September 9, 2025 • 43 mins
Years after their initial conversation with the world's foremost expert on underwater explosions, Ben still sings the praises of Dr. Rachel "Big Spinach" Lance. In the first part of this special two-part series, Ben, Noel and Max welcome Dr. Lance back to learn more about the phenomenal -- and, frankly, inspiring -- story of a ragtag crew of rogue scientists who saved submarines ... and, in doing so, saved the Allies during D-Day.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to
(00:27):
the show, fellow Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so
much for tuning in. Let's hear it for our super producer,
Max Tiny Subs Williams.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Max the Living Large Language Model Williams.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
Yes, Max uh untold story of D Day Williams.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
Wait a minute, who's that?
Speaker 4 (00:53):
Well?
Speaker 5 (00:53):
That the person who said, who's that chiming in?
Speaker 3 (00:56):
That's the crowd?
Speaker 5 (00:58):
I am.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
I am ben Bully in this part of the world.
And you just heard from a returning expert, a person
who continually uh appears on every single episode we do.
In the credits, it is weird none other than Professor
Rachel big Spinach Lance. Doctor Lance, thank you for coming
(01:26):
back to the show.
Speaker 4 (01:27):
Ah, thank you. Yeah, it is just doctor Lance. Though
I'm no longer a professor. I have left that lifestyle behind.
I have stopped. Yeah, transition.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
Does that happen on day one?
Speaker 4 (01:41):
Okay, you have to turn them in when you leave?
Speaker 5 (01:43):
Yeah, right, like day of elbow? Yeah, and sock security
escorts people out. Uh now? Yeah. Rachel.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
In our previous exploration, the thing that inspired us us
to brag about your bona fides and accolades for low
these several years we talked about the story of the Hunley.
Could you give us a brief recap on that?
Speaker 4 (02:13):
Oh, I don't know if I could be brief, I'll try,
all right. So February seventeenth, eighteen sixty four, the Civil
War in America is raging full force. One of the
major sources of the bulk of the conflict is Charleston,
South Carolina. It's being bombed and blockaded on a constant
basis because that's where the war started. So naturally, what
(02:35):
do the Confederates decide to do but use a bunch
of recycled steam boiler parts to handcraft a submarine, as
we all would. This crew of eight personnel take their
hand crank homemade submarine out around eight pm that night,
and they use it to press a two hundred pound
(02:57):
black powder bomb against the side of one of the
Union ships blockading their city. Now that's a bomb about
the seism a beer cug. The bomb does successfully go off,
but then the crew and their vessel disappear until the
modern era. So modern explorers found it first in nineteen seventy,
then again in nineteen ninety five. It was brought up
in two thousand and Once it was raised, the mystery
(03:20):
of why it disappeared in eighteen sixty four after apparently
being victorious and sinking this unionship only deepened. Everyone was
in the sub Nobody was trying to get out, the
hatches were all locked. They didn't try to pump out
any water. Everyone just kind of slumped over at their
battle stations, and it was like, we have achieved our goal.
Farewell Crural world.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
And what somehow Clive Cussler is involved in this whole thing,
the best selling author.
Speaker 4 (03:47):
Yeah, so he's since passed away, but yes, in the
nineties he was very active in funding a lot of
exploratory groups looking for ships. And there was another explorer
named Lispance who had written a bunch of letters saying
he discovered this disappeared Hunley in nineteen seventy and he
Custler's team took that information. As far as I can track,
(04:10):
that's what really happened. He took that information and they
went out with they are much greater resources than they're
much greater cloud, which does matter. In nineteen ninety five,
and they did something really smart. They announced that they
found it, which since then name Cloud Custler is attached,
gets real big press and real big pressure, and they
refuse to tell anyone where until everyone had signed all
(04:32):
the contracts agreeing what would happen to it, so that
everybody was motivated to stop fighting and figure it out
so they could get this artifact back.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
And for anyone who wants to know more about this,
turns out there's an entire book, yeah, which inspired our friendship.
It is called In the Waves, My Quest to Solve
the Mystery of a Civil War Submarine, by none other.
Speaker 4 (04:59):
Than you, our undying friendship.
Speaker 3 (05:04):
Fams.
Speaker 4 (05:05):
Unlike the crew of the alright, no, it's you know
they would have. It was years ago. We can make
dark jokes.
Speaker 2 (05:13):
About it, for sure, and gay if I could, can
I can? I just rattle off some Clive Cussler novel names.
We've got plague Ship, We've got the Saboteurs, We've got
the Romanov Ransom, Polar Shift, the Jungle, The Course of
can Shadow Fire, Ice, Devil's Gate, and the Navigator.
Speaker 3 (05:28):
Sorry, these are just very like.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
I like the bookend with the plague Ship and Navigator
was my favorite.
Speaker 3 (05:36):
It's very metal, I will say.
Speaker 4 (05:37):
Like plague Ship is a better title than in the Waves.
I'm sorry it is.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
Yeah, well in that case, I gotta give credit.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, in that case, then it sounds like, uh,
it sounds like it's time to write a third book,
since you definitely haven't been busy writing a second book
not too long ago called Chamber Divers, the untold story
of the D Day scientists who changed special operations forever. Uh,
(06:12):
this is this is something we've read again, fans, viewers
and our this is the brag. We were talking about
this off air and no'll remember we always like to
say this at parties. We know the world's foremost authority
on underwater explosions.
Speaker 3 (06:27):
It's so niche. I love it.
Speaker 4 (06:30):
I do a lot of physics in my free time. Yeah.
Before we were talking about what your what your hobby
would be if the world suddenly, like everyone disappeared, I
think underwater blast physics might be it like that.
Speaker 1 (06:45):
Perfect perfect We're we're reaching out to a lot of
people with that one what more universal concept.
Speaker 5 (06:53):
Uh so let's maybe let's.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
I almost said, dive into this, so keep it right,
all right, we'll keep it. We'll keep it for the doctor.
So tell us a little bit if you can about
D Day, which was not too long ago. I think
a lot of people in the United States have seen
depictions of.
Speaker 3 (07:16):
It, famously in saving private run part of it.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
Yeah, yeah, so when people are I don't know, I
was thinking about this Noel and Rachel off Air. I
was thinking, how do people who live in Normandy now
feel about D Day?
Speaker 5 (07:37):
As a good question to start with.
Speaker 4 (07:38):
Right, fun fact, I recently had the opportunity to go
to an underwater physiology conference, not in Normandy but close
by and breast and I asked many French people this question. Really, Yes,
they're very honored by the actions taken by the other
allies at D Day, like they they take that ouniverse
(08:00):
thory seriously and they even young people were deeply moved
by that event. And how much the world really came
to France with a specific purpose. It was broader than
France alone, of course, like World War two is bigger
than France alone. But they they very much have the
(08:22):
mentality and attitude that they were rescued and they appreciate
that and the amount of effort and blood that went
into it.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
Now Normandy famously known for their high quality butter that
they produce.
Speaker 4 (08:35):
Yes, they're very sassy about their butter.
Speaker 3 (08:38):
It's really good. Good.
Speaker 4 (08:40):
If you tie and buy on salted butter, you get
kicked out. No.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
I mean the first time I had French butter, it
was like, this is a whole other universe, Like this
is nothing like the butter we get over here.
Speaker 4 (08:52):
Yeah, they're not, they're not proud of nothing like that.
I'll say that it's good. It's good.
Speaker 5 (08:57):
They've got they've got credit work.
Speaker 4 (08:59):
Exactly, They've got the good. So yeah, d Day, June sixth,
nineteen forty four. As an American, i'd found even as
someone who has always been invested in history, specifically World
War Two history, grew up watching tons of documentaries with
my dad. My grandpa's both fought in it, and so
I had never processed it that way. But one day
(09:21):
I just had this weird realization that we as Americans
think of World War Two as Pearl Harbor December seventh,
nineteen forty one, and then a time warp occurs and
it's June sixth, nineteen forty four and we're storming the
beaches of Normandy.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
Sometimes history does be like that, Yeah, sometimes linear.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
And people just explain it by as though their studio
exacts pitching a film right right.
