too stubborn to drown and too drunk to care

In the gray, choppy waters of the North Sea, just off the coast of Denmark, the Battle of Jutland erupted on May 31, 1916. It was the grandest naval slugfest of World War I, where the British Grand Fleet and the German High Seas Fleet decided to throw steel and shells at each other in a contest of who could sink the most ships before tea time. History remembers it as the largest naval battle of the war, a chaotic mess of dreadnoughts and destroyers that ended in a draw—Britain kept its chokehold on the seas, Germany slunk back to port, and everyone claimed victory while quietly tallying their dead. Significant? Sure, if you think ensuring Britannia rules the waves while losing more ships than your enemy counts as a win.

Enter Brandon Herrera, a scrawny deckhand aboard HMS Indefatigable, a battlecruiser with all the durability of a soggy biscuit. Brandon wasn’t your typical war hero. He’d joined the Royal Navy because the recruiting poster promised three meals a day, and he’d spent most of his childhood fighting seagulls for fish heads on the docks of Liverpool. Valor? Courage? Brandon didn’t know the meaning of those words—he barely knew the meaning of “starboard.” But fate, or perhaps a cosmic prank, had other plans.

The battle kicked off with a bang—literally. German shells started raining down, and within twenty minutes, Indefatigable took a hit to its magazine. The ship exploded in a fireball that could’ve lit up Copenhagen, sending most of its crew to a watery grave. Most, but not Brandon. See, Brandon had been napping in the galley, curled up inside a giant soup pot he’d mistaken for a hammock after a late-night rum binge. When the ship went up, the pot—cast iron and apparently blessed by Poseidon—got blasted clear of the wreckage, bobbing to the surface like a cork with Brandon snoring inside.

As the battle raged, with HMS Lion and SMS Lützow trading blows like prizefighters, Brandon’s soup pot drifted through the chaos. Shells whizzed overhead, waves crashed, and Brandon? He woke up, peeked out, and decided this was a terrible day to be sober. Grabbing a floating rum cask—because of course one was nearby—he took a swig and started paddling with a ladle, shouting, “Take that, Kaiser!” at nothing in particular. A passing destroyer, HMS Shark, mistook him for a downed officer rallying the troops, because who else would be yelling nonsense in the middle of a war zone?

Here’s where it gets ridiculous. A German torpedo boat, S-52, spotted Brandon’s pot and, assuming it was some secret British weapon (because why not?), opened fire. Brandon, half-drunk and fully annoyed, chucked his empty rum cask at them. By sheer dumb luck, it landed on their deck, rolled into an ammo crate, and sparked a fire. The S-52 veered off, crew panicking, and crashed into another German ship, SMS Regensburg. Two vessels out of action, all because Brandon wanted to keep his buzz going.

The British, desperate for a morale boost after losing three battlecruisers in one afternoon, fished Brandon out of the drink. Admiral Jellicoe, squinting through the fog of war, declared, “This man’s a bloody genius!” Brandon, dripping wet and reeking of rum, mumbled, “Can I have my pot back?” The press ate it up. “Hero of Jutland!” the headlines screamed. “Single-handedly turns the tide!” Never mind that the tide didn’t turn—Britain lost more tonnage, and Germany still claimed a tactical win. Brandon was awarded a Victoria Cross, pinned to his soggy uniform, mostly because no one could explain how he’d survived, let alone “disrupted enemy operations.”

So there he stood, Brandon Herrera, the accidental legend of Jutland, a man who won a medal not for bravery, but for being too stubborn to drown and too pickled to care. The North Sea kept churning, the war ground on, and Brandon? He retired to a pub, regaling anyone who’d listen with tales of how he “sank the German navy” with a soup pot and a hangover. And the medal? He pawned it for a lifetime supply of rum.

JD the Bot Guy