Real Life / There Is No Kill Like Overkill

Whatever happens, we have got
the Maxim gun and they have not.

— Hilaire Belloc

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Crime

Malcolm X was murdered in 1965 in New York by a Sawed-Off Shotgun blast to the chest, and then was shot 16 times by handguns. Someone wanted to get the job done...^note
Thomas Jefferson's assassination attempt against his former vice-president Aaron Burr in the early 1800s. The idea was to have Burr framed for treason, but as the charges kept getting dismissed on lack of evidence, Jefferson tried everything from forging evidence, to bribing over one-hundred witnesses, to installing a temporary military dictatorship in New Orleans, raiding mail, trying to have the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court impeached, and then trying to introduce legislation that would give him the power to arbitrarily impeach any judge. At one point, he authorized General James Wilkinson to essentially do whatever it took to kill Burr, which led to a force of two-hundred-and-seventy-five soldiers being sent to arrest the guy. When Burr somehow escaped and was eventually tried and acquitted (again) by the Supreme Court, before escaping to Europe, Jefferson implicitly threatened England with war if they harbored Burr.
- ...And Burr survived.
This is reputedly how the murder of the Russian monk Grigori Rasputin took place in 1916. It's said that he was given four poisoned cupcakes and a bottle of poisoned wine (which had no effect), then shot in the chest six times, castrated, wrapped up in a blanket and thrown into the deathly cold Neva river, and pushed under the ice, which he tried to claw himself out of. His cause of death was then reported as asphyxiation by drowning and hypothermia. However, these are myths instigated by his political enemies to make him seem like a semi-invincible force of evil. In reality, after he didn't eat the cakes and just sipped a bit of wine, he was shot twice in the body and once in the head, died instantly, and his body was dumped into the river; the reports of him trying to "claw his way out" was likely caused by his corpse floating under the ice due to the slow current not sweeping him away as expected.
After the Bolsheviks herded the Romanovs and their servants in a room, they opened fire with handguns at point-blank range. While the Tsar and Tsarina died near instantly, his children weren't exactly as lucky due to the fact that the children had hidden a huge amount of jewels in their clothing, which acted as armor. Cue the 20 minute long repeated bayonetings and shootings of the children. Alexei was particularly hard to kill, despite his hemophilia; he was stabbed numerous times in the chest before being shot a few more times in the head. The girls suffered a similar fate, though it wasn't nearly as prolonged. One of the girls had Olga's brain matter splatter in her face before being knifed to death herself. Unfortunately, when they were hauling all 11 bodies (this includes a maid, their doctor, and such along with the family), one of the girls (either Anastasia or Maria) was still alive. She proceeded to sit up, cover her ears, and scream wildly until several Bolshevik henchmen came over to finally shoot her dead. Then they drove the bodies to a mine shaft, stripped them, and then threw them all into the mine shaft before chucking several hand grenades in, hoping that the mine would partially collapse and conceal their handiwork. Unfortunately, the next day, word had gotten out that something had happened near the mine shaft, so later that night the Bolsheviks went back, got the bodies, and drove them to a more remote area where they proceeded to bash the Romanov corpse's skulls in so their faces wouldn't be recognizable, then tossed the bodies onto a burning pyre and doused them with acid.
To go along with the Romanovs, Alexandra's sister Elizabeth was killed the next day. How so? Well, first they gathered her along with several prisoners and took them to another abandoned mineshaft, then proceeded to beat her and the prisoners. Then, they took everyone and pushed them down the mineshaft, throwing a grenade down there for good measure. Unfortunately, the grenade blast only killed one person. The reason they found out this only killed one person was that Elizabeth and the others began to sing a Russian Orthodox Hymn. Another grenade was thrown down, but the singing continued. Finally, the Bolsheviks decided to throw a bunch of brushwood into the shaft and set it alight. One guard was to stand by and watch this to make sure they were all dead. In early October, White Soldiers discovered the bodies, and found that Elizabeth had managed to bandage one of those injured during the fall prior to her death. These were the bodies that were found (NSFW)◊. The Bolsheviks seem rather fond of overkill, now don't they?
Most people know that Joan of Arc died by immolation. What most people may not know was that Cardinal Henry Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester, intended to prevent any possibility of a posthumous cult glorifying the Maid of Orleans by destroying any possible relics associated with her. Hence, Joan of Arc wasn't cremated once, but thrice: the first pyre killed her by suffocation; the executioner then took the time to show the audience that she indeed was dead. Then, another pyre was lit and kept going for several hours, which made her cranium and abdominal cavity explode, spattering the onlookers with bits of Joan's insides. Then, they lit up a third pyre, to which they added pitch and oil to burn the remaining organs (namely, the heart and entrails, moister than the rest of the body); the remaining ashes and bone leftovers were finally scattered in an unknown location. Ironically, Joan of Arc was canonised in 1920, actually creating some kind of "posthumous cult" for the Maid of Orleans.
Bonnie Parker & Clyde Barrow were both shot 25 times by a six-man posse who shot a total of 130 rounds into their car. According to firsthand accounts, the officers began shooting with automatic rifles (namely, the Colt Monitor, a civilian version of the BAR light machine gun,) and when the rifles ran out, they discarded them and drew shotguns, emptying them into the car. When those ran out, they drew their service pistols and began shooting into the car until it rolled off the road and stopped moving. With nine police officers around the country killed at their hands, one can't be too careful.
