The Pacific Theater Was A Nightmare
Maybe we don't talk about the Pacific Theater in World War 2 as much as we should because we don't want to acknowledge how gross it actually was. The Battle of Peleliu is arguably the best example of how foul it was. Unspeakable war crimes, temperatures exceeding 110 degrees, crabs eating dead bodies that had exploded from the heat, human mutilation by normal men who'd been broken by the savagery of the battle. Peleliu might have been literal hell.
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Rob Fox
https://www.instagram.com/robfoxthree/
https://twitter.com/RobFoxThree
https://www.tiktok.com/@robfoxthree
Dan Regester
https://www.instagram.com/danregester/
https://twitter.com/dan_regester
Speaker 1: You are now listening to soft core History. What is up?
Welcome back to soft Core History. I am your host
for the week, Rob Fox, joined as always by Dan Jester.
Speaker 2: I'm ready to spring Ford.
Speaker 1: I forgot about it. My wife woke me up at ten, and, uh.
Speaker 2: You felt like a dick because you slept in so long.
Speaker 1: I guess. I was like. She was like, Rob, it's ten,
and I was like, don't fucking feel like ten.
Speaker 2: Well didn't, and that's why I'd lost an hour.
Speaker 1: I didn't know that. I just forgottenuntil until later that day.
Speaker 2: Basically, no, I'm just feeling aggressive. I want to spring
at you, just attack you.
Speaker 1: Please don't. I got to sprained my calf. Today they're
not sprained, Uh, cramped it cramped up.
Speaker 2: Real bad man, forty years old. Never looks so good.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I don't run on an incline on a treatment.
I guess when you haven't been running in a while.
Speaker 2: Talk on incline. Let's how you burn more fat. Walk
on incline like a steady pace.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't give that a shot. I've just been
fucking sprinting.
Speaker 2: Dog put it up to like fifteen and then probably
like a three to five. Good to go. That's the
fat burning zone right there. Hell yeah, when I was
your free fitness tip of the day.
Speaker 1: Thank you. This episode is brought to you by nothing
to do with fitness. Actually, we have a really cool
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Watch company Persadus waschco. They do a lot of military
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But they hit us up because they have a really
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it that I will get into it later, but I
just wanted to talk about a top because you.
Speaker 2: Can see it behind Rob's.
Speaker 1: The box right here with a little mount Serbaci flag raising.
It's a really cool watch. They hit us up of
the blue. They were just like, we think you have
a cool podcast. We do history themed stuff and we
thought it would be a great fit. Highly recommend if
you're into this specific watch or any of their watches.
They have a lot of cool just like bare bones
kind of like military watches that are kind of sick,
like that's my style. If I'm not wearing an Apple Watch,
so very very thankful to them. I'll get more into
the details in the mid role, but I highly recommend
listening to it because it's like a very interesting company
that I didn't know about, and I'm so glad they
reached out because now I'm just like balls deep.
Speaker 2: In their catalog hashtag spawn con Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yep, Hey, we're all spunk, all Connispond in some degree, Yes, yeah,
all Connospond. This is a charity.
Speaker 2: It used to be.
Speaker 1: It's almost a charity, it used to be. Yeah, it's
goddamn near a charity. There are charities that make more
money than us.
Speaker 2: I actually wish we operated more like a charity where
we as employees got paid, yes, and it was all
tax free. M hmm.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we should be a chair some sort of religious charity.
Speaker 2: We are in LLC, but there's a way we can
kind of fanangle this to be a church in the
state of Texas. No doubt we have a cult.
Speaker 1: Got to be if Satan can have a check with
followers to a degree, Yeah, the softies more than more
than a cult would have.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think so. Some of the cults we've spoken
about on this program.
Speaker 1: It's like forty of them forty people, there's at.
Speaker 2: Least sixty people to listen to the show.
Speaker 1: Well, there's more than listen to it, but there's like
sixty to eighty really dedicated dudes.
Speaker 2: Okay, guy that is trying to sell the watch, I'm
under selling it for comic effect.
Speaker 1: Okay, okay, okay, fair enough. Yeah, yea, yea, yeah, yeah,
you did not enough.
Speaker 2: If you want to sponsor the show, there's more than
sixty people, a little a.
Speaker 1: Lot more than sixty to listen to it, but there's
like sixty to eighty who would join our cult immediately,
like without.
Speaker 2: That are in the discord. Yeah, yeah, that's part of
the reason you joined the Patreon. Pictureon dot com slash
Softcore History two additional episodes every week, plus you can
join the discord.
Speaker 1: Yep.
Speaker 2: We're building a community and a future cult.
Speaker 1: A future cult can be a sex cult. It'd be gay.
But just because there's only dudes.
Speaker 2: It's not history. Yeah, and it's our audience. We've seen
the metrics. Yeah we know ninety eight guys, yeah, yep, yep.
But anyway, I got a pop top to get the
female audience up. You do, and well it would just
bring the gaze. It would it would it would only
be the gay Yeah, and our male audience would actually
go up.
Speaker 1: Whatever. Dude, gays got money to spend, Give me some dinks.
Speaker 2: I'm fine with that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, get me some dinks in here'll they'll they'll buy everything.
Speaker 2: If I have to queer bait, I will.
Speaker 1: Yeah. But let's get to this week's episode. It is
Pacific Theater themed in honor of the Perses. Watch that
we'll talk about later.
Speaker 2: But yeah, just gets the episode. We can also just
do a World War two history episode.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, but I wanted to do Pacific again because,
like I said, I've said before, my grandfather always who
was in the Pacific, always complaining that was the real forgotten.
Speaker 2: Did he get drafted? No, okay, no, he volunteered, gotcha.
Speaker 1: But he didn't. He didn't go till forty four because
he's in med school and they.
Speaker 2: Were like, I'm very much still in that age range
I might get drafted. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Both my grandparents were in the third in their thirties
when they were in the war thirty four. I think
I think my oldest grandpa was thirty two, and he
was the one in the Battle of the Bulge and
then my Robert Fox Senior was maybe like thirty maybe
twenty eight.
Speaker 2: So if this I ran stuff keeps popping off, Oh yeah,
you're in the danger zone. You might have to find
another although although the rest in.
Speaker 1: Peace to the soldiers that were killed, as you pointed
out to me.
Speaker 2: He's forty two. Yeah, yeah, he was a mechanic.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because he was just it was just a basic guy.
Speaker 2: Somebody was trying to dunk on him for his physical appearance.
Speaker 1: They come in all shapes and size.
Speaker 2: He was a bigger fella. It's like, man, he was
a mechanic. He's not working on the base on the
front lines.
Speaker 1: I don't think fighter pilots are kind of old too,
like so that fight maybe not fighter pilots, but a
lot of pilots are in their forties.
Speaker 2: They're tiny, right, depends on the plane in order to
fit into the cockpit.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it depends depends on the plane. But yeah,
but today we're going to talk about the watch is
Ewajima themed and I feel like that battle has been
done ad nauseum. So I want to do a battle
that I believe.
Speaker 2: They ever watched Letters from Me Regema uh in Eastwood.
Speaker 1: Classic well, he did two eu Agema movies.
Speaker 2: I know, I didn't watch the other one.
Speaker 1: Flags Our Fathers that was the first one.
Speaker 2: And then was it a double feature?
Speaker 1: So a really interesting story about that.
Speaker 2: Was it like the Tarantino Robert Rodriguez double feature kind of?
Speaker 1: But so I think Eastwood had no intention of doing
one from the gym.
Speaker 2: Was it called Grindhouse?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Yeah, and then it was Planet Terror and I
don't fore forget the other one. But Eastwood was only
going to do Flags of Our Fathers, which was about
again you can see it on the watchbox, the flag
raising at Mount Surabaci and how like all those dudes
died like eight days later, like except for like one
because Eva Gema was a nightmare. But Eastwood, this is
like the last person you would expect to hear about this,
if you don't, if you just only read things about
Clint Eastwood. Eastwood was so like touched by how shitty
of an experience it was for the Japanese as well. Yeah,
that he just decided to follow it up with what
ended up I think being the better movie in letters.
Speaker 2: Of the Japanese perspective, Yeah, which you don't get a
lot of no, no, I mean, how many historical war
movies do you get the losing perspective? Well, okay, here's
a better quite on the Western Front.
Speaker 1: How many how many war movies do you get the
like almost like the bad guy perspective, because there's different
between losing perspective and bad guy perspective. Right World War One,
the Germans they not bad guys.
Speaker 2: Will Helm's a dick, but he had a tiny ham
who isn't you know? Really the French. The French were
the biggest dicks of World War One in my opinion.
