Combat-Writing Thread

(I should get to that question....not now, though)

I'm writing a historical short story for my writing class, set during WW 2.

So an American platoon enters a German town, which was initially believed to be empty of enemy combatants. However, it turns out that there was a small German squad, including one crack sniper. The rest of the squad gets cleaned out pretty quickly, but the sniper gives American soldiers quite a trouble.

Two questions.

• How plausible is this scenario: the German sniper sets himself up that the American soldiers are led to believe that he was firing from a church tower, although he was routinely changing his position. In fact, the sniper even sets up a booby trap inside the tower, which takes out unfortunate soldiers that are sent in to take care of the sniper (they had no access to artillery strikes and...okay, I don't know why they would).

• ...On what kind of circumstances would result in a soldier running on top of rooptop and tackles the sniper through a window into another house? Basically, I want to plausibly write a scene where the main character and the sniper gets into one on one close quarter combat.

I think it would be very difficult for a lone sniper to hold out against an entire squad for very long. The squad would know how to move from cover to cover, eventually boxing the sniper in where he cant get away. Also, machine guns and bazookas make effective anti-sniper weapons when you can figure out where they are.

I would read up on some stories about snipers during WWII. There are a lot of them.

Assuming the Allies have both air superiority and artillery support, I'm not sure why they wouldn't just hit the building or buildings and clear him out that way. In fact, that was a fairly common way of dealing with snipers. You say they don't have artillery; why not? Do they also lack air support?

I can see him trying to work toward an heroic ending, which is fine- air strikes tend not to inspire readers so much. But to make it plausible, which seems to be his concern, something must be stopping the squad from using standard tactics successfully. Maybe there is some huge open space between them and the sniper, the MG was blown up, and there are no reinforcements nearby.

People kind of just assume, if they don't know, that the sniper or artillery spotter is in the highest thing they can see. Lot of church towers got knocked down during WW 2 for no good reason.

Recently I've been trying to puzzle out just what makes the tone of works like Generation Kill. I don't see this kind of sensibility very often in media involving the military, and would appreciate a few examples of other works that have it. I find it compelling for reasons I can't quite place.

I've got sort of a strangely specific question, but here goes anyway.

What would be the best bare-handed technique/style for a fighter that doesn't have the body mass to actually strike with enough force? Like, say, a 13-year-old boy.

Strength isn't an issue, he just isn't big enough to put enough weight behind his punches. Oh, and he's fighting to kill, obviously.

edited 18th Sep '15 4:24:06 PM by gameknight102xx

Go for grapples and throws. Lots of pivoting dudes over your hip and turning your opponents force against them.

edited 18th Sep '15 4:25:11 PM by LeGarcon

Judo, akido. Both spent a couple hundred years having been adapted for the use against armored samurai; targets where simply striking is counterproductive.

edited 18th Sep '15 4:33:14 PM by Night

I thought grappling would be the more effective approach. What style would be better, exactly? Judo and Akido are options, but what about other styles? Or did every grappling martial art originate in the East?

edited 18th Sep '15 4:37:26 PM by gameknight102xx

Pankration was Greek, and knights were taught wrestling and grappling, along with dagger-fighting (since strikes were, as with the samurai, useless against armored foes).

Depending on the time period, Sambo might also be worth looking into. That one's Russian in origin.

When writing a fight scene, how could I express the difference of fighting styles through the actions of the fighters? For example, a boxer vs. a fighter well-versed in CQC military-style combat, or a grappler vs. someone that fights with souls and dead spirits? I ask this admittedly weird question because I'm developing a Fighting Series and I want to emphasise the various fighting styles the characters have with each other.

@gameknight102xx: Part of the problem is, realistically, there is no fighting style that would slant the odds in favor of a 13 year old boy against a full-grown adult who knew what they were doing. Strength and size matters. He would be far better off using a weapon, and surprise.

But if he has no choice but to go into unarmed combat with an adult, then jujutsu, or one of it's many derivatives, is probably the best overall choice. Grapples combined with throws and enough quick striking moves to give the kid the best shot he could have.

@mrstack345: I'm not sure I understand your question. What's preventing you from just describing it?

edited 19th Sep '15 7:43:09 AM by DeMarquis

A question for my WWII story.

On what circumstances, would a single soldier getting a drop on and overwhelming a sqaud of eight soldiers be plausible?

