Conclusion and Questions from the Legion

Hey everyone, Joe here. For the entire month of June, new patrons can get fifty percent off the first month of the Legion of the Old Crow tier on our Patreon. So if you're a new listener, an old friend, or maybe someone who's just been curious about what kind of fun we're having over on Patreon , you can check out our entire Bat catalog from the past eight years , all for the price of a crisp white monster. So for the whole month of June, use code donk fifty on Patreon to get fifty percent off your first month. To the crack of rifles and the acrid stench of sorcery, a sunny invasion sweeps through the highlands of the Confederation, and Sayat's peaceful village life breaks with the dawn. A soul survivor amidst the smoking ruins of all that he held de ar. Sayat must make a choice, is pursuing revenge against the mercenaries that took everything from him, worth becoming one himself. As his escape pushes him into the gruff embrace of the Foundlings Brigade, he must learn to tread a path between his need to understand why his people were targeted for destruction and the new responsibility of his soldier's life, even as each new encounter with the horrors of battle force him to confront the terrible costs of his oath. Before long, the shifting fog of war casts old certainties into a haze of doubt, while the stuff of legend seems clear as day, and Syatt finds himself drawn into a much larger conflict than he could possibly imagine. My debut fantasy novel The Highlands Burn is now out on eBook, audiobook and pap,er back. Much like our podcast, this book is a totally independent production, and I hope you'll give it a try. As always, you can find the links where you can get it in the show notes below. Hello and welcome to the Lions of By Donkeys podcast, the only military history podcast in the entire world. I'm Joe, and with me is Tom special guests, Gregory Foley of Bloodwork . How's everybody doing? So welcome to the afternoon zoo crew. We've got air horns, we've got, I'm not gonna do the effects. Don't don't do the effects. That's a slippery slope. But number one, on the agenda, Greg, what does the K stand for? Oh god, it's nothing interesting, but just to let people know, I am not Polish. I'm incredibly up . The K is silent like the G and Lasagna. Yeah, I do it just to keep people on their toes because a real G who moves silent like the G and Lasagna. Yeah. I'm not a G. I move incredibly loudly like a K. Lasagna. I also move incredibly loudly. I moved like the O and r Torghad. That's because you were built like a meaty Javelin. No, but there was a guy in my secondary school who like I knew as Pablo. And the whole time when I was a teenager, I thought his name was Pablo and then after knowing him for years, I heard someone called him Stephen and I was like, What the fuck? Oh, no, his name's Steven. I was like, Why is your name Pablo? And I was like, could you join the school and he had a really like olive complexion and massive chin? And someone said, Who's that fucking? Pablo. She just went, I don't know, Pablo or something. And I'd known him as Pablo for years. And then I had the exact same thing as a teenager where eventually I was like cornered by some people in my friend group at the time, we thought you were Polish I thought your name was actually Heck. Creck. They're like green eyes, freckles, massive fucking head guys, like how many clues do you need? I've seen my head, of course, I'm Irish. Yeah, exactly. I'm a plastic paddy, but I'm still a paddy. Neck the width of a run flat tire . Yeah, I'm happy I'm here to continue my London residency for yet another day, another week, another episode. And fellas, I've gathered you here. Talk about drones. Oh boy, kind of. Oh, we talk about we talkin' like FPV drones or are we talking like a Sun O live concert? Before someone comments, I know it's sun that the O is meant to be a symbol the same as on the AMP. I don't care. You really know your audience, don't you son? Yeah . See, seeing how I have no idea what that second thing is, we're gonna be talking about regular drones. Okay. Boo. Again, kind of. Yay. Drones once the territory of science fiction writers like myself now live in the nightmares of your modern day soldiers and civilians and more often than not these days your social media feed because that's the kind of reality we have created for ourselves But this is a relatively new development in the history of warfare. Well, obviously, drones have been kicking around for quite a long time now. Hell. I had a small company based drone back when I was in the Army. It sucked. It was unarmed , but we did have it. One of the stories in my book The Hooligans of Kandar talks about how we just kept crashing the fucking thing 'cause it sucked, but what if we told you the development of the first armed drone probably goes back a lot further than you'd think. Is it going to be, you know, strapping some sort of Icorean wings and a gun to a Prussian? That would arguably work better? Okay, we're talking World War two again. nineteen forty three and what would eventually turn into the American Operation Aphrodite. There's also a secondary one Operation Anvil, but pretty much everybody knows it. By Operation Aphrodite . But first , some unmanned aerial context . One for you, buddy. You can boom me all you like. I've seen what makes you cheer. I'm in the chat just posting trash can emojis repeatedly. That's fine. That's where I live. I'm Oscar the Grouch of Podcasting. It should probably come as no surprise to anybody that the first nation to slap some kind of rudimentary radio control system on a weapon was the Nazis. Nazi pilots in their newly rebirthedf Luwaffe discovered during their time assisting Franco's fascists during the Spanish Civil War that you know what? Hitting a moving ship from a plane is actually really goddamn hard. Wouldn't it be cool if bombs could somehow guide themselves. See, this is interesting for me because I understand there are kind of like two strands that you can sort of trace the development of technology such as drones. And like one of them is this kind of like quasi humanitarian ideal of like making war less lethal to the individuals fighting it to the extent that you like pursue a form of war which negates the presence or need for humans entirely . And then the other one is the very sort of Nazi fascist form, which is like how can we make sort of like robot death machines? I also will posit a third option, which is an insane theory that I saw like maybe about six months ago in a thread about like, oh, you know, weird Nazi weapons and like people were talking about like, oh, did the Nazis get to the moon? And there was one guy who is burned into my brain. He was like, No, the Nazis didn't develop UFOs because UFOs are Jewish technology. Oh, that's a powerful brain right there. I mean, that's deep Nazi thing is like there are Jews on the moon and that's why we need to get there. I love the idea they did not invent UFO's like the use stands for unidentified meaning you don't know where they're from. You fucking . Yeah, they d themrew with their hands behind their back. Yeah, so they couldn't see their own drawings. There had been a guy that was working on this for quite some time, a guy named Max Kramer. Kramer is one of those guys that's the perfect product of his day. And by that, I mean he just kind of worked on everything from gliders to cars to proposed missile systems, as well as the science of airflow over bodies and movement. And don't forget not saying the N word at the comedy store. I mean probably saying the N word of the comic. This specific Kramer they would have loved it. We're talking about the Nazis. They're like they're just cheering, say the N word again. Eventually he lands at the German Aerospace Laboratory in McGinswurg in nineteen thirty eight on a system of radio controls that could send short signals to a free falling bomb and redirect it using adjustable spoilers as it fell through the air. Using a system of low band radio signals and radio antenna embedded in the tail of the b theom bbomb, could be dropped, and the pilot and controller who dropped it could then adjust it, assuming they kept the bomb with an eyesight below them and controlled it the entire way. Okay , if you're thinking that this seems to have a pretty serious flaw being that the bomber itself is now a sitting duck after dropping it, you would be right . They wouldn't be able to take any evasive maneuvers whatsoever