Hour 2: Bad Omens

Bad omens at the river. Problems with the invasion months before the snow starts to fall. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is a Jesse Kelly Show. It is the Jesse
Kelly Show. Another hour of the Jesse Kelly Show on
a magnificent Tuesday. I'm so excited because we are about
to do part Deuce Deuce, do part do whatever, the

(00:33):
second part of our Napoleon Invasion of Russia, disastrous Invasion
to Russia. I hope to try to finish today. I
don't want to drag this on all week, as I've
done it before. I can't promise that though. If you
missed part one, A lot of preliminary stuff got set
up last night. iHeart Spotify. iTunes is where you can

(00:54):
go download the podcast hour two of last night. Right
after Medal of Honor, we started in on the history.
If you are sitting around waiting for politics, you're have
to wait awhile, we'll be back to that in about
an hour. Next hour, we'll get back to politics and
talk about them foreigners and Iran updates and someone got
eaten by a crocodile and so many other things. But

(01:16):
that is for another time. Thirty second recap on last night,
Napoleon slapping around every country in Europe has pretty much
conquered most of continental Europe. He's still in a bad
war in Spain and things like that, but set that aside.
Napoleon also brought Russia to heal. Napoleon's real enemy was Britain.

(01:39):
After he brought everybody to heal, he told them all,
we have now a continental system. You are not allowed
to trade with Britain, trade with each other. That's fine,
we are going to starve Britain to death. Alexander he
is bizar, the king of Russia. Alexander admired Napoleon. Love

(02:02):
might be a strong way to put it. They express
their adoration for each other several times in writings. But
he also had to run an empire. He also had
to run Russia, and not trading with Britain was destroying
the Russian economy. You can be the most powerful czar

(02:23):
in the world. If prices get too high, if people
can't afford things, inflation and everything else, you are not
going to be a czar for very long. They decide
in eighteen ten, all right, let's get it on. Napoleon
is tired of Alexander secretly trading with Britain. Alexander feels

(02:47):
like he has to. Napoleon feels like he's being insubordinate.
Napoleon is going to raise the largest army in his
mind that has ever existed, and he's going to send
that army into Russia. By the way, I realized I
misspoke on something last night. Someone emailed in, and I
feel like an idiot. Before Napoleon invaded Russia, Charles King,

(03:11):
Charles of Sweden invaded Russia, and Peter the Great was
the Russian king and he stopped it. But really, the
Russian winter did a lot of that work. Last night,
I made it sound like I sai. It's not that
I made it sound like I said it as if
Peter the Great was the one doing the invading. It's
just me being stupid and misspeaking. Peter the Great was
the one fighting off the invasion. Okay, it was Charles
who did the invading, So please please remember even I'm

(03:35):
not perfect. I know that shocked. What Chris, I know
that's shocking, all right. So back to where we're at now.
Napoleon's army, he is gathering them from all these countries.
He has conquered the Italys, the Germans, everywhere else, and
they are marching towards the Russian border to prepare for
an invasion. Now we're gonna come back to them. We

(03:55):
touched on them a little bit last night because I
need to shift gears. You're in talk about Russia and
what the state of affair is there with their leadership,
with their army. What was it like? So I want
you to imagine this. I want you to imagine you

(04:16):
get a letter. You're in a little Russian village, You've
got a son, he's eighteen years old. You get a
letter dropped off of the house, and that letter says
your son is now forced to join the military. What
would prompt somebody to immediately began weeping and preparing a

(04:43):
funeral service? In Russia at this time, It's just one
of the saddest things in the world when you consider
all these people were real people, with moms, brothers, sisters,
dad's girlfriends. If you got conscripted into the Russian military,

(05:05):
you served for twenty five years. Twenty five years. Do
you know the percentage of Russian conscripts who ever returned
home alive? Ten When I mentioned the funeral service, I
hope you don't think I was being tongue in cheek.

(05:27):
If your son, if someone in the community got conscripted
they would essentially have a celebration of life, a funeral
service for him as he left, because the expectation was
you will never see him again. Twenty five years in
the Russian military, he's gonna die. He's going to die somewhere.

