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I’m sure you’ve heard the one about how targeting an enemy soldier with a .50 BMG is a war crime, but targeting his belt buckle is okay because it’s “materiel”? Yeah, it’s totally false, but boy does that story get around…
I believe it it is a misunderstanding that originates from the term anti materiel rifle. These are often in .50 calibre. People thought it was called that because shooting a person with .50 BMG was inhumane and therefore forbidden…
I hated hearing that shit. But the fact that my sniper element only rarely employed the Barrett gave it a lot of credence.
I vaguely remember Hognose chronicling some supply jackets that wouldn’t issue OTM 7.62 because he declared himself official enforcer of the Hague.
The Hague is one of those really stupid obsolete things we need to withdraw from.
It wasn’t the supply types that pulled that crap with OTM; that was purely down to JAG. I was there when it happened at 101st ABN divisional HQ in Tikrit during the whole debacle, and it came down to a JAG officer “activist” who thought she knew better than anyone else. She didn’t actually know squat, but her intransigence kept OTM out of the hands of the sniper elements for a bit, until she got crushed by higher.
If I remember, there were multiple JAG-related events with a similar MO, which I blame on there having been a bit of a fad within legal circles there at the beginning of the “Global War On (some) Terror”. We could actually hear these assholes discussing the best ways to undermine Coalition efforts, there in their little “discussion groups”. We had a couple of good JAG officers, but there were also a lot of scumbag “activist” types whose sole goal was to cripple combat efforts.
The OTM thing did happen; it also got crushed when the real JAG officers stepped in, up at theater level. The divisional-level assclowns were the ones responsible, and a lot of them got banged up for it. One that I can recall was sent out to serve as permanent legal representative out on some dinky little Forward Operating Base that was under constant fire and which basically had contacts every night. I think they lasted about a month, then had to be MEDEVAC’d for a nervous breakdown and never returned to theater.
A combat theater is nowhere you want to be enacting your little “social justice” ideals.
And yet you whiny American f**gots cried about everything the heroes of the resistance did to make you run.
“Heroes of the resistance” didn’t show up very often. They were mostly child killers, rapists, and killers left over from Saddam’s days.
I do remember a lot of very brave Yazidi and Shia/Sunni tribal sorts that enjoyed killing those “heroes” when they had the chance, being as the majority were former regime thugs that had spent decades terrorizing them.
They weren’t “heroes” and they weren’t “resistance”, either. They were mostly the regime leftovers who were pissed that they were out of a job, or they were Iranian/Syrian infiltrators working to prevent Iraq from ever getting out from under the tyranny of it all. Wasn’t at all surprised or sad that it eventually blew back on the Syrians, and I was pleased to see that karma finally caught up with Soleimani when it did.
Your value system is a bit off, I think. Your “heroes” are scum; when we caught our baby rapists and killers, we put them on trial and imprisoned them if they were guilty. The people you laud made videos showing them burning women alive in cages because they wouldn’t convert to Islam. Among a million other atrocities.
Kirk, it sounds implausible that these regime babykillers and hearteaters would last long enough for several years and/or be in such great number after years of US occupation, that they could actually manage to force the US armed forces out.
It just couldnt be that these were the dominant types of insurgents, or that all the insurgents were such, as by statistic its impossible, its not like former regime ruled with a help of million of such persons who just dissapeared from the earth when US took over; surely they got the hard copy intel who were regime local executives and enforcers in local offices, not to mention common people snitching on their forment baath tormentors.
You’re comparing opene tipped match ammunition designed to win at Camp Perry with indiscriminate area weapons and suicide bombing?
No wonder it didn’t take the 3rd ID so long to roll up into Baghdad.
The bravest Iraqi fighters I saw were hand me down uniforms, carrying Glock 22s, and going out in soft skinned pickups.
Yeah, the Iraqi Police and everyone else that tried putting Humpty Dumpty together again after the war deserve nothing but respect. Unfortunately, those poor bastards were in the minority.
