HOE Listener Special with YOUR questions
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Hello, this is Matt and McKinley from History Dispatches. We are the father-son duo bringing you the weird, the wild, the wacky, and the craziest tales from across time. From the Ice Bowl to the Great Heathen Army and the head of Oliver Cromwell. The same head they kept on a pike for three years? Yep, all here on History Dispatches. New episodes every weekday. Find out more at HistoryDispatches.com or wherever you get your podcast app. ♪

Hello, everyone. Stuck. Are you here? And I'm Gabby. And welcome back to the podcast. Guys, it's the listener special episode. Oh,

We are in Galway, Ireland, and I'm just going to give you a heads up right now, diving straight into this. So we went out and we were like, okay, we're done, guys. But then we were like, we can film one really funny video. So we went back out and then we found like this late pub and then it played like really fun music from like our childhood. And then I met like a bunch of girls in the bathroom who were like the best people I've ever met. And...

This bar served dirty martinis, which is like my whole thing. Olive flavored vodka or gin. That's my thing. So if you haven't been able to figure it out by now, we are fairly inebriated. No, we're not. Fairly. I'm not going to say the amount. I did walk into a wall and Steve was like, whoa, all I heard was the thud.

Yeah. So when we are doing this and we are going in, and I said, the whole point of the listener special in the first place is that this is going to be taking questions that you all have actually asked. I went and submitted a, what it's supposed to poll kind of thing. I submitted a thing to Instagram that allowed you all to put questions that you wanted to ask specifically for the show. And the way that we do things here when we do a listener special is that we take whatever it is that you all ask and we, you know,

choose or Gabby chooses random ones and then we just dive into it from there. There's no prep work. There's no nothing. We just go and talk. The world's worst final exam because I get to quiz him, but he has had zero prep time. And I've been drinking. So this could get very unhinged very fast. If you hear anything that I have said that goes against anything else that I have also said,

Oops. Yeah. Whoops. Good luck. I don't know what to do with that. OK, so first question, Caleb Ho asks, can you make curry with a mallet? Yes. Immediately. Yes. Yes, you can. All right. It starts real simple. Right. So first off, you get the curry spices. Right. Then you get a mallet. You roast them. Mm hmm.

And then you smash the spices with a mallet and then mix that with water to create some kind of like slurry. And then you just bake chicken in that. Bam. Boo Habir asked the German occupation of Nancy France. Wait, say that again. Nancy France. Nancy France.

Wait, hold on, hold on, hold on. Like Nazi France, like when Germany occupied them? I don't know. I think he probably misspelled that in the first place. No, no, no, Nancy France. Nancy, city in France. Oh, okay. Yeah, look, you're right. I completely forgot about Nancy France as a thing. Okay, this is what happens when you go into something with, as I said, literally zero prep work whatsoever. I do not know the very specific details of

Of the Nazi occupation of Nancy, France, like of that specific city. I can tell you all about different kinds of things that took place over the course of the Nazi occupation of France in which there were many things. At that point, I don't even know exactly where to begin. But okay, okay. My favorite little detail of that, or I say favorite. It's a messed up thing, but it's something that really did happen and you saw it all across the...

France, Holland and anywhere else that the Nazis occupied. Gabby, are you familiar with what would go down with girls that would sleep with the Nazis? Yeah. And they would be like they would wear their uniforms and whatnot. But afterwards, their heads would be shaved. Right. Yes. So if you were fraternal fraternize that.

Fraternizing with the see, this is the alcohol that's going to play fraternizing with the enemy. You were seen as a traitor. And then afterwards, once they were driven out, when all of their men sent overseas, so the only men to fraternize with were the.

Well, the N-words, Gabby, Gabby, Gabby, Gabby, hold up. You're sounding very German right now. And when I say that, no, no, no, hear me out. This is going to bring us to another detail. Did you know that in the aftermath of World War I, there were a lot of mixed race babies in Europe, which led to a big problem as the Nazis saw it because of this? Really? Yeah.

Yeah. So the French specifically, like, yes, the Americans brought this over, but the French had a very large African contingent that fought in World War One. Algeria. Yeah. Well, not just Algeria. We're talking like from French Morocco heading down to the south into like Western Africa. Yeah.

Like Congo. Okay. So the French had a large African contingent that served because go figure, a lot of your men end up dying in the war and you need other men that are on duty there to guard and other things. And so from these African contingents that were serving in occupied parts of Germany in the Rhineland and others, you saw a massive boom in population of mixed race babies, which led to...

the purges and complications that would then end up happening in the wake of the Nazi takeover afterwards. In fact, there's a story, and I don't want to bring it up for the very specifics of it, but it's very sad, but there's actually a story of a young mixed-race-like boy who he just wanted to be a Nazi, which sounds so weird. It sounds weird, but the whole thing with the Hitler Youth is...

he desperately wanted to be a part of this because it was the local thing that all the boys of his age were doing. But he was excluded from it because he was mixed race. And that was a reality that it reached a certain point that you either fled or you were killed. And that is something that would end up happening because you would get sent to camps.

Yeah. This kind of spins off of that here. Yeah. I'm sorry for that very dark and depressing turn. But this is what happens with tangents leading into tangents. So David Young 62 asked, why didn't Russia give back the countries they occupied in World War Two? Why didn't they give them back? Are they trying to get countries they occupied in 1800s? OK. OK. So here here's the thing.

