Note: "Maxim 5" in The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries states "Close air support and friendly fire should be easier to tell apart." Should be, yes. But sometimes you need to call in an air strike on your own position, just to be sure.
You're the hero, and you've got a chance to take a shot at the villain. If you don't do it now, the chances are good the villain will get away, or the doomsday device will go off, or something equally nasty. One problem: your ally is in the blast zone.
"Like You Would Really Do It", the audience (and maybe the villain) is thinking.
Sometimes the answer is "Oh, but I would." While it's possible (and more common) for the hero to Take a Third Option, the hero actually going through (even accidentally) with it obviously has much more dramatic impact. An Anti-Hero will decide that saving the world is just too important to let collateral damage or personal concerns get in the way and tearfully pull the trigger. Sometimes there will be consent, explicit or inferred, on the part of the person in the firing line, that getting the villain is more important than them surviving. Non-Anti Heroes put in this position might have sworn a mutual pact to take the villain down no matter what, up to and including a Suicide Pact in dire circumstances, or the trapped character will give some sort of signal indicating to their comrade they're prepared to die for the cause. Or they may have some Applied Phlebotinum or superpower stashed away that the villain (or even the hero) doesn't know about and may secure their survival.
An alternate way this trope can occur is when a character makes a Heroic Sacrifice by directing someone else to open fire on their own position in hopes of taking out the villain as the villain attacks them.
If the character making the Heroic Sacrifice does die there will be deep repercussions. At the very least, if it's possible, a posthumous recognition of their life and deed will be called for. At worst, the hero will discover just how much Being Good Sucks, No Good Deed Goes Unpunished, and they may spend the rest of their life as The Atoner.
May come close to or overlap with I Can Not Self Terminate, Kill Us Both, Mercy Kill, and/or Shoot the Hostage if the character(s) sacrificed has been, or will be, put through hell by the villain, but a Mercy Kill alone does not this trope make. Arguably a supertrope of Kill Us Both.
This differs from Shoot the Hostage in that the innocent in the line of fire is not a hostage but a fellow hero. For cases where the character sacrificed is being used as a Human Shield, please put those examples under Shoot the Hostage rather than here.
Kill Us Both is a more specific case where the hero can restrain, but not defeat the villain on his own, and decides that he'd rather be killed than let the villain continue his reign of terror. This focuses more on the decision that collateral damage is acceptable and holding fire is not.
The heroic counterpart to We Have Reserves, this differs in that while the villain orders his archers to shoot at his own men callously, the heroic general gives the order with a deeply felt tear in his eye.
See also Cold Equation, where saving a more important group unavoidably requires dooming a less important group, and Godzilla Threshold, where dire necessity drives the heroes to take extreme measures. Compare Attacking Through Yourself where you shoot through yourself to achieve the same goal.
As this is a Death Trope, unmarked spoilers abound. Beware.
Examples of this trope include:
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Anime & Manga
- Happens twice in the final battle against the Guild in Last Exile: Sophia orders the Sylvanas to shoot its way through the downed Urbania in order to not crash into it while they are charing Dalphine's warship. Moments later they shoot said warship only to learn just too late that Sylvanas' captured captian, Alex, was on board.
- And Alex's last words upon seeing the Sylvanas approaching were for her to open fire.
- In Dragon Ball Z,
- Subverted during Goku and Piccolo's fight against Raditz — the only way to kill Raditz was for Piccolo to shoot him with his Special Beam Cannon while Goku was holding onto Raditz from behind. Goku does indeed make the sacrifice willingly, but Piccolo wanted to kill him anyway, and only regrets that Goku can come back to life afterwards.
- Goku exploits this trope in his fight against Cell. Cell has announced his intention to kill everyone on the planet one by one should he win, so when Goku starts charging up a Kamehame Hadouken at an angle that would destroy the Earth if actually fired, it gets Cell so taken aback by Goku's seeming willingness to go for the Mercy Kill of the planet and its population that he's caught completely off-guard when Goku teleports right next to him, Kamehame Hadouken ready to go at an angle that leaves no one aside from Cell in the beam. No. Goku wouldn't blow up the planet — he just needs you to think he would.
