Operation Cottage: The Most Awkward WWII Invasion of... Nothing? (with Kelly Corrigan)

Kelly Corrigan is all class. As an award-winning journalist, podcaster, and author, her insights are a breath of fresh air. Today, Ed and Kelly cover Operation Cottage, a screwy attempt by American and Canadian forces to recapture the Aleutian Islands during WWII. But when the Allied soldiers arrived, all was not as it seemed. Subscribe to the SNAFU YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/@SNAFUPod Buy the SNAFU book: www.snafu-book.com http://www.snafu-book.com/ See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  The Navy eventually realized they'd spent half the night shelling Phantom radar echoes and gave the whole debacle a name worthy of this absurdity: The Battle of the Pips.

• 0:11Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 0:13Speaker 00

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• 0:16Speaker 01

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• 0:17Speaker 00

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• 2:40Speaker 00

  Hello and welcome to Snafu. I'm Ed Helms, your host, and this is Snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screwups, or more specifically, the show where I ask brilliant guests to help me unpack some of the least brilliant moments in history. And in the process, maybe understand ourselves a little bit better. Today, I am joined by a four time New York Times bestselling author, host of Tell Me More on PBS, and the brilliant mind behind Kelly Corrigan Wonders. She's even written a children's book called Hello World. She's wise, hilarious, kind of endlessly curious, and just a delightful human being who I adore. She is, of course, Kelly Corrigan.

• 3:25Speaker 00

  Kelly, welcome to Snafu.

• 3:27Speaker 01

  Hello, Ed Helms.

• 3:30Speaker 00

  So glad to have you here today.

• 3:31Speaker 01

  I'm delighted to be here. I'm really flattered. Thank you.

• 3:34Speaker 00

  Oh, amen. We met a few years back, and I have to say, as soon as I met you, I was like, hell, this is a friend. Like, I have met a friend.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  That's what I said when I called my husband. I said, you know who I spend a lot of time with today? Ed Helms. And he's like, Ed Helms, like from the office, from the Hangover Ed Helms? I'm like, yeah. And I said, I gotta tell you, like, I have a feeling I'm gonna know him for a long time.

• 3:57Speaker 00

  Oh, that's very sweet.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  I don't know what note we started on, but there was something about the very first conversation we had that was much deeper and better than most first interactions.

• 4:10Speaker 00

  Amen. Yeah. You're like, you called your husband and you're like, he's way less annoying than Andy Bernard.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  He didn't sing for me.

• 4:18Speaker 00

  He's actually, he's kinda normal. Kelly Gorgon Wonders is a phenomenal podcast, which I highly recommend. You're five years in, over 700 episodes. The format of the show, it's basically a masterclass in human curiosity. In like exploring what makes us tick, what we fear and love and how we cope. And I'm just curious, after all of that deep listening, do you feel any closer to the the secret of living a good life? Or, or is there anything like some crazy counterintuitive revelation about the human condition that you've landed on?

• 4:57Speaker 01

  More that sometimes when you're listening to someone, a guest on the show, they synthesize things in such a memorable way that it's almost like I've sort of known this, I've sort of intuited this my whole life, but now you just put the words on it. So two that come to mind are this, we had this neuroscientist on named Lisa Feldman Barrett. She's some top 1% scientist cited worldwide. So in any discipline, so she's really respected. And she has a great book called How Emotions Are Made, and that's what we were talking about. And the line she said was, "The best thing for a human central nervous system is another human central nervous system.

• 5:39Speaker 01

  And the worst thing for a human central nervous system is another human central nervous."

• 5:45Speaker 00

  Damn it.

• 5:46Speaker 01

  So pick your human central nervous systems wisely.

• 5:50Speaker 00

  Right.

• 5:51Speaker 01

  And that's the feeling that you get. I mean, that's what happened when we first met, really, is my central nervous system and your central nervous system kind of rubbed up against each other and it was like, oh, this is a good.

• 6:00Speaker 00

  Yeah. But that's a lot of pressure when you're like on the life partner choices. That's like, oh geez, I better get this right.

• 6:07Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, this other guest said that we're an average of the five people we spend the most time with.

• 6:12Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 6:13Speaker 01

  And so that's sort of a related thought. And then this other guest said that listening is so close to love that most people can't tell the difference.

• 6:23Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 6:24Speaker 01

  And so if you kind of glue those all together, you get. Some clarity about like who you're looking for out there and you're looking for people who can be still, who can listen, who can take it in.

• 6:37Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 6:38Speaker 01

  And that's the central nervous system that's going to work for you. And that's the central nervous system that's going to make you better.

• 6:44Speaker 00

  I love that because I've always felt that profound insights are things that we hear that were like these aha moments, they feel like aha moments, right? They feel like things that like, oh my God, what a revelation. I now understand that better. But you're really just, it's already, it's actually just affirming something that you already felt. The only reason it's an aha moment is because you know that it's true the second you hear it, because it resonates with something already in you. And to, and I just, I love that because it speaks to this like, kind of like grand human intuition that we all share and that we all could be, we all understand these fundamental truths.

• 7:25Speaker 01

  Yes, and that intuition is being developed and honed by knowledge. Don't you feel from podcasting that you're just full of so much more information to draw from? Like, I feel like my inputs in the last five years have gone through the roof.