When the Russians established Russia,

So when they determined with the Western powers how Europe was going to look after World War II, the agreement as part of it between Stalin, Churchill, and FDR was that fair and free elections were going to take place throughout Europe, right? Now, hear me in my mind. Fair and free. You can't see this right now, but I'm making like really big air quotation marks when I go and say that. Yes, yes.

There is no way in hell that Stalin was ever going to want to allow free elections in anything that he possibly thought were going to not side with him. So Poland, was it Hungary? There were a couple, I think like in Romania and maybe Czechoslovakia, where the communists legitimately did win elections.

at least the largest percentage of the vote, even if they didn't have a majority to then be able to go on and form a government. But overall...

In election after election after election, the Russians would go in and basically say, oh, yeah, no, this other party that was running is banned. It was actually the communists that won. Oh, what? Did it did a hundred thousand ballots just suddenly appear that all voted communist? What? No way. And that's kind of what happened. And the whole reason that they did so in all of these different countries is because they needed a buffer.

The whole idea, right, is that when you look at the communist ideologies, Stalin firmly believed that the

The Soviet Union needed to focus inward to strengthen itself in preparation for a confrontation with the West. Earlier communist ideologies, like in the case of Trotsky, Trotsky wanted a global world revolution, an uprising of the proletariat classes everywhere. Whereas Stalin wanted to strengthen the Soviet Union into a kind of superpower. And in order to do that, he wanted to bind the other powers.

states to the Soviet sphere of influence to create his own puppet regimes as a kind of buffer between Mother Russia and the West. In fact, one of the only nations that Stalin did not directly interfere in, and I mean interfere, like majorly interfere in, was Italy. Do you know why?

Because he believed and many in Russia believed that the communists were going to win the election legitimately because the communists were actually on the rise at that time. And there was a genuine fear in the West that what was going to happen is that the communists were going to take over Italy and it was going to flip the Mediterranean, that that was going to be like a huge deal. Ultimately, no, it didn't happen. And that was like,

A major loss of influence that there is a huge potential what if scenario of what if Italy had flipped communist because it didn't. But that was the whole idea. OK, so E.I.L. underscore Leslie said, what was more impactful, the Battle of Marathon or the Battle of Thermopylae?

Oh, God, no. Definitely the Battle of Marathon. Are you kidding me? Like, that's the battle that actually ended up driving specifically, like, the Persians back. Thermopylae is famous, right? Thermopylae is really famous, but it was a rearguard action. And this is what a lot of people don't realize, is that even in the story of 300 Spartans, it was 300 Spartans and several thousand other allied forces that held back.

Back the Persians. And even once they were surrounded, it was...

Only the few who stayed behind as a part of the rearguard action, because the entire point was to delay the advance of the Persians so that they could all fall back into a stronger defensive position and then fight from there. That was the entire point. The Battle of Marathon was actually one of the deciding pivotal factors of the war. Why was it called the Battle of Marathon? Is it because it was the battle where the guy ran and died? Yes, but it wasn't called because of that. That guy...

I can't remember the guy's name off the top of my head here and that's going to bother me. The marathon guy? No. I'm going to have to look this up. I'm actually pissed on his behalf because imagine dying because you ran so far and now...

Now everybody else fucking dunks on you because they can run that far without dying. Insane. The Kenyans put the Greeks to shame. Oh, God. I say that because, okay, my cousin just ran in the Boston Marathon. We were looking at everyone who plays like first place and I was like, well, not, you know. So I looked at this here, right? You look at the...

It was the women's, I think it was. The women's marathon. Kenya, Kenya, Kenya, I think Eritrea. Kenya, Kenya, Ethiopia, Ethiopia, Kenya. So those are the top five for like where the runners came from. And I looked at that and just went, yeah. Yeah, the Greeks would have had to run for their money. I ran cross country in high school and a bunch of people were like, are you from Ethiopia? And like, no, I'm not. I just...

I wish, because maybe I would have won something. Tuberculosis was like just the real big thing that tried to nerf you. You don't have to tell anybody I had tuberculosis. That's like a Victorian England disease. Like, I must go to the ocean and breathe in the sea air.

Yeah. For anyone who does not realize Gabby legitimately had tuberculosis.

I have the worst heart rate known to man. Like, Steven has to be like, hey, Gabby, you've been red zone for like 30 minutes because I don't get enough oxygen because my lungs are so messed up, you guys. I don't know. Did I answer the question? Did you? What was more impactful, the Battle of Marathon or the Battle of Thermopylae?

Okay, yeah, no, I did. Okay, it was Marathon. It was definitely Marathon. Marathon was absolutely it. So, Edwin underscore says, who is your favorite Habsburg? Charles II. It has to be. Didn't he die, like, super young? Oh, my God, he did. So, why is he your favorite? He was the age of, like, 38 or 42 because he's the most inbred. And it's like everyone knows this kind of story in here, but it's like I've talked about this before when I did a whole video analyzing, like, just how inbred was he.

Charles II Habsburg was more inbred than what would happen if his parents were full-blooded siblings and had, like, brother and sister and had a baby together. Because he is the progeny of multiple uncle and niece, first cousin, second cousin, and many more relations, marriages, in just a line, going back by...

Not many years, like a hundred odd years, 150 years. And it's, it's bad. Like he, they, they tried to raise him to adulthood specifically. So he existed in his miserable, infantile, imbecile state. And that's how it's, he's described in order to do one thing and one thing only. And that is desperately try to have a child.

which he could not do. And so when he died, it started the war of Spanish, like the war of Spanish succession, which ultimately ended up leading to like a million deaths in Europe. It was like one of the first great major wars of Europe. And it all happened because of a serious case of inbreeding. How could that not be my favorite? Okay. I have to ask. You're going to hate me for this question. Okay. Shoot. Go for it. What is it? What am I looking at? Okay.