The St. Valentine's Day Massacre, where a number of associates of Bugs Moran's were obliterated in an apparent attempt on Moran's life (Moran was late leaving his hotel, so he wasn't there when it happened). Four hitmen from Al Capone's organization showed up at the SMC Cartage warehouse, two of them in civilian clothes (overcoats and fedoras) and two dressed as police officers. The "officers" ordered the five gangsters, one optician, and one mechanic they found to line up against the wall. The two civilians then entered and proceeded to literally slam them against the wall with their tommy guns. After they finished, additional shotgun blasts from the fake policemen were used to obliterate James Clark's and John May's faces. Then, to make it look like everything was under control, the civilians left with the "officers" prodding them with billyclubs. If you want a good idea of what it looked like, see this. Oh, and this◊ was the aftermath, with some of the bodies an inch of skin away from being sawn in half, and blood, guts, and bone pooling all over the garage floor. The force of the bullets somehow sent James Clark slamming into the floor and Pete Gusenberg jammed in a chair, broke a saw, perforated hundreds of bricks, and caused massive collateral damage throughout. What's most astonishing about is that one of the victims, Frank Gusenberg, actually lived for six hours despite being in horrific pain.
Some of the other gangsters active in 1933-1934 met very unfortunate ends like this:
- Homer Van Meter, a long-running associate of John Dillinger, was ambushed in St. Paul in August 1934. Detectives chased him into an alleyway, and one of them shot him in the chest with a shotgun. As Van Meter struggled to stand, the police shot him fifty times with their pistols.
- Baby Face Nelson, who died after his fatal shootout with Agents Herman Hollis and Samuel P. Cowley in Barrington. For the record, before Nelson was able to down Cowley and Hollis, Cowley fired a burst with a Thompson submachine gun that hit Nelson seven times, and Nelson was also shot five times in both legs (for a total of ten pellets in all) with Hollis's shotgun. Adrenaline accounts for his ability to live despite this, although he died about three to four hours after the shootout.
North Korea has been known to have people executed by antiaircraft gun, to make sure there's nothing left of the condemned.
In medieval and Renaissance Europe, the punishment for treason for men not of the nobility was: first hanging by short drop until the condemned could be cut down, then castrated^noteto symbolize that their property had been confiscated and could not be passed on to heirs, then their organs torn out with hot pincers, and finally they would be drawn and quartered. Their heads would be cut off and placed on stakes; anything else left of their bodies afterwards was burned.
- The first known case of someone being "hanged, drawn, and quartered" was Dafydd ap Gruffydd, half-brother of the last legitimate (semi-)independent Prince of Wales, Llewelyn ap Gruffydd. In 1283, he had allegedly betrayed Llewelyn, and proclaimed himself the Prince of Wales instead. This was after conning Llewelyn into betraying a peace he made with Edward I. When captured, Dafydd was dragged behind a horse through the streets of Shrewsbury (the "drawn" part), strangled nearly to death in a short-drop hanging (the "hanged" part), then eviscerated alive, then had his arms, legs, and head cut off (the "quartered" part) and sent to the far reaches of England as a warning against the crime of "high treason".^note It would become the typical punishment for "high treason" in England, Great Britain, and ultimately the United Kingdom for nearly 600 years to come. Its most famous use was the execution of Scottish freedom fighter William Wallace in 1305, as depicted in the 1995 film Braveheart.
In 2006, after killing a police officer, a Jamaican criminal named Angilo Freeland was shot sixty-eight times (out of a hundred ten rounds). When asked why he was shot so many times, an officer responded, "That's all the bullets we had."
When the SAS shot dead three IRA members in Gibraltar, one was asked at the subsequent inquest, "Why did you shoot him sixteen times?" His response? "The magazine only holds 16 rounds, sir."
The shooting of Amadou Diallo. 41 bullets fired with 19 hitting him. The shooting started when Diallo reached for his wallet (he didn't speak English, and the officers reportedly believed he was reaching for a gun). The officers kept shooting his body because he looked like he was still standing up, as the force of the bullets propped him up against the door; he didn't fall until they stopped shooting.
Retired nurse crushed to death after being run over by 3 vehicles.
On September 8, 1935, Dr. Carl Weiss shot popular Senator Huey Long; Long died in the hospital two days later. Long's bodyguards returned fire... 62 times. Considering they were armed with regular handguns, they probably had to reload before continuing to fill Weiss's body with lead. Being angry with themselves that they had failed at their job probably had something to do with it. There's even a (disputed) theory that the bodyguards were the ones who actually hit Long by accident, rather than Weiss.
The 2008 killing of Travis Alexander in Arizona: He had been shot in the face, his throat was slit from ear to ear, and he had been stabbed 29 times. A medical examiner determined that he may have been dead already by the time he had been shot. Although Arizona had by then outlawed the "insanity" defense, Arias' defense team had her claim that she was a victim of physical and emotional abuse; Alexander had been seeing several women during their relationship, and that might have explained the repeated stabbings in an obvious rage. The "battered woman" defense did not succeed, as Arias was convicted of capital murder, but since the jury deadlocked on imposing the death penalty, she was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
Edward Teach, commonly referred to as the infamous pirate Blackbeard, was shot at least 5 times, was cut with a sword twenty times, and had his head chopped off and suspended from the ship! (The head thing was just so they could collect the reward, but still!) Certainly untrue legends made the injuries inflicted seem like less overkill by claiming that his headless corpse still swam around the ship three times after they tossed it into the water.
Two examples from Romanian history:
- On July 16, 1936, Mihai Stelescu was shot in his hospital bed between 38 and about 200 times before being cut into pieces with axes by the Decemviri, an Iron Guard death squad, who then danced around his body. His crime: leaving the ''Iron Guard'' and starting another nationalist organization. Four of those involved in Stelescu's execution were theology students.
