How to screw the enemy
 

The walk down memory lane in the machineguns thread got me thinking that psychological techniques don't need to be restricted to large scale operations.

My example of using the camera flash to keep recruits on their toes might work just as well to demoralise a dug in enemy as it did in the exercise I mentioned.

What other experiences/ideas are out there to screw with the minds of the enemy on a small scale?

Remember that great scene in Apocalypse Now at night at the bridge where the lone VC out on the wire kept calling out taunts to the dug-in soldiers. That obviously f***ked with their heads a bit. Well, that is until "The Roach" fragged the little bugger with his M-79. :cool:

Usually I start by bending them over and ripping their pants off....

OHHH not that type of screwing...


Urban setting... a patrol comes around the corner to find... a garbage can in the middle of the street with a string leading to a third floor apartment...

and inside the garbage can... 3 pissed off skunks...

According to an old friend who was a sergeant in the paratrooper: a well placed isolated mine can seriously delay your ennemies'progression.

Then, Colonel Leclerc achieve victory over a largely supperior italian garrison at Koufra with only 300 men and a single artillery piece (a 65mm mountain howitzer). He kept moving the gun around firing from several directions, tricking the Italian commander who believed that he was facing several batteries.

May be not a true answer to the first question but you might find this interesting.

When we were on excercise we liked to sneak up on sleeping sentries and steal their weapon - lets them think how much worse it could have been and also lands them right in the shit :D

That's why you tie it to you with a dummy cord when you sleep. I did that even in Basic. The drill sergeants like to steal weapons while us recruits were asleep in their pup tents, even reaching from the sides. Drill Sergeant Washington tried to do that one night during a field problem when we had been issued blanks, and as I felt my weapon move, I quickly raised it and let a burst loose not far from his face. (I wasn't going for his face, but there it was...) He wasn't happy about that one, but our other platoon drill sergeant convinced Drill Sergeant Washington that I had done the right thing. Drill Sergeant Becvar (the other platoon drill sergeant) later told me I should have just yelled "Bang! Bang!"

Did they call you "slicky boy"?:p

Yeah, that'd work....

They're supposed to be training for realism and yet want you NOT to pull the trigger?

:confused:

I never told DS Washington this, but I secretly thought I scared the crap out of him!

An IED under a garbage can lid in your enemy's line of march. Do that a couple times, then all you need to do is set a garbage can lid in front of them, trapped or not.

When you put down a minefield for enemies coming from a known direction, preregister your mortars behind the minefield. When the hit the minefield, open up with the mortars. The enemies can either go forward though the mines or backwards through the mortar fire. If they don't move, have your forward observer start sniping at them.

(to not tip this off, fire some mortar rounds into the area and then lay the minefield, so you have mines mixed with shell craters)

Of course as all minefields should be covered by fire and patrolled to prevent unopposed lifting/clearing (as happened in Vietnam after a rather large field was handed over to the ARVN), who needs the FO to fire?

:)

That's definitely true; in fact, it's a classic US Army Basic Training scenario.

A little thread necro since there seems to be a number of new members now with plenty of stories and ideas to share on this topic...
Lt Ox, I'm looking at you! ;)

ok I will start slow
 

First you find out that your op force is a bit on the superstious side. The you make sure He knows what the real meaning of the Ace of spades is, then you get the bicycle playing card company to send over decks that have fifty two of the buggers in each deck
After that it is a simple matter of nailing err I mean laying the card on the bodies of every VC bast.. err of the enemy dead.
next one is even better

You break out your trusty Dillon Reloader and reload some enemy small arms rounds with a mixture of nitrate fertilizer and diesel fuel. Place said rounds in the magazines of fallen enemy soldiers and see how long it takes to blow up a hundred weapons and their users.

Sounds like the sort of trick SOF or alphabet-agency paramilitaries would use, very effective I bet.

Lets see..... dynamite inside a log next to an old fire... Your enemy occupies your old position and the night is cold.

A radio tuned to talk radio about 100 - 300 meters from the enemy keeps them hearing something all night.

Bogus maps "left behind" in an ambushed area. These all lead the enemy into hellish terrain that is preplotted for artillery.

When you capture a group, make sure you act surprised and take one away from the group. You have to talk loudly about how it was too soon for him to be captured.

Random fire missions on low water crossing, saddles between hillocks, and the reverse slopes of hills keeps the enemy off balance in contested terrain.

Wear the enemies boots or sandals or change into them in a creek or stream once in the objective area.

Mining an enemy cache is as important as reporting it.

Swapping in booby-trapped mortar bombs and recoilless shells into the packing crates of an enemy cache kills trained crews, creates mistrust in the enemy supply, and demoralizes replacements.

Leave irresistible lures like radios and with those broadcasting a homing beacon you can track movements.

Let the point element or the lead platoon pass them blast the IED..... the mistrust grows in the unit.