The other guys is a ‘fanatic’ but never a ‘hero.’ Actually the tale herein reminds me of Catch-22. Yossarian jokes about the ‘220mm LePage glue gun’ that blues together in mid-flight. A few pages later he is hortified to hear the best repeated as gospel truth. Which happens I do not doubt
We NEVER WERE a signatory of the Hague Convention. doh
Declaration (IV,3) concerning Expanding Bullets. The Hague, 29 July 1899.
Declaration
The undersigned, Plenipotentiaries of the Powers represented at the International Peace Conference at The Hague, duly authorized to that effect by their Governments, inspired by the sentiments which found expression in the Declaration of St. Petersburg of 29 November (11 December) 1868,
Declare as follows:
The Contracting Parties agree to abstain from the use of bullets which expand or flatten easily in the human body, such as bullets with a hard envelope which does not entirely cover the core or is pierced with incisions.
The key bit is that the abstention only apples to conflict between ‘The Contracting Parties’.
PS: that was new to me!
That’s just plain stupid to even consider that this was true. Any student of American Military history knows that the .50 Browning Machine Gun has been used to mow down enemy combatants since before the end of WWI and every war the the United States Military has been involved in since. Audie Murphy was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for mounting a burning tank and basically stopping a German attack using the tank’s .50MG.
The human animal prefer striking bulls*** to ho-hum fact. Such sort–the vast majority– need diligent herding
We’ve had this discussion before, in other threads on here.
One point about this that always comes up is the sheer “stickiness” of bad information; that deal with “shoot the buckles of their pistol belts” is something that I think I must have heard a half-dozen times from trainers over the years. They all believed it; even heard it from supposedly “expert” law of land warfare types like the JAG officers come down from on high to do the annual briefings. That particular “meme”, for lack of a better term, is as fully embedded in military culture as the one about Mattel making M16s. You can brief the hell out of the real information, train them on it, make them take tests on it, have them do practical exercises on it, and… You’ll still hear them “passing it on” to their buddies informally a week or two after training.
Just like that goddamn fairy tale about Mattel, that their “Vietnam Veteran” uncle told them when they were little. That sticks; the real deal…? Mostly, doesn’t.
What’s the law in economics about bad money driving out good…? Gresham’s Law? There’s something similar, in information/knowledge: The romantic lie will be remembered over the truth, every time.
The other point I like to bring up about all this is the essential sadism embodied in the whole “No Expanding Bullets” idea. Most people do not connect the fact that the Hague and Geneva things came in long before antibiotics, so what they are in essence actually doing is massively cruel to the wounded. Instead of killing them relatively quickly through massive blood loss from huge gaping wounds, the assholes in charge of these things banned such projectiles in favor of full metal jacketed ones. Which, in the pre-antibiotic era, virtually guaranteed that said cute little “clean” bullets would inflict through-and-through wounds, dragging filthy uniform bits and God alone knows what else, through the wounds and deep into the body.
Which almost guarantees gangrene, and a long lingering death over a period of days, if not weeks, back in the medical evacuation system.
If the real interest had been “Let’s not be cruel to the enemy…”, then they would have mandated humane killing projectiles that expanded and did as much damage as quickly as possible. I will point out that hunting with FMJ rounds is illegal in most regions of the world, these days, for just these exact reasons. FMJ promotes suffering, in the absence of advanced medical care.
With the way they’re ruining the antibiotics by overusing them, we may well be back in those “bad old days” before long. I imagine that people will still be demanding FMJ projectiles…
Idiots, mostly.
Rifle wounds healed even before antibiotics, and pure lead bullets shot by black powder rifles/pistols hardly expanded at all. The expansion/fragmentation was a problem introduced with smokeless powders and it’s enhanced muzzle speed.
IE, after the battle of Adwa, Italian doctors had the possibility of visiting wounded Ethiopians, and noticed that many wounds left by the Vetterli rifle the Italians used were pass-through, that would have rapidly healed. They wrote that in 1896, well before any antibiotic, and the Vetterli rifle shot a 10.4mm pure lead bullet.