to try to run away from fighter interceptors or incoming fire if they wanted to control the bomb. Like the second the plane moved after dropping the bomb, all control over the bomb was lost. Eventually what would become known as the Fritz X was born. There was a seven hundred pound armor piercing rudiment,ary guided bomb. And you know, they could be guided somewhat. Adjustments could be made, but it's not like a smart bomb. I feel like that's an extra jump in terms. And unlike a lot of seemingly stupid wonder weapons designed by the Nazis , this one was actually quite effective for a little while anyway. Slightly over one thousand of the Fritz X's were built and they were first deployed in july nineteen forty three. The first deployment was completely fucked up and the pilot hit nothing, but within a few months of fine tuning, the Fritz turned into a real motherfucker. When the Nazis turned on their Italian allies, after, of course, the Italians saw the writing on the wall and did what they did best during any World War. Change sides , the Nazis went after them. A flight of Fritz armed bombers hit the Italian Navy and fucked it up. Like this thing worked. Soon it was turned on the Allied Navy and much like the meds that some of us are on, it was super effective. The Italians also tried to make a sort of like proto drone put out of like pasta, but it didn't work because the soldiers kept eating up as the guided yoki . The Fritz also wasn't the only radio guided weapon that the Nazis had rolled out. There was also the HS two hundred ninety three, the first guided anti ship missile. But the guidance system was somewhat different and the two hundred and ninety three was an armor piercing , it soon began to drop ships off the coast of Italy. And it doesn't take long for the Allies to figure out that the bombs were being radio controlled. They in turn worked out countermeasures to them, jamming systems like we all know and love today. This didn't work great at first, but then the Allies kind of got a great gift in that they were able to capture several of the bombs intact at Anzio. Wait, like, were they capturing the bombs like midair or the big old net? No, they invaded Anzio . They were able to construct jamming systems based on the captured designs , which then worked. One of the reasons why the Allies were pretty quick on the uptake when it came to radio guided bombs was they were working on their own at the same time. This isn't like a technology that the Allies captured from the Nazis and then like, oh, this is a really good idea. We should do this. Like they were a parallel invent ion. Theirs was called the Azon bomb, and it was in development since nineteen forty two. Rather than using it to target ships though, their idea was to use as a form of precision bombing to hit narrow bridges along the Burma railway. And largely, these bombs worked on these targets selected for them. I should say I'm using the word worked the same way like the Nazis bombs worked . They hit targets at a higher percentage than their dumb unguided cousins . But it's not like they were great. But the bomb had obvious limitations , mostly the same ones that the Nazis had. Guiding it required planes to hang out overhead, making them sitting ducks for incoming fire, which is also why they chose specifically to use it on targets that probably weren't going to be well guarded. Also because of that same system , it meant that each plane could only drop one of the bombs because by the time they were done guiding the first one in, they'd be way out of the target area. So at the same time the Azon is being constructed, the commander of the U. S. Army Air Corps, Henry Harley Arnold , better known as HAP, pitched a new idea. What if we had a radio controlled bomber , not a bomb , stuffed it full of explosives , thousands of pounds of explosives, and just crashed that motherfucker directly into the target? Ah, American kamikaze. Exactly. See is, this a highly evolved version of my previous idea of strapping a bomb to a dog. Yeah . The Soviet Union would have hired you. They'd get there eventually. I'm still available, guys. No, the Soviet Union just would've strapped a bomb to a guy. I've been sitting by that phone for years now waiting like goodwill hunting. You like Borscht? How do you like that Borsch? They had plenty of old planes sitting around that could be used for this one way trip and they wouldn't have to worry about killing any pilots in the process, you know, hypothetically. Okay, interesting. Foreshadowing is a literary device used by writers who give hints or clues about capitulation . Joe's new book is out now. Yeah, if you like stories, buy my book, The Highlands Burn. Buy the book. Arnold's idea, despite being admittedly pretty nuts for today , was accepted almost universally as soon as he pitched it. I understand that the US military was doing a lot of that kind of thing around that time. Crazy ideas are going to fuck it go with it. Yeah. Cat island. Yeah. And the reason for this is pure practicality. The US Army Air Corps at the time because there was no air force yet was losing a staggering amount of pilot s , but they did have a ton of planes . So the goal was we need to kill fewer pilots. We got stocks of old planes we don't need anymore and possibly this will kill less pilots. Great. Wait, so they're going to try and use full sized planes. Yes. Full bombers. Sorry, Tom, did you have a better idea? Maybe a smaller, more nimble , less costly version of the United States and suggesting a smaller plane. Gay. What are you a communist? Gay and communist. You know what the thing? Why don't we build the bigger plane? Yeah. Yeah . That's usually new . And it will this is like one of the few times in history that I will say like the cost of a bomber is like nothing that the U. S. needs to worry about. Yeah , because this is the era of like hitting the big factory button. This is planes go burrow . And then this idea was given to Jimmy Doolittle to take charge and then he kicks it over engineers to make this system workable. Jimmy Doolittle fake ass name in the same league as Al Falk. Yeah. I just want to point out they should have had Doolittle training the dogs. Actually exactly. Maybe it was like a personnel mix up and they said the Swiss guy who was probably better at aeronautics to work on the drone and Jimmy Doolittle was meant to talk to the dogs. Maybe William Prestier could speak to the bombers. Yeah. This episode is coming out after the other one. Otherwise, this could be a very confusing. Okay, that's good. If you could speak to a military vehicle, it'd be like the worst power on Earth because it's just full of soldiers jerking off all the time. You're doing JOI for the plane . When you first mentioned building a bigger plane for this drone project, I just immediately pictured a humbly with winks . Not far from it. Tiny tiny wings . Like a really fat horse. So the planes used for the program were the ones considered no longer usable for normal combat operations. The term they used for these were quote war weary or planes that had outlived its service life. That meant they could use the B seventeen. It was a choice that made a lot of sense given the fact that the US is cranking out B seventeen s like crazy. The US built twelve thousand B seventeen s and the service life of a B seventeen was thought to be twenty five missions . Yeah, you know, the US military much like the men that are in its employer both very concerned about body count . That one third of the planes that were built would survive this estimated combat service life. So that left the US with a lot of planes to either part out or try to figure out what to do with. Owing to the fact that these are meant to be robot kamikaz es. The planes were stripped of thousands of pounds of unneeded gear for the new role. Armor was gone, turrets were gone, bomber ks were gone, you don't need those anymore. The planes were stripped down to the most bare bones possible while still technically being able to fly . The only addition other than the explosives, of course, would be the equipment needed to turn it into a drone, transmitters for control, and old TV cameras, so crews flying behind the drone in another plane called a mothership would be able to control it from. They didn't use the term drone because it hadn't been quite developed yet . Rather they used the term baby. You got a mothership and you got a baby ship. I thought it was so you know, before the plane, you