War With A Mate - Episode 46: Ships In The Night

Episode Date: October 19, 2025

And there goes Operation Stage Two, of Turn Two! More aggressive and conniving action by James sets up the Axis forces for a fierce beginning to Turn Three, as Andy’s prayers to the weather gods are left unanswered. ABC’s tenure in the history segment comes to a close, and discussions arise from the mailbag around employment, game reinforcements and the adrenaline rush of spreadsheets - and a Common Ground that pounders how much shame a downtrodden celebrity would embrace to make a quick buck.

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Because we have your number. Hello. Hi. What time is it, Andy? It's recording time. It's more of an eight time. Ah, I thought it was 9.06. Don't let them peek behind the curtain. At what time it is Don't reveal that

Don't reveal what time it is You can't dox time It's too much personal information Well then we go off the same 24 hour clock That every other person does Am I doing this late? It's not that late As you crack open a beer

Wow, someone's cutting loose Of course Cut loose, foot loose Kick off your Sunday shoes actually that doesn't rhyme that's actually just that's fuck me up I don't know what you were doing

was that a reference? yes it was a Footloose reference I know Footloose was but you just said a thing and then yeah it's a lyric Footloose related yes it's the lyrics to Footloose

oh okay the song the titular song of the film Footloose is that where Baby Gets Put In A Corner? different no different film we've covered that oh yeah

that's Dirty Dancing yeah they're the same film in my head right why? they're just some 80s dancing things we can't we can't get into this this is going to take us far too off tangent and it's going to make me far too furious with you this is not about dirty dancing or footloose this is about war with a mate that's what this is here and now the i know you said the game name instead this is the podcast in which we play the campaign for north africa in its entirety the really long game yes

there you go that's us we're doing that you found the right place playing the end of turn two up stage two today we are we are which takes us nearly to the halfway point of the practice six turns we're doing before we do 111 turns of the game yeah oh we haven't even started you how does that feel bad yeah also good why because if we hadn't done the scenario the game itself would be fucked that's true one of us would already be in dire straits but today i'm feeling way better than i have in in months ever actually about my truck convoys yeah you had a decisive truck well you seem to have sought you'd made a move but we'll get to that you also just seem to have soared your supply situation out i think i've sorted out my supplies completely i think they're

working now i think with the trucks what i did the first few months of this game well nearly a year is i neglected the trucks and it's only recently i've got them back into a steady flow where now i think i know how they work yeah so going forward i have no concerns about my trucks and that should scare the living daylights out of you i mean it does because you've got air superiority and more guys on the ground my only real hope was these supplies stop you using them yeah and that was the the case for a little while but now no more because that's what we've been doing today isn't it it's truck day it's my most dreaded session of this game every time it rolls round every few weeks i don't like truck day i think well did you like it now did you not like

it before because it wasn't working or you just don't like the mechanics of it i'd say it's a solid combination of both right it's it's the fact it's not fun it's the least fun part of the game it's moving around resources it's the least rewarding part i wouldn't say it's the least rewarding on account of it being by far the most important that doesn't make it rewarding uh i it sort of lets you do other things is the reward yeah but that's like saying paying for electricity's fun no it's like a nice purchase you are right yeah it's just something you have to do of all the things you have to pay for every day of well you don't pay for it every day but every month that goes by when your bills come out whether it's your your phone bill or your

internet bill your electricity bill uh your power bill is just the worst uh they owe me like two months worth how how you managed to wrangle that because i don't send them meter readings very often um and they will you hear that octopus energy and they were overcharging during summer because i didn't have the heat on and most of the lights in my flat are broken uh so there's very little power draw that's a good point you've always got at least one light bulb out in your home at any given time yeah i need to do the bathroom one yeah you've got to be careful with that it's it was fine in summer but the nights are pulling they are i always dread when i have to use the toilet at yours and it's the sun has started to set and i need to whack out the

fucking torch on my phone to make sure i'm not soiling your bathroom it's always a risky play oh yeah but so far i've only you know i've only shot on the floor twice well i've missed it it's dark in there you never go when it's light i suppose moving away from how many times i've shot on your floor in the dark what happened today well yeah truck it my trucking was pretty simple um yours is always just a straight line i just left a straight line and i'm setting some stuff up so it was actually easier than usual and then i guess i also something i did which i should have just done from the very start i moved my sjsu's from decalia which is a city two hexes outside of alexandria the major difference being alexandria has its own airfields like

takalia does but also unlimited resources and supplies so i've just moved the sgs use there that's a solid move so i don't have to worry about them ever not having stuff i don't know why i genuinely don't know how i was thinking not putting them there to start with does that mean you technically have air superiority because you have a an airfield with infinite supplies that feels superior I guess if you have one perfectly supplied plane against

100 planes where 50% of them are supplied, the person with worse supply does still have more because I think you've got double the number of planes as me, or at least you did to start with roundabout, you've not picked up you've not picked off enough where it's evened out, I've still got

yeah, I think you've killed maybe 10 planes in the air and then i killed the fight well not killed but i knocked the five squadrons out of commission oh in terms of the ones that you've decommissioned yes you've taken out quite a lot but in terms of ones you've shot down that are non-retrievable yeah it's i think maybe about 10 to 12 yeah well air combat doesn't have a huge attrition rate um yeah it's relatively safe we tend to kick off and someone will get two or three kills in the first batch and i'll go oh is this where this starts to kick in and then it never and then it isn't um but yeah it's pretty

actually hard to shoot planes down unless you have a huge advantage which we never really have a huge gulf no i think because we're both using our like starting planes there's not been the like mismatch of like spitfires against your starting or meshesmiths versus my gladiators yeah and our pilots don't tend to crop a ball that often a lot of my pilots are currently assigned to squadrons that can't be used because of the whole debacle at fort madalena which i'm still not pleased about but i suppose water under the bridge and all that now that the whole kerfuffle in that space has kind of pitted out a little bit uh yeah but you you made a move on your face so you sorted your normal trucking out and then you had a little cheeky truck convoy have a go at moving well i