That’s not true for the lacerations of fragmented/explosive bullets. It’s not like people back then were idiots. They knew their wounds and their medicine.
As stated the rationale of banning expanding/explosive rifle/pistol bullets is that they have a negligible military value. When someone is struck by a bullet, he’s out of action in 99% of cases, regardless the kind of bullet. No battle had been ever won because the bullet wounds of one side were were less likely to heal.
I had always heard that the purpose of the FMJ bullet was to wound thus taking 2 to 4 more out of combat to tend to the wounded individual. dead is dead. GRU took care of them later.
Also the engagement mentioned above at 1400hr 1-26-1945 in the Colmar Pocket, France involved a M-10 Thank Destroyer (TD).
The real “genesis” of the full metal jacket started with the French 8x50Rmm Lebel in 1886. The combination of the new smokeless powder (Poudre B) and a faster rifling twist mandated a cupronickel alloy jacketed bullet over a lead or steel core.
A solid steel bullet might or might not take the rifling, and would probably ruin the barrel in under 100 rounds. An “old-fashioned” lead bullet, even with pewter hardening, would strip in the faster-twist rifling. The cupronickel alloy jacket over a steel or lead core won by default.
The problem was getting the core to stay put inside the jacket. Various tricks like soldering were tried, but in the end the simplest way was to make the lead core from swaged lead rod or “wire”, drop it back-end-first into the jacket stamped into a “cup” shape, and then spin-compress the bullet nose ogive shut over the core’s ogive.
That bullet had no exposed core material anywhere, took the rifling correctly, and didn’t shed the jacket at the flight and RPM velocities of that era.
Yes, modern soft-point and hollow-point ammunition evolved from that, when it was realized that exposed lead at the tip or a hollow cavity gave high expansion at the newer, higher velocities. But those were not favored for military use due to feeding problems, especially in self-loading actions.
Ultimately, the deciding factor was the machine gun. Bullets that might “hang up” in the feedway, or shed or strip their jackets in the barrel or enroute to the intended recipient(s), were not helpful to heavy machine guns. The full metal jacket became the standard because it just worked better in what had become the primary ground weapon, the tripod-mounted, belt-fed heavy MG.
The Hague clause was more of a recognition of the technical requirements of modern mechanized warfare than an actual “humanitarian” measure. For instance, there is no prohibition against using expanding bullets against “savages” or “tribesmen”; they weren’t signatories, and nobody wanted to impede the activities of European troops in African and other colonies.
See;
Humanitarian bullets and man-killers; revisiting the history of arms regulation in the late nineteenth century
https://international-review.icrc.org/sites/default/files/reviews-pdf/2022-11/humanitarian-bullets-and-man-killers-920.pdf
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eon
Examining it all on the technical merits of projectile manufacture shows things in a different light than if you look at the propaganda/”humanitarian” justifications used by the negotiators.
When I was researching this issue back in the day, the sources paid limited attention to the technology of production or ballistics; the negotiators did not look at what Col. Rubin was doing, and they didn’t look at what was possible in the factories. It was all blue-sky diplomatic bullshit mouthed by the usual upper-class twit types that infested the realms of “international law”, back when. And, still do.
I rather doubt that any considerations of “What can we produce economically…” would have mattered to them; all they cared about was performative “concern” and a desire for one-upping the adjacent empire. I don’t think that the Germans would have liked it very much if their activities in their various colonial efforts had come under criticism, because they were emphatically not any better than what the British Empire did to the Boer; the only difference was that the supposed “exploited natives” in that case were white and vaguely Germanic. I suppose that the Kaiser would have had something to say if the Zulu had been the victims, but likely not as much. After all, with the things he said before sending German troops off to the Boxer Rebellion, I doubt he’d have cared about any “Dum-Dum” bullets used on Zulu or Matabele targets. Nice white Boers, who happened to be German clients…? Yeah; he had a great deal to say through his emissaries.
