This is a podcast from woor. It is the Jesse Kelly Show.
Another hour of The Jesse Kelly Show on a spectacular, a wonderful Thursday Tuesday. Sorry, I got myself super excited. I'm super exciting. So we have to try to finish up Anzio tonight. Yes, I will get to some politics next hour. Trump's talking about Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post being controlled by the crazy people.
There's a wonderful conversation to have about that.
There's a hilarious article out about feminists being dumped for being feminists.
Good ceasefire agreement in.
The Black Sea, all that, so much more coming up in the final hour of the world famous Jesse Kelly Show. But we're not in the final hour, are we. We are in the second hour, and so it's time for our number two. Part two, I should say of the Battle of Anzio in World War Two. I've told you before. I've always found this to be fascinating and most people don't know much about, really any part of the Italian campaign. Part one was last night. It was mostly set up.
If you happen to miss it, here's the thirty second version of it. The Allies wanted to find a way to distract Germany, also to potentially find a way into Europe from the southern end. They decided to try for Italy, but the Italians surrendered. The Germans took over Italy, and now the Germans are lying in wait for the Allies dug in ready to kill a bunch of them. We
under a man named General Lucas. We land at Anzio behind the German lines, of course, and the Germans are led by a general by the name of Kesserling, a very very capable general. To put it mildly, we land at Anzio. The coast is clear. General Lucas has an opportunity to then push towards Rome quickly if he moves with speed and purpose. Instead, he's a nerd, this man. He believes they're all lying in wait, and he waits.
As he waits, Kesserling gets his Germans into place. And this comes back to something we talk about a lot. One of the incredibly boring aspects that I love of wars and battles are logistics. Logistics, moving men, moving materials to and fro. In fact, let's talk about that really briefly, as it pertains to where we're at in the world at this point in time. This is nineteen forty four, early nineteen forty four. The D Day invasion is six months away.
So here's here.
Are the naval strains on the world. The United States of America has been fighting a war against the Japanese and the Pacific for a long time. The Brits are also trying to fight against the Japanese in that area, Burma, places like that. We also have to deal with the Soviet Union. They need help, they need supplied. We can't just ship supply ships into the Soviet Union. The German you boat still sink them. So we have to dedicate. Everyone has to dedicate naval assets there. They're shipping in
the Africa. There's shipping everywhere. And again everything is finite. Troops are finite, navies are finite. We are not getting the best of the best for the side campaign, I hate to call it, that is known as Operation Shingle, the side campaign of Anzio of Italy. We don't get the best of anything. Now, that's our logistical problem. On the German side, they could move troops quickly the roads, they knew the area they would dug in.
They quickly get.
Their troops surrounding us in Anzio. By this point they've commandeered the trains. They're using it all now. And one of the all time bad timing things, you know, how Luke is gets there to Anzio and he parks it for a little while while we dig in. So we create this kind of beachhead, this big bubble, and we're dug in and things are going well. Lucas waits until he thinks, Okay, I guess I guess we should check things out. Maybe we should move forward out of here.
He starts to move out or probe whether or not he should move out, right about the precise time Germans surround us and dig in with cracked troops. We start to probe out, we start to send patrols out and they don't come back. And I'm going to talk to you about this, just really briefly. Patrol because you've you've heard that word a lot, I'm sure if you've ever watched a movie or read a war book, or you've
heard the term patrol. But what does it mean. Well, this is actually a great example of what it means. It's part of living the life of an infantryman. You will have an area you're dug in, we'll just call it a base, but it doesn't always have to be that, but a place where you have a headquarters, in a hospital, a place that you have secured, a secured perimeter of some kind, call it that. But you don't win a
war by staying in base wherever you are. Even if you're on the defense, you have to go out and find out where's the enemy, where's he moving around. If you're on the offense, you have to go find out. Hey, there's a little town over here. I wonder if there are some German troops in that town. We should go check it out. Now, let's stop and take it yet
another little sidetrack. Why don't you know if there are troops in that town or not at this point in time, Because both sides have air power, all the movement is at night. During the day, the plane fly over, it's like everything is dead on the ground. Whatever you want to do German side American side, you have to do it in the dark. So if you're the Americans and you're dug in, if you want to know if there are German troops, well you have to send a patrol
out and find out if there are German troops. You see, now we send patrols out and like I said, they start dying. How many at one point in time. You know about rangers. Everyone knows, you've heard the word Army Rangers. Will Rangers are really getting their start here. And I know that rogers rangers pre revolutionary where I understand the Rangers trace their lineage clear back to them. But this is really when the Army Rangers are becoming the Army Rangers.