thought you know truck convoy not really fun i don't like truck day but why not make it fun it's down to me beauty is in the eye of the beholder and i beheld beauty yeah you fired them along the track uh from fort magdalena to my supply dump yes slightly to not go through the uh the zone of control of the seventh yes they've been sat around there still and my my guys have been eyeing up that supply dump you've had for a while because i've been thinking this whole time is it fake or is it real and today i thought fuck it let's have a look at this and turns out my truck has just enough cpa to not only zip around past there and steal some supplies but then also to dart north and give them to the one of your units that were undersupplied i think no these

are the new units these are the the ones i hadn't found for most of the game oh this is the wall that i've made oh so did they have much to give them or did they like join them it's more for them to sit there with extra because as you know i took ammo yeah and ammo i can just use that from the same hex that it's in so oh yeah so they're sort of pseudo first line trucks at the minute yeah i just thought i can zip them over there if the breakdown happens which it did only 10 mind you then they're there with extra points of ammo it's not a whole lot of ammo that i took because there was 500 it was pretty close to full

of ammo. I was genuinely terrified when I saw how many supplies you had at that supply dump I thought it might have been a dummy but you had like 500 of everything Yeah I'd filled it up like two like an upstage previously and then no one was really pulling from it. Yeah I've

been pleased that I now know that's definitely a supply dump because now that's something I want. I want to capture it. I want it to be mine. So when i drive off the seventh i'll take that and that will be my little way station on the way to well the seventh are going to go and basically take the remainder uh no is that oh okay you just don't want me to that's not a thing it's hard to tell maybe it's a thing maybe it's not it it is a thing i have a plan oh okay i

actually do have a bit of a plan to take that supply dump for my own you can have it i can have it yeah really yeah has it got that easy i don't become that disengaged i don't need it you don't need it no there's so many supplies in there yeah but there's no one around the use it seventh the seventh are there they've always been there yeah that's where they live it's the house yeah i guess oh i wish i'd moved i could have moved the seventh into the supply dump last term but it would have put them on max cpa which meant if you'd attacked they would have gone into negative uh yeah so i stayed free cpa away so my guys would have the cpa for defense all right should have just gone to the supply dump i mean the only thing it would have stopped is taking

the small amount of ammo that i did i'll i'll be quite candid with you here i haven't even taken ten percent of the ammo that was in there yeah because i had 500 in round about yeah and then two-thirds of it is gone um is it two-thirds or one-third one-third you can use so two-thirds is gone that's a rule that we were quite shocked to read today is that whenever an opposing force arrives at a supply dump two-thirds of the ammo is discarded because it's not compatible with their weapons yeah which means i've now essentially eradicated two-thirds of the ammo from there if you show up and try and use it again you eradicate another two-thirds yes so it obliterates the amount of ammo if we keep on chopping and changing between that yeah everything else is

one-to-one i think between sites i know fuel and water definitely are yeah fuels are as well stores are fuel is uh water absolutely yeah crazy if they were like no this is this is italian water you can't have the italian water it's full of pasta that is not a disparaging remark with prejudice that is part of the rules of the game it's before someone tries to call me out for saying something that's not not appropriate yeah yeah it's a very niche nation to try and be you know a prejudiced man towards but i'm not i'm playing as them yeah but i don't want to say that my heart is where theirs are because it's a different time and they were fascist there's a lot of nuance in this game it's a it's a pr nightmare you've walked into a minefield

oh god a dummy minefield yeah it didn't need to be dangerous but i made it that so i i did that i made my little sneaky move around i've also used the guys from tripoli a bunch of my trucks that have arrived from there to finally resupply some of the supply dump next to my my new wall up at the north road which makes sense yeah so they've got a bit of a replenishment and i've also used another existing convoy to pop into bardia and then pop to that supply dump as well so that supply dump which is at the rear of this new wall i've got in the north it's got a little bit of supply going on nice which is good it's also that may be another way station on the push east yeah now i'm understanding how to use the trucks you create these way stations you create

these rally points and then you ferry resources between them what's crazy is it tells you to do this in the rules but i just didn't pay attention yeah there were too many rules andy i didn't want to get bogged down in all of them i thought i'll pick and choose the ones that seem important like you know use your men to kill the enemy men yeah i don't really think much about how to feed them or water them but now i'm thinking that way i am an unstoppable force yeah and in a genuine threatening way i think you might be in trouble i am just i am i also zipped a convoy west over to map b where a bunch of my airfields needed some desperate supplies yes so now they are stocked up a lot of stores have been sent out which will tick them over for the foreseeable for the sgs use

some water which wasn't massively needed but still beneficial ammo is where it was you got a lot of ammo to them ammo is what was needed they're fine for fuel but ammo was the real hurting point yeah because those bombers bombers go for it well that's why i'm like just moved them to alexandria like it was adding a stop for my trucks to go from alexandria to there drop a shitload of stuff off and then go back to Alexandria and reload it's just cutting that out is going to be

very helpful all in all, I didn't mind truck day to day it's still my least enjoyable part of the game and it was a fairly brief one, we did the trucks and that's kind of it, I still need to do the breakdown for my units from last turn yes, because

we'll do that at the start of the next one I think because we've got a couple of bits of admin to catch up on sort of pre-going and upstage free, I guess. Yeah, been a busy week. I did not have the time. That needs to be done next time. Maybe I'll do it, actually.

I might do it beforehand. I've got all the breakdown written down. I just need to roll it. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I'm going to make sure I've got all the breakdown mapped out during the week, and then when I come around next time, I can just throw down the dice. Then we can figure that out.

But we did roll the weather. We did hot weather again. Hot weather again. Woohoo! No, why? That's not good for anyone. You know that as well. It's worse for you, I think. Want to recap what the hot weather does? Should we do a little pop quiz for each other? Oh, God. It doubles water usage.

It does. It affects your construction. Requires double. It doesn't do anything to aircraft, does it? It doesn't to aircraft, but it does to trucks. And then also there's an immediate 6% free. There's an additional percentage that needs to be taken off immediately. Slash.

Yeah. Water distribution. Yeah. That's bad because one thing I've not been focusing on is water. Well, you need to take it off now, not water distribution. Yeah. I need to do that now. 6%.