Speaker 1: Why they just were. I'm not gonna argue. I just
was just wondering, Well.
Speaker 2: I'm not gonna blame them for being a little upset
at the Germans for totally wreaking havoc on their country.
Speaker 1: Beffing them forty years earlier in the Franco Prussian warr
and taking Alsace Lorraine.
Speaker 2: They went a little far though after they won.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the treaty ever, saw, I mean, it was just
a revenge treaty at that point.
Speaker 2: Even Woodrow Wilson's like, come on, Guss, that's that's a lot.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And they're like, get to the fuck out the field,
you stupid.
Speaker 2: And then, of course, you know, kind of creates the
circumstances for Hitler to rise the power. Oh it France
created Hitler.
Speaker 1: Yeah, kind of. They set the stage when you make
a man desperate. In that desperation, they turned to it man.
They didn't fully understand.
Speaker 2: Did he find a ruby the saws of a grapefruit?
Speaker 1: Tangerine? Yeah, playing child was playing with a ruby the
songs of a tangerine.
Speaker 2: Damn it, I got the line wrong.
Speaker 1: It's uh, grapefruit is not British enough.
Speaker 2: You're right, tangerine the prison don't even know what a
great friend is.
Speaker 1: No, no, but uh oh, I was gonna say, but
from the bad bad like bad guy side, you don't
really get like a German POV or a Japanese PV,
or you get some Confederate POV.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess I do, like the Confederate States of America.
That uh docu Machi series documentary.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah, that is that is such a good
commercials make it. It should have been it should have
been bigger. But we're gonna talk about another battle in
the Pacific Theater that I think was even worse than
E Regima, arguably in large part because it ended up
and I want to say this off the top because
you're gonna hear all these details, and I don't even
want to save it for the end. It ended up
not being useful, like it ended up being totally unnecessary
to have had this battle.
Speaker 2: I feel like that's a lot of battles.
Speaker 1: Maybe, but this one was one of the most horrific
things I ever about, and I knew a little bit
about it, which talk about the Battle of Palelou today,
which featured the first Marine Division and the eighty first
US Army eighty first Infantry Division. It is portrayed in
The Pacific, which I think is vastly underrated. But I
don't even think the Pacific does this justice. Like the
Pacific that if the Pacific had done this battle justice
you would it would have been unwatchable. This these this
episode or two episodes would have been fucking unwatchable.
Speaker 2: The Pacific is so good it makes Remy Malik be digestible.
Speaker 1: I remember that you were arguing forever that you hate
a Remy Maulic, and like I was, like, just watch The.
Speaker 2: Pacific is a bad Bond villain too.
Speaker 1: He has the perfect look for a pond villain. He
does like that vacant like.
Speaker 2: Missed the pond. Nice to see you. It's like a
poison merchant.
Speaker 1: I fucking knows it's got like nanobots killing pants. It
wasn't a great Bond movie.
Speaker 2: Little tear came down my eye though, when I saw
Daniel Craig look up into the sky eat those missiles. Well,
I don't want to ruin the surprise.
Speaker 1: It's like five years old. Ten years is the rule? Okay,
all right, fair enough.
Speaker 2: Make sure to cut that out future Dan, I won't.
Speaker 1: The Battle of Palelu featured Uh. They were trying to
basically take the this this island that had an airfield,
and they thought it would be end up being useful
except pretty much immediately after it was over, MacArthur was like,
I'm a pivot and the island became useless and everything
that happened on it became not worth.
Speaker 2: Anything that happened, you know what's going on with the
island now with it's just.
Speaker 1: That it's a shithole coral island like it, there's no
The only useful thing too, it was that there was
a fucking airfield.
Speaker 2: On it, yeah, a place to land.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And then they ended up not really using the airfield.
Otherwise they would have just bypassed it, which is what
they should have done. So the commander of the First
Marine Division, Major General William Rupertis, he was like, this
island's tiny, not defended super heavily. We're gonna take it
in four days. Never what you want to hear going
into a battle or war. Home by Christmas.
Speaker 2: It's a slam duck.
Speaker 1: Yeah, home bike, You're never home by Christmas. Now, unbeknownst
to the Americans, the Japanese who had been, you know,
taking it on the fucking Chin. This is nineteen forty four.
They've been taking it on the Chin, los An Island
after island, and they were like, I think we need
to adjust our tactics on how we defend these islands.
And they did. This battle takes place from September fifteenth
to November twenty seventh, nineteen forty four. Like I said,
US Army eighty, first Intry Division and the First Marine
Division fought to take an airfield. It's a small coral island,
like a real just gnarly, and we'll get into the
we'll get into the what do you call it, the
terrain of it. So the defenders. The Japanese defenders of
this island put up such an insane resistance. Why because
they're fucking crazy.
Speaker 2: They're fucking Japanese pointless island. Oh no, they don't care
give up the airfield.
Speaker 1: Well, the Japanese at this point, and probably even a
year before this point, if not since the Battle of Midway,
have pretty much had I think one goal because they
knew they couldn't win, win, right, So it's essentially what
they were trying to do was fight to some sort
of stupe to make the level of blood for the
Americans too much to bear, the horror of the fight
too much to bear, so that the American public us
fickle bitches. We're really the reason we've any war we've
lost or not done well in. It's because of the
American public.
Speaker 2: It's the backlash.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's our biggest weakness. All of our enemies know
the same thing, which is they'll get antsy.
Speaker 2: Do you think Iran's doing that right now?
Speaker 1: I have anything left I do. Yeah, I mean they
know or think we're not gonna put boots on the ground,
so that's a big advantage for them. But we'll see
what happens with that. So the but the Japanese put
up such an insane resistance that the island became known
as Emperor's Island because they were all dying for you know,
the Emperor.
Speaker 2: Obviously Helen Keller's best friend. Yes, yeah, Helen.
Speaker 1: Keller's best friend. Emperor here he do.
Speaker 2: Bad woman not talked about enough. Bad Woman also pretty
much exposed over the last year. What I'm hearing, we're vindicated.
Speaker 1: You have to get an episode on that, like just
updating the fact he.
Speaker 2: Already did it. We said what needed to be said.
We would just be rehashing our takes.
Speaker 1: Fair enough, I mean, we said she definitely didn't fly
that plane.
Speaker 2: But apparently she could sort of see and hear.
Speaker 1: Also she eugenicis stole.
Speaker 2: A bunch of books, like just she played your eyes?
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah yeah. Can you plage your eyes if
you're not aware of the world around you? But she was.
Speaker 2: The whole thing was a fake.
Speaker 1: Okay, fair enough, So Palelu. How many Japanese people do
you think we're Japanese soldiers? Do you think we're defending
the island?
Speaker 2: I'm gonna say twelve hundred.
Speaker 1: You're not bad. It was less than ten thousand. That's bad.
Speaker 2: It's not even close twelve hundred, but it's it's nine thousands,
like crazy giant battle like the Battle of the Bulge
or something, right where you've got hundreds of thousands of
soldiers going at each other. They were just trying to
add some glory to your grandfather.
Speaker 1: He wasn't a pale lou no. The Bulge, oh.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, it was just had to slip that.
Speaker 1: It was literally the largest battle in US Army history.
Whatever you want to say, did that's that's a fact.
Speaker 2: Just keep stroking your dead grandpa.
Speaker 1: Just it's just a fact, totally tell you. So, there
was a fifty five hundred Japanese soldiers, about four thousand
naval naval troops with fifteen hundred of them were also
infantry or trained for infantry. So about the tactics. Previously,
the Japanese would put up pretty pretty good resistance on
the beaches, right, kind of a D Day situation.
Speaker 2: You'd lay in a lot of machine gun under fire, artillery.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but they quickly, and I guess not quickly, but
they did finally realize they were like, you know, when
we put a lot of people on the beach, the
Americans tend to roll up with like five aircraft carriers
and like ten battleships and destroyers and frigates and just
turn the beach into a flaming hole.
Speaker 2: Yeah, kill a lot of us.
Speaker 1: So finally they were like, all right, let's let's do
something different. We're gonna let them. We're gonna offer a
token resistance on the beach, but we're gonna hide in
the hills.
Speaker 2: Did Japan have a ton of submarines.
Speaker 1: They had a decent amount.
Speaker 2: Never hear about them. I only hear about like the
U boats.
Speaker 1: That's because U boat it's a sexier term. But I mean,
you know, a Japanese submarine was responsible for probably one
of the most famous horrific things that happened in the war,
the US s Indianapolis.
