Forging Naval Leaders: Craig Symonds on WWII and Annapolis

Podcast Episode 211

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Digital Fortin Media proudly presents the What's the Scuttlebutt Podcast with your hosts, Don Abernathy, Jeff Copsetta, and Dennis Blocker.

SPEAKER_03 0:16

Welcome everybody to another episode of the What's the Scuttlebutt Podcast, your favorite World War II-based podcast, and you want to talk about baptism under fire. Boy, have we got a good night for you? Jeff is uh taking the night off. He's working on uh his college papers so he can be an actual historian. He's going to college, you guys know all that. So our friend Zach Morris is filling in tonight on talking fast because the power may go out here at any moment. I'm in Florida, we got a thunderstorm going. So for the listening audience, if at some point you hear me stop rambling, that means I've lost the internet. Zach and Dennis are going to carry on with the interview without me, and things will be great for everybody. So without any further ado, welcome to the show, Zach. Dennis, happy to have you back. Thank you. Great to be here. Zach's coming in strong with a great guest tonight. Zach, without any further ado, why don't you introduce our guest? Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 1:04

So I want to thank uh author Craig Simons uh for joining us today. He is the author of the new book, Annapolis Goes to War, the Naval Academy class of 1940, and it's Trial by Fire in World War II. So we're excited to talk about that one. But he is also the author of one of my favorite books of all time, Neptune. Which is possibly one of the best written books uh on the amphibious forces in the European theater uh that I've ever come across. So thank you, Craig, for joining us tonight. I really appreciate your time.

SPEAKER_01 1:35

Thank you, Zach. Appreciate being invited.

SPEAKER_02 1:38

So why don't you tell us about this uh new book, this Annapolis Coast of War? You know, what's a little background on that?

SPEAKER_01 1:45

Well, it's interesting. I I wrote a book uh uh among the two, other than the two you already named, on uh Chester Nimitz called Nimitz at War. And that was my most recent book. And and I looked at World War II in the Pacific from his viewpoint. That is, in a way, from 30,000 feet, you know, the commander's view of the largest theater of World War II, 65 million square miles, and it gave a certain perspective. But I wanted to do something that gave the perspective of the junior officers, the 01, 02, eventually 03 young officers who, you know, conned the ships and flew the planes and charged the beaches, who did the dirty work of the Pacific War. And one way to do that was to look at the class of 1940. And I was extraordinarily uh lucky, in a way, that at their 45th reunion, the members of the class of 1940 decided that as a gift to the Naval Academy, they'd already given a stained glass window to the chapel, but they wanted to do something more that connected them with the next generation of midshipmen. And they decided that anybody who wanted to participate should sit down and write out uh answers to nine questions. Why did you go to the Naval Academy? What was plebe year like? What was the rest of your experience like? What sport did you play? What was your first assignment? What do you remember about it? And so on. And so those who chose to participate, more than a hundred of them, more 150 of them, wrote out these lengthy, thoughtful, introspective, uh, sometimes handwritten on legal paper, sometimes typed. But then they all got sort of put into a file, into 19 Hollinger boxes in the Special Collections Archive at the Nimetz Library at the Naval Academy. And they did not really get a lot of attention. As far as I know, I'm the only one who has been through them. Certainly I'm the only one who's been through them all. Um, but what they gave me was a really sharp look at not only what they did, but what they thought and and uh what it meant to them to participate in this war. So this is a study from the day they showed up in the Naval Academy as 17-year-olds from the most part on a sweltering typical Annapolis summer day in June of 1936, the four years they spend at the Naval Academy and what that was like for them, and and it hasn't changed a whole lot, but it's changed a little bit. And then the five years that they spent in the Navy as junior officers ride, and it ends with the Japanese surrender on the USS Missouri on September 2nd, 1945. So those nine years saw them grow from callow, you know, inexperienced, nervous young men to, in the most case, lieutenant commanders or majors, or in a few cases lieutenant colonels, uh, who were pretty much running a war.

SPEAKER_03 4:49

I'm really excited for the subject matter of this book because we've all heard the stories about the West Point grads, right? We all know everything the West Points do, but to get this angle, to get this aspect of the Navy and what the Annapolis graduates went through, that the amount of research that probably went into this book, like you said, it's spanning nine years, that's a tremendous amount of research and chronicalization. And not to mention, as Dennis could tell you, trying to figure out what gets cut and what doesn't.

SPEAKER_01 5:15

Yeah, that's true. But in addition to that, one of the problems I confronted was I wanted to make sure everything I I did where I talked about these young men was contextualized. So I not only had to say what they did, I had to explain where they were and why they were there and who else was with them and what were the circumstances. So if I'm talking about Guadalcanal, uh men who were on the four cruisers that were attacked by the Japanese at Savo Island, for example, I had to explain what those cruisers were doing at Savo Island. So the the real difficulty, I think, was mixing the big view of the war itself with the then close in personal view of the individuals who were manning the second turret or the machine gun battery or some other aspect uh of those cruisers. So so that was an interesting uh job. And putting it all together, as you say, in a in what I hope is a seamless narrative, I think was a real challenge, but also a lot of fun.

SPEAKER_03 6:18

When doing the research, and as you said, you started prior to the war, but during the research during during your research and looking into this, was there a clear differentiation between pre-war training or um community at Annapolis and then you know, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and we got to get ready to move. Did they streamline things? Did things get changed up drastically? Did they kind of maintain their existing regiment?

SPEAKER_01 6:46

Well, for them, there are two milestones. One is graduation. Oh boy, we're not midshipmen anymore. This is great. Now we're in the real Navy. And 160 of them got sent to, oh, this little place in the mid-Pacific called Pearl Harbor. So they are all there in 1941. And in fact, the first thing a junior officer wants to try to do is qualify as officer of the deck. Now, to do that, you've got to spend about a year or so learning all, you know, all your responsibilities and so on, and able to handle emergencies. And while at sea, a battleship, for example, would probably have a senior lieutenant or lieutenant commander as officer of the deck, who is in effect in charge of the ship. But when the ship's in port, and especially on a weekend, you can turn that job over to a junior officer, say somebody who's recently qualified as officer of the deck. And as it turned out, three of these guys, three of them, were officers of the deck on the California, the Oklahoma, and the Arizona on Sunday morning, December 7th, 1941.

SPEAKER_03 7:55

You want to talk about taking on responsibility? That's a graduate program right there.