Speaker 4 (09:49):
To be the zed this miracle time warp occurs for
Americans at least, and that's the way we talk about
World War Two. And I started picking away at it
and I was like, why was there at delay? And
as I wrote in The Waves, my first book, there
was one part in there that actually you can see
as the carryover link that became chamber divers So there's
(10:13):
one part in there where in nineteen forty, this group
of British scientists is doing this experiment on themselves that
had relevance totally by coincidence to the hl Henley from
the Civil War. So I used that experiment in The Waves,
and I didn't really at that time connect it, but
(10:34):
because I didn't know yet, I honestly didn't know. One
day I was sitting there thinking about World War Two
as one does, and thinking about carbon dioxide as one does,
and I realized, like, wait a minute, these guys were
in London in nineteen forty doing this weird little test
(10:54):
on themselves with carbon dioxide, and I was like, they
were being bun Then why did they care about carbon
dioxide when bombs are literally falling on you and I
started digging, and that's the story that ended up leading
to chamber divers because it turned out that one little
(11:15):
paper was really all that they'd been allowed to publish
from this series of experiments where the ultimate goal was
the beaches of Normandy. So circling back, that's three and
a half years, or I might have done that math wrong,
don't don't emn me. Between December ninety one June nineteen
forty four, what was happening in that time period was
(11:38):
science because of beach landing, at least on the scale
that took place at Normandy had never happened successfully. So
we think of it, we think of D Day, and
we think of it from the modern perspective as like
this huge event, this major storming, and people died, of course,
and I will never make light of that, but like,
(11:59):
oh oh, overall it was a success. The Allies took
the beaches. We don't realize fully how world shaking that
is because no military had successfully done that before. Every
previous attempt had resulted in absolute massacre on the beaches.
So it took those intervening years to figure out how
(12:21):
to do that. And so that's what I wrote about.
I wrote about this one group of scientists that was
a contributing factor. You know, obviously no one group did
it all by themselves. It was massive, but like what
this group did was a part of it.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
It makes perfect sense, and I love the point we're
bringing up here. At the time, the invasion that we
call D Day today in the West was the largest
of its sort in history and also the.
Speaker 5 (12:55):
One successful one.
Speaker 3 (12:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
We're talking to hundreds of thousands of troops, uh, tens
of thousands of vehicles, a bunch of equipment. Yeah right,
a real cannon fodder type situation.
Speaker 4 (13:09):
Yeah, I mean the engineering problem of hey, get a
tank from a ship to the land. That alone, that's
a challenge. Now you had people shooting at you. It's
a bigger challenge, right, And they did it, but they
did it through this crazy amount of innovation. One of
the previous examples, Winston Churchill during World War One, actually
(13:30):
led an attempted beach landing at Gallipoli and they got
stuck on the beach for a year and they eventually
gave up and left after.
Speaker 5 (13:42):
They have to stay the whole year or the weather nice.
Speaker 4 (13:47):
I mean, they were just there for a year with
no housing, beach shot at it was, Yeah, there's.
Speaker 5 (13:54):
No supply chain logistics exactly.
Speaker 4 (13:57):
It was. It was a terrible military failure. So Churchill
in particular was deeply aware of how big of a
problem this was.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
So what we see then, It's a point we continually
returned to, is that history is often taught to us
as a series of one off, discrete events at best,
maybe a linear pop pop pop, like the acts in
a film. But the the fascinating thing is every day
(14:25):
is still occurring between those big moments, and as you said,
there's so much science involved, there's also a lot of
humanity involved, which we might We have to get to
some of these big characters in our second episode, But
is it fair to say, Rachel that there was a
little bit of mad science involved?
Speaker 4 (14:48):
Understatement? I think these people were I don't want to yeah.
Speaker 5 (14:54):
I don't want okay, but they were like a half
order of.
Speaker 4 (15:00):
They were maybe like one banana what they were doing.
I do think it takes, and this was a group.
I do think it takes a really special person to
be in your home, to have food shortages, to have rationing,
to have bombs falling on you, and to say I
will stay because London is where the lab is, and
(15:21):
I think this is a big enough problem that I
am willing to put my body on the line to
test it. And that's exactly what this group of scientists did.
And they were all actually geneticists, and like, if you
want to save that for the second part, we can
get to that. But that's what I think is really
important is these people were scientists. One of them this
was a huge area of background for him. But the
(15:42):
Rusts were kind of learning it on the fly because
they collectively realized that the Allied militaries knew nothing. They
knew nothing, and so the fact that they had one
expert all of a sudden made this genetics lab in
London the global epicenter for un underwater research, many subs diving,
(16:03):
all of it that they would need in order to
plan these landings.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
Now, also this story was previous to your publication, Chamber Divers.
This story was classified, right, it.
Speaker 4 (16:19):
Was classified for minimum seventy years, so that was the
UK records. Now in that time, there is some nefariousness
some of the government officials involved, like stole some of
the work from these these scientists, and so there was
like added confusion that I started digging out as I
started going through the original records. Now everyone's dead, but
(16:39):
like you know, I have had no a vengeance against
that I needed against people who died, like when I
was in middle school. But so yeah, there was nefarious
happening in that time period. So this minimum of seventy
to eighty years of classification was applied to all the work,
and the UK did a bulk declassification of a lot
(17:03):
of D Day records and World War Two records in
about two thousand and one. So these records started being
declassified in about two thousand and one, and a lot
of the American records I had to submit requests for
to get them declassified. Wait requests, Foyer requests. Yeah, so
(17:24):
those were readily accepted. I'm not going to pretend it
was a huge battle, but what it does show is
that nobody had ever publicly read them. So the fact
that I had to do that they had not already
been cleared for release shows that I was the first
one to go through some of this stuff.
Speaker 3 (17:41):
Nice.
Speaker 4 (17:41):
So yeah, yeah that was an adventure, and that's why
this book also took a long time. Like my first
book came out April twenty twenty There were pandemic issues
with researching this, Like I started researching this and then
the pandemic hit and it became an infinitely longer task
and that I couldn't really even finish until travel started
(18:04):
clearing up because these records were in multiple archives throughout
the world and it was just this whole big thing.
But yeah, that this one came out last year, April
twenty twenty four. I had some personal issues that were
happening around there, which is why it took me a while.
They were jud to you, guys. I'm so sorry. Please
do not take it as a reflection of our.
Speaker 3 (18:22):
Kidding, dying friendship.
Speaker 5 (18:25):
You're a You're a wizard. A wizard is never late.
Speaker 4 (18:28):
Yeah, I went to like a personal cave. But as
I crawled myself out, I was like, oh, no, we're here.
Speaker 3 (18:37):
We've been waiting.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
We've been mentioning you every episode many years. So putting
out the vibes into the universe. Mentioned on the jacket
of your book, this concept of let's see you use
the term maverick hard drinking submarine researchers. Can we unpack
that just a little bit before we get into the
main kind of duo and the love story that I'm
(19:00):
folds sure, wild story.
Speaker 4 (19:02):
All right, where do you want to start? You want
to start with Maverick.
Speaker 5 (19:07):
Bombs.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
The bombs have not maybe yet quite fallen on London,
but uh, there is an ill.
Speaker 3 (19:16):
Wind in the air.
Speaker 4 (19:18):
War is coming.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
Yeah, people got the bad vibe, right, So uh so
now we have, as you said, uh, we've got a
bunch of boffins, right, and what are our boffins to do?
Speaker 4 (19:31):
What to do? Yeah, I'm sorry, I've not heard that word.
Speaker 5 (19:38):
Well, I guess our eggheads are our fellow nerds.
Speaker 4 (19:45):
Okay word, Okay. So war is coming. There's this character
Hitler who's over on the mainland and he's expectorating some
very terrible things. Of of the things that he's just
like spitting on and out about is that he wants
to reclaim previous parts of the German Emperor Empire, the
(20:08):
Holy Roman Empire whatever you know. Terminology is being used
for the fluctuations of territories throughout Europe. So anyway, he's
being very vocal. He's planning to take over some stuff,
and the European countries around him are not thinking that's
so nice. They're like, no, you know, we're not going
(20:30):
to agree to that. So this guy, I don't know.
Speaker 3 (20:32):
This guy seems like a totally good dude.
Speaker 5 (20:34):
Yeah he's not the.
Speaker 4 (20:35):
Best I have notes, but anyway, So by about nineteen
thirty eight, nineteen thirty nine, it's very clear that he
cannot be modified through diplomacy, and so England in particular,
who had been Germany's opponent during World wars World War One,
knows that war is coming for them. So one of
(20:57):
the things that they very smartly do as an island
nation is working on their submarines and their ships and
their ability to have naval warfare. So June first, nineteen
thirty nine, they have this submarine called the HMS Bedus
and this is the bit that was in the waves
that kind of brought me over. HMS Thetis sinks. It's
(21:18):
in very shallow water. Literally at the for the first
few hours, the stern of the submarine is sticking up
out of the water. They can see it, they can
touch it, they can send rast to it, but they
can't get out the one hundred and three people crammed inside.