Speaker 2: Okay, you remember that now.
Speaker 1: So the US s Indianapolis was the boat that took
the atomic bombs to where they needed to go to
get loaded onto the planes. And it was on the
way back. And because this was so top secret, it
never reported its position to anyone. No one. It was
like no one. They didn't want anything intercepted about it.
This was just a secret crew. And it got got
by a Japanese submarine and sunk and no one knew
it was where it was, and a bunch of sailors
survived and then spent the next couple of weeks getting
eaten by sharks.
Speaker 2: Okay, that rings a bell. Now do you recall the
famous now imagine if the nukes were still on it? Yeah,
much different story.
Speaker 1: Yep. Do you recall the famous speech in Jaws? Black
like a dollar's eyes, right, don't even think they're alive
to they roll over white and bite you.
Speaker 2: I haven't seen Jaws in twenty years, but yes.
Speaker 1: He is recounting his experience on the USS Indianapolis. Gotcha. Yeah.
Or if you want arguably a better version of that speech,
watch it's always Sonny in Philadelphia, where Charlie does it
about a rat about rats.
Speaker 2: I think that's a better way to go about it
either way.
Speaker 1: So Peleelu had like horrorrrific terrain, very easy to defend,
very difficult to attack, like steep coral ridges, rough hills,
all this stuff. So the Japanese commander essentially made like
a honeycomb of caves and tunnels inside the hills, all interconnected.
It was. It was an excellent There are a bunch
of fortified bunkers. It was an incredible defensive system, really innovative,
all that stuff.
Speaker 2: Who was the queen Bee, Colonel Nakagawa, so.
Speaker 1: Weirdly in this too. They did still do it in
this battle, but they were like, hey, guys, we got
to stop Bonzi charging so much. They have like machine
guns and semi automatic rifles. Running at them is not working.
Speaker 2: At least do like a zigzag motion. Don't run in
a straight line, Like.
Speaker 1: We need to rethink this, Like, let's only use it
when we're really it can't be our plan a. So
they didn't. They were They really were like, don't Bonzie
charge unless you have to, unless you really feel like it.
Speaker 2: Great name though, great brands. Oh yeah, Bonzai charge.
Speaker 1: Bonzi charge, kamikaze, Right, it's so much better than suicide
bomber or I don't know, bum rushing a machine gun nest.
Speaker 2: Yeah, run into your death.
Speaker 1: So again, like I said, these changing tactics were all
about getting the United States into a war of attrition,
getting us just tired of it, and hopefully the Japanese
can just retain some level of their empire in America.
Will be like god, fine, if.
Speaker 2: You think about it though. That was the most extreme
elimination challenge, the Bonzie Charge.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I think it's inspired every Japanese game show
to present bring it back. So the Japanese had altered
their tactics for this battle. The Americans have not whatsoever,
did not think by Christmas. Yeah, did not have a plan. B.
We're just like, we're gonna do what we're gonna do.
And this was even after a previous battle where the
Japanese had basically done what they were going to do
on Peleelu and uh. The US suffered three thousand casualties,
which was a lot for a battle of that size,
and they were just.
Speaker 2: Like, hey, we got bodies we want we won.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we got bodies.
Speaker 2: We had a bunch of Italians that we're trying to
get rid of.
Speaker 1: Irish don't love them. No, if we could cut down
on the Catholic popular I think that's why everyone in
a World War two movie you rarely find even though
it was a Protestant country, it's always.
Speaker 2: You get a ton of crucifixes.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's always guidos and mix.
Speaker 2: Just saying the hal Marys and the our fathers.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Uh So going into the battle.
Speaker 2: Huh did we crack a code there? What they were
trying to get rid of our people?
Speaker 1: It was Catholic eugenics.
Speaker 2: It was a Catholic genocide. Yeah, war.
Speaker 1: Is that on your little conspiracy theory chart? Oh?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I do have a little conspiracy chart that has
every conspiracy in the world on here.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna find a spot for it.
Speaker 2: The Great Awakening. Yeah, I gotta figure out where to
put this on set. But you know, if you really
scroll in, you can see everything. It's very tiny.
Speaker 1: Thought it's good. Yeah. Well, if you wanted it to
be a readable it'd have to be the size of
a fucking like car dealership American flag.
Speaker 2: And if you want to add something to this set,
feel free to send it to Rob's work because I'm
not giving out my address.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we don't need a po box at some point.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and we get big enough when we have more
than sixty people.
Speaker 1: So the Americans roll up to Pale lou and they
of course bomb the shit out of it, battleships, aircraft carriers,
so on and so forth. The Americans were like, well,
I think we crushed it. The Admiral Rear Admiral Jesse
Oldendorf was like, we ran out of targets.
Speaker 2: I think we could everything, but they're all underground.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but they were pretty much all underground. Most of
the Japanese soldiers had survived. Uh. Even the battalion that
was left to defend the beaches was pretty much unscathed
because they were just hiding underground. They knew it was
gonna happen, Like he knew exactly what was gonna happen, in.
Speaker 2: The words of Admiral Akbar. But Crop Coprop, he gets
so much love and so much play. He's in like
three scenes, isn't he.
Speaker 1: Yeah. A lot of people in those movies that are like, like,
Boba Fett's barely in it.
Speaker 2: I know people were like upsetsed this whole universe around.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Isn't the prequels though.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, they expand him on them. But in the
original three when everyone like nuts over him, he's just
like barely there. It doesn't he gets eaten.
Speaker 2: Kind of sucks.
Speaker 1: Actually he doesn't get eaten. They wreckcon to that what
he climbs out of the black pit. In the show,
there's a show Boba fed on Disney pluff.
Speaker 2: That's stupid.
Speaker 1: It's not good I didn't like it.
Speaker 2: No, well it's ip. You can't kill off a character
that has good IP.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I do appreciate that they used the actor who
was the clone in all the Clone War in the
Clone Wars film, right to keep it consistent.
Speaker 2: We release clones, but for the draft, just have clones.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we need their clone armies. What are we doing
so the Marines land on September fifteenth, they're having droids,
We have clones. Yeah, the Marines land on September fifteenth.
As the landing craft approached the beaches and the Marines
got on shore, the Japanese just popped out and let
fucking loose with artillery and machine guns. They were on
all the flanks. I mean, it was a horrific crossfire.
And this isn't even much. Many guys defending it's it's bad.
Losses on White Beach one in particular, were really bad.
A tank crewman recalled, when the tide went out that night,
you could have walked three hundred yards across the each
on the bodies of dead Marines. He's like, there's no oh,
no ground, Like it was just dead marines everywhere.
Speaker 2: No more blood than water.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we'll get into that because it gets this thing
gets gross real fast. And the first reason it was
gross is because despite the fact, well September, but even
all the way through November, temperatures on this god forsaken
desert island were between one oh five and one fifteen. Yeah,
with one hundred percent humidity.
Speaker 2: And you're getting off the boats, you're stepping on all
the coral. There's a couple of sea urchins or something.
Oh the coral.
Speaker 1: That's another thing. The coral did two things. A rips
It rips you up. It rips you up. You can't
dig into it. It was even ripping there like boots
apart and shit.
Speaker 2: That's why I don't support saving the Great Coral Reef. No,
that thing, if it had its opportunity, it cuts you up.
Speaker 1: It's just a living rock.
Speaker 2: It would slice you up.
Speaker 1: Kill it.
Speaker 2: No, it's a living knife.
Speaker 1: Really, it is a living knife. Yeah, it's a sentient knife.
The coral rock was also really really good at absorbing
heat from the sun, and at night it would radiate
it all back off of itself, so the temperature didn't
really drop at night.
Speaker 2: If you were on the ground or in the ground,
which the water glow all were that.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I don't know. If the water glows
like that.
Speaker 2: Bay in Puerto Rico, I think that's is that like
micro organism.
Speaker 1: It's that's plankton or yeah, yeah, not plain.
Speaker 2: I don't know if I had a similar effect.
Speaker 1: What's the what's the plant that makes most of our
oxygens in the water, that's what glows. It's above my
peg alga or something. I don't know, don't care. By
the fourth day of the battle, there were as many
heat casualties as there were combat casualties.
Speaker 2: Send out a bunch of like seventy year old geriatrics.
Speaker 1: It was just that fucking hot. And here's the other I.
Speaker 2: Mean, that's what happens every summer in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico.
The olds get out of their car in the midst
of summer, and some don't make it to.
Speaker 1: The door from their driveway.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they'll fall and they just kind of like sizzle
like an egg on the pavement.
