he wants to be the first group of planes in history to do this information so he gets especially designed planes uh sea planes and he decides he's gonna go across the south atlantic to rio de janeiro okay yeah uh they head around this like horn of africa and then from uh guinea basu they head across which is sort of bottom of the cave of west africa yes yeah yeah yeah uh they head across there and it actually goes quite well uh two planes don't take off to overheating and one crashes but the pilots are rescued okay not too bad then i suppose and they

arrive to like crowds of tens of thousands of people so yeah it's yeah it sounds like a successful job yeah and that works so well that they want to do another one for the 10-year anniversary of the italian air force the regia aeronautica okay yeah which coincides nicely with the century of progress which is the chicago world fair from 1933 to 1934 right so he's gonna fly his planes from rome to the chicago world fair to be like the exhibit as well okay that's ambitious uh yeah he heads up to amsterdam which he described like this is an example of basically what's going to happen everywhere he goes but he flies up to amsterdam uh huge reception he's given the keys to the city and in a message to mussolini uh he says they gave us everything but rest and sleep

he's like a global superstar at this point uh they continue up they go along sort of to iceland uh wait there for a bit and then head on to the americas uh they're doing this all on sea planes not because they're like wanting to land in the middle of the ocean it's just they're going to places without runways so a lot of early aviation is sea planes yeah because there's not an infrastructure to house planes yeah whereas now they're like a novelty then it's like the only realistic way of doing it yes yeah yeah so they have they're supported by five destroyers um who do like radio ops and give them food but they don't publicize any of that yeah for the public it's just we're doing this flight of i think it's 50 planes yeah it takes away from the shine of it

if they've got actual help yeah so he eventually arrives in chicago um on the 15th of july uh it's proclaimed Italo Balbo Day. The guy got a day? Yeah. A street is renamed to Balbo Avenue. One of the towns they flew over on the coast to give a scale of how big this thing is, the population of the town is 10,000.

30,000 people come to the town to see the planes fly over. Bloody hell, that's a big turnout. Yeah. um but something i do quite like is when they arrive the american air force flies over spelling italia out in planes which is more coordinated and like a higher skill maneuver so they do a little bit of like uh yeah that's impressive mate but we're gonna overshadow you yeah it's like oh a little tribute to you uh we've spelled out your name with our planes yeah ah you're shitting on us a little video uh but during this he gets he appears on the cover of time magazine

what the fuck um he's nominated by the sioux tribe to be a chief and given the name chief flying eagle what is going on they send a roman pillar from his home from italy and put it up as a memorial in chicago on balbo avenue which is still there this is this guy briefly the most important man in the world he's briefly the one of the most famous people in the world um his name becomes people will be like oh there's a balbo which describes planes flying in formation so like in italy the word for planes in formation becomes this guy's name oh my god this guy's living the fucking dream also i don't know if i've physically described him yet he has a bizarre goatee like you know how normally a goatee is like just round the mouth and

it's not too long or anything yeah he has like if he's just cut the sides of quite a substantial beard into a point like you know the egyptian pharaohs with those like things out their chin yes he kind of has grown one of them it's like a dense long goatee i'm picturing like a bit of a gnome thing going on he it would be a gnomish goatee it would actually yeah that is but uh a balboa is now the name of that type of goatee and mustache right god this guy's everything's named after him yeah you wouldn't know what someone's talking about if they're like referred with balboa it's like you took my planes took my facial hair talk about man of the year time magazine so this is all while this is all happening uh italy he's also involved in

discussions of potentially reshaping the entire italian military into one branch called the balbo it would have been i assume but they're trying to they're thinking about getting rid of separate like air force navy and just having one thing and that ultimately falls through because he's the guy they're like gonna say is being in charge of that and mussolini's like no no no no i think i'm actually quite sick of this guy this guy is a genuine threat to me he's publicly disagreed with me he's internationally popular he's also popular with our ground force black shirt folks it's just a concerning guy for a leader so despite doing so like well at all of this stuff um mercilini is like i need to get