Bogler Sean asked, who is the most violent woman in history? Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Violent woman. How would you even classify most violent? Before you answer that question, I'm just going to follow her on TikTok real quick. Okay. Because I must. Why are you? Okay. She's standing up. She's looking at me right now.

Who is the most violent woman in history? I know you're looking at me right now and you're anticipating that I'm going to say you, but it's not you. And the reason it's not you is because you don't have an army or political power to actually be able to do something. Yes, you could. No, you could start the Internet. You have the ability to do these things, but you do not have the actual ability necessarily, I hope, to actually lead a military force or something capable of exerting great violence upon society. Your entire cope is that

I don't have the skill to lead a military force. No, not skill. You definitely have the skill because Gabby, I have heard the statements that you have made. And let me tell you this right now. You would fit very well in with like a 13th century ruler with a prejudice for their neighbor that is just willing to be able to launch a couple purges. Just answer the question. And who's the most violent woman in history?

Maybe. No. No, it would have to be something with a purge that would happen. I don't even know. Cleopatra was actually quite violent, but it still wouldn't even be her. Catherine the Great wanted to put Russia onto the world stage and led multiple wars in that effort to specifically do that. She did actively lead multiple military campaigns. Wasn't Tomris your girl crush? Yeah, but I mean, that was a thing for general, like for tribal war. You want to talk about in terms of size of scope, it arguably might be Catherine the Great. What about the pigeon lady?

Okay. Yes. But even then, the story that goes behind Olga of Kiev and when she is going and sending an entire flaming horde of sparrows into a frickin city in order to light the thatch roofs on fire. Yes, that is now. Okay, just pick. Just pick. Just say a name. If I'm going to go for one that is maybe not based off of some kind of folklore or just simple story. You have to go with who you're most attracted to. Go. That's not fair. Go. It's you.

Oh my god, actual name. Historical. Gabby, I've seen some of the portraits of a lot of these people. It's you. Stop. Stop. Okay, listen. No way. Listen, I don't even know how long that video was when you just looked at me here. It was like two minutes long. You didn't get to the fucking point. I did.

Okay. Okay. Okay. The point is you, Gabby. You were always the point. Jack and Leahy asked, what do you believe was the most interesting firearm in history and or armor? Thanks. Oh my God. Okay. That's two different questions in here. Most interesting firearm. You could go with that one first. Okay. Okay. There are multiple. There are multiple that fit this category and I love so many of these. So the, what would I even say for this here?

There's so many fun ones. What would you say? Hopefully an answer. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. The revolver rifle, right? Yeah.

The revolver rifle is genuinely one of my favorite. Here, I'm going to bring up the specifics of what it is that I'm talking about. The revolver rifle. So was it a revolver that was a rifle? Yes, but it was a black powder weapon. Or not black powder. It was like a, or sort of. It's the Colt New Model revolving rifle. This thing is freaking, it's the 1855. That's right. It's the 1855 Colt revolving rifle. It's so beautiful, guys. I'm telling you this right now. If you want a beautiful,

beautiful looking gun from the 19th century. This thing is gorgeous, but here's the problem. All right. This was developed at a time before you had modern cartridges because the whole idea behind a modern cartridge in a revolver is you stick the bullet with its jacket and

inside of a revolver, like it's casing, right? I'm blending the terms when I'm going and describing this in the first place, but you put the full round inside of the revolver, inside of its... Why am I fumbling for the exact word of what it is here? You know, the revolver... I've had too much alcohol. The revolving spinny bit is the whole point of a revolver. And what happens then is that as it fires, it strikes the pin in the back, which in turn...

fires the round out of its casing. That is the whole point. In the case of the first revolving rifle that Colt created, this was a black powder weapon. So you loaded it into the, like you loaded it from the front, from the front of the cylinder. That's the word I was looking for, the cylinder. And you did each one

And only afterwards, in the same way that you would load like a musket, but through each one of these little cylinders, was it ready to fire. The thing about this is that even though the gun was remarkably beautiful and it was effective because, yes, you could fire multiple shots simultaneously,

And simultaneously, the major issue that they ended up having with it is that there's this little thing called chain fire, where when you have a black powder weapon and the black powder is...

Not all entirely in the cylinder. When you go through the process of reloading, if it's not completely clean, there may be scattered bits of black powder around the edge of the cylinder, which in turn, when you fire, could cause that black powder to ignite the other parts of the cylinder, which means that all six rounds could fire off at the exact same time. Now, Gabby, I want you to think about this. You've explained it to me in...

Great detail at that. What was the museum we were at earlier this year? And we looked at a lot of guns. It was a natural history museum, but it was also like a history museum. Is it when we did the armament museum in Austria?

Dude, I don't know. We've been so many places. I think it's in Prague, but we were in there and you were looking at all of these guns and you were like describing each and every single step of the development to me. And I was like, please, it is 2 p.m. and I am not into this right now. She hadn't had enough beer yet at that point. I hadn't had any beer, actually. Just knowledge. For those of you that are listening here right now, you know how a revolver works. You hold...

The actual like the grip of the revolver, you are holding it and the cylinder is facing outwards. Wait, parallel to the barrel. Okay, Gabby. Yes. Imagine like kind of with Russian roulette. Now I want you to imagine this, right? How do you hold a rifle? Hopefully pointed away from you. Okay. Where are your hands on the trigger and like the handle?