Speaker 1: Just like old wet meat cooking.
Speaker 2: And that's how a lot of those guys go out. Yeah, uh,
your grandpa cooks.
Speaker 1: The men were also extremely dehydrated, in large part.
Speaker 2: Because they brought water for four days no, but.
Speaker 1: You know what they brought their water in. You know
what the US military was shipping water in in the.
Speaker 2: Pacific, something that would get really hot.
Speaker 1: Uh no, worse Well, actually they probably did get really hot,
but that's not what did it. They would just put
put All the water was just kept in old oil
drums that they didn't do a great job cleaning. So
like gasoline, big gasoline drums.
Speaker 2: I could get down with that. I love this all gasoline.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, it's not great to drink, you.
Speaker 2: Know, link I just kind of like jacked up, jazzed up.
Speaker 1: I don't so these dudes could barely drink the water.
Fuel not for human that is rip fuel, not for humans.
These dudes could barely drink the water. It's like making
them puke and shit. And if they did get it down,
then they've got oil in their tummies and they're having diarrhea,
so they're dehydrated as fuck.
Speaker 2: Diarrhea in a war zone doesn't sound ideal. Uh, getting
got while you're just squatting down with a runny pooh
coming out.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Now, I would like you to also keep in
mind that.
Speaker 2: If you saw your enemy taking a shit, would you
fire on him or would you give them the courtesy,
that's a freebie. I think i'd give them, you know,
some time, not at this battle gets settled.
Speaker 1: Maybe there maybe some battles. Yeah, not at this battle.
Speaker 2: Okay, you got to take every.
Speaker 1: Guy you fucking can.
Speaker 2: Like, I would obviously eventually take them prison or shoot them,
but I would let them finish.
Speaker 1: That is a scene in some it might be being
of brothers. Yeah, it's band of brothers. They catch a
German like taking a ship.
Speaker 2: Let them live.
Speaker 1: Well, they capture them. But yeah, okay, yeah, so yeah,
these dudes were just shipping their pants.
Speaker 2: It's just a state of vulnerability that we can all
relate to.
Speaker 1: HM.
Speaker 2: It connects us on a human level.
Speaker 1: It goes yeah, it goes deep. It's pretty it's pretty
rough to do that to a person.
Speaker 2: I've thought about it too. I sleep naked every night.
Somebody breaks into my house and I have to fight
a person naked. That is like my biggest nightmare.
Speaker 1: It might be their biggest nightmare.
Speaker 2: That's gonna that's how you counter it. Yeah, they have
they have a weapon, but I'm naked.
Speaker 1: And that's gonna. That buys you two seconds.
Speaker 2: Right, They have a knife for a gun and I
just have a hog.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it buys you two seconds of their shock.
Speaker 2: Yeah, or like it's comedic either way, you know, if
it's a cold night, yeah, it's all you know, afraid it's.
Speaker 1: An acorn.
Speaker 2: And they just laugh. Yeah, and then you attack and
then you attack. So yeah, I think being naked in
the fight against the home invader beneficial.
Speaker 1: And as they're bleeding out, tug on it to let
them know, like, hey, it's not always like this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, feel like it's cold man. Yeah, I just got
a shower.
Speaker 1: It's like, I get it. You don't need to tug
on it. It's like, no, I'm a grower. I want
you to know.
Speaker 2: We're ifom bleated out too, just like it's not usually
like this, dude, I just God, fluff yourself before you die.
Speaker 1: So the coral terrain, like I said, sharp jagged. Uh.
People were cutting their hands and knees and legs and
boots on this shit. I was just fucking them up.
Digging foxholes was pretty much impossible, so men had to
crouch just behind like these coral crop like crop ups
or whatever, so not good cover. When it rained, it
didn't really get much cooler, just mixed all the blood
and mud.
Speaker 2: And dirt together and made and shit together, just sloshed
everything up.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Like I said, it's one hundred and fifteen degrees
on this island, And when it's one hundred and fifteen
degrees and there's a dead body, it decomposes really fast.
In fact, all these marines and US soldiers that were
on the beach or right off the beach or whatever,
the ones that died were pretty quickly bursting open like
dead whales.
Speaker 2: Okay, that is my favorite story about like the early
nineteen hundreds Slaid eighteen hundreds of how they cleaned the
beaches of Wales.
Speaker 1: What dynamite?
Speaker 2: Dynamite?
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a good way to do it.
Speaker 2: It's huge.
Speaker 1: What else are you gonna do.
Speaker 2: It's a great way to spend a second. Just have
the town come and we dynamite away.
Speaker 1: Dynamiting a whale. Yeah, I would go to that, even
now with a phone and a TV. I'd go to that.
Speaker 2: I would go see a whale just get blown to smithery.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Uh So in this baking heat, bodies were bursting
open and there and their guts would just spill out.
The flies were insane, like full black clouds of flies
on dead bodies. They would be so numerous that you
couldn't You would just be like, oh, that must be
a dead body because the big suckers to twenty yeah,
big motherfuckers. There'd just be like twenty thousand flies on
every dead body, like you couldn't even see the bodies,
like it was just a moving like flies. It was
foul and meggots too.
Speaker 2: Protein, but the flies, yeah, or the maggots, you know,
if you run out of food.
Speaker 1: What was really fun about the flies and how numerous
they were is that, you know, all of them could
get a good spot on the dead bodies, so they'd
start finding just open wounds on the living go inside,
just start laying eggs and eating that. So you'd have
to constantly clean your open wound, or.
Speaker 2: Just don't get a wound, dud, don't get shot, don't.
Speaker 1: Get shot, don't trip on coral idiot, moron. You know
it does not like you. It sounds like you're fighting
fault mostly with the soldiers.
Speaker 2: Will I victim blame yes all the time.
Speaker 1: You're fair. Obviously, it smelled like ass. Smelled as horrible
as you could ever imagine anything smelling well.
Speaker 2: Because when you die, you either fart or shit your pants.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you're just rotting meat at that point, that.
Speaker 2: Too, but you do let it loose, you do, it
all comes out full body explosion.
Speaker 1: Here's the thing that didn't help either. All the living
soldiers also needed to poop, and they didn't have anywhere
to do it, but right where they were.
Speaker 2: Do you think that's your soul living your body the
shit either the far.
Speaker 1: The shit, it's your sins, your sins.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 1: That's how you know if if someone takes a huge dump,
they're going to hell.
Speaker 2: No, it's releasing from their bodies so they can ascend.
Speaker 1: To the house so the soul can fly free.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, so if you don't poop, then you're going
to hell.
Speaker 1: Okay. Obviously marines had to crawl over these dead bodies
constantly to get from A to B to C to D.
Here's a fun one that is one of the most
dystopian sci fi things I ever heard.
Speaker 2: Did they start using the bodies as a wall?
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, they did do that, but that's not what
I'm talking about. It's a coral island in the Pacific
that was just littered. I guess a native species to
it was land crabs, those big fucking crabs. Yeah, they
also create protein. A lot of crab, a lot of
crabs eating dead bodies. Okay, so crabs just like wandered
onto the beach and droves and just started like eating
all the dead soldiers.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but then you have yourself a crab bake.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but at that point you're kind of eating your
buddy in a way. If the if you catch a
crab that's on a guy eating him, you were then
not you were then pretty much directly eating the person
the crab was eating.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but there's a non zero chance you've eaten pig
that is eating a person.
Speaker 1: Yeah, non you know, there's a non zero chance, but
there's one hundred percent chance that if you pick a
crab off a dead marine and have a crab boil.
Speaker 2: In a pinch, I'll eat that crab.
Speaker 1: Uh. But yeah, there's just little sea spiders everywhere just
eating eating dead bodies.
Speaker 2: That was kind of one of my favorite things growing
up in the mid Atlantic Northeast, just pool party with
a bushel of crab. I am a much picking apart
the crab people in the South, I think do more crawlfish.
Speaker 1: Boiled crawfish, crab boils, the way to go.
Speaker 2: Crabs, the way to go Old Bay all day.
Speaker 1: You get real meat from a crab too.
Speaker 2: It depends what kind of crab we did, blue crab.
It's a lot of work, but you're there for the
conversation and the beers. Yeah, and the little meat you get.
If you get some king crab, then we're talking. Oh yeah,
but that's a little bit more pricey.
Speaker 1: Well it's bigger, big fuckers.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we didn't have kinkrab money.
Speaker 1: Soon after the beach landing, the airfield was right there,
and that's when they were hit with the first Japanese counterattack,
which included eleven somewhere between eleven and seventeen light tanks.