- On Christmas Day, 1989, following their conviction by a Kangaroo Court, deposed dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife Elena were executed by firing squad. After they were lined up against the wall, the leader of the firing squad began firing more or less immediately rather than organising the firing squad first, and the other soldiers present quickly followed suit. Hearing the sound of gunfire, every soldier in the complex with a clear line of sight from their windows to the Ceaușescus also began firing on the couple, releasing a quarter-century of pent-up anger against the dictator and his wife. They were reportedly hit by over 120 bullets.
After a failed coup d'etat against Florence's ruling d'Medici family, the patriarch of the rival Pazzi family was tortured, hanged, buried, dug up, thrown into a ditch, dragged through the streets, and propped up at the door of Palazzo Pazzi, where the head was used as a door-knocker. From there the head was thrown into a river, fished out, hung from a willow tree, flogged, and then thrown back into the river.
Nearly all the Manson Family's known murder victims could be considered as overkill, but the prime example would be Wojciech Frykowski, a friend of Sharon Tate. He was shot twice, bludgeoned with a gun butt 13 times, and stabbed 51 times.
The Rayleigh bath chair murder in Britain during World War II. A soldier named Eric Brown was fed up with his disabled father's abusive treatment of his mother and himself. His reaction? Steal an anti-tank mine from an armory and hide it in his dad's wheelchair. His father's nurse suffered leg injuries, and bits of his father had to be recovered from several neighborhood gardens.
In two separate shooting sprees in New Orleans, 23-year old Mark Essex killed 9 people (including five police officers) and wounded another dozen on Dec 31, 1973 and January 7th, 1974. After cornering Essex on a hotel rooftop, police shot him to pieces with snipers from the surrounding buildings and further riddled him with bullets from a team of officers deployed in a CH-46 helicopter the NOPD had called in from a nearby Marine Corps base. A subsequent autopsy determined Essex had been shot more than 200 times.
Richard Huckle, an English child predator and rapist who was convicted of 71 charges involving Malaysian children, was found dead on 13 October, 2019 after his cell mate Paul Fitzgerald tortured him to death in an attack that lasted over an hour. Huckle was strangled by an electrical cable sheathe, raped, repeatedly hit on the floor hard enough to break his jaw, punched, stabbed in the neck, penetrated in the anus by a spoon handle, and had a pen jammed up his nostril into his brain. Fitzgerald was subsequently convicted of murdering Huckle, and admitted he had wanted to cook and eat parts of Huckle's body.

Vehicles

The final fate of the German battleship Bismarck in WW2. During its final battle, nearly every single piece of the vessel's superstructure was destroyed and at least one torpedo slammed into it. Of course, if the Royal Navy had been a little more rational about it, she probably would have been sunk a lot sooner: closing to point-blank range meant that virtually none of their fire hit the Bismarck's hull. There is still some debate over whether Bismarck sank due to damage inflicted by the British, or if it was scuttled by her own crew.^note
The German Battleship Scharnhorst, a battlecruiser, was a much larger threat to British shipping than the Bismarck ever was. After an extensive and bloody career alongside her sister ship Gneisenau, Scharnhorst was eventually singled out and sunk. The Royal Navy brought the Duke of York (a mainline battleship), one heavy cruiser, three light cruisers, and 9 destroyers together, and after some 12 hours of on-and-off battle in pitching seas and a blinding snowstorm, Scharnhorst finally went down by the bow— all serviceable guns still firing and screws still turning.
"Gentlemen, the battle against the Scharnhorst has ended in victory for us. I hope that any of you who are ever called upon to lead a ship into action against an opponent many times superior, will command your ship as gallantly as the Scharnhorst was commanded today." Admiral Sir Bruce Fraser KCB KBE RN
The Tirpitz, sister ship of the Bismarck, was sunk in port by British Lancaster bombers using 12,000-pound Tallboy bombs. Tirpitz sustained at least two direct hits from these bombs, and a disputed number (between 1-4) of near misses. Even the bombs which missed were powerful enough to create blastwaves in the water that damaged the ship. The Tirpitz capsized not long after, and the fires started by the Tallboys detonated the ship's magazine. Battleship or not, throwing no less than 36,000 pounds (and possibly over 50,000 lbs) of high explosives at any one target has to be some kind of overkill. And that doesn't include the dozens of Tallboys that were dropped that did not score hits or near misses on Tirpitz (even with the best targeting devices of the day, high altitude bombing was not nearly as accurate as some other methods, but it was necessary as the Tallboy needed to be dropped from altitude in order to attain the speed needed for the penetrator to blow through heavy armour).
HMS Agincourt. This battleship was built in Britain for the Brazilian Navy. Before she was finished, she was sold to the Ottoman Empire, only to be seized by the British at the outbreak of World War I. The ship was built with 14 12-inch diameter guns, mounted in 7 turrets. No other battleship in history has mounted as many heavy guns as Agincourt.^note When she entered into service with the British Grand Fleet, there were fears that if she fired all her guns at once, the resulting force would cause her to capsize. When she fought at the Battle of Jutland in 1916, her captain decided to order full-gun broadsides against the enemy. When she fired a full gun salvo, "the resulting sheet of flame was big enough to create the impression that a battlecruiser had blown up; it was awe-inspiring." Amazingly, no major damage was caused to the ship, although all the glass and table wear onboard was shattered by the force of the blast! The secondary armament was equally oversized, with 20 6-inch guns in single-gun casemates for protection against destroyers and torpedo boats; this gave Agincourt more such guns on one side of the ship than a typical battleship of the era had, total. Agincourt was fortunate to have never been hit by enemy shells, as all this firepower was paid for by having weak armor.^note
The B-52 Stratofortress was The Dreaded specifically because the crew tended to empty the entire payload onto the target. Please note that the B-52 is not a small plane: it's big enough to warrant eight jet turbines to even get it off the ground, and it has a payload to match. Such was its power that most commanders surrender en-masse when they even think there's one around—a reputation that goes as far back as Vietnam. There's an old joke among B-52 crews listed elsewhere here on TV Tropes that bears repeating here: B-52 pilot looks at his bombardier and points out the window at the ground 35,000 feet below. "See all that land down there? Fuck up everybody on it."
