WWZ 'The Battle of Yonkers' Analysis

[Aratech]

Originally Posted by Typhonis 1

FBH the point is it seems the Author either didn't do his homework or used fiat to hand the zombies a victory against an enemy they shouldn't have overcome given where said fight took place and what tactics were used. Shit armored bulldozers would have had a field day with the Zs.

You say that as if those two elements were mutually exclusive.

[Chris O'Farrell]

Originally Posted by cypress_z

Honestly, I don't think they WERE ignorant as to what they were up against, at least not totally. As the other chapter interviewing the former Chief of Staff showed, however, the administration was INCREDIBLY paranoid about people finding out too much about the zombies, because it would have lead to a panic and total economic collapse. So, they probably knew what they were up against in this fight - the common soldier at least knew to shoot for the head. The higher ups almost certainly knew the full details.

Problem is by Yonkers the Zombie issue is completly in the open, I mean NYC itself is LOST to the hoard, and for weeks we've had Zombies moaning and walking around enough for society to start to collapse. Holding back critical data at this point has no logical reasoning, all it does is hamper the troops, badly.

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Alright, alright, perhaps. But I still need to stress that they may have put too much emphasis on the latter, instead of the former. Trying too hard is a realistic mistake.

Well I'll concede its not IMPOSSIBLE. I still contend however that they could have easily and totally met ANY propaganda needs without screwing up a pure military engagement. But I still think that if the orders had come down that this was a pure propaganda engagement, the soldier in question would have said as much in his interview.

I suppose when you think about it, though, casualties in WWI were horrendous. Truly, amazingly atrocious, and caused simply through fixed machine gun positions and chokepoints. In all honesty, even a few machine guns and soldiers with rifles should have been enough in this situation.

Well THAT is probably a bit too much; against MILLIONS of Zombies where you need very precise shooting to kill them or even cripple them you need a lot more then a few machine guns and rifles, even if just for reasons of overheating and barrels wearing out, soldier fatigue and so on. And they are engaging the zombies in an urban environment which will tend to funnel the Zombies, but it'll also limit strong-points abilities to work together.

It's hard to call it truly stupid when you recall they're just facing shamblers, though. I'm serious in that a few machine guns should have been enough, and they had more than a few. Or perhaps they simply overestimated the effectiveness of the machine gun; expecting it to be more than sufficient for a WWIesque charge by infantry - especially in lieu of the fact that they had enough artillery to make mother earth herself cry.

An M2 can fire what, 3000 rounds before it needs its barrel changed? To say nothing of cooling and other wear/tear issues? Really, I wouldn't want to try and STOP the Zombies with nothing but light infantry, but the infintry should frankly never have seen more then a scattered handful of survivors and 'pickups' forward of the 'death zone' the arty and air-strikes were making of the main body of the hoard ten of so kilometers downrange.

No... I mean, if this were against human opponents, particularly ones with tanks, I'd cry incompetence even faster than you have. Being that concentrated is just asking for a single artillery strike, and enemy tanks would easily pick out their open profiles on the elevated terrain.

Against zombies without artillery, however, it isn't that bad.

The objective of an infantry battle against Zombies is going to be to keep the hoard at range, concentrate them and channel them in ways that make sure you can deal with them, and they can't get to you, or are at least VERY slowed down.

Setting up fox holes and sand bags impairs the Zombies not ONE bit, provides not ONE bonus for the good guys -and in fact makes them somewhat less mobile. Dito forcing the armor to become pillboxes.

Its not the WORST setup, but its arguably a worse setup then just setting up on the road and having at it, and FAR from the best.

This was probably just overconfidence. Not exactly excusable, but human. They honestly didn't expect the zombies to get that far.

There are two useful sayings that come to mind right now;

1. Assumptions are the mother of all f#(ups.
2. Quantity has a Quality all of its own.

If we are looking at MILLIONS of Zombies as a worst case scenario coming up against you in a single continuous engagement, its beyond absurd that they wouldn't have even the most BASIC contingency planning for things going wrong. And that kind of planning is what Generals get paid to do, planning for how battles can go wrong is almost their day job as battles very very rarely go 'right'.