• 7:40Speaker 00

  I love that podcasting has emerged as such a vital medium in our culture now because it feels like an antidote to, to social media. It feels like an antidote to all of the, the just like crazy, flashy, quick disposable stuff. Yes, to your point, it has provided a, a great scaffolding for my curiosity and connection with so many cool people like yourself. All right. Are you ready to snafu, Kelly Corrigan?

• 8:09Speaker 01

  I cannot snafu. I've been waiting to snafu all day.

• 8:18Speaker 00

  So you've probably heard the phrase, the fog of war. It's a perfect metaphor, the chaos and confusion and split second decisions made with bad information. But in today's story, that fog wasn't just metaphorical, it was quite literal. We're heading back to World War II and to one of history's most baffling military mix ups, Operation Cottage. I'm assuming you've never heard of this. It was actually a giant operation in the Pacific Theater, but it is largely forgotten to popular memory. Kelly, you may not seem like the obvious co-pilot for a war story here.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  I was wondering how this got matched to me.

• 9:00Speaker 00

  Especially one this gloriously botched, but I actually think you're perfect for it because your superpower is bringing empathy and curiosity to human folly. And, and, and finding sort of the human through line in when things go sideways. And, and let's just say this story is going to give you a lot to work with.

• 9:20Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 9:21Speaker 00

  So, we begin in 1942 when the British Army pitched General Eisenhower on a bold idea, a joint American-Canadian commando unit, trained in the specialized skills needed to fight in extreme cold. Why? Because they wanted to hit some strategic targets in Nazi-occupied Norway. And as we all know, Norway is quite chilly.

• 9:47Speaker 01

  You're saying...

• 9:48Speaker 00

  I also, I just want to point out how nice it is to, to sort of remember America and Canada teaming up together.

• 9:56Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 9:57Speaker 00

  And being just sort of like rowdy neighbors getting in trouble.

• 10:01Speaker 01

  Every old days, so.

• 10:01Speaker 00

  Yeah. Right? And by the way, it's worth pointing out that Canada does not get enough credit for its role in World War II. They were a powerhouse, like cranking out weapons and gear and supplies and munitions for the Allied forces. So, way to go, Canada. We, we love you up there. So Eisenhower was very into this idea and he tapped Lieutenant Colonel Robert T. Frederick to train and lead what became, uh, named the First Special Service Force. Frederick handpicked lumberjacks, miners, hunters, anyone who could survive the rigorous training in a Montana winter and still smile about it. They trained in freezing temperatures, climbed cliffs at night and learned to ski with 50-pound

• 10:46Speaker 00

  packs. These guys were basically human Sasquatches trained in warfighting.

• 10:52Speaker 01

  I haven't thought about Sasquatch in some time. That's fantastic.

• 10:56Speaker 00

  You're a Montana gal, right? You spend a lot of time there.

• 11:00Speaker 01

  I know. I was wondering if you're giving me a little hat tip on that Montana thing. Yeah, we live more than half the year in Montana, in both of them.

• 11:08Speaker 00

  And my family spends a ton of time in Idaho where we have a lot of family. So we know these Rocky Mountain badass types. Does this describe you at all? Are you like an outdoorsy?

• 11:19Speaker 01

  No, not a tiny bit, Ed.

• 11:21Speaker 00

  No.

• 11:22Speaker 01

  Nineties a little bit. In fact, I have a word of the year every year where it's like, I'm trying to keep growing. You know, we don't want to stagnate. And the one year my word was hardy.

• 11:35Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 11:36Speaker 01

  And it just meant like, you know, embrace opportunities for hardiness. Because people in Montana honestly are, you know, like, it was minus 37 degrees once in the five years that we've lived there.

• 11:50Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 11:51Speaker 01

  Uh huh. And people still wanted to like meet up. Oh, that's not going to happen for me. Like, I'm not opening the front door.

• 12:00Speaker 00

  That's hardy.

• 12:01Speaker 01

  Bleeding out on the street in front of me, like, I'm so sorry through the window.

• 12:05Speaker 00

  And if you inhale too quickly, like you get a lung infection from frozen.

• 12:12Speaker 01

  So no, I am not hardy at all.

• 12:14Speaker 00

  All right. So this special unit is training in Montana. And the Norway plan collapses. Turns out it was a logistical nightmare and allied priorities were shifting fast. So what was this badass new outfit to do? Well, fate would take them to another frosty theater of war, the Aleutian Islands. Do you know anything about the Aleutian Islands?

• 12:39Speaker 01

  I do not.

• 12:39Speaker 00

  The Aleutians are that long sort of ragged tail of islands that stretch nearly 1,000 miles between Alaska and Russia. It's that little, the beard of the sort of face that is Alaska. It's kind of what separates the Pacific Ocean from the Bering Sea. And they're home to the Aleut people who've lived there for millennia, fishing, hunting, those brutal waters.

• 13:06Speaker 00

  Since long before the emergence of nation states and world wars, of course.

• 13:11Speaker 01

  Do we know how many Alute people there are or were?