Eventually it does kind of reshift the stern sinks below,
but even then it's in really shallow water. The people
(21:39):
inside have underwater breathing apparatus, they should be able to
get out. Only four make it, and those four are
the best word I can come up with is bedraggled,
like they are in rough shape. They are plucked off
the surface of the ocean. One of them is actually
(22:02):
the captain of the submarine, which is contrary to a
lot of practice about the captain going last. But what
had happened was the crew inside was really scared, and
so he went early to be like, I will do this,
I will show you it's safe. So because of that,
we know a little bit about what's happening inside the submarine,
we know a little bit about the air that they
were breathing, how these underwater breathing apparatuses work. And to
(22:25):
shorten a lot of bureaucracy, basically, the Royal Navy realizes
that they've built submarines, and they've built escape apparatuses, and
they haven't tested them at all in that application. So
they've got all these things. This is their plan A
and it is their only plan for getting out of submarines.
(22:47):
And they realized like, oh damn, we don't actually know
if this will work or if it will actually kill
you as you try to use it.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
Oh, because okay, I see it's a fatal version of
leedle horse water because you can get the sub close
to the shore, but if you can't unpack this up exactly, Okay.
Speaker 4 (23:06):
It's like they've led the horse the water, but they
didn't check to make sure the water wasn't poisoned first,
So the right just poison horses. So anyway, this one
guy living in London, he grew up in diving. His
name is John Burdon Sanderson Healthinge. He went by JBS,
(23:27):
so his first three initials. He grew up in diving
because his dad is this like or his dad was
this world famous physiology diving researcher. His dad was the
one that solved how to come up slowly enough so
that you didn't get the bends decompression sickness. So his
dad was really famous. But his dad just died the
(23:48):
year before. So now the Royal Navy has nobody and
they kind of start scrambling about. So this guy JBS,
he'd grown up in this environment. They had a gas
chamber in their home that his dad would test stuff
on his children, including TBS and JBS's sister, Naomi, and
(24:10):
the kids were like part of the experiments. They were
helping run the experiments. Naomi was like in charge of
CPR if like a test, so too cassed out. Yeah,
and she was like twelve at the time, right, So
they they know this because it's been part of their upbringing.
So JBS really steps up. He gets a but of
his bunch of his buddies. JBS has been through two
(24:31):
wars before, he's been through World War One, he's volunteered
in the Spanish Civil War, and he gets a bunch
of his veteran buddies and they're like, we're gonna show
you what happens when you try to use these because
we're going to test it on ourselves in a safe,
controlled environment. So that's where I think the Maverick part
really comes in is at the beginning, there was nobody
even really asking these people for help. They just kind
(24:53):
of were like, I did an experiment and I got
the answer.
Speaker 3 (24:57):
And this is desperate time.
Speaker 4 (24:59):
Yes, I mean he was right. Like he was a
great scientist. He was a professor at University College London
and that's where he ran a genetics lab and that's
what he'd been studying, but because of his upbringing he
knew how to do dive research.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
Did you say University College London? Has always struck me
as a little redundant.
Speaker 4 (25:16):
He done that out, doesn't it? But like, so him
and his buddies do this experiment, they get these results,
and there's this dramatic scene where JBS is literally on
the stand during the Royal Navy inquiry to figure out
who to blame for this accident. And he got out
of the tamber at something like three or four am
(25:37):
that day and they're like, well, how much how much
would we need to manage the carbon dioxide in the
sub in order for people to survive? And he does
the math on the stand, being like this will take
me a few extrare minutes to still have a migraine
from these experiments like the night. So I'm not going
(25:57):
to do math while people are watching me do the math.
Like I need to be kind of like in my
office with a blanket. It's like a little hoodie and
you know, scribbling away and then you're a math yeah,
and then I'm great at it. I will Sam Crackerjacket
private math, but like in a court scene of real action,
supervised math. Uh, seems seems harder. So from that moment on,
(26:20):
he and his lab do become the go to for
underwater physiology questions. But what's even wilder is the allies
in general know so little about surviving underwater that they
don't even really know what to ask them to study it.
And so yeah, they kind of like he works with them.
(26:44):
They make a little shopping list of questions. And if
you read this list, it's wild because it is it
is everything. It is like how much oxygen is too
much oxygen? How much oxygen is not enough oxygen?
Speaker 5 (26:58):
Do people have guilt? Yeah, because we could save a
lot of bit of money.
Speaker 4 (27:02):
What about carbonaxid? It is literally like everything that you
need to survive as a human or need to avoid
to avoid death. And they're just like, can you work
on it?
Speaker 1 (27:16):
So did they ask questions about not death but depth?
Speaker 4 (27:21):
They did, Yeah, so that was on their list. They
still had questions about coming up from depth. So you
got to realize too at this point diving diving is
still hard hat stuff. So we're talking Cuba gooding, junior
Men of Honor. You need a giant ship. That is
what diving is as of nineteen thirty eight.
Speaker 2 (27:40):
And we're talking like diving bell situations, like the giant
helmet's all of that.
Speaker 4 (27:44):
Yeah, diving bell is like a thing that the people
go in, so you're kind of inside of it. But yeah,
that or a giant helmet you're walking on the bottom.
But either way, we now have this island country probably
going to work with mainland Europe got people in submarines.
There's not a good way to have this surface applied setup.
(28:08):
And they also realized, like in the submarines themselves, they
don't really know how to keep people alive in them.
They've kind of just been building them and helping for
the best, like don't run the diesel engine while you're underwater.
Like that's about it in terms of how to keep
people alive in a submarine.
Speaker 1 (28:26):
At that time, Can we ask real quick, Rachel at
this point, Okay, we've figured out part of the technology,
we haven't figured out how to keep people reliably alive
(28:46):
with this technology.
Speaker 5 (28:49):
What was the reputation of.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
The service members who might volunteer to hop on us
up if they were figuring this out? I mean, what
were the fatality rates? This feels very much like a
risky one way party.
Speaker 4 (29:06):
Yeah. So even now, if you talk to submariners, the
attitude amongst that community is very much that if something
happens to the sub they're going down, and they seem
to have like a weird peace with it, which I
understand from a personal survival standpoint, that's probably what you
(29:29):
got to do in order to go to work in
the morning. So I fully support that. But as a scientist,
I'm like, let me let me work on this for you.
Let me be back here working on that. But yeah,
at the same time, World War One has just happened.
There are all these German wolf packs. The wolf packs
have had crazy success, but we've seen the sinkings occur
in World War One and so World War Two. The submariners,
(29:51):
at least as far as I can tell, it is
very much their mentality that they go out there assuming
there's a good chance this is a one way trip,
accepting that fate and doing what they can for their
country anyway, which is pretty bleak, and I think we
owe them better personally, Like I think, yeah.
Speaker 5 (30:13):
I agreed with that.
Speaker 1 (30:14):
You know, it calls to mind the later stories about
helicopter pilots in Southeast Asian conflicts. In the in the
seventies who just made their peace.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
I mean, I can't help but see parallels with like
early space travel, like it, just in terms of the
level of unknown, the level of risk, the level of
like is this technology good enough?
Speaker 4 (30:39):
Yeah. One of the most common questions I get about
the HL Henley that's our civil wars up is do
you think they knew they were going to die? And
I typically answer that yes, but not necessarily in the
sub so, I think that when you have a time
of war, you have people who are exposed to so
(31:02):
much that they become willing to do whatever they can
to help end it and to help defend their comrades
in arms. And I think those become two really major goals,
and with that becomes a level of acceptance about the
risk because there's so much that they can't control.
Speaker 3 (31:25):
I have a.
Speaker 4 (31:26):
Buddy, he's become a buddy through writing. So if you
don't mind, can I give his like a book a
shout he doesn't please?
Speaker 1 (31:33):
Do we also like to know his social Security number,
a social media Yeah.
Speaker 4 (31:40):
I don't know his handles off hand, but his name
is Casey Oloff Tellison. That's kay A C. Why And
he wrote just an absolutely stunning book called Freaks of
a Feather and that's his memoir as an active duty
service member in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he talks about
the same thing. So that's why I quote him frequently.
He has a particular passage in there where he talks
(32:02):
about that same mentality of being like, I can't control
if I'll die today. I'm just going to go out
and do what I can. So it is essentially what
it came down.
Speaker 3 (32:11):
To before the grace of God and all of that.
Speaker 1 (32:13):
Yeah, yeah, Freaks of a Feather that it's.
Speaker 3 (32:16):
A great title. By night, it's instantly arresting. I must
know more doing it now.
Speaker 1 (32:21):
And this is this I think speaks to you know,
the commonality, the human thread that we see throughout so much,
so much of human conflict. Right there are people who
decide that, you know, what I'm going to do this
morning may likely be a one way trip, but I
(32:42):
have to do it. And then I'm glad we spent
some time on the perspective of these early submariners, right
who know the technology is it there? Can you imagine
the meeting where you meet your sea and they start
telling you the idea of a submarine and then you say, yeah,
(33:04):
so also, yeah, quick question here in the back, first day,
how do we get out?