I disagree, myself. If this were done against a human opponent, they'd all be dead.

Well it would depend greatly on what the enemy was bringing to the table in the fight. The Fulda Gap was going to be a monster that ate up divisions and spat out corpses if WW3 ever broke out, mostly because it was a natural choke point that one side had to hold, and the other had to break and you would get lots of infantry and armor dug in to stop the Reds.

Again, I disagree with this point as well, because of reasons outlined above. But it's possible they might not have, also for reasons outlined above.

I think they expected the artillery and machine guns to be defense enough.

Again; MILLIONS of Zombies. And again, Generals are paid to deal with possibilities, not probabilities when it comes to planning major engagements.

Eh, I'll cover this point enough later on.
I think that being so heavily artillery reliant was certainly a mistake, and that yes, they should have utilized their infantry better.

Well if they were going to rely on the Arty as their primary weapon, they sure as hell should have been USING it properly. Engaging only when the Zombies reached the front line, and then wasting salvos of rockets on a handful when they had to be grid squares COVERED by the hoard further to the South, makes me question if they knew how to USE their primary weapon...

It's all for show, as we all well know by this point.

No, we don't. There is no direct evidence that the Combat Engineers were doing ANYTHING 'for show', the Soldier in fact says that the orders coming down the chain of command were from a General who was fighting the wrong enemy. From a pure propaganda purpose, it would have been much better propaganda to show the civilians 'this is how you fight a zombie hoard, these are the kind of things you can do to set the field of battle' e.t.c. It makes a lot more sense that they had General dead set on fighting the Cold War then politicians giving orders to do things as stupid as blasting tank pits for reasons no-one really gets...

I agree on this point, but see it as a strike against the narrator, not the author. I mean, this stuff IS there, and the author had to have researched enough to know how and why these things show up along with tanks and the other units that were there. It's - self aware, I think.

That was a comment against the soldier ranting about all these 'useless' things more than anything else, not so much Max Brooks or the Narrator.

I agree that the narrator is unreliable and that this statement is an offhand statement, but he's right in that there is a lot there for show.

See I dispute that. 'A lot in there for show' only makes sense if it either is NOT part of the units normal TO&E which would tag along where this brigade/division/corps/army goes, and it was brought in specifically to 'look cool'. The stuff like the C4I/EW gear doesn't count by that standard, nor is it something that would 'look cool' for the cameras, and *certainly* not to lines of tanks and soldiers.

If the soldier said 'and we were forced to line up in ranks like Napoleon and fire in ranks with the cameras rolling all around us, TAHT might read as a setup, but there is NOTHING 'set up for show' about an armored battle group bringing on its full TO&E along with it!

Like the artillery. I mean, you don't need artillery against zombies at all. An infantry platoon in a single building, resupplied by helicopter, could have taken out the Yonkers horde with little effort in a little time.

Now I think you're being a LITTLE crazy there. Millions of hard-to-kill infantry targets are NOT going to be taken down by a couple of squads. I mean kill them enough, and you'll build a pile of zombies large enough for them to climb up into the buildings if you kill enough of them! And as you pointed out, later they just get into Napoleonic squares with 'water-boys' changing over rifles and kill hoards easy as you please. The idea that a far larger mechanized infantry force, with massive fire and air support DIDN'T win such an engagement...

Later chapters support this line of thinking. So yeah, it IS all for show. Not so much the bridges and porta-potties, but the artillery itself.

Artillery is the PERFECT weapon to use against tightly packed hoards, FAR more so then rifle fire! If the Hoard is going to mass by the hundreds of thousands towards you, arty is almost tailor made to scathe down hoards. Rifle fire is inefficient in comparison, requiring a lot more people, a lot more time, risk and far more preparation on the ground compared to self propelled arty units.

I honestly think they just felt totally safe from the zombies, considering what they were committing to the operation. But yes, this is a tad silly. Still, it also kind of smacks of desperation.