- In Code Geass, after Suzaku is immobilized but has caught Zero, the Britannian military orders him to keep them both there so they can bomb the area and kill them both together. This result is only avoided by Lelouch using his Geass to force Suzaku to save them. This is more due to apparent racism against Suzaku (an Honorary Britannian-A Japanese citizen that's in the Britannian military) as well as hatred of Zero, and Princess Euphemia herself tries to stop the bombing.
- In Fullmetal Alchemist, this is what finally manages to put a wound in King Bradley/Wrath. Bradley is holding a half-dead Fu in front of him, when Buccaneer stabs his sword straight through the old man's back, wounding the Homunculus in the process. Turns out the only way to hurt someone who could use his Perfect Eye to see all movements and predict all situations was hitting him from where he could not see.
- Sometimes, Ranma ˝ will have bitter foes teaming up to take down a common (and invariably much more dangerous) enemy. Then one of them will get hit by the other's friendly fire, starting up another fight between them while the actual enemy stares from the background.
- This trope is turned on its head in Naruto by Akatsuki members Hidan and Kakuzu. Hidan, a Combat Sadomasochist armed with a triple-pronged scythe and voodoo-doll like powers attacks foes close up, his partner, Kakuzu, a master of Elemental Powers, shoots at Hidan and his opponent locked in combat. What makes this exceptional is that Hidan is functionally immortal, so it's really only dangerous to their opponents.
- In Mobile Suit Gundam SEED, Lt. Badgiruel at one point orders a missile strike while Kira is in the blast radius, the reason being that Kira was overwhelmed by his opponents and needed some assistance. She reasons that he will be fine because his mobile suit has Phase Shift armor meant to resist such attacks (but is by no means invulnerable to them). Andrew Waltfeld, the enemy commander, wonders whether the Archangel doesn't care about the life of their pilot, or if they have such trust in his abilities that they know he will not be harmed by such tactics.
- Gunslinger Girl. Terrorist Big Bad Dante tries to use Rico's handler as a Human Shield against his cyborg, who is brainwashed to protect him at all costs. However Jean had earlier instructed Rico to kill Dante (who had killed Jean's family years before with a car bomb) even at the cost of their own lives. Rico decides to Shoot the Hostage. With an anti-tank rifle.
- Fate/Zero has Kiritsugu shoot down a jumbo jet full of undead and Natalia, the woman he sees as a mother, rather than risk the undead spreading after it landed.
- In Black Lagoon when Fabiola displays her combat skills on the Columbians, their leader orders a car-mounted machine gunner open fire on the bar while he's still inside.
Comic Books
- In one X-Men comic, Cameron Hodge tried to goad Cable into shooting him through Psylocke. He failed, and good that he did, since he was literally Made of Iron and Psylocke would have been the only fatality.
Fan Works
- Dragon Ball Z Abridged: Goku asks Piccolo to warn him before he fires so that he can get out of the way and leave Raditz to die alone, but Piccolo simply kills them both instead and proceeds to kidnap Goku's son as part of a plot to take over the world.
Films — Live-Action
- In The Green Berets, a forward base is being overrun and the base commander calls an airstrike on his own command post. However, friendly forces evacuate in time.
- James Bond
- In Die Another Day, Bond ends up shooting M to get at the guy behind. Turns out it was a simulation, with M receiving Only a Flesh Wound in the process.
Q: Forgive my mentioning it, 007, but a perfect marksman isn't really supposed to shoot his own boss.
Bond: Check the replay. You'll find he's dead and she's only got a flesh wound.
Q: There's always an excuse, isn't there? 00-zero. - In the opening sequence of Skyfall, Eve is trying to line up a sniper shot on a mook Bond is fighting atop a train about to enter a tunnel. However, Bond is fighting the mook in hand-to-hand combat, so she can't gurantee who she'll hit, and there's no time to realign. Despite Eve's hesitation, M orders the shot be taken, so Eve shoots. Bond is hit, and the mook gets off unscathed, setting off the events of the film. (He somehow survives, of course.)