Speaker 2 (33:09):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, fine, it's fine.
Speaker 4 (33:15):
Yeah, but after the Thetis. So that was June nineteen
thirty eight, so obviously work comes for England faster than
it does for America by nineteen forty there in the blitz, right,
so they very quickly start planning for that exactly because
the Thetis event really shook the nation. You know, when
they brought the they recovered the submarine, they brought the
bodies out, and they put big sheets up to try
(33:38):
to block it. But like still everybody there knew what
was happening, and so there are oral histories of like
people from that coastal town just being like we just
sat there and watched, like we couldn't see everything, but
we felt like someone needed to observe this moment. And yeah,
it really shook the maritime community in the Royal Navy,
and so they immediately start building buring escape practice towers
(34:02):
and they start working with these breathing apparatuses and doing
tests on these breathing apparatuses which were a great concept
but essentially had just been taken from mining like coal,
coal mining, copper mining in the air, you have a
lot fewer problems to do with. So they had never
been fully tested at depth underwater, and it was that
(34:24):
added pressure that it turned out was screwing everybody up.
Speaker 1 (34:28):
We were saying breathing apparatuses that hopefully, No, I'm not
the only person in the crowd tonight who's picturing something
vaguely canvas or steam punky. Can you tell us a
little bit about what these breathing apparatuses looked like.
Speaker 2 (34:42):
I'm also picturing Frank booth from blue Velvet, kind of
like with like desperately from.
Speaker 4 (34:48):
Maybe go as steam punk as you can possibly imagine.
So my guess this is like before widespread plastic, right,
So the containers are made up but aluminum. They're painted black,
they're like corrugated, so it's corrugated metal containers. They've got
corrugated rubber hoses, they've got different types of breathing bags.
(35:10):
So this is before scuba. Jacques Cousteau was working in
Nazi occupied France, so the way these different groups went
about it were all they all iterated toward the same
end result, but they were all different. So they have
these breathing bags, so you breathe into the bag and
then it would get cycled through this canister. It would
(35:30):
add more oxygen, and then you would breathe that kind
of refreshed air back in. So when you're breathing, you
need oxygen at the right level, and you need to
get rid of carbon dioxide. So normally we do that
by just exchanging air with the world around us. The
trees handle the carbon dioxide part where that you tried
to yeah, thank you trees, and then there's just enough
(35:53):
air that it's not really a problem that needs active processing.
But when you get into smaller and smaller space, that's
why you don't want to breathe out of a plastic bag.
You're gonna run down the oxygen, you're gonna produce more
carbon dioxide. There's all of a sudden, no exchange happening.
So they were essentially breathing into canvas or leather bags,
(36:16):
but they were processing it with these canisters that took
out the carbon dioxide and oxygen bottles that added more
oxygen in.
Speaker 1 (36:24):
Okay, And it sounds like you have to have a
specific let's call it a don't panic level of breathing
frequency right, if you breathe too fast, if you're huffing
in a hurry, would that mess up the apparatus?
Speaker 4 (36:40):
Yeah, Oh my gosh, great question, Ben, Get out of
my brain. Yeah. So we've literally been studying this concept
since so that was a big part of my job
as a scientist. Is still and we've made advances. I
don't want to say that we haven't like but there
have been huge leaps and bounds. But these devices still exist.
So if you look out, if you look at rebreathers,
(37:01):
if you google the word rebreathers, you'll see the modern version.
So they're made with more modern materials. You're gonna deal
with anidized metals, and you're going to deal with plastics,
and you've got like plastic lined woven fabrics and stuff
for the bags. Plastic made those a lot easier. They're
now controlled with computers, but you still run into the
(37:22):
same problems that the human body is hard to modify
and it has very strict rules about breathing. Breathing is
the thing that will kill you first. In any scenario.
You get three minutes without oxygen, three days without water,
and three weeks without food, So you gotta pay attention
(37:43):
to the breathing far and away. Anytime you're going into
an environment where we don't naturally live as like caveman
style human beings, surviving underwater is a really big one.
So as soon as they start discovering that and they
realize how little they know, and they realize like this
war is coming, mainly Europe, they're going to have to
(38:03):
develop their underwater technology a lot more. So D Day
becomes the ultimate target. It starts with the thetis, It
starts with these breathing apparatuses. They progress and accumulate from there.
If they start building smaller submarines, like I said, that's
the submarine version of putting your head in a plastic bag.
So that takes work. They need to be able to
swim underwater on purpose. That takes work. And yeah, if
(38:28):
you start breathing too fast, you can owe what's called
overbreathing your system, like you start to hyperventilate, and it's
the passageways may not be big enough, and it may
not be scrubbing carbon dioxide at enough rate, and all
of that stuff requires testing so that it happens first
(38:48):
in a lab where we can resuscitate people as opposed
to while they're being shot at on a Nazi occupied be.
Speaker 5 (38:57):
This is the perfect segue to episode two.
Speaker 4 (39:01):
A cliffhanger too, Yeah, cliffhanger like quant do Hawk sorry
do howk is one of the sites at the beaches
of Normandy and it's this straight up vertical cliff and
there was a big German armament at the top and
(39:21):
so some of the US Army rangers were signed the
task of scaling this vertical cliff as part of the
early assaults on D Day. So you can still go
see it. You can stand to the top. You can't
really go to the base as a public member of
the public, but like, it is an oppressive feat and yes,
so they developed a lot of like grappling hook and
rock climbing stuff to do that particular thing and take
(39:43):
out that battery.
Speaker 1 (39:45):
It's it's fascinating to fascinating in a new small part
heartbreaking how much technological innovation comes from conflict, comes from war,
you know, and how much amazing it's also departs that
are now uh Rachel, As we reached the end of
(40:05):
the first part of our two part series on Chamber
Divers and D Day, we do have to confess to
you that we have we have a selfish ulterior motive.
Noel and I are going on a.
Speaker 5 (40:21):
Cruise very soon in October. We've never been on.
Speaker 3 (40:26):
I've never been at sea.
Speaker 1 (40:28):
Yeah, I've not out a cruise like so this is
new territory. So that's why we're asking you somewhat oddly
focused questions about what can go wrong on the water praze.
Speaker 3 (40:41):
It's gonna be fine. Say, it's gonna be fine.
Speaker 4 (40:43):
Fine if you're on the surface and you're breathing. There's
so many problems you've already solved.
Speaker 3 (40:50):
Okay, that's that's the way to look.
Speaker 4 (40:53):
Solve so many problems. You guys are going to be great.
And also like the more you eat, the more insolution
you have against another major problem that we will see
in Normandy, which is hypothermia.
Speaker 2 (41:07):
I was gonna say, we are actually going to do
a podcast about the Bermuda Triangle from the.
Speaker 3 (41:13):
Bermuda to try what could go wrong. We're not tempting faith.
Speaker 4 (41:18):
If they're technology clitches, I'm going to suspect they were
intentional on your part. I'm just sating you're giving.
Speaker 3 (41:25):
A lot of credit here, but I appreciate that.
Speaker 5 (41:28):
Hold the periscope.
Speaker 1 (41:30):
We are making this, as we said, a purposeful two parter,
and we're excited to see how much deeper this story goes.
Speaker 3 (41:40):
But deeper. Hold the periscope, Ben, You're on fire.
Speaker 5 (41:44):
Thank you.
Speaker 3 (41:45):
Better dunk you into some some water.
Speaker 5 (41:47):
Thank you. So reaching a new level of depth. Terrible puns.
Speaker 1 (41:52):
Yeah, some people would say they're subpart look Lord, all right,
all right, so big, big thanks to our returning guest
doctor Rachel Big Spinach, Lance and Noel. Just the energy
and the knowledge here. I am having such a time,
the passion.
Speaker 3 (42:10):
She's a wonderful person.
Speaker 2 (42:11):
She's an expert in her very, very niche and delightful field.
And we're so grateful that she she came to hang
out with us for not one, but two episodes.
Speaker 1 (42:20):
And here's a mark of character for doctor Lance. We
try spoiler at the end of our second episode. We
try to get her to say something bad about Jonathan
Strickland aka the Quist, and I suspect she was.
Speaker 3 (42:35):
Just too nice to do so she won't do it.
Speaker 1 (42:37):
Big thanks to our super producer, mister Max Williams. Big
things to Alex Williams who composed this track.
Speaker 3 (42:42):
Who else?
Speaker 5 (42:43):
Who else?
Speaker 2 (42:44):
Oh jeez, Yeah, Christophraciotis needs, Jeff Coates here in spirit,
Jonathan Strickland the quister, A j Bahamas, Jacobs the Puzzler,
and of.
Speaker 3 (42:52):
Course Rachel Big Spinish Lands. How can we not thank.