The studs they have now, and they were studs at this point in time. They took the best of the best, put them through brutal training, and these guys came out the other end studs. At one point we sent out a patrol the Rangers who didn't get massacred. Seven hundred and sixty seven of them were taken prisoner. That's the level of German competition we have around Anzio. That's who's dug in here. We are now trapped. We keep sending out these patrols and our patrols continue to run into
a German perimeter that is dug in. We are trapped. We are held inside of this pocket. But the Germans weren't going to let us just sit there now we're going to talk about artillery briefly artillery and World War One because it's gonna matter. Have you ever seen any of the huge artillery guns from World War One? Fascinating, Highly recommend you look them up. They even had names artillery guns, but they were much bigger than most of
the artillery guns that we were using in World War Two. Why, though, why would you have bigger guns that fire further and bigger shells in World War One than you do in World War Two. Well, yes, you want your artillery guns to be big and to fire big shells and things like that, but they also need to be able to move. Why do they need to be able to move because unlike in World War One, the opposing army's going to move.
In World War One, you could fire.
Those big shells because they're dug into a fort or they're dug into a.
Trench in the ground.
In World War Two, when the armies are always moving, they're mobile, you can't have a huge artillery piece that requires a freaking train to get it into place, because by the time you get it into place, the enemy will simply have moved and you're out of luck, unless, of course, you're stuck in a little pocket on the coast of Anzio with nowhere to go. The Germans bring up something known as Anzio Annie. What was Anzio Annie? It was actually not one, It was two artillery pieces.
Go look up Anzio Annie. That is the kind of firepower that was raining down on our troops in this pocket. And Hitler himself, he said, I don't want the Allies to remain where they are. I want to I think he called it a boil. I think he said he wants to lance the boil. If I remember right of the Anzio campaign. Hitler knows he has us surrounded. He knows he has us surrounded by crack German troops. He knows our general is obviously, at this point in time,
a cautious type. If we're being nice, we'll call General Lucas cautious. If you were being harsh, you'd call him worthless. And the truth is probably somewhere in between. You never know what to believe either way. The Germans start to hurt us, they start to rain down artillery, they start to infiltrate, and that brings us to the amazing story of Felix Sparks. Before we get to Felix Sparks and his story. You're gonna want to take your chalk for
this next little bit. It's amazing and awesome and horrible. You know, it's fine if you've got your testosterone. You see, testosterone levels are off a cliff historically the United States of America, we've lost fifty percent of our testosterone in fifty years. We drink estrogen, we shower in estrogen. It's everywhere, and now our tea levels are they're dropping some. We can't even have kids anymore. We need to handle this problem naturally, natural herbal supplements from Chalk. They have one
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We'll be back. Miss something.
There's a podcast, get it on demand wherever podc the Jesse Kelly Show on a Tuesday. You can email the show love heye, death threats, whatever you'd like Jesse at Jesse kellyshow dot com. Continuing on with our history the Battle of Anzio w W two. This is of course part two. Part one was last night. If you miss that, iHeart Spotify iTunes.
It's all free.
Just go download the podcast to the show and catch up. Now back to where we were, We are dug In and Anzio. The Germans have surrounded us. We start probing, start sending patrols out to see exactly what the resistance is.
And we are finding out the hard bloody.
Way that resistance is heavy and that these are not chumps. These are highly trained German troops and they're giving as good as they're getting. And that brings us to the story of Felix Sparks. There's a chance you've heard the name Felix Sparks because he was actually involved in one of the most famous.
Parts of the war. Felix Sparks after this, long after.
This, ended up being part of a unit that liberated one of the concentration camps. That's what he's most famous for. But that was not If you talked to Felix Sparks later on in his life.
That was not the worst moment of his life. That was a dark moment.
Obviously, you walk into a camp with people starving to death, that was a dark moment. The worst moment of his life came here in Anzio. Now, what in the world could possibly have happened to Felix Sparks that was worse than finding a freaking concentration camp.
Well, this brings us to.
A conversation we've had before on the show about about how, look, life is unfair. Okay, war is obviously extremely unfair, and even within militaries there is oftentimes an extremely disproportionate number of burden, amount of the burden held by a few people in the military. Here's a good example, our most recent one, Iraq Afghanistan. Regular troops put in good, honorable service in Iraq and Afghanistan.