- In Die Another Day, Bond ends up shooting M to get at the guy behind. Turns out it was a simulation, with M receiving Only a Flesh Wound in the process.
- A "call in an air strike on your own base" occurs near the end of Platoon. As North Vietnamese Army troops are overrunning a U.S. base, the commander orders a U.S. jet overhead to "expend all remaining" ordnance inside the base's perimeter. The ordnance turns out to include napalm, which incinerates almost everyone.
Capt. Harris: For the record, it's my call! Dump everything you've got left on my pos! I say again, expend all remaining in my perimeter! It's a lovely fucking war. Bravo Six out.
- The film Bat*21 has Gene Hackman's character calling down an air strike on a massing of enemy troops, despite the reconnaissance pilot's warning that it's too close. Though, it's probably more inexperience than bravado.
- We Were Soldiers has this trope when the commander had to call in "Broken Arrow," massive emergency air support, to stop an enemy attack about to overrun their position. Unfortunately, one of the soldiers calling in airstrikes has one that comes too close and some fellow soldiers are hit by the friendly fire. While the soldier is obviously distraught, the commander tells him to not worry about that and keep going since the entire unit's survival is at stake.
- In Beneath Hill 60, Pte. Tiffin has been trapped in a collapsed mine shortly before the explosion is set to be detonated. Unable to dig him out in time, the team beg Woodward to delay firing until Tiffin has been freed. Woodward, knowing what the consequences would be after months of careful planning, sets off the explosives, killing Tiffin.
- During the climax of Flight of the Intruder, Lieutenant Commander Virgil "Tiger" Cole, already badly wounded, realizes that a nearby NVA antiaircraft vehicle knows where he is and is using him to lure the Combat Search and Rescue helicopter into their kill zone. He pops smoke, then radios the AD-1 Skyraiders circling overhead to blast his position off the face of the Earth.
Cole: "Sandy Lead, this is Cole, 505. I'm all screwed up. Been shot, my back's broke. I'm sitting on a ZSU, they're usin' me for bait. I'm poppin' smoke. Everything ya got, lay it on me...I'd do it for you. Alpha mike foxtrot..."
- A villainous example occurs in Avengers: Endgame. Thanos, being slowly ripped apart and tortured by Scarlet Witch in retaliation for what his alternate self did to her beloved in Infinity War, calls in panic for a massive airstrike on her position. When informed by Corvus Glaive what the consequences will be for his own side, he tells him to do it anyway. It's a small price to pay considering what he intends to do if he survives and wins.
Literature
- Discworld: In Hogfather, when Teatime is armed with Death's sword that can cut anything and in the presence of a dreamed-of chance to kill The Grim Reaper himself (not to mention the children Susan is responsible for), Susan, in desperation as much as anything, throws the poker (imbued with the children's belief that it can kill monsters), right through Death - showing that Death isn't a monster and the completely-human Teatime is. Death's been a fairly sympathetic character for a while by that point, but even so, Susan admits that she was only "reasonably confident" that it would work.
- At the end of the first Hunger Games book, Cato has Peeta in his grip, and Katniss cannot kill him without also killing Peeta. She shoots Cato in the hand instead, and he lets go.
- A variation occurs in Red Storm Rising. As the NATO soldiers on Iceland are being overrun by Soviet troops, their newly arrived air support is forced to strafe dangerously close to the good guys' position. It's so close, in fact, that The Hero, Lt. Edwards, is nicked by shrapnel.
- In the Ciaphas Cain short story "The Beguiling," Cain calls down an artillery barrage on a finishing school he'd just left. The students are actually Slaaneshi cultists who'd created a daemonhost.
- He mentions several of these incidents when serving with Colonel Mostrue, one of the few people suspecting he's the self-serving weasel he describes himself as, and who has very little problem with speedily authorizing an artillery barrage on Cain's position.
- Both of the audio dramas end with Cain ordering an airstrike, and telling the attackers to use his combead signal to tell them where to shoot. Of course, he then immediately removes the combead, leaves it in the target area, and runs like heck.