The AC-130 Spectre is a cargo plane with an anti-aircraft gatling gun and an artillery piece sticking out of the belly pointed at the ground. Its ammunition is measured in thousands of pounds and with its infrared cameras and laser targeting has been known to drop shells right on top of individual people. Given that such a plane would be a very enticing target for modern fighters, they are often only deployed in areas where their side has absolute air supremacy, such as when the enemy are insurgents equipped with AK's and perhaps the occasional pickup truck with a machine gun on top. The degree of overkill this platform presents is best demonstrated by an interesting trend as newer versions are developed: As targeting technology has become more accurate, the number of weapons mounted on the plane has decreased. One of the two versions in service today, the AC-130W, omits the big artillery piece entirely (being modified from a previous non-gunship C-130 variant), but in exchange, has added wing hardpoints for carrying guided bombs and missiles to let them engage targets from even further away. The other version, the AC-130J, has the wing hardpoints and the big artillery piece.
The Italian B1 Centauro and Centauro II are wheeled reconnaisance vehicles... That mount MBT cannons. There's actually a good reason for this: the Centauro was conceived in the late stages of the Cold War, when the Italian Army needed to procure a new reconnaisance vehicle and replace the aging M60 Pattons in its inventory, and mounting a 105mm tank gun on a reconnaisance vehicle allowed to both reduce the need of new (and more expensive) MBTs to buy and brink tank firepower around much faster, especially in the hilly and mountainous terrains that occupy almost 80% of Italy. The Centauro II is simply an improvement on the Centauro after after the original incarnation proved its worth in multiple peacekeeping missions, with the switch to a bigger 120mm tank being the natural consequence of Italy, like the rest of NATO, having switched to that caliber for their [MBTs], thus simplifying logistics by maintaining the same caliber.

War

Older Than Dirt: Around 1555 BCE, King Seqenenre Tao of the Seventeenth Dynasty of ancient Egypt, ruler of Upper Egypt (i.e. southern Egypt), waged a war of national liberation and unification against the foreign Fifteenth Dynasty that ruled Lower Egypt. At some point, it seems he lost a critical battle and was captured by the northerners. After his capture, his hands were tied behind his back and was brutally executed. Analysis of his mummy shows that his captors struck his temple with an axe, pierced his skull end to end with a spear, beat his body with maces and clubs, and stabbed him repeatedly with daggers or small swords. They then sent his body up the Nile to his countrymen, apparently still in hogtie, so he could be mummified and buried (because hey, just because you brutally executed a man doesn't mean you have to offend the gods by not allowing him to have a proper funeral). The mummification bit is important, because the only reason we know any of this is that his mummy survives, and modern forensic examination of the mummy shows all the wounds of this distinctive death. (The Egyptians were loth to write down the circumstances of anyone's death, doubly so when it was a king, so there's no written record of Seqenenre Tao's execution.)
During the US's attacks on Iran through Operation Praying Mantis in the 1980s (while aiding Iraq in the Iran–Iraq War), an Iranian frigate defending an Iranian oil platform decided to challenge an American surface action group. Three American ships opened fire with guns and missiles. After multiple gun rounds and six Standard Missiles from the first two ships had impacted, the captain of the third ship decided that he would make sure and fired a Harpoon anti-ship missile. By the time it arrived at the frigate's location, there weren't any pieces of the frigate left floating that were large enough for the missile to lock onto.
The use of the M1 Abrams for urban warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan is seen like this since the tank was designed to take on Soviet tanks en masse on open terrain, which they did easily at the beginning of both wars. Never mind a tank is much more vulnerable in a city than on open terrain. Videos exist of insurgents trying to take on an Abrams with a 'puny' RPG-7 rocket launcher - a weapon better suited for much weaker targets - only for the rocket to explode ineffectually against the tank's armoured hide. Cue a mass pants-soiling incident as the tank's turret gently turns around to fire a shot capable of liquefying the people stupid enough to try to take one on.
Using battleship artillery to bombard enemy shore positions. Ships can bear far bigger and heavier guns than is possible to deploy on land, and 6-inch is the usual maximum caliber on ground force artillery. At sea, it is considered a light cannon. In Operation Desert Storm, Iraqi positions in the Euphrates Delta were terrified of the presence of scout drones because they came from said battleships; it meant those BFGs were about to be aimed at them with a pretty good chance of hitting. After a while, some troops were surrendering to the drone because they knew what was coming.
- Case in point: The Iowa-class battleship USS Wisconsin on 15 March, 1952. While shelling railroad infrastructure along the North Korean coast, an NK 152mm artillery battery made the mistake of challenging the Wisconsin to a fight, bracketing the ship with shells and actually managing to score a direct hit on one of the ship's 40mm guns, dealing minor damage to it. Whatever elation they felt at hitting the ship, however, likely quickly turned to absolute pants-shitting terror when the Wisconsin adjusted its course and replied to the attack with a full broadside of its nine 16-inch (406 mm) main guns. After the North Korean artillery position and much of the surrounding area had been replaced with a crater, the ship escorting the Wisconsin sent a signal lamp message to the battleship: "Temper, temper, Wisconsin."
The gunnery officer on the destroyer USS Johnston happened to spot a Japanese officer onshore rallying defenders during the Battle of Kwajalein, and opened fire on the man with all five of the ship's main guns. Results were predictable.