Low level privates....... feed them good, give'em a hooker, and send them back. They will tell everyone the Enemy is real nice and surrender is easy.

or did you want vicious and violent scorched earth stuff like castration, mutilation, and field expedient lobotomies?

POW
 

when you have a few, It cuts down on the number of personnel you have to assign to guard them if ,having det cord, you take a wrap around each POW's neck and carry on continuously to tail end charley.
You of course take a wrap of a (separate) piece around a suitable tree and handing the detonator to the guard he sets it of,f the tree falls having been severed nicely. He, the man assigned as the guard, then attaches loose end of cord to detonator and smiles at said POWs.

Have you spoken to anyone that has made that trick work? It sounds great in theory, but plain ANFO needs a decent sized detonation to kick it off and I'm not very confident that a rifle cartridge primer would be enough. In a previous life when I was a powder monkey we had a few tricks to turn ANFO from a low explosive into a low-grade high explosive, I guess that might give better results in rigged small arms rounds.

You can Beanpole a round by Switching Rifle powder with Pistol Powder. It's said that in Vietnam there was a program to seed VC/NVA supplies with booby-trapped rounds. It wasn't every round in a magazine but random shells. They even went so far as to print up "reports" about how only a small number of rounds were bad and the casualties were few. The reports continued to state that the problem had been fixed and "good" ammo was now coming from the factory. It became so common that US soldiers were told not to use Enemy weapons and US Ammo Manufacturers ended up making Soviet Ammo for SF use.

I read about that, I think in one of the books about MACV-SOG operations, but they were using military-grade explosives in the rigged rounds, not ANFO.

They tried a lot of stuff
 

But the best was two grains of bullseye with c-4 on top.
You can not move a slug that fast, so the energy got ta go somewhere.

Rumors abound.
I do know that no one but a pog picked up anything that he did not lay down
they was way better at traps then we or they spent more time at it.

At Bastogne, the US forces encircled there had two 105mm howitzers. The Germans never made a concerted, all-fronts effort to take the town. They'd push on one front, then withdraw, then push on another, etc.

The two guns would shift position and provide support to the defense; it was later learned that the German commanders thought they were facing an entire US artillery battalion due to the volume of fire just two guns were putting out.

Another fun trick I heard MAC-SOG pulled was removing the pin from grenades and putting said primed grenades into LAW tubes and leaving them for the VC to pick up. Picks up tube, out slides grenade, off pops spoon...

The US Army invented boot that looked liked bare feets or sandels

http://www.usmilitariaforum.com/foru...352-sog-boots/

As dynamite needs a shockwave or blasting cap to go off, that you done here is give them a nice warm fire.

Interesting... Well, the instance I know of this.... A man in the country had a thief that would steal tools and firewood left out. So he bored a hole into a cut log for fire wood. This hole was filled with a gunpowder pipe bomb, and I don't know how much. The end was replugged with a wood plug and scuffed to look untampered. The owner tagged the log with some orange marking paint like it had been tagged by a forester and placed it in his wood pile.

After a trip into town to do some shopping he discovered that the thief had struck again. That was the last time his wood pile was stolen from again.

Always seed the area around mines with scrap metal..... It takes the engineers far, far longer to clear lanes or remove your mines.

5lbs of C4 in a plastic bucket under and AP is still strong enough to blow off a wheel or sever a track and is just as undetectable.

A forest fire really ruins an infantryman's day.

Send one EPW back with all the right hands or ears of his unit.

Strip prisoners naked and march them back like that.

You can put quite a lot of C4 in the bottom of a mortar tube and still be below the firing pin.

A lot of artillery rockets are smaller than the diameter of a mortar or gun tube and makes a sweet obstruction.

Place bounties on the heads of the enemy combatants. Everybody likes a little jingle in their pocket.

Even if the bounties are ignored by the locals, the enemy combatants are not sure.

Dress up as the enemy and kill a village or two.

Serbians used to emplace 152mm HE shells base of forward entrenchment.... In a fight they would "abandon" a forward trench and "retreat". The Albanians and Croats would occupy those positions and be killed when the shells were command detonated as a daisy chain.

Hot lead from captured ammunition can be melted over a small fire then pours into the barrels of captured weapons.

zero delay smoke grenade fuzes don't look any different form four second AP grenade fuzes.

inserting a squib load at about #20 ruins a machine gunners day

You may have to "upgun" the primer to get sufficient blast. The people in Africa who tried this used magnum rifle primers in 7.62mm casings (FALs). You can also "up" your flash by putting a cap for a child's cap gun (the paper strip kind) inside the casing in front of the primer. Keep in mind that even a small pistol primer will blow your fingertips off if handled improperly (I've seen this first hand). There is a significantly larger amount of power in primers than most people know. I saw a second accident involving a primer pickup tube with about a dozen primers in it. The explosion sounded like an M-80 and destroyed a lexan tube. The handler had to go to the emergency room to have his hand sewn back together (we think static electricity set them off).