That's true.
These special operations guys, Seals and Green Brays and those types, they really bore the burden of that war. Ten twelve deployments. We're talking Navy Seal heroes killing themselves when they get back. They're so mentally shattered from carrying the burden of that war World War two. Since we're on the subject of World War Two, You know what I think about a lot when I think about things like the Battle of Midway, I think about our torpedo pilots. You know, we really
generally had a few different kinds of pilots. There were fighter pilots, and there were dive bomber pilots, and there were torpedo planes. And they would carry one torpedo underneath them and they would have to carry it very low level with the water and fly directly at at a ship. If that sounds like suicide, good because it pretty much was. On top of all that, our torpedoes for the longest time in World War two didn't work. It was a national scandal at the time. Oh yeah, it was terrible, Chris.
We had faulty torpedoes. They would hit ships and not even blow up. We would be listening and we'd hear it cliank off the ship. It wouldn't blow up, or they would just dive down to the bottom of the ocean because the fins were wrong.
They'd stick.
So we had these torpedo guys at the Battle of Midway. I forget what the exact number is. So I'm going to mess up the exact number, but I think it was forty forty five of them went out.
None of them came home.
Now you think about the Battle of Midway, it's thought as this thought of as this tremendous success, and of course it was. We stopped the Japanese advance and we ambushed them, and from then on they were always on the retreat. And of course it was a success for America, for the military, for the Navy, for the Marines, for the it was a huge, huge success. But that one unit, the torpedo guys, none of them came home. They were
all gone pretty much all. I forget what the exact numbers are, but it was basically all of them gone. In wars, infantry troops, frontline infantry troops will bear a tremendous burden that many other troops, not that there's anything wrong with their service, that many other troops simply will never know and will never feel. We've brought up D Day so many times that this unit. Yeah, the total numbers are bad, but this entire unit was gone. Felix Sparks,
he was a company commander at the time. Just think two hundred men Whenever I say company, think two hundred men. That number is never going to be exact, but that's rough. Okay, two hundred men. He's a company commander. He is a company commander of a guard unit. It's more of a think about it this way, hometown boys. His unit, he was a Colorado guy, Felix Sparks. His unit was basically all Colorado and Oklahoma guys. Now, these are people he
would have already trained with. These are people. If he didn't know them personally, he would have known people who knew them because he would have known these communities. He would have known them in an intimate way. The same way in your area, if you wherever you happen to live, if you go overseas anywhere in peacetime.
Look, it just happened to me.
I told you when we were in Italy. I was at the elevator and we had to go to some stupid dinner thing I didn't want to go to, and it was all these foreigners all around me. And there was this couple, this old black couple there and they were speaking English and I knew they were Americans. We hugged. It was yes, my people, Right, you have an infinity. Well, his people were from his area. That was the unit he commanded, and we'll talk about what happened that day.
Hang on, it is the.
Jesse Kelly Show on a Wonderful Tuesday. Back to our story talking about the Battle of Anzio. This is part two of all of it. So Felix Sparks, he commands an infantry unit. He commands an infantry unit at Anzio at a time where it's tough duty to command an infantry company at Anzio because the Germans have decided they are going to push the Americans back into the sea, and they began to pound American lines in filtrate, invade, and we don't like to ever think in these terms,
especially when it comes to World War Two. They're winning pushing Americans back. Our lines are collapsing. Felix Sparks Company, they were on the far flank. Now that means they're on the end. And whenever you were on the end of a line, you know you have all these troops
set up. When you were on the end, you have by far the most important job because if you collapse, if the end of the line collapses, it can actually mean everybody dies because it allows the enemy to get to the side of everyone behind and beside everyone and essentially enveloped them and wipe them out. It's part of how Julius Caesar beat Pompy Magnus in almost this exact same way. He was outnumbered. Pompey had everything, Pompey had
better supplies. Julius Caesar attacked one of his flanks, wiped it out, and rolled up his entire army. Just ancient days, modern days, if you're on the end, you must hold fast. Sparks is on the end. He's out there with his entire company, dug in and income some cracked German troops. At first, Sparks describes it as he couldn't figure out who was coming at him because there were so many. There were so many, and they were trotting just right
at him. He actually called back to headquarters and said, hey, do we have any of our guys wearing overcoats and stuff? And headquarters once they figured things out, said, uh, no, those are Germans. You might want to start shooting. Sparks's unit one hundred and fifty seventh. They started shooting, and the Germans were shooting back, and it was some of the most terrible fighting, and it's kind of one of those things. Guys love these stories because of the heroism.