(05:52):
This is goodbye, raising your boy to eighteen. You get
a letter in the mail and he's gone forever. Now
that's part of the Russian system. There are other parts
we have to discuss here. Remember last night when we
were talking about, Oh, there's no such thing, never been
any such thing as an all powerful king. Kings always

(06:13):
have other people who have power in their countries, generals
or lords or dukes or whatever. I mean, all people,
all kinds of different titles that may mean everything to
you or nothing to you, but it meant a whole
lot back then. Alexander, Yes he is the czar, he's
the big cheese and Russia, but he has all kinds
of lords with different motivations and different things they are

(06:35):
concerned about as well. Now, these kinds of systems where
you have a monarchy, oftentimes the military is plagued with ineptitude,
and it is plagued with ineptitude because surprise, surprise, the
choicest positions in the officer corps, the leadership positions. Who

(06:57):
do you think they go to. Do you think they
go to that prize recruit who showed promise in boot camp? Nope,
it's the son of this lord, or it's this lord
or the son in law of this lord. There's a
real nepotism system there. And as king, by the way,
you really don't have the luxury of not doing that

(07:19):
when this super important lord who kind of runs this
certain area comes to you and says, hey, this third
army over here, I've got a son. I mean, he's
twenty two. It's kind of a moron, but I want
him to be in charge of that looks good on
the resume. I want to fancy uniform, all kinds of medals,

(07:41):
I want a ceremony, and mister Tzar kind of needs
you to make that happen for me. It happened. Problem
with that, of course, is you get a mixed bag
of people in leadership. I'm not going to tell you,
because I did so much on this that all the

(08:01):
Russian generals were bad. I'm not saying that at all.
They had some guys in there that look very, very capable.
Some other guys look like, well, maybe that one wasn't
his fault. He got kind of put in a bad situation.
But they also had a lot of donkeys in there.
They had a lot of goobers in there that should
not have been leading troops at all. And I just

(08:22):
described who the troops are. These are conscripts who are
going off to die. Surprise, surprise, it's Russia. The treatment
is pretty brutal for the troops. Not the best conditions
in the world. I will say this for the Russians though,
and you can see evidence of this during this little

(08:44):
invasion little during this massive invasion Napoleon is about to launch,
they are quite disciplined. After they got whipped the last
time by Napoleon, they did somewhat go back to the
drawing board and say, hey, we got to get better
at this, we got to get better at that. Look,
you'll get executed for cowardice and a heartbeat. In the

(09:06):
Russian military, it's very vicious, very rigid, and so it's
very much the Russian system. There is another part of
the Russian system that is going to come into play here.
And if you are a Russian listening to the sound
of my voice, Chris, We've got to have some Russians
out there, right. If you're a Russian who loves Russia
and the Russian history, you will love these guys. If

(09:31):
you are somebody who maybe you're French, probably not high
up on your list. Cossacks cost secks with a C.
I'm not going to go into all the details of
Cossacks because it's not important. But what you should know
is these are cavalry troops. These are guys on horseback,

(09:55):
very very brave, very very capable troops. If you want
some shock troops to get in and get out, get in,
hit something, steal something, turn around, get out, do some
scouting for you, harassing for you. The Cossacks were on
point and completely utterly ruthless in every possible way. You

(10:18):
don't want to get captured by them. We'll get to
that in just a little bit. We'll be back fighting
for your freedom every day the Jesse Kelly Show. It
is the Jesse Kelly Show on a wonderful Tuesday. Member,
you can email us Jesse at Jesse Kellyshow dot com

(10:39):
and I will get back to some more of those
in the final hour of the show tonight. Back to
Napoleon's invasion of Russia Part two. So I mentioned kind
of the Russian structure, their conscripts, their leadership. Now let's
talk a little bit about Russia's strategy. When we look
at historic military campaigns, we simplify them. We all do this.

