- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Still very OOC:
Hydrogen zeppelin plus gratuitous incendiary bullets on board for no reason, possibly plus rifles that may be prone to accidental discharges, sounds like it's about their speed.
Others have touched on this point, but first, there were clearly some rather bloody wars fought against the larger survivor enclaves, which would have had the usual ratio of WIA to KIA. And also, you'd see a lot of people hurt by things other than zombie infections. You have soldiers whose knees are blown out from marching thousands of miles with heavy kit and minimal mechanized support. You have soldiers who caught a disease on campaign and suffered long-term consequences. You have soldiers who were a little too old for this shit and suffered a succession of health problems that eventually invalided them out of the service and left them ruined for most postwar work. You have soldiers, so very many, whose problems are mainly psychiatric.
And on top of that, with the sheer scale of this army, there's a lot of largely unharmed veterans who still need things. Things like a GI Bill are expensive, but can save you a lot of trouble with your veterans after a big ugly war. The junta is a fucked up government, but even they have some conception of doing right by the guys with the guns.
So there's plenty for a VA to do.
The only time this kind of perimeter makes sense against zombies is if:
1) The defending force is so large that it can hold a really substantial amount of ground, and could reasonably be threatened by hordes in the hundreds of thousands from multiple directions at the same time, in which case you really have multiple battles going on in parallel because of the distances involved and you've moved beyond tactics into the realm of operations, or
2) The defending force is small and in 'irregular' terrain it cannot plausibly retreat through, but where it might hope to hold out and do some good or await reinforcement, but where because of the nature of the terrain it is utterly unpredictable where the most zombies will be coming from next.
The Battle of Hope is neither of these situations. Here, when it's clear that the zombie line is overlapping your rifle line to the point where flanking units can't hold them back, the correct solution is to turn 180 degrees and power-walk a couple of miles, then use the distance thus gained to resume the battle.
They were not a very well conceived aircraft at the time of their creation. They have aged particularly poorly.
More generally, if Max Brooks wanted a full-bore arsenal assault pulverizing a zombie horde to work, he'd have written the Battle of Yonkers as a victory. This book was always about how modernity is weak and decadent (and that includes modern weapons) and how MANLY RIFLEMEN are the key to victory in warfare (and the more deliberately archaic their kit is, the better).
Um, I think you've kind of lost track of the premise of the thread, or are trying to reject the premises the author has written into the thread's narrative of IC history and win a debate with them. It's really not very becoming.
In this Let's Read's continuity, the tactics don't magically work, they're objectively worse than doing things correctly would be, and the US's soldiers suffer for it. Which chains into the speculations you've made.
Except the snipers aboard the damn zeppelin, because apparently the Yanks like to operate that way.You don't need helium, hydrogen works just fine. It's not like anyone is using explosive incendiary ammunition this side of the first world war, after all...
Hydrogen zeppelin plus gratuitous incendiary bullets on board for no reason, possibly plus rifles that may be prone to accidental discharges, sounds like it's about their speed.
Well.what's the WIA to KIA ratio? Ghouls tend to either kill you or never touch you, and I don't think they had very good field medicine in the fights against other humans. This is dark to say, but the reason they might be able to pull off a very good VA is that there are simply not that many vets where casualties but not fatalities.
Others have touched on this point, but first, there were clearly some rather bloody wars fought against the larger survivor enclaves, which would have had the usual ratio of WIA to KIA. And also, you'd see a lot of people hurt by things other than zombie infections. You have soldiers whose knees are blown out from marching thousands of miles with heavy kit and minimal mechanized support. You have soldiers who caught a disease on campaign and suffered long-term consequences. You have soldiers who were a little too old for this shit and suffered a succession of health problems that eventually invalided them out of the service and left them ruined for most postwar work. You have soldiers, so very many, whose problems are mainly psychiatric.
And on top of that, with the sheer scale of this army, there's a lot of largely unharmed veterans who still need things. Things like a GI Bill are expensive, but can save you a lot of trouble with your veterans after a big ugly war. The junta is a fucked up government, but even they have some conception of doing right by the guys with the guns.
So there's plenty for a VA to do.
Yeah. Importantly, the main thing keeping zombies off you is the volume of rifle fire you put out. As your troops rearrange to form a square, three quarters of them must stop shooting and reposition. This virtually guarantees that if there is still pressure on your front, that pressure will now be sufficient to overwhelm the square's front.I mean, yes, I guess that's true. But Brooks doesn't seem to understand what an infantry square was for. Its only purpose is that it stops the enemy from flanking you, because a square has no flank.
Being flanked is a big risk when fighting cavalry, but zombies aren't small, fast units. They're slow, dumb, and numerous; they're unlikely to attack your flank unless they're attacking your entire line. The threat isn't being flanked, it's being overrun, and if you don't have fortifications or something, an infantry square is a strictly inferior tactical option to walking away before you get overrun.