SPEAKER_02 8:01

Yeah. Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_03 8:03

Wow.

SPEAKER_02 8:04

Greg, how did you hear about those letters that you were talking about that like were vaulted away? Like, was that did you stumble on that by accident? Or how did that?

SPEAKER_01 8:11

Not really. You know, I knew about it when it was being created because the class of 1940 wanted a uh Naval Academy history professor, which I was, uh, to assume some responsibility for, you know, collecting them, organizing them, putting them in box, keeping them in more or less chronological, or in this case, alphabetical order. Uh, and one of my colleagues, uh Robert William Love, uh now retired, uh, was the guy who did that job. And so I knew from him and from them at the time it was being created that this archive existed, but it wasn't really until I'd finished with the Nimitz project that I decided I'm gonna look into this and see what's in there. And of course, what I discovered is a treasure trove.

SPEAKER_04 8:58

Well, I gotta tell you, sir, I I just ordered it right now.

unknown 9:02

Oh, good.

SPEAKER_04 9:04

I'm a little bit upset at you, sir, because I have a stack of books beside my bed. And now it's three inches taller. Yeah, now it's another inch taller. That's right. I just can't wait to get into it. I'm so excited already. Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_02 9:21

It catapulted to number one on my reading list too.

SPEAKER_01 9:25

Absolutely. Thank you. I hope your readers feel the same, your listeners feel the same way. Oh, I'm sure.

SPEAKER_03 9:30

Well, the thing that also excites Dennis and Zach both is um they've both had um enormous experiences of digging through artifacts and reading handwritten letters and diary entries and researching their own books. And so the fact that you had this basically unsealed treasure trove that's been sealed up hermetically in a in a shelf somewhere, and for who knows why, up to this point, you're the only one who seemed to either show interest or knew that it was there, and to have access to unspoiled history in and of itself is enough to excite anybody.

SPEAKER_01 10:07

It was kind of in raw shape when I first took it on. I I would go into the archive with the phone that I'm holding in my hand, and I'd turn a page and say, Oh my god, this is gold, and I'd take a picture of it, and then another page, and then I'd take a picture of that. Well, then of course I would go home every day for about a year with uh 30, 40, 50, 60 uh photographs of these, often handwritten, uh sometimes typed, which I was always grateful for, but then I'd have to upload them on my computer, print them off on my printer, and then you know, work from that. So there was some mining that had to be done, but uh the class did the lion's share of the work for me. Uh it was raw material, but it was absolutely wonderful material.

SPEAKER_03 10:53

But that mining kind of allows you to almost pre-parse out information that you kind of feel that you won't really need, correct? So it's almost a little bit of to be sure.

SPEAKER_01 11:02

There were many pages. I turned the page and said, nope, we don't need this. Uh this is not pertinent, this is not relevant, this is not interesting. Um, of course, some of the not interesting stuff you want to include, because, you know, yes, thousands of young men were at the point of the spear, flying planes, driving ships, in subs, charging a beach, whatever they might be doing. Uh, and the class members of the 1940 went to every service selection. So I follow about a dozen of them. If you can think of this as kind of uh like the naval equivalent of uh the um not the boys and what am I thinking of? Uh Banda Brothers. Band of Brothers. These are Band of Brothers who go to sea. But of course, they don't operate together. They're scattered all over the globe. And they run into each other once in a while. One uh serendipitously will be plucked from the sea uh by another when the Yorktown sinks and he's hauled on to an accompanying destroyer. So wow they connect and reconnect as the as the war goes on. Uh and uh so so that makes the story, uh gives the story an interesting edge as well.

SPEAKER_04 12:12

I have a couple things for you, sir. First of all, um Zach and I already have a plan for when the apocalypse happens. Um we're going to, well, everybody else does whatever they're gonna do. Zach is Wednesday, by the way. We're gonna meet at the National Archives in College Park with a bag of MREs. And uh we're just gonna go in and do exactly what you were so fortunate to be able to do.

SPEAKER_01 12:37

Yeah, yeah. Bitman done that, no MREs, but uh spent a lot of time to the National Archives. Wonderful place, by the way. I have one coffee.

SPEAKER_04 12:47

Um in your in your um your writing career with the advent of Excel spreadsheets and uh Word. Um how has your your writing you you have all these fellas that you've got to keep track of. Right. What does that look like in your office? Is it a is it an Excel spreadsheet? Is it is it post-it notes on the wall? Is it uh a graph? What does that look like? Great question.

SPEAKER_01 13:13

You are you are talking to an analog 19th century historian, I'm afraid. I do stuff on paper. I have stacks and stacks of paper, I have bankers' boxes full of notes and drafts. But the one absolutely essential thing that the computer has done for me is it allows me to rewrite. And truth be told, that's the part of book production I like the most. The research is fun because you come across stuff and go, oh wow, look at this. Um and the writing is interesting because you're you're crafting it and putting it together, and this goes here and that goes there, or maybe this doesn't go anywhere. But what I like most, to be honest with you, is once I have kind of a draft, I like rewriting. I like to look at it the way I think my Naval Academy students would want to approach it. How much background do they need to know to understand the context here? What do they want to know about these characters and their personalized that helps them identify with what they were doing? So as I go through it and rewrite it, you can do that so easily on a word processing system. And I use Word, that's the one I use. I mean, there are others as well, but uh, and then I'll rewrite it again and again and again. So what comes out, the one you just ordered, is probably something like the 14th draft. So uh the great thing about computers is not the spreadsheets for me, anyway, but simply the opportunity to fine-tune uh the writing itself.

SPEAKER_04 14:48

I wanted to ask you one of the one of the uh searches that I do on Google whenever I'm uh researching a subject is I will enter in the keywords um, let's just say um uh George S. Patton Papers, location of.

SPEAKER_01 15:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 15:08

So where have you decided where the Dr. Craig Simon's papers are gonna be going?

SPEAKER_01 15:18

You touch a nerve there. Um yeah, I mean, before I can offer my archives, as I said, I have bankers' boxes full of notes and papers and drafts and other things. Um and before I can really go to an archive, probably the Naval Academy, possibly the Naval War College, and say, here's a collection, would you like this? I have to organize that stuff. I have to get rid of duplicates and put them in order and put them in files. And that's a job at least as big as writing a book. So I've I have put that off, sadly to say. So not sure where they'll end up, but probably one of those two places.