At the same time we hate everyone hates men and women. We hate these stories because of how horrible and tragic it was. They were way out numbered and they had no chance. The Germans started to mow through this company. Now this company was given as good as they were getting. At one point in time, a guy we still don't know his name. We only know about him and what he did because Sparks saw him do it. The guy hopped up on top of a tank.
There was a fifty.
Cow there, Germans all around him coming at him. He strapped himself to the fifty cow and just started putting in work, putting down Germans like you can't believe, till finally a German snuck up on him killed him too. Felix Sparks's company is dying. There are Germans inside the lines, there are Germans around the lines, and soon Sparks described what it was like. This had to be the most
amazing feeling, the most horrific feeling in the world. Sparks knew the stakes of his If his line collapsed, his line collapsed, and Germans were pouring beside him, going right by him, practically ignoring him as they poured back into the rest of the troops. What would that have been like? You're watching the enemy, he can turn and kill you at any moment. Instead, he's infiltrating back into American lines sparks.
What's left of his men, which aren't many at this point in time, has to be some sort of an organized retreat. He ends up in a cave. He's in a cave, and the Germans eventually find out where he is, where everyone is in the cave, So the Germans start sending troops, some of their best troops, the shock troops, after him. When's the last time you were in a cave? I personally, I love them because they're creepy, aren't They
can't see you, don't know what's around the corner. They never look like they do in the movies where it's this perfect line. There's always this crevice here and there. They're just creepy. Now they're creepy on your own when you're waiting for a bat to fly into your ear.
What's a cave like?
As you try to throw as many grenades as possible and kill as many Germans before they can come into the cave and finish you off. Felix Sparks is stuck in this cave for days, killing Germans as they try to get in the entryway. It's so bad he has to keep calling American artillery in on top of his position so they can kill as many Germans as possible at the entryway of the cave by the time this
thing is over. Remember what I was talking about about, how some units they bear the entire run of things. Felix Sparks and one other man, they are the ones who finally made it back to the command tent when it was over. One other guy, the rest of them gone. Mingo looked up Felix Sparks. I believe he lived to be in his eighties. I think they wrote a book about him called The Liberator, which obviously focused mainly on the liberation of the concentration camp, things like that. That
was stuff he went on to do later on. But Felix Sparks, his men they all died here. Now he didn't obviously, but his men they all died. That is how desperate the fighting is. As the Germans push and push and push. At one point in time, they've broken through enough American lines, they've killed enough Americans at Anzio that we are finally at our last line of defense. You know what defense in depth is, right, we've talked
about it before. A very old way of thinking, ancient warfare way of thinking, would be, you put all your troops on the line, and they'll put all their troops on the line, and then and then you slam into each other and you fight until you win. And then the offense defense that's what you do. And then both sides eventually figured out, wait a minute, if I'm on offense, I should hold a unit in reserve in case something goes wrong. Then I can plug them in here. And defensively,
we figured this out too. We really mastered this during World War One. We don't need a trench. A trench can be taken out, they can invade it. They get that we need lines of trenches. So you have to take this trench line, and then the next trench line, and then the next trench line. Well, same concept here. This was very much World War One style fighting. We eventually get back to our final trench line. The next thing behind it is the freaking see And just to
let you know, how desperate this was. There is and I believe it's still there to this day.
I've never been. I would like to go.
There is an entire command structure for our generals underground, because anything above ground was dying at this point in time, artillery, machine guns Germans coming in the Battle of Anzio was terrible. Beyond belief. We as all this is going on in desperation to save the troops of Anzio. Because at this point in time people were saying this is going to be the next Gunkirk, that's how bad it was going
to be. They launched yet another offensive south of Anzio at that Gustav Linemember I told you it was about halfway up the Italian boot the German defensive line. They were so desperate to save the troops at Anzio that they launched another offensive at the Gustav line that also failed because they weren't they couldn't get up the hills to kill them. So they were dying going up the hills in another part of Italy just to try and
save the American troops at Anzio who were dying. It's wild you've never heard about this story, right, Normandy Ewogim, You know those things they get all the love. This was as terrible fighting as it was. All right, I'm gonna wrap up this story and we'll move on back to politics in a moment. Before I do that. You know our dogs, I can't believe they live as long as they do. America, we know our dogs die early. Here people have been confused for the longest time as
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My dog are going to Roughgreens dot com slash Jesse, We'll be back. It is the Jesse Kelly Show on a Tuesday. Don't worry, we still have an hour left. I'll get back to politics in a little bit. We'll talk about how the communists end up controlling the street. Animals can control the boss if the boss isn't careful, and feminists at all kinds of other things.
