"Short hair, tight clothing."

 

Pole arms.  Can be lowered with force sufficent to crush skull and prevent blocking.  Can be used too distroy the stairs behind you.

 

 

Tanks

Big ones little ones, MBTanks, Anti-infantry rapidgattling gun tank, Flame tanks. All tough and NBC sound.

Uh Uh -  Read about the battle of Yonkers in World War Z? - wrong battle, fighting  the wrong war with the wrong weapons against the wrong enemy. Zombies have no morale to break and have no fear. Their only motivation is to catch you and eat you. But they have the intelligence of a newt. and the ONLY way to kill them is to destroy the brain. A decapped head will still snap at you. Very few soldiers are trained for those head shots.

 

 

Result?  Massacre of the high tech army. They just keep coming - hundred, then thousands, then millions of them swarming from NYC.   Lines were set up on the ground, not in the surrounding heights which zombies couldnt climb. Now if the tanks were loaded with flechettes - ALL rounds -  that might make a difference, but they were armed with conventional AP, HE, HEAT, and few Flechettes. But not shells, not flame unless it fries the brain.

 

Infantry are trained to hit the body mass - not sharpshoot the brain.  Would need retraining. And in a zombie catastrophe, where logistics fall apart, bigger ticket items would be worthless -  bad bang for the kill, so to speak. Japanese polearms are excellent - blade combined with crossarms for standoff, and can sever at the neck by thrusting the moonblade. Pretty cool, as long as the head is destroyed. (See WWZ for the blind martial artist and how he survived!)

 

Best tactic?   Prepare the ground, make them come to you, form huge Infantry square,  with reserves and triple lines, a la the movie 'Zulu' , massive division resupply, with pikes  as standoff, unlimited ammo supply and resupply, NO heavy weapons (bad Kill-Cost ratio compared to shooting where a trained infantry with supply can kill hundreds) and all infantry trained to shoot the head. You start shooting the Zacks until you start building walls of them all around you, which becomes part of your defense, then pick off the zombies as they manageably try to scramble over the bodies.

 

Eventually, you will clean out an area.  Call in the cleanup crew, then move forward and repeat.

 

 

swhitebull -  just finished reading World War Z again, coupled with the Zombie Survival Guide, by Max Brooks, son of Mel. WW Z is a book interviewing about 40 survivors from the war from across the world, from the initial outbreak in China to the spread of the infection,  to the near extermination of the human race, to the resurgence of humanity to triumph.   Well worth the reading, and wait for the movie on it next year. 

Full plate armour seems sensible for clearing enclosed spaces, although not as thick as the medieval stuff. Just thick enough to stop bites and scratches, aluminium sheet and perspex would probably do. On the medieval kick, castles and similar fortifications would seem wise. A curtain wall would enable you to take a heavy toll without undue risk to the defenders. Polearms and shield walls do not seem like a good idea, as in a crush (which you would need to stop an advancing horde) you would not have the agility to pick and choose target points. And zombies would out-push you.

Pike men and small-arms, however, makes sense.

If the zombies can be made to come on en masse, then machine guns, used properly, would be effective. A more stable mount, better range, better fire control. A slow firing weapon like the .5 or a Vickers would be more useful as high rate of fire does not gain you anything against an opponent who is in plain sight and moves slowly.

I have to say that WWZ sounds like the sort of book that makes assumptions as plot devices - i.e. the military are really, really stupid and gratuitously incompetant, rather than devise a way for the threat to realistically overcome them.

Air burst munitions, MLRS "steel rain." And if they still rely on the CNS, VX, sarin, other organic phosphates.

All you wind up with is shredded putrefying zombie flesh, unless you get lucky with a head shot.  Nerve agents and gas wouldnt work - they're already dead and dont breathe!!  Best you could do is immobilize them. Again,  look at the Battle of Yonkers!!! It was tried - and failed.

 

I still think the best approach is a lobotomizer for closein work - part spade, part moon-axe, all japanese, and all stainless steel, after the infantry-squares have done their work in building zombie walls.

 

 

swhitebull  - I take my zombies seriously.  The remake of Day of the Dead is coming out, and next year,  World War Z from Max Brooks hits the screen, courtesy of brad pitt's production company.

HE shells kill by primary and secondary fragmentation, not blast or flame. Therefore HE would be viable. If nothing else it would slow the zombies down, assuming that they rely on muscle and bone structure for motion, and not magic. The same goes for air-dropped HE and artillery munitions. Land mines would be reasonably useful too A zombie without legs will be slower.

the military was initially incompetent - at the top levels - in dealing with the zombies. underestimated the numbers, the logistics, the tactics and force mix. Not atypical of generals fighting the last war, but not prepared to fight a current one. That was the point of Brook's battle of Yonkers. He goes into the affects of CAS, MLRS, etc. as well. His revised winning tactics were the ones I outlined above, thru trial and error, and body armor based on modernized chainmail, and discusses the use of castles in Europe and safe zones.

 

swhitebull - read the book,  its worth it, and I couldnt put it down - took 2 nights to read. He interviews 40 people for their experiences during the war. Neat approach. No shield wall, just kill zones to build the zombie walls, which slows down the hordes, backed up by TONS of ammunition, with resupply by helo. As a plot device, it works, since the military chose the time and place of the defense. Also, he sets up attractor spots - human bait- to attract zombies, but are impregnable fortresses, thus allowing the military to move into positions to choose their battles.     