"Mr. Hagen, that was very good shooting," called Captain Evans from the bridge. "But in the future, try not to waste so much ammunition on one individual."
After the Sepoy Rebellion, the British executed some of the captured rebels by blowing them from guns, meaning they would strap each man to the muzzle of a cannon and fire it. Other executions in the region occasionally utilized crushing by elephant.
One of the unused plans for eliminating Osama Bin Laden was an airstrike that would have involved 32 bunker-busting bombs to take out a single building (just in case there were any underground bunkers in the neighborhood). According to military estimates, the effect of the raid on the surrounding city would have been similar to an earthquake... something that made the US government a bit squeamish. (Source: The New Yorker) A commando raid also had the benefit of being able to verify that Bin Laden was actually in the building, whereas obliterating it with bombs would leave open the possibility that he could slip out in between launching the strike and the bombs actually falling. Not to mention that, if the operation were compromised, it would be much easier for Pakistan to forgive a small incursion of American special ops forces to kill one terrorist with no civilian casualties than to forgive an entire city block and everyone in it being cratered.
- This report released in March 2014 claims that the Navy SEALS who killed Osama bin Laden used over a hundred bullets to bring him down, likely the reason why the government refuses to release photos of his obviously mutilated corpse.
In the Second World War, the British needed to destroy a German train tunnel that went under a mountain. German engineers had proven themselves remarkably adept at undoing the damage dealt by saboteurs, so the RAF decided to send Lancasters armed with Tallboy bombs to target, not the tracks themselves, but the mountain! Three bombs hit the mountain, and only one actually passed-through the tunnel, but the result was that the mountain collapsed, sealing the tunnel for the remainder of the war.
During the Battle of the Bulge, one American soldier recalled an event where he and his squad were sent to do recon on German forces in the area and ended up getting pursued by a Tiger tank. The tank followed them all the way back to the village where the soldiers were garrisoned and trapped them in a house. While he and the squad escaped out the back door, the tank, thinking that the soldiers were still inside, stuck its main gun through the front door and fired at point-blank range before leaving. That German tank crew must have been having a really bad day.^note
William Slim's task when building the Fourteenth Army in Burma? Prove to his men that the Japanese were not unbeatable supermen. His solution? Attack platoons with battalions and tackle companies with brigade groups; i.e., a dozen-to-one odds. His response to complaints that this was using a hammer to crack a nut? Hey, it works!
- This is the same Bill Slim who, when confronted with mediaeval city walls in Burma that the enemy had turned into a fortress, decided not to waste time besieging the place. He called forward the sort of very heavy artillery normally used to shell a target from miles away, emplaced them five hundred yards from the Japanese-held fortifications, and had six- and eight-inch guns (compatible with those used on warships) open up at point-blank range. The city fell within two days.
The Fast Carrier Task Force (known as TF 58 when commanded by Spruance or TF 38 when commanded by Halsey) remains one of the largest assemblies of carriers ever operating together. Every battle it was in was overkill, even against land-based airforces. This is before accounting for American technology advantages. In the Fast Carrier Task Force's heyday, it was operating the Hellcat; its opposing number was still using the Zero.
- In Operation Hailstone, a nascent TF 58 brought 560 aircraft in a raid against Truk Lagoon. Only 350 Japanese aircraft were present to oppose it (with estimates of only half being operational, as opposed to TF 58's full operational strength). Additionally, most aircraft were destroyed on the ground in the initial attack.
- For the Battle of Philippine Sea (better known as the "Turkey Shoot"), TF 58 brought approximately 900 carrier aircraft. The Japanese brought approximately 450 carrier aircraft and 300 land-based aircraft to oppose it. The American forces not only had a numerical advantage, but also had an ever-widening technological gap and experience gap. By this time, Japan had lost its experienced pilots in the brutal combat of the Guadalcanal campaign, and struggled to even achieve basic proficiency for naval combat aviators. This would be the last hurrah, and the Japanese carriers would only be able serve as a decoy in Leyte Gulf.
- For the Battle of Okinawa, the Fast Carrier Task Force numbered approximately 1200 aircraft. By dint of contrast, the RAF's entire strength for the Battle of Britain was just shy of 2000 aircraft.
An F-15E Strike Eagle scored an air to air kill during the first Gulf War against an Iraqi Hind helicopter on 14 February 1991. Using a GBU-10 laser-guided bomb. The 2,000-pound bomb, designed to bury itself beneath concrete runways before detonating, destroyed the rotor blades and the cockpit (along with the hapless pilot inside), exited through the bottom of the helicopter, and then exploded. Confetti was all that remained of the helicopter. Why resort to this instead of just firing an air-to-air missile? The radar couldn't get a solid lock due to being scattered by the helicopter's rapidly spinning rotor blades.
- Another from the First Gulf War, an A-10 piloted by Captain Bob Swain engaged an Iraqi helicopter... with the enormous 30 mm Avenger cannon mounted in the nose of the aircraft. The Avenger is designed to destroy heavy armored vehicles, not fragile rotor craft, and much like the GBU above, the attack annihilated the ever-loving hell out of the enemy helicopter. Captain Swain attempted to identify the class of helicopter engaged, but neither he nor his wingman were able to determine what he'd just destroyed because the Avenger had reduced the helicopter to shredded metal chaff. This earned his aircraft the affectionate nickname "Chopper Popper," as it was the first recorded air-to-air kill with the A-10, much less with its stonking huge main gun.