Uh-huh. Uh-huh. The butt? You're holding the underside of it, right? You have one hand that would have around the grip as well as is ready to pull the trigger. The other is on the underside. Where is the cylinder? Like kind of close to your face, right? Like kind of pointed towards you, but like not really. You know what I mean? Where are the holes of the cylinder pointing in relation to this?

It's pointing to your hand that is holding the underside of the rifle. Oh, okay. So it's like that. It's like the little pistol. Okay. Yeah. So it's fine. Chain fire is dangerous because it can cause a gun to explode in your hand in the case of a simple revolver. Can you chain fire from you to a guy next to you? Has that ever happened in battle? Yeah.

I think there were multiple cases of stuff like that happening. Or remember, there were multiple cases of accidental sparks or things discharging powder in battlefields, which caused cannons to prematurely fire or to cause like other issues like that could happen. This was a major problem on ships, which is why they had to keep the powder room locked tight and stored deep within the belly of the ship.

Away from anything that could potentially cause it to ignite. Okay. So what do you believe was the most interesting armor in history? Because you're still on fire. I know I'm still on firearms in here and I and I and I love that thing. I didn't even get to talk about the repeating Danish rifle from the 1600s. Okay, we can talk about it. Okay. Okay. Other one other one here. That is the one that I find to be just stupid. This one is so innovative. It is amazing.

They had repeating firearms in the 1600s. The Danish invented a type of firearm that would repeatedly load musket rounds and preset amounts of powder into a repeating rifle that was so incredibly fancy and stupidly expensive. This thing was...

This thing was purchased by like the Danish Royal Guard and used by it was so expensive to create only like one to 200 guys could ever be equipped with something like this because for the same price that you could get one to 200 of these guns you could get like five to 10,000 other muskets. I am not even like they were that expensive.

But that's kind of the whole point is that these were an elite thing. So when you hear people talking about how like, oh, back in the day, the founding fathers would not have known about like repeating weapons or all these kinds of, no, they did. They did know about these things. That was a real thing. It's just more of a matter of the technological ease at which you could create them and their accessibility.

But these weapons have actually existed for a lot longer than we think. We don't think of repeating weapons taking place until what, like the earliest mass, not mass produced, but like the earliest one being the puckle gun. No, no, it existed well before that. OK, so Daniel, of course, asked, how often did knights wear full armor?

only as long as it was necessary. Because I can't imagine being stuck in a fucking tin can would be super comfortable. You know?

Do you have any idea how bad back pain would be? Like, just if you had to wear your armor literally all the time, constantly, it doesn't... This is a reason why you'd have squires who would help you suit up in preparation for battle. And it's also why timing of battles were so incredibly important. Because what they would do is, like, a smart thing to do is to launch an attack on someone prior to them being able to get ready if you can hit them hard enough. Because if your guys are in full armor... Did they actually...

Oh, yeah. That's my stuff. I'll give you a prime example. Can you call time out? No. God, no. No, that's not going to work. I'll give you a prime example of this. One of the things that ended up happening is that, and it's before knights of the medieval period, but when you have in 1066, what was the Battle of Hastings that established England in the first place? Yes. When you have Harold Godwinson,

Who went up against Harald Hadrada. Of course. The King of Norway. We talked about this. Yes. Hadrada's forces were completely caught off guard because if I recall correctly. Hadrada was fair hair? Yes. That was his nickname if I recall correctly. His troops had been.

They didn't have their armor. They were relaxing. They had been a bunch of had been bathing. They were they were they were in their skivvies. And then what ended up happening is Godwinson's army appears because they force marched and it completely surprised him, which meant that they went into battle without hardly any of their heavy armor or weapons or anything. And they got slaughtered. They actually killed them. Oh, God. Yeah. While they were looking hot.

your priorities especially after several dirty martinis i'm just messing with you sorry guys sorry sorry sorry so car king 19th asked which general from pre-industrial times would be best suited for modern warfare pre-industrial times napoleon that wasn't industrial

Well, I mean, if you want to think about the first Industrial Revolution, maybe, but I mean, he would arguably be the closest bet. If you wanted to do anything, all right, let's say pre-Napoleon. Let's say that. You're still going to have something that's going to need to understand and be able to adapt William of Orange.

You have to look at the commanders back in the 1600s. This being a point where artillery was a larger part of the battlefield, but simultaneously it wasn't something that was...

Good and effective. Like, let me give you a prime example. When you think of a cannon, remember how we went to the Civil War battlefields? Yeah. And you'd say, oh, here are these cannons on these giant wheels. And they would wheel the cannon up and then you'd get them into position and then you would fire, right? Yeah. Back in the day, cannon were way more fixed. Like, you literally had a giant metal tube that was set up on some sacks and angled so that it was in a fixed position. You couldn't really move.

move it and then you would fire it and it's called a demicanon and then you would take that if you wanted to transport it you would take the cannon apart you would put it on the back of a cart with a horse and then that horse would haul it off to another location or to go back and be repaired you didn't have mobile artillery but William of Orange was

Oh, he developed flying like artillery. Really? What that means. Okay. It's going to confuse things. Flying artillery basically meant is that you would have these light cannon that would be led by teams of horses where you'd have like four to six horses dragging one small cannon and basically

on wheels on its own cart, you could move that cannon rapidly from one position to the other position in the battlefield. So like, "Oh no, we need more artillery support. Move it that way. Now you can fire." You didn't just have a cannon stuck in one area where it couldn't do shit after an enemy had already left.