If they were desperate, then frankly they should have been doing a HELL of a lot more planning for what could go wrong, as opposed to just assuming everything was going to go perfectly well! Having reporters hanging around in the middle of your fire teams on the front line in large numbers, not embedded but just 'there', is really just ASKING for problems, even IF everything goes according to plan.

The civilian populace had gone nuts. The zombies were NOT a huge concern in and of themselves, although the disease they (and more importantly the refugees) spread was.

Which is irrelevant to fighting THIS battle the way it should have been fought, except only so far as winning it decisively to show that the situation is under control. They chose to fight Yonkers because they wanted a set piece battle against the Zombies to show they were on top, they just fought it like first year officers in training. The refugee problem and the spread of the virus is the big strategic issue, but in this case, they were just told to go and kill off a whole bunch of zombies...

The communication networks would have been in serious disarray. It's possible they simply gathered as many reporters as they could and threw them there in an effort to make them stop running around spreading bad news and chaos and make them report the story they wanted.

You can't have it both ways. If civilian communications are in complete disarray, then the value of Yonkers as a propaganda campaign to show that everything is under control becomes dramatically reduced. And if they had just 'grabbed' the reporters and brought them in for this, then they would be under military control and be able to be put where they wouldn't BE a problem...on the top of buildings a few hundred meters to the rear would be perfect if you wanted them close, but not underfoot, for example.

Anyhoo, the author does make a note that the narrator was wildly exaggerating.

Well thats kind a given, I doubt the US *has* a tenth that many reporters TODAY to have one for every two soldiers...

It's funny how differently we interpret the unreliability of the narrator.

But I think we're both right to a degree - propaganda clearly had a big impact on how this battle was fought. They didn't need artillery if they'd only cared about killing a lot of zombies.

But as it was a far more effective weapon then light infantry, and part of the normal TO&E of the units deployed, it makes sense that they would bring it if they WANTED to kill a LOT of zombies, the same reason they brought tanks and IFVs. Infantry are going to do a lot poorer a job then armor in munching very large numbers of Zombies. Sure they -properly set up- could do the job given enough time, but to kill a lot of zombies, as fast as possible, you can't go past Armor and Artillery.

Agreed. He was just being stupid here. But again, not the author. I think the author did realize the narrator was incorrect, here.
Agreed, also, see my explanation from my notes on the battle.

By Narrator I take it you are talking about the Soldier recounting, and by Author you mean the 'in universe' guy writing the book, not Max Brooks right?

Because I was talking about the soldier, not Brooks.

Exactly what I said, more or less.

Again, agreed.

I find the idea that they dug out Land Warrior for this to be preposterous, myself. We scrapped it before the book was written for being stupidly expensive, and the only way they could have used it was to take it off the shelf, dust it off, and put it directly into use - which they wouldn't realistically do, even to show off, because half of it doesn't work right.

Well this is an alternate universe, and they even have Comanches in service, where in our universe they were killed, so clearly they did get it working. I don't think this is a case of weapons systems being 'pulled off the shelf' -as there is no way in hell TODAY they could find enough prototype Land Warrior systems to outfit a short platoon, let alone a division, as the weapons in the WWZ Universe were continued and eventually put into service.

Its odd, for a military that apparently had been 'cut' heavily back, that they had all these expensive weapons systems in use that OUR universe gave up on for being too expensive...

Although this does, at least, give a reasonable treatment to how land warrior would probably totally fuck things up if they DID try to use it in it's current, unfinished, barely usable state.

Indeed.

This is the most unreasonable part of the whole chapter to me.

MOPP-4 isn't THAT bad. He does whine a LOT.

Well you'd know better then I, but I've heard a lot of horror stories from guys in the sandbox...

Yes, they weren't very reactive.

That is perhaps the greatest understatement in this whole thing. And where the biggest fault lies as REGARDLESS of if this was some kind of propaganda exercise, they should have reacted FAR sooner when ti became clear things were not going well.

A couple of notes:

1: He is probably exaggerating the ineffectiveness of the weapon. But even so, it's possible zombies might have survived, by having a car or something block any lethal shrapnel (well, not a car, but the "or something" - I know a car won't stop it).