An M1 Abrams tank gunner shot an unarmored Infantry combatant with the tank's main 120mm after seeing the Iraqi Republican Guardsman pointing an RPG at the tank. Typically, an Abrams gunner would switch to anti-infantry "beehive" ammunition, which consists of a shit-ton of ball bearings in place of where a warhead or kinetic penetrator would be, and beehive ammunition in itself is often overkill for a single infantryman, given that it's essentially a massive 120mm shotgun shell meant to defend against groups of enemies attempting to swarm the tank. In this case, however, the gunner acted on reflex with no time to change ammunition, meaning the unfortunate combatant who'd made the regrettable decision to engage the Abrams was blasted with not a shit-ton of ball bearings, but a single High Explosive Anti-Tank (H.E.A.T.) round meant to go against enemy tanks. The man's body reportedly tumbled away like a leaf in a strong wind after imploding from the force of the H.E.A.T. round.
When King Edward I of England conquered Wales, he ensured its permanence by building eight massive castles,^note among the most fantastic in the world, referred to by a historian as "an orgy of military architectural expression on an almost unlimited budget".
Using a Patriot surface-to-air missile to shoot down a quadcopter. For context: A Patriot is a Surface to Air Missile that travels five times the speed of sound designed to knock down ballistic missiles. The quadcopter reportedly cost $200 to buy from Amazon. Although the fact that the Patriot system could acquire and kill the quadcopter at all is actually pretty impressive due to how far outside its intended mission set such a small low-flying target is.
During The Vietnam War, the American forces were so desperate to take out the Viet Cong that they often utilized excessive firepower to get the guerrillas out of the jungle. Here's an attempt to kill one sniper, for example. Even more amazing, the sniper actually survived the barrage and escaped with his life. This has become standard procedure when dealing with suspected sniper nests after Simho Häyhä's reign of terror as the White Death during the Winter War. It eventually got to the point where the Red Army called in artillery strikes on places they thought he was hiding in to try and kill him. He survived those attempts (even getting counter-sniped with an explosive round), and continued to terrorize the Russians until the end of the Winter War. Since then, instead of having two men engaging in a lengthy Sniper Duel, commanders would often simply call in for an artillery strike or a bombing run to make sure they're either dead or have vacated the premises.
- At one point during the Normandy landings, American soldiers on Omaha Beach got held up by a few German snipers◊, and so made a radio call to the battleship Texas◊, a New York-class Super-Dreadnought, requesting they take care of that problem.
The AIR-2 Genie. How do you bring down waves of incoming Soviet bombers? By sticking a nuke on a rocket and firing it in their faces.
In World War I there was a "Zone Call", which was a request for every available weapon of any calibre within range to fire at the maximum possible rate on a single grid square until anything within it was obliterated. That was reckoned to cost around a million pounds a minute (£55M in 2018 money). The proper use was for attacking large concentrations of enemy troops, but a Royal Flying Corps officer called one in to get rid of one antiaircraft battery and was court-martialed for the waste.
Mexican revolutionary general Pancho Villa was killed instantly when he got hit with nine expanding bullets in the head and chest. Three of his four bodyguards were also killed during the shootout as well, leaving only one survivor.
Operation Paul Bunyan, where the US and South Korea deployed engineers, security guards, backed by utility copters, artillery, gunships and more to... cut down a 100-ft poplar tree. However, considering they were dealing with North Korea in response to the axe murder incident, it also doubles as Gunboat Diplomacy.
During the The Mexican Revolution, the Decena Trágica — the "Ten Tragic Days" that concluded the first, idealistic phase of the revolution — saw many horrible deaths. But of these, the death of Gustavo Madero, brother of the president Francisco I. Madero, was notorious for how gruesome it was. A mob of soldiers loyal to Victoriano Huerta threw him into a courtyard, insulting him, then kicking, slapping, punching, stabbing and caning him until his face was swollen by the beatings, where he was blinded in his remaining eye with a bayonet by one of them, while the other soldiers stabbed him with knives and swords, all while Manuel Mondragón watched with glee; once they had their fun, he was shot 21 times, and then the soldiers further defiled the corpse by ripping organs out of it and throwing dirt and manure onto the remains of the corpse.
On August 6, 2011, a U.S. Army Chinook helicopter was shot down by militants in Afghanistan, killing all 38 people and one military dog aboard, the worst loss of life in a single incident in the entire US war against the Taliban. The insurgent who made the shot bragged about it over two-way radio, which was picked up by US Air Force signals intelligence. They tracked his location and, two days later, dropped four 500-pound GPS-guided bombs on him and his comrades. And followed up with strikes from an AC-130 gunship and two Apache helicopters. Talk shit, get hit, indeed.
Speaking of Afghanistan, the British Empire found it was impossible to take it over during the time India was a colony of Britain. Namely, three wars Britain fought in Afghanistan convinced the British that there was only one method to not getting attacked by Afghan tribesmen, and that was staying out of Afghanistan but threatening disproportionate reprisals if any Afghan tribal conflicts spilled over into India, as summarized here:
"We don’t care what you do to each other in your clan feuds, but stay on your side of the border. If you come into British India, we will come after you with everything we have, kill you, kill your relations, kill every member of your clan, burn down your villages, and kill your goats. Nothing will remain.
And you know damned good and well that your neighbors, who don’t like you either, will tell us exactly where to find you.
So do whatever you want to each other. Just stay the Hell out of the Raj while you’re doing it."
- Not surprisingly, the Afghans decided not to bother India until after 1947...