Speaker 1 (42:54):
Her again as we always do, and join us later
this week when we're bad with more from Rachel.
Speaker 3 (43:01):
We'll see you next time, folks.
Speaker 2 (43:09):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to
(00:27):
the show, fellow Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so
much for tuning in. Let's hear it for our super producer,
Max Tiny Subs Williams.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Max the Living Large Language Model Williams.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
Yes, Max uh untold story of D Day Williams.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
Wait a minute, who's that?
Speaker 4 (00:53):
Well?
Speaker 5 (00:53):
That the person who said, who's that chiming in?
Speaker 3 (00:56):
That's the crowd?
Speaker 5 (00:58):
I am.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
I am ben Bully in this part of the world.
And you just heard from a returning expert, a person
who continually uh appears on every single episode we do.
In the credits, it is weird none other than Professor
Rachel big Spinach Lance. Doctor Lance, thank you for coming
(01:26):
back to the show.
Speaker 4 (01:27):
Ah, thank you. Yeah, it is just doctor Lance. Though
I'm no longer a professor. I have left that lifestyle behind.
I have stopped. Yeah, transition.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
Does that happen on day one?
Speaker 4 (01:41):
Okay, you have to turn them in when you leave?
Speaker 5 (01:43):
Yeah, right, like day of elbow? Yeah, and sock security
escorts people out. Uh now? Yeah. Rachel.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
In our previous exploration, the thing that inspired us us
to brag about your bona fides and accolades for low
these several years we talked about the story of the Hunley.
Could you give us a brief recap on that?
Speaker 4 (02:13):
Oh, I don't know if I could be brief, I'll try,
all right. So February seventeenth, eighteen sixty four, the Civil
War in America is raging full force. One of the
major sources of the bulk of the conflict is Charleston,
South Carolina. It's being bombed and blockaded on a constant
basis because that's where the war started. So naturally, what
(02:35):
do the Confederates decide to do but use a bunch
of recycled steam boiler parts to handcraft a submarine, as
we all would. This crew of eight personnel take their
hand crank homemade submarine out around eight pm that night,
and they use it to press a two hundred pound
(02:57):
black powder bomb against the side of one of the
Union ships blockading their city. Now that's a bomb about
the seism a beer cug. The bomb does successfully go off,
but then the crew and their vessel disappear until the
modern era. So modern explorers found it first in nineteen seventy,
then again in nineteen ninety five. It was brought up
in two thousand and Once it was raised, the mystery
(03:20):
of why it disappeared in eighteen sixty four after apparently
being victorious and sinking this unionship only deepened. Everyone was
in the sub Nobody was trying to get out, the
hatches were all locked. They didn't try to pump out
any water. Everyone just kind of slumped over at their
battle stations, and it was like, we have achieved our goal.
Farewell Crural world.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
And what somehow Clive Cussler is involved in this whole thing,
the best selling author.
Speaker 4 (03:47):
Yeah, so he's since passed away, but yes, in the
nineties he was very active in funding a lot of
exploratory groups looking for ships. And there was another explorer
named Lispance who had written a bunch of letters saying
he discovered this disappeared Hunley in nineteen seventy and he
Custler's team took that information. As far as I can track,
(04:10):
that's what really happened. He took that information and they
went out with they are much greater resources than they're
much greater cloud, which does matter. In nineteen ninety five,
and they did something really smart. They announced that they
found it, which since then name Cloud Custler is attached,
gets real big press and real big pressure, and they
refuse to tell anyone where until everyone had signed all
(04:32):
the contracts agreeing what would happen to it, so that
everybody was motivated to stop fighting and figure it out
so they could get this artifact back.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
And for anyone who wants to know more about this,
turns out there's an entire book, yeah, which inspired our friendship.
It is called In the Waves, My Quest to Solve
the Mystery of a Civil War Submarine, by none other.
Speaker 4 (04:59):
Than you, our undying friendship.
Speaker 3 (05:04):
Fams.
Speaker 4 (05:05):
Unlike the crew of the alright, no, it's you know
they would have. It was years ago. We can make
dark jokes.
Speaker 2 (05:13):
About it, for sure, and gay if I could, can
I can? I just rattle off some Clive Cussler novel names.
We've got plague Ship, We've got the Saboteurs, We've got
the Romanov Ransom, Polar Shift, the Jungle, The Course of
can Shadow Fire, Ice, Devil's Gate, and the Navigator.
Speaker 3 (05:28):
Sorry, these are just very like.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
I like the bookend with the plague Ship and Navigator
was my favorite.
Speaker 3 (05:36):
It's very metal, I will say.
Speaker 4 (05:37):
Like plague Ship is a better title than in the Waves.
I'm sorry it is.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
Yeah, well in that case, I gotta give credit.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, in that case, then it sounds like, uh,
it sounds like it's time to write a third book,
since you definitely haven't been busy writing a second book
not too long ago called Chamber Divers, the untold story
of the D Day scientists who changed special operations forever. Uh,
(06:12):
this is this is something we've read again, fans, viewers
and our this is the brag. We were talking about
this off air and no'll remember we always like to
say this at parties. We know the world's foremost authority
on underwater explosions.
Speaker 3 (06:27):
It's so niche. I love it.
Speaker 4 (06:30):
I do a lot of physics in my free time. Yeah.
Before we were talking about what your what your hobby
would be if the world suddenly, like everyone disappeared, I
think underwater blast physics might be it like that.
Speaker 1 (06:45):
Perfect perfect We're we're reaching out to a lot of
people with that one what more universal concept.
Speaker 5 (06:53):
Uh so let's maybe let's.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
I almost said, dive into this, so keep it right,
all right, we'll keep it. We'll keep it for the doctor.
So tell us a little bit if you can about
D Day, which was not too long ago. I think
a lot of people in the United States have seen
depictions of.
Speaker 3 (07:16):
It, famously in saving private run part of it.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
Yeah, yeah, so when people are I don't know, I
was thinking about this Noel and Rachel off Air. I
was thinking, how do people who live in Normandy now
feel about D Day?
Speaker 5 (07:37):
As a good question to start with.
Speaker 4 (07:38):
Right, fun fact, I recently had the opportunity to go
to an underwater physiology conference, not in Normandy but close
by and breast and I asked many French people this question. Really, Yes,
they're very honored by the actions taken by the other
allies at D Day, like they they take that ouniverse
(08:00):
thory seriously and they even young people were deeply moved
by that event. And how much the world really came
to France with a specific purpose. It was broader than
France alone, of course, like World War two is bigger
than France alone. But they they very much have the
(08:22):
mentality and attitude that they were rescued and they appreciate
that and the amount of effort and blood that went
into it.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
Now Normandy famously known for their high quality butter that
they produce.
Speaker 4 (08:35):
Yes, they're very sassy about their butter.
Speaker 3 (08:38):
It's really good. Good.
Speaker 4 (08:40):
If you tie and buy on salted butter, you get
kicked out. No.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
I mean the first time I had French butter, it
was like, this is a whole other universe, Like this
is nothing like the butter we get over here.
Speaker 4 (08:52):
Yeah, they're not, they're not proud of nothing like that.
I'll say that it's good. It's good.
Speaker 5 (08:57):
They've got they've got credit work.
Speaker 4 (08:59):
Exactly, They've got the good. So yeah, d Day, June sixth,
nineteen forty four. As an American, i'd found even as
someone who has always been invested in history, specifically World
War Two history, grew up watching tons of documentaries with
my dad. My grandpa's both fought in it, and so
I had never processed it that way. But one day
(09:21):
I just had this weird realization that we as Americans
think of World War Two as Pearl Harbor December seventh,
nineteen forty one, and then a time warp occurs and
it's June sixth, nineteen forty four and we're storming the
beaches of Normandy.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
Sometimes history does be like that, Yeah, sometimes linear.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
And people just explain it by as though their studio
exacts pitching a film right right.