For your information, the single soldier is bigger and more experienced, while the sqaud is made of freshly recruited, exhausted, and malnourished soldiers. Would that make it more sensible?

That's actually happened. More than once.

All righty, that's taken care of.

So I need a situation in which a competent, if impulsive, commander of a unit(technically, its the entirety of a city-state's army, although the setting is the Bronze/Iron age so it presumably wouldn't be as large as the term "army" traditionally applies), could get themselves (and those under their command) captured by a hostile (third-party) force, after winning a complete victory over their initial target.

Preferably, this should not negate the victory.

For reference, I need a way for the hero to be captured, in order to necessitate being ransomed, while a) still having a victory to claim for reasons of political capital, and b) needs to look competent, even when making the error. Basically, I wish for him to look like he made a good effort, with the ransom being a small set back in the scheme of things, rather than an incompetent fool.

Thought I'd write this up for the front page. It lifts liberally from various sources, including Wikipedia, postings on the subject by Derek Lowe, and several US Army field manuals, but by no means should be considered comprehensive.

Chemical Warfare - A Writer's Guide

Overview

Most of you probably have first-hand experience with chemical warfare, though it's equally likely you didn't realize it. If you've ever used bug spray on a spider and watched it roll around thrashing in its death throes, that was a useful introduction to chemical warfare. We'll be getting back to it later. In the meantime though, we've got a lot of ground to cover before we get to that point.

In general, chemical weapons are comparable to conventional explosives in terms of manufacture and delivery in that there are tiers of capability and ease of manufacture, but a particular volume or weight of even a basic chemical weapon will be significantly more lethal than its conventional equivalent. For all that, however, it must also be noted that while a van full of nerve gas in a major city would be an unrivaled atrocity, that same van is easily capable of transporting a nuclear device, which would be even more destructive. The general modern policy of a germ is a gas is a nuke has lead most nuclear-capable nations to abandon their chemical weapons programs because comparatively the nukes are so much more effective it makes no sense to maintain chemical weapons instead. Of course, nuclear weapons pay for being so many orders of magnitude more destructive by being so many orders of magnitude harder to make.

Modern chemical warfare history starts with World War I. A total of forty different substances were actually trialed on the battlefield during the war, and many of them weren't very effective. Others were irritants; intended to prevent the donning of protective gear before more lethal agents could be deployed. We will dispense with such; things like CS gas are left out of the usual military arsenal, primarily because of the fear someone might mistake them for lethal weapons and retaliate in kind. Instead, we will focus strictly on the stuff that kills you for the purposes of this discussion.

The ideal chemical weapon is relatively heavy, so that it lingers near the ground, is odor, immediate-symptom and tasteless until well after its lethal exposure threshold, and has a low lethal dose threshold. Some things you really don't want to encounter one on one, like hydrogen cyanide gas, simply get blown about, rise, or require a fairly high lethal dosage. They'll kill you very quickly if you make some in your garage, but in the open air, trying to deal with large numbers of people spread out across an area, they just don't work. Keep in mind that just because you've heard of it being a real danger in your chemistry classes, it doesn't necessarily make for a weapon.

Non-Nerve Gas Chemical Agents

The low end of chemical weaponry is analogous to the classic fertilizer and fuel oil recipe for making bombs: it's simple, it's not very effective compared to its more advanced cousins, and we should all be thankful it doesn't happen more often. Single-element gases like chlorine and fluorine are important components of many modern chemical processes, and produced and shipped in massive amounts in most industrialized nations. They're quite heavy; they pool in low areas in the ground unless there's a good breeze going. However as noted they're not very effective; most of us have smelled, and tasted, chlorine in swimming pools. It's what makes your eyes burn. Fluorine is significantly more dangerous, but it's also harder to make (the list of professional chemists poisoned or blown up by their own efforts to synthesize elemental fluorine is long) and it is visible; fluorine gas is famously green and its smell is also distinctive. Both of them also have immediate and unpleasant effects on the body well below their lethal threshold. Nobody gets exposed to these things and doesn't know it, and most of them will make efforts to get away long before they have reached a lethal or even possibly a dangerous level of exposure.