rid of this guy i mean i i understand why he feels threatened this guy is loved by i presume millions yeah so in the 13th of august 1933 he's promoted to air marshal um because he's done such a good job but then on the 7th of november 1933 he's appointed the governor general of the italian colony of what'll come to be called libya oh i see if we remember some of the stuff that happened with graziani with the libyan genocide and stuff you know when i was mentioning uh planes dropping gas into the desert oh yeah these are his planes what a bastard this is him but we'll get to his uh his time in north africa next week uh as governor and his abrupt end his untimely demise yeah the death of a superstar uh yeah uh just a couple of small things that i just found very funny

uh this world fair in chicago it's meant to be like the latest and greatest in technology and innovation from all over the world it's like a soft power thing but showing off yeah thing it's described things that people could expect to see at the fair the latest wonders of rail travel automobiles architecture and even cigarette smoking robots which is the exposition is about to emphasize technology progress and the creation of a utopia well that cigarettes couldn't be smoked by robots yes a design but that's not good they shouldn't be smoking there's no benefit to a robot having a cigarette no they can't there's no chemical change that's nothing that's not utopian that's stupid

that's what they're showing oh god why was the past so fucking muddled also uh last thing about this this isn't related to any of this uh but did you know there's a first authenticated membership of the mile high club no i didn't realize they gave out actual certificates or anything it's a moment in the history of aviation pilot lawrence sperry and uh co-pilot slash socialite dorothy rice sims were in a flying boat equipped with an autopilot on november 21st 1916 uh they were having sex in the plane but one of them bumped the autopilot which resulted in a botched landing in which both of them were discovered naked.

So there is actually a first nightclub. The founding members are known. It's one of, if you look at the list of moments in aviation. You know what, I'm really surprised that they don't refer to it as getting balboed. I'm sure he

wanted to give it a go. He probably did. He was not a faithful man to his wife. the man was a scumbag by a lot of regards i know the last leg of that tour there in new york a million people came to watch the parade like what the hell he is famous in a way i don't actually think translates to modern times anymore like there's people who are hugely famous but yeah it just the way that he's famous as well it's it's so broad it because it's a it's an accomplishment yeah yeah it's it's so odd because there's not

really modes of transport being newly developed now in in the sort of modern age for anyone listening in the future that's 2025 well the thing i kind of thought of this is like a buzz armstrong uh buzz armstrong the love child of both um buzz aldrin was that's right isn't it buzz aldrin yeah um that's calling who the hell's armstrong oh my god uh neil armstrong neil i'm bloody hell i know he said lance yeah this is if neil armstrong was like part of the cabinet for like the US

is like had a substantial political career then went to space and then created the man burn and then like yeah and it was named after him it's like a very bizarre thing but yeah

this is brilliant for propaganda for the Italians but also it fools the higher ups because they're air force is all for doing like stunts basically they're like obsessed with getting speed records and like fists and stuff but they're not actually that useful for what you want your air force to do which is fight a war yeah this uh i i see why he ends up getting killed yeah because this man is a phenomenon like the the stuff going on around him he's drawing in a crowd of a million yeah

The guy is so big that you can't help but be threatened if you're in power, and he's already publicly denounced some of your standpoints. Yeah, he's pushed you and has the support of the people. That must be terrifying as a fascist leader. Yeah. This guy's popular, loved, sent him a bloody pillar from his hometown. It's up on Balbo Street. What a fucking stupid time.