And like, yeah, you would need someone like that that is able to adopt or Gustavus Adolphus. He did a similar kind of thing and was able to lead the Swedes to dominance in the north for quite a while. And that is why he has an entire album about him in Sabaton. Literally, yes. She's not. That's not even a joke. That is exactly why. Wait. Sorry. I am still sick. But.

When we first started dating, Carol as Rex was the Sabaton album that you introduced me to. And then somehow you conditioned me to only be able to study when that was playing.

So in order for me to get good grades on any of my exams, I'd have to be blasting Sabaton. It was very confusing for her roommates. And I remember this because it would be a thing where Gabby is literally pre-med at that time. And she is studying for biochem and just blasting Carlos Rex. Okay. So Leo Salomagomez asked, favorite medieval battle of all time? Oof.

Battle of Cressy. I did my senior thesis on it and I... You got an A. I got an A on it. And I framed it because one thing about this guy is he's going to procrastinate until he cannot, in fact, get an A. Mm-hmm.

So the Battle of Crecy is definitely my favorite medieval battle because it's part of the Hundred Years' War. It's in 1337. It is so incredibly stupid, and I love it. The French outnumber the English drastically. It's like two to one at this point in here. The English have their forces positioned on a slightly higher defensive position than

They're mostly archers. They lay down stakes that are pointing towards the enemy. The French get to have their leisurely morning breakfast. It's just the English. We can do whatever we want to them. Fuck these guys. We don't even care. And then ultimately what they end up doing is they go, okay, the English have their longbowmen. We need to send something at them first. So they send their crossbowmen.

They send their crossbowmen, whose strings, mind you, have been ruined by the wet weather because it was raining, and only the English, it seems, actually took care of their bows during this time. So the crossbowmen, who normally would get outranged by the longbowmen anyway, now have to go and fire uphill from a closer range to try and hit them, and they get absolutely eviscerated.

So the crossbowmen, the Genoese crossbowmen, start to retreat. And the French knights seeing this are like, this is pathetic. We can do so much better. And the commander gives the order to attack. Oh, but sir, what about our crossbowmen? Just ride through them. I'm not even kidding. The order was given to charge through their own crossbowmen

Which, as you can imagine, completely broke apart their formation, but the French looked down upon the Genoese that much that they just didn't give a shit. They charge into this battle, uphill, against the Longbowmen, get their horses shot out from under them as they're doing this.

And the entire ground underneath them, because remember, it has been raining, becomes a churning mass of mud. The horses are slipping and falling. The men are in full armor, falling off their horses and dying. And it is devastating.

freaking pathetic. One of the things that happens in this is that I kid you not, the king of Bohemia, who is blind, mind you, is so eager to get into battle that he has his household guards tie his horse to their horse. We're still in battle of Crescent. Yes. And then he leads the charge of one of the charges.

Only to immediately get slaughtered because he dies. Oh, yeah, he's blind. Gabby, it's a blind man with his horse tied to other horses. Do you know what happens when one a single one of those horses gets shot out from underneath it and falls? The others fall. The others fall because go figure if you tie five horses together and one of them collapses, the other ones go with it. Yeah, that's not great for the.

I think I recall in the end this battle was so definitive that something like 70 or 80 percent of all upper nobility in France died. Like the leading the highest members of French society wiped out, gone. That's really sad.

Yeah. So what did the French society do? Did they just rebuild? Oh, eventually they do. Did they restructure their society? Eventually it does actually develop. But for a while, the English basically have free reign of the French countryside. Like that was a definitive battle that just put the English for the victory. This is one of the early battles of the Hundred Years War. Oh, that makes a lot of sense. And it goes on for a lot longer. Okay. So A underscore Dirty underscore C 30 asked,

What is your favorite event from history that isn't well-known in the Western world? Is not well-known in the Western world. Oh, dear God. There are so many possible answers that I could give for this. Not well-known. Not well-known. Not well-known. Oh, dear God. Okay. Okay.

Off the top of my head, this might be a little bit of a cop-out because depending upon what you've studied, you definitely have heard of it, but I don't think people really appreciate the impact of it. And I'm bringing this up because it's very relevant to a lot of the people that we've met while here. For those that don't remember, we are right now in Galloway, Ireland. We came over and were in Scotland for a while. We will be going back to that for a bit. And we have met, I think...

about 80% of our Uber drivers to different places have typically been either like Turkish, Pakistani, or like Indian. And with a lot of them being Pakistani. And, um,

One of the key reasons that that happens, and also Indian, and one of the key reasons that that has happened, and you see a lot of that with varying different populations in specifically Great Britain, like the British Isles, is because of the partition of India and Pakistan, which people know obviously this happened, right? Oh, yeah, in the aftermath of World War II, India and Pakistan would split apart, and this would create...

a massive migration that from that you would see millions of people migrate. But even then, people don't realize the sheer scope of what happened. This was the largest single migration of people in all of human history. Millions of people from Muslims in India would go to Pakistan and Hindus in the Pakistan area would go into India. And over the course of this,

I don't even remember how many people died, but if I recall correctly, it is hundreds of thousands. It is a... Because this is something that descended into mass ethnic violence in many places. Like, it was... It was a...

brutal affair, which in turn means that people didn't just flee to Pakistan or to India from their respective locations. Many of them ended up fleeing abroad. So the reason we see a lot of East Asian peoples arrive in like England and Scotland and Ireland and whatnot in or say Northern Ireland during that time is

like the 1950s, is because of this migration. It is responsible for one of the largest movements of these people in all of history.