SPEAKER_04 16:01

Excellent, excellent. Well, I can I can uh tell you that I know Zach and I would probably be on that list to offer our services.

SPEAKER_02 16:08

Oh, yeah. Right?

SPEAKER_01 16:10

Hey, like I said, be careful what you offer.

SPEAKER_04 16:13

No, I'm very serious about that. I did that for the William L. McGee uh archive.

SPEAKER_05 16:18

No, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 16:20

I did his uh archive and organized that and uh dedicated we gave it to the museum there in Fredericksburg.

SPEAKER_05 16:26

Yeah, terrific.

SPEAKER_04 16:27

So it's it's that's a treasure trove what you have there. I know you're um you've looked at it hundreds and hundreds of times, but you know, for the the young historians of the future, you know, they're gonna they're gonna really want to look at those papers. That's that's that's why I asked. That's awesome.

SPEAKER_02 16:44

Oh yeah. And speaking of papers and archives and all the information that you collected, Craig, do you I have to ask, with all these stories and all the treasure trove of documents you came across, do you have a favorite story or a most noteworthy story that stands above the rest that you came across during this whole project?

SPEAKER_01 17:01

Well, I I got to know these guys. I felt like I got to know these guys. I call them my kids, my boys. They're all gone now, of course. They're the last one died in 2016, so they're certainly not kids anymore, but but that's the way I see them because they were between the ages of 17, in a few cases even 16, and then 26 or 27 years old when the war ended. So they were they seemed like kids to me, and I got to know them. So there are individual stories, probably of each one. Uh a few of them are more colorful than others. I particularly got to enjoy the antics of John Locketer. John Locketer uh went to one of the most prestigious uh prep schools in the country, the Latin School in Boston. Uh, but he saw a battleship floating in Narragansett Bay when he was nine years old, never forgot it, was determined to go to the Naval Academy, and did. He went to a prep school and got the highest score in the country on the qualifying exam, got an appointment, got in, but John Locketer was a cut-up. I mean, he when he was in Hawaii, he read in the paper that some well-to-do heiress was putting giving a party for the pilots in Hawaii, and he contacted her and said, Well, why are you doing that for them? What about us destroyer men? Shouldn't you give a party for us too? Well, she did. So she put on a big party, and and I mean, you know, that's just the kind of thing he would do. As an example, and when he graduated from the Naval Academy out of a class of 456, he was in the top hundred academically and the bottom 20 on behavior. So that's the kind of guy he was. Uh, it's the kind of guy you'd like next to you. He'd he'd be a gray wing man to have. So so there are uh those personalities that I felt I got to know um in putting this story together. I mean, another one, if you want for a particularly exciting story, uh the captain of the Naval Academy basketball team, Joe Hanley, Mike Hanley, actually, Michael Joseph Hanley, um started out in uh blimps of all things, but he ended up in destroyers, and he's the executive officer on the USS Dashel, and it arrives in Okinawa on April the 3rd, 1945. It's sent out to be a picket destroyer at the northern end of the Picket Line, north of Okinawa, on April 4th, which is the day the Japanese launched 750 planes from Kyushu, half of them kamikaze, to take out the American fleet at Okinawa. And of course, the very first ship they saw were the Picket destroyers. And the Dasho was attacked by 20 planes in less than an hour, with Mike Hanley down in the CIC running the radar, running the giving whole direction. I mean, just you can imagine what that was like. And of course, he describes it in this brilliant, uh evocative prose that no one had looked at until now. So that that's a pretty good story. Wow.

SPEAKER_03 20:29

I just can't imagine being confined to a vessel while the sky's literally falling in on you and having limited you know places to go. Not that you have a whole heck of a lot of places to go if you're on uh terra firma. I mean you're still limited to the distance at which you can run, but at least you have the the uh delusion of hey, if something were to go crazy, I'd have a place to go, versus being confined on a ship.

SPEAKER_01 20:53

And and in a way, you can multiply that by for those who were serving in a submarine.

SPEAKER_03 20:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 20:59

I mean, you think about it being in a submarine, being attacked by, in one case, one of my guys, one of my kids was in a submarine that was attacked by three destroyers at the same time with depth charges going off and the pinging sonar and trying to keep quiet, and they're running silent, and they go to the bottom. The ship's been tested down to 250 feet, but they go down to 405 feet to the bottom to try to escape it. And uh afterward, members of the crew broke out in boils and hives because the tension was so great. Uh yeah, that's pretty tough too.

SPEAKER_04 21:35

My goodness. I can't even imagine. No. No. No, the closest I could come to that is probably when I uh in Alaska when I stepped on a ground wasp nest. Yikes uh they come tearing out, and I didn't know which direction they were coming at me, but they were definitely zapping me. Yeah, yeah. It's uh and and also 9 11 when we didn't know how many. More planes there were, you know. We thought it was over, and then you hear about the Pentagon, and then you hear about Pennsylvania, you know, and then you're like, oh my gosh, what other cities? Chicago, Los Angeles.

SPEAKER_05 22:10

Right.

SPEAKER_04 22:11

I mean, it's not anywhere near, of course, uh not anywhere near that, but what it was out there in Okinawa, but uh kind of get you kind of get you thinking post-war on how that the that that version of PTSD, right?

SPEAKER_03 22:24

Because we all we're all familiar with the infantry version, the fireworks on the 4th of July might cause someone to freak out, or the backfiring of a 56th Buick might cause someone to hit the deck, but having PTSD of being in cramped quarters such as a submarine or a small vessel and then going into post-war life, I mean, that's gonna you probably won't be a steam fitter. Uh there's gonna be a lot of jobs that you probably wouldn't be able to mentally handle if you feel enclosed.

SPEAKER_01 22:49

You know what's interesting. A lot of these guys came to the Naval Academy. Remember, they came in 1936. The depression is on. There are no jobs. There's no place to go. Colleges are too expensive, hardly anybody can afford it anyway. So the golden ticket to either West Point or Annapolis gets them out of this economic conundrum, and a lot of them did it because it just seemed a smart thing to do. And yet, after those four years of brutal war, all of them, all of the ones that I follow in my storyline here, stayed in. Wow and did a full career. They all retired as captains, a few of them became rear admirals, uh, or generals in the uh Marine Corps, major general in the Marine Corps, but they stayed in for uh for the for the duration of their careers. Um a couple of them got divorced, and I think that may be an indication of some of the difficulties they were dealing with.