Because you can get that. you can like i can have my nine percent and then an additional 18 if it's all hot yes which goes from oh evaporations like you keep an eye on it but it's not a major threat to like oh boy yeah there goes all my fucking water and my fuel vehicles break down easier that's it yeah they move is it one column towards the worst result one to the right yeah so trucks now essentially just move one to the left instead of the beneficial two to the left which means some of the short trips will actually have breakdown potential yes a lot of them don't such as your road that i've blown up a little bit yes because currently

that doesn't cause breakdowns it does change the range because of the cpa but but hot weather it does yes it will cause a problem yep hot weather if you want to get them back that way oh potential breakdown maybe hot weather isn't all that bad yeah look at that look at you liking hot weather You're talking me around. Was this our common ground? Yeah. Hot weather's good. I think next turn will be good.

Not next turn, sorry. Next stop stage. Jumping ahead of myself. Next stop stage will be a fun one because we've got... I think for you. Well, yeah. Sorry, I'm talking about my perspective. It's going to be really fun.

For you, it'll be engaging at least. Yeah, a lot of stuff happened to me. That's a really optimistic way to look at it. So much is going to happen to you, Andy. you're gonna have a really eventful upstage yeah i don't know this hot weather's kind of pissed me off a little bit maybe it won't be as active as it once was gonna be i was honestly hoping for worse worse like rainstorm or sandstorm why shut down air stuff for a turn or two but at the moment air stuff's kind of balanced but you just resupply them yeah but that's why it's

balanced otherwise it's just in your favor oh okay because i had such short supply i do have those extra fighters or bombers i think the bombers that showed up yeah at the start of this turn so that's all right you need to fly them in from tripoli i do yeah is that so that's probably a transfer mission it is i need to assign them to one because i keep on forgetting to do that so transfer mission next air stage which is pretty much the next thing we're doing yeah we'll have distribution and stuff yeah you know that i don't even mind so much because that's Just sort of, like, tick a box. But with trucks, I have to think.

I hate thinking. It's my least favorite thing to do. I also don't mind the water distribution because I've got my Excel rows set up where if I just open a unit to do something with it and it's not got last turns on, it's just a case of copying the row. Yes.

So it's not... I mean, I want to do it as all as they're there, but it's not one where i can like miss it and cause problems as it were look at you i can make i can make mistakes i can make problems out of it i actually i endeavor to well not really that's going to make the game more complicated um i just i fear i will but i'm getting i'm getting more into the swing of it the admin everything starts to move seamlessly it's like a dance andy you feel that it's like a samba is that a dance is it a song is it a music class is it a class is that a thing probably the proletariat yeah the bourgeois the bourgeois the pay

bourgeois the proletariat and the samba yeah here come the samba ready to dance on the means of production oh i was thinking of zumba ah yes zumba because that's not a type of dancing is It's just a type of class There's like Zumba style of dance as well No I don't think Zumba's a dance at all Zumba's like a movement I think it's like a yoga I don't think it's a dance

I'll be honest I've never I've never moved I rarely move What I do is I move people Oh that's nice So do you, you move people We move them in mysterious ways And they move us too

With their messages, their emails just their emails really that's how they get in touch with us well sometimes for a web form but that seems to have dropped off uh that's a good point um occasionally we get them but for the most part through those glorious glorious emails and i think we should tap into that we should feel moved i actually did a test when i set the contact form up and it worked but since i set the contact form up no one's messaged through the website so i might i might be spending a bit of time the next few days debugging that i'm sure maybe no one's sending anything no one's sending anything don't worry it ebbs and flows we get these in waves we have had a few emails come through we

have indeed a fair few you got one for us i do i do this email comes from oryx which is an awesome name um hey y'all i just wanted to start by saying your podcast is absolutely brilliant oh oryx you guys really are mad lads for doing something i wouldn't even wish upon my worst foes lol ah there we go brought back down to earth thank you i'm currently on episode 30 been recently binge listening to y'all's podcast for a week-ish there's the y'all while at work which i recently was told i was fired at so you guys have really made the blow a little bit more manageable thanks for that oh shit i'm sorry to hear that oryx that is that is never an easy situation but i hope you're back on your feet soon and i also sucks yeah i

I think we've both been in situations where there's been redundancies at work. Yes. There's been big changeovers. You leave a trail of destruction in your jobs. The companies you work at never seem to last long afterwards. Well, none of the companies I've left in my career at this point still exist. Yeah. Do you have anything to say about that?

Have you done something? I'm a good employee and they couldn't do without me. that's how i'm spinning it that sounds like sabotage but okay oh deary me but no arix we feel your pain there we've been there i hope you're up on your feet and i also love a good binge at work of podcasts um in fact sometimes i'm surprised i wasn't fired for just binging podcasts at work but enough about myself i've been thinking of a good question for y'all and i think i finally got one so when you are reinforcing a division how do you do that with toe points capability points or is it as detailed as individual squads where do you get

your reinforcements from is it a reinforcement pool of points or is it a case of infinite points of whatever you need just need to bring it there along with your dead camels um so on that point the reinforcements they so if you've got a different unit if you've got a battalion that you want to attach to a division you just wander them over there and you expend some cpa and they can just join up as long as there's room uh yes um they have historical like designations anything that's like historically attached to it you can just add back yeah you clip them back in without any real issue if you're putting stuff that isn't assigned it's limited by the size of the thing so for a division i think you can do like two infantry and one armor and then of sort

of unassigned stuff but there's also you also get historical reinforcements on the arrival chart which is like when a unit arrived in the conflict yes like historically uh then you also have replacement points which we've not got into too much yet i don't think uh i've not really used them too much i might have another look at them but they'll be coming up for me soon because i've those tanks that i'm repairing and they become replacement points yes so i'm going to then look at replacing some because i can only imagine some of that wall that i've moved over along the north road i've got tanks in there and they moved quite far so i think they'll probably break down so when they break down what you can do with these replacement points is slot them back into a

unit that lost two points through whatever means and the replacement points just fill that tank back up so if you've lost two toe points of tanks for example and you've got two two replacement toe points of tanks they just sort of backfill that loss um and then when it comes as you said there andy the reinforcements they're scheduled historically so some units show up on certain turns there's a full list of when they show up so for those ones you've just got more units on the board extra counters but you can amalgamate groups with restriction you can use replacement points to top them back up and you get some scheduled same with aircraft as well they get scheduled i also get commonwealth production so every turn i get trucks uh depending how many on the roll of