The Japanese counter attack and hit the American lines. This
is This fight is actually depicted in the Pacific in
the In the show, the counter attack obviously doesn't work
and a lot of their tanks get knocked out. But
by the end of the first day, the Marines had
suffered pretty bad casualties and they were still pretty much
unaware though that the Japanese had changed their tactics. So
they were like, oh boy, that was crazy, but I
think we got them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think we did it. Little did they know,
Little did they know.
Speaker 1: As night settled in with the Marines just off the beach,
basically Japanese troops wearing helmets of dead Americans began infiltrating
the marine lines and just stabbing people to death in
their foxholes. It's a good way to go, yep. But
eventually the battle does shift into the hills. That's where
the Japanese really wanted to have the fight, and that's
where it goes from gnarly to pure fucking nightmare. Hell fuel.
Speaker 2: Did we figure out they were coming up from the ground. Yeah,
eventually get the flame throwers.
Speaker 1: Oh, flamethrowers play.
Speaker 2: Grenades, big role in this battle. Put the big old
explosives into the hole.
Speaker 1: So I'll just say it now. Actually, one thing they
would do once they realized that had this whole cave
system was they would just start dumping a bunch of
gasoline or like jelly gas something like that into.
Speaker 2: The frontroleum substance.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like into the fronts of the cave, like into
the mouths of the caves, and then the flamethrowers would
light all that shit up and then we'd just let
the Japanese cook alive inside the cave.
Speaker 2: Had their selves a jet bake. Yeah, it's one way
to put it, I guess.
Speaker 1: So once we start getting inland, there was one rifle
platoon that began knocking out Japanese gun positions, machine guns, artillery,
and they use rifle grenades or they just like storm
the whatever it was. After knocking out a couple of
machine gun positions, these group of Marines faced a cave
that had a piece of artillery forty seven millimeter gun
and you know, they threw up smoke grenade to conceal
their movement, and uh, they launched a grenade into the
into the cave and the grenade detonated the gun's shells,
like all the artillery shells sitting around the gun, which
was a monstrous explosion. The Japanese just started running out.
Their bodies were on fire, and they were so on
fire that all their ammo belts with bullets just started
exploding on their on their hip cool cutting them in
half and shit.
Speaker 2: Sawed by their own weapons.
Speaker 1: Captain George P. Hunt K Company, third Battalion, First Marines, Uh,
he got trapped in the hills at a place called
the point and his two hundred and thirty five man
company cut off, and by nightfall there's about seventy eight
of them left from the original two thirty five. The
japan we're just hitting them again and again, popping out
of caves. They didn't even know where from. They had
a small perimeter.
Speaker 2: It's the worst game of whack a mole.
Speaker 1: It's you don't even know where the holes are now
the mole just comes out and bites you on the
neck from behind. Yeah. At one point, a Japanese machine
gunner just popped up right on the front of their
lines and just mowed down a bunch of marines essentially,
just like just ripped them in half with this. I
guess it was bigger than a submachine gun hunt. Saw
one man have his entire lower body, like just his
body was cutting half essentially by a machine gun burst.
The Japanese were up above them, and they would just
roll grenades down the hill.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's kind of the worst version of a cheese
wheel race.
Speaker 1: A little ski ball almost, so I guess you're going
down instead of up. But the men held though. By
dawn there were over one hundred Japanese bodies surrounding them,
many of them have been burned alive by flamethrowers. The men, though,
still couldn't get out of there, so they started stacking
corpses Japanese corpses as a barricade, your body wall. But
there was so much blood that it mixed with the
sort of like dust from the coral into like this
weird mud, like literal mud blood. Okay, the unit held though.
At the end of it, out of the two hundred
and thirty five shithun were dead, only eighteen were left
completely untouched. Only eighteen weren't even wounded. Out of the
two hundred and thirty five, there's another guy, Sergeant Jack
Ainsworth Marine kept a diary about everything he saw at one.
Speaker 2: Nice diary, dude, sweet bro, doesn't matter what you're documenting,
still diary.
Speaker 1: Still a dinary. He watched a dude take a full
on artillery shell to.
Speaker 2: The chest, wrote it down, great detail.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so there was just like the the guy just
like vaporized. Basically, men would shoot anything that moved at night,
according to him, including their own wounded screaming for help,
so they didn't give away their position.
Speaker 2: Was there a ton of animals just sounded like just
the crabs, just the crab crab island. That's how Earhart went, right,
That's how they speculate.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, she was eating my crabs almost certainly.
Speaker 2: Shot down and became Tokyo Rose. Yeah, after her co
pilot got eaten by crabs.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they left him to eat my crabs and she
became the most famous DJ of the nineteen forties.
Speaker 2: You will die here.
Speaker 1: Your wives are getting railed back home. You're going to die.
Speaker 2: Jodie's enjoying himself.
Speaker 1: All right, real quick, let's talk about the watch that
is bringing you this episode. First off, we just like
to thank persadess Watches for even thinking of us and
reaching out. Persadas does a lot of really cool history
themed watches, a lot of sort of like American military
themed watches, like gi stuff from World War Two, really
simple sort of like throwbacks to those type of watches too.
The watch they wanted us to talk about today, which
is their Pacific Campaign commemoration watch, which they send us
in this sweet little box right here with the Mount
Serabacci flag raising on it. What's cool about this watch
in particular is that it commemorates a lot of the
biggest engagements of the Pacific Theater, both naval and on
land with the Marines and the army stuff obviously, Pearl
Harbor Midway, Guadalcanal's on here, Ewjima obviously, and Okinawa as well.
You can find Palelu in there as well. It's not marked,
but you can figure out where it is. What's really
cool about this watch in particular, like I said, it's
got the map on it. That's super sweet, but it
has real volcanic sand in the face, taken directly from Ewjima,
and it maps the whole sort of island hopping campaign
out getting all the way to Okinawa in nineteen forty five.
It's a double domed K one mineral crystal ten ATM
water resistance field watch standard. And you know, they just
wanted to commemorate the Pacific Theater, which I for one
do not think gets nearly enough love or commemoration or attention.
My grandfather, like I said, called it the real Forgotten War.
I guess he didn't think highly of the Korean War. Whatever.
I don't know, but it's an awesome watch, and Persadis
in general, they just make really cool watches. Man. You
got to check it out. If you're a history buff
at all, whether it's this Pacific Campaign commemoration watch or
just one of the other ones they do, super cool.
Highly recommend checking it out, especially if you're a vet.
You the link is in the description on YouTube, on Apple,
on Spotify, go check them out and whether you want,
whether you want to get this watch or you want
to get another one of their really cool sort of
military or historical throwback watches. I think I think they're
super slick. It's great, like every day where type of watch.
I am. I'm gonna wear this one because I have it,
but I'm definitely buying buying more than this one. Uh.
I'm not a big watch guy or like a big
watch fiend, but these ones like tickle my fancy quite
a bit. They're really really cool and really really well made.
So whether you just want a cool watch, uh you're
a history buff, or you in particular want to honor
the men and women who served in the Pacific theater
of World War two at places like Peleelu, places like Ewgima,
which again, the coolest part about this watch is its
actual Ewgima volcanic sand in its face. It is rad
I can see it, can see it in here's this
is sweet. Honestly, check out the Percedis Watch Company again
the link click that link that is in our descriptions
because that tracks that you went there. Lets them know
that our listeners went there. So go check that out.
Thank you very much to the people of the Percedas
Watch Company for hitting us up. We love you guys.
You make some really cool stuff and guys, this is
like tailor made for us. Check it out. One thing
that happened a lot was that the Japanese. Because the lines,
everyone had to stay quiet and a lot you couldn't
see shit at night. Obviously, you had to keep light discipline.
The Japanese would like sneak into random fox holes, kidnap
marines and just drag them back to their caves for
fun play time.
Speaker 2: You get a little sadistic. Oh yeah, you turn into
a total monster. Yeah, in a scenario like that.
Speaker 1: So when the Japanese started doing this, the Americans were like.
Speaker 2: Done.
Speaker 1: That's what I was like, Yeah, I would shoot a
guy pooping in this battle. Okay, one marine. This happened
a lot actually, but they found one marine.
Speaker 2: I think both sides broke.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, we'll get into how the Americans broke a
little bit in a minute. One side, they found one
marine in a cave, decapitated with his dick and balls
stuck in his mouth.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, the Japanese aren't really known for their
war crimes. No, they were like, whoa, that's crazy they
did that. What They definitely didn't mutilate people and cut
off their genitalia.