Speaker 4 (09:49):
To be the zed this miracle time warp occurs for
Americans at least, and that's the way we talk about
World War Two. And I started picking away at it
and I was like, why was there at delay? And
as I wrote in The Waves, my first book, there
was one part in there that actually you can see
as the carryover link that became chamber divers So there's
(10:13):
one part in there where in nineteen forty, this group
of British scientists is doing this experiment on themselves that
had relevance totally by coincidence to the hl Henley from
the Civil War. So I used that experiment in The Waves,
and I didn't really at that time connect it, but
(10:34):
because I didn't know yet, I honestly didn't know. One
day I was sitting there thinking about World War Two
as one does, and thinking about carbon dioxide as one does,
and I realized, like, wait a minute, these guys were
in London in nineteen forty doing this weird little test
(10:54):
on themselves with carbon dioxide, and I was like, they
were being bun Then why did they care about carbon
dioxide when bombs are literally falling on you and I
started digging, and that's the story that ended up leading
to chamber divers because it turned out that one little
(11:15):
paper was really all that they'd been allowed to publish
from this series of experiments where the ultimate goal was
the beaches of Normandy. So circling back, that's three and
a half years, or I might have done that math wrong,
don't don't emn me. Between December ninety one June nineteen
forty four, what was happening in that time period was
(11:38):
science because of beach landing, at least on the scale
that took place at Normandy had never happened successfully. So
we think of it, we think of D Day, and
we think of it from the modern perspective as like
this huge event, this major storming, and people died, of course,
and I will never make light of that, but like,
(11:59):
oh oh, overall it was a success. The Allies took
the beaches. We don't realize fully how world shaking that
is because no military had successfully done that before. Every
previous attempt had resulted in absolute massacre on the beaches.
So it took those intervening years to figure out how
(12:21):
to do that. And so that's what I wrote about.
I wrote about this one group of scientists that was
a contributing factor. You know, obviously no one group did
it all by themselves. It was massive, but like what
this group did was a part of it.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
It makes perfect sense, and I love the point we're
bringing up here. At the time, the invasion that we
call D Day today in the West was the largest
of its sort in history and also the.
Speaker 5 (12:55):
One successful one.
Speaker 3 (12:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
We're talking to hundreds of thousands of troops, uh, tens
of thousands of vehicles, a bunch of equipment. Yeah right,
a real cannon fodder type situation.
Speaker 4 (13:09):
Yeah, I mean the engineering problem of hey, get a
tank from a ship to the land. That alone, that's
a challenge. Now you had people shooting at you. It's
a bigger challenge, right, And they did it, but they
did it through this crazy amount of innovation. One of
the previous examples, Winston Churchill during World War One, actually
(13:30):
led an attempted beach landing at Gallipoli and they got
stuck on the beach for a year and they eventually
gave up and left after.
Speaker 5 (13:42):
They have to stay the whole year or the weather nice.
Speaker 4 (13:47):
I mean, they were just there for a year with
no housing, beach shot at it was, Yeah, there's.
Speaker 5 (13:54):
No supply chain logistics exactly.
Speaker 4 (13:57):
It was. It was a terrible military failure. So Churchill
in particular was deeply aware of how big of a
problem this was.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
So what we see then, It's a point we continually
returned to, is that history is often taught to us
as a series of one off, discrete events at best,
maybe a linear pop pop pop, like the acts in
a film. But the the fascinating thing is every day
(14:25):
is still occurring between those big moments, and as you said,
there's so much science involved, there's also a lot of
humanity involved, which we might We have to get to
some of these big characters in our second episode, But
is it fair to say, Rachel that there was a
little bit of mad science involved?
Speaker 4 (14:48):
Understatement? I think these people were I don't want to yeah.
Speaker 5 (14:54):
I don't want okay, but they were like a half
order of.
Speaker 4 (15:00):
They were maybe like one banana what they were doing.
I do think it takes, and this was a group.
I do think it takes a really special person to
be in your home, to have food shortages, to have rationing,
to have bombs falling on you, and to say I
will stay because London is where the lab is, and
(15:21):
I think this is a big enough problem that I
am willing to put my body on the line to
test it. And that's exactly what this group of scientists did.
And they were all actually geneticists, and like, if you
want to save that for the second part, we can
get to that. But that's what I think is really
important is these people were scientists. One of them this
was a huge area of background for him. But the
(15:42):
Rusts were kind of learning it on the fly because
they collectively realized that the Allied militaries knew nothing. They
knew nothing, and so the fact that they had one
expert all of a sudden made this genetics lab in
London the global epicenter for un underwater research, many subs diving,
(16:03):
all of it that they would need in order to
plan these landings.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
Now, also this story was previous to your publication, Chamber Divers.
This story was classified, right, it.
Speaker 4 (16:19):
Was classified for minimum seventy years, so that was the
UK records. Now in that time, there is some nefariousness
some of the government officials involved, like stole some of
the work from these these scientists, and so there was
like added confusion that I started digging out as I
started going through the original records. Now everyone's dead, but
(16:39):
like you know, I have had no a vengeance against
that I needed against people who died, like when I
was in middle school. But so yeah, there was nefarious
happening in that time period. So this minimum of seventy
to eighty years of classification was applied to all the work,
and the UK did a bulk declassification of a lot
(17:03):
of D Day records and World War Two records in
about two thousand and one. So these records started being
declassified in about two thousand and one, and a lot
of the American records I had to submit requests for
to get them declassified. Wait requests, Foyer requests. Yeah, so
(17:24):
those were readily accepted. I'm not going to pretend it
was a huge battle, but what it does show is
that nobody had ever publicly read them. So the fact
that I had to do that they had not already
been cleared for release shows that I was the first
one to go through some of this stuff.
Speaker 3 (17:41):
Nice.
Speaker 4 (17:41):
So yeah, yeah that was an adventure, and that's why
this book also took a long time. Like my first
book came out April twenty twenty There were pandemic issues
with researching this, Like I started researching this and then
the pandemic hit and it became an infinitely longer task
and that I couldn't really even finish until travel started
(18:04):
clearing up because these records were in multiple archives throughout
the world and it was just this whole big thing.
But yeah, that this one came out last year, April
twenty twenty four. I had some personal issues that were
happening around there, which is why it took me a while.
They were jud to you, guys. I'm so sorry. Please
do not take it as a reflection of our.
Speaker 3 (18:22):
Kidding, dying friendship.
Speaker 5 (18:25):
You're a You're a wizard. A wizard is never late.
Speaker 4 (18:28):
Yeah, I went to like a personal cave. But as
I crawled myself out, I was like, oh, no, we're here.
Speaker 3 (18:37):
We've been waiting.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
We've been mentioning you every episode many years. So putting
out the vibes into the universe. Mentioned on the jacket
of your book, this concept of let's see you use
the term maverick hard drinking submarine researchers. Can we unpack
that just a little bit before we get into the
main kind of duo and the love story that I'm
(19:00):
folds sure, wild story.
Speaker 4 (19:02):
All right, where do you want to start? You want
to start with Maverick.
Speaker 5 (19:07):
Bombs.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
The bombs have not maybe yet quite fallen on London,
but uh, there is an ill.
Speaker 3 (19:16):
Wind in the air.
Speaker 4 (19:18):
War is coming.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
Yeah, people got the bad vibe, right, So uh so
now we have, as you said, uh, we've got a
bunch of boffins, right, and what are our boffins to do?
Speaker 4 (19:31):
What to do? Yeah, I'm sorry, I've not heard that word.
Speaker 5 (19:38):
Well, I guess our eggheads are our fellow nerds.
Speaker 4 (19:45):
Okay word, Okay. So war is coming. There's this character
Hitler who's over on the mainland and he's expectorating some
very terrible things. Of of the things that he's just
like spitting on and out about is that he wants
to reclaim previous parts of the German Emperor Empire, the
(20:08):
Holy Roman Empire whatever you know. Terminology is being used
for the fluctuations of territories throughout Europe. So anyway, he's
being very vocal. He's planning to take over some stuff,
and the European countries around him are not thinking that's
so nice. They're like, no, you know, we're not going
(20:30):
to agree to that. So this guy, I don't know.
Speaker 3 (20:32):
This guy seems like a totally good dude.
Speaker 5 (20:34):
Yeah he's not the.
Speaker 4 (20:35):
Best I have notes, but anyway, So by about nineteen
thirty eight, nineteen thirty nine, it's very clear that he
cannot be modified through diplomacy, and so England in particular,
who had been Germany's opponent during World wars World War One,
knows that war is coming for them. So one of
(20:57):
the things that they very smartly do as an island
nation is working on their submarines and their ships and
their ability to have naval warfare. So June first, nineteen
thirty nine, they have this submarine called the HMS Bedus
and this is the bit that was in the waves
that kind of brought me over. HMS Thetis sinks. It's
(21:18):
in very shallow water. Literally at the for the first
few hours, the stern of the submarine is sticking up
out of the water. They can see it, they can
touch it, they can send rast to it, but they
can't get out the one hundred and three people crammed inside.
Eventually it does kind of reshift the stern sinks below,
but even then it's in really shallow water. The people
(21:39):
inside have underwater breathing apparatus, they should be able to
get out. Only four make it, and those four are
the best word I can come up with is bedraggled,
like they are in rough shape. They are plucked off
the surface of the ocean. One of them is actually
(22:02):
the captain of the submarine, which is contrary to a
lot of practice about the captain going last. But what
had happened was the crew inside was really scared, and
so he went early to be like, I will do this,
I will show you it's safe. So because of that,
we know a little bit about what's happening inside the submarine,
we know a little bit about the air that they
were breathing, how these underwater breathing apparatuses work. And to
(22:25):
shorten a lot of bureaucracy, basically, the Royal Navy realizes
that they've built submarines, and they've built escape apparatuses, and
they haven't tested them at all in that application. So
they've got all these things. This is their plan A
and it is their only plan for getting out of submarines.