And I don't think a lot of people appreciate that because when people talk about, as an example, there is issues with modern migration and immigration, but sometimes people are getting unfairly criticized whose families have quite literally been here for 60, 70 years because it stems back to that point. They're not modern immigrants or anything like that.

It's just one of those points that I want to bring up because you see a lot of contention of this kind of view online where people don't understand the scope or why something has happened. That's just the Internet. That's just the Internet. That's the reality. Okay. So Aries.325 asked, who was the smartest or dumbest dictator in history? Yeah.

Why not both? Oh, my God. You have. Here's the thing. Here's the thing. Here's the thing. Smartest dictator in history. Cincinnati's the story of Cincinnati's. Even if it's apocryphal, because he gives. I feel like is it is smartest or is he the most noble? The smartest. Because here's the problem.

There is a phrase when talking about government in history that the greatest form of government is a benevolent dictatorship because under a benevolent dictatorship, you have a dictator who wields

almost supreme authority, or maybe just absolute supreme authority, who is able to do what is best for the people. They are able to quickly pass legislation. They are able to quickly enact their will. They are able to make things happen, which allows for rapid change to take place and help society. Mind you, I'm not talking about just a dictatorship. I'm talking about a benevolent one, because in a benevolent one, it is done specifically for an idea of power.

good, not just self-enrichment, which is oftentimes what you see. The problem with a benevolent dictatorship is that usually in history, they are very, very quickly followed by not so benevolent dictatorships. Is it possible that when you do things that may make big changes, those can affect other things down the line that didn't you have to like correct? Yeah.

And then it leads to another person coming at me like, hey, yo, wait, do we need to fix this? It can. It can. And that is something that can happen. But this is why we're saying that something like Cincinnati's would be the greatest dictator, because he came into power, did his duty of what he was supposed to immediately gave it up. And that duty was singular in purpose. Save the city. Drive off the enemy.

Go back to farming. That is it. That is literally everything. If you want to talk about the worst dictator. Yes, please. The worst dictator is going to depend upon the context of whether or not you are talking about someone who is doing something morally horrible, or you could also have someone who is just stupidly ineffective. Like I'll give you this as a prime example. In terms of sheer horror, one could argue that it is likely going to be Pol Pot.

Of Cambodia. He is responsible for killing 25% of Cambodia's entire population. Like he, this is a guy who was, I thought I recall correctly. He started out as a school teacher and in the end was murdering just about each and every single person that you could possibly imagine with the Khmer Rouge. It was, uh,

Oh, dear God. It was horribly brutal. If you want to talk about worst dictator in terms of they sucked at their job. They sucked at their job is a good one. Yeah. There's a number of different ones that we could actually bring to mind. Everyone's going to bring up Mussolini as an example. Mussolini was actually a remarkably effective leader over the course of the 20s and the early 30s. I'm going to need you to explain that. Okay. Okay.

There is a whole thing. Italy was not in good shape. All right? It was not. Italy has not been in good shape for quite a while, actually, if you want to look at things historically. Yes. So...

Mussolini is the guy who created fascism as an ideology in the first place. Really? Yeah, he is a person. So Mussolini is the one that started the fascist movements. And he took over Italy in the early 1920s. So he was anti-immigration, anti-other? So the idea was he actually was a devout socialist in the beginning. Really? Yes. How do you get...

Fascism from socialism. OK, so it's fascinating. It's a big jump. Right. So he believed that in order he thought that socialism. Oh, God, we're getting into like historical. I'm sorry. I need to know. You can give like a brief overview if you don't want to give an in-depth view. Mussolini was a was a devout socialist.

But there was a split in socialist belief and ideology that developed as a result of like World War I. You have one group that believed that, oh,

war isn't going to solve anything. We're not going to be a, like we can't have war to kickstart the revolution. It needs to be done on like a base industrial level with the general population and peasant uprisings and striking and factory workers. And that's what needs to be done. The other view that developed was that in order to kickstart the revolution,

War was necessary because it would create the conditions in which you could actually have a socialist or communist or whatever, like I say communist, but like a revolution that you could actually use that as a means by which to advance the state and advance the socialist view and ideology. Okay. And Mussolini, as time went on, became party to that second one. He became a leader.

National socialist. National socialist. Shorten the two beginnings of that. Nazi. Oh. National socialist. That is where that, or that's where the socialists began to differentiate from the national socialists. And from there, the idea of fascism and the way that it would develop is...

I mean, it's a completely different economic model and I would have to do a whole video analysis specifically explaining that. Oh yeah, no, you don't need to go into all of that. I just wanted to know the progression of how that would even come to be and that, yeah, that clarifies. So Mussolini, the way that fascism worked a lot in the beginning was corporatism, where it wasn't worker-owned businesses. It was businesses that were a part of the state and the party.

And that they would work in cooperation with the workers to control society. I'm not doing a good job of explaining that because I would need an actual in-depth proper explanation of it. But basically, that's how it was. And with Mussolini, he did kickstart a lot of Italian industry. He brought it more up to speed. But Italy was still far behind.

far behind the other powers of even Germany in its piss poor state after World War I. It was behind France, it was behind England, it was behind all of them. Italy needed to modernize and Mussolini's plan to recreate the Roman Empire and build it in his image as he wanted

He predicted that he wasn't going to be ready until like 1942 at the earliest. It was more likely 1943 or 1944. And that was the whole plan with Hitler, that that is when war would happen.