• 13:14Speaker 00

  The current population of the Alute people is estimated to be around 15,000 across the United States and Russia with the majority living in Alaska. So they obviously live there and carve out a living, but for outsiders, these islands are a very punishing place. Jagged volcanic rocks surrounded by frigid ocean, broken up by vast stretches of soggy tundra called Muskeg, which is basically nature's kind of like frozen wet sponge. Add in relentless rain, near constant fog, and temperatures that hover just above freezing, and you've got one of the most brutal landscapes the US has to offer. It's beautiful, but absolutely out to get you.

• 13:56Speaker 01

  Bless the Alutes.

• 13:57Speaker 00

  I know, right? Well, regardless of the unforgiving landscape, the Aleutian Islands were still American territory. So when Japanese forces started snatching them up in June of 1942 to build airfields and submarine bases, let's just say we were not amused. It might be a frozen hellscape, but it's our frozen hellscape, damn it.

• 14:21Speaker 00

  And by the way, hold on a second. Don't we happen to have a special team of soldiers trained specifically for frozen hellsapes? Why, yes. Colonel Frederick, get your fancy new First Special Service Force out there and take our dang foggy islands back.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  Team Sasquatch.

• 14:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:39Speaker 01

  You're on.

• 14:40Speaker 00

  Colonel Frederick and the First Special Service Force actually missed the first World War II battle in the Alutsians, which was the Battle of Atu, another island. And that had been a very rough one. There were less than 3,000 Japanese troops on the island of Atu, but it took American troops three weeks to fight through the muddy bogs and capture the Japanese defenses up on the mossy ridges. And when it was all said and done, the US lost 549 soldiers with total casualties approaching 4,000.

• 15:13Speaker 00

  This is a lot of people and action going on in a very remote place. And I think that's also part of what sort of contributes to its being more lost to our, our cultural memory.

• 15:27Speaker 01

  Do you ever feel like it's just the most insane way to solve a problem? I mean, it's just so insane when you, whenever you get like a 30,000 foot view of war.

• 15:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:39Speaker 01

  We've all acclimated to the idea of it, obviously, as we should, since it's always been here and may always be with us. But every now and then, if I come to it fresh again, I'm like, wait a minute. So these countries have a problem and the only way they can figure out how to solve it is to take their 18 year olds and put them against our 18 year olds and see who kills the most. That's insane. That's so depressing.

• 16:04Speaker 00

  It is. It is. And, and it, it often feels like one side sort of forces the hand of the other side because it becomes like an existential threat for one party. I also find it fascinating, the, the kind of, obviously, World War II was so literally a world war. And this is such a great example of something so far from the European theater. We're, we're up way up in Alaska in, in what feels like the most remote place ever. But the Japanese saw serious strategic possibilities in putting little bases on these, on these, on this archipelago. And the Americans were just like, no, we have to stomp this out.

• 16:49Speaker 01

  My God, the Elutes must have been like, really? Like, no one has ever come here. We have had this strip of land.

• 16:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:57Speaker 01

  For thousands of years, and now you're just going to destroy it all.

• 17:00Speaker 00

  Yeah. And a number of the indigenous population were captured by Japanese as Americans and killed, of course. They were very much sort of caught in the crossfire, unfortunately.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  I wonder if they felt American.

• 17:17Speaker 00

  That's a very interesting question.

• 17:19Speaker 01

  In 1942, like, how much they even knew about the context of it? Like, was media reaching them? Were they listening to radios?

• 17:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:28Speaker 01

  The paper reaching them? Or was it like this just shocking?

• 17:33Speaker 01

  Appearance of modern insanity.

• 17:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:37Speaker 01

  In their beautiful frigid.

• 17:40Speaker 00

  I would imagine, I mean, some of them were brought back to Japan as prisoners of war. And I would imagine they're just like, what? What do I have to do with this?

• 17:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 17:53Speaker 01

  Minding my own business, getting some oil from this whale. And now.

• 17:58Speaker 00

  It's wild.

• 17:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:00Speaker 00

  So that was the Battle of Atu on the next dilution island called Kisca. The radio signals, campfires and bunkers detected by US reconnaissance indicated as many as 10,000 Japanese troops stationed there to guard their airfield and submarine base. The US leaders had learned a very hard lesson taking Atu. So for Kisca, they knew they needed a new approach. This time it was going to be a massive operation, over 30,000 troops, 100 warships and 100 aircraft converging on a single fog shrouded island. And at the tip of the spear, of course, was Colonel Robert Frederick's crew now proudly known as Freddie's Fighters.

• 18:47Speaker 00

  And now for some reason, this entire operation was named Operation Cottage. I don't know why. How do they come up with these things?

• 18:57Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 18:59Speaker 00

  Operation Cottage kicked off with two solid weeks of bombing the ever loving dingus out of this island. American and Canadian pilots dove through the fog at dangerously low altitudes and pounded Kisca with bombs. Next was the ground assault. Colonel Frederick's elite commandos were to slip ashore under cover of darkness, secure the beaches and clear the way for the throngs of infantry waiting just offshore. It takes a little. A little something special to be these like tip of the spear commandos, right?

• 19:32Speaker 01

  Unbelievable. God bless them.

• 19:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:36Speaker 01

  No, I mean, do you think that they were lumberjacks and hunters, like that they were chosen for their tolerance of temperature, air temperature?

• 19:45Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, just hardship, basically.