know, commits mechanical suicide. It can watch whatever the nineteen forties version of the Ed Sullivan show. Flip flip it on, give it one last show. Yeah. The operators on the m othership would then guide the baby onto the target like any responsible mother would. Yeah, exactly. Let's take a moment to talk about the explosives 'cause holy shit was this thing powerful. twelve thousand pounds of torpex A torpex is an explosive normally used in torpedoes, and its name What a name and due to its chemical properties it had fifty percent more explosive mass than TN T. I suppose it's meant to detonate underwater or so. But what is a drone but a torpedo of the sky? That's right. You don't expect to get a torpedo back, do you? It's better than my name of the skypedo. Unfortunately back in World War two, American submarines of tentimes actually got their torpedoes back , which led to several problems. The torpedoes of the sky is just bringing me back to my idea that Armenians are just landlocked Irish people. It's true. It's true. I can see it. They're not allowed in the air or in the sea. They have to be as close to the ground as possible hence the average height of an Armenian man. Yeah, that's why I had to be expelled from the country. You were shot like a meaty javelin into the sky over the border.. Yep And all the best ones are Catholic. Sorry. Sorry. I don't mean that. That was a joke . Yes, you do. Greg means exactly what he says. You should take him very seriously whatever he says. I defer to the most superior Irishman in this conversation. I would say you're the world's first apostolic like hater, but then the entire nation of Turkey exists. Sorry. So these things were going to be powerful as hell . However, engineers rapidly ran into a pretty serious problem. The plan, as pitched by Hap Arnold, was quite honestly impossible. Owing to technological limits at the time, there was no radio control systems available, nor did they have any idea of how to make one that was accurate enough, powerful enough and stable enough to control the baby while it taxied down the runway and took off. Well, that's it, then it means that we can't do the project and I guess we have to call it to an end. There's nothing to discuss any further. So this has been lines led by Donkey. Thanks for exactly. Listen, you guys, I'll see you later. That's when Hat Arnold was like, Yeah, you guys make a really good point. Sorry about that. Hat Barnold was like, No, no, no, no, we're going to do this because one day this technology will metamorphosize into being the foundation for three dickheads in a room talking about my projects. Exactly. Laying his fist on the table and saying, gentlemen, I will have my Skypedos. Give me my flying babies. I refuse to have my grandchildren live in a world without riffs beamed right into their phone. What's a riff? Your grandkids are gonna love him. He hasn't invented yet . No matter what they did, the plane just kept losing connection , not to mention, even if they had a decent one, imagine how hard it would be to control and conduct a takeoff operation using nineteen forty's video cameras that just been kind of tilted down so you could look at all the controls and out the window and see where you're going from a different plane flying behind it like there's so many points of failure here. This is, you know, proof that the American military did not in their like technical development, you know, department did not hire enough perverts because if you had enough perverts , they would have totally figured out how to make a wireless camera work. That's true . Now this is normally kind of like Greg Joked, where a plan dies , but not this one. Arnold, Doolittle and the Engineers once again got together and they tried to figure out how to fix this little problem. You guys can probably already pick up where this is going, right? I could walk with the animals, talk to the animals. They put people inside the plane. Oh good. Yeah, it's just like, you know, all these like AI assistants or whatever. It's like, yeah , maybe it's a machine, maybe it's a guy in Guatemala. Exactly. Picturing one guy on the plane sat, at the radio desk being like, this is great. And then be like, Wait hold on a minute, where are the other guys shot up in the door To their credit, when they came up with the idea of like, we're going to have to have at least two people in each flight. They wouldn't force anybody to do it, and they would have to be volunteers, a pilot and an engineer. Now the plan changed to account for the fact there are now living folks packed inside of the flying bomb as well. Sound next to twelve thousand pounds of torpe . America right behind them. America just inadvertently invented, you know, the warhammer dreadnaw is like, what if we strap one unlucky soldier who is like technically willing because they're committing burg er Jihad against the East into a death machine . We have to graft a pilot's soul, yes, to the B seventeen. I think it's actually larger than that. I think that the United States military just invented nine eleven. Actually hold that thought. Can't cool. Because we almost accidentally did that to several British villages, but we'll get there. Oh, great. We hope we do. The crew would control the plane on the ground, take off, get to an altitude of two thousand feet , go back, arm the bomb and the remote controls, and then jump out of the plane. Something made easier by a safety feature they decided to include, which was just removing the canopy so you could jump straight out. The get the fuck out button. Well, there was no button. There was just no canopy now. Yeah, it's like listen, you got it. That'll shave nine hundred grams or suppose we don't use metric because we're in land of the free. It's like this will shave like what however many ounces get it out, you can jump out of the back. Because like before a pilot would have to walk back to a door that's in the middle of the plane to jump out. The idea was now like, oh now you can just get up from your seat and whoop right out the top. I don't think it works that way though surely. Sometimes okay notice how they said sometimes. Good thing about having twelve thousand of these planes is there's lots of opportunity for trial and error. That's right. Some more volunteers. They put the door in the wrong place and the pilot jumps out goes straight into the engine right into propellers. It's like they'll never know this was a failure. All the pilots are dead. And as we've kind of established, there's never any shortage for volunteers for any weird ass military project. Yes, yes. Then after this process is done, the pilots jump out, then the mother ship falling behind would take over flying and conduct the operation. Even with this new setup, the project was, let's say, not exactly putting up dubs. The radio transmission system they were using was a modified version of the same one used in the Azon bombs. Now this plane is moving faster, it has more moving parts and significantly more points of failure than the bomb ever did. Pretty soon after the system was implemented, they began running into a few problems. During the first test run, based out of the Royal Air Force Base at Fursfield, sure I pronounce that wrong because England town names and all, the pilots took the plane up to where they needed to go, passed controls over to the mothership, and then safely jumped out. However, as the m othership was piloting the drone, they lost connection. It just dropped. Like, you know, you're using T Mobile or something. The drone plummeted to the ground and exploded outside the town of Orford. By drone, just to be clear at this point, you mean plane? Yes. Okay, cool. And it was packing twelve thousand pounds of torque. I mean, you gotta find out what happens. Exactly. Listen, you know, something could have gone wrong and we could have gotten the good result of Wigan being completely exploded. Like, this thing is so big , sc it'resaming like a fucking mushroom cloud when it goes off. And since the mission was top secret and the plane was packed full of explosives, British authorities simply claim that it was a German rocket attack, so nobody would ask any questions about it, and those were quite commonplace in the UK at the time . Yeah. You know, from what I'm understanding, at least some small part of the sort of rural blitz campaign was just the poor inhabitants of these small bumfuck towns in England having to endure explosive planes falling out on the side. What was