 

Also just going from my point above, a person was shot square in the chest by a APFSDS, there would be no torso left, yes the head would proably be intact and maybe some limbs, but how can a head move on it's own? Now firing a APFSDS inot a zombie square, and thats alot of shreaded bodies, again not completely destroyed but far less capable then they were.

The modern technological army is designed to fight other modern technological armies, the key feature of which is that they rush about and hide, notably unlike zombies (unless of course you're talking about "28 Days Later" style zombies) In Vietnam, for the sake of example, 10,000 rounds of S.A.A. was expended per casualty caused by S.A.A, so that covers rifles and machine guns, both with the infantry and vehicle mounted.

When the targets are walking about in plain view and slowly, modern firepower is simply going to wreck impossible numbers. As 00_Chem_AJB notes, even impacts from large calibre weapons that do not kill outright with a head-shot are going to smash the body apart. Unless these are magic zombies, they need bone and muscle structure and nerves to function. Smash the bone, pulverise the muscle, sever the nerves and you the zombie will be slowed or stopped, so you can apply the coup de grace at your leisure.

Nerve agents do not need to be breathed in to function - AIUI they attack via exposed skin, but you might need some kind of circulatory system to get it into the brain. when combined with artillery, the non-'lethal' wounds would create a route into the body for the nerve agents. Combined arms - you know it makes sense.

If, however, they are magic zombies who can ignore the laws of physics as we know them and be subject only to common misconceptions, then this shouldn't be in a Science Fiction forum, but a fantasy forum.

look back at the flail tanks the allies used on the beaches at normandy.  imagine what something like that would do to a zombie horde. 

i think it would be a heck of an idea to avoid any kind of hand to hand combat with zombies. 

The more I hear about this WWZ story, the worse it sounds, to be honest.

WE're talking literally MILLIONS of zombies, all advancing, with one thing in mind -  trap and eat. I do NOT believe, short of nukes - that the armed forces would prepare for that. IN the fictional battle of Yonkers, the army prepared for 1000s, not millions, prepared with heavy biological suits (they didnt know at that point if the virus was airborne or not), The first MLRS tookout 3/4 of the zacks, the others were all shredded but kep t on coming, crawling, dragging whatevef, with 10 of thouasands behind them, coming up from NYC, backed up to Times Square. Second waves of MLRS and HE didnt have the same effect, because the tightly bunched Zs tended to shield each other from head shots.

 

No balloon effect either -  when a bomb goes off close to you, it causes the liquid in your body to burst, like a balloon. Since the Zs have gel rather than blood , there is less bosy fluid, hence less effect.

 

No Sudden Nerve Trauma either from bomb bursts - not a lot of electrical nerve system in the zombies. (Brooks goes into  physiological depths to explain the physical effects of his brand of zombism. a virus that reposits in the brain, and shuts down all systems not necessary for mainitainin the virus - i dont have my handbook handy to explain).  Which explains why nerve agents didnt have much effect, if any.

 

 

His next wave of kill zone was the heavy arms, tanks, bradleys, chain guns FOTT missiles, grenade launchers, mortars,

Comanches, etc. 1000s of zombies bought it then. That's when the fire power started to slowly die down as unit loads started to diminish.  No one thought how many rounds would be needed for sustained operations - or the sheer numbers of zombies (upwards of a million),  budget cuts under the previous administration that was tired of fighting brush fire wars after Iraq, etc. 

 

 

What collapsed the last line was NOT the courage of the troops (though that too was suffering due to watching so many zombies coming and being wired in to the Net so that each trooper could see what was happening on the battlefield), but in the haste to set up the defense lines, not ALL the buildings were searched thoroughly, and there were zombies in surrounding buildings, including behind the troops. NOt many, but enough to begin to cause panic. NOr did th emilitary put the ground troops up on the buildings, where they would have been safe. Plot device of course, but could the military screw up like that?  Certainly, especially in a panic situation where NYC had millions of zombies, all coming your way. PLUS a belief that SHock and Awe, which worked so well in Iraq, would work against zombies. (THis was in the early stages, and not a lot was yet known about the zombies, other than they moved slow, ate you, and transmitted the virus somehow, and that a shot to the head was the only way to kill them)

 

The bottom line is that the military was fighting with the Shock and Awe strategy, against an enemy that cant be Shocked and Awed.  The only thing that saved many military lives was the uses of MOABS further down the road, giving them time to retreat and recoup.

 

Brooks doesnt mention the size of the US units involved, but from reading between the lines, I would surmise at least a brigade of troops, with support and normal unit loads.

 

 

swhitebull - I would still recommend reading the book, it deals less with the military aspects, than the social, economic and political aspects of the struggle. Internal evidence suggests it first breaks out about 2013.

So it was more of a case of running out of ammo, at this point, I would of used heavy armour to charge the horde, as I doubt a zombie or whatever number can get inside a a locked down tank, this would of given time to evacuate the infatry and other soft units. Though if millions of zombies where coming out of a doomed city, I would think twice about using tactical nuclear weapons or FAE and incendiary/napalm  stirkes.