(11:06):
We have to because it's too complicated, and we only
know kind of headlines or a chapter. We know what
we read or what we see or something like that.
So the Russian the Russian strategy for Napoleon's coming invasion,
we know now in hindsight that there was kind of

(11:26):
this organized retreat. We'll put it that way, not to
give the game away. We'll get to that in a
little bit. We kind of know that now. And so
it's common for people to think, well, Russia just decided
we'll just retreat. Let the land fight for us, let
the winter fight for us. That's what we'll do. It's

(11:47):
not at all that simple, not at all. I mentioned
all those lords and powerful people before. Okay, just retreat. Okay,
So you you want me to take my house, my mansion,
all my farmers fields, and you not only want me

(12:08):
to abandon them, you want me to light them on
fire on the way out and destroy not just my
life's work. Remember how so much of this part of
the world worked, and so much of history worked. That's
going to belong to your children. That's the inheritance of
your children. That stuff will likely be in your family,
in your mind for hundreds of years. You want me

(12:31):
just to leave and light it on fire. This was
highly controversial inside the Russian military. What to do, when
to do it, where to do it, all kinds of
generals and debates and know and this is right now,

(12:52):
we know it as some side of some sort of
genius strategic retreat. It was hot debated at the time,
and not only before the war. Was this strategy hotly
debated the entire time, which we'll get to during the war,
this strategy was hotly debated. Now, let's leave Russia and

(13:14):
let's get back to Napoleon, because I touched on this
last night. He is again, he's calling in troops from
all these countries he has conquered, and this is creating
huge problems for Napoleon already that will end up coming
back to haunt him. I already talked about the distances
last night, what it takes to supply these troops and

(13:35):
Napoleon really was a logistical genius. Napoleon. Napoleon's the one
who coined that phrase an army runs on his stomach.
For instance, previously, if the French army was out on campaign,
they had essentially whole armies of support personnel who would
be at where the troops were going to stop for

(13:56):
the night, and already had rooms reserved for them, and
wine and food set aside to hand to every trooper
who walked into town. A hyper hyper level of organization.
Napoleon was masterful at it, making sure his men ate,
their horses, ate, they had all the supplies they need,

(14:18):
medical supplies. He was masterful at logistics. But at this
time there was something going on in Europe, a bunch
of different things going on. But they weren't having the
best crop that year. Napoleon, it doesn't sound like much, right,
Who even wants to talk about that? What are we
going to talk about? Wheat boring. It's a really big

(14:40):
deal when you not only have to feed the population
that's going to remain, you have to feed an army
of six hundred thousand men. Before they reached the Russian border,
there are problems of rape and murder, armies walking through

(15:02):
friendly territory. They are walking into villages, they're walking into homes.
They're killing and pillaging innocent people already on the way.
I brought that up because I want you to think
about this. We haven't even crossed the Nieman River yet,
but that's the Russian River. We get to that in
a moment. We have not even crossed the Russian River yet.

(15:25):
We have not heard a single shot fired in anger yet,
and already this army is going hungry. Men are deserting,
They are committing atrocities in friendly territory, in friendly territory.
And this is before a single snowflake falls. That's months away,

(15:47):
before a single snowflake falls. And then something else happens
that we're going to touch on over and over and
over and over again. What happens to human beings when
they are not enough nutrition, when they are not getting calories.
What happens. It's not just that you lose weight. People

(16:07):
get sick. Your body has to have nutrition, It has
to have calories to fuel your immune system to fight
off all the various diseases. When you start getting sick,
your body is not strong enough. We already have men
who are falling by the wayside, drinking bad water. They

(16:30):
have the uh they they're making messis in their pants.
I'll put it that way. They're making messy. That's exactly right, Chris.
I'm not going to say that word on the air.
It starts with a D. All right. They got the
splatters here, all right, what Chris? I didn't want to
say the bad word on the air. They got splatters. Eventually, though,

(16:52):
they do get themselves squared away as they possibly can be,
and it's time to cross the Nieman River and go
to war with Rush. Next.