- The Cruel Sea: A British ship in World War II finds men in the water after their ship has been sunk by a U-boat. If the ship rescues the men, the U-boat will get away, and sink more ships. If they start dropping depth charges NOW, then the survivors will die, but there is a chance of sinking the sub. They drop the charges.
Live-Action TV
- In Heroes, the puppetmaster Eric Doyle was defeated by having Claire's mother shoot her. Lucky for them, Doyle didn't know Claire has a Healing Factor.
- In an episode of Chuck, a particularly inconvenient air strike led to a near miss Out of the Inferno situation and a lot of Stuff Blowing Up.
- The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Best of Both Worlds Part 1" ends with Commander Riker ordering an all-out attack on the Borg ship, even though Captain Picard is being held on board. (Un)fortunately, the attack is completely ineffective precisely BECAUSE Picard is aboard the enemy ship and has had all his knowledge of Star Fleet defenses and attack plans absorbed as part of his assimilation into the Borg.
- A much less extreme example, but in the Criminal Minds episode LDSK, Hotch does first verbally devastate and then physically kick the shit out of Reid in order to gain the trust of a sniper who's taken both of them hostage.
- And so Reid can get Hotch's backup gun from his ankle holster.
- A variant appears in the Battlestar Galactica pilot:
Tigh: Seal off everything forward from frame 30 and start an emergency venting of all compartments.Tyrol: Wait, I got over a hundred people trapped behind frame 34, just need a minute to get them out!Tigh: We don't seal it off now, we're gonna lose a lot more than a hundred men. Seal it off. Now!Tyrol: THEY JUST NEED A MINUTE!Tigh: WE DON'T HAVE A MINUTE!!! The fire reaches the hangar pods, it'll ignite the fuel lines and we'll lose the ship. Do it!
- The Doctor of Doctor Who has occasionally found himself in this type of position. Most notably, it was revealed that in the Time War he locked all of the fighting in a inescapable loop, dooming everyone in it to eternally repeat the fighting. This included not only the Daleks and the Evil time-lords, but all his friends and family. In the End of Time he was forced to repeat his choice.
- After the trauma of the war, it perhaps explains why he hesitated so much in making a similar choice again, if it meant the death of his companion Rose. He got out of it the first time; the second he tricked her in to being sent home, while still leaving himself and Captain Jack Harkness to die.
- In NCIS, Gibbs had tracked down a spy within NCIS. Her operator, though, had grabbed her as a human shield. With the standard dramatic pauses, he finally shot through her and killed the bad guy, and her too.
- Though in Gibbs' defense he only shoots her after he sees her mouthing for him to shoot.
- At various times in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Liv and Stabler have each been in a position where their partner is being used as shield by the bad guy. In all cases, the one being held hostage always actively encourages the other to shoot to kill the bad guy with no concern for their own safety. Liv and Elliott ALWAYS Take a Third Option, sometimes with disastrous consequences when their hesitation allows the bad guy to escape.
- There is one instance that is wholly played straight however in the episode "Zebras" Stabler is taken hostage by the lab assistant Dale Stuckey. Benson proceeds to convince him that she was in love with him and begs him to allow her to beat Stabler, which she does until Stuckey drops his guard and she takes him down.
Tabletop Games
- The Warhammer 40,000 Apocalypse asset Fire On My Coordinates, available to the Imperial Guard, allows them to drop an orbital strike on a friendly unit who is being overrun.
- Commander Chenkov is quite famed for dealing with the enemy by flooding them with human waves. One of his favored tactics of a slightly different variety is to surround the enemy command forces with troops in close-range to stop them from slipping away and then leveling the entire area with artillery fire. Unlike other examples of the trope, Chenkov is more executing the trope because he chooses to instead of needing to.
- The Skaven in Warhammer are the only faction allowed to shoot into close combat, because they don't really care about their expendable Mooks. The rule is called either "Life is cheap" or "Coratteral damage".
- Dungeons & Dragons:
- At least one Wizard has centered the Fireball spell on themselves in order to save the rest of the party. Note that some editions allow builds that can exclude certain areas from area spells, and suddenly a desperation move becomes an everyday strategy.