SPEAKER_03 23:46

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 23:47

But uh but it's fascinating to me that uh they made that decision.

unknown 23:52

Wow.

SPEAKER_04 23:53

A little bit off topic, a little bit.

SPEAKER_01 23:54

Um, let's go, by all means.

SPEAKER_04 23:56

Far away. Is there a moment in your career um with long career and esteemed career? Is there a moment in particular that you kind of had to pinch yourself? You couldn't believe you were lucky enough to be there at that moment with whoever was there.

SPEAKER_01 24:15

Yeah, more than one, I have to say. Um they say that a lot of life is luck. I mean, you make decisions, of course, and the decisions matter, but you the circumstances have to be there to allow you to make that decision. So um when I was on active duty in uniform, um, just after I uh got commissioned at Officer Candidate School, I was offered a job to be a flag lieutenant for the president of the Naval War College. Now, what ensign gets that job? And then when he retired a year later, the new president of the Naval War College, uh Admiral Stansfield Turner, later the CIA director, uh, wanted to change the curriculum to focus on historical case studies and was looking for people who had degrees in history, and guess who had one? So Admiral Turner gave me an opportunity that was truly remarkable. I had to pinch myself when that happened. So teaching at the Naval War College when I was 23 years old, and my students were captains and Marine Corps colonels and army colonels who were old enough to be my father. Um that was amazing. Uh and then after I finished that, uh, I was hired at the Naval Academy. I mean, there is no better job. There is no better job in the country than teaching midshipmen at the Naval Academy. They're eager, they're enthusiastic, they're smart, they're disciplined, they're just wonderful young men and women. And uh so I did that for 30 years, and I pinched myself every year when I had that opportunity. So, so yeah, a lot of pinching going on in my life. Yes, absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 25:53

I I have a question for you, Craig, and this is a question that I've had since 2013 when I found out you were doing research at the at the LCI archives at the Fredericksburg Museum. Now, before we started recording um for our audience, Dennis was talking about how uh about 10 years back Craig went to the Fredericksburg Museum, the Pacific War Museum in Texas, and he did a lot of research with the amphibious forces, and he looked up things like the LCIs, the LSTs. The question I have for you, Craig, is I mean, like me and Dennis, we have a connection, the kind of a niche piece of history, the amphibious forces. What brought you to the museum to do research on the amphibious forces for Neptune?

SPEAKER_01 26:31

Well, two things. Um, three things, actually. Um, my very good friend Michael Hagee, former Commandant of the Marine Corps, with whom I served at the Naval Academy, invited me to become a member of the board of directors at that museum, which I did for six years, and that was a good experience. And then in the process, I learned what a treasure trove is available there. So I use the archive in Fredericksburg for my book on the Battle of Midway. There was a lot of stuff there, first-hand accounts. Dick Bess has a long oral history that I don't think is any place else. I mean, he does have other oral histories, but there was new and original material at Fredericksburg, and that was great. So when I decided to tackle D-Day, the Navy's role in D-Day, Neptune, which which you uh held up in front of the camera earlier, and I appreciate, um, I knew I wanted to understand as much as I possibly could about the amphibs. Uh, and and you're right that you know the amphibs are kind of like the unappreciated ugly ducklings of the war. They were absolutely essential. My I have argued in print and elsewhere that the LST, no uh no shade on the LCIs, but the LST was probably the most important ship of the whole war. Carriers, battleships, cruisers, yeah, yeah, yeah. But the LST, unglamorous, unnamed, they didn't even have uh individual names, they had numbers. But without the LST, not only could we not have carried out the D-Day operation in Normandy, we probably could not have carried out the Trans-Pacific uh campaign, the Central Pacific Drive. I mean, they were so in the age of armored warfare. If you can't put armor on the beach early on in your invasion, you probably can't do it. And so the LCI, which actually was a relatively new acquisition at the time, when I got into LCIs, I thought, this is priceless stuff. LCIs, for those who don't know, the LST can bring armor ashore, trucks, tanks, jeeps, and so on. The LCIs bring the infantry, and these twin ramps drop down on either side of the bow, and the troops just run down that bow and onto the beach, and they're quite vulnerable. I mean, they don't have a lot of protection and they don't have a lot of offensive punch. But again, they got the soldiers to the beach. I mean, the first wave, of course, are the Higgins boats, and we've all seen, you know, Tom Hanks and others jump out of Higgins boats and run up the beach. But the LCIs brought the bulk of the soldiers ashore, both there and elsewhere. So so they were they were critical. So that's what drew me to that was my study of uh Normandy.

SPEAKER_03 29:05

You know, I really never gave it much thought before, but I'm as you're saying that I'm trying to think on the global worldwide scale of World War, was there another piece of transportation that moved as many personnel as they did? And I have a hard time thinking of one.

SPEAKER_01 29:20

Well, you could argue, if you wanted to, that the regular transport ships that carried American soldiers from America to Britain carried more soldiers total. But they didn't deposit them on the other side. Yeah, I was gonna say you can get them there, but you need a way to get them on the soil. Exactly. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 29:39

I mean, you can build an interstate, but without an off-ramp, you're just running in a circle.

SPEAKER_02 29:43

There you go. Oh, yeah. One of the things I learned from your book, Craig, was uh I had no idea that it uh was discussed at the highest echelons of government. Like Winston Churchill is literally fighting over these LSTs. You know, they're delaying the D-Day invasion because they don't they didn't meet their quota of LSTs. Like all that stuff is is great information that I had no idea. And I recently was on NBC arguing the same thing you were arguing in the book that, you know, I I love the LCI history, but really the way you laid it out in Neptune is the LSTs quite possibly were the most important vessel.

SPEAKER_01 30:13

Yeah, I labeled that chapter uh with a quotation from Churchill, some goddamn things called LSTs. But to give him credit, he really initiated the idea of creating a vessel that could deposit armored tanks and trucks and so on onto the beach. And the idea of a cupboard in the bow, that kind of came from him. And the very first ones were British design, and they took uh oil tankers from Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela and modified them to carry tanks and tried them out. They tried them out at Dieppe, that did not work too well. And what's interesting um is not only did he uh design the help design the initial version of what became the LST, the tanks they carried uh were called the Churchill tank, and the ships themselves were called Winston's. This guy was not that modest.

SPEAKER_03 31:11

Well, speaking of supply and demand and having enough, how many shipyards did we have manufacturing those simultaneously during the height of the war?