that? And then was it a German shut up. Yeah, the government's just like, sometimes barns just do that . It wasn't an explosion, it was a weather event. The barons only do that when they're extremely stressed. Are you sure you're shearing the sheep correctly? Yeah, if you don't shear the sheep regularly they do, just explode with the force of twelve thousand pounds doorpet. Why is this really fine red rain falling on me in this one ridiculous spot? Who's that parachute that's been shredded to pieces? That's also covered in red rain? With one plane down, it was time to get testing again. Right. So the next baby takes off with its crew aboard. As soon as they do, something goes terribly, terribly wrong . The pilot doesn't even have time to get to altitude before he loses control, like this was even a failure of the radio controls, right? It was just the plane failed. That was a twenty six flight . twenty six mission . The engineer manages to bailout, but the plane plummets to Earth and explodes, killing the pilot. I hope that the mothership just has like one of those little tags on the back that just says baby on board. Yeah, slap . Since this is the nineteen forties and they're flying a bomb with the shittiest radio controls in the world, and it's a top secret program , absolutely nobody is sure what caused the baby to lose control. The army just shrugged and loaded up another one. Yeah, I can't get over the idea of like a baby on board tag, but also like in the mill of American bumper stickers is like in this plane we kneel for the cross and stand for the flag and it's just like a giant decal of a Thompson submachine gun on the side. I like the idea of it's like it's one of those very American bumper stickers I've never seen anywhere else, but it's like one big plane to show like the parent and like several tiny planes babies. Yes . The third flight also crashed and killed the pilot. This time it, don't worry . This time it was after the engineer had bailed out and the pilot turned the remote control system on. Virtually as soon as the plane switched systems , it just dived directly towards the ground like a fucking meteor, trapping him inside because he's supposed to jump out of the now open canopy. Yeah, but it's diving so fast that he cannot get out. World is a fuck, one dead pilot, a million dead planes. That's a hell of a way to go. The army looking at a second smoking crater with a corpse inside waved over another pilot. Just like poking the corpse of the pilot with a stick. He's like, yeah, he didn't get through it. So this was this was in the UK as well. These are all crashing in the UK. So I love the idea to get a British major coming out to going damn shame, I tell you that. Anyway, learn up another yank. Go and get him on. We'll get this to work no matter how many yanks are in the process. I don't care how many yanks we have to spend. Sending another one of those flyboys. There's a real methodological failure in that line. These planes keep crashing and stuff keeps going wrong, but they cannot learn from the mistakes because they keep killing the pilots as well. And also because they're crashing into the ground with so much speed and force. There's no way to like autopsy the flight. Like yep, it crashed. What made it crash? Oh pilot baby. Amission assessment. Shit fall . I'm neither a technician nor an engineer or anyone with that those kinds of skills , but I just can't help but feel as though there must have been some way that you could troubleshoot before the plane was in the sky with two human lives on board. I don't think so I disagree with you, mostly just because I hate the concept of flight. Yeah, fair enough. If we get rid of more pilots, we'll get rid of the idea of flight. Soon we'll be a ship based people more yanks. Once again, Armenians meant to be on the ground. Yeah . The next few tests actually went well enough. And by that, I mean nobody died and they didn't almost blow up a British village. So the system was tabbed for an active operation. In the beginning of august nineteen forty four, flights of babies and motherships were dispatched to attack a Nazi Uboat Base in France lo,aded up with hundreds of firebombs and nearly a thousand gallons of naphalm. The first baby took off, the crew switched over to remote control, safely bailed out, and then the baby lost connection and crashed into the sea. The next took off, immediately ran to control problems , which left the crew on board. The pilots fought for control of the dying aircraft encircled in the air of Ipswich. People were terrified that they were about to wipe the fucking town off of the map because just to be clear here, it absolutely would have been. We're creating a crater in Midlands England. But the pilot managed to get enough control back to aim it towards the sea and get the fuck out of there, saving quite possibly hundreds of lives. The next flight sent towards Germany either crashed on their own or were shot down before the motherships could guide them onto their targets, with one pilot killed because when he bailed out his shoot didn't open and he went splatten theed B toritish countryside. So not only are we dropping planes on British villages, we're also just dropping dudes. I'm sure this would have been fantastic for morale for the entire unit of soldiers who are tasked with like being part of this operation so far there's an attrition rate of a hundred percent. Not everybody has died. Okay , just some severely maimed. I would say it's like, you know, thirty percent, which is still very high. Yeah, you know, you'll die or you can end up like the guy from the One Video for Metallica . I do like the idea if you've ever seen the film Dogma. It's like dudes like me just don't fall in the sky, you know? But it's happening in the British village and a pilot just goes cratering through your barn and James how feels just like airplanes have taken my legs, taken my arms I'm picturing just a song port the plane is done with this one . Oh patent, please help me . We're getting a morse code message through from the plane. What's it saying? It just says kill me. Over and over and over again. I'm just picturing some poor couple just minded their business walking through the street and having a pilot just go smack into the ground like directly in front of them and then some British military propaganda is still trying to keep the secret. It was a German missile.. Shut up I told you they're getting tired. Jerry started dressing his men up in American uniforms and throwing them from the sky. Sign for their surrender. This isn't what they don't really tell you about the foundation for the keep calm and carry on campaign. Yeah, right. Keep calm carry on please, step over the flying corpse. That's an albatross. Keep an eye out there. Germans falling from the sky. With all the failures and dead bodies beginning to pile up, the U. S. Army Air Corps finally put a pause on the program to try to work out the kinks. But that did not mean the project was dead. It seems like their kink was killing pilots. That's my kink. Stop belie . Keep on killing all those flyers . That's because there are actually two different programs trying to do the same thing, one for the Army, Operation Aphrodite , and the other one for the Navy, Operation Anvil. The operational name would go on to be reused again into what would be called Operation Dragoon, but Operation Anvil in this context means the drone program. Anvil, like a thing famously known for flying. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Maybe it should have been Operation Hammer because they're going to crash repeatedly into the anvil. I mean, to be fair, it's pretty accurate with depictions of like anvils from, you know, Acme cartoons of true. You know, between them being dropped on Wiley Coyote all these pilots being like smashed to death by like a hulking plane . It kind of works. Our head engineer fucking the road runner. It's just the road runner and the plane crashes and he just pops up over hill and goes, Me . This is basic project management and just managing expectations. You name it project anvil. As long as that plane behaves in the sky to the floor in any way that is remotely an improvement upon dropping an anvil from the sky , it's a success. Sometimes the plane just does that. The only way is up or down. Yeah , sometimes the only way is down because there's no landing these fucking things. The only way is up and then down . Functionally, these programs were the same, though the Navy had a slightly different remote control scheme, and it's not really important for our story here. And since there was being run by the Navy, they used planes that they had lying around, which happened to be mostly the B twenty four Liberator. The Navy was absolutely certain that their program was different and better, and decided to aim it towards an important target in order to prove their point . That target was the V three program. Now most people are aware of the Vengeance Rockets. That's what the V stands for the Nazi Rocket Program. But the V didn't actually mean rocket. It just meant vengeance weapon. And the V three wasn't a rocket at all. Rather, it was a massive multi stage, multi chamber , smoothbore cannon that fired a fin stabilized projectile with the goal of shelling London from northern France. Yeah, I read a really famous book written by a New York recluse about this . The cannon was massive and needed to be built at a grade into the ground in a series of tunnels. And the idea was that eventually this whole facility would have a whole battery of these cannons pointed towards London and be able to drop hundreds of shells per hour into the city. Obviously this never happens. So the Navy selected their volunteers from their program, and one of them might be someone that some people may have heard Engineer Wilford J Willie. No, actually, not that one. Pilot Joseph Kennedy Jr. Yes , a man famous for being very good at flying planes Sound that Clackson? Kennedy Clackson . Well, weirdly enough, the Kennedy Clackson does sound like a gunshot. Yeah, well the Kennedy Clackson has two sounds, gunshot and punk crash . So what happened in the book depository? Someone turned to Lee Harvey Oswan and went, Oh my God it's JFK Sound the claxes like you got it boss. Oh shit wrong shit fuck out Joseph Kennedy was the oldest of the Kennedy Boys like JFK is his next youngest br . Joseph had been the one being groomed for a political future. Yet when he was born, his grandfather who was mayor of Boston at the time, declared a journalist that his grandson was going to be the future president of the United States. I mean, to be fair, he was right, just not in the way that he thought he would be. But it's great, you know , with the naming convention of the family is like JFK is going to be president. One of them, you know, dies then, you then know, you got another one . Joseph Kennedy Jr. was also a huge fan of one Adolf Hitler , as was his father. Joseph's father was a huge fan of Father Charles Cauflin, a vuliewerent ant,i semite , far right, Catholic American nationalist. At least at first, Kennedy eventually turned against Cauflin when Cauflin accused FDR of being a communist, but not for any of the other stuff that Cauflin stood for , which is kind of ironic because Joseph Sr. would eventually turn against FDR for standing with the UK in the war against the Nazis. Joseph's father then became Ambassador to the UK and held countless unauthorized meetings with his Nazi counterparts, where he expressed support for what they were doing prior to the war and said that America would support the Nazis too, but unfortunately FDR had simply fallen under the spell of Jewish influence. I believe the people of the UK should side with the Nazis He hung out with an intensely pro Nazi circle of the British aristocracy, which admittedly is just almost the whole thing. It's like him rolled out . It's just redundant. The royal family. The king. When the war started, Joseph was vocally against it and kept trying to organize unauthorized meetings personally with Adolf Hitler to try to bring the US and Germany closer together. Imagine getting left on red by Hitler . His meetings eventually leaked back into the US media, and he again, of course, blamed the Jews for this. Can't get a text back because of the Jews . There's definitely dudes who are posting shit like that 's like oh I'm getting left on red mugged by some food because of the jukes. I mean that's effectively the whole male loneliness epidemic excuse, right? He eventually resigned but publicly remained a supporter of FDR due to previous agreements the two had in exchange for Kennedy using his influence to get FDR elected. FDR would then in turn support Joseph Jr. in his assumed future political career. Joseph Jr. had a lot of the same beliefs as his father. He had traveled to Germany in nineteen thirty four and absolutely loved it, or as he put it, quote, the need of a common enemy, someone of whom to make the goat, someone by whose riddens the Germans would feel they have cast out their cause of their predicament. It was excellent psychology and it was too bad that they had done it to the Jews. The dislike the Jews, however, was well founded. They were at the heads of all the big businesses in law etc. It is to their credit for them to get so far, but their methods have been quite unscrupulous. The lawyers and the prominent judges were all Jews, and if you had a case against a Jew, you were almost certain to lose it. As far as the brutality is concerned, it must have been necessary to use some the Irish should have never become white. This is just one of those situations where you have to understand that not everybody knew what was going on in the Third Reich and not everyone knew what they were really up to. And then you just get a quote like that in which an individual very highly placed in the American establishment is to the letter sort of perfectly like analyzing and diagnosing both the political program and the prognosis for this solution. Yeah, we need to make the greater Massachusetts area all Juden Frauley. He loved the Nazi sterilization program too . He wrote about it saying, quote, It's a great thing. It'll do with many of the disgusting specimens of men. So quite literally what you were saying, Greg is like everyone's like, Well, they didn't know everything the Nazis were doing. Meanwhile, Joseph Kennedy Jr.'s like, No, I've seen what they're doing. It rocks. Now, he read Jonathan Swift and he was like, Oh, this is actually a really good idea. Yeah one of the kind of pithy remarks that I often make lately with regards to sort of institutional both Islamophobia and increasingly transphobia in the United States and the UK is that like the primary lesson that a lot of these sort of liberal intelligence here and ruling class learned from the twentieth century with regards to fascism and the Third Reich was good system, wrong target . And you know, that always feels a bit glib but when I say that and then you hear a comment from Joseph Kennedy Jr. saying everything they're doing ab issolutely banging on. It's just unfortunate they're doing to the Jews. But I do kind of agree with that also. Joseph Kennedy Jr is in the background screen. Lads, lads, lads, lads, lads. Chug, chug, chug. After the night of the brokenass G,l Joseph wrote to another American Nazis supporter, Charles Lindbergh, okay saying that he was concerned, not about the street violence, but how bad the violence looked, which is quite ironic because that's what a lot of people within the Nazi government thought as well, which is , you know, why it evolved into what it was. Like a lot of people both in the US and the UK who definitely agreed with a lot of what the Nazis were doing, when the war started, he dropped out of university at Harvard and was commissioned into the Navy as a pilot to fight in the war. It's one of those strange things that happened during pretty much every World War, every large scale war in general. And even really anything that gives like a little veneer of like adventurism and daring do is like, no, like I actually quite like the people who are going to go fight, but that doesn't mean I'm going to go do it because it seems fun. I'm choosing to believe that it was actually an alternative thing where what happened was people would go this guy's such an insufferable prick, can we please put him in all those babies? No, let's put him on the baby. Let's take a third way Revangelist position and that like we need to bring this back to the sort of rhetoric because you know, oh woke university students now would not get on the death plane to fight the Nazis. Well, what's the thing is he didn't start off on the death plane. Like he completed his regulation twenty five combat flights over the next couple years of. The way it worked back then is that pilot casualty rates were so high that they had a combat mission number that when they reached it, sometimes that number moved up, sometimes