Many of the skeletons of the soldiers in the Battle of Towton (during the Wars of the Roses) show grievous wounds. An example is the skull of a soldier named Towton 25◊, who suffered eight head wounds:
"A healed skull fracture points to previous engagements. He was old enough — somewhere between 36 and 45 when he died — to have gained plenty of experience of fighting. But on March 29th 1461, his luck ran out. Towton 25 suffered eight wounds to his head that day. The precise order can be worked out from the direction of fractures on his skull: when bone breaks, the cracks veer towards existing areas of weakness. The first five blows were delivered by a bladed weapon to the left-hand side of his head, presumably by a right-handed opponent standing in front of him. None is likely to have been lethal.The next one almost certainly was. From behind him someone swung a blade towards his skull, carving a down-to-up trajectory through the air. The blow opened a huge horizontal gash into the back of his head— picture a slit you could post an envelope through. Fractures raced down to the base of his skull and around the sides of his head. Fragments of bone were forced in to Towton 25's brain, felling him. His enemies were not done yet. Another small blow to the right and back of the head may have been enough to turn him over onto his back. Finally another blade arced towards him. This one bisected his face, opening a crevice that ran from his left eye to his right jaw. It cut deep: the edge of the blade reached to the back of his throat."
During the Spanish Conquest of the Aztec Empire, as narrated in The True History of the Conquest of Mexico, the captain of the first Spanish expedition, Francisco Hernández de Córdoba, received no less than ten native arrows. He survived thanks to his armor, but died from his wounds shortly after.
Backfired in the early stages of the Battle of Berlin in World War II. At the Battle of Seelow Heights, the Soviets began the push to take Berlin with an absolutely massive, hours long bombardment by artillery and rockets... and, combined with defenders having diverted a river to turn the ground into a soft, swampy mess, the bombardment tore up the ground so badly that Soviet tanks could not navigate the area, and the infantry became so bogged down when they attempted to advance that it made them easy targets for the German defenders. While the Soviets overwhelmed the Germans in a matter of days, they suffered considerably higher casualties than expected doing it.

Weapons

The proposed Supersonic Low Altitude Missile, or SLAM conceived by the U.S. Air Force. It was never built, fortunately, but the sheer absurdity of its lethality cannot be understated. It would have been launched by rocket, descended to an altitude of 1,000 feet (~300 m) to avoid being detected by radar, and flown at Mach 3, thrice the speed of sound, while dropping its payload of 16 hydrogen bombs. Oh, and it was itself nuclear-powered, without a filter, meaning it would spew huge amounts of highly radioactive air wherever it went, for as long as the fuel would last, which could take weeks. More details on the U.S. ICBM page.
The Tsar Bomba H-bomb, designed to level cities from 10 kilometres away, with a design payload of 100 megatonnes. Tested at half yield (50 Mt) 4 kilometres over Novaya Zemlya island, it registered as roughly a Richter 5 on seismographs, broke windows in Finland, and could have caused third-degree burns from 100 kilometres distance.
Not to be outdone, Edward Teller, a leading physicist in the American nuclear weapons program, proposed a 10 gigaton 'super-bomb', pushing the principles of the Teller-Ulam thermonuclear weapon design he helped devise to the limits. Let that sink in for a moment: that's 100 times more powerful than the Soviets' Tsar Bomba, and by Teller's own estimations, it was enough to wipe out all of New England, or Germany, or France, or the entire Korean peninsula with the blast alone, and kill the entire planet by nuclear fallout - a true Doomsday Device. Suffice to say, his proposal was turned down.
- Teller reportedly had a chart in his office listing ever larger hypothetical nuclear bombs and how to deliver them. The last one on the list was to be delivered from "backyard", since it supposedly would have killed everyone in the world and did not need to be carried anywhere.
Back in the 1960s, the people behind the development of the Orion Drive - the idea of using pulsed nuclear detonations to push large spacecrafts with specially-designed pusher plates through space - once proposed various weaponized versions of their Orion spacecraft designs, the pinnacle of which was the Orion Battleship. The Orion Battleship is a 4000 ton monster with 11,000 cubic meters of internal volume which is armed to the teeth, with not only three Mk-42 5-inch naval turrets and six 20mm CIWS turrets, but also 500 missiles which could be fired from 3 banks of 30 silos each (90 in total) each of them tipped with a 20 megaton thermonuclear warhead, as well as hundreds of 'Casaba-Howitzer' bolts (think nuclear-shape charges that can spear targets with lances of directed, focused nuclear fire) which could be fired from six launchers, and six hypersonic landing boats/nuclear bombers. This thing had enough firepower to wipe out whatever space forces the Soviet Union could build and launch and still have enough to wipe the Soviet Union itself (if not the entire continent it is on) from the face of the Earth. President Kennedy and others in the US government were reportedly so horrified by the proposal (which was pitched by the designers complete with a car-sized model of the whole thing) it led/contributed to the cancellation of the whole project.
Rods from God. It would have an explosive yield roughly 100 times larger than a modern nuclear missile.
The Cobalt Bomb. Roughly 510 tonnes of cobalt would be needed, and due to wind and other factors, it probably wouldn't succeed in wiping out all life on Earth, but it'd come damn close. The only problem is how much it would cost... and possibly others not being entirely willing to just die.
Finnish Lahti-Saloranta L-39 anti-tank rifle used as a sniper rifle. While efficient as an anti-tank rifle in the Winter War, it became obsolete already during the interim peace for its intended use. But as it was accurate and had long range, the Finns found it a new life as a sniper rifle during World War II. It has iron sights, calibrated to 400 m, but it is accurate for sniping up to 1400 m distances. It was usually employed for anti-sniper action, but at least one Il-2 Shturmovik assault plane has been shot down with it. After WWII it has been successfully used as an anti-helicopter weapon.
Several of the weapons on this list seem to have been designed with this concept in mind. Some notable entries: Tyrannosaurus Rounds (the name should say it all), Varmint Grenades (note: using these against humans has been declared a war crime).