SPEAKER_01 31:20

The number that jumps into my head is 170, and I'd be more comfortable if I could check that number, but I think that's probably pretty close. And what's interesting is less than half of those existed when the war began. You know, there are people who say that today, well, we we we couldn't do that now because we don't have the building capacity. Well, they didn't have the building capacity in 1940 either, but we built the building capacity. They built new shipyards and new slipways, and then built new ships in those slipways, in the new shipyards. So don't underestimate the resiliency of American productivity.

SPEAKER_03 31:57

And to that point, I was just at a D-Day event um on the 7th, and I had my EE8 field phones, and I was talking to somebody about retooling our manufacturing, and I took the cover off of the the bakelite mouthpiece off the phone and held it up. Manufacture, Kellogg. So just as I say, everybody was making everything back then. You didn't have to be, you know, a bakelite manufacturer. If you had warehouses, we'll retool it and we'll we'll get it up and running. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 32:28

Yeah, that's pretty awesome. Well, there were 30,000 components necessary to make up an LST. And they were manufactured all over the country and then shipped by rail to the building sites where they were assembled. I always think the way to connect with the younger generation is it's a gigantic Lego set, and you've got 30,000 pieces and you've got to put them all together, and you have to weld them together. Uh, prior to this, of course, ships were generally riveted, but you can use less steel if you weld because you go uh you don't have an overlap uh when you weld instead of when you rivet. So they were saving just a tiny bit of steel with each ship. Of course, the downside of that was every once in a while, in a particularly powerful storm, the welds would come apart.

SPEAKER_03 33:14

Really? I figured the tolerances would be stronger.

SPEAKER_01 33:16

That's that's no, no, no, no. Uh as a sailor described it, it's like watching a run in a woman's stocking. They just zzz. And perhaps the most notorious example of that was when the USS Pittsburgh was dealing with the typhoon off Japan. Not the first Halsey typhoon, but the second Halsey typhoon. Uh the skipper saw those welds moving a little bit, and the bow was going up and down independent of the rest of the hull. He pulled everybody out of the bow, closed the watertight doors, and sure enough, the bow of the Pittsburgh, 170 feet of it, just ripped right off and floated away. So there were there were some drawbacks to using welding instead of rivets.

SPEAKER_03 34:02

Now that you say that it makes sense. Like when you're explaining the rip of the tear, I'm thinking of the heronbone twelve uniforms, right? The reason they use her and bones, it hypothetically would stop a tear. Well, that rivet would be almost like that same stopping point. You'd have to start again around that rivet. So yeah, that that does make sense now that you when you visualize it that way. But yeah, you would think counterintuitively you would think that a weld would have a stronger tolerance, but no, I that's that's amazing. Prior to the war, was the the selection process, I guess would be the correct terminology. With the the selection process to get in Annapolis in the mid to late 30s the same or similar as it is during the war or even post-war years?

SPEAKER_01 34:41

You know, I don't know about during the war, but it was very different from what exists today.

SPEAKER_03 34:45

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 34:45

And I'll tell you the way it worked. Um from the beginning, you know, each congressman and each senator had the privilege of nominating a candidate from his district uh to go to one either of or both of the service academies. Um and for a while, uh in the twenties and thirties in particular, uh some congressmen used that as a way to uh reward friends, you know, children of big donors or supporters or the mayor's son or whatever. Um but what they found was that a lot of people were upset by that. I mean, there are more disappointed people who didn't make it than the one who did. So virtually everyone adopted a process of giving an exam uh in their district, and the person who got the highest score on the exam would then get the nomination. That's one exam. Then that candidate also had to take an academy exam to be admitted. So every successful candidate had to pass two exams, um, and to make sure that they had a pretty good chance, a lot of them went to preparatory schools, schools that were created specifically to help young men be successful in the uh in these admission exams. So so it was kind of an ordeal for them. Uh there were no recruited athletes at all uh in those days. Um so everybody took exams and the highest scores got in, and that was it.

SPEAKER_03 36:18

Well, I mean it seemed like the only way to ensure that you're getting the cream of the crop, right? You don't want to water down your candidates through nepotism and favors.

SPEAKER_01 36:24

So that's absolutely true. But having served on the admissions board with the Naval Academy myself, I can tell you that in the modern era it's a bit more complex. They apply to the Naval Academy, not to their congressman. And the Naval Academy goes through their records rigorously and applies points to various things grade point average, SAT scores, varsity athletics, leadership in school, Eagle Scout. I mean, there are a near-infinite number of things for which you can obtain points. And you must have a minimum of 55,000 points to be qualified. So we make up a list of the qualified candidates from any particular congressman's district, with the one with the highest score at the top, and then on down the list, and we send that to him or her, and we say, This is the candidate from your district that we think you should nominate, and 90% of the time that's what they do. Wow.

SPEAKER_03 37:23

Well, let me ask you this for our listening audience. Perhaps uh someone has a son or daughter at home that's in middle school, they they're kind of like, maybe this is an option. What are things that they could do extracurricularly, like you suggested Eagle Scouts in a modern day that they could kind of start prepping their kid to do before they even get to the high school to help them have a better chance of being accepted through that selection process?

SPEAKER_01 37:46

Well, let me start with curricular before I go to extracurricular. I think probably the most important thing is to take the hardest courses your school offers. Make sure you're in the tops math track and science track and all the other, because they're looking hard at that, because even though you can be a history major at the Naval Academy, and a lot of history majors make admiral, they do quite well. Um, but but the core curriculum is heavily STEM. So make sure that when you send in your high school transcript, it's got physics and chemistry and calculus on that list, and that you got A's in them. So that's that's probably the most important thing. SAT is important as well. Um but as far as extracurricular activities, they want to know that you're a well-rounded, a fully rounded individual. Sports is one way. If you engage in sports year-round, that's to your credit. You don't have to be a star. We just want to see that you're interested in in a physical activity. Clubs, if you're in scouts, that's great. It's not an automatic bump up, but it shows again the well-rounded uh interests of somebody who's a candidate for the Naval Academy. Here's something I suggest to anybody who is serious about it, and that is when you're a sophomore in high school, apply to what's called a summer seminar. It's kind of like summer camp. It's at the academy, and for a week, you will live like a midshipman. You'll sleep in Bancroft Hall, you'll get up early, you'll go for a run, you'll visit classes, you'll do some athletics in the afternoon, but you get a sense of what the place is like. And I think that's probably one of the best things you can do to make sure that you are a fit for a very particular institution.