Speaker 2 (17:02):
Feeling a little stocky, follow like and subscribe on social
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Speaker 1 (17:09):
It is The Jesse Kelly Show on a Wonderful Tuesday.
A reminder, if you miss any part of the show,
you can download the whole thing on iHeart, Spotify iTunes. Now.
Napoleon has finally got his gigantic army onto the Russian border.
I brought this up last night. We bring it up again.

(17:30):
I don't want to make this sound simple, because it
gets simple in my mind and maybe it gets simple
in your mind. When I picture the Grand Army on
the Russian border, I picture one big army gathered in
one big area getting ready to cross over into Russia.
Napoleon has done a moron. You can't supply an army

(17:52):
like that. Remember, they have to eat. Horses have to eat,
the men have to eat. Russia's a huge place with
multiple different cities. They are spread along the Russian border
in multiple different armies, depending on how you want to
define an army. I've heard three, I've heard five. But

(18:12):
then it looks like this group splits up. Just know
that it's not one mass of six hundred thousand men
that arrived at the Russian border. Also know this. By
the time we're kicking off now, as I tried to
touch on before, it's no longer six hundred thousand men.
What has been whittled away? I read? I read ten

(18:35):
different things. I don't even want to give you a number.
Maybe we call it ten percent, maybe we call it twenty.
But all of the men are no longer there. Some
of the ones who are there, they're in a bad
state already. However, Napoleon is pushing forward. Now, let's pause
for a moment, because we have all kinds of writings

(18:57):
and analysis and things like that to discuss. Why continue
to push forward? Obviously, this is going to be a disaster, right, Obviously,
you can't feed your troops already, You've got desertions, people
are getting sick, your allies are unhappy. Why not just stop? Well,

(19:20):
this is a talk we've had before, and it applies
to us today, and it applies to every time in history.
No matter how powerful you are as a leader, when
you get the gears of war churning, it has a
momentum to it that even the most powerful man on

(19:40):
the planet oftentimes doesn't have the power to stop two
years of preparation to gather all these men in one
place with the intention of attacking Russia. Even Napoleon probably
cannot stand in front of his army and say, you know,

(20:03):
this was a bad idea. We're going home. Even if
he had the actual power to do so, could he
afford that kind of a loss of reputation Napoleon got
to the border of Russia, and then how would they
sell it? Chicken? Now, yes, you're too scared. There are

(20:24):
personal and political realities of every military campaign, as we've
discussed over and over again. By now, yes, things are
looking rough, but Napoleon can't put the brakes on this
bad boy, it's moving forward no matter what. And there's
another part of this. What's it say in the Good

(20:45):
book Pride Goeth before what the Fall? Look at it
from Napoleon's perspective, Yeah, okay, my men are a little
down and out. They're a little hungry, having some medical problems.
I understand all the problems, but I'm also Napoleon. Every
time I've squared up against the large European army, every

(21:08):
time to this point in time, for the most part,
I have whipped the living crap out of all of them.
I am too smart, I am too fast. They don't
know how to deal with somebody like me. Yeah, it's
been rough until now, but I have a plan, and
my plan is this. I am going to cross the

(21:29):
Nieman River. Don't worry about remembering the name of the river,
just no, that's the border, right. I am going to
cross the Neman River, and I am going to bring
my forces, which are numerous, to bear against the largest
Russian force I can find. I am going to smash
it to bits. And once I smash it to bits,
then Czar Alexander will have no choice but to sue

(21:53):
for peace. After I annihilate his army. After all, I
far out number him. I have so many men. And
again he didn't have the hindsight we have. If you
look at Napoleon's resume up to this time, you kind
of have to understand the arrogance. Why wouldn't he think

(22:14):
that that's what has happened every other time they get
to the Nieman River. There is a story, I guess
I have to believe it. I read it in two
different books, so I guess I have to believe it.
That Napoleon rides off at the Nieman River with a
bunch of his men and he's just scouting. He's scouting around.