it moved down, they could just get out of the military or take another assignment. Hey, listen, look, all you can say is that Joseph Jr. had a more successful flight record than JFK Jr. I mean, the Kendid's low bar, but you are correct. Yeah, you need to stay away from guns and plan . And also the Department of Health . Yeah . I'm now constructing an alternative theory of the Kennedy Curse, which is that they basically saw this first guy that was a massive Nazi in such bad vibes they're like there's only one solution for this. We need to eradicate your entire bloodline. Maybe OurFK Jr is kind of like the Emperor of Man and that like all the other Kennedys need to be sacrificed in order to funnel like power into him like psychos being sacrificed to the emper or. I mean, thankfully he'll take human sacrifice but also just any random roadkill that they find. Yeah, like he'll do cocaine off the toilet seat. Yep, he sure will. He'll also share your steroid dealer. So yeah, like I said, he finishes his Regulation twenty five combat flights and then volunteers to join Operation Anvil in the Navy. So with that, let's go back to the US Navy's first active operational baby flight, which sounds like it could be a lot of different things to be completely honest. Kennedy and Willie took off in their plane, which had the wonderful name Zootsuit Black. Oh my god hate America so much for a myriad of reasons, but shit like this constantly imagine the whole plane wearing a zoo suit. The baggiest suit on a plane. That's why they kept crashing 'cause the fucking shit shirt sleeves. Turbine. That fried anim es. Instead of a pin up being painted on the nose, they just have like a really, really good portrait of Dizzy Gillespie on the front. It's playing Scar three decades too soon. But what the fuck is that ? It might not be for you, but your kids will hate it too . I will defend Scott, fuck it. You would. Obviously, their flight, like I said, was targeting the V three program. Behind them were three other planes, a recon plane whose job is to record the entire operation, a navigat plane, and the mothership. At first, everything went according to plan. Kennedy brought the plane to the altitude it required and engaged the remote control system. As was procedure, they remained on board as the system took over. This also worked seemingly flawlessly. Kennedy and Willie then went to go back and arm the bomb so they could then bail out of their designated bailout point over Kent. Kennedy radioed the code word for the bomb being armed, which was spade flush and the plane immediately exploded in the air. The alternative is like the plane could have crashed into like Tumbered Wells. And it was like, You fucked God what are you doing? Crashing your plane in my front garden? You went to the back of the plane and went hold on, this is really weird. What's this book depository doing at the back of the plane? I mean, to be fair, what are you aiming for? If it did crash in Kendr you know all the metal would be stripped from that wreckage in about three seconds. Listen, I'll have it. Back to nature. Obviously, this explosion kills them both instantly. A Kennedy? And don't forget engineer Willie. Yeah, Willie. So let listen. Nobody ever remembers engineer Willie. Let all the headlines just like Willie dead. Like a tiny tiny tiny Willy Willy. He also killed. Don't worry used to it. Yeah, I mean like much like JFK's head, sometimes planes just do that. Exactly. Burring debris rains down the village of Blyburg, damaging fifty buildings and starting several fires. You can't say the people of Blyburg don't hate you, mister Kennedy. They certainly didn't blame Willie. Yeah. Nobody ever blames Willie. Nine, nine, not really . Nine they have killed Willie . The explosion was so powerful it nearly blew the recon plane that was following it out of the air and injured one of the men on board and forced them to make an emergency landing in a nearby field. If this was a much more covered story, we could have had an alternative version of the song from Inside Louis and Davis. It's like please, Mr. Kennedy, oh , I don't want to please don't shoot me into Adder Ket. Please. That's what it click. Was this plane? Do you know what explosives were laden on this plane? Was this one Napalm? No, this one was pure torpex. Okay, fantastic. Either way he would be horrific. But the idea of like watching and like seeing just two of your colleagues just like explode in a fireball and then raced down on the floor. Maybe the planes keep exploding because the torpex has reached sentience like, I'm not in water, fuck this . I hate the air. I'm taking you down with beautiful. They didn't they didn't check the Torpex's full label and see that its surname was Oswald . But this is where I get to tell you. Wait, it gets worse . Oh good. The mission they were going on to attack the V three program was actually completely pointless from the very beginning. Not by the U. S. military? That's because on july sixth, nineteen forty four, acting on intel passed to them by the French resistance, the Royal Air Force bombed the hell out of the V three site with their infamous Hallboy Earthquake bombs. Using regular planes? Yeah, regular airplanes can easily special bombs, but you know, America just like heard that goo. Yes, this is what if we throw a Kennedy at it? Yes, you complet theed mission but it's not impressive, is it? No one died. We've killed dozens of Kennedys and we're gonna do more. We have vats of Kennedys growing in the lab. Go back to the Boston Laboratory. Pull a few more eyes . They're just like , I remember a guy I used to know who trained to be a doctor in the like, I think late sixties and he explained to me like the cadaver pool where like you learn about cadavers and just like Yeah , it was just like a pool of cadavers and you just got like a hook and like pulled one out. Yeah go fishing. The Royal Air Force Bombing mission rendered the cannon site which was already under construction, totally worthless. It was abandoned and never restarted again. Good for them. That meant there's absolutely no reason for the Kennedy mission to go ahead, but the Royal Air Force never told the Navy or the Army Air Corps so they had no idea . So therefore, dead Kennedy, no good reason for it. No, there I' thinks a good reason. I think Joseph Sr. knew this was going to fail. He was like put my boy on the plane because he knew it would sharpen John Steel, sharpen steel. He will be stealed in his reser ve by the death of his brother and he will become the top shagger president Jav came grievously wounded in World War two ? Yeah , I don't know if the theory pans out or maybe Joseph was like we'll send them both to war. One of them will at least survive Odds are we'll get one back but it did wonders for Hunter Biden but also JFK himself also you know sharp as attack. Yeah, it's like a listen to drug abuse or anything like that. Nope. The Navy launch an investigation into the incident and then, you know, like all the other ones just kind of shrugged. Yeah, it's just a Kennedy. You gotta get used to it. Here, listen, they're Irish, but they have lots more ? The whole program is full of so many problems. All the only thing they could come up with was , well, the crew probably didn't fuck up and cause the explosion. The bomb was rigged wrong, or the electric were wrong. Something was wrong with the crew blame the Irishman. We know this one. Blame Willie. Yeah . And then there are some stories about how the Navy covered up Kennedy's death, which isn't entirely true. They did cover up how he died for at least a year . But the real reason for that isn't because he was a Kennedy, it's because he was involved in a secret program. They didn't tell anybody else how the other pilots died either. Yeah, I'm not a big fan of this like prequel to the Sabr uder tape. Dude, when we were in this guy, I looked out the window and I swear dog, they'll tell you it wasn't there, but I saw a grassy knob dog right up there. I mean , it's a grassy kno. There's technically a zip pruder film of this Kennedy dying too. His sake. Not a lot of people knew about it. The Pruders can earn work. I'm sick of these Kennedy's native films. It's like the people who's like, oh, you've seen like a serious man. It's like, you don't know the real shit. You have much Bart and Finn. As far as we know,, like all it happened was that like the entire Kennedy family had a congenital allergy to cameras . Yes . That's the theory I'm going