(22:47):
And they realized like, oh damn, we don't actually know
if this will work or if it will actually kill
you as you try to use it.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
Oh, because okay, I see it's a fatal version of
leedle horse water because you can get the sub close
to the shore, but if you can't unpack this up exactly, Okay.
Speaker 4 (23:06):
It's like they've led the horse the water, but they
didn't check to make sure the water wasn't poisoned first,
So the right just poison horses. So anyway, this one
guy living in London, he grew up in diving. His
name is John Burdon Sanderson Healthinge. He went by JBS,
(23:27):
so his first three initials. He grew up in diving
because his dad is this like or his dad was
this world famous physiology diving researcher. His dad was the
one that solved how to come up slowly enough so
that you didn't get the bends decompression sickness. So his
dad was really famous. But his dad just died the
(23:48):
year before. So now the Royal Navy has nobody and
they kind of start scrambling about. So this guy JBS,
he'd grown up in this environment. They had a gas
chamber in their home that his dad would test stuff
on his children, including TBS and JBS's sister, Naomi, and
(24:10):
the kids were like part of the experiments. They were
helping run the experiments. Naomi was like in charge of
CPR if like a test, so too cassed out. Yeah,
and she was like twelve at the time, right, So
they they know this because it's been part of their upbringing.
So JBS really steps up. He gets a but of
his bunch of his buddies. JBS has been through two
(24:31):
wars before, he's been through World War One, he's volunteered
in the Spanish Civil War, and he gets a bunch
of his veteran buddies and they're like, we're gonna show
you what happens when you try to use these because
we're going to test it on ourselves in a safe,
controlled environment. So that's where I think the Maverick part
really comes in is at the beginning, there was nobody
even really asking these people for help. They just kind
(24:53):
of were like, I did an experiment and I got
the answer.
Speaker 3 (24:57):
And this is desperate time.
Speaker 4 (24:59):
Yes, I mean he was right. Like he was a
great scientist. He was a professor at University College London
and that's where he ran a genetics lab and that's
what he'd been studying, but because of his upbringing he
knew how to do dive research.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
Did you say University College London? Has always struck me
as a little redundant.
Speaker 4 (25:16):
He done that out, doesn't it? But like, so him
and his buddies do this experiment, they get these results,
and there's this dramatic scene where JBS is literally on
the stand during the Royal Navy inquiry to figure out
who to blame for this accident. And he got out
of the tamber at something like three or four am
(25:37):
that day and they're like, well, how much how much
would we need to manage the carbon dioxide in the
sub in order for people to survive? And he does
the math on the stand, being like this will take
me a few extrare minutes to still have a migraine
from these experiments like the night. So I'm not going
(25:57):
to do math while people are watching me do the math.
Like I need to be kind of like in my
office with a blanket. It's like a little hoodie and
you know, scribbling away and then you're a math yeah,
and then I'm great at it. I will Sam Crackerjacket
private math, but like in a court scene of real action,
supervised math. Uh, seems seems harder. So from that moment on,
(26:20):
he and his lab do become the go to for
underwater physiology questions. But what's even wilder is the allies
in general know so little about surviving underwater that they
don't even really know what to ask them to study it.
And so yeah, they kind of like he works with them.
(26:44):
They make a little shopping list of questions. And if
you read this list, it's wild because it is it
is everything. It is like how much oxygen is too
much oxygen? How much oxygen is not enough oxygen?
Speaker 5 (26:58):
Do people have guilt? Yeah, because we could save a
lot of bit of money.
Speaker 4 (27:02):
What about carbonaxid? It is literally like everything that you
need to survive as a human or need to avoid
to avoid death. And they're just like, can you work
on it?
Speaker 1 (27:16):
So did they ask questions about not death but depth?
Speaker 4 (27:21):
They did, Yeah, so that was on their list. They
still had questions about coming up from depth. So you
got to realize too at this point diving diving is
still hard hat stuff. So we're talking Cuba gooding, junior
Men of Honor. You need a giant ship. That is
what diving is as of nineteen thirty eight.
Speaker 2 (27:40):
And we're talking like diving bell situations, like the giant
helmet's all of that.
Speaker 4 (27:44):
Yeah, diving bell is like a thing that the people
go in, so you're kind of inside of it. But yeah,
that or a giant helmet you're walking on the bottom.
But either way, we now have this island country probably
going to work with mainland Europe got people in submarines.
There's not a good way to have this surface applied setup.
(28:08):
And they also realized, like in the submarines themselves, they
don't really know how to keep people alive in them.
They've kind of just been building them and helping for
the best, like don't run the diesel engine while you're underwater.
Like that's about it in terms of how to keep
people alive in a submarine.
Speaker 1 (28:26):
At that time, Can we ask real quick, Rachel at
this point, Okay, we've figured out part of the technology,
we haven't figured out how to keep people reliably alive
(28:46):
with this technology.
Speaker 5 (28:49):
What was the reputation of.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
The service members who might volunteer to hop on us
up if they were figuring this out? I mean, what
were the fatality rates? This feels very much like a
risky one way party.
Speaker 4 (29:06):
Yeah. So even now, if you talk to submariners, the
attitude amongst that community is very much that if something
happens to the sub they're going down, and they seem
to have like a weird peace with it, which I
understand from a personal survival standpoint, that's probably what you
(29:29):
got to do in order to go to work in
the morning. So I fully support that. But as a scientist,
I'm like, let me let me work on this for you.
Let me be back here working on that. But yeah,
at the same time, World War One has just happened.
There are all these German wolf packs. The wolf packs
have had crazy success, but we've seen the sinkings occur
in World War One and so World War Two. The submariners,
(29:51):
at least as far as I can tell, it is
very much their mentality that they go out there assuming
there's a good chance this is a one way trip,
accepting that fate and doing what they can for their
country anyway, which is pretty bleak, and I think we
owe them better personally, Like I think, yeah.
Speaker 5 (30:13):
I agreed with that.
Speaker 1 (30:14):
You know, it calls to mind the later stories about
helicopter pilots in Southeast Asian conflicts. In the in the
seventies who just made their peace.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
I mean, I can't help but see parallels with like
early space travel, like it, just in terms of the
level of unknown, the level of risk, the level of
like is this technology good enough?
Speaker 4 (30:39):
Yeah. One of the most common questions I get about
the HL Henley that's our civil wars up is do
you think they knew they were going to die? And
I typically answer that yes, but not necessarily in the
sub so, I think that when you have a time
of war, you have people who are exposed to so
(31:02):
much that they become willing to do whatever they can
to help end it and to help defend their comrades
in arms. And I think those become two really major goals,
and with that becomes a level of acceptance about the
risk because there's so much that they can't control.
Speaker 3 (31:25):
I have a.
Speaker 4 (31:26):
Buddy, he's become a buddy through writing. So if you
don't mind, can I give his like a book a
shout he doesn't please?
Speaker 1 (31:33):
Do we also like to know his social Security number,
a social media Yeah.
Speaker 4 (31:40):
I don't know his handles off hand, but his name
is Casey Oloff Tellison. That's kay A C. Why And
he wrote just an absolutely stunning book called Freaks of
a Feather and that's his memoir as an active duty
service member in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he talks about
the same thing. So that's why I quote him frequently.
He has a particular passage in there where he talks
(32:02):
about that same mentality of being like, I can't control
if I'll die today. I'm just going to go out
and do what I can. So it is essentially what
it came down.
Speaker 3 (32:11):
To before the grace of God and all of that.
Speaker 1 (32:13):
Yeah, yeah, Freaks of a Feather that it's.
Speaker 3 (32:16):
A great title. By night, it's instantly arresting. I must
know more doing it now.
Speaker 1 (32:21):
And this is this I think speaks to you know,
the commonality, the human thread that we see throughout so much,
so much of human conflict. Right there are people who
decide that, you know, what I'm going to do this
morning may likely be a one way trip, but I
(32:42):
have to do it. And then I'm glad we spent
some time on the perspective of these early submariners, right
who know the technology is it there? Can you imagine
the meeting where you meet your sea and they start
telling you the idea of a submarine and then you say, yeah,
(33:04):
so also, yeah, quick question here in the back, first day,
how do we get out?
Speaker 2 (33:09):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, fine, it's fine.