And then Hitler went and attacked Poland and dragged him into the conflict. And yeah, Italy ended up joining the conflict years before they were actually ready. And Mussolini would do all the stupid kind of shit of like replacing generals with his lackeys and yes men and people who would listen directly to him instead of those that were actually semi-competent and knew what the hell they were doing.

You can just I just don't understand that, because if you're in a war and you need your people to do well, why would you replace your men in charge with just randoms? Because if you have people that are loyal to you, if you have people that are skilled, but they're not loyal to you, what happens if they turn the military against you? OK, touche. I mean, I guess. Yeah.

That's one of the problems when it comes with a lot of dictatorships is that they are only able to be maintained through the presence of force. If someone else also has force backing them, they can stand against you. There's no institutions to protect you as dictator. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Okay, so...

Piggybacking off of that, Scarlet Widow 1989 asked, what would have happened if the Japanese did not attack Pearl Harbor? They would have ran out of resources. The Japanese or Pearl Harbor? The Japanese. They would have ran out of resources. So they had to do what they did? They didn't have to attack Pearl Harbor per se. The...

So there were two different war plans. You had War Plan North and War Plan South, and the Japanese chose War Plan South. War Plan South focused on the Navy, and the entire idea of it was to invade the Philippines, invade Indonesia, invade Malaysia, knock the United States out by going in, taking over or destroying the U.S. Navy at Hawaii, etc.

The whole idea of it was to expand southward across the islands and take the very, very resource-rich locations because Indonesia, Malaysia, or Malaya, like all these different areas, this is the region that largely was producing huge amounts of oil and rubber.

Do you know what you largely need in a war with mechanization like airplanes and shit? Both of those? You need a lot of rubber and you need a lot of oil. The Japanese had barely any of it. The Japanese also had shit quality steel. They've had historically horrible quality steel. And the...

the Americans for years prior to this had embargoed them so that they stopped trading oil and stopped trading steel to the Japanese, which meant that they were running out of resources to be able to use for that expansion.

So they needed resources, and the entire idea of War Plan South was to knock the U.S. out of the war preemptively and then seize all these resources. The other plan was War Plan North to invade Siberia.

Which that didn't happen because... To invade Siberia. Yeah, against the Soviet Union. Because the resource... Siberia. The place where they send people who are prisoners. Yes. Because the area is stupidly rich in resources. I mean, the amount of valuable, rare materials... But how do you even set up to harvest those resources? Because it's, you know, Siberia. That's the problem. It would take years.

Years of investment to be able to get a lot of it in the first place. So they just went south part of it The big reason why they did so is because the army wanted to put in a push north into Siberia because it's landlocked you go north with the army and

The Navy wanted to go south because you sail across the ocean to all the little islands and you seize it with the Navy. The Navy and the Army were competing with one another for power and influence. So the Japanese Navy and the Japanese Army. Correct. And then the Army...

Fucking lost. Oh, God, the army had a series of setbacks over the course of the 1930s that were complete embarrassments. And it led to the Navy getting prioritized. And because the Navy then got more political power and authority, the admirals were more important than the generals. They pretty much got to determine what ended up happening with the strategy. Wow. I I didn't know any of that.

Yeah, it didn't have to happen. Like literally, if a couple of key things had changed, the the Japanese probably would have invaded Siberia against the Soviets. So I think this should probably be the last one because we are approaching almost an hour. Oh, my gosh. But there's so many more. Can we do it? We need to do another one. OK, I think so. Hayden G. Peacock asked, how did the U.S. react to the Canadian Confederation in 1867? I said that word weird. Confederation.

Yeah, confederation. How do they react to it? So here's the thing. The Canadian Confederation was not necessarily the creation of a completely separate independent state. It sort of was. But a lot of people don't realize that Canada as we know it didn't really exist until that point because it was instead a series of different colonies. So like you had the Hudson Bay, you had Quebec, you had all these different

that were completely separate from one another. They were governed completely separate. But in 1867, that is when they would confederate into a singular entity, like one colony, that it was Canada. From there, I don't remember if that is the year that they became a dominion. I don't think that happened until like 30 or 40 years later. I'm pulling that number out of my butt just saying that in the first place. But yeah,

If I recall, the United States was a little bit too busy to really have any kind of concern over it because it was two years after the Civil War. This is Reconstruction period. So what is going on to the north is not necessarily as important, but I think that there was tacit approval, I think, there.

On July 1st, 1867, the British North America Act was passed by the British Parliament, forming the Dominion of Canada. So that would be the Canadian Confederation. Yeah. Like, honestly, I think that the Americans were mostly just distracted after the end of the Civil War and didn't really care. Though, that being said, there was still a lot of contention because, okay, there's the whole issue that ended up happening because of...

British support for the Confederates back during the war that pissed off quite a number of people within the Union.

And then on top of that, this was like peak Manifest Destiny, if you will, during that time. And there were some hardliners I know from the North that really wanted to take things all the way. Like not just out West. Like you know how there's the whole thing of Manifest Destiny out West? Like that's the whole idea? Yeah. There was this idea of Manifest Destiny includes all.

All the Americas. It means we're going to expand and take Canada. It means we're taking all of it. Anything that was British is American. That ultimately obviously did not happen, but there were some hardliners that believe that. I don't really know where else to go with that, to be honest. OK, so last one. Yash underscore twenty four point nine asked about Gandhi's assassination.