SPEAKER_03 39:37

Dennis, put your hand down. They don't offer that for gentlemen already. I want to bark out for the week.

SPEAKER_04 39:44

You can see the wheels turning.

SPEAKER_05 39:49

I'm sorry to say this.

SPEAKER_01 39:50

I'm not sure you can do the pull-ups either.

unknown 39:54

Ow.

SPEAKER_03 39:56

Oh my god.

SPEAKER_04 39:57

I can do the long run, but this is this has uh been amazing, and I know we've got a hard stop in three minutes. And and Sarah, there's a question that I have for you. We've talked about this a lot on this podcast, is how fortunate Zachary and I were that we were able to pull from World War II letters and and things like that. What are your thoughts on the future for historians that are gonna have to write about Iraq and Afghanistan and hopefully get a hold of old emails or get a hold of the Yeah, it is a problem.

SPEAKER_01 40:27

And I'm in a way, I'm grateful that I I won't have to do that, but I'm sure creative historians in the future will find a way. But a lot of stuff is gonna disappear, too, that into the ether. How much of it is recoverable and how it's recoverable, I'm not technologically proficient enough to be able to say. But you're right. When you've got a hard copy of a letter, you know, dear wife, here I am sitting in a foxhole and missing you. I mean, the are we still gonna have that? I don't know.

SPEAKER_03 40:56

Yeah, real quick, uh, just kind of playing off of that, I worked in uh terrestrial radio for six years. My I was a producer for an afternoon show. Back in the 90s, mid-2000s, they reached out to all the media manufacturers saying, hey, what is the best long-term form that we can store our audio files on? They thought it was CDs. Turns out CDs break down, that foil breaks down. Out of all the mediums in the world, the engineers, I think, at Sony or JVC told them VHS tapes. So what they would do No kidding. And and what so they were doing this back in the 90s. They would take their their dat tapes from the radio, convert it to VHS tapes. And when I worked there in 2013 up until 2016, we had a VCR that every day we'd pull tape out because they they were on the same radio station since 1994, all the way up until last year. So during the show, we would pull a VHS tape out, had it plugged into a computer, hit repla hit play, hit record, and digitize it off of VHS tapes because it turns out the VHS tapes did not break down, unlike what the DVD salesman told us.

SPEAKER_01 41:58

Right, right, right. No, I've been told that about CDs. I did not know that about uh uh VCRs.

SPEAKER_03 42:04

Yeah, the CDs, the actual CD, that that film on top breaks down over time and you can't use them. So turns out get a VCR and uh and find some old tapes. But yeah, it's crazy. Craig, where can people find you? Get a hold of your books, uh, website, emails, any anywhere.

SPEAKER_01 42:20

You don't have a website, um, but the best place to go, uh I'll I'll have to say the cheapest price you can get is on Amazon. Um they still can beat Barnes and Noble and others. I I'd like to say it's at your local bookstore, and it may be, and I like to support local bookstores, but uh truth be known, Amazon still gives you the best deal.

SPEAKER_03 42:38

Head over to Amazon and you can hit follow the author and get all the latest updates. And as always, we will link to everything on WTSPworldwar 2.com. We want to thank you for your time, sir. It's been a pleasure. You bet. My pleasure. It's fun, guys. Thanks a lot so much. Pleasure having you.

SPEAKER_02 42:54

That was yeah, that was a good one.

SPEAKER_03 42:57

Just a heads up to you guys, um, head over to YouTube.com. I posted last episode's video version of the What's the Scuttle Up Pot podcast where um myself, Dennis, and Jeff were talking about how we can go about preserving living history and maybe start trying to work your way up into the ranks as your senior officers start to age out. You can kind of help maintain these hobbies. But the reason you want to go check out the video format is during the video, I kind of interlaced some of the photos of the displays we talked about, Dennis's equipment, but more importantly, stick through the whole video because at the end I included Dennis's video that he talked about where he was kind of walking through the display, and I also included video footage that I shot at our D Day event that really we were so busy talking to the to the public, which is great. I didn't have a whole lot of time to shoot a bunch of video, so I had this nice video of our displays with no context to put it in. So I added that to the end of the video as well as some archival footage because we talked about John Thomas, who was one of the reenactors who passed. To where last year and a half, I found footage of me and him at one of my first or second events, like 2012-2013, where we're I'm wearing my Marine Corps HBTs and we're doing a weapons demo for the public down here in Naples. It's older footage, it's shot on a less than great cell phone, but you get the idea, you can see John Thomas doing his thing. And if you've never been to a living history event and seen a weapons demo, you get an idea of what that's like. So go check out the last episode we just did of the What's the Skull But podcast, and you can see that uh footage that Dennis myself and uh the photos of the young man that Jeff was talking about. And um, we're gonna have this week's episode up here in probably a few days as well. So, real quick, let's do a quick round robin of what you're reading. Uh, Zach, you're the new uh temporary, you know, co-host spot filler for Jeff. So, what you reading, fella?

SPEAKER_02 44:50

All right, well, I'll tell you what I just finished. I actually just finished Dennis's book, Bonsai Cliff, which was about this story of Saipan. Oh, audiences, go check it out. It's a real quick read. It's I think it's like less than a hundred pages. You get through it probably in a day, less than a day. And it's just it has a lot of really incredible information in there that I didn't even know existed. So that was great. But what I'm currently reading right now is Joseph Belkowski's Beyond the Beachhead, which is a history of the 29th Infantry Division in Normandy. And that's one of the it's I'm halfway through, it's already one of the best books I've ever read. I wish I would have picked it up and read it 20 years ago. Really? It was that good. Yeah, it not only explains the the guys in the story, it has one of the best background information uh chapters that I've ever come across where it explains even the basics of entrant infantry units and and artillery. And I I learned a whole bunch about just basic artillery units that I didn't know before. And uh it's just one of the best books I've ever read. So that's what I'm reading right now, Beyond the Beach, Ted.

SPEAKER_03 45:49

When you guys read books like this, um obviously when you hear interviews with uh musicians, for example, to talk about their influences. I was influenced by this band and this band and this band, and then you can and if you go listen to my third album, you can hear at the time I was listening to this band and my album's influenced by them. Do you guys find that when you read a book that really just kicks it to you, like you're explaining, that it kind of influences your writing, whether it's a book or an article or an uh entry, whatever, do you find it you kind of pick up their a little bit of their influence for at least a short period of time, if not long term?

