I love how people have criticized the book without ever reading it.  Granted, the people who have read the book are doing a poor job at telling exactly why Yonkers was over-run.

 

The real reason why Yonkers was over run had nothing to do with the modern guns that were used, it had to do with Fear.

 

What does artillery and napalm do other then brutally kill its targets?  It scares the living crap out of the surviving targets.  But what if your targets can not be frightened?  What if your targets will take a blast from an artillery round that blows off both its legs and an arm, and yet it still claws its way towards you with his one remaining arm, still eager to win?

 

The Fear that is generally installed on an enemy after an impressive display of fire power was not effective on the zombies, which caused it to bounce back into the military's face.  After seeing the zombies react to the the impressive artillery strike by simply getting back up, the human emotions overtook the forces and they went into extreme panic.  The zombies never took over until this panic was installed.  Once everyone went into a panic, the zombies got through.

 

Also, according to an article I read, Max Brooks studied military warfare and weapons and was trained by the US Army in ballistics before writing this book.  The guy knew his stuff.  But none of you would realize that without reading the book.

 

So next time, read the book, and then share your comments.

The bodies and brains of zombies would not be subject to the concussive blast effect of high explosives due to the fact that most of the liquid inside zombie bodies has congealed and would take very little damage from blast waves. That was discussed as a reason in the book. Also in his earlier work "the zombie survival guide", Brooks goes into detail about the virus (solenum) transforming the brain into a completely new, self-sufficient organ. Therefore it is unknown how the effects of high explosives would have on a zombies head.

 

Also the idea of running over zombies with armored vehicles works to a point, but when the are millions of zombies bunched together for miles and miles even the brute force of a tank may no longer be able to push forward. As well, eventually all vehicles break down, or need to be refueled or reloaded, which would be impossible with dozens of zombies clinging to every part of each vehicle. Even driving would soon become impossible, with zombies scrambling all over your vehicle, obscuring viewing ports and other visual sensors.

Cripes.

Given enough time the same useless arguments get wheeled out to try and win by attrition. It's like dealing with conspiracy theorists.

It doesn't matter if the zombies are proof against "concussion". Blast is a remarkably inefficient way of causing casualties. As a result, the primary casualty-causing effect of any high explosive weapon is primary (the casing and pre-formed fragments) and secondary (dirt, stones, bits of other people) fragmentation. If you are close enough to be killed by blast you are close enough to be blown into far more pieces than is conducive to survival and certainly more pieces than is needed for any form of mobility.

While the effects of blast is a poorly understood field, metal fragments travelling up to a couple of kilometres per second shouldn't be quite so confusing.

As for the need to read the book, I think by now the onus is on the supporters to intelligently argue the merits of the book rather than just demand that the book be read.

Another book cites a statistic that only one in 10,000 bullets fired in Vietnam found its mark. Consider on top of that the statistics of casualties in conventional warfare where small arms casualties make up between a quarter and a half of all those wounded or killed. The rest is handled by artillery, airpower and traps/mines.  In this environment, the enemy has projectile weapons that they can use to interfere with the defender's shooting, they are running and taking cover and generally being a hard target. Compare that with a slow moving mass that doesn't really bother to take cover and put that up against machine guns, automatic rifles, artillery, air power and sundry other weapons and you need another vector for the Zombies to win or even get close. The easiest way (and apparently the one that the author has chosen*) is to make the military stupid. Really, really, stupid. And panicky. and hundreds of other negative aspects that people project onto the military and that the military spends a great deal of time training out of people.

*He is not alone. Pretty much every hero-orientated film or book in existence dumbs down everyone else in order to make the hero look better. There is also a large movement dedicated to portraying the military in the worst possible light or ascribing them civilian traits that even the greenest recruit in a modern western military will have mostly got shot of by the time he leaves initial training.

Last time I was involved in a zombie apocalypse (taking place in Sweden as usual) we were told to scrap the mentality of taking all zombies out in one chokepoint. 

"You have armor protection, speed, maneuverability and firepower. You don't want to risk panic while facing millions of zombies in one place when there is a way to proceed in a far more subtle and low-risk manner", said our Colonel. Soon after he got infected by a zombie-feeding raven crapping in his mouth while he was sunbathing, but that's another story.

 

We suffered severe combat stress lossess in infantry soldiers that had personally experienced the "one chokepoint, one big fight" -approach. The sight of once-fallen zombie that got up again was quite stressful when witnessed in quantities. There were also a couple of incidents where a private would recognize some of his/her relatives in the zombie crowd. Not helping. (Though I have heard that it was a nice curiosity to spot former ABBA -members amongst the living dead.)

 

So we tried another way to look at it. We set up practically zombie-immune defencive fortifications and sent hunter-killer teams out for few hour destroy missions. Those teams comprised of one Leo 2 -tank and three wheeled APC's. The tank acted as a life insurance to relieve stress in infantry squads inside the APC's. The team always maintained visual contact with each other. Instead of using massive chokepoints, we tried both to destroy controlled lured-out zombie masses with mortar fire, or individual zombies with rifle fire from the hatches in the APC's. We had a basic rule of never letting a zombie touch our vehicles, crushing z's with the tank excluded.

 

The Leo 2 was there for no other reason than being able to tow broken down APC's back to safety, plus letting the infantry guys know they had an emergency exit available. One sortie would typically take out a few hundred zombies, plus being able to rescue still-living civilians on APC rooftops - yet maintaining defencive combat abilities thanks to the tank and side hatches. Combat stress levels dropped significantly after this method got adopted. Some troops even considered it as being fun.

 

I remember one time the Leo 2 broke down inside some Swedish suburb. The APC's were all carrying civilians on them, so the tank crew buttoned up and waited for help for 11 hours before being towed back by other tanks from another base. The Swedish crew found out a natural way to amuse themselves and relieve stress while waiting.

 

Mikko

 

 

 

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