a dice um and also through the game i've got a production thing where i can make certain like guns or tanks uh but they're like limited yes so i can make i don't know the exact numbers but i can make like three mark uh 10 tanks for instance over the course of the game yes so this means to manufacture and produce things um some groups like the long range desert group are optional you can construct them out of a few different units uh any armored recce vehicle yeah um yeah and then i think some special stuff like you get we both got a version of long-range desert group you get um you go you've got another special forces thing don't you i do it's like an sas kind of equivalent yeah um so like a commandos yeah so yes there's a few units

you can make as well you can assemble at your own leisure um which sort of leads on a little bit to your second point um in terms of different units of secondly how do you reinforce your planes or bombers when you inevitably lose it cough cough james lol ha oh very funny oryx yeah james gets his plane shot down but as you said before it's not that many is it so um um is it the same situation as previously mentioned infinite planes just get them there uh no unfortunately they are they're scheduled so purely scheduled yeah so i got 12 in turn two i got 36 in turn two lucky you not any more for a while i get another 12 or maybe 24 i think it's 12 another 12 between turns three and six and those ones i just schedule as and when but they all show up off map and i

need to schedule the flight over actually just like we covered before so i need to fly them over on a um a transfer mission so those are are also predetermined by history and that's that's when they rock up so that's how that works and we've also got i'm also wondering when you inevitably finish your scenario will you be listing uh the most successful units divisions battalions squadrons of bombers and individual pilots i think it would be loads of fun and maybe you two could have a tiny reward for the individual with most successful bombing runs almost plain shot down and the reward would be a glorious poncho well wouldn't that be nice orcs unfortunately we're still sourcing our ponchos they're tough to get but uh and right now the reward for this

practice scenario is a kinder bueno so if some lucky duck is getting a poncho just because they've got the best bomber then i would love my poncho andy um well it's not we've not agreed to that so yeah but if we did but we haven't yeah but a listener suggested that that's kind of rude are you gonna just kind of shrug off what the listeners want is this not all for them andy what's going on here fine we'll do ponchos yes this is a trap i've been doing worse since this email came in so you'd be overconfident perfect uh anyway that would be all my stupid questions ah there's no stupid questions rx if that was we would have had to shut down this email box a long time ago because oh my goodness we we can't handle anything that's about us because it

the whole scenario is stupid us playing this game is stupid so if we didn't accept questions that were stupid or stupid orbiting, this wouldn't be possible I mainly get very good questions. All the questions we've got are very good. As for doing a breakdown

I think we will do one when we finish the scenario, there'll probably be a gap of a little bit between us starting the game again where we go over the rules one last time to confirm stuff we will and we'll probably do breakdowns of how the scenario went who sort of excelled best moves

that kind of thing yes we'll need a big debrief at the end of the scenario where we can go back over how all of this went what the next steps are and also just i think maybe a week or two breather for us to get ready for the full game so keep an eye out for that oryx because there definitely will be plenty to to review um and you also go on to say deepest apologies for my terrible writing dyslexia in a kind mistress greetings from iceland sinceri oryx um it's to be fair i mean andy your writing is sometimes messier than this and that's legible yeah i mean second language i'm dyslexic it's a very good yeah also a good point yeah um yeah greetings from iceland oryx if this is a second language you've nailed it if there's dyslexia on top of that it's genuinely impressive

so good on you sometimes i struggle to write coherently and oh hang on a minute also if you're this is a second email that came through also if you're reading this i forgot to ask for the pilot episode which would be much appreciated if i could get my gremlin hands on it lol thanks again i do have some devastating news for oryx and anybody else who wants that yes that's gone into the oobly out of the podcast guards we went looking for this the other week we we can't find the lost pilot recording which is file does not exist which is devastating because that's where i first coined deserts of my mind i um i'm beside myself when i when i realized it was gone i was genuinely devastated i'm gonna keep looking for it i think it might be somewhere

i just don't know where it would be what we do have are a few of the whoopsies we had episodes i was at 30 odd um or 40 odd where it where we forgot to record part way through um so if want to hear me talk to myself for a bit i think episode nine we've still got where that was a hiccup funnily enough i think that was about dirty dancing at the start oh okay so we've got a few other bits and pieces so oryx i will send you over something it won't be the pilot while i'm trying to locate that but you can have something a little consolation prize a wooden spoon but thank you for the email i hope everything goes well with the job and yeah good luck question wise very good it's nice to know about replacements it's a little reminder that we can do that as well i think we

need those little nudges sometimes people to put us in the right place um we got another one here from perrin perrin uh hi y'all not sure if you got my last message uh we didn't sorry we did have a look in our email box we had look perrin i don't know if that was an email you sent to us it never arrived so maybe it went to the same place the pilot episode went to but i've been listening for the past few months and this has been a great addition to my friday afternoons at work it makes the last hour when i'm alone in the office seem less grueling uh you get messages from all around the world and i want you to know you're uh finding the far reaches of the world in cornwall ah yes that is distant land fields afar uh as an accountant i love spreadsheets uh and i don't even

uh use them at their full potential and i must ask a question about the organization uh do you have a lot of uh linking between your units and tracking sheets and have nice little reports or summaries uh that show totals if not would something like that actually be useful e.g knowing your overall strength the the strengths of specific divisions in an area or distribution of resources you have available oh my sweet summer child um parent um no we you're an accountant you've explained parent and you don't use spreadsheets to their full potential we are short-sighted naive fools who decided to play a game we can't play realistically yeah we have definitely not used them to their full potential so we don't have reports or summaries um i barely

even have totals i would like them i it's a beautiful idea maybe we'll spend some of that gap really yes the wall of my gap yeah not a full year gap month yeah the gap month maybe we'll maybe we should look at some reports that could be interesting yeah we'll set up some power bi dashboards yeah no i like the idea of it and i think it's a a good idea parent i'd like to see how this translates and maybe put some some graphs out there for those that love some graphs and charts i genuinely would look a thing of like this is getting low like stuff i just forget is there like an airfield oh i mean if you looked at mine there would just be a like a chart of warning a shot of food and it just crashes down it's like the stock market in 2008