The whole thing was patently ridiculous once you got down into the weeds. I suspect that there were rather a lot of men who died in the abattoirs of the hospitals and clearing stations during the pre-sulfa and penicillin days who’d have happily traded their gas gangrene for a relatively quick bleeding-out on the battlefield.
I once spent an afternoon in a library going through medical papers and volumes describing battlefield surgery and wound treatment in the days between the Civil War and penicillin coming in. The photos and illustrations included with the case studies were, to put it bluntly, epically horrific. The one that stood out to me, long years after, was the case where a guy got hit by a bullet in the lower leg. By the time they got done with him, they’d progressively amputated that leg something like five times, hoping to stop the gangrene. At the end, the flesh was rotting across his entire lower abdomen, and he’d been undergoing treatment for something like six weeks before finally succumbing. The person doing the documentation dryly noted several occasions where the patient begged the doctors to just kill him and get it over with.
That crap about “humanitarianism” always hit differently, after going through those books and papers. You sort of reached a conclusion, after a bit, that the involved parties in all the high-minded negotiations were either utterly ignorant of the realities of battlefield medicine, or they were some of the cruelest psychopathic sadists in history.
According to Jack Coggins in Arms and Equipment of the Civil War (1962), doctors in the 1850s to 1870s didn’t know crap about sterilization, infection, or anything of the sort. Germ theory had been around since the 1600s, but before Pasteur nobody took it seriously. Doctors believed a wound had to suppurate to heal; “laudable pus” they called it.
Cauterization with hot oil or hot irons was the standard treatment.
When some doctors ran out of oil and tried clean cloth dressings, their patients improved- and the doctors were reported to higher as violating protocols. To say nothing of the ones who rediscovered the old Roman medical trick of using maggots to debride dead tissue in a wound. (No, seriously; the little critters won’t eat live flesh.)
Alcohol wound sterilization was discovered almost by accident in the Franco-Prussian War. As for sterilizing anything else, they didn’t bother. The surgeons didn’t even clean their instruments- or their hands- between patients.
It’s been argued that if not for what passed for medicine between 1861 and 1865, Stonewall Jackson, Jeb Stuart and John Buford might have lived through the Civil War. Which could easily have changed things on the battlefield.
clear ether
eon
Ignatz Semmelweiss pioneered antiseptic procedures working in a maternity word. Sadly he was an acerbic enough genius to be hounded out of his job and into an insane asylum circus 1870 in the dear old Doppel-Monarchie
This reminds me,
there is an excellent french comic book/graphic novel called Peter Pan, by Regis Loisel (an interesting mashup with Jack The Ripper incidents from Whitechapel!) that in one part of the story deals with the “not washing hands” infection issue.
“Loisel has made a sequel to Barrie’s novel in which he relates the origin story of the beloved Peter Pan character. Readers who are only familiar with the Disney incarnation are in for a surprise, because this is a dark and brooding tale aimed at adults, not kids.”
The Hague convention didn’t apply only between signatories. Once a country signed it, it was bound to adhere to it, even when fighting non-signatories. That’s why the Brits opposed to that.
oops. It was really a “TANK” Destroyer.
This is a common(er) mistake, Geneva conventions concerns with casulties of war, like civilians or prisoners of war, Hague conventions deal with weaponry !
I seem to remember Audi Murphy jumping on to a burning M4 Sheman tank and using the .50 to stop incoming German troops and getting the MOH for it.
Hi Roger. That’s the depiction in the movie.
Heh, watched 2nd installation of GI Joe movie just the other day, where current hollywood mainstream last action hero The Rock does the same in one scene, although MG taken from some buggy he was driving.
I believe that well over 99% of bullets fired in combat miss. How many thousand rounds were needed in Vietnam to hit one VC? With that in mind, the idea of exploding rifle bullets makes no economic sense whatsoever. Any country issuing them would be spending an insane amount of money on ordnance which would almost always miss the enemy.