with . This is like kind of obscure the real details of what happened to the point that there is some sort of confusion on what mission he actually died on. Some sources saying he died while targeting a U boat pen on a mission that actually took place about a week before he really died . However, official documents, dispatches from Doolittle, and the book Kennedy's at War points out that he died on august twelfth, nineteen forty four , which is the day of the V three mission. Like maybe and this is like a wild swing is maybe the Kennedy's are the first like proper example of spontaneous human combustion and it's because Joseph Sr. made a deal with Satan that one of his sons would be president Yeah? , why not? You really like Hitler. That's a good enough reason for me for him to explode. A truly Faustian bargain is like one of my offspring will be president and Satan just goes , Yes, but not for long. All the other children will die in increasingly comedic ways. I just think it has to be absolutely humiliating posthumously to have a thing where sort of anybody who talks about you're like, No, he was really great. He was a war hero and fought and died for our country. And he goes, What was he doing? I don't know. No one, we don't know. This is where things get kind of weird. There's another strange wrinkle to this whole story , which brings us to a different American family, the Roosevelts. I thought it was gonna be like big Eddian little Lady. We're gonna get to Grey Gardens next. Elliot Roosevelt, FDR's son, was a colonel in the Army, and he claimed to have been in the recon plane filming the Kennedy mission take that you bitch. This camera's gonna take you down. But that's the thing I'm gonna beat on him. He said this for years, but there's no evidence he was ever there at all. Like he was not involved in this whatsoever. So we got an exploded Kennedy and a Roosevelt stolen valor situation to the Delta Force guys that claim they killed bin Laden to Roosevelt's being like no, I killed Kennedy with me now put some respect on that psycho if he was a seal it's like, you know, when rappers film them and their crew jumping other rappers this is like called evidence stomp on his head , tpum on his head . like But Elliot Roosevelt was not there. This lie went on for years. Such a strange thing to lie about. Yeah, why lie about it? I mean, he was a colonel. Like he was doing actual work . Like weirdly Roosevelt's kids were actually like pretty competent at their job, but then he had to just like, by the way, I was there when Kennedy died. Yeah, but also again, you're just way ahead of the mile. Give it two decades and me like, I was there when Kennedy died, fucking bomb, but any part. No one gives a shit about this one. That is absolutely like a drunken lie you would tell a woman that you're trying to sleep with at a bar. I was like, I know Kenny. I was there and he died and she just recorded him exploding. She was like, Which one? Don't worry about it. It was like, no, no, no, I was there at the lesser known wall. It was the velve att underground Kennedy . The oysters in the nobount of Kennedy deaths. You've probably never heard of them, Joseph Kennedy Jr. Like everybody's so popular with the I was there when JFK got killed, but Yamafuckers have even heard of Joseph Kennedy exploding. Or even like those people who are like, Oh, you know, when Robert died and was like, oh, I was so upset. I was like, No, I was there when the real shit. A real hero for this country. Civil rights, who cares about that? This man was going to b omb the Nazis he bombed himself. So technically he did bomb the Nazis. And to be fair, if you are like , actually, that's unfair. I don't know if Willie was a Nazi. He bombed precisely one Nazi. But if you were like in the middle that like the Kennedys and the Roosevelt's were like moving in, most of those people probably did not like the civil rights movement either. No , I mean FDR is about as good as it got, but the other thing as well is that this is like classic lying guy behavior where like you're lying, but the thing with lying guys is that they always overcook it. And with the JFK assassinations, you know, like, unless you were there in Dallas at the time, like the only way you would have heard about it is on the radio. You wouldn't have seen it, you know, people heard it being announced on the rad io. And this is a guy feeling like, that's nothing. Two decades ago, I was there and I saw the other Kennedy getting killed. Not only that, I was there and I filmed it with my camera and you're like, you're full of shit, man. And he lied in a way that's so easily disprovable because like the military keeps paperwork on who's on every flight like bro you're not on this and it's like the pure Simpsons is like can I see it? No there were several other attempts to make this stupid program work too but every single mission ended in f ailure. It killed several more pilots, including a guy who tried to bail out but got strangled by his own static line parachute when he jumped. So you know, they added a wind chime to the plane . Another wonderful fuck up happened in October same year when a flight of babies targeted some Nazi U boat pens in Germany . Their weather was terrible, but the mission went ahead anyway, and when it became clear that the weather was so bad they couldn't even find their target, they tried to guide the babies towards Berlin just to hit something , right? But they lost control of them. One of the babies crashed into the sea, which seems like they love doing, after running out of fuel, but another one just kept going, independent of any control , flying all the way over Germany, crossing into Sweden and crashed and exploded outside this town of Trohatton. Sorry, just to be clear , Joe, which plane models were being used for these missions? It was a B seventeen and a B twenty four . Just you know, for an individual like me who's not as well versed in sort of military technology. Give me a sort of comparative about the size of these planes. For World War Two, they're quite big. This sounds like hellish. Like the B seventeen is like when you close your eyes and think of World War two bomber, you're probably thinking of B seventeen. This sounds like an absolutely hellish situation for anybody not directly involved to see like planes, just like Kamikaze like crashing into the sky intentionally or not. This sounds like you have to be in Sweden of all places. And this sounds like an absolute hellish way to both wage warfare and experience it as like an innocent non combatant on the ground. Thankfully it was very successful. Oh that's good. There was another mission with the delightfully named plane the stump jumper . Yes. Which just sounds like something someone on the internet would call my mom . This flight also failed. The stump jumper jumped to no stumps. Rather than being officially cancelled, Aphrodite and Anvil just kind of petered out. Army and Navy teams went back to the drawing board trying to fix the mass while planners and commanders kept trying to figure out just the right target for their big dumb babies. But as the war began to shift undeniably in the favor of the Allies, Edge's normal ass bombing did more and more damage and because of air superiority, fewer pilots died, the further use of the babies got kicked down the road is just being largely unnecessary. I do love the idea of like the whole time they're doing this, like the British Air Force are just doing regular bombing campaigns is s likeort of racking up winds and then I mean, so the United States is imagined , fuck are you guys doing? Well, that's like the weird thing of the US bombing campaigns were fucking catastrophically successful by the definition of success of the day. Yeah , but at the same time they're losing so many pilots. So it's like what if we could do this without killing pilots because the pilots are kind of hard to train. But then after a while you stop losing so many pilots like okay we don't need to use a giant radio controlled flying monstrosity. Yeah, but like we got so many more Kennedys we have to kill. They stopped all there ahead. And also JFK wasn't a pilot so they couldn't use him. I mean he was in the Navy. That's why JFK got shot is because they couldn't get him in this program . So eventually they had to get Lee Harvey Oswald to Russia to be programmed to come back and then kill him and then get Jack Ruby who isn't a gemstone. Thank you. I think that by this method of madness, JFK would