the line of food goes down the line of hunger goes up yeah i guess that is how that works supply and demand we demand food and there's no supply as a smaller side i recommend having a look at excel esports it is funny seeing people taking data collation seriously and making impressive documents of weird scenarios didn't know that existed i will have peaked my interest yes that's the thing i love data when i'm looking at it i don't love collating data yes i like other people to present me yeah i love that oh is it um there's a subreddit which is all about different oh like data is beautiful yes i think that's it yes data is beautiful or data porn or something like that yeah where it is just crazy charts about inane information but i always find myself

scrolling through top post of the month on stuff like that there's another great one a great graph website but actually it's like correlation versus causation or something like that but they find completely separate like data sets that line up weirdly well like the number of the number of films nicholas cage stars in in a year is like almost directly correlated with how many people drowning swim like home swimming pools like they find just like two things that aren't related but the graphs line up like perfectly another good one for that is google trends yes where you can just search two different search trends and see how they've worked out another i think this is correct um correct me world if i'm wrong i will check this afterwards i'm interested but i'm

pretty sure there's been no shrek film ever released under a conservative government in the uk i think they've only been exclusively released under labor governments well they're clearly a metaphor against liberal power structures yeah uh shrek is uh partly political um and in any case you didn't see my last email i highly recommend jack churchill for the history his nickname was mad jack he feels like a war veteran born in the wrong era uh but it still goes to town to quote if it wasn't for those damn yanks we could have kept the war going another 10 years and his choice of weaponry was certainly fitting his name uh i know a bit about this guy i think he would be a fun he'll be a fun one oh well watch this space then perrin it seems as though

andy's already got his eyes on him i don't know if he ever shows up in north africa but just the story of what he does is probably just worth telling i shall remain subtle humble and brave much to the confusion of my friends Perrin. Oh Perrin I'm with you when I try and explain this to people I know they either become frustrated that I'm talking about it again or they're just confused about the premise of it. It's a very hard

thing to explain so I feel your pain and it's lovely to hear that we get you through Friday afternoons. I've had many a podcast get me through some Friday afternoons so it's lovely to be that for someone else. I'm very glad you spend those afternoons listening to us talk about this Feels like you could

probably do something more productive with your Fridays, but I'm very, very grateful that you're not. He's in the office. Yeah. We don't know that it's an office. Is it an office? Just at work. Could be anywhere. Could be in the shipyards. Could be a forestry ranger. Oh, I like that. That'd be

interesting. I don't think you should have headphones in during that. Hey, you just walk the forest. Play it out loud. That would scare the animals. Yeah. Woo-hoo! Woo-hoo! We need to get some sort of mating call We'll see if we can get all the animals to flock to Perrin. We'll just play a high-pitched noise that draws animals.

Just underlaying the podcast. That's a great thing. Yeah, I guess we don't auditarily abuse animals enough in this podcast, so let's get into that leaf. Yeah, let's drive them wild. Oh, well, thank you for that, Perrin and Oryx and everyone else. There's still quite a few emails that we've got in our little backlog there, but anyone who does want to get in touch, you can do via our email,

which is info at warwithamate.co.uk and our Instagram which is just warwithamate or at warwithamate as the Instagrams would call us and the website please for Andy's sake, if you want to diversify things a bit, go to warwithamate.co.uk send through a web form

just to convince Andy it's working maybe also email just to be safe but yeah we might not get the web form, we don't know if it works but we do have all of those options and we'll read anything there is no stupid question what we're doing is the stupid thing if you're asking a question about

it then that's your you're allowed it's questionable and if it's not about this we'll probably read it and answer it anyway to the best of our abilities and our abilities are limited anyway oh dear handy it never gets any easier does it no getting through the game getting through the emails oh the emails is easy that's a nice distraction from the game it's been nice that it's been consistent as well we've never since we launched it had a a week where we've not had emails had a couple of scares but yeah we had a couple of scares but you guys came through you always come through please don't leave us out in dry don't leave us like my men in the desert don't leave us starving then we have to come with a new segment and at that point god knows what

we'll come up with it'll probably be bad it'll be yeah you don't want it a fret keep emailing us we'll make bad segments. You don't want another common ground, alright? That's already purely hubristic charm. We think it's fun. We don't even know that it is, but we have a good time doing it. Don't let us do that again. Andy, I think we should go

to one of our more fan favourite segments. One that is very coherent, very well put together, well researched, and just slick. I think it's time to delve into history. Yeah, and we'll be a final one of our ABC series.

so far? Oh, Andy, I've got to the point now, and it's genuinely damaging. I get upset when we get to the end of a history segment. I get genuinely attached to these characters. Do not worry. We're just running them up to the start of World War II. He's going to be appearing in quite

a few planned episodes down the line. I'm just going to space him out a bit, but I'm excited for the Avengers crossover event of all the history segment characters. I'll have to see if Bagnall and Cunningham ever ever met up.

Is Rommel Thanos? Maybe. Sort of in the context of this game, he's the oncoming threat. He's got the Infinity AM radio in his jeep. No FM for Rommel. No FM for Rommel. Alternative podcast title.

So, let's delve back into ABC's history. So here's a quote describing him. I often reflect on what made him the best of Destroyer captains. without a doubt it was first class seamanship fine ship handling tough and uncompromising discipline and an aggressive fighting spirit he was clearly greatly respected in command but i suspect feared by those that did not meet as high standards and expectations revered feared

yes i will say i would like him to be like a captain or a boss like he wouldn't go easy on you but you would third but fair the impression i get is you would get the best out of you so after the straight of uh dandonelle and the failed action at gallipoli he himself is promoted because he's successful in his sort of assignments he's promoted to commander and he spends most of 1916 patrolling the mediterranean which he finds boring frankly the sort of he doesn't see much chance for advancement there either uh things are sort of drying up so he requests um a transfer and he moves over to the dover patrol who patrol the channel and the sort of coast around england okay yeah here he fights the germans again um he fights uh he has two or three naval battles here

where he fights german destroyers and is successful uh which ends in his uh second uh bar on his distinguished service order hey he's moving on up uh yes so this comes to the end of world war one in the inter-year wars he's involved in a conflict i didn't know britain was involved in he's involved in defending all yeah i defending latverian independence oh okay from communists white russians um which is the right-wing side of the russian civil war not a drink i thought yeah Oh, you beat me to it. I saw your eyes light up in my head when I was writing it. Oh, fine. Get on with your history, then.