Speaker 1: No, never once. This actually happened a lot. Marines found
that several times dudes who were dragged like captured, dragged
into caves or spider holes and tortured to death.
Speaker 2: They were jealous though, they had some down jealousy penis envy, yes,
so they cut it off and like what if we
can attach it to our own.
Speaker 1: And it didn't work, so they put it in the
guy's mouth. Yeah, then cut his head off.
Speaker 2: Human scent and penis.
Speaker 1: They also found one guy so they found the dick
and mouth thing like multiple times.
Speaker 2: It's fucked up.
Speaker 1: So like this is essentially how several marines died in
this battle. They were captured in the Milanite, by the way,
probably like eighteen year olds. They're captured the Midianite, dragged
into a cave, beaten, had their dick and balls cut
off while they're alive, while they're Oh yeah, dude, you're not.
You're going maximum punishment here, Like they're doing it after
the fact, had their dicking balls off, had it shoved
into their mouths, and then were to cap and then
we're beheaded by a Samurai sword.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, they did have swords then.
Speaker 1: Good swords, sweet swords.
Speaker 2: When he had a World War two Samurai sword in here,
I think that might run you, It might, but I
think it's cooler than an actual Samurai sword from this,
you know, sixteen busheto Yeah, like, yeah, I don't care
about the ronan.
Speaker 1: I want a World War two a sword.
Speaker 2: That was used to cut off a dude's penis. Well,
it has to have that in the description.
Speaker 1: If you want her apartment to be super haunted by
a headless like a guy, well, yes, a headless and
a guy holding his head and just being like because
the back end of a severed penis is hanging out.
Speaker 2: Of it, Well, he was headless because in two ways.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, technically retained both of them.
Speaker 2: A head on the head, it cancels it out.
Speaker 1: It's a hat on a hat, it's too much. A
third one they just found like torn apart. They found
another guy just like ripped to pieces like an animal
ate them. Yeah, but it wasn't. It was just the Japanese.
Speaker 2: So our last resort.
Speaker 1: Another set of bodies was found tied to trees and
that clearly had been used for bayonet.
Speaker 2: Practice playing darts.
Speaker 1: Each one had about fifty stab wounds in it, and
their balls were also cut off.
Speaker 2: But it's their deal man left nearby.
Speaker 1: They didn't put them in the mouths. They were just
just cut them off, and we're like, yeah, just toss it.
Speaker 2: So they cut off our genitalia. So in retaliation after
World War Two, we made them blur out all their porns.
Speaker 1: What they blur porn Japan?
Speaker 2: You can't show penis for vagina? Oh shit, it's all
blurred out.
Speaker 1: Yeah, got a one hundred year rule on that in
twenty forty five.
Speaker 2: That makes sense. Yeah, that was us. That was kind
of like us having our soldiers' backs. But all right, fine,
you dickheads, you cut off all of our penises. You
can't even see a penis and porn now, you.
Speaker 1: Don't mean to know what a penis looks like. So
this got to the American soldiers. This whole everything was
happening in this battle, the brutality of how horrible the
Japanese were started to bug up bug us okay, real,
you know, really bothered us. One marine who going into
the battle. Before the battle, his fellow marines described as
a pretty mild mannered guy. Yeah, pretty ho hum, pretty
quiet guy. Sure, something just snapped at some point in
the Battle of Paleolu, and uh he he just started
collecting Japanese skulls. Have to yeah, uh at one point
I guess he had like a foxhole or something that
had like that had fifty Japanese skulls arranged around it.
Speaker 2: So he's skinning the heads. Yes, you need a hobby.
Speaker 1: And here's the thing that was even killed down un
He would specifically look for the Japanese who had like
metal teeth because he liked how they shined in the sun.
Speaker 2: Okay, So anybody with crowns.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So just like Steve from Iowa, who's just like, hey, guys,
I'm here to do my duty. Like a couple of
days into pale lou Is, just like I will be
collecting the skulls of my enemies. I am filled with
more hate than you could possibly imagine.
Speaker 2: We have some depraved motherfuckers. Some people go over. I'm
sure there's plenty of like serial killers in World War
Two that just were like all right, hell yeah, free rain.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you gotta send those guys to the specific though.
They can't be doing that shit in Europe.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess not.
Speaker 1: You'll get in trouble. I don't think there were rules.
Speaker 2: There were no rules in the Pacific.
Speaker 1: Now, years later, like decades later, he was asked about it.
He goes, I think this is like a I wouldn
say the exact quote and then say what I think
it means. He just goes, it's aid. Decades later he
admitted we were around the bend, which I think just
means like, yeah, things got pretty crazy.
Speaker 2: I mean it sounds like it. Everything you described does
not counter that argument.
Speaker 1: No, another marine. Now, this was slightly portrayed in the Pacific,
but not to the gruesome detail that it actually happened.
And I believe this is from Eugene Sledge's book with
the Old Breed, which is one of the two or
three books that The Pacific was based on.
Speaker 2: The Sledge Man.
Speaker 1: Yeah, oh shit, Eugene Sledge, the kid from Jurassic Park.
What the guy who plays him in the Pacific was
the kid, the little boy from.
Speaker 2: Dras oh Okay.
Speaker 1: Another marine cut off a Japanese hand from a Japanese
soldier who is still a lot but like injured. Just
cut off his hand with his k bar knife.
Speaker 2: He didn't take his samurai's horn into it.
Speaker 1: I don't think not all of them had one. I think, right, Yeah,
So he just found some grunts, some grunt injured and dying,
and cut off the still living soldier's hand, and uh,
he was gonna he was planning to dry it out
and keep it as a as a souvenir. But I
guess everyone else in his unit was like, absolutely.
Speaker 2: Not, dude, I can't bring that around.
Speaker 1: I'm not.
Speaker 2: I am not going on patrol with you with the
haunted hand.
Speaker 1: Yeah, with a fucking hand in your bag. Please. They're like,
please throw the fucking hand away.
Speaker 2: And he was like fine, God, Yeah, this isn't talked
about enough. How depraved everyone gets some war.
Speaker 1: This is as bad as it's ever gotten. I think
for any war the United States in particular has been
in disagree.
Speaker 2: I think it's all like this.
Speaker 1: No, this was not happening in the War of eighteen twelve.
Speaker 2: I'm sorry, you don't think we were giving it to
the Canadians.
Speaker 1: I don't think we were cutting off Canadian hands and
do it. I don't think we're doing the shit that
happened here.
Speaker 2: Maybe not in the War of eighteen twelve, but when
all the Civil War vets went up the Irish for
that rebellion, when they went up to Canada and tried
to take Canada, they might have done it.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I mean, look, no war is good.
This is what I This is why I like, there's
a I guess all wars passed a level where you're
like not really don't really need to differentiate unless it's
to just like really get in the weeds.
Speaker 2: Any medieval battle, they're doing this kind of shit.
Speaker 1: Oh yes, this is medieval shit happening in living memory,
within living memory, essentially.
Speaker 2: Maybe not doing this in the American Revolution. But no,
I'm not putting it past some people.
Speaker 1: I just don't think it was happening in most of
the wars like this.
Speaker 2: You don't think Sherman was collecting skulls down in Atlanta.
Speaker 1: I actually don't. I really don't think you was. I
think the Civil War was especially like obviously fucked up
should happened, but I think you're like fighting your own
like people you're gonna live with later.
Speaker 2: Yeah, world War One, I feel like there were there
were some pockets.
Speaker 1: Of this, Yeah, for sure, for sure, but weren't there
We weren't there long enough, Yeah, to get driven truly insane.
Speaker 2: This definitely happened in Vietnam, Yes, yeah, I.
Speaker 1: Think there's something about East Asia, the jungle.
Speaker 2: Brings it out and the heat that just you go
full apocalypse now.
Speaker 1: Yeah, pretty pretty much. Yeah, Like I don't I'm positive
this didn't happen in any meaningful way in like the
g WATT.
Speaker 2: I mean, there's plenty of stories of us mistreating the
hell out of prisoners.
Speaker 1: And I'm not saying there was nothing, but I'm saying
that everything that I am talking about.
Speaker 2: In the dudes and what pissing on prisoners, Yeah, yeah, yeah,
one hundred percent, it's a different level, I suppose.
Speaker 1: I'm just saying like this was widespread, This was like
normal in this battle.
Speaker 2: Tokens and trophies in other battles.