- Also a tactic when you have a Totem Barbarian that has taken Bear as their first totem. With Danger Sense giving them a chance at quartering the damage, they have a decent chance of outlasting the enemy.
- Also good with a Rogue or other class that has the Evasion feature. With a high Reflex save, they stand a good chance of taking no damage at all.
Video Games
- In Xenosaga, Kos-mos shoots through a team member to kill an enemy when she calculates it to be more efficient.
- In Soulcalibur III Maxi's ending has him telling Kilik to stab him to destroy the Soul Edge (and prevent him from falling under his influence). Whether he survives or not depends on a Quicktime Event.
- [PROTOTYPE]: Blackwatch has no qualms against "burning" their own to stop the spread of The Virus.
- Alex even gets an ability later that lets him impersonate a grunt, point at anyone and shout "It's him!!". Every soldier around immediately unloads on the poor schmuck. Yup, even if it's just another grunt. Heck, even if it's their commanding officer. Better safe than hideously dismembered by an abomination unto the eyes of God.
- A common manoeuver in Worms, a game that includes both teams of characters and various weapons of mass destruction. A deadly combination.
- Also a stock-standard maneuver in Final Fantasy Tactics, where non-Summon Magic spells hit anyone caught in the blast zone regardless of allegiance. While sometimes you might want to get away from a targeted enemy to avoid damage to your adjacent units, you might also decide to weather the damage if it will take out the enemy. In fact, two favorite techniques among players are to target your own unit with a spell, then send it rushing into the thick of enemy forces, or just going ahead and blasting everyone in the battlefield with a Calculator. Protecting them with magic-absorbing equipment is optional.
- Played perfectly straight in Metal Gear Solid. Shortly after Grey Fox takes out MG's radome, Snake is put in this position, complete with Liquid's comment "Can you really shoot? You'll kill him too!" Needless to say, you can't pull the trigger (or whatever the equivalent is on missile launchers).
- There is a subversion that's possible, though. If Snake has at least one missile remaining, he'll mentally berate himself if you try to pull the trigger by thinking "It's no good, I can't do it!" If, however, you have no missiles left, he'll mentally berate himself by thinking "It's no good, I'm out of missiles." As if he could, but lacks the ammo.
- A common maneuver in Team Fortress 2 is the "spycheck": attack your supposed teammate. If he doesn't flicker in enemy colors (or in the case of getting blasted by the flamethrower, catch on fire), then he really was on your side after all. (Fortunately, in this game you are Friendly Fireproof, so spychecking—or running at a supposed teammate to see if you no-clip through them—is highly recommended.)
- Also done in Team Fortress Classic - except that friendly fire is in effect...and Spies look disguised even to their own team.
- In the post-season 8 Federation tutorial in Star Trek Online, the ship on which your Player Character is taking xir midshipman cruise is attacked by the Klingons and your CO, Masc P. Taggart, is taken captive. To defeat the enemy ship's cloaking device Captain Taggart tells you to lock onto his combadge signal and fire, though the Klingon captain stabs him to death before you actually do so.
- In Modern Warfare 2, during one of the game's early levels, the US Rangers often have heavy support fire on the city even when many of the Rangers are inside. One of the rangers quips "Since when does General Shepherd care about danger close?" Much later in the game, when it's revealed that General Shepherd is Evil All Along, Price and Soap, now on his most wanted list, are infiltrating one of his compounds. Once he knows this, he bombards the compound with explosives, prompting a Meaningful Echo from Price.
Web Comics
- The Order of the Stick:
- Invoked when Quirky Bard Elan and his Evil Twin Nale are duelling. One of them (Nale) tells Vaarsuvius, the team's wizard, to blast both of them, as it's the only way to be sure the evil twin gets hit. The other accuses him of only saying that to convince Vaarsuvius that he's the good twin. Defied when Vaarsuvius Takes A Third Option.
- While fighting vampires
, Hilgya casts a Chaos Hammer spell centered on V, who is being attacked by the vampires.