The highway was described several times as an open kill ground, the sheer amount of shrapnel several MLRS rockets packed with sub-munitions are going to put out is going to be horrific and I find it rather unlikely. That said, its not IMPOSSIBLE.

2: On wasting ammunition: If they expected consistent resupply, it wouldn't have been a massive issue. Foolish though, sure.

Well even WITH unlimited God like ammo mode engaged, you still have to reload the weapons and that takes time, to say nothing of other problems with sustained firing. You have a finite number of launchers, blowing your launcher capacity on nothing is a good way to not have them ready when you need them. And they SHOULD have had all the supply they needed with them, its not like they are shipping MLRS ammo halfway across the world here.

3: They might well have let them get that close so the cameras could see them. They did let them get way too close though, I agree.

There is this cool feature on cameras that has been around for some time. Its called a 'zoom' button

I think you're seriously underestimating how desperate they were to restore American morale in this battle. They were definitely trying way too hard, and making mistakes because of it.

Which is pure incompetence; if they were TRYING hard they would have fought this coldly and dispassionately as a military engagement. I honestly don't see how you can' try too hard' without being a complete idiot; the Government tells the military to fight a set piece battle against possibly the biggest Hoard known, to make a public point. Fine. They clearly went their with all the equipment they could possibly want, nothing at all about this suggests this was a 'scratch' force put together on a shoestring or anything.

In simple terms, the best cure for desperately wanting a victory...is to just LET the military go and GET the victory and let the results speak for themselves!

Which I think is part of the point - he's probably counting the ones that are still moving, but mission killed.

Well his statement is 'some were still walking, others to trashed to stand were crawling'. Thirty/Forty/fifity along a half mile stretch of freeway, and about three quaters of them went down. I'm guessing the 3/4 is total kills and the remaining quater are either still walking or crawling, but still *moving* forwards at any rate.

It sounds like it was to me.

Which would make it all the more important that the 'newbs' should be properly briefed so they KNOW what to expect and how to fight. This guy appears to have been told little beyond 'shoot head'.

Of course they don't. He's clearly exaggerating. What's more likely is that the car explosions looked cool and without them, it seemed less effective than the first barrage.

Well he says that there were twice the zombies in the second barrage but only half went down this time, we've gone from 75% lethality to 50% lethality here with a *lot* more zombies, the soldier describing the 'trickle' turning into a 'stream' at this point. More zombies SHOULD mean the relative rate of death should increase if anything, not decrease...

Again, I think this is basically just psychological.

He is relatively specific; the first barrage killed 3/4, the second which had a lot more targets killed comparatively less. It suggests to me that Brooks really had a grudge against any method of killing zombies that wasn't 'rifle shot to the head' as he went out of his way to write it as illogically less and less effective as the swarm got bigger and bigger. I could concede one comment from the narrator, but this is simply part of a larger pattern which gets hammered into our head again and again.

Again - stupid, but not game breaking if they expected consistent resupply.

Well for a start there isn't any logical reason WHY resupply would be interrupted, nor is there anything said about a sudden interruption. The narrator rants that they just *forgot to bring enough ammo*, not that they were waiting on it to arrive and it didn't. He in fact MOCKS the idea that there were 'supply issues'. And the context he puts it in, 'budget gets and supply issues' appears to be talking NOT about tactical level resupply issues like getting enough rockets to the troops in this engagement, but the US military as a whole not having enough due to 'budget cuts'.

If THAT is the case, it makes the liberal waste of impossibly precious rockets against a few dozen zombies actually *zombie* level stupid, especially if they had built their battle plan AROUND that weapon, yet blew all their ammo on a couple of zombies.

But, much as the Narrator calls BS on that, so do I. If they have enough cash to be building Comanches, deploying Land Warrior, the JSF and so on, there is no reason they won't have the cash to buy enough ammo. And if they are moving a large divisional sized formation with all the other TO&E stuff they don't technically need for this engagement, then I can't see any excuse for not bringing along what they NEED more then anything else!

