The Sinking of the H.L. Hunley

The story of the H.L. Hunley really begins with the Union blockade of the Confederacy during the Civil War, which was ordered less than a week after the fall of Fort Sumter in South Carolina.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. We have
a past podcast subject that has been in the news lately.
That is the c s S. H L. Hunley uh,

(00:23):
and that's following a newly published paper on the cause
of death for the people who were inside that Confederate
submarine when it was lost. And typically it's the sort
of news that we would cover with an episode update,
where we would either play the previous episode first and
talk about the new developments afterward, or the other way around.
But that previous appearance of the Hunley on our show

(00:45):
is from the eleven episode More Shipwrecks Stories Battleships, so
it's only about eight minutes of an episode that also
covers several other shipwrecks as well. So instead of doing
a normal episode update that we might do typically in
another circumstances, we're going to give the h L. Hunley
the full treatment today. And huge, huge thanks to Rachel Lance,

(01:06):
who dropped us a note about the Hunley a few
days before we recorded this. She's one of the authors
on this paper. That just came out about it, which
actually grew out of her pH d research. So we
will be talking about that some more later in the episode.
And the story of the H. L. Hunley really begins
with the Union blockade of the Confederacy during the Civil War,
which was ordered less than a week after the fall

(01:28):
of Fort Sumter in South Carolina. So for a quick recap.
After multiple slave states, including South Carolina, seceded after the
election of Abraham Lincoln, Major Robert Anderson of the U. S.
Army occupied Fort Sumter and refused to hand it over
to the Confederacy, and after a couple of skirmishes, a
Confederate force attacked the fort on April twelfth, and the

(01:50):
Union surrendered it on. The attack on Fort Sumter is
generally marked as the official beginning of the war. Almost
immediately after this, the United States governed meant started working
on a plan to cut off the Southern ports from
international shipping. The goal was to prevent the South from
exporting its goods, including cotton and produce, and to prevent

(02:11):
Southern states from importing trade goods, weapons, and other material
that would be needed for the war. This was all
part of a military strategy called the Anaconda Plan, meant
to choke off the South and bring a speedy end
to the conflict. There is some debate about how effective
this was. It definitely made things tougher on the South,

(02:31):
but the war was definitely not brought to a remotely
speedy end by putting it into place. The government had
two main options for stopping commerce at the southern ports.
President Lincoln could issue an executive order closing them, or
a blockade could prevent ships from entering or leaving them.
Either way, though, cutting off the Southern states to shipping

(02:51):
would have a negative impact on international trade, which meant
other nations were likely to object, so the likely international
response had to be part of that decision, and there
were pros and cons to each of these two strategies.
An executive order closing the ports would be simpler it
would not require a massively huge navy to enforce, but

(03:11):
it would also be difficult to enforce. This was especially
true since violators would need to be tried in the
state where they'd violated the order, which at that point
would have been a state under Confederate control. That would
make such a proceeding highly unlikely, so it was really
easy to imagine someone just ignoring the order, knowing that
it wasn't likely or even impossible that they would be

(03:33):
prosecuted for it. A blockade, on the other hand, was
an internationally recognized wartime action, and standards for blockades had
been outlined in the eighteen fifty six Declaration of Paris.
Although the US was not a signatory of the declaration,
it could expect other nations to respect the blockade as
long as it was implemented and maintained in a way

(03:54):
that followed international law. The only exception would be if
other nations were willing to officially take the Southern side
in the conflict, which would put them at war with
the United States, but at the same time, implementing a
blockade would shift the framing of the war. You might
remember how in our podcast on nuclear close Calls, the
United States presented it's a blockade of Cuba during the

(04:17):
Cuban Missile crisis as a quarantine rather than as a blockade,
because a blockade assumed a state of war, and the
United States was not at war with Cuba at that time,
so this was similar blockading the Southern States meant that
the Union was recognizing the Confederacy as an opposing belligerent.
This meant the war was no longer an insurrection or