• 19:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 19:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, outdoor hardship. And also just be like, hey, you're going in first. Like, there's no infrastructure. You're setting it up.

• 19:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 19:55Speaker 00

  You're doing the thing. I just, I think that's so incredible. And it's so funny to me when I think back on my younger self as like a 16, 17 year old, I literally thought, and I was like, I think I could be a Navy SEAL. Like this, I was on, I was a varsity swimmer. I was captain of my swim team. I loved being in the water. I was like, I was incredibly physical and I was just like, I think I could be a Navy SEAL. And meanwhile, my co-captain on my high school swim team went to the Naval Academy, became a Navy SEAL.

• 20:33Speaker 00

  And the more I learned about it, I just was like, I look, I'm like, no way could I have done that at all.

• 20:42Speaker 01

  I just, in the last year, had dinner with a Navy SEAL who had retired after 30 years and was trying to acclimate.

• 20:50Speaker 00

  30 years. Wow.

• 20:51Speaker 01

  Regular old, boring civilian life.

• 20:54Speaker 00

  Right.

• 20:55Speaker 01

  And my two observations were, one, he drank a lot and he drank fast. And two, that he, um, he had to summarize things in such a way that it was clear that there were whole years of his life that he would never be able to talk to another civilian about. And then maybe they're so close is that they're doing and seeing things that only other Navy SEALs see and do.

• 21:25Speaker 00

  Of course.

• 21:26Speaker 01

  Thus, they are so deeply bonded. My dad's best friend was a Navy SEAL. And what I thought a Navy SEAL was before this dinner was kind of what you thought a Navy SEAL was when you were in high school, which is like really good swimmers.

• 21:40Speaker 01

  Limited view. That's like 100 criterion.

• 21:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, God, it is. It is really wild.

• 21:49Speaker 01

  Grateful. Thank you so much. I don't even know what you've done while you've been doing that and writing books and making podcasts and getting to know it helps. And you're, I don't know what you're doing out there, but boy, our lives don't have anything in common.

• 22:01Speaker 00

  Amen.

• 22:02Speaker 01

  Making my peaceful existence possible in some way that I'll never really get.

• 22:07Speaker 00

  You are so right. That is, that, that is a deep debt of gratitude. We owe to all of the men and women in uniform. It's, it's really, you're, you're so right. And so much of what they have done and seen and experienced would probably benefit them to unpack and unload with loved ones, but it's classified. Like they're not even allowed to talk about it.

• 22:33Speaker 01

  I know. It's a tough setup. I'm telling you, we have to take care of the VA. Like VA hospitals need support. Like that, that job, we have to put great people in that work. Like that, we really, really, the least we could do is take excellent care of every veteran.

• 22:49Speaker 00

  Right. How is this controversial? Like, come on.

• 22:53Speaker 01

  Honestly.

• 22:53Speaker 00

  Let's get this done.

• 22:55Speaker 01

  Yes. Let's do, let's be right. Let's do right by people.

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• 23:30Speaker 04

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• 25:21Speaker 00

  All right, let's get back to this snafu.

• 25:23Speaker 01

  I know, I know. We got 30,000 people, we got the fighters going in first.

• 25:28Speaker 00

  So that's the plan. The plan is for Freddie's fighters to go in first. But something strange happened on their approach to Kisaka. The fog of war rolled in, literally. A very thick fog bank. With visibility so low around the islands, the Navy relied heavily on their new technology radar. And on July 27th, US ships detected unidentified radar blips, or PIPs as they were known, about 100 miles south of Kisaka, and assumed that these were Japanese ships. Have you ever been stuck driving in like terrible fog?

• 26:06Speaker 01

  Yes, I used to live in San Francisco, it's crazy.

• 26:08Speaker 00

  Oh, it's so terrifying.

• 26:10Speaker 01

  It is.

• 26:10Speaker 00

  And you just feel so helpless. But these guys are going off their radar, and they just opened up a massive barrage of firepower on these radar PIPs for 30 minutes nonstop. And notably, nothing fired back.

• 26:26Speaker 00

  When the moon rose and the fog lifted around 2 a.m., there was nothing there. There were no ships, no enemy, just empty ocean. As one historian put it, "The only damage to the American ships had been caused by their own salvos." The Navy eventually realized they'd spent half the night shelling Phantom radar echoes and gave the whole debacle a name worthy of this absurdity: The Battle of the Pips.

• 26:50Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 26:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, not to be confused with Gladys Knight and the Pips.

• 26:55Speaker 01

  No, never.

• 26:56Speaker 00

  Who are Atlanta, Georgia icons.

• 26:59Speaker 01

  And delightful.

• 27:00Speaker 00

  Yes, and quite wonderful.

• 27:02Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 27:02Speaker 00

  But this is, we're just getting started with this snafu. "Alas, at midnight on August 15th, the actual invasion of Kisca began, and the problems just started happening right away." Apparently Colonel Frederick did not realize, and I quote, "The current around Kisca was outgoing."

• 27:23Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 27:24Speaker 00

  Which I have to assume that means he just timed the tides wrong, but either way, it's just, it's, or maybe there's a giant ocean current sort of circling it, who knows? But some of the landing boats, they're basically in these big, these like inflatable boats paddling ashore for two miles of open water, and some of them made it in under an hour, others not so much. Frederick's own boat took nearly five hours to fight its way against the tide, and one unlucky craft overloaded with officers and radio gear got swept completely out to sea and had to be rescued the next morning. But at least they had the radio gear, I guess.