SPEAKER_02 46:24

Oh, absolutely. Uh I can even just name a couple books that are like that to me. Uh, the one of the very first ones I ever read uh that I ever read was Laura Hildenbrand's Unbroken, the story of Louis Zamperini. And that was to this day one of the best. And I just I remember closing that, taking a deep breath, and then going to my computer and start writing because it was that that really catapulted. It was such a great book. But then also, and I know Dennis, you'll agree with me on this one because you've read it too, um, The Cincinnati by John H. Morell, the story of the of the Black Cat Flotilla 13 uh in the Pacific. And that one really was the one that got me started writing LC Item articles uh for the LC Item newsletter. It was one of the best written books, and it's too bad because it's out of publication now, so it's really difficult to get. But you know, to our audiences, if you can find a copy of The Cincinnati by Admiral John H. Morel, you will not regret picking that up and reading it.

SPEAKER_03 47:18

You know, we talk a lot about Amazon on here. When it comes to out-of-print stuff, do not sleep on eBay. You can find a lot of good stuff on there.

SPEAKER_04 47:25

That's true.

SPEAKER_03 47:26

Yeah. I know eBay's old school, but that's where the old school stuff is.

SPEAKER_04 47:30

Yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_03 47:31

Because there, you know, there's a lot of older people who, or even younger people, there's a lot of people who have cool things sitting around that they it doesn't justify creating an Amazon account. They're just gonna throw it up on eBay or even Facebook Marketplace for that matter.

SPEAKER_04 47:42

Yeah, absolutely. Dennis, what you reading? Um, well, yeah, I want to touch on that what you just asked uh Zach about the the books that we read. Do they influence our writing? And uh absolutely. I mean, Ernie Pyle for me. Right, Ernie Pyle. Oh, yeah. Like hands down, first up. Uh his writing style was so great that they gave him a column, right? And and everybody across the nation read it. Why did they read it? They read it because he was like sitting down with their son in a trench somewhere, drinking a cup of Joe in the mud, and just having a conversation. And the one thing that I loved about Ernie Pyle that I incorporate in my writing is that I he lists the name of the guy, but not just his first name, his last name, and the city where he came from, right? And I just love that. Another one that influenced me very heavily is Stephen Ambrose, yeah, and all of his books, uh Pegasus Bridge, D-Day, of course, Band of Brothers. I mean, absolutely love that. And there's just something about uh Steven Ambrose's ability to take you on these large operations, but yet it almost it feels like you're still among these regular guys and gals, and you're just along for the ride. And it's almost like um you're on a Discovery Channel documentary with following this team, and you get to look over the cameraman's shoulder and he brings you along on this journey, a cops, right? You get to go along on this journey, and you can't believe you're there. Um, that's the kind of writing that I really enjoy and try to incorporate into my own. As far as what I'm reading, I'm quick.

SPEAKER_03 49:34

I want to pause real quick because you mentioned Hurney Pyle and War Correspondence, and then you went on to documentaries. Did either one of you see the Netflix series Five Came Back about war correspondence and Hollywood product producers and their contribution to the uh the film industry during the war?

SPEAKER_02 49:50

I don't believe I've seen that. Is that on a certain last one?

SPEAKER_03 49:53

That's on Netflix. At least it was it was produced on Netflix. I doubt they released it to any other service. Um, I Googled it, it's still shows Netflix. That's a very, very good documentary.

SPEAKER_04 50:02

If you like it, Zach, it's worth the great.

SPEAKER_03 50:04

Yeah, I think it came out pro six, seven years, uh 2017. That's a very good, very good one.

SPEAKER_04 50:12

Uh little side note, documentary-wise, just a little plug for Ken Burns. I just watched uh uh listened to Joe Rogan's podcast with Ken Burns, and he just finished uh a new documentary series on the American Revolution.

SPEAKER_03 50:28

Wow.

SPEAKER_04 50:29

And um, so I think he said it's gonna be eight episodes, and that's gonna be coming out in the next uh several months.

SPEAKER_03 50:34

So you were talking about the cool things that you liked about Ernie Piles, not only did they talk about the first name, the last name, but where they where they're from. And when you were saying that, I was having an audio dialogue in my head. I think it was from Kenz Burns The War, where they had Tom Hanke read um newspaper clippings from like some small town in Illinois.

SPEAKER_04 50:55

Yeah, Lucerne, Minnesota.

SPEAKER_03 50:56

Yeah, because he would do oh, and then they had other people, every time they introduced someone in that series, they would do the first name, last name in the city they grew up in. So that's that every time I hear that kind of format, it reminds me of that very, very good document. That series was great.

SPEAKER_04 51:13

I just appreciate that because I don't want ever want anyone to just assume that I'm talking about some other guy. Like I want my readers to know this guy from this hometown, he experienced this, yeah, and there's no confusion about who you're talking about, and he gets credit or she gets credit for what they experienced. Um, I just really appreciate that about Ernie Pyle and and Ambrose.

SPEAKER_03 51:42

Well, that's to that point, the world was smaller back then, right? And what I mean by that is we're so interconnected now that our influences are kind of spread out. Whereas back then, you were your influences was the geographical location which you could travel, which back then a lot of times wasn't very far. Some of these guys never left their hometowns, and so their hometown really predicted their personality traits and their education and their influences and their upbringing, and whether they're a farmer, a hunter, a trapper, a steel worker, a plumber, a city slicker, what have you. And so to include their city, not even state, but more the the granular level of their city, if you were to take the time and do the research on the city at that time, it really gives you a window into that person's soul and upbringing.

SPEAKER_04 52:31

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 52:33

Oh yeah. And I'm glad you said Ernie Pyle, because uh if I had to pick one correspondent that I quoted the most in my book, it was definitely Ernie Pyle. I love the way that he writes, and like you guys are saying, he sometimes he went as far as to even list his hometown address to the person he was interviewing. You know, you'd this person from this unit, you know, from somewhere Pennsylvania, you know, 123 Elm Street, you know, he would actually put their address to indisputable that that's the guy. So I I love that about him too.