Wait, like Indira Gandhi's? Yeah. Like the female prime minister? All it says is Gandhi's assassination or Bhagat Singh. So, okay, like, because we have Gandhi's assassination, but then we have Indira Gandhi. Okay, she was, what, the first female prime minister? Was she president or prime minister? I'm trying to forget this in the first place. She was like the first leader of India, and she got assassinated, but she was a...

If I recall, she was like a Hindu nationalist. And there is a, oh my God, I had to bring this up in the first place. I don't even know where to begin when talking about political figures and possible corruption and everything else. But she has, the whole thing with the Gandhis, there is a lot more baggage than what people normally give credit for when talking about them in history. Because there are a number of figures that people think of as almost sacred. Like the Gandhis are not,

are not necessarily paragons of virtue, unlike what a lot of what we think in history. It's way more complex than that, but that would require something way more in-depth than what I could probably do right now. You should do an episode on it. I could. Also, Indira Gandhi was the prime minister. So was prime minister, not president. Okay, good to know.

I don't think I can really do much else immediately off the top of my head. We should skip past this one, but here's my promise to you. I will do an episode on the whole thing for Indian independence and then what happened with like Indira Gandhi and others. Sounds good. And finally, nerd for film asked, what's a funny moment that influenced history? Funny moment that influenced. Okay. Okay. Okay. I have a lot of favorites because I love dumb deaths in history. Like,

It sounds so dumb. I know, I know. But it genuinely is amusing to me how very rapidly things can change over something so incredibly stupid happening. Prime example that I have of this off the top of my head is the Spanish Civil War. The leader of the Spanish Civil War in the end, the guy who took over everything was Francisco Franco.

He was not supposed to be the leader of the conflict. He was not. There was a Spanish general. I'm trying to remember the name of him in the first place, but he was way more popular, and he was the big leader that was the thing that would unite the nationalists in the very beginning of the conflict. The dude died when he wanted—he insisted—

that when he was going to land back amongst his troops, he was going to do so in style with all of his luggage, all of his treasure, all of his everything, and insisted that the plane that take him do so immediately instead of waiting for a bigger, stronger, heavier plane that could carry more luggage because he wanted to show up in style immediately.

Can you guess what happened when this overloaded plane tried to take off? It did not. It crashed. It immediately freaking crashed and burned and he died. This is within hours of the Civil War kicking off. The leader of the of the whole nationalist movement died because he was impatient because he was impatient. You know, I'm going to bring up his story in the first place. He died.

What was the hurry? Style. He literally wanted to style on everyone. I'm not even kidding. Could he not have left his stuff and just go with the plane and then another plane bring his stuff? I feel like that would be a logical next step. You know what I'm saying?

Here it is. Here it is. Jose Sandro. So this was the leader. And OK, I want to hand you this guy's picture in the first place. Look, look at his drip. Look at his drip. I mean, he's dripping. But why would he do what he did? He's got some style. He is known as the Lion of the Riff. That was his name. OK, so his death.

On the 20th of July, 1936, Sanjuro or Sanjurjo was killed in Eseril in a plane crash when he tried to fly back to Spain. He chose to fly in a small aircraft, the De Havilland DH-80 piloted by Juan Antonio Ansaldo. One of the main reasons for the crash was the heavy luggage that Sanjurjo insisted on

On bringing, Ansalda has warned him that the load was too heavy, but Sanjurjo answered back, quote, I need to wear proper clothes as the new Cadeo of Spain. He literally just wanted to look nice.

Unaccountably, Zandra chose to fly in Insaldo's plane rather than a much larger and more suitable airplane that was available. The larger plane was the eight-passenger de Havilland Dragon Rapid, the same one which had transported Franco from the Canary Islands to Morocco. Zandra, however, apparently preferred the drama of flying with a daring aviator such as Insaldo, who actually in the aftermath of that, he actually did survive the crash. It was only the leader that died.

So yeah, when Mola also died in an aircraft accident, who was another leader of the Nationalists, Franco was left as the only effective leader of the Nationalists cause, which led to a number of rumors that he'd caused their deaths in the first place. But no, it literally happened by virtue of sheer stupidity and luck.

So the only reason that we have all these images of Francisco Franco, who ruled Spain for like, what, 20 something, almost 30 years. That only happened because some dumbass died in a plane crash because he wanted to take his suit. That's insane. Yeah, I think that's a good one to end it on.

All right. Well, with that, my friends, thank you all very much for listening to this listener special. I really do appreciate all of you. Rest assured, for those of you that are patrons, we have a patron-exclusive episode that will be coming shortly. We're just...

A little bit inebriated at this point. We need to go to bed. But we will be recording that here soon in order to be able to put up for you. For those of you that are listening right now, if you want ad-free episodes as well as that bonus content, if you want the additional episode that patrons get, you got to go and join Patreon. And I know I saw a comment on Patreon that was like, hey, where's the rest of the Vietnam series? James has had a lot going on.

But he is working on it. So that will be coming this month. But he has had like a ton of family stuff, personal life stuff. You know, it comes up and he's the one that's been like spearheading that entire series. So.

As soon as it's available, we will have it to you. So in addition to that, along with the Vietnam episodes, we're creating our own things for some patron exclusives. Like we have the listener special and there are two more things that we are working on here that will be quite nice. One of which will be an exclusive. I don't know. We just had the episode on the second part of the inventions, like the history of weird just household appliances.

That just came out as a Patreon exclusive. So if you guys are into that, check it out. Anyway, my friends, thank you all very much. Goodbye. Bye.

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