(04:37):
a rebellion or some kind of internal matter. It was
a war between two separate opposing entities. On April nineteenth,
President Lincoln issued a proclamation ordering the blockade of the
entire Confederate coast, with the exception of North Carolina and Virginia.
He issued a second proclamation eight days later which added

(04:58):
those two states to the plan. In the words of
his initial proclamation, quote for this purpose, a competent force
will be posted so as to prevent entrance and exit
of vessels from the ports aforesaid. If therefore, with a
view to violate such blockade, a vessel shall approach or
shall attempt to leave, any of the said ports, she

(05:19):
will be duly warned by the commander of one of
the blockading vessels, who will endorse on her register the
fact and date of such warning. And if the same
vessel shall again attempt to enter or leave the blockaded ports,
she will be captured and sent to the nearest convenient
port for such proceedings against her and her cargo as
prize as maybe deemed advisable. This was a colossal undertaking.

(05:43):
The plan involved not only blocking the twelve major Southern ports,
but also guarding its entire coastline. This is about three thousand,
five hundred miles or five thousand, six hundred kilometers, and
although leaders hoped that it could be done with about
thirty warships, it became year really quickly that thirty was
not nearly enough. Small vessels dodged the warships guarding the

(06:06):
ports by traveling along inland waterways, and commerce continued essentially unimpeded.
I mean it was harder to do, but like they
didn't make much of a dent and getting done. That
continued at the southern ports for months. Gideon Wells, Secretary
of the Navy, then established a Blockade Strategy Board, which

(06:26):
convened at the Smithsonian Institution and made an extensive study
of Southern waterways to try to figure out how to
bolster this blockade. Their research stretched from July to September
of eighteen sixty one, and they ultimately issued ten total
reports on how to make the blockade more effective. The
number of blockheading ships would grow well into the hundreds,

(06:48):
and by the end of the war, the United States
would have the largest navy on Earth. Meanwhile, the Confederacy
worked out a number of strategies to try to get
around this blockade. For a time, the Confederate government tried
issuing letters of mark to privateers to operate from the
Southern ports and try to take prizes from the Union
trade ships. This was particularly effective at distracting the United

(07:10):
States Navy for the first several months of the war,
but as the blockade got tightened, privateers stopped being able
to sneak out and into the Southern ports, so their
usefulness declined, and eventually their use in the war really waned.
Another technique was blockade runners, small lightweight sailing vessels and steamers,
most of them civilian vessels that largely operated at night.

(07:33):
Blockade runners would sneak in and out of Southern ports
and carry goods to and from neutral ports like Bermuda
and Nasau. Charleston, South Carolina, was a hot spot for
blockade runners until early eighteen sixty three, when the Union
significantly reinforced the blockade there. Then most blockade running activity
moved to Wilmington, North Carolina. Small vessels ran the blockade

(07:56):
all through the Gulf coast throughout the war as well,
having grown up in Carolina and spent a fair amount
of time in the Wilmington's and Rightful Beach areas in
the summer. Blockade Runners they have kind of a folk
hero quality in this, like they're kind of a nod
to the very romanticized idea of how the Civil War
went down, have kind of a sticking it to the

(08:17):
man running the blockade like spirit. Uh So, I have
always found the story of the Blackade Runners kind of
fascinating um from that point of view and life experience. Yeah,
I think it's certainly like conjurors images of just sort
of some interesting stealth moving and yeah, and I can

(08:38):
see where it gets romanticized. I think they're they're even
you know, hotels and restaurants and things like that named
with the Blockade Runner or or nods to famous Blockade runners.
To me, those words will always mean star Wars. So
of course there were not just efforts to run the Blackade,
but also to destroy the ships in the Blockade themselves,

(08:58):
and that is what brings us to the s s
h L. Hunley, which we will talk more about after
a sponsor break. The h L. Hunley is named for
Horace Lawson Hunley, who was born in Tennessee on June three.
He got a law degree from the University of Louisiana

(09:20):
which is now to Lane University in eighteen forty nine,
and he opened a law practice in New Orleans. He
also worked at the New Orleans Customs House, and he
previously served in the Louisiana Legislature. In eighteen fifty nine
or eighteen sixty he bought a plantation, and in addition
to the enslaved labor that worked on the plantation, according
to the eighteen fifties census, he enslaved eight people for

(09:42):
domestic work at his home in New Orleans. By eighteen
sixty one, he was doing pretty well financially, but he
was always interested in finding new ways to bring in
additional income, and one of these was the development of
a submarine vessel to be used in the Confederate War effort.
This really seems to have been a ski that was
driven more by money and by pride than by patriotism.