Phosgene gas is significantly worse than these two; it's more effective at killing you, it has better dispersion characteristics and a lower lethal threshold, and while it does have a distinct odor, the rotting-vegetation smell of phosgene is not generally recognized as dangerous. It also has no immediate exposure effects; the effects of phosgene occur over time, and it can take hours to show symptoms. Most of the people who have been killed by gas attack in the history of war were killed by phosgene during World War I. Fortunately, phosgene is not an article of commerce as such and it's not something you could make in a garage, unlike chlorine. It has commercial uses, but people who use it commercially make it for themselves and use it on-site.

But all of these agents have a rather critical flaw: they attack your lungs. They will blister your lungs, and fill them with fluid, and you will cough a lot and eventually drown in your own fluids if you got a high enough dose. But for them to do this, you have to breathe them in. While I don't recommend dancing naked through any of them save for your trusty gas mask, you would in theory be safe doing so.

Mustard gas isn't like that. It'll do terrible things to your lungs, but it will do terrible things to all of you, and it penetrates normal clothing pretty good. It is referred to as a "blistering agent" because that's what it does. It does not irritant the eyes or lungs, and its lethal and danger thresholds are far below the level it can be smelled. The result of mustard gas exposure is chemical burns on any exposed tissue; including the lungs and throat if you've breathed it (its primary method of killing people), but it'll also burn your skin, your eyes, and anything else it comes in contact with. There are no legitimate commercial uses of mustard gas, and it takes some special equipment and lab technique to make, but it's still a plausible weapon for relatively low-budget terrorists if they can recruit some chemistry students.

There is also Lewisite, an arsenic-chlorine mixture that operates in a manner similar to mustard gas, but it is significantly more difficult to produce than mustard gas. On the other hand, it penetrates clothing better than mustard gas does. It is also non-flammable, unlike the other gasses in this section. In general, it is a highly unlikely weapon to reappear after it was phased out of use in 1950, not least because of its high production difficulty.

Nerve Agents

You remember that comment about spiders and Raid at the beginning? I mentioned it because we were going to get here. If you've seen a spider, spasming and rolling uncontrollably, you have witnessed a nerve agent at work. And yes, if you were exposed to a high dose of nerve agent, you'd do a very good impression of that spider.

The resemblance is not coincidental. The first modern nerve agents were an outgrowth of insecticide research done in Germany in the 1930s. While some are more lethal than others, some are more stable, and some are easier to make, they all kill you in the same way: they neutralize acetylcholinesterase, an enzyme in pretty much everything on Earth with a nervous system that "clears" received signals from nerve cells. With no clearance, the nerve cells keep reacting endlessly, soon every receptor on them is full, they go into total overload, and the body goes haywire. Most nerve agents penetrate the skin and normal clothing with ease, and as a result only fully sealed and specially designed protective gear will keep you safe. None of them have an odor or a taste.

The immediate symptoms are a shortness of breath and dimming of vision. These are followed by your nose starting to run, you start to sweat heavily, and you begin to salivate uncontrollably. Your muscles stop working; they all relax and you fall over at the same moment you lose bladder and bowel control, and you've lost your ability to see by this point. You can't swallow the gunk in your mouth and you have trouble breathing, assuming you're still breathing at all. If the lack of oxygen hasn't rendered you unconscious at this point (and it probably hasn't unless you're dealing with a weak agent) you will feel yourself go into hideous, incredibly powerful convulsions. Because your autonomic nervous system is no longer regulating them properly, your muscles contract and release with much greater force than normally; strong enough to tear them to shreds and/or break your bones. Assuming you don't bang your head against something hard enough to kill you in this stage, you will also begin to vomit. If choking to death on your own vomit does not kill you, finally your heart goes into tachycardia and arrhythmia, and that will kill you. You'll notice I've just described three mechanisms by which this stuff can kill you in the final stages; even a lesser dose can do enough to your lungs (by filling them with fluid you couldn't swallow properly, or by paralyzing them) to get you that way eventually as well.

Like I said, you're imitating that flailing spider. Neutralizing injectors do exist, but in the case of most weaponized forms by the time you realize you need to use them it's highly likely you will have skeletal-muscular damage before the neutralizing agent finishes saving you; at best a long period rehabilitation and therapy, at worst being an old person in a young person's body.

Needless to say, this stuff is not as easy to handle as dishwater. The first agent of its kind, Tabun, was manufactured in the mid '30s in Germany. Despite a very advanced setup for the time (double walls, positive pressure systems, and full protective suits) the factory still managed to kill workers on a semi-regular basis. Making nerve gas is not something that will be accomplished by chemistry students with a basic lab setup, and some of the reagents involved are just as lethal in the enclosed space of a factory as the non-nerve agents. This is highly advanced work and requires a very high and very expensive level of infrastructure.