• 28:02Speaker 01

  I guess.

• 28:03Speaker 00

  If you're that, that team, that, do you sort of, do you blame the current, or you just pretend like, "We were, we saw something over there. We were going to get those things."

• 28:13Speaker 01

  What do you mean? How did we end up here? You didn't see it?

• 28:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:17Speaker 01

  It was huge. It was as big as a building. I don't know what it was.

• 28:20Speaker 00

  There were radar pips everywhere.

• 28:22Speaker 01

  I always feel like when I hear stories like this, that I would just, um...

• 28:28Speaker 01

  I'd be the first one to declare defeat. I'd be like, all right, guys, it's great.

• 28:34Speaker 00

  We lost.

• 28:35Speaker 01

  We didn't do well. I'm gonna jump in this water and bring this thing to an end because I just want to have the stamina.

• 28:40Speaker 00

  Oh, no.

• 28:41Speaker 01

  For this weather and this situation. My fingers are cold. My toes are cold. I don't look good. I feel like my hair is a mess. I'm gone. I'm out. Love you. Tell my...

• 28:50Speaker 00

  I feel like your priorities are a little off.

• 28:52Speaker 01

  I'm just saying, I don't think I'm the survivor. If I get caught in a tree well or an avalanche, I will claw my way. I would just be like, oh, well, it was great. Like 58, that's like a lot of years. Don't worry about it.

• 29:06Speaker 00

  Here's the thing. I think you would surprise yourself.

• 29:09Speaker 01

  Really?

• 29:10Speaker 00

  I just have this feeling like you've got, there's something in there that would emerge. The second wave of landings was the next day on Kisca's northern shore. The commandos ran into even more trouble. They'd been promised a flat, pebbly beach. That was the recon. Easy in, easy out. Instead, they ran aground on a steep, jagged mess of volcanic rock and boulders up to 16 feet high. The landing stalled instantly as men scrambled to unload gear and climb over terrain that looked nothing like the brochure.

• 29:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:41Speaker 00

  So it's safe to say confidence and morale is maybe starting to teeter a little bit.

• 29:48Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 29:49Speaker 00

  Now, there was one upside to the botched landings, which was that no one was shooting at them, which they expected. So the Japanese guns on the island were silent as the commandos struggled ashore, soaked and exhausted. But that calm did not last. As Frederick's men pushed inland through bogs and rocky ridges, the larger landing ships unloaded wave after wave of infantry behind them. And here's where a series of tragedies starts unfolding. First, that illusion fog. It rolled in and just swallowed everything. Entire units disappeared in the gray. Radios failed and no one knew who was where.

• 30:34Speaker 00

  Then, American and Canadian troops spotted movement in the mist and opened fire, convinced they'd found the enemy, but they had not. When the smoke cleared, a dozen soldiers were dead, casualties of a battle fought entirely against themselves.

• 30:52Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 30:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:54Speaker 00

  Um.

• 30:55Speaker 01

  It's so demoralizing.

• 30:56Speaker 00

  It's a brutal one. I mean, but i- if you're in, you put yourself in their shoes. Uh, and they're all, they all have the lesson of the, the Battle of Atu, which was brutal. And the, the Japanese fighters, of course.

• 31:11Speaker 01

  Out there.

• 31:13Speaker 00

  They had a, a warfighting ethos called Bushido, which was sort of a descendant of the Samurai discipline where, where like they are all in and just, they, they will not surrender. They will just attack and attack until basically they're.

• 31:28Speaker 01

  Can you imagine how deep up these people's bodies are? Talk about the nervous systems. I mean, you just gotta be so jacked up and it's, and all your, um, signals are failing. Like you can't really see what you're doing, can't really see where you're putting it down. You don't really know where anybody is, like the adrenaline and the cortisol. I mean, you just like a crazy, um, physiological state to try to make a decent decision in. And then the hecticness of it and the sort of group think of it, like if you shoot, like the guy next to me is gonna start shooting, then I'm done, start shooting and, and then.

• 32:03Speaker 00

  You are, this is, you are perfectly capturing the fog of war. That is what the fog of war is.

• 32:09Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 32:10Speaker 00

  It's like, maybe we sit down and just have a cup of tea.

• 32:13Speaker 01

  I know.

• 32:14Speaker 00

  And just calm our nerve, our nervous systems are overactive.

• 32:19Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 32:19Speaker 00

  We're not making good decisions.

• 32:21Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 32:22Speaker 00

  Let's just, everyone breathe, let's be mindful for a second. But then of course you instantly panic because you're like, I don't think the Japanese guys are being mindful right now. They're trying to kill us. Well, there was even more danger afoot offshore. Uh, the destroyer USS Abner Reed, remember there's a hundred ships.

• 32:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 32:44Speaker 00

  In this thing, this is a massive operation.

• 32:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:48Speaker 00

  Isn't that, isn't this kind of like, you're like, what?

• 32:50Speaker 01

  I'd like to see if, I mean, I can, I'm, I'm recalling in my mind, like those old black and white photographs where you can see a hundred ships in one eyeful, in one frame.

• 32:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:58Speaker 01

  I mean, a hundred ships for 10,000 Japanese soldiers. That's like, that's pretty strong showing, like we were ready for.

• 33:05Speaker 00

  Yeah. Oh, they wanted to shut this down. This was like, we have to just close this door. So the destroyer USS Abner Reed struck a Japanese mine that no one knew was there. The Navy knew there were mines, but believed that the nearest mine field was 2,000 yards away from where the ship was. And this blast ripped the stern clean off, hurling dozens of sailors into the freezing water. Eighty-seven were killed and 47 were wounded. Many were were pulled from the frozen water or freezing water, I should say. And then back on land, things are still just eerie and off, right?

• 33:47Speaker 00

  They're two days in now, slogging through mud and fog and something's off. And the patrols just keep pushing deeper into Kiska's hills and there's no gunfire. There's no snipers. There is no resistance at all. And finally, the truth starts to sink in. There are no Japanese soldiers on this island at all.

• 34:09Speaker 01

  No.

• 34:11Speaker 00

  The enemy had vanished weeks earlier and all they left behind were a few booby traps, some wrecked equipment and graffiti in their abandoned bunkers mocking FDR and Churchill. Thirty thousand troops had stormed an empty island.

• 34:28Speaker 01

  Oh, God, Ed. I mean, what are you like of all the activity in World War II? Top to bottom, from day one till the final surrender? How many, what percentage of it was something like this?

• 34:45Speaker 00

  This one feels colossal. Like, like, I'm sure that this is happening on a smaller scale, like every day in a war.

• 34:52Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 34:53Speaker 00

  What is clear is that the fog of war is incredibly real and present all the time, whether or not there's literal fog.

• 35:00Speaker 01

  I don't have an ounce of judgment over this. I'll tell you one thing that's not happening in my body right now is I'm not thinking, God, those idiots. I'm thinking, of course, of course. Like, I would imagine that this is the number one challenge when you're mounting these a world war in 1942.

• 35:23Speaker 01

  That all kinds of situations on the ground don't match whatever your signals and indicators are giving you in advance. And all kinds of resources, including human lives, were wasted because it's just too hard to get a handle on exactly what's going on on the ground. So anyway, I'm actually a wealth of knowledge about this stuff, it turns out.

• 35:44Speaker 00

  Yeah. You're an even better co-pilot for this story than I possibly imagined. This is, you're so well-prepared for this.

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• 36:57Speaker 05

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  Uh-oh.

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  I better get that.

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  Oh.

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• 37:57Speaker 03

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• 38:33Speaker 00

  All told, the US and Canadian forces lost 313 men, sending 30,000 men into an empty island. As a failure of intelligence, the invasion of Kisga was a massive embarrassment and overall, it's just an all too perfect example of the fog of war. So what actually happened? Well, remember the Battle of the Pips? It turns out, and we actually know a lot about this because after the war, there were a lot of interviews with Japanese naval officers and so we actually got a very detailed account of the Japanese side of this.

• 39:18Speaker 00

  It turns out, the night of the Battle of the Pips was the night that the Japanese Navy was evacuating all their troops off of Kisga. Some historians think those radar pips were probably Japanese submarines that had popped up as a diversion and then dove again to draw attention away from the rest of the fleet. And while the US was shooting at the pips, the Japanese ships sailed by in the opposite direction in a super tight formation under complete

• 39:48Speaker 00

  Radio silence. The logistics of the Japanese evacuation is is also fascinating. It was incredibly disciplined and well planned evacuation. The ships had reached Kisaka, picked up all 5,000 or more of their troops and sailed away again while the US Navy was busy shooting at Phantoms.

• 40:09Speaker 01

  5,000 bodies is so many bodies to move effectively and efficiently. You know what I mean?

• 40:15Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 40:16Speaker 01

  Whole deal. And if you're going like from land to sea to, I mean.

• 40:21Speaker 00

  I've talked about this a lot over the years. I have ADHD and and logistics just make me crumble. Like the like the more complex and the more people and the more things are involved in a logistical plan, the more I just like implode. I can barely comprehend it, let alone plan it, and then let alone execute it. I sort of like freeze. And so all of these like mass, like just the logistics of war are so overwhelming. It's to your point, it's crazy.

• 40:57Speaker 01

  And with the technology of the day.

• 41:00Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 41:00Speaker 01

  It's just like I went traveled for a year when I was 25 in 1992. And I didn't have a credit card and I didn't have a cell phone. And my parents didn't know what country I was in. They could not have found me.

• 41:18Speaker 01

  And I but my goal was to call once a month for 12 months. So for 29 days in a row, my parents didn't know where I was. And I didn't really know where I was. You know, and I didn't know where I was going next.

• 41:32Speaker 00

  And it was okay with everybody? Everyone felt okay?

• 41:35Speaker 01

  Because that's all there was. And so if you think about how many ways things could go wrong with a kid traveling the world with like a paper map.

• 41:49Speaker 01

  And that's it. And then you multiply that by 5,000 people. Like, how did they even say what time they were gonna get on the boat? It's like mind boggling. So I'm with you. I mean, I don't have ADHD that I know of, but I am not the logistics person in my life ever.