(10:04):
Although Hunley himself was a slave owner and he supported
the institution of slavery, he also thought it was really
foolish and shortsighted for the South to be going to
war over it, but Businessman and the Confederate government had
offered substantial prizes to anyone who could sink a Union warship,
and Hunley really hoped to get himself one of those prizes,
and he was also wanting to make his own mark

(10:26):
on history and establish a legacy for himself. In his
pursuit of a workable submarine, Hunley teamed up with other
financial backers and went to James McClintock, an engineer who
was living in New Orleans who had also been working
on a small underwater craft with Baxter Watson, and once
they were all working together, their first attempt at a
submarine was the Pioneer, which was a thirty five ft long,

(10:49):
roughly cylindrical vessel with tapered ends. It was powered by
two men turning a crank while a commander controlled the
depth and used fins to steer. Although the Pioneer essentially
worked and it was authorized for privateering with a letter
of mark, it wasn't particularly refined. It moved slowly, and
it leaked, and it never saw combat. When the Union

(11:11):
captured New Orleans in April of eighteen sixty two, the
team intentionally scuttled it so that it would not fall
into enemy hands. This might be where things like privateers
get romanticized, because you have to have nerves of steel
to be like, it's essentially a big barrel. I think
I'll take it under water and pull a crank. Yeah,
this whole they talked about in the prior episode, which

(11:32):
I think was from Sarah and Bablina, about how nerve
racking it must have been to be in any of
these vessels. I mean, at this point, being in a
submarine is still a pretty closed in tight quarters experience.
But these were just basically metal tubes that you had
to crawl into and then crouch. Yeah. Yeah, Like, here's

(11:52):
the submarine I built in my backyard. Go take on
the war effort in it. That would be scary. And
from there, Hunley, Watson, and McLintock fled to Mobile, Alabama,
where they met Thomas W. Park and Thomas B. Lions
of the Park and Lions Machine Shop, and it was
there that these five men, along with William A. Alexander,
worked on another submarine, American Diver. Their efforts with the

(12:16):
Diver weren't nearly as successful as they had been with
the Pioneer, though McClintock spent months trying to develop an
engine that could power the sub rather than using the
power of human beings turning cranks. Because moving fresh air
into a submersible craft was a tricky proposition, using an
engine rather than than human exertion for propulsion would give

(12:37):
it a greater range and more power, but he couldn't
get an engine that was small enough to fit, so
he ultimately gave up after having spent months trying, and
then went back to the crank method that they were
using before, and he wound up with a design that
was slightly larger than the Pioneer and had two additional
crew to power that crank. Uh It performed well enough
in tests in a lake, but even with two more

(12:58):
men working the crank, once the American Diver was launched
into the sea, it wasn't powerful enough to overcome the
pull of the tide. The crew had to struggle just
to make it back to port, and once they did,
for reasons that aren't entirely clear, the vessel was immediately
swamped and sank, and it has never been recovered. So
not only had the team spent months working on a

(13:19):
vessel that didn't work in real world conditions and then
lost it. They also sunk all of their capital into
that venture. They would have been out of the submarine
game entirely had they not found a new investor. That
was Edgar C. Singer of Texas, who was an expert
in torpedoes and Singer arrived in Mobile in the spring
of eighteen sixty three and was impressed enough with their

(13:41):
progress that he funded work on another submarine, which took
place over that spring and summer, and the result was
the h L. Hunley, which was originally named the fish Boat. Yeah,
it's not clear to me exactly when they changed it
to the honly Um, but the Homely was longer than
the Pioneer or the American Diver, with a total length