I was just reading this like, what the fuck is going on? That's why I tried to give some context for the air aviation stuff, because the first time I read it, I was like, this simply doesn't make any sense to me. Well, as history goes, it seems to be as wacky as always, and

thank you for putting that together, and I'm very excited to see how it concludes, Andy. Well, I think history is odd, but what we like to do is a little bit odd as well. A little bit quirky. that's what we are our own just two wacky guys doing wacky things we're just so fun and quirky and different so because of that i think it's time andy to tap into something that just before you do

can i just say the douchiest thing someone's ever said to me please you know this person i'll tell you who it was afterwards they earnestly said i'm the kind of quirky person who should be good at art i've got i've got a couple of guesses as to who that is i think i've yeah i know this might be so sorry no that i think i know but we are the quirky people who are good at art yeah and part of that art is that at the end of each episode we can always come back together we can get past the hardships of you um i guess you haven't done anything wrong to me in this particular play session but i am still feeling animosity towards you don't smile at me like that that makes me angry i know so in order to do that we have to find some common ground

and now for something nicer a little oasis in the war it's time for some common ground i'm trying the intro for common ground I'm recording maybe yeah what have you got for me synchronicity so

my common ground this week I was having a little bit of thought about different different stuff in my my life

things I enjoy okay things that I was like how can we find a common ground that's going to be less complaining because I feel like mine are a little bit complaining

sometimes I get down with some issues things that rile me up so i thought what's nice and i think we need to start finding more flavors more flavors more flavors interesting is this a is this a new one because they did come up with a new there's a couple options here yeah because back in my day when i was growing up it was sweet sour bitter there was no umami where's this come from umami yeah so you're wanting a new one like that basic no are you just wanting new i would be very happy if there's a new a new sort of core flavor yeah but i'm also happy with just getting it down to

basics you know what i was thinking you've got you've got the cola plant yeah okay and you know we get the one yeah it comes from the big cola tree that's where the cola comes from you've got the cola plant yeah you cola cola great refreshing soft drink yeah very good cheap cola uh on brand cola whichever there's got to be more plants that have good flavor i mean oranges yeah yes these are done these are already done talk about a new flavor okay come on i know about oranges man i'm not a complete fool so is you got you know people like head into the amazon or unexplored parts of the world looking for flavors absolutely where are the rest of the flavors you're telling me that we found all of the flavors what kind of hubris is that as a species

that we found all the flavors a bunch of plants that we already know about have probably got good flavors we're just not daring enough to go out and get them well yeah nettle tea is really nice but that's pretty niche okay now we've got nettle tea maybe i'll have to try that one i think i found i find a lot more enjoyment in flavors of drinks um than i do in flavors of food so would you be willing to take some traditionally food flavors and move them to a drink i would i would i would be happy to do that um and in terms of food for one thing i will say actually um slight tangent but kind of related i went for a meal yesterday and they had at the table they had popcorn on the table this is a restaurant i've been yeah and it was seasoned but it was like beef popcorn

it was incredible okay genuinely really fantastic because i'm i'm initially skeptical of anything meat flavored that doesn't have meat in it yeah what about crisps are you into meat flavored crisps no chicken flavored crisps or beef or whatever i love a good chicken flavored crisp i don't mind them but they're not meat flavored no there's a there's like a meat seasoning usually it doesn't yeah because part of the yeah part of what i enjoy about the meat is the the texture as well yeah so i guess i i yeah i know what you mean but the beef beef popcorn it was so good we'd asked afterwards you know can you buy this like you know packaged already but they're like no we just like season some popcorn and i looked online and you can't buy i couldn't

find anywhere where you could buy this like beef flavored popcorn but if anyone's out there and you know where to find it please let me know because it's great i might just have to try and make my own i was just thinking that it's probably very easy to make it's it's actually probably pretty easy to make you just get some some flavorings and you sprinkle it on some seasoning and it's probably easy to do but that again it's it's just a bit of creativity you that i guess is a bit more mixing something that already exists with a new texture and consistency but i want i I'll be fine with that. I'll be fine with a new core flavour.

I want fun plants to be boiled down into a flavour. You know what I think you want? New flavours. I also want. It's not necessarily... You know that stuff you eat it or whatever and then it changes your taste buds for half an hour? Oh, yes.