- In the backstory as described by Lord Shojo, Soon Kim told Dorukan to cast a rift-sealing spell while Soon himself and Kraagor were dangerously close to the rift. Soon survived; Kraagor didn't.
- Schlock Mercenary:
- Just from the comic's Big Book of War there are two relevant entries:
Maxim 5: Close air support and friendly fire should be easier to tell apart.
Maxim 20: If you're not willing to shell your own position, you're not willing to win. - The defictionalized version of the book contains some annotations on the margins. Maxim 5 has some by Karl Tagon:
April 3036: This page deserves friendly fire ticks. I hope the skyheads shoot better in war time than in training exercises. IIIII I
June 3070: Done with tick marks. DONE. We're at war now and I have personally given orders that would fill this page with ink. And it can't just be tick-marks. I need a page big enough for all the names. - That "page" becomes the Titan Wall, a massive monument of 4.5 thousand tons of titanium.
- The most important incident that Tagon Junior still bears a grudge about happened during the opening salvo of the terraforming wars, when Kaff Tagon's girlfriend turned out to have been packed full of weaponized nanotech. She infected Karl's wife, Karl noticed what was going on, sealed his armor, grappled the two and commanded his son to throw an incendiary grenade to burn both of them and the expanding cloud of nanites. Kaff hesitated and Karl let go of the girlfriend to reach for his own grenades, which gave her enough time to spit the nanites at the other people in the room. The entire family died except for Kaff and Karl, with both of them blaming the other and making little attempt to hide it.
- Just from the comic's Big Book of War there are two relevant entries:
- Parodied in 8-Bit Theater when Black Mage orders Fighter to attack a dragon they planned to blast with spells.
Red Mage: Won't he be caught in the blast?Black Mage: No, but technically the dragon will be.
Web Original
- In armageddon of The Salvation War, during the final major battle in Hell (the humans against Beelzebub's army) several Russian BMP's called for artillery on their own position. Turned out better than expected for them since the incoming shells were full of sarin gas and a fully locked down BMP is gas tight (no air in). On the other hand, it didn't work out so well for those who didn't get the radio message.
- Whateley Universe: One of the reasons that all the surviving Dragonslayers are at least mildly insane is the number of times their Communications Officer, God's Messenger, had to call in artillery and/or air strikes on their own position.Supposedly, on at least one occasion, rather than 'danger-close', he called it as 'danger-stupid', adding, 'lock my coordinates and fire for effect!'.
Real Life
- There were several episodes in World War II of observers calling down fire on their own positions. Several died doing this, which would make it a Heroic Sacrifice.
- In a notable example, Audie Murphy did this several times during his most famous Roaring Rampage of Revenge / You Shall Not Pass! moment. The Germans advanced to within twenty yards of his position, so he ordered more fire missions on his position. When the artillery director asked if they were really that close, Murphy replied, "Hold the phone for a minute and I'll let you talk to one of the bastards!" The only reason he stopped calling artillery on his own position was that the artillery itself severed his field telephone line. Oh, and he did this all while exposed on top of a burning M10 tank destroyer, cutting down Germans left and right with its .50-caliber machine gun. He was awarded the Medal of Honor for. Oh, and he managed to do an Unflinching Walk when heading back to what was left of his unit as the Tank Destroyer exploded seconds after he exited it, peppering his ass and legs with shrapnel. He then reorganized his unit and led a counterattack that sent the numerically-superior Nazis running.
- In 1944, Lieutenant John R. Fox was directing American artillery fire when a German counterattack threatened to wipe out his position. He ordered the artillery to shell his observation post, as the only way to stop the attack. When the radioman back with the guns questioned the order, Fox just replied "Fire it." At the time, there was an informal rule in the US military banning non-whites from receiving the Medal of Honor, but he was one of seven African-American soldiers from World War II to receive that award in 1997 after Bill Clinton ordered a review.