(14:01):
of fort or twelve meters that included a five ft
long or seven point six meter main compartment, and then
running all through that compartment was the crank connected to
a propeller by a series of gears that would be
operated by a crew of seven. Space inside of the
scrap was very tight. Those men would basically, one at
a time, crawl or sort of sidle their way in

(14:25):
and then cunch over this central crank uh an eighth
man who was the one in the in command of
the vessel, controlled the depth and the direction. I'm so
claustrophobic just hearing that description. Tracy's watching me wins and squirm.
And the artwork for this episode on that will be
on our website is like a diagram of what the
thing looked like. It is very it's very it's very

(14:47):
tight and there. Out of the water, the hunley looked
like a giant metal tube with tapered ends and fins
and a couple of domes on top. But in the
water it was pretty easy to mistake for a porpoise
or a dolphin. Bella and snorkel tubes were used to
move fresh air into the craft, with a lit candle,
providing an early warning system for oxygen getting too low.

(15:08):
It's one of the things that previous hosts remarked on
as being little nerve racking to have to keep an
eye on a candle to know if you had enough air.
The craft's buoyancy and depth were controlled through a pair
of ballast tanks, one four and one aft, and each
of them was equipped with its own pump. The pumps
were also capable of removing water out from the crew compartment,
which was somewhere it should not be. The vessel's buoyancy

(15:30):
was a very delicate balance, and too much water collecting
in the main compartment would cause the vessel to sink.
They began testing the Hunley in the Mobile River in
July of eighteen sixty three, working the bugs out before
inviting Confederate military officials to observe. They conducted a successful
demonstration on July thirty one, which involved approaching a barge

(15:52):
in the river while towing a mine, and when it
got close to the barge, the Hunley submerged, passed under it,
and resurfaced other up the river. Meanwhile, once the mind
came in contact with the barge, it exploded and sank it.
This demonstration was a clear success, but it was not
met with the unanimous approval among the Confederate Navy. Submarine

(16:14):
technology in general was viewed with some suspicion, and a
lot of people thought it was dishonorable or underhanded to
sneak up on an enemy and attack it in a
way that had no hope at all of defense. Uh
the whole the whole collection of torpedoes and minds, and
things like that that exploded in the water were all
known as infernal machines at this point in history. Um

(16:36):
The counter argument to the idea that it was dishonorable
to be using these things to blow up a ship
when people had no way of defending themselves was basically that,
as underdogs with fewer naval resources than the Union the Confederates,
that you basically had to use whatever tools they had
at hand. Rear Admiral Franklin Buchanan, commander of the Naval
District of the Gulf, was one military figure who did

(16:59):
not tirely trust submarines. Yet he was the one who
contacted Flag Officer John Randolph Tucker, who was in command
of the Confederate Navy and Charleston, to unreservedly recommend the
Huntley's use against the blockade there. Tucker passed the recommendation
on to General p. G. T. Beauregard, who immediately requested
that the Hunley be sent to Charleston. Tucker had apparently

(17:21):
been confident enough that Beauregard would want to take this
infernal submarine off of his hands that he had already
made arrangements to transport it to Charleston. Before he actually
got that permission, the Hunley went to Charleston by train,
where it arrived in August. Soon the Confederate Navy took
control of it, feeling the civilian team's progress was too slow.

(17:42):
But on August twenty nine, eighteen sixty three, while at
the dock being prepared for a training mission, the Hunley
sank and five of the eight crew aboard were killed.
Horace Hunley then demanded that the control of the submarine
be returned back to him from the Confederate military, and
this was granted, but it did not end well for
him either. On October fifteenth, he planned a demonstration in

(18:05):
which he would dive under a Confederate vessel and then
surface again on the other side, with himself in command
of the vessel. But after the dive, the Hunley did
not come back up again. Hunley himself, along with the
rest of the crew were all killed, and due to
bad weather, the vessel wasn't recovered for weeks. When it
was recovered, it turned out a valve on the ballast

(18:26):
tank was open, which had allowed water from the sea
into the crew compartment, which had sunk the vessel and
killed everyone aboard, although they had managed to raise the
h L Hunley from the sea floor. After both of
these incidents, General Beauregard was understandably reluctant to allow the
vessel to be used again, but Lieutenant George Dixon, who
had previously lived in Mobile and had worked at the

(18:47):
Park and Lions machine shop when the Hunley was built,
asked to be put in charge of it. Dixon was
finally given permission to target the U. S S. Housa Tonic,
which was part of the Union blockade at Charleston Pix
and carried out this operation on February eighteen sixty four,
after about two months of training and practice for the crew,

(19:07):
and we will talk about the mission and how it
went both well and poorly. After a sponsor break, when
the h L Hunley embarked on its mission to destroy
the unionship Housatonic, it was no longer towing a mind
behind it, as it had done in that initial demonstration

(19:29):
in the Mobile River. Instead, it was equipped with a
black powder torpedo attached to the end of a twenty
ft spar so for the sake of clarity. Torpedoes at
this point generally did not have any kind of propulsion
or guidance like they do today. They were a lot
more like mines than modern torpedoes. They usually had to
just be rammed into their target in some physical way.

(19:51):
The plan for the Hunley was to do exactly that
and then raise a blue phosphorus lamp to signal that
the mission was complete, and after seeing the signal, men
on shore would light a fire that the Hunley could
use to navigate home. The Huntley approached the Housatonic at
about eight pm on February eighteen sixty four. Robert F. Fleming,

(20:12):
one of the few black men stationed aboard, spotted something
odd in the water. He alerted Acting Master's mate Louis
a Compwait, who observed the object and so that it
was a log. Fleming did not agree with this assessment,
given the objects shape and the fact that it was
traveling quickly across the tide instead of with the tide.
He alerted another sailor on watch that there was a

(20:34):
torpedo incoming. The Housatonic was prepared for a submarine attack.
Thanks to word carried by Confederate deserters, the Union knew
that the Confederate Navy had a vessel that could approach
ships while partially or entirely submerged. The semi submersible. David
had also attacked the U s S New Iron Sides
the previous October, so all the blockade ships in the

(20:57):
area took the precaution of anchoring in fairly shallow water
and keeping the boilers ready to move if necessary. Even so,
the response aboard the Housatonic was kind of sluggish. Fleming's
observations weren't readily heated, leading him to say he was
going to slip the anchor chain himself if he had to.
It was only after Compway took a second look with

(21:18):
binoculars that he actually sent word up the chain of
command that an incoming vessel was on the way. Eventually,
Acting Master John Crosby alerted the Captain Charles Pickering. As
the rest of the crew began trying to take evasive action.
Pickering began firing on the Hunley with his shotguns, since
the Hunley had already gotten too close for them to

(21:38):
hit it with a cannon. In spite of the efforts
aboard the Housatonic, the Hunley successfully deployed its torpedo, blowing
a huge hole in the side of the ship and
causing it to rapidly sink since it had been in
shallow water with the hope of deterring a submarine attack.
It came to rest with its rigging above the waterline,
and those crew not able to make it to life

(22:00):
boats were able to cling to the rigging while waiting
for rescue by other ships in the blockade. Although the
Housatonic sank and very little aboard was salvageable afterward, most
of the crew did survive, five were killed out of
a total of about a hundred and fifty five. Fleming
reported that while awaiting rescue, he saw a blue light
on the water, presumably the Hunley signal of success, and

(22:22):
there's some debate about what he might have seen them.
He wouldn't have had knowledge of the Hunley signal plans,
and he wouldn't have had reason to make it up,
but it seems likely that the only light actually burning
aboard the Hunley was the candle that was used to
monitor the oxygen level. Only also never made it back
to port due to elapse in communication there on Shore

(22:44):
officials in Charleston didn't actually realize the ship was missing
for days and with no surviving witnesses on their side.
It took the Confederate Navy a while to confirm that
the Housatonic had been sunk as well. The Confederate Navy
tried to keep the word of the Hunley's lass from spreading.
It would have been impossible to try to locate or
raise the ship, since it had gone down in the

(23:04):
vicinity of the blockade and no one aboard had survived
to give its precise location, But it was useful to
the Confederacy for the Union to believe it still had
the capability of a surprise submarine attack, and believing the
Hunley or at least the crew were still out there
was also a boost to flagging Confederate morale. Once it
was clear that no one had survived, theories abounded about

(23:28):
what might have happened that night aboard the Huntley. Perhaps
too much water had gotten into the Huntley when the
hatch was open to raise that blue light and it
had sunk. Perhaps the explosion had damaged the vessel, or
gunfire from the ship had pierced the hull. Or maybe
in the thrill of the moment, that candle had burned
out and nobody had noticed, since the captain of the

(23:49):
vessel was the only one who could really control its
direction or its depth. If he had been killed or
injured somehow, then his loss would have doomed the whole crew.
So there was a lot of speculation, but no one
had any idea. The Hunley stayed in its place on
the seafloor long beyond the end of the Civil War
in the eighteen sixty five. More than a hundred and
thirty years later, on May third, an expedition by the

(24:12):
National Underwater and Marine Agency, which you'll see abbreviated to
NUMA spearheaded by author Clive Cussler, discovered it in the
Charleston Harbor. It was raised from the seafloor on August eighth,
two thousand, but when it was open, things became even
more mysterious. The entire crew were still at their stations,

(24:32):
apparently having made no effort at all to escape, and
showing no evidence of serious injury. Among what remained of
their corpses, Dixon's pocket watch was stopped at eight three,
leading to questions of whether it had been running slowly
and had stopped at the moment of impact, or if
it had just run down and the time was a

(24:54):
coincidence in terms of it being close to the time
of day that they attacked. That he's the Tonic Dixon,
his lucky twenty dollar coin which he had held onto
you after it partially deflected a musket ball that struck
him in the leg, and the Battle of Shiloh was
recovered from the wreck as well. Apart from the condition
of the crew, the vessel itself was also intact, with

(25:15):
nothing to indicate that it had been taking on water
or incapacitated in some way. There were two large holes
in its sides and missing glass panes from one of
the viewports, but this was eventually determined to have happened
long after the Hunley came to rest on the ocean floor.
And this all brings us to the new research that
made headlines in August. While doing work on a PhD

(25:37):
dissertation about injury and trauma patterns from underwater explosions, Rachel
Lance looked at data from several famous historical battles that
involved underwater explosions, and one of these was the H. L. Hunley.
This eventually led to a paper published in Plus one
on August entitled quote Air Blast injuries killed the crew

(25:59):
of the submarine h L. Hunley. Since the Hunley was
on the seafloor for more than a hundred years, coming
to this conclusion required construction of a one six scale
model of the ship, which they nicknamed the CSS Tiny.
The CSS Tiny was exposed to a variety of underwater
blasts in a pond in St. Louis, North Carolina, with

(26:19):
the data from all those explosions collected and analyzed. You
can read this entire paper online and we will link
to it in the show notes. But to sum it up, quote,
the blast produced likely caused flection of the ship hall
to transmit the blast wave. The secondary wave transmitted inside
the crew compartment was of sufficient magnitude that the calculated

(26:40):
chances of survival were less than six for each crew member.
The submarine drifted to its resting place after the crew
died of air blast trauma within the hull. The blast
wave wasn't enough to physically throw the crew around or
damage their skeletons, but it was enough to cause massive
lethal pulmonary trauma, which either killed the crew instantly or

(27:02):
incapacitated them beyond the ability to try and escape. This paper,
of course, does have some limitations. No matter how accurate
a scale model is still a scale model, and the
analyzes required proportionately scaled down blasts to be done in
that lake. There's also some debate about exactly how large
the payload of the Huntley's black powdered torpedo was, and

(27:25):
also to confirm these findings, the modern autopsy would have
needed to have been performed on the bodies of the
crew when they initially died more than a hundred years ago.
Obviously that's not gonna happen. So when time travel gets invented,
we are going to sus this out. We have so
many terrible uses of time travel that come up on
our shower them, like could you maybe have like prevented

(27:49):
this from member? Oh no, we're just gonna figure out
what happened. But given all the other factors about how
the event transpired and all the other unanswered questions and
how the crew was found, it does make a lot
of sense as an explanation. Today, the h L. Hunley
has been through a massive conservation that has removed more
than one thousand, two hundred pounds or about five D

(28:12):
of concretion from the vessel and it's at the War
and Lash Conservation Center in North Charleston, South Carolina, where
conservation work is still ongoing. Tours are available, but only
on the weekends to allow for conservation work during the
week The Hunley's crew were also given a funeral and
buried on April seventeenth, two thousand four, in the same

(28:33):
cemetery as the men killed in its prior sinkings had
been laid to rest. The next successful attack by a
submarine during wartime would be on September five, nine fourteen,
when the German U twenty one hit the British Pathfinder
with a torpedo, sinking it and killing two hundred and
fifty six as the H Hunley. We've gotten several requests

(28:54):
for the H Hunley over the years, and it was
only more recently that I realized that it had been
in that one eight minute segment earlier. Yeah, so thanks
again to Rachel Lance for sending us a note about this, yeah,
where we will link to the paper, which does have
other authors in addition to her as well. We will
link to that from the show notes for folks who
want to read it. It is very interesting. Uh, do

(29:18):
you have a listener mail I do I have a
listener mail. This is from John and it is uh.
We have gotten this comment from a few folks. It's
a correction from our Evacuation of Dunkirk episode UM. And
so thanks to the two or three other people who
have sent us similar notes over the last several weeks.
So John says Tracy and Holly, I have tremendous passion
for history, and I love the way your show connects

(29:40):
listeners with little known and often forgotten episodes in history.
I particularly enjoyed your two part are on dune Kirk,
a significant event that a few people were aware of
until the release of the eponymous movie. However, I do
have an issue with your closing comment to the evacuation
of Dunkirk episode and it you said quote it would
be nearly four years before written launched another major assault

(30:01):
on the ground in France. In fact, on August ninety two,
an Allied force of more than six thousand troops landed
at Deep France with a goal of destroying key German
military installations and securing important intelligence before dashing back to England.
The plan was developed by Lord Mountain Batten, and the
Allied force included a thousand British soldiers, more than five

(30:23):
thousand Canadian soldiers, and fifty soldiers from the United States
Army Rangers, the first American soldiers to participate in hostilities
on European soil in World War Two. Tragically, the mission
was an enormous failure, largely due to poor planning, bad luck,
and a German army that was not taken it all
by surprise. A total of one thousand, one seven men

(30:46):
were killed, including nine hundred sixteen Canadians, the most Canadian
troops to be killed in any one day during the war.
Seven Americans were also killed. After the failed raid, Mount
Matton said quote, I have no doubt that the Battle
of Normandy was one on the beaches of Deep. For
every man who died in Deep, at least ten must
have been spared in Normandy. In Ur. I write this

(31:09):
email from Deep, France, where I'm visiting with my mother
and brother to celebrate the seventy anniversary ceremonies. John goes
on to talk about family relative who was killed and
buried there at in that invasion. John also included some photos.
Thanks so much, John, I definitely should have said no
other major successful right like the successful part was definitely

(31:35):
left out, and I honestly could not tell you at
this point whether the sources that I was using in
preparation for those episodes made reference to the assault on
Deep or not. It's been long enough ago and all
of those UM books have gone back to the library.
But for the sake of comparison, the D Day Invasion
of Normandy included a hundred and fifty six thousands. It

(31:59):
was much much larger than this one was. So yes,
I apologize for that oversight and for not being more
clear in what I was saying UM at the end
of that episode. So thank you to John and the
other folks who have written in with that correction for us.
If you would like to write to us about this
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stuff works dot com. We're also on Facebook at facebook

(32:21):
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(32:43):
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