While Tabun has largely passed into history, save for people just getting into the whole nerve-gas thing, its close relatives Sarin (first synthensized in Germany in 1938) and Soman (1944, same place) are still with us. Both are somewhat safer to synthesize than Tabun, as there's no hideous glass-corroding hydrogen fluoride involved. The gold standard for nerve gas and the one most likely to be seen in military use by the a superpower is VX, which has basically the optimum combination of ease of dispersion, lethal amount, works-through-skin-contact, persistence, and ease of production. Sarin, Soman, and VX can be formulated into "binary' forms, where the last phase of the chemical reactions to create it takes place inside the shell or bomb after it's been dropped or fired; it should be noted that none of these binary forms has ever been given a "live" test as such, though given the amount of money poured into them by the superpowers during the Cold War they can be assumed to work.

While post-Soviet papers discussed a supposed new line of nerve agents in the 1990s, it can be assumed that little came of this if it was real; there plain isn't a point. These things are about as lethal as a chemical agent can be made.

So What About Using It?

The biggest problem is delivery. Just opening up a canister of the stuff isn't very effective. Those of you who were with us in 1995 probably remember Aum Shinrikyo, a Japanese doomsday cult, staging a sarin attack on the Tokyo subway. A coordinated gas attack on the world's busiest and most crowded commuter system at the height of rush hour managed to kill only a little over a dozen people, actually injure about fifty, and cause temporary vision problems in somewhere from a thousand to six thousand. They conducted it by leaving punctured packets of Sarin on the floor. An earlier attack, conducted with a refrigator van and just releasing a cloud into a subdivision, only killed five to eight people. Considering that it takes less than a pinhead's worth of Sarin to be lethal, these are not impressive records. World War I saw a rapid progression from canisters to increasingly sophisticated shell-based delivery systems for a reason. Research on the subject after the war pursued the same angle and added aircraft bombs and rockets. A good delivery system will cover for a multitude of other sins.

The other problem is that chemical weapons are relatively unuseful in a modern military context, and have been since the '60s. Against a modern first-world or even second-world army, armed with protective gear and decontamination knowledge, you might cause a few casualties with your first strike, but after that you will accomplish very little indeed...and they will probably retaliate in kind or worse. The Soviet Union invested heavily in chemical warfare and had the best doctrine, but even they recognized that the use of chemical weapons by the '80s would be more about making people decontaminate their airfields or pre-positioned equipment before they could use it, rather than as lethal weapons.

Even in World War I, while the initial use of chlorine took the Allies by surprise, they were retaliating in kind within a couple of weeks and the whole thing devolved into just another kind of stalemate. During World War II, the Germans were alone in the field of nerve gases, but never used them in the belief it would likely end up the same way; whatever combat advantages they might gain would be moot when RAF Bomber Command and the US 8th Air Force started dropping mustard gas bombs on their cities. The only result of a chemical escalation would have been to make the war infinitely more destructive, but it would not have created a useful battlefield advantage. The only combat chemical weapons casualties of the Second World War occurred when a ship carrying mustard gas was sunk by an air raid.

The only effective use in the modern era, thus, is against civilian populations. This is largely anathema to sane nation-states, but convenient to terrorists. However they are also the people least equipped to make effective use of chemical weapons in most ways; their delivery options are largely limited to the most ineffective methods and their choices of agent circumscribed. Still, while we will probably never see the large-scale battlefield use of chemical weapons again, terrorist use is disturbingly, and depressingly, possible.

edited 12th Oct '15 10:30:04 PM by Night

Excellent as always. I'll go ahead and link that.

I'll also add that nonlethal chemical agents like tear gas are commonly used on the battlefield today; lachrymatory agents were used throughout WWI, and as let as Vietnam US flak-suppressing aircraft in Vietnam were discovering that while a salvo of rockets and bombs might cause an NVA flak gunner to flinch for a moment, a blanket of tear gas will force him and keep him away from his gun. Even if their effect on personnel isn't high, riot agents have definite applications in area denial, particularly against poorly-equipped enemies, and there's a general agreement throughout the world that they Don't Count for purposes of chemical warfare.