Speaker 1: Yeah, a lot of a big one was and this
was also portrayed in the Pacific. We're about to get
to a specific event that was in the Pacific, but
they didn't show it as much a lot. They were
collecting gold teeth left and right. The Americans were a
lot of gold teeth in the Japanese mouths, I guess
for some reason. So yeah, like I said earlier, flamethrower
teams would just hose jelly gasoline into caves and then
light it on fire and let the guys. Let the
guys burn it death. Some people would run out on
fire and they would shoot them. But so yeah, this
is the one from from Sledges book that they like
toned down in the show. There was a lull in
the fighting on a place called Bloody Nose Ridge, and
Sledge watched one of his fellow marines.
Speaker 2: Bloody Nose Ridge just doesn't fit for war. It's somewhere
you meet after school to fight, Sorry, meet us at
a bloody Nose Ridge after the bell.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's where like sophomores fight each other.
Speaker 2: Yeah, maybe you get your like first kiss up on
Bloody Nose Ridge after you beat a kids.
Speaker 1: You win a fight. Yeah, yeah, with a bloody nose.
Speaker 2: You have your first couple of beers at Bloody Nose Ridge.
But you don't have war, bloody nose.
Speaker 1: You don't do this at bloody Nose Ridge. So he
watches a marine. There's like nothing going on. So he
watches a marine go up to a like basically like paralyzed,
but a live Japanese soldier is lying on the ground
and the marine is, you know, hunting for gold teeth.
So he jams his knife into the guy, into the
Japanese soldier's mouth and starts like blade first and starts
just hitting it with his palm to like get the
teeth out, get the gold teeth out. But the knife slips,
and I guess he just stabs the Japanese soldier like
straight in the mouth, like rips through his gum and shit.
And the guy's like he can't really scream or anything.
He's just kind of like moving a little more because
it is obviously the most painful thing that's ever happened
to him.
Speaker 2: Hmm.
Speaker 1: Blood just starts pulling out of pouring out of the
guy's mouth. The marine.
Speaker 2: It doesn't happen to you at the dentist, not like that.
Speaker 1: I never needed a tooth removed, so granted I don't.
Speaker 2: Have dental insurance or health insurance at all, right now,
so you gotta take what you get.
Speaker 1: If it's a guy with a bayonet, that's my guy. Yeah,
well you're slightly paralyzed for it's under thirty five pain medication.
Speaker 2: Set tells me he's a dentist or was a dentist.
Speaker 1: He calls himself the dentist. Yeah, and you're like, oh,
so you're a dentist. I'm the dentist. He has a
bag of teeth, seems legit. Trust that where'd you get
it from? If he's not a dentist, he's.
Speaker 2: Not just collecting teeth off hobos.
Speaker 1: I certainly not.
Speaker 2: Although I do look homeless.
Speaker 1: No, you don't mean you got a beard? But pretty
well kept, is it?
Speaker 2: I don't really do anything to it.
Speaker 1: It just grows nice.
Speaker 2: It's not puby, no, no, if you feel it to,
it's so soft.
Speaker 1: Yeah, A lot of a lot of people get pew beards.
You don't got that not I. So then the marine, though,
doesn't give a fuck that this paralyzed, like semi paralyzed
guy is just like and there's blood coming everywhere.
Speaker 2: So he.
Speaker 1: He's like, God, I just can't get into his mouth
that good. So he takes his knife and just cuts
his cheek, each cheek open all the way up to
the ear so he can just really get good tooth axis.
Speaker 2: No, I got these guys.
Speaker 1: Yeah, literally, he jokers the guy.
Speaker 2: My mother any bit of a drinker.
Speaker 1: So now he's just trying to yank the teeth out.
And at this point, Sledge is like, oh my god,
I cannot watch this. Just kill him, just shoot him, right,
Holy shit, dude, this is fucked.
Speaker 2: I mean so fuck. Chase is looking back, hey you
right now, like what are you yeah talking about Sledge.
Speaker 1: I guess the guy turns around and is like, mind
your own fucking business.
Speaker 2: Yeah that sounds right. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Uh. Fortunately, I guess another marine heard Sledge and I
like saw what was going on, like herd Sledge be like, dude,
just stops killed, Like this is fucked, man.
Speaker 2: Not a wholl crumb if it's the first time, nop.
Speaker 1: So another marine what like sees what's going on and
walks up. It's just like I imagine he walks up
like it's so bored and annoyed too, like just walks
up and it's like like looks at the marine with
a knife and it's just like dude, and just blows
the Japanese guy's brains, like, just shoots him in the head.
Get your fucking teeth, asshole.
Speaker 2: The Marines back then have the same stigma of just
being jar heads, just nothing upstairs.
Speaker 1: I don't even know if they were called jar heads
at that point.
Speaker 2: They might have been, but were they kind of the
the dummies the meatheads.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't know, I don't know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I'm sure one of our military listeners will
let us know.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And again, because the heat was horrible, flamethrowers were
used a lot. Things would get wet with rain and
then get like start baking. He was so humid that
sledge in his book werecalled multiple times of having to
crawl over Japanese bodies and as his like arm would like,
I don't know, go across a guy's dead guy's face
or whatever, like the skin would just slough off onto
his sleeve, just like exposing the guy's cheek muscles or whatever.
Just literally the worst place that's maybe ever existed, all
for none. Yeah, there was no reason after the war,
and really you actually after the battle, but especially after
the war, Uh, people were like, why why did we
go there? Because MacArthur immediately was like, all right, we're
ready to take the Philippines. Let's do that. Palelu was
not really useful to attack the Philippines, so the airfield
became kind of pointless, and the Japanese defenders on the
island could not kill anything in the water, you know
what I mean. It wasn't a submarine base. They didn't
have big enough guns to sink a battleship or an
aircraft carrier. You could have just you have just skipped it, yep,
could have just skipped it. And Palelu never played an
important role in any any subsequent battle or operation of
the war.
Speaker 2: It was sometimes you just got a side quest.
Speaker 1: The highest casualty rate of any amphibious operation in the
Pacific War. Now, not long after I think Iwajima was
like February forty five or something like that.
Speaker 2: It's pretty late in the game.
Speaker 1: Well there's eight nine months left in the war at
that point. Yeah, And Iwajima had a similar situation where
you know, they had some token, they had beach resistance,
but really it was all about the caves and all
that stuff. So the Japanese had the same plan at
Ewa Jiba they had at Pelulu and.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's really all I'm kind of picturing right now
is the movie Letters from Ewajima and all the scenes
of them popping out of the ground.
Speaker 1: It's the same thing, same thing, same thing. The American
high command did not make many adjustments after Pala Lou.
Speaker 2: They were just like, I don't know, we won, Yeah,
why making in game adjustment?
Speaker 1: Right? We got the dub, we we scored. What do
you want now?
Speaker 2: Was it pretty? No, not at all.
Speaker 1: It wouldn't a pretty win, but I'll take it.
Speaker 2: Win's a win. When wins a win if you got
bodies and Catholics a throw.
Speaker 1: So they didn't really adjust their tactics very much. They
were just like, boy, that was rougher than the last one.
Speaker 2: Are we good at in game adjustments?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Totally. But I think they just were like, I
don't know, it's working.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think we just I think we're good pre game.
Speaker 1: I think we're bad pregame. No you do, Okay, let
me take them back now, we elite pregame.
Speaker 2: Maybe that's what I'm basing off of.
Speaker 1: Up to World War Two, we were dogshit pre game.
We got off to pretty bad starts in the Revolution
eighteen twelve. I think the Mexican War, we just dominated
the whole time. So hell yeah, Civil War obviously two
years of dog shit before we got anything done, except
on the West.
Speaker 2: Had to get grant, had to call them up to
the miners.
Speaker 1: Yep. The Spanish Marian War is a hard one to quantify.
It was three months, yeah, and and Spain was like
a paper tiger. Doesn't even do it justice. It was
like a paper bobcat.
Speaker 2: Spain's not a real empire, it was.
Speaker 1: It wasn't even a shell of its former self. Like
I know it's in Europe and it has a rich history,
but we were fighting a third world country pretty much
like Spain was ass at that point. World War One
didn't get off to a great start. World War two
decent start, but could have been a lot better. Got
hammered obviously in Casserine Pass, Pearl Harbor. But we won
big early battles in World War Two, like Midway and
stuff like that, so we did better from the jump.
Speaker 2: Pearl Harbor was like going to practice hungover, not expecting
to have to play a tournament. Yeah, like, oh, I
guess we're playing five games today.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, and you just you're just shitting your pants
and puking by the end of the second game, just out.
But I mean we did we did do well from
the start. I think in the Pacific Theater for sure, Emick.