I've heard about this. i think if you could just have that as a more accessible thing like if you could have like an energy drink or like a bottle and then you drink that and your flavor your taste buds are like different for half an hour then you can drink that and then everything you've already eaten tastes different that would be incredible because i'm such a i'm such a fussy eater yeah that i think that would be great for me to diversify things because then i can have something i'm already familiar with the consistency of but it's going to be a different flavor yeah or and you can hunt for like oh can i make a lettuce taste like chicken nuggets yeah that's a that's

a good way for me to get healthy i'd actually prefer this to you know zenpix a big thing now yes i'd rather let's let's introduce things that change your taste buds so you just eat healthy but think you're having a cake oh yeah that's good because now we've not only introduced the idea of exploration touching back to you know the the age of balbo and you know this idea of the the contemporary explorer going out there and being a pioneer of something we need flavor pioneers you're a gastronaut oh my fucking god that is incredible that is the best thing you've ever said a gastronaut is don't don't recoil in shame this is a moment of pride soak it in this is art this is what we do here andy this is fucking incredible stuff oh god and as

if just this is free for people to listen to as well that's insane i can't believe people just get this oh my god i am blown away andy i think uh that's this may be my favorite common ground just solely for that gastronaut i i want to be a gastronaut yeah i want to voyage out into the amazon i want to find a unique plant i want to find a new flavor or take something that's probably very bad for you as a drug and just walk around the local supermarket and try things fresh for the first time yeah pay for it first don't just eat stuff in the supermarket i hate that oh god that would that you know when people eat like a bag of crisps and i'm like i'll scan it oh we've had this experience we we were at the supermarket with a friend do you remember a few years ago

friend former friend uh yeah someone we knew and they had we were we were gonna make a dinner i was i was like let's go let's let's do something different guys let's make a dinner and we were like yeah let's let's go do that let's go make a dinner so we did that we went off got the ingredients from the the supermarket and when we were there this other guy with us wandering around started eating a bag of i don't think it was crisps you know i think it was like nuts or something and if whatever it was they were eating nuts and uh finished the bag and i was like you can't do that man you gotta you gotta actually pay for this and he was like well i'm gonna pay for it it's just i'm hungry now and i was like we're gonna be in here for like 15 minutes tops

you can wait surely so no because he wanted to eat the thing walking around so people would comment on that is also the case there was a there's another aspect to this i suppose so we'd we'd address that said like that you can't do that man and he was like no i can't i'll just pay for it when we get there i was like well they're gonna be probably a bit shirty with you i would imagine and then i realized there's a bigger issue and i was like i'm just gonna leave this for him to figure out so we got to the self-service checkout and as we got to the self-service checkout i was like right you pay for your thing over there buddy started paying for mine scanning everything through and then i hit him because he scans the empty packet and of

course it doesn't register on the weight of the self-service machine because the thing's fucking empty so i'm sat there smug as can be looking at him as he has to call over for help from one of the attendants who looked at him like he was dead correctly so and they were like oh like you have you eaten this here you're trying to buy this and he's like yeah and they're like well in future can you please bring it over here pay for it and then you can eat it and he was like yeah okay i'm like don't be no you're in the wrong don't be snarky back guy's doing his job you've done you've done things in the wrong order you need to buy the thing and then you own the thing and you eat the thing so i i think yeah it's just god so yeah i i think um flavor we need to explore we need to we

need to expand we've got two options we do we've got head into the unexplored regions of the world for tasty stuff rewire our mouths maybe do both yeah i think if there's anyone out there who has any suggestions on wild flavors i don't mean eat this very spicy chili and it'll make you be sick this isn't a an eating challenge that i'm after i want a nice new flavor it can be something that doesn't taste like anything else yes i want give me the most unique tasting thing if anyone knows what that is if anyone can give a suggestion send over a message to us it's not rotten shark meat info at war with a mate.co.uk no i'm not having cis drumming it's not what i want again unique not horrible i don't want a horrible thing but what i would say that is this has been a

lovely thing not a horrible thing we've had a great time we laughed we cried a good time was had by all i i think for me that's everything yeah i've got nothing else so uh stay sort of and we'll catch you next time thanks for listening thanks for listening We'll be right back.