His comment was that it did less damage than the rockets - not that it was as effective as a squirt gun. It would have killed hundreds a shot, but it does have less of a lethal radius than the MLRS and they aren't packed shoulder to shoulder at this point.

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Per shot they have enough radius, especially as the zombies are shuffling down towards the good guys along a defined sort of highway to hell. With enough 155 guns doing their usual sustained firing of what, 10-15 rounds per minute? You would be more or less generating a wall of death the zombies simply would not get through as their forward speed, at least not in anything LIKE the numbers we see later. 155mm shells are literally something that come in 'boxes' of a few hundred thousand here and there...

I have no idea what he is talking about here, seriously. I will say that arty generally does its damage through one of three ways;
Well, all I can say is that while they don't seem to have any special resistance to being ripped apart by shockwaves, as they are explicitly described getting ripped apart, they do seem to be somewhat "gel-insulated" against them.

And honestly, I think the narrator is wildly exaggerating the ineffectiveness of the weapons here.

Yes, because Real Men (TM) fight Zombies either with a Rifle or Lobo

I totally, completely agree.

Stop doing that, it takes all the fun out of this thread...

I don't know either, to be honest. But really; they might have had them just to say, "look, we've got everything!" and not expected to use them - their supply problems had probably started to crop up by this time, forcing them to use those inferior munitions.

Can you actually provide me some evidence of these supply problems? I've had a quick skim through the book again and I can't really find anything that suggests that. The implication of the 'supply' problems at Yonkers was that it was a post-engagement excuse brewed up to excuse their loss, one that the Soldier doesn't buy -and is presented here as strategic 'budget cuts'.

I frankly don't buy it either if they GOT all the units and their support units into place this easily, I can't see logistics being such a problem.

Still, the author could have simply WRITTEN it into canon explicitly and avoided 3/4 of the mess of this...

I agree with that statement.
Proof this isn't Cold War doctrine at work. I honestly think they reverted to something WWIesque because they were fighting zombies. WWI era tactics WERE effective against human waves, after all, and that's how zombies fight.

The problem is that Trench Warfare is generally predicated on defensive firepower combined with cover, barbed wire and so on being too much for infantry to punch through, even with their OWN arty support and firearms and roughly even numbers.

A 'Zombie Wave' attack is somewhat different beast, but they didn't actually DO any of the things they should have done to deal with a massed infantry charge.

To be fair - we don't know why this happened. The Narrator refuses to tell us, instead just ranting like an idiot. Assuming either way is simply an assumption. We can assume there was a good reason for it, or that they were complete morons. I prefer the former, because it's more realistic.

I'd usually agree, but given the numerous OTHER dumbass decisions on how they fought the battle, its somewhat more consistent to just say 'dumbass'. THAT is the real problem with Yonkers, that its not just one or two things which can be written off as 'situation fracked up, we don't know why, but ti happens', but a constant STREAM of basic mistakes again and again.

Well, to be honest I'm not sure zombies would trample each other like humans do. They aren't stomping, running, panicing - they're just slowly shuffling forward. Even then, lethal wounds for a trampled human wouldn't bother a zombie at all.

Yes but a Zombie that is torn up, shattered and burned having a half million people or something steadily walking over them -and burring them- is probably much more likely to at the LEASt become totally disabled so it can't move at all. Which is good enough until the cleanup teams can get to work.

But this is a whole other debate I REALLY don't want to get into, considering what's already on my plate...

Fair enough, though I had some bits from other chapters lined up

The narrator is a dick. Don't make too much out of this obviously ridiculous comment.

Oh my comment WAS a mocking of the narrator, but its hard to tell at times where the narrator -soldier- stops and Max Brooks starts...

I... again, I don't think they'd trample each other to death. But whatever.

'Trample' is probably too strong a word. Burried and crushed would probably describe the results better.

They might well have called in the airstrikes at this point in time.

