We've talked extensively about John Wayne on this podcast. He might be the patron saint of friendly

fire. A white guy with a weird preoccupation with war movies who never participated in a war. I mean we probably have plenty of

political disagreements with the Duke but he's our kind of coward. At this point we've

seen John Wayne fight in the Pacific Theater in so many ways and flying leathernecks from the air and

Sans of Iwo Jima on the ground and in they were expendable from a PT boat on the

ocean. I'm sure that eventually the 120-sided dice will find his long-lost

1953 film about bayoneting Japanese space soldiers in geosynchronous orbit

over Indonesia. But until that happens, the only way to go with John Wayne is down, below the surface, in a submarine.

And now that we've established him as the patron saint of friendly fire,

I'd like to nominate our mascot as the Mark 14 torpedo.

The notoriously unexplodie ship-to-ship ordinance the U.S. Navy took to World War II when hostilities broke out.

The Mark 14 plays a big role in this film as the

Thunderfish, our hero's submarine, keeps firing them at Japanese Q boats and

destroyers and merchant vessels and keep seeing those ships fail to sink.

This is all very stressful for Duke, which is the name of the character played by the Duke,

because the captain of his submarine got stuck outside the conning tower during a crash dive and valorously sacrificed himself to save the crew.

But if Duke is going to get revenge, he's going to need torpedoes that do more than just

make a loud clank when they come in contact with the hull of an enemy ship.

The film, written and directed by George Wagner and released to a still up for World War II content American public in 1951,

peppers in a lovey-dovey B plot with Patricia Neal who plays Duke's ex-wife and a hilarious sea

plot about the Thunderfish's sailors making drunken nuisances of themselves whenever they make

landfall at Pearl Harbor.

...