- The Punt Gun, a 6 ft to 10 ft long shotgun firing one pound of shot that would likely give Wrex or Grunt wet dreams that was used for the harvesting of wild waterfowl for commercial purposes. In fact, it was SO effective at turning out large numbers of dead birds that the practice of Punt Gunning was banned in most of the U.S. around 1860 because stocks of wild waterfowl were significantly depleted to dangerously low levels.
- Still think Shotguns Are Just Better? Then your fantasies are fulfilled in the M576 grenade meant as a close-range option for grenadiers in the event enemies get too close for comfort...in short, it is a 40mm shotgun shell.
During World War II, the British came up with the idea that to destroy hardened targets, they needed a really REALLY big bomb. What they got was the Tallboy, a bomb so big that during its design phase no existing bomber at the time could carry it. Even when the Tallboy was scaled down for production, bombers needed special modifications to carry them. However, the Tallboy was hideously successful since it destroyed its targets by creating man-made earthquakes. The Tallboy was so successful that once they had the capability to carry it, the British designed an even bigger bomb, which was known as the Grand Slam, and weighed nearly twice as much as the Tallboy. Even better, the Tallboy was officially known as the Bomb, Medium Capacity, 12,000 lb.
- The Americans, meanwhile, developed the Pumpkin bomb, a conventional variant of the Fat Man atomic bomb which was loaded with 6,300 pounds of TNT. The Pumpkin bomb was designed to be of similar weight and ballistics to the Fat Man, allowing it to be used as a training weapon, but when used with an air-burst fuse, it was also devastatingly effective against most unhardened targets. While the bomb was overall much lighter than the Tallboy, most of that was due to the Tallboy's reinforced casing designed to penetrate hardened targets, with the Pumpkin bomb carrying a larger explosive charge. Forty-nine Pumpkin bombs were dropped on targets in Japan during WWII.
News stories in the early 2010s have revealed that China has begun issuing miniguns to local police forces, leading many Chinese to wonder just what the hell their police are expected to face that would warrant so much firepower.
Medium Atomic Demolition Munition (MADM), or if you would prefer: Nuclear Landmines. The name says it all. It's even the page image for Overkill on The Other Wiki.
Flamethrowers and Napalm are as simple as overkill can get. Blast someone with fires of 1,500-2,200°F and their body will either become completely charred over or reduced to ash and bones.
- Even this isn't enough for some people: infamous and beloved Marine Lt. General "Chesty" Puller witnessed a demonstration of the man-portable flamethrower; reportedly, his very first question after the flame trooper finished lighting up his targets was "So where the hell do you put the bayonet?"

Other

A group of scientists in 2007 performed some research involving shooting mosquitoes with lasers. They had a Schlock Mercenary poster up on the door: "There is no overkill. Only 'Open fire!' and 'I need to reload'." Appropriately, the poster has a huge musclebound soldier pointing a prodigious quantity of firepower at an insect.
The book Great Mambo Chicken & the Transhuman Condition describes some explosives enthusiasts designing a mock A-bomb to win a contest:
"They came back the next week with a device that would not only look like an A-bomb explosion, it would actually work like one... he took a two-hundred-pound lard can and put three pieces of primacord inside, looping them around so they completely covered the bottom. Then he poured the ammonium nitrate into the can, inserted sticks of dynamite all around the perimeter, and ran the primacord fuse up to a blasting cap on top of it all. The cap would fire the primacord, which in turn would set off the dynamite, which would crush the mass of ammonium nitrate until the necessary pressure was reached — a true implosion device, just like the atom bomb."
If the good old fly-swatter is not enough for you anymore, electrified ones are on sale. Not only do they swat bugs and jolt them to death, but if you charge them enough, they literally make them explode into dust.
If one's trying to get rid of a spider in their house, there are certain ways to kill the spider. Then there's torching your house like this man in Seattle did.
A 2016 New Zealand documentary interviewed the police officers sent to investigate the Mt Erebus air disaster. Apparently, they were rather disturbed by birds that kept eating the bodies as they were being salvaged. They asked for help from the US base in Antarctica who sent them a Light Anti-tank Weapon! While the more gung-ho policemen were all set to fire it off, "wiser heads prevailed", as oxygen cylinders that were still hidden under the snow could have exploded. Eventually, the bodies were just reburied until they could be evacuated.
Blowing from a gun is a method of execution practiced for centuries on the Indian subcontinent, especially under The Raj. To quote The Other Wiki: "… the victim is typically tied to the mouth of a cannon which is then fired, often resulting in death". Wait, often!?
- North Korean dictator has apparently become partial to a variant of this, executing his "enemies" by shooting them at close range. With an anti-aircraft gun. Starting with his uncle.
George Pullman was so hated by some of his former employees that his family was afraid they or other union supporters would dig up Pullman's body to desecrate it or hold it for ransom. They arranged for Pullman to be buried in a lead lined coffin that was sealed in a concrete box, which was then covered in tar paper and asphalt. The coffin was lowered into a concrete lined pit at Graceland Cemetery in Chicago. A layer of concrete was poured over the coffin, then steel rails bolted together were placed in the pit, and all that was covered by yet another layer of concrete. The burial took two days to complete. Author Ambrose Bierce said of the precautions, "It is clear the family in their bereavement was making sure the sonofabitch wasn't going to get up and come back."
When it comes to getting rid of a bee or wasp nest, the most common methods are either using a spray or other chemical to kill the hive or physically removing it and putting it in a bag. This guy opted to use explosives to rip apart the hives on his property. Specifically, he used the M-80 fireworks, which are known to be military grade explosives.

There Is No Kill Like Overkill / Real Life

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