Very interesting, and a delightful surprise!

I believe that one proposed technique for the employment of chemical weapons was to deploy one agent to cause soldiers to vomit (thereby forcing them to choose between removing their protective equipment or choking) and then deploying a more lethal agent to finish the job. Of course, one could argue that if you can penetrate their equipment with the non-lethal agent, you should just cut out the middle man and go straight to the lethal one.

Chemical warfare is definitely one of those niche items. Since CBRN protection gear is rather bulky and cumbersome, though, you could make the case that it encumbers your opponent.

Night's comment about Soviet doctrine is largely correct - it was intended to be used as an area denial weapon, with non-persistent agents being dropped on enemy forward areas whilst persistent agents protected the Soviets' flanks. They would also have targeted bypassed pockets of resistance, logistics, hostile NBC systems, and so on (this was always intended to be in concert with conventional and nuclear munitions). However, in the defence it would also be used to canalise enemy forces. They would also contaminate rear areas and lines of communications and supply lines, with the aim being that the agent would have dispersed once Soviet units began counterattacking. This would have let them be preserved for reuse.

This is going to sound incredibly dumb, but here I go - how can I diversify wars and make them a bit more interesting and unique? I'm thinking on the whole, here: not just why the war got started, but its conduct and maybe even how it ended.

Easy! At best, pop culture has a limited view of war that simply boils down to "war is bad". At worst it's a collection of stereotypes: General Failure passes orders to The Neidermeyer with Drill Sergeant Nasty oppressing the troops and hearding them like lambs to the slaughter.

-____-

Alright-y then, let's see how we can tell the story without being cliche.

• Even if Armies Are Evil is in play, don't forget that most soldiers have families, hopes, dreams and Even Evil Has Loved Ones.
  • Professional soldiers tend to focus on the art of war more than just violence.

• Most leaders are in it to win it. General Failure does happen, sometimes a leader is just an empty suit. But most get replaced or they lose badly.
  • Leaders tend to play chess and don't consult the pieces because that's what subordinate leaders are for.

• Yeah, it all makes no sense to Trooper #3977 on the front lines with lots of people trying to kill him, but unless something goes horribly wrong, he should not be alone.

• When things do go wrong, it's a chain of events or an organizational failure. the Nazi Wehrmacht was a bunch of independent units that thought doing their own thing would win (spoiler: they lost). The Vietnam War era US military had many little failures that just kept adding up. The Soviets in Afganistan lost the will to fight when they lost their air cover thanks to Stingers.

Unless the setting has elves, orcs, hobbits and two towers, no Classic Villains are needed.

Show the fight from the squad level all the way up to the general sweating over the map.

It's the enemy sentry screaming because the heroes just killed his best friend. It's the commander holding back tears as he wrings another "we regret to inform you" letter. It's the general submitting his resignation as yet another offensive grinds to a halt.

That was fairly useful, thanks^note Although I've never subscribed to the Armies are Evil trope, but that's besides the point!

FWIW, I'm trying to write what are meant to be in universe retrospectives (albeit more "fictional!Wikipedia article" than "So there I was..."). The problem is, I suppose, I'm finding it difficult to make wars (or even campaigns) that have more to them than "Side A has territory/resources that Side B wants, so they go to war". It's frustrating, since I do have a fairly in depth knowledge of several wars and their conduct - but I can't seem to apply that knowledge to make my fictional ones stand out. War may be the continuation of politics by other means, but if you can't come up with an interesting war, or politics surrounding that war, what's the point?

You could have a war that's more ideologically driven, waged between two incompatible political or religious systems. You could have a war waged over a moral issue, akin to US Civil War in some aspects. You could have a trade war in which what's being targeted is not land or physical resources but one another's commercial goods. You could have, depending on the setting, a blood feud, where the original issue is long since forgotten, but the violence carries on.

You can also vary it up in terms of who is fighting. A Spartacus style slave revolt looks very different from the American Civil War, despite the fact that both are, in the end, about the same issue. Instead of having two states fight it out over resources or land you could make one of the actors a state or empire and the other a horde of migratory, stateless barbarians—or flip it around and have the empire be trying to confiscate the lands of the local tribes, as happened in colonialism.

Finally, of course, if you change up the technological levels and military philosophies of those participating, it will drastically change how the war looks.

How common is torture within the context of special operations work?