May have also dropped a nuke for all we know, but nothing is SAID so we can assume that it wasn't done. But the critical point is that by this time the Generals have to have known that things are going BAD, they are out of their arty, chopper and major power weapons systems, but they aint doing anything on the front lines to organize a fighting withdraw, or release the armor to try and buy some time or anything...

Its just another example of strategic failure among many.

Eh.

Remember they also had refugees streaming at them, and there's other towns around Yonkers. They might have cleared Yonkers itself prior to the battle and a lot of the surrounding area, but inadvertently other hordes to them, or refugees might have reanimated and started coming after them.

You know, there was so much POSSIBILITY here for a good story.

The most awesome thing would have been for the infintry to have been inadvertnly placed in front of some park land or something that had been unknowingly made into a mass grave for 'dead' civilians. And then in the middle of the engagement, the rear area suddenly has zombies pouring out of the ground among everyone.

THAT would probably shatter the cohesion of any unit.

Still, Yonkers is a small enough area that it SHOULD have been properly swept. MP units on the flanks and read should have been keeping the refugee traffic -if any after the last of he Refugees and first of the Hoard earlier when the battle started- flowing away from the area.

I think he's just making excuses for what he sees as his own failings in the heat of the moment.

Quite possible.

Yes, yes, I agree the Land Warrior section was ridiculous, and totally unrealistic.

Stop that.

I agree on this point.

And that.

Well, they presumably cleared the entire town of Yonkers first (otherwise there'd be zombies all over), but missing a single house in a city that size isn't totally unreasonable.

Quite true, but the chaotic response WAS.

They probably just wanted the horde close enough to see, and substantial enough that the artillery could chop them up on camera. I mean, you don't need artillery OR aircraft to wipe out the New York horde. Just a single platoon in a building, resupplied by helicopter. But that wouldn't have looked good for the cameras.

They had plenty of News Copters to take the pictures of the hoard being mashed into paste by arty fire, or, failing that just a UAV feed to the news. SOME front line action with the camera is good, and you'll get a moderate amount of 'mop up' work, but the idea of letting them all into point blank range just for a good picture when they can arguably get pictures as good or better without failing so horribly...

No, he just clearly doesn't get it.

"Scott...you just don't get it, do ya?"

There's other chapters where he mentions these being used. Why not here, I'm not sure.

It really is bloody odd choice of ordinance, a hell of a lot more expensive then a simple bomb or cluster bomb...these are psudo cruise missiles after all.

Although I don't know if the US even uses Napalm anymore.

I think you are correct here, Napalm isnt used itself, but there IS a substitute in service which is comparable in effects, used in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

The heat of the explosion and fires might have thrown things off. Or maybe it's just a literary flourish, I wouldn't make too much out of it.

Well its from the POV of a somewhat hyper PBI, so its more then possible that he COULDN'T see and didn't get the word if their uber Land Warrior system had been shut off to stop the panic.
In fact that in turn could explain the complete falling apart of the line if the troops were cut off from Comms. Nothing of the sort is mentioned, but it COULD have been and would have made sense. They are suddenly cut off with an unstopable Hoard getting VERY close...

Maybe they thought they could still salvage their position at this point. That would make them idiots, certainly, but they were desperate idiots.

At this point they are out of their heavy weapons, have no arty support and have the Hoard in close proximity, AND have just used up their one and only apparent air strike on hand...

They are not THAT desperate! If they had been using the brains they supposedly had, they WOULD have had contingecny planning play at this point to withdraw either from the line, or even perhaps into the tall buildings and seal the access points to the roofs, continuing the engagement from there or something...

But there wasn't any attempt to hold the line, it quite literally just 'collapsed' in a panic.

They did NOT want to be perceived as having been pushed back by the horde. They'd have been understandably reluctant to back off.

There wasn't any order to hold the line after the Land Warrior crap and the Air Strike, the line just broke and ran, complete breakdown of Command Authority, panic with people shooting each other, Tanks running over friendlies e.t.c.

Too little, too late.

Well yes at this point, but the USAF *should* have had far more then a bunch of JSF's on standby, a few squadrons of A-10s with cluster bombs, thermal weapons, dumb bombs, and of course the Almighty GAU could have torn up the close parts of the hoard extremely effectively.