Latverian nationalists are Germans, so Britain's involved in this. Also, I believe, Estonian independence. So, throughout several encounters with German forces trying to undermine the Latverian independence movement, he exhibits good self-control and judgment, and his commanding officer at the time says, commander cunningham has on one occasion after another acted with unfailing promptitude and decision and has proven himself an excellent officer an officer of exceptional valor and

unerring resolution his this service sees him rise to the rank of captain so he gets that promotion on new year's eve 1919 and that promotion he is to lead the destroyer flotillas um so he's starting to move from commanding his own vessel to commanding larger groups of ships okay well this is where it really starts to start then starts to start yeah yeah sure we'll go with that we'll run with that that's lazy but we'll do it so he serves more time here until the late 1920s when he returns to britain uh to take part in the army's senior officer school at cherenice as well as the imperial defense college this is a quite an interesting scheme actually uh they sort of realized an issue they had in world war one which is the various branches of the military

weren't working well together so this is they sort of cherry pick the best upcoming officers from the air force the army and the navy and have them all go train together and learn about like what restricts each of them what they struggle with to sort of have a better view of the overall battle space okay i'm sort of a um like a think tank yeah kind of that's a probably a good way to describe it yeah so the idc um had been in existence for some years its admiral object was to bring together senior officers of the royal navy army and air force with officers from the dominions and to train them with knowledge of each other's problems i look on my year at the idc is one of the most interesting and valuable i have ever spent it was mostly new

ground to me and at times the going was hard but expert staff already helped me out i learned a lot and the association with civil servants with their views and ideas was entirely new to him which was particularly valuable this is also the first time he ever goes up in a plane oh wow he's went airborne yeah another guy there who will become the leader of the british air force oh so rubbing shoulders with some uh well some high women running the navy this guy will be running the air force like this is the level of guys at this school okay so these are really the the top dogs creme de la creme yeah well he has a bit about selection here which i quite like students were supposed to be specially selected for the course and this method was rigidly adhered

by the army and the ref in the case of the navy however it was sometimes the custom to take who was best available a bad uh practice which occasionally resulted in naval students being of inferior caliber to their military counterparts however i would not complain as otherwise i do not think i would have been selected he's back to being really subtle and humble yes he is um still brave oh yeah and while he's at the imperial defense college uh he will also meet his wife oh i love it by at here's some stuff about their relationship uh he first comes into her orbit in 1917 uh so this is going back a bit but we finally sailed from malta at the end of december full of mail and passengers for england the latter included a warrant officer the good the governor's aide to

camp and a small scottish terrier belonging to a young lady in malta that someone had asked me to take home and deliver to quarantine the young lady whose name i did not know at the time had either gone or shortly going home many years later i made the discovery that her name was miss nonna christine byatt we married in 1929 oh bless yeah um at trinidad we stayed with sir horace and lady Bayat where I finally made the acquaintance of Sir Horace's sister and discovered it was her Scotty who I

had brought home from Malta. Oh, so you brought the dog and hadn't known it was her and then met her later on? Yeah, I met her three or four years later. Ah, it was written in the stars. You know what, Andy? They were passing each other

like ships in the night. Yeah. Naval reference. so back to his military career yes he's then promoted to vice admiral in july 1936 at this point the job becomes a administration and management job he's not on ships he's sort of back in england in an office which he doesn't like so he should have been out of action for quite a while here but one of his superiors got sick um so he got to assume the role of second in command for the mediterranean fleet and as he does he takes over the hms hood to be his flagship which is a unique one-off ship design so he's got his own one-off like flagship oh okay uh if the

ship was like the gonna be the first of its kind but then during world war one they realized oh we made some pretty big design problems of this so he got to the one dodgy ship well they fixed the ship and then they're like it's too it's more expensive to fix than we're just going to make a new design so he just gets he's the only guy with this type of ship for a while hey you got a unique ship that's pretty cool yeah i would like that i'd like a one-of-a-kind ship bit of a millennium falcon kind of situation and his arrival on the ship is quite uh fun i'll just jump back in here he was met by blake's flag lieutenant james munn as he's approaching the ship a young officer he knew well in spite of his persuasions i went on board the hood at once

i was not popular at all as they had hoped i would not appear before 8 30 the captain indeed was still in his bath for which i do not blame him oh that's an awkward one to walk in on yeah to someone who spends his entire life on small ships like destroyers and stuff this is like he describes it as palatial in comparison uh large and airy cabins on the deck above the core deck with great windows instead of the ordinary portholes he describes this as massive and i guess it is for navy standards but it would be like fairly disappointing as like a room to be like but he was on the what was that ship he was on the really cramped one the doris yes the doris compared to the doris it's oh it's beautiful yeah well he's also moved from the gun room to the

captain's cabin uh but even in destroyers which is smaller the captain often slept in a room with other people oh just to save space and now he's like got his own room as it were ah god i wish i had my own cabin so these promotions will keep coming until he eventually earns flag rank of rear admiral of destroyers in the mediterranean uh and during this time period he spent a lot of time drilling his crews uh with maneuvering like submarine detection gear and also moving at night um which means uh his fleet is probably the best drilled in the world at the time world war ii starts just very high standard of training he's got them to in the interwar years yes cunningham himself describes the mediterranean fleet as the finest command the royal navy has

to offer and in the book at the same time he says he probably knows the mediterranean as well as any naval officer of his generation because he's been patrolling it during world war he spent a lot of time in the med which uh serves him well because he becomes the commander of chief of the mediterranean on the 6th of june 1939 as commander-in-chief his main concerns were the safety of convoys heading to egypt and malta and another thing uh you might have noticed you don't have ships in this uh yes uh that is because of him it's takes place over two battles which will both be covered but he wipes the italian fleet out of the mediterranean cunningham yeah so we'll leave uh him there uh just at the start of world war ii but his story's definitely not over and