technically have to be killed by a boat because he was on a PT boat where you control boat, get killed yeah, whatever. The problem they're coming up to basically is that as you said, like pilots are very hard to train and what they need is the kind of caliber of pilot who's valuable enough to put in a plane, but not so valuable that you're going to be sad if you lose them, but unfortunately they haven't perfected the McCain yet. That's one of the problems with this program is like the pilots volunteering for had largely finished all their missions anyway. Imagine some really dogs shit pilot and they're like oh yeah you're perfect. So on the cane , I don't know if I've said it on the show is when I was in Hanoi weeks ago I was crossing over a bridge to go to a temple and I was walking back and I spotted this statue and I was like this. And all of writing in it is in Vietnamese, but there's like a little sign next to it and I read it and I was like, there's a monument on this bridge to John McCain getting down and it's like so cool. I was like, imagine you fucked up so bad that an entire nation decides to build a monument to your fuck up. I mean, it's a bit of a retroactive flex because he became famous after he was shot down. Yeah, which is why that memorial becomes important. Just like if he never gets elected or does anything, just like that, he's just another pilot that guy. I seem to remember hearing that there was even a thing where John McCain visited that memorial or something like it, believing that it was a statue that had been erected as a tribute to him . And like, yeah, I don't know. To have to check, have a Google. I could be wrong, you know, I'm an idiot, but I'm pretty sure there was a whole story where like he went and he was like, No, we're making fun of you, dude. There may even be photos of him with the statue. So the project was eventually approved for further use in April of nineteen forty five, but then the war eventually ended shortly thereafter and stopped even more pilots from dying in acne ways and stripped down busted up planes over England and Germany. One Kennedy down, the end. Warren Kennedy down. We're covering for the rest of you fuckers need to go . How well? I got a plane with your name on it. Everybody just trying to coax Kennedy's into the drone plane. Don't ask why. I have a thing with RFK where every single time I try and do an impression of him, I just end up going . We're not an impressions guy but I feel like if I did my throat would just hurt. But yeah, that is Operation Aphrodite and the fate of one very fascist friendly Kennedy in a ball of fire. But fellows, we do a thing on this show called Questions from the Legion. If you'd like to ask us a question, you can support the show on Patreon, you get access to the Discord, which has a channel for this kind of thing. You can ask us on Patreon. You can put it in a radio controlled plane and blow it up somewhere over the UK, and we will answer it on the air. That was a joke. For anybody that's listening. Yeah, don't do that. Don't do that. That's right upon. It doesn't just get covered up as a state secret anymore. So today's question from the Legion is, if you can nook one fast food franchise out of existence, what would it be? Huh ? Would be Leon, which is a very UK , it's like never had it. So it's fast food but it's meant to be like healthy so you can get like a chicken breast burger that has barely any flavor on it and some waffle fries . It's like Protestant McDonald's pretty much. Okay. I kind of assumed McDonald's was protestant McDonald's. No, there's a you know, that's multi faith, you know, unless you are a Palestinian. Greg, what's your answer? I'm going to have to say Subway primarily no all defense subway . Subway is trash. So I'm one hundred percent with Greg on the tool like Subway is trash. Second of all, like I feel like you point out here, we need to pick out what we're n ooking based on the flavor and the restaurant itself. Yes. Okay. I'm still picking Subway. Okay, so no, I have I have reasons for that with Subway. Like, yeah, the food is trash, but then also like I feel like particularly in like cities like London and other big cities where used to have like a sort of thriving sort of independent deli sandwich chains. I feel like Subway was one of the companies in the early two thousands along with other cafe chains that like basically killed that off and replaced us with like s deort ofad chain cafes everywhere. And they're not. I mean, this absolutely fucking seriously like Subway have not paid for the crimes that they are responsible with relation to Subway Jared. Not even fucking kidding. It's absolutely album. Actually, I completely forgot about that. Yeah, I was picking Subway based on the fact that their sandwiches suck, but there's also that too. Yeah. Also the thing with Subway is that they got brought to court because their bread didn't had so much sugar in it that it didn't technically count as bread. I mean, I assume this is not a lawsuit that happened in the United States. No , I happen to the UK . I remember when Subway used to be a passable and then they like everything's getting, you know, progressively worse, but Subway was ahead of the curve on that one. I really fucking hate Subway. So I'm a toss up between Subway and mostly Subway. And I can't think of another one that I hate like I don't really eat . I like RV's and it's a regional it's a regional delight . But yeah, like I was like honestly anybody, if you've actually looked into this whole subway jar story, like I know everyone knows like the truth is out there . I know everyone knows the basic story that oh they had this mascot and it was a pedophile, but it is it was a scandal like as sort of evil as like the BBC Jimmy Savil scandal where like they all knew what was going on. They assisted him and they're like, no, we have to protect Jared. Look at him. He's so very protected . No, like absolutely disgusting. He needs to stand out there holding a big pair of pants. Oh, a London one. I will actually kind of UK in general nuke prep from space. I hate their coffee when I moved to this country, they had the subscription where you pay twenty quid a month and you get like five coffees a day and this is a pretty sweet deal. This was the summer when like it was like forty degrees one day and every single pre did not carry ice and they were like oh sorry no ice drinks today. Do you want like a room temperature ice latte with no eyes That.'s just shitty co ffee. That's homophobic. Yeah, you're right, Tom. That's worse than the subway story. Yeah. I've never gotten coffee at a Pret and I've only gone to a Pret at airports. Do you want a sandwich that is ninety percent spinach I like spinach though. I don't know what that's supposed to mean to. I've seen you run on a treadmill. You're like a horse. That's why I hate them so much there can be only one But I believe that's a podcast fellows,, you host other podcasts. Plug those other podcasts. Beneath Skin Show about the history of everything told you the history of tattooing and I am the producer of a show called Bloodwork with this wonderful man sitting beside me. Hello, listen to blood work podcast about the economy of violence. What's again my name is Gregory Foley I'm the host yeah I've been doing it with Tom for about six months now we've had a really good fun we've got a lot of really quite interesting exciting episodes that are lined up out in coming Jun seort of into July. So if you would like to hear a story about a load of flat nose geezers who recruited a neo Nazi wizard , check out our Patreon. Yeah, the history of Combat eighteen with Garth Watkins. We've just come back with Part three and yeah it's heating up which is to say is getting even dumber and they're about to pull the screwdrivers out so tune in. Or alternatively you can listen to our four powered series on the history of the AK forty seven. This is no longer the only show that I host . I also host the unnamed untitled warhammer podcast over on iHeart Radio with Robert Evans, but this show has a patreon. Consider supporting this show on Patreon and makes everything we do possible. It's an independent show. We have no ads, no marketing. Only you guys. support us, get years and years of bonus content every episode early, leave us a review, and wherever it is you listen to podcasts. Bye my book , the Highlandsburn, Out Now on Paperback eBook and audiobook, read by me in case you're not sick of my voice. Until next time