The first exploding bullets were British;
https://americansocietyofarmscollectors.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Jacob-rifle-exploding-projectile-Civil-War-Carlson-v120.pdf
This was followed by Gardiner’s version, which was time-fuzed rather than impact-detonated;
https://americansocietyofarmscollectors.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Gardiners-explosive-musket-shell-Civil-War-Hamilton-v120.pdf
The idea was that explosive bullets were to be used against artillery caissons. Since it took hitting and penetrating about 4cm of wood to convince the percussion tube in a Jacob bullet to detonate, this would make sense. The Jacob rifle was probably the first genuine “anti-materiel” rifle in history.
While there were reports (and accusations) of explosive bullets (mainly Gardiner type) being used against personnel on both sides in the American Civil War, it would have been very difficult to discern the difference in wound effects between an actual “explosive bullet” and a typical .58 Minie’ ball, which was destructive enough without any “enhancement”.
In fact, several cases of supposedly “explosive bullets” wounding or killing soldiers had one thing in common; the projectile hitting the soldier around the beltline. More likely, these injuries or deaths were caused not by an explosive bullet, but by an ordinary one striking the soldier’s percussion cap pouch on the belt. Which was designed to hold one round box of fifty musket caps or a hundred “loose” caps, each of which was charged with one-quarter to one-half grain of mercury fulminate.
When struck a sharp blow by anything, but especially a Minie’ ball, even in the leather cap pouch, that many copper caps loaded with fulminate could do a deadly impersonation of a fragmentation grenade.
incidentally, not long before his death in December 1858, John Jacob discovered that his “explosive bullet” did not need the copper percussion tube full of fulminate compound to cause expansion when shooting at tigers or Indian elephants. The hollow cavity by itself caused the .58 caliber bullet to mushroom to over .80 caliber but still drive in over five feet in heavy muscle on “soft-skinned” heavy game.
Yes, Jacob more-or-less inadvertently invented the expanding “hollow point” bullet, entirely by accident.
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eon
Thats why these drop the grenade/bomb drones today are so insanely effective. Never ever in last 100 years was so easy to kill an infantryman.
Hi. The two most popular military cartridges today are the 5.56 NATO and the 7.62×39. Both rounds have pointed bullet that results in a very small surface area at point of contact. This should allow the projectile to ass between clothing fibers Etc. Without collecting a huge amount of contaminants. On the other hand the hollow point bullet has a larger surface area at contact plus a garbage can in the middle to really collect and store about anything it bluntly passes through. The case of the “through and through” wound I think I would prefer a pointy tip bullet come in one end, pass through and keep going out the other rather than the hollow point coming in and dumping all its garbage as it turns into a “Black Talon” that is shredding everything in its path.
During the retrograde action being conducted by Major Reno and Captain Benteen on June 25-26 1876 in the valley of the Little Bighorn River, Montana, a 7th Cavalry trooper was shot through the calf with a bullet. A Sergeant un-twisted a rope of chewing tobacco. He soaked one of sections in water and poked it through the bullet hole, in one end and out the other. The wound healed completely without infection. The Trooper had probably worn the same trousers for the entire time from Ft. Lincoln while traveling through the prairie a foot and horse back. The wound probably started out with some pretty unhealthy ingredients being brought in with that bullet. It seems that if nicotine is as bad for us as they say it must be hard “germs” also.
I once had a case of incipient athletes foot clear up after wading through a marshy end of a lake in the Yukon filled with fallen trees. Tannic acid I’m guessing.
Our ancestors knew that tannic acid and nicotine are powerful disinfectants. Not much in the way of bacteria or etc. can survive contact with either one.
Probably the only thing more effective in that area is chlorine bleach, but it’s too dangerous for contact with the patient. Generally, if something breathes O2, chlorine bleach is likely to kill it.
clear ether
eon