- Averting this was one of the great innovations in artillery tactics pioneered by the Germans in the First World War. By 1916 the Germans had successfully implemented artillery 'creeping barrages', used to keep the enemy's heads down while the infantry advanced on their positions and began assaulting them. However, this tactic was not as effective as many Generals had hoped. The retired artillery reservist officer Colonel Georg Bruchmüller discovered why: far too many shells landed 'short' (by tens of metres or more!) and would hit the infantry if they followed the barrage too closely. Yet, the barrage was what was protecting them from enemy fire. So Bruchmüller worked on getting their trust back by using only the most reliable artillery pieces for the barrage. For a start he started having guns tested for their accuracy, having the ones with over-worn barrels (resulting in lessened accuracy) assigned to other duties. But his true genius was only using 'medium' howitzers (artillery pieces with high firing arcs), the most accurate type of gun, for the barrage. With this move, and a very thorough series of personal lectures and question-and-answer sessions with all the artillery and infantry commanders involved at every level of these operations, he earned the infantry's trust. And in the Riga (Baltic/Northeastern Front, 1917) and Michael (Western Front, 1918) offensives, among others, it showed.
- In the First World War the British weren't overly concerned with averting this trope when copying the Franco-German 'creeping barrage', largely because using more reliable artillery pieces for the barrage (in the German mold) was a seen as a reversal of 'the natural order of things': medium artillery pieces were for targets a medium distance away, and the barrage was to be fired at relatively close targets, so light artillery pieces would be used. Even if they were less reliable.
- The British version of the barrage had a twist: the British were the only power to manufacture the notoriously expensive and unreliable 'Shrapnel shells'. These exploded forward, not outward, a bit like flying shotguns battering the ground in front of them; and the trick was to keep pace with the airbursts as the gunners shifted their aim, so they occurred right over your head and the ground in front of you was made unlivable. In fact, it was considered good form to hug the barrage so close that you received a few own-goals, because if you lost the barrage's protection, you would expose yourself to even more murderous losses from German machine-gun fire.
- Forgetting this is the reason why much is made of British troops being ordered to walk towards the German lines. It wasn't out of some stupid fanatical adherence to discipline; it's because the person mocking the British for this tactic has forgotten about or doesn't know about the wall of high explosive and steel (and later, sometimes several walls at once) being swept back and forth across the enemy lines in support of the attack. Get the fire roller right, and the men can walk to their goal in perfect safety - get it wrong, and not all the running in the world will save them.
- It is also, however, dependent on the availability and skill of your artillery, which explains much of the Somme: then-shoddy manufacturing practices resulted in perhaps a third of all British shells being duds, and inexperienced officers assigned insufficient artillery density for many sectors. That, in addition to the inexperience of British artillerymen in firing a walking barrage, led to the horrific British casualty ratios. It should be noted that British troops operating alongside French sectors experienced much fewer problems, and that the French attack was amazingly successful by 1916 standards. It should also be noted that the gradual perfection of British artillery tactics was one reason why the deadlock of the trench was broken in 1918.
- During the Battle of Kapyong (the Korean War), the Canadian and Australian soldiers fighting against the Chinese called an airstrike on their own position. This is, believe it or not, one of the saner things they did during that battle. They ended up only losing around 50 soldiers compared to the Chinese 1000+ killed, which is especially amazing since the Allied Command believed them to be wiped out by the much larger enemy.
- This was a common occurrence during the Vietnam War due to how the NVA and Vietcong fought. But one of the most extreme examples comes from a case where a unit that was being overrun called for fire support from the USS New Jersey, and its nine 16 inch guns. The barrage of one ton projectiles ultimately forced what was left of the NVA back, and somehow spared the unit that called in the support. The radio operator that called in the guns was awarded a Silver Star.
- The Iowa-class fast battleships had an exceptional fire control system that produced spectacular accuracy. Even the laser- and/or GPS-guided specialty rounds fired by modern howitzers are hard-pressed to do better.
- To put this into perspective, the Gun Directors used by the Iowas for their 16in guns are able to put nine shells within fifteen feet of one another at 25 miles (max range for the guns), and were able to do this in 1943. The entire reason that they remained in service for so long is that they were built to be nigh-unbreakable in order to survive the shock of a full broadside. Modern Self-Propelled Howitzers by comparison are prone to computer freezes, and can sