fellow ridiculous historians, we're back with the classic.

I'm Ben Bullen.

Our colleague Noel Brown is on Adventures.

We'll be returning soon.

And look, I got to show you out.

Super producer, Mr. Max Williams, you and I were talking off air, as we do pretty often,

about just how bizarre World War II was.

Yeah, I mean, it's honestly become kind of a pet interest of mine.

And it spun from working on this show about, you know, in world, in, you know, the European theater, there was actual fighting on land on each other's countries and stuff like that.

But when it became in the United States and Japan, there was never really fighting on either continental land between those countries.

So there was a lot of really weird ideas they had throughout the years of how to either attack the other one or defend from an attack.

So, like, you know, we have the episode most recent one, I'm pretty sure, about, like, them building fake towns on bomber factories or, like, them fighting, like, battles on worthless, like, frozen tundra islands in the North Pacific or obviously

the balloon bomb episode, which is before this. And so then like reading this, it's like World

War II bat bombs. Okay. We, they kept trying. Look, war is a huge driver of horror and also scientific and medical innovation.

So if you go to your average doctor's office or to your average space launch center,

as I'm sure we all do, then a lot of the amazing technology you see is directly descended from the atrocities of warfare.

Really, most modern war is a war of tiny edges, right?

It's a war of seeking any possible advantage.

Everything can go on the drawing board, even if we understand that most

of the stuff will never leave that drawing board because they're frankly desperate and stupid

ideas.

So this involves, of course, a long-running obsession of our sister shows, stuff they don't want you to know,

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