we'll be coming back to some of his exploits later on setting him up as a character who's going to play a major role well i hope we come back to him because i i have this crushing sadness every time we leave them behind it's uh i think the the worst one for it was the the maori yeah um that one was particularly devastating to say goodbye to but i'm i'm gonna miss cunningham yeah he's uh he's i think the there's something about his sort of it is quite a humble story that he tells in this book yeah this is an autobiography isn't it yes and it's it goes he wrote it in 1951 so it's also quite fresh because there's something about somebody who's so accomplished being very blasé about all the accomplishments that he's made yes and and still

going on i mean yeah wiping out the mediterranean fleet of italians and then still going back into the book and talking about all of these things acting as if he didn't really earn or deserve them and that he was only picked because the selection process for the naval branch was haphazard yeah and that it was just who's available which i don't think is the case i'm gonna have to do some more research but i think he's been i think he's been on the fast track to a certain extent or certainly been watched for and groomed for this for a lot of his career yeah he doesn't give off savant vibes it seems to be the case that he is just quite talented yeah yeah there's something about him that's quite charming yeah i'd also recommend the book because it's got as

well as the military description understanding the naval stuff which it helped with a lot he's one a good writer it's also got some really great slice of life stuff in there yeah like the cook and bacon on the train platform i love that his horse that has to go 90 degrees or the like newspaper they made there's a bit in it where one of the first guys to receive a medal from i think king george it's like early on in his life uh it might be queen victoria actually uh she reportedly puts the pin in through his uniform but doesn't like bend it fast enough so she just pins it into his chest and he just stands there stoically and doesn't react um there's a lot of it's very personable as well as giving you the overview so yeah i'd recommend it to listeners yeah you know

what i might even give that a read there's something quite i don't even know what the word is it nice maybe or warm about hearing all these like very human stories amongst like a war setting yeah this horrible shit going on and these people talking about these nice moments or these funny anecdotes and it's like it's wild that you get these in such a strange environment yeah that's strange a dangerous and terrifying environment well there's also the saying like some version of this people will have ever heard i think of like war is like 99 boredom and one percent sheer terror or some version that where it's like just waiting and a very brief moments of activity but Most of it is you marching or sitting in a defensive position

with your mates, I guess. Those moments are important as well between the battles and stuff. I think it's an exacerbated aspect of, and this is a very strange and maybe bold comparison to make, but an average work day where you have these slogs 9 to 5 and then you do have these moments that you remember, which is the the nice moments where you are you know having a fun time yeah and you're in amongst a work environment and you spend all your time there but you do have these these nice moments

you you get a bit of enjoyment about it and those are the things that you tell funny stories about it's not the job itself and i guess it's it's part of that i guess if anything just sort of the inverse where here at war the thing that history remembers are the the one percent the terror yeah the excruciating fear and the horrors of war and it's actually just apart from that you spending time with people you're incredibly close with yeah i think also a lot of history reduces it to like blocks of people yes or like formations i think it's good to remember that like every guy in there was actually a person with a life and with anecdotes and great story a lot of will just be lost now because they put people who didn't write them down or tell them well it's the

it's the same sort of stuff your grandparents try and tell you and you you shrug it off and you in hindsight are like really wish i'd listened to that my my granddad um he he died a little while ago and he was in um he was in egypt during world war ii and so yeah he never got any like stories out of him but i got a few but there yeah i sort of look back now and i'm like because now i've got this interest which i didn't have back then god there would have been some cool stories yeah but yeah so anyone listening if your grandparents have got stories listen hear them out they might be interesting but if they've told you the same story about 50 times over and over i get if you want to disengage from that it's a bit much but that's grandparents for you that's

life but sometimes you've got to give them that little wiggle room having you andy sometimes in a situation where you don't really feel comfortable you have to give way you have to allow for that leniency you have to find 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 You have to find that common ground. I've got one for you. Okay, this...

I mean, this isn't even for... Are you annoyed at me today? Have I griped you? I guess I'm more... You've wronged me more. Yeah, I've wronged you more. It's not often that I'm standing up here in my ivory tower, on my high horse.

I don't know if the high horse could actually get into the ivory tower because it's got a spiral staircase. So it'd probably be difficult. You can get them up, you can't get them down. oh that's deep because of arrogance uh and the way and the way horses knees work yes i guess that's it it's it's both um the the physiological design of the horse and the architectural design of an ivory tower all ivory towers fun fact for listeners have spiral staircases well how else are you gonna get up exactly don't fact check that by the way

nice i don't even know if ivory towers are real so common ground this week let's hear it i've got an idea for like a business or an app that i think is good this doesn't sound like a common ground do you know who i am this isn't dragon's den i'm gonna pitch you and see if you're like i've done that with the dig rooms i'll occasionally pitch a business yeah i didn't like that one but i suppose maybe this is better uh it's the app it's called harang okay this sounds interesting and i think it'll have high demand but maybe low supply okay that's always good it's a reverse basically it's like a reverse cameo where instead of sending a request for a message to a famous person and i'm sending the message back you send them a message and you get a video of them watching

the message and if they take the money they have to watch the whole message and you see the video of them doing it the whole time sorry i'm so confused by this so so i'm sending um matthew mcconaughey a message which i i assume you have a positive relationship with him why would you assume that i do you like him well you've got to bear in mind we we still have that celebrity cameo from last week he's still asleep on the sofa yeah we need to get him out and i don't know if he gets on with mcconaughey you know i don't think he does yeah i don't know because they've i think they've worked together at some point but i'm not a hundred percent well no you go back to sleep we're not we're talking about you not to you don't do not look at me do not look at

me anyway sorry he's a distraction so yeah you want to send a message to like a public figure i guess i know they got it and see them react to it so you can pay like a hundred quid to you might send him a positive one but the reason i called it harang is this is this is gonna be toxic and this sounds terrible if a celebrity's thick skinned there's money so they have to sit there with their phone in front of them or their screen in front of them yeah you see them react to the whole message they hit record and they do they read it aloud that it plays you record them a or like an audio message yeah so instead of them sending you a video you send them a video oh i Right, okay, yeah.