(22:36):
Where do we want to cross? You know, crossing a
river is not an easy thing, certainly crossing with a
big army, that's not an easy thing at all. Where
do we want to cross? What are we looking at? Here?
He's riding with his men, and apparently a rabbit gets scared.
He jumps, a rabbit runs out in front of his horse.
His horse slams on the brakes. Napoleon keeps going. Napoleon

(23:02):
gets launched off of his horse. Now he's still a
relatively young man at this time. When you're that age,
you can survive something like that. Just fine, he's not injured.
He actually hops right up. Now this story doesn't sound
like anything, probably to you or me. As the story goes,
and I heard this consistently, that was viewed by the

(23:23):
men with him as a terrible omen for what was
to come. And one of them flat out told Napoleon
we should not cross that river. This is now a
bad idea, as a bad idea. But as I just
pointed out over and over again, he's Napoleon and he's
going They crossed the Neman River, and they think to themselves, well,

(23:50):
now we're here. We know Alexander's been building troops up
for a couple of years the same way we have.
Surely we're about to run into him. But Alexander gives
the order. Many of his generals are very reluctant to
follow it, but they do as they're told. You know,
if you don't do that kind of thing in Russia,
you do get shot for it. And they pull back.

(24:14):
Napoleon is frustrated. But Napoleon looks at his men who
are already tired. Remember some of these men have already
marched twelve hundred miles before they got to Russia without
a car twelve hundred miles. Napoleon, now he'd I don't
mean physically whip, but he starts to spur his army on.

(24:39):
He is demanding his men move at breakneck speed because
he views that as his chance to win this war.
If they move fast enough, they will catch a big
Russian army. If they catch a big Russian army, they
will be able to wipe out, wipe out the Russian
army and win. That's the idea. But as many general

(25:02):
throughout history is found, men do not exist on paper.
Men do not exist on that map you keep in
your general's tent. Men are flesh and blood, human beings.
Men have to have rest, and they have to have food.
Men have to have calories. Men, even the strongest men

(25:24):
on the planet, they will eventually run out of gas
if they don't have these things. Napoleon's army is simply
not physically strong enough at this time to push hard
enough and find that Russian army fast, and there's something
else working against them. Everyone knows about the Russian winter.

(25:44):
Everyone knows that we'll get to that. That's going to
be part of the story. Obviously, what a lot of
people don't discuss what Hitler have discovered later on A
Napoleon is discovering now is the Russian summer. It's freaking
hot and there's not enough water. Do you know how
much water you need for six hundred thousand men marching

(26:06):
twenty miles a day. It's a lot. We'll continue in
a moment. We'll be back.

Speaker 2 (26:14):
Feeling a little stocky, follow like and subscribe on social
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Speaker 1 (26:20):
It is the Jesse Kelly Show on a Wonderful Tuesday. Member,
you can email us Jesse at Jesse kellyshow dot com.
Jewish producer Chris has been mulling all this over during
the break and he just asked me as we were
coming back, do I think it's possible for Russia to
be invaded and conquered. I'll tell you what, Chris, I

(26:44):
want you to hang on to that question whenever we
finish this little history tale, which is clearly not going
to be today. Whenever we finish it, we'll revisit it
and we'll have a little discussion about what do I
think about that. Before we get to any of that,
we have to continue. As I mentioned, Napoleon is frustrated
there hasn't been a big battle. But I mentioned there

(27:08):
was dissension in the Russian ranks about this strategy. There
was enough dissension that Alexander he felt as if he
had to give the Russian troops the opportunity now and
then to cross swords with Napoleon. Otherwise you risk them
losing all their morale. Men men go to war. They

(27:31):
want valor, they want glory. They felt like cowards. You
run the risk of sapping all the juice out of
the troops if you just retreat all the time. Now
there's something. It's not enormous, but I'm going to bring
up a couple names of battles because in case you're

(27:52):
interested or geeking out on this and you want more details,
you can go look these up. There's the Battle of
Vidabesque is the best way I can describe it. Vitebesque
starts with a ved you'll figure it out. What is it.
It wasn't actually a huge Titanic struggle. The Russians decided, hey,
let's cross swords with these people. They would get into