SPEAKER_04 53:00

Yeah, and you know, Burgess Meredith portrayed him in that the story of G.I. Joe. Um when Robert Mitchum was in that. Robert Mitchum plays the uh the captain, that's the Italian campaign. And uh Burgess Meredith is just he he's Ernie Pyle. And it's just this have you guys ever seen it, The Story of G.I. Joe?

SPEAKER_02 53:21

No, what's the name of the movie? That that's it.

SPEAKER_04 53:23

The story of G.I. Joe. Okay. I'm gonna. And it's it's Ernie Pyle following this unit that he writes about. And um the the scenes there. It's and I gotta give him props too. One of the reasons that the movie really stands out to me personally is their depiction of PTSD with the uh sergeant, who is he he's just this ex a great leader of men, and he's always taking the hard uh missions for himself. He's always making sure all those guys are fed, he's making sure everybody's got ammo. He can't do anything about their cleanliness, but at least he can get them out of the rain, you know, and and this and that. And uh I I won't ruin what happens, but there's a scene in there where everybody has their limit, right? And it's right out of the book, and and it's just beautifully filmed, and I think it's probably one of the first. That one in the best years of our lives, that movie. I think it's one of the first the story of G.I. Joe to really show PTSD. Um, and uh it's it's hard hitting. It's hard hitting. Uh it's really something.

SPEAKER_03 54:31

What year did that come out?

SPEAKER_04 54:33

I'm not sure. Yeah, I'm not sure. It's a black and white uh movie. Uh Robert Mitchum in one of his first uh appearances um in a lead role.

SPEAKER_03 54:42

Um wow. They wasted no time. 1945. War had barely even wrapped up, but they probably started filming it in 44.

SPEAKER_04 54:53

Yeah, and uh it's just it's just so uh man. I just have so much admiration for Ernie Pyle.

SPEAKER_03 55:04

But oh me too. So what book are you reading?

SPEAKER_04 55:09

Yeah, so far as far as what I'm reading. That's an easy answer. I'm reading hundreds of pages of service records because I um Zach uh trained me to track down and and request these files, and I've requested over a hundred already, and I've got now I'm working on the 438 crew. So, you know, by the time I'm done, they'll it'll be three, four hundred files that I'll have. But um just a matter of fact, before we started, I I received two today from the National Archives. So I was going through the file for Ensign Donald Kromer from my grandpa's gunboat, who is wounded, and I found out from the file that he got hit in his right thigh in in the front out the back, and um and that he was uh battling seasickness the whole time and it was debilitating. And Rufus Herring, who receives the Medal of Honor, writes in his officers report that he's a great guy, uh, very sharp, uh willing to learn, but is unable to perform his duties because he's always in the bunk um throwing up and vomiting. He can't do this, he can't handle the motion sickness. Of course, uh that problem was um taken care of at Iwo Jima when he was wounded and he was removed to the States. But uh, you know, that's the that's what I've been reading. Is it's just hundreds and hundreds of pages of files.

SPEAKER_02 56:38

And Don, before we move out, move on to yours, uh, what you're reading and your inspirations. Uh Dennis, if you haven't received Brockmeyer's records, speaking of that, they should arrive by Wednesday. So awesome.

SPEAKER_03 56:47

Yeah, it tells me you guys are either going to have to give Dennis's mailman or the researcher at the archives a nice Amazon gift card for Christmas. We we talk about that all the time. Yeah. Especially when they show up in boxes, the mailman's like, oh, I'm not the Dennis Blocker house again.

SPEAKER_02 57:03

You guys should have seen Jeff's great grandpa's records. I had to send him a box. It was the first record instead of an envelope, it came in an actual box. They had someone at the archives had to go fetch a box to fit all these in and stuff in my way. So yeah.

SPEAKER_03 57:14

Wow, I didn't know my grandfather's packages came in an Amazon box. We all recycle those Amazon boxes.

SPEAKER_04 57:22

Back to the future.

SPEAKER_03 57:24

Fun fact, I think I don't know if they still do, but I remember a couple years ago, somebody put out like a story or something. Like, if you took your empty Amazon boxes and broke them down and then put them in another Amazon box, you can ship them back and they would reuse them. But I don't know if they're still doing it. I mean, it makes perfect sense. The amount of cardboard they they go through. It makes perfect sense. Um, right now, the book I'm reading, I'm three or four chapters into our buddy Henry's book, The Old Breed, The Complete Story Revealed. Oh, yeah, yeah. His writing style is very, very similar to his father's. Um, and it's interesting because I know a lot of this stuff is previously unpublished, but and Dennis knows too, from and Zach, you've been a listener to the show for a while, but when I'm reading this stuff, I'm like, oh yeah, Henry told me and Jeff about this on episode you know 104. So we're reading this unpublished stuff, but it wasn't that Henry was reading it, it was he was just telling us stories that his dad told him growing up, and a lot of those stories in the book. And so some of the stuff is new to everybody, but to me and Jeff, it's like, oh yeah, we've heard he's in our audience for that matter. So if you've been listening since episode 91, I think it was when he came on. Some of these untold stories will be will you know ring familiar in your ears because Henry has told them on the st on the uh show before. And so um very excited for him. It's a great book, and uh yeah, so that's that. Um just a quick reminder again, please head to uh youtube.com, look for D410 Media, and you can check out all of our um we're gonna do more and more videos. I don't know if anybody's noticed, but I got a nice new camera tonight. Um actually redoing the studio. I I built this studio in 2018 and it hasn't changed much. Still got the old green screen that no one uses anymore. Um got a new desk. It looks good. It looks good. No, I got a new desk where we're gonna rotate the entire room so you guys will be able to see my collection in the background, the helmets on the wall, Steve. No more fake corrugated steel, all that. Um, so the next episode we're gonna have a different view and um we're gonna keep things grinding. And I want to thank each and every one of y'all who uh have been hanging out with us since 2018. And um, for myself, Zach, Dennis, and don't worry, Jeff will be back. He's just he's the guy's super wicked busy. Um anybody can tell you who's ever gone through college to be a you know to get history degrees, it's uh it's no easy, it's no walk in the park. You got a lot of paperwork to do, and that's what he's doing. So thanks to Zach for hanging out with us. He will be in and out of rotation whenever Jeff's not available. Zach will pick up his his role and we will carry on. But uh also head over to patreon.com, look for D4 uh D410 Media as well, or go to WTSP WorldWar II.com and you can click on Patreon there. And um, yeah, that's it. Thank you guys so much, and we will talk to you all next week.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:12

This has been a digital 410 production.