Hell, a continual wave of fighters down the highway should be entirely possible AND should have been brought in as soon as the big guns stopped firing, to take up the slack, even IF you had big bombers thundering on the main body.

Yes, definitely a FUBAR situation.

AKA Zero planning and control of the situation. Its not like this couldn't be seen coming from the second the forward observers should have been saying the arty was having less effect then hoped, or when the arty actually stopped firing.

Zombie Hoards don't move fast, they had plenty of time to work out a plan, but they just kept going at it as if it was all going to plan, right up until the troopers ran for it...

I'm not even going to comment on the helicopter. I mean, I'll defend a lot of this chapter, but this is ridiculous.

Yes, may it never be spoken of again. I in fact thing Brooks must have been playing Half Life 2 at the time and killed some Zombies with a buzzsaw and gravity gun, put 2 and 2 together and gotten 5....

A break in morale leading to a rout. Has happened in real life. Not against zombies, granted.

Yes, but the way it happens is a little iffy. The job of Junior officers and NCOs is to see these situations and deal with them, knowing when its time to bug out being a good example, organizing fighting retreats, preparing the ground with stuff to cover such a retreat and so on. Oh sure such a complete collapse could happen, but against Zombies it should never have GOTTEN to that point.

We don't know where they were headed, frankly.

Well the implication is that they ran and broke off the entire engagement. If they had pulled back and finished it, killing the hoard, then you would expect the Narrator to say as much, and the battle to not be known -rightly or wrongly- as a catastrophic defeat...

They clearly tried something different and it didn't work.

Yes, but the 'something different' is more or less making sure that the military loses the battle when they hold every single card. Its a case of 'in order to lose this, we are going to have to make almost every single mistake we could make, even at the most basic level. Oh, we just made every single mistake we could make'.

The whole problem most people have with Yonkers is that fact, that the writer simply fiats everything to make SURE mistakes are made and make SURE the outcome is what he wanted it to be.

Its not that the military fought well but were simply outnumbered. Its not that they didn't have the tools or the ammo, its not that they didn't have the intelligence they needed...its just that they either didn't USE what they had the way they would be expected/should have, or, somehow managed to completely miss the months leading up to Yonkers showing the Zombie threat and how to defeat it.

This is just the narrator waxing philosophical.

True, it just smacks of Brooks again. 'Oh Noez, the Zombies know no fear, we didn't realize that and that makes our big bad weapons systems useless!'

I honestly want to just post some of the other sections so people don't end up thinking the whole book is just Yonkers.

THAT is something people shouldn't do, if anything I think the focus on Yonkers as opposed to the rest of the book makes the point. The major problem with containing the outbreak in WWZ was a mixture of incubation time and spread. With a human vector, and a long incubation time, a single infected person could infect countless others over a wide area if you were unlucky, dealing with THAT popping up amongst you is horribly hard.

Yonkers on the other hand is epic fail because it WAS just a set piece grind match against Zombies that the Military had been given, a set piece battle, but they managed to lose it by making mistake after mistake after mistake, at a time when there really isn't an excuse for most of them.

Its not to say there are not other 'rolleyes' movements in the book...but nothing on the same concentrated level as Yonkers.

Yonkers was stupid. But it was a kind of stupid I could see realistically happening, as a desperate army pushed to the brink engaged a new foe and tried too hard to gain a propaganda win, at the same time changing old strategies in an attempt to adapt to a new foe, and failing.

Even so, though, the horde WAS wiped out, and the army took almost no casualties. While it was stupid at many points, that at least makes perfect sense.

Oh, and let me add that the whole size/font crap made it REALLY annoying to quote you.

Yeah, sorry about that.

[consequences]

Page 202: "and, of course, our own version of Yonkers at Inchon", as stated by the DDCI of South Korea.

A lot of my problem isn't the fact that one country managed to completely fuck up everything about a battle in a way that only the most clueless RTS noob might. It's the perception that every country worth mentioning managed to fuck up a major set-piece battle beyond redemption.