(28:15):
a tussle with Napoleon. They would seem to find out.
It's not that the Russians were weak or terrible. They
were not, and that they had a lot of guys
like the Cossacks who I mentioned, were very, very capable troops.
But they kept figuring out pretty quickly. Ooh, we're a
little bit outmatched. Napoleon is good, his army is very good.
His core group of veterans. Remember this is the core

(28:37):
group of veterans who've basically conquered Europe by this point
in time. The Battle of Vitebesque is actually three battles,
but small ones in three days. The Russians, yes, they
they give back, for sure. They kill some French, they
kill some of the Grand Army, but they get their
nose bloodied a little bit. What do they decide? Surprise, surprise,

(29:01):
we're pulling back. Let's pull back even more. By now,
Napoleon is beginning to get frustrated, and this is decision
making time. Napoleon is not a moron. He understands that
the Russian winter is bad, and there's another part that's bad.

(29:23):
We keep talking about the logistics of all this. Russia
is so much poorer than the parts of Europe all
these armies came from, and I'm talking about the basic
country side. There's just not enough stuff in existence to
support these armies. So what do you have to do

(29:45):
if you're Napoleon, You have to send out entire units
to go forage for food. You have to try to
pillage your way, try to live off the land. But
they have to go further and further and further from
the lines. And we'll come back to that here in
a little bit. Napoleon has not been given his big battle.
He's frustrated, he's tired. He has to pause for a moment.

(30:10):
How much trouble is he in by this point in
the war. He has lost half of his horses. Already,
half of his horses are gone. There's not Remember I
told you yesterday twenty pounds a day. I just talked
about how hard it is to find supplies twenty pounds
a day per horse. The horses simply aren't making it.

(30:33):
Horses are coming up, lame member. Horses are flesh and
blood things too, saddle sores, all kinds of stuff. Anyone
who knows horses or is familiar with horses knows that. Look,
it's not a car with four legs. It's flesh and blood.
Things go wrong. Napoleon just says, okay, pause, for a second.
His generals are telling him, you have got a pause

(30:54):
for a second. He has run his army into the
ground at this time, and now it debate time. This
is one of those moments. I brought this up yesterday,
one of those if you could be a fly on
the wall moments. I wish I could have been there.
I wish I could have heard how the arguments went.
But the debate is, why don't we just stop just

(31:20):
for now, Stop for now, Let's get our men healed up,
let's work on the food thing, let's gather some more
horses around. Why don't we stop, then we'll come back
in a year. Then we'll continue this in a year.
The other half of this debate is, yeah, but what

(31:45):
if we pressed on the gas pedal. We pressed on
the gas pedal. Yes we will suffer, Yes we're going
to lose men, but the Russians are close to us
right now. Another year means giving Russia another year to
build fortifications around the country, to do all kinds of

(32:05):
things around the country. Again, in hindsight, we look at
the decision. Now, surprise, surprise, Napoleon decides to step on
the gas not to give it away, but surprise. We
look at that kind of decision now and we think,
what are you suicide of? What a total idiot? What
are you thinking? In Napoleon's mind? Remember how often we
talk about how there's a political aspect to every war,

(32:26):
not just military. He's got problems back home here. He
still has a war going on in Spain. His allies
are angry already with him. He's having a hard time
keeping the coalition together. Napoleon politically does not have the
luxury of just, you know what, I'll put my feet
up here in Russia and enjoy myself for a while.

(32:48):
Napoleon thinks he has to get this thing wrapped up quickly,
no matter what the cost. And yes, the cost ends
up being staggering, but you can kind of understand that
way of thinking. Right tomorrow, we will continue with Napoleon
stepping on that gas pedal. Whether we will finish or not. Again,

(33:10):
I have no earthly idea. I am going to try,
but I'm not in any rush. I'm enjoying it. News
kind of sucks right now. Anyway, we'll do some emails.
Next hour. We're going to talk about JB. Pritzker's moves, foreigners, trash,
in the country. Someone got eaten by a crocodile. All
that and so much more still to come on the
world famous Jesse Kelly's show, We'll be Back.