The only time this kind of perimeter makes sense against zombies is if:
1) The defending force is so large that it can hold a really substantial amount of ground, and could reasonably be threatened by hordes in the hundreds of thousands from multiple directions at the same time, in which case you really have multiple battles going on in parallel because of the distances involved and you've moved beyond tactics into the realm of operations, or
2) The defending force is small and in 'irregular' terrain it cannot plausibly retreat through, but where it might hope to hold out and do some good or await reinforcement, but where because of the nature of the terrain it is utterly unpredictable where the most zombies will be coming from next.
The Battle of Hope is neither of these situations. Here, when it's clear that the zombie line is overlapping your rifle line to the point where flanking units can't hold them back, the correct solution is to turn 180 degrees and power-walk a couple of miles, then use the distance thus gained to resume the battle.
As others note, A-10s are not a good choice here; you'd want piston-engine or turboprop aircraft dropping napalm bombs. A-10s have neither the desired area effect nor much of anything else, and they are poorly equipped for communication and coordination with ground units. Them fucking up and strafing their own side is a realistic danger, and in fact has happened quite a few times.OOC:
The whole battle of Hope being basically an unsupported Napoleonic square with we-have-Garands-at-home vs a major city's worth of zombies infuriates me now. Seriously, zombies walk in straight lines towards targets, how is that not a perfect situation for some A-10s to brrrt a good chunk of the horde before they get close to the infantry? And no artillery? I know that WWZ zombies are immune to overpressure, but since apparently weaponizing and mass-producing a fucking shovel is on the table, it wouldn't be hard to jury rig some shrapnel canisters for modern artillery.
They were not a very well conceived aircraft at the time of their creation. They have aged particularly poorly.
More generally, if Max Brooks wanted a full-bore arsenal assault pulverizing a zombie horde to work, he'd have written the Battle of Yonkers as a victory. This book was always about how modernity is weak and decadent (and that includes modern weapons) and how MANLY RIFLEMEN are the key to victory in warfare (and the more deliberately archaic their kit is, the better).
OOC:I don't think mortar fire was prohibited to use, or even necessarily inefficient. It just wasn't the done thing.
Canonically, the only time late-war infantry feared being truly overrun was facing a swarm of 1,000,000+ zombies - the battle of Comerica Park/Ford Field. And they still managed that one, in the end.
So, if your force was about to face more than that, it probably would be a good idea to thin it out from range, or from the air.
Or employ some divide-and-conqueror tactics. There's no rule that says you have to face them all in one go. You can use multiple Reinforced Squares, and let the horde break itself into bite-sized pieces.
Um, I think you've kind of lost track of the premise of the thread, or are trying to reject the premises the author has written into the thread's narrative of IC history and win a debate with them. It's really not very becoming.
OOC: I'd engage with this more seriously, except I get the sense that for you this is a fundamentally unserious "no actually, the book is right lol" proposition.Because 5.56mm is going to be cheaper than 155mm, regardless of some added ingredients? And Lobos were literally melee weapons made out of existing materials. No moving parts, no complex production chains. Of course they're cheap.
Uuugh, fuckin' reformer brainworms... They never stop finding ways to re-entrench.Also apparently that his works have gotten him a lecturing position at West Point, as mentioned in the interview.
Yeah, that checks out. Cult of the badass. Max pokes fun at it in the Zombie Survival Guide in a few places, but falls prey to it in a lot of other places.Max Brooks isn't trying to invent the best weapon for the kind of conflict his army is involved in. He's trying to invent the best weapon for a badass soldier to use, a soldier who can fight in any situation using only whatever's on his person. A slightly more grounded version of B.J. Blazkowicz, basically. Carrying three different barrels for the same rifle is more sensible than carrying three whole rifles...but it's less grounded than giving different soldiers different kinds of rifles.
Well you see, I don't actually want to create a self-insert, like, it does not enthuse me and the last time I tried to engage with a Let's Read like this in that way it got lame and unpleasant.It's never too late to invent one! I just stuck a somewhat more competent version of myself into the Midwest vM described.
Well, in the novel's continuity, the shitty tactics magically work, mostly because they're being carried out by Good Resolute People instead of Bad Irresolute People. Thus, there is no anomalously high casualty rate to explain, retreating is simply unnecessary because you are doing things the Right Way, and so on, and so on.Pretty much. It's just extraordinarily hard to accept that the Junta would forgo basic tactics such as "retreating" in favor of line battles, like, these are literal military officers. They should *know* this shit, like what the fuck? Either the Junta was high on copium thanks to Max Brooks's shitty writing or they intentionally decided to accrue the most horrid attrition rates to not have to deal with future rebellions or food insecurity, which I could see happening given the dismal state of the USA in the west.
In this Let's Read's continuity, the tactics don't magically work, they're objectively worse than doing things correctly would be, and the US's soldiers suffer for it. Which chains into the speculations you've made.
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