• 42:08Speaker 00

  So obviously, this was a huge, colossal, sort of military fail. But the soldiers themselves maybe didn't mind so much because one soldier said afterwards that he felt the most horror imagining what would have happened if the Japanese forces had been there and, you know, had not abandoned the island. He said, quote, "I think few realize how close to a suicidal assignment our part of the operation was." Another soldier later told reporters, quote, "My reaction, since I didn't have a strong death wish at age 21, was relief."

• 42:51Speaker 00

  American and Canadian troops spent the next few days kind of just shaking it off. They reportedly were riding around the beaches on left behind motorcycles and trucks. And I think that that part's actually relatable. Like, if you're expecting to have a freezing cold battle in tundra swamps and then all of a sudden you just have a bunch of free time and some empty Jeeps, like, you're gonna blow off some steam, right?

• 43:19Speaker 01

  And you're kids. You're nothing.

• 43:21Speaker 00

  You're kids. You're right. These are kids. Exactly. So what became of Freddie's Fighters, the first special service force, after they shook off all this fog? Well, after their unglamorous start, they were sent to Europe and became one of the most effective Allied units. They were sent to attack the Italian fascists in Southern Europe. And during the D-Day landings in Normandy, Freddie's Fighters were knocking the Nazis out of Rome. As for Robert Frederick himself, he was eventually promoted to brigadier general. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross twice and got a full eight Purple Hearts for being wounded in combat, which is

• 44:04Speaker 01

  Well done.

• 44:05Speaker 00

  Wild. Yeah. Supposedly Churchill called him the greatest fighting general of all time, which is that's that's serious. That's a serious compliment. And he said that if the Allies had a dozen more generals like Robert Frederick, Hitler would have been beaten in 1942.

• 44:25Speaker 00

  That's our story, Kelly Corrigan. Let's

• 44:28Speaker 01

  God bless Fred.

• 44:30Speaker 00

  God bless Fred, Robert Frederick.

• 44:32Speaker 01

  Fred, God.

• 44:33Speaker 00

  Yeah. I just love having walked through this with you and feeling, it is so easy to kind of take a kind of highfalutin, scornful approach to some of these terrible mistakes, but,

• 44:49Speaker 00

  but just as I suspected, you are bringing so much humanity and compassion and curiosity to the experience of these people in in this crazy situation. I love that and I appreciate that very much. Then this is kind of my favorite part. Are there any sort of larger takeaways that you're that you're feeling or does that this conjures for you just in a sort of like grand kind of human nature context?

• 45:21Speaker 01

  I mean, I feel I feel that it is imperative that we find a different way of solving these problems. It's just that the story is so insane

• 45:33Speaker 01

  that it draws attention. It draws the eye to the ludicrous nature of war as a problem solving method.

• 45:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:47Speaker 01

  It's ludicrous. It's ludicrous to send these poor kids over to try to shoot and kill other people's poor kids. Like, put the generals in the room. The presidents in the room. But why don't we let one leader try to kill another leader? Why do we have to do it with all these kids like as if they're

• 46:08Speaker 01

  like, if that's the way we're going to solve problems, why don't we do it with five on five V five instead of 100,000 V 100,000?

• 46:17Speaker 00

  We're so thirsty for violence as a species.

• 46:21Speaker 01

  I know. It's really in us. It's really in us. That is another thought I was having, which is that these lumberjacks or these hunters.

• 46:32Speaker 01

  You wonder how difficult or conversely, how very easy it was to sell them on becoming the tip of the spear in these ungodly conditions and join Freddie's fighters. Like, it seems like it wouldn't be that hard to get a narrative going that could make these lumberjacks feel like this is their shot at heroism and saving the world. And putting it in that do or die context, like that historic context of that war, you could probably get a lot of people to do a lot of things that on a different day with a clearer head, they would say, I'm not participating in that. I'm not gonna go destroy somebody's land.

• 47:16Speaker 01

  I'm not gonna go kill somebody's kid.

• 47:18Speaker 00

  Right.

• 47:19Speaker 01

  You can't make me do that.

• 47:20Speaker 00

  Right. Isn't there the version you're talking about where the generals or the leaders just say, hey, well, let's avoid this completely. Again, I mean, this feels a little pie in the sky. When one party does present an existential threat to your country, like, what do you, and conversation just won't, there is no conversation with madness, right? Like Hitler, Hitler is just mad.

• 47:52Speaker 01

  Right. So if you want to go like, if there is no conversation as a solution and you feel you must go to violence, why can't we pit five people, five of our people versus five of their people?

• 48:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, or one on one.

• 48:12Speaker 01

  Do a hundred thousand and a hundred thousand.

• 48:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:15Speaker 01

  I mean, the destruction, like, why we had to break down all these buildings, these people's apartments and like blow up their kids' cribs and send their baby formula to the high heavens with a bomb? Like, it's crazy. So that was one thought I was having over and over again, which of course is totally pie in the sky and it'll never happen and I know that with all my heart sadly. The other thing I was thinking about is because of like the rousing rhetoric that you would probably have to use to get a normal person to engage like this, a normal person to take a gun and shoot another person. It must be so demoralizing when the people who talked you into this grand effort

• 48:57Speaker 01

  turn out to be just normal Joe Schmoes who screwed up all the logistics.

• 49:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, just imagine that that information starting to ripple through the ranks.