Speaker 4 (33:15):
Yeah, but after the Thetis. So that was June nineteen
thirty eight, so obviously work comes for England faster than
it does for America by nineteen forty there in the blitz, right,
so they very quickly start planning for that exactly because
the Thetis event really shook the nation. You know, when
they brought the they recovered the submarine, they brought the
bodies out, and they put big sheets up to try
(33:38):
to block it. But like still everybody there knew what
was happening, and so there are oral histories of like
people from that coastal town just being like we just
sat there and watched, like we couldn't see everything, but
we felt like someone needed to observe this moment. And yeah,
it really shook the maritime community in the Royal Navy,
and so they immediately start building buring escape practice towers
(34:02):
and they start working with these breathing apparatuses and doing
tests on these breathing apparatuses which were a great concept
but essentially had just been taken from mining like coal,
coal mining, copper mining in the air, you have a
lot fewer problems to do with. So they had never
been fully tested at depth underwater, and it was that
(34:24):
added pressure that it turned out was screwing everybody up.
Speaker 1 (34:28):
We were saying breathing apparatuses that hopefully, No, I'm not
the only person in the crowd tonight who's picturing something
vaguely canvas or steam punky. Can you tell us a
little bit about what these breathing apparatuses looked like.
Speaker 2 (34:42):
I'm also picturing Frank booth from blue Velvet, kind of
like with like desperately from.
Speaker 4 (34:48):
Maybe go as steam punk as you can possibly imagine.
So my guess this is like before widespread plastic, right,
So the containers are made up but aluminum. They're painted black,
they're like corrugated, so it's corrugated metal containers. They've got
corrugated rubber hoses, they've got different types of breathing bags.
(35:10):
So this is before scuba. Jacques Cousteau was working in
Nazi occupied France, so the way these different groups went
about it were all they all iterated toward the same
end result, but they were all different. So they have
these breathing bags, so you breathe into the bag and
then it would get cycled through this canister. It would
(35:30):
add more oxygen, and then you would breathe that kind
of refreshed air back in. So when you're breathing, you
need oxygen at the right level, and you need to
get rid of carbon dioxide. So normally we do that
by just exchanging air with the world around us. The
trees handle the carbon dioxide part where that you tried
to yeah, thank you trees, and then there's just enough
(35:53):
air that it's not really a problem that needs active processing.
But when you get into smaller and smaller space, that's
why you don't want to breathe out of a plastic bag.
You're gonna run down the oxygen, you're gonna produce more
carbon dioxide. There's all of a sudden, no exchange happening.
So they were essentially breathing into canvas or leather bags,
(36:16):
but they were processing it with these canisters that took
out the carbon dioxide and oxygen bottles that added more
oxygen in.
Speaker 1 (36:24):
Okay, And it sounds like you have to have a
specific let's call it a don't panic level of breathing
frequency right, if you breathe too fast, if you're huffing
in a hurry, would that mess up the apparatus?
Speaker 4 (36:40):
Yeah, Oh my gosh, great question, Ben, Get out of
my brain. Yeah. So we've literally been studying this concept
since so that was a big part of my job
as a scientist. Is still and we've made advances. I
don't want to say that we haven't like but there
have been huge leaps and bounds. But these devices still exist.
So if you look out, if you look at rebreathers,
(37:01):
if you google the word rebreathers, you'll see the modern version.
So they're made with more modern materials. You're gonna deal
with anidized metals, and you're going to deal with plastics,
and you've got like plastic lined woven fabrics and stuff
for the bags. Plastic made those a lot easier. They're
now controlled with computers, but you still run into the
(37:22):
same problems that the human body is hard to modify
and it has very strict rules about breathing. Breathing is
the thing that will kill you first. In any scenario.
You get three minutes without oxygen, three days without water,
and three weeks without food, So you gotta pay attention
(37:43):
to the breathing far and away. Anytime you're going into
an environment where we don't naturally live as like caveman
style human beings, surviving underwater is a really big one.
So as soon as they start discovering that and they
realize how little they know, and they realize like this
war is coming, mainly Europe, they're going to have to
(38:03):
develop their underwater technology a lot more. So D Day
becomes the ultimate target. It starts with the thetis, It
starts with these breathing apparatuses. They progress and accumulate from there.
If they start building smaller submarines, like I said, that's
the submarine version of putting your head in a plastic bag.
So that takes work. They need to be able to
swim underwater on purpose. That takes work. And yeah, if
(38:28):
you start breathing too fast, you can owe what's called
overbreathing your system, like you start to hyperventilate, and it's
the passageways may not be big enough, and it may
not be scrubbing carbon dioxide at enough rate, and all
of that stuff requires testing so that it happens first
(38:48):
in a lab where we can resuscitate people as opposed
to while they're being shot at on a Nazi occupied be.
Speaker 5 (38:57):
This is the perfect segue to episode two.
Speaker 4 (39:01):
A cliffhanger too, Yeah, cliffhanger like quant do Hawk sorry
do howk is one of the sites at the beaches
of Normandy and it's this straight up vertical cliff and
there was a big German armament at the top and
(39:21):
so some of the US Army rangers were signed the
task of scaling this vertical cliff as part of the
early assaults on D Day. So you can still go
see it. You can stand to the top. You can't
really go to the base as a public member of
the public, but like, it is an oppressive feat and yes,
so they developed a lot of like grappling hook and
rock climbing stuff to do that particular thing and take
(39:43):
out that battery.
Speaker 1 (39:45):
It's it's fascinating to fascinating in a new small part
heartbreaking how much technological innovation comes from conflict, comes from war,
you know, and how much amazing it's also departs that
are now uh Rachel, As we reached the end of
(40:05):
the first part of our two part series on Chamber
Divers and D Day, we do have to confess to
you that we have we have a selfish ulterior motive.
Noel and I are going on a.
Speaker 5 (40:21):
Cruise very soon in October. We've never been on.
Speaker 3 (40:26):
I've never been at sea.
Speaker 1 (40:28):
Yeah, I've not out a cruise like so this is
new territory. So that's why we're asking you somewhat oddly
focused questions about what can go wrong on the water praze.
Speaker 3 (40:41):
It's gonna be fine. Say, it's gonna be fine.
Speaker 4 (40:43):
Fine if you're on the surface and you're breathing. There's
so many problems you've already solved.
Speaker 3 (40:50):
Okay, that's that's the way to look.
Speaker 4 (40:53):
Solve so many problems. You guys are going to be great.
And also like the more you eat, the more insolution
you have against another major problem that we will see
in Normandy, which is hypothermia.
Speaker 2 (41:07):
I was gonna say, we are actually going to do
a podcast about the Bermuda Triangle from the.
Speaker 3 (41:13):
Bermuda to try what could go wrong. We're not tempting faith.
Speaker 4 (41:18):
If they're technology clitches, I'm going to suspect they were
intentional on your part. I'm just sating you're giving.
Speaker 3 (41:25):
A lot of credit here, but I appreciate that.
Speaker 5 (41:28):
Hold the periscope.
Speaker 1 (41:30):
We are making this, as we said, a purposeful two parter,
and we're excited to see how much deeper this story goes.
Speaker 3 (41:40):
But deeper. Hold the periscope, Ben, You're on fire.
Speaker 5 (41:44):
Thank you.
Speaker 3 (41:45):
Better dunk you into some some water.
Speaker 5 (41:47):
Thank you. So reaching a new level of depth. Terrible puns.
Speaker 1 (41:52):
Yeah, some people would say they're subpart look Lord, all right,
all right, so big, big thanks to our returning guest
doctor Rachel Big Spinach, Lance and Noel. Just the energy
and the knowledge here. I am having such a time,
the passion.
Speaker 3 (42:10):
She's a wonderful person.
Speaker 2 (42:11):
She's an expert in her very, very niche and delightful field.
And we're so grateful that she she came to hang
out with us for not one, but two episodes.
Speaker 1 (42:20):
And here's a mark of character for doctor Lance. We
try spoiler at the end of our second episode. We
try to get her to say something bad about Jonathan
Strickland aka the Quist, and I suspect she was.
Speaker 3 (42:35):
Just too nice to do so she won't do it.
Speaker 1 (42:37):
Big thanks to our super producer, mister Max Williams. Big
things to Alex Williams who composed this track.
Speaker 3 (42:42):
Who else?
Speaker 5 (42:43):
Who else?
Speaker 2 (42:44):
Oh jeez, Yeah, Christophraciotis needs, Jeff Coates here in spirit,
Jonathan Strickland the quister, A j Bahamas, Jacobs the Puzzler,
and of.
Speaker 3 (42:52):
Course Rachel Big Spinish Lands. How can we not thank.
Speaker 1 (42:54):
Her again as we always do, and join us later
this week when we're bad with more from Rachel.
Speaker 3 (43:01):
We'll see you next time, folks.
Speaker 2 (43:09):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
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