And this this brings us to this point in time.
So the German offensive to push us into the sea does stall out, It does fail, both sides digging in still Now, General Lucas gets sacked. They dump him, and look, I have all kinds of emails about well, how we start out yesterday, Jesse. Isn't this why Patten said a good plan executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week. Yes, it's one of Patton's great lines. Look at, generals are a hard thing to analyze. You're
gonna have your favorites and ones you hate. I'm gonna have my favorites and ones I hate.
It is what it is.
I generally try to trust the men who served under them, because that usually doesn't lie. That's my barometer for it. But I'll say this about General Lucas, really about any general you love or hate.
Remember that generals have.
Traveling press tours with them, They have staffs of propagandists with them for and against them. Lots of the generals we look back on, not just in World War Two, but prior to that, historically, Lots of the generals we have that we think so highly of. He was the most brilliant, he was the best he was. He had a team of writers with him writing down how wonderful he was at all times, and oftentimes those are the
documents that survived the ages. And this is in no way dogging on somebody like Alexander the Great, for instance, Alexander the Great, one of the greats of all time. Of course, not denying that Alexander the Great was also aware that propaganda mattered. How he was thought of mattered. He was very much a human being who saw his
historical significance. He wanted to be historically great. Alexander the Great took a lot of steps to ensure there were people around him writing about him that made him look pretty good. Sound pretty good. MacArthur was infamous for this every I don't mean to even call out those two guys. Generals in command can be they can get the rewards of a great press team, and they can also catch the ire of history if there's a propaganda tour against them,
if there are vested interests against them. I don't know whether General Lucas was a great general, bad general, great man, bad man. I'm not gonna lie to you. I have no idea. You want to point to his failures here and say he got a bunch of brave soldiers killed with his cautiousness cowardice?
Do you want to put on it? Okay? I give you that.
You want to say he's following the advice he got from people. I would agree with that, maybe, Donald, I don't know.
What if?
What if the failures at Anzio and it was not well received back home that we were taking these kind of losses for a place. The American people didn't understand why they were supposed to care about.
What if?
What if Lucas was the scapegoat for Fdr Eisenhower even and I'm not even saying he was. What if those guys who would have had friendly people in the media. They didn't want to look bad. What if they went to the big newspapers and said, Hey, this General Lucas, what a dirtball?
Huh?
Really screwed this whole thing up? What's going to survive to the year twenty twenty five. All those articles, all those books, all those quotes about what a complete nutteror moron General Lucas was. But whatever it was, he gets sacked, He gets replaced. His deputy slowly but surely builds up American supplies all this while while we're dug in and kind of everything stalls. Now he's hoovering up as many bombs, bullets, armor, as much as he can get onto the beach in
his sector. He gets onto the beach, and then we once again attacked down south at the gustav line, and again we attempt another breakout at Anzio, and finally, after months and months of fighting, we do break out. We are successful. You can see the video to this day of General Clark on his jeep cruising through Rome as we reconquered Rome and all those other things but Anzio, and there are good books out on this. I would
recommend it if the subject interests you at all. Anzio is one of those things that never sat well with the guys who were there. It didn't the American public wasn't in love with it. And look, doesn't that kind of make the point I was just making about generals.
It's a battle. Most people don't know that much.
About why, because that wasn't what the United States of America. They didn't want that in the headlines. They didn't want that as chapter one of the World War two book. They wanted that buried in the back somewhere because it was a side mission, really a distraction mission. But it was a distraction mission where we ended up leaving a lot of guys high and dry. I'll tell you Felix Sparks. You remember Felix Sparks, a guy who lost his entire unit.
From what I can gather from the things he wrote and said, had a lot of bitterness and sadness the rest of his life. Guy lost his entire company. Like even if he didn't know all of them personally, he would have known their towns, He would have known people who knew them. What if you're in command of two hundred men, all of them die and you find out that They all died on a side mission for a country that you didn't even really place a top priority on.
It's hard enough if you knew your friends died in a worthy cause. You find out you lost all your friends, all your men for that kind of thing. It's going to stay with you, isn't it. So there, that's the Battle of Anzio. Hope you enjoyed it.
I did. This has been a podcast from wor