And force them to watch it, I guess, by paying them money. And you get to watch their reaction. Do they have to respond in any way, or is it just a clip of them watching it, and then they can just end the clip? I guess they can, but they just need to watch it. They're not obliged to. No, it's just so you know they've heard your message.

Right, okay. I have a few questions about this. First and foremost, Andy, I think this is a really dangerous idea. I think this is really psychologically damaging for anybody who's a public figure in any way, shape, or form. Well, they don't have to be on it. Just like you don't have to be on Cameo.

Yeah, I know, but you also don't have to necessarily become a child actor. I think that's still psychologically damaging. I think people see it as something they can do to become successful, and it seems all good. And, you know, a lot of money for just watching a video sounds good, but people at the moment are already distressed and terrorized

by the online presence of of masochistic fans um who think it's it's fine for everybody else to have to share their pain by them just being horrible and negative so i feel like this could quite easily spiral into that um so i guess on this uh episode of paxman how are you going to rebuke that it's kind of the it's kind of the point is it i guess yeah okay uh wow i think there's some some deep consequences to this one um it's i don't maybe i think we need some sort of protections in place for these people there'll be terms and conditions oh yeah because people read those yeah you get them bound from the app afterwards maybe but god the person's already read the message uh so i take it you can't use any sort of um any crazy offensive language uh

you can't you can't just rag on them with expletives and and slurs and anything like that it it has to be a coherent message yeah you can't just yell for i guess there'll be standards or if you want to maybe a guy sets a tier up so tier one it's like it can be negative but it's like less than three minutes does the pay more for worse content i guess does the app offer some sort of counseling services to these celebrities um it offers the money they can use for counseling if they want well i think it's a bit like the lottery you know the lottery when you win after a certain amount in the uk i think you get assigned a financial advisor automatically i mean yeah that makes sense so maybe you do that for these celebrities maybe if someone's account's

really going bad like they've they've just done something wrong i guess if they're in the press for any controversial or even on the fence reason maybe they get suspended for a period of time that's when people want to message them yeah i know i know but it shouldn't be for that you should be able to pick out obscure celebrities and and boost them into the stratosphere with messages that are confusing or mean-spirited. Yeah. I kind of get the spirit of it. I don't... You see, the thing is, people would

use it. It would... They would, and I'll be honest. It's damaging to society and individuals, but people would use it. I'm showing all my cards right now, Andy. I'm fascinated by the idea. I think it's ingenious, but not good or perfect.

I think it's massively flawed i think it's morally gray um but i'm i'm fascinated it's the credit default swaps of sending people messages you think this could potentially cripple the global housing market it's certainly bad from conception to execution and it will it will just be abused by rich bankers to be mean to people you're um right okay no there's something here you are onto something so harang is um is it is it free to access and then you have to pay each thing or do you subscribe pay to send them like per message yeah so yeah very similar to cameo basically yeah it's basically the cameo the inverse you're paying for what you send rather

than what they yeah but you still get a message from them it's just a it could just be silence while they listen to it yeah maybe you send them something nice they send you something nice back but they're not obligated to give you anything more than the reaction yeah okay i i guess you can't do that with cameo already you know the only thing is you don't get the reaction back necessarily but you can put mean things you can put anything in the request you can send a cameo request to um aaron paul from breaking bad if he's on cameo i don't know this is just putting it out there um you could put anything in that cameo request it could be mean and i don't i do not endorse anyone does this it's a bad idea it's a horrible thing to do but you can't put anything

in that request he doesn't have to reply to it but you don't know he's seen it it's probably being like his assistant i guess it depends on the celebrity yeah i guess it depends on the level not everybody has a an assistant no i think it's it's got some legs to it i'm gonna if i'm not responsible for any of this i'm going to give this a tentative yes okay i think this is a this is an interesting common ground for me andy because i love the idea i just i would hate to be associated with it okay if i knew this app was going on i i'll be honest i would never use it

but i'd i'd watch compilations of it being used on tiktok yeah i think that's the issue it it's i think it speaks to the the shallow world of consumerism at the moment and the fact that i really want to watch videos of this app but never use it and not be responsible for it i think speaks to the sort of spectator and bystander effect of current entertainment i think what you've done is you've you've really shone a light on how cursed we are in a digital age with the accessibility of mean-spirited remarks yeah let's monetize that but the thing is you're giving it to to rich people what do you mean i mean celebrities are rich and they're the ones who are going to be using this app to make more money yeah but they're

doing that anyway we can't act like that though we can't we can't see the world through that lens we need to be better okay but for now having said that i'm willing to give harangue a go i think it'll have a nice four months in the spotlight and then it'll be banned in every civilized country in the world oh this is a get in and out this is a pump and dump scheme yes and it won't be the big celebrities it'll be the ones who are down in their luck no it'll be like people yelling at like a chuckle brother for some reason it's a horrible app you say there's just one there's only one chuckle brother left yeah so i said ain't off there and is it paul or barry that's left paul i don't know okay i'll be honest i

don't know i can't remember but yeah i think it would be successful chuckle chuckle vision chuckle chuckle vision chuckle chuckle vision god they used to put anything on you can talk oh you know what i i think with with that we've we've um if we continue to look into this idea further i'm only going to be more convinced it's a fun idea and i can't have that on my conscience i'll get in touch with some vc firms we'll see how it goes do not put my name on this okay but then you don't get any of the cash do not put my name on this oh okay well i think we've we've done it all we've we've laughed we've cried we've read some emails we've played some campaign for north africa we've heard about cunningham and how he destroyed my naval

fleet and we've well i've sung the chuckle vision theme in a small part at least i think that's what we do every week that's the formula going forward that's what we do now and everybody listening you know how to get in touch with us info what were the mate that could at uk instagram what were the mate website what were the mate that could at uk love to hear from you guys and that is i think that's a wrap andy yeah we'll call it that so stay subtle humble and brave and um would you comment about deserts of your mind hey oh nailed it i could template the shit so easy well farewell good night and stay safe or don't i'm not your dad We'll be right back.