• 49:07Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 49:08Speaker 00

  I mean, I'm sure there's a colossal relief, but then, once that relief kind of washes out, it's like, what the hell?

• 49:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 49:16Speaker 00

  What the hell?

• 49:17Speaker 01

  This doesn't seem so grand anymore.

• 49:19Speaker 00

  Um, I, I want to just kind of raise one, one sort of final thought and get your take, which is, um, the fog of war, and, and in particular, how the fog of war, uh, was, was so present in this, in this tragic story. This is obviously a grand scale, but it's a, it's a rather poignant metaphor for an individual experience when we're in our own fog, whatever that fog is, anxiety, depression, uh, grief, or rage, or what, whatever fog you might find yourself in, um, you know,

• 49:59Speaker 00

  just as these soldiers wound up shooting at each other, isn't it fascinating how we can end up fighting ourselves in trying to reach our goals and sort of shooting ourselves in the foot, um, when we're in, in, in that fog?

• 50:17Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah, I think about this a lot, and it comes up on the, my podcast a lot, which is that, you know, when the water's rough, sit down.

• 50:28Speaker 01

  Don't stand up in a rocky boat. Meaning like when you're, um, being flooded with cortisol, adrenaline, this is not a time to make decisions.

• 50:43Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 50:44Speaker 01

  Even when you're being flooded with the good stuff like dopamine or serotonin.

• 50:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:49Speaker 01

  Not a time to make decisions. Decisions are to be made when you're at your most level and neutral.

• 50:56Speaker 01

  And so I would say that those sort of physiological states are mirroring this fog of war, like that you're in your own little fog of war. Just be still.

• 51:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, which is so hard because in those moments, our mental wiring just wants action.

• 51:16Speaker 01

  It does.

• 51:16Speaker 00

  It wants to solve that fog with some action.

• 51:20Speaker 01

  And I think that one of the gifts that I'm perceiving as I get into my late 50s is I am more comfortable with unpleasant emotions because I am absolutely sure, finally, after decades of not being so sure, I guess, I am absolutely sure that no feeling is final. So I know it will dissipate. And I know that it's like, kind of like me talking to myself and making stuff up. And so I just know that in not that many minutes, I'm going to feel different, whether I manage the emotion or not. It just, you just can't stay in that heightened state for that.

• 52:06Speaker 00

  And that's reassuring. There's comfort in that. That fog will lift.

• 52:12Speaker 01

  Totally. It's just weather. In fact, weather is probably the greatest metaphor, which I guess is what you're really doing in this final beat, is that weather is the perfect metaphor for our emotions. That like, no sunny day lasts, no rainy day lasts. The fog won't last. The fog will come back.

• 52:34Speaker 01

  It will be cold. It will be warm. It will be just right. It will be awful. And on and on and on. And so it goes externally and internally.

• 52:46Speaker 00

  Amen. Kelly Corrigan, I feel like that's a perfect place to wrap this up. I'm so grateful that you came on and you brought it. Like you brought, you brought the Corrigan. Big time. And I really appreciate it. This was really fun. Thanks for having me. Of course. Snafu is a production of iHeart Podcasts and Snafu Media, a partnership between Film Nation Entertainment and Pacific Electric Picture Company. Post-production and creative support from Good Egg Audio. Our executive producers are me, Ed Helms, Mike Falbo, Glenn Basner, Andy Kim, and Dylan Fagan. This episode was produced by Alyssa Martino and Tori Smith.

• 53:28Speaker 00

  Our managing producer is Carl Nellis. Our video editor is Jared Smith. Technical direction and engineering from Nick Dooley. Additional story editing from Carl Nellis. Our creative executive is Brett Harris. Logo and branding by Matt Gosson and The Collected Works. Legal review from Dan Welsh, Megan Halson, and Caroline Johnson. Special thanks to Isaac Dunham, Adam Horn, Lane Klein, and everyone at iHeart Podcasts, but especially Will Pearson, Carrie Lieberman, and Nikki Ator. While I have you, don't forget to pick up a copy of my book, Snafu: The Definitive Guide to History's Greatest Screw-Ups. It's

• 54:07Speaker 00

  available now from any book retailer. Just go to snafu-book.com. Thanks for listening and see you next week.

• 54:25Speaker 04

  The scariest part of Halloween isn't the full moon or a chainsaw starting up in the distance. It's running out of Reese's Cups. Because when you open the door to four princesses, six superheroes, and three Draculas all reaching for your Reese's Cups, things can get scary fast. Especially when you were kind of counting on some leftovers. So this Halloween, buy extra. Because your neighbor Jeff dressed like a kangaroo? That's scary enough. Running out of Reese's Cups doesn't need to be.

• 54:55Speaker 03

  The Halloween party is at my place this year. It's my favorite party to host, with the lowest prices. And the huge selection, Total Wine & More is my first stop. A bottle of wine for me while I'm preparing the snacks, ready to drink cocktails for the party, and beer for the friends who always end up on the couch. Between hosting and grabbing something to bring, I love getting the lowest prices. Now I'm ready for Halloween. Are you? Get the fun started at Total Wine & More. Spirits are not sold in Virginia and North Carolina. Drink responsibly. Be 21.

• 55:25Speaker 02

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.