We won Guadalcanal and Midway and forty two, which was
for all intense purposes. The first year of the war
Europe took a little longer. I mean, we got shwacked
at Casserine Pass, and I think we needed some adjustments
in North Africa before we kind of like really got
our footing. But then after World War Two, I think
we've been pretty good. From the Korea was a weird one. Actually,
we got like pushed to the brink in Korea and
then just started like we just got like cornered. And
it's like a boxer in a corner, like a UFC
fire gets corner and then just like punches his way
out of it in a way that's just insane and
takes the upper hand.
Speaker 2: Or you know a lot of people would say a
cornered animal.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. But since then we've been pretty good. From
the jump, I mean, Desert Storm was a clown show.
I mean that was absurd, how easy that was. Obviously
we rolled over a rack in Afghanistan pretty quickly. It
was more the after everything, after the initial stuff.
Speaker 2: Right, it's maintaining Yeah, yeah, uh no, I don't know.
Speaker 1: We were always winning in nom Like we weren't losing
fights in Vietnam. Yes, we technically lost, we did, but
we weren't ever losing fights. We just it was our fault.
It's my parents' fault, your parents fault.
Speaker 2: Like you said, news gets to the public and they
want to make us quit.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they're like, why are we there? What is this for?
Is it draft?
Speaker 2: Hopefully it doesn't repeat.
Speaker 1: But that's all I got today. On the Battle of
Pale Lou arguably the worst battle, the grossest battle the
entire Pacific theater.
Speaker 2: I don't think I'm picking that one to go to.
Speaker 1: No, No, you don't want flies.
Speaker 2: It's for none, Like, there's no glory, there's.
Speaker 1: No point to any of it. It is. It is
one of the most you can get eaten by crabs,
sort of storied chapters in Marine Corps history.
Speaker 2: Se body carried off by a just a group of crabs.
Your dead bodies, crowd crowds are from a crab.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and apparently and like or if you if the
crabs don't even get to you yet, like your body
just explodes like a dead whale.
Speaker 2: It's all bloated. Yeah, no, no, thanks, Bud.
Speaker 1: It's, in my opinion, the grossest battle of the war.
Speaker 2: People do not just because of the steaks. There are
no they're none none. These people die for nothing, for
an airbase we didn't use.
Speaker 1: So when I talk about when the Pacific theater is
just criminally underrated, criminally forgotten because you know it's not sexy.
Speaker 2: No, no, it's not what you know, black and white.
Speaker 1: Well, it's pretty black and white. Japanese were evil. Yeah,
every inches a year.
Speaker 2: You're just talking about a guy collecting teeth and skulls
and the and.
Speaker 1: They they made us do that. They broke us, Yeah
they did. There's only so many of your friends you
can find with their dicks in their mouths.
Speaker 2: You get a fight on their level.
Speaker 1: Yeah, before you're like, well, I'm done, I'm done being
a human being.
Speaker 2: Those people came back to this country. I know we
need to follow up on what happened to them. Everybody
that came back from this battle.
Speaker 1: What happened So that one guy was like, yeah, things
got a little crazy, I guess.
Speaker 2: They had families, children, tell us about the war. Paul
started companies here. Maybe not maybe definitely. They were union men,
they were They really put us in the position we're
in now.
Speaker 1: It's not it's not no, it's not in that.
Speaker 2: Those their kids, okay, the boomers, Yeah, yeah, well they
raised those kids.
Speaker 1: You know what, it's it's hard to focus on your
kid when you keep remembering your friend getting eaten by crabs.
Speaker 2: Yeah, one of them though. Right now, I'm sure there's
a skull being passed from a generation to generation.
Speaker 1: How'd you get this, Grandpa?
Speaker 2: Is that a real Japanese skull?
Speaker 1: Well, there was a Japanese man who was very much alive,
and he was crawling, begging whatevers worshiped for the sweet
release of death. And I said, you know what, buddy,
I'll give it to you as slowly as possible. And
I just got a sow it as head off for
a while, there wasn't a lot going on. And then
I skinned it, steamed it, put it in my bag, brought.
Speaker 2: It home, turned it into a coffee mug.
Speaker 1: It's why your grandmother never came into a man cave.
She didn't like anything that was in there. No it's
deeply haunted. It's just a Poulter Guys situation.
Speaker 2: Actually, yeah, that's a skip over this island for our
future Halloween horror tour.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Probably probably. I really don't even know.
Speaker 2: Let men even get to it? Would you want to
get to it?
Speaker 1: You can get to it, it is.
Speaker 2: Is there a population that lives on it now?
Speaker 1: Yeah? One hundred percent. You I just saw the flight.
It was like two thousand dollars gross. Obviously it's more
than one.
Speaker 2: What's gone up because of the oil prices?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, certainly it is in Oh my god, there's
like hotels and shit. There's a place called Honeymoon Beach. Oh,
I don't think. I don't think that's what what people
think it is.
Speaker 2: It's like Bloody Nose Cliff.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Uh yeah, man, this place, it's just in the
middle of it.
Speaker 2: Really misnamed.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah. Submarine was like Honeymoon's over and then it
just stuck Honeymoon Beach. Yeah. I'm getting like shitty internet
right now, so I can't do right look at it.
Speaker 2: But I pay for the highest internet here. Then apparently
it just drops out all the time.
Speaker 1: She a Google yep. So yeah, it's part of Plow.
Speaker 2: It's like a smaller island, uh, apart take a ferry from.
Speaker 1: To Palelu probably, but there is uh there's like memorials
to the Marines and the and the eighty first Infantry.
Speaker 2: To really small, well really tiny.
Speaker 1: It was, yeah, super tiny. The airfield's still there. So
now you just land on it. I guess to visit.
Speaker 2: You see the whole island in thirty minutes.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't know that. There's a lot of stuff though,
doesn't look like it. We get the satellite view. I
don't know where. I don't think you can stay on
this island.
Speaker 2: I don't want to.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was wrong about the hotels. Uh, yeah, you
just visit it. You have to stay on Plow probably.
And here's the other thing too, not a fun vacation
because the beach isn't when it's one hundred and ten degrees.
Speaker 2: The water is boiling.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but it's like going to Galveston.
Speaker 2: Yeah fuck that.
Speaker 1: But you can't stay on Palau, which.
Speaker 2: Is Galveston somehow wears the bigger isley.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Texas beaches are gross, but.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's all I got for today. On the Battle
of Pale lou the grossest battle in the Pacific theater
of World War Two.
Speaker 2: What'd you learn to all this all this pointless information? Thanks, No,
it's not that, it's just there was no reason to
fight this battle, no at all. No, And honestly, that's
what I learned. Most battles, probably in human history, didn't
really result in the objective.
Speaker 1: The decisive thing it was aiming for, And a lot of.
Speaker 2: People died throughout human history for nothing. Oh yeah, most
people actually have died in human history for nothing.
Speaker 1: I mean most of the battles you think about. I
always like to just think about that. It's like some
guy was out of battle being like for my country,
for my family, this is everything. And then now like
now we're just like, well, like the guy just got
cut in half by a broad sword, and we're like,
just got a spear through the face, and we were
like thankfully.
Speaker 2: On the Patreon on Wednesday, we will be talking about
a battle the Head, Consequences and mattered sweet can't wait.
Medieval battle though.
Speaker 1: Who's today's hit hitler?
Speaker 2: Today's hitler, I'm gonna say, is the guys that decided
to drag men into caves and cut off their package, yeah,
and shoved in their mouths. Yeah, that's not cool, dude,
not sweet.
Speaker 1: It's not sweet.
Speaker 2: I just have an agreement as a society, as a
human species, to leave people's junk alone.
Speaker 1: Ye, boobs wieners because the Japanese cut off boobs a.
Speaker 2: Lot too, head or heart shots. Let's not torture.
Speaker 1: Yeah. It also just strikes me as odd because like, Okay,
I get it, you're angry, and essentially they know they're
gonna die, so they don't care about anything. But it's
like I'm not gonna win you in the battle, like they're.
Speaker 2: They're still coming and now they're angry.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and now they're just mad. But they didn't want
to they didn't want to surrender anyway, So I guess
it is what it is. Well, that's all I got
for today. Thank you again to uh persadess Watches that's
p R a E s I d U s. UH
got to check out there. Well really all they're watched,
but the EU Gema watch UH is awesome. It's really
really cool. Check it out at persads dot com. That's
p R A E s I d U S. All
the details in the description to UH get you what
you need from them again. Highly recommend checking them out,
especially if you're a vet H. I feel like you
guys would appreciate these watches a ton so for Dan Rochester,
I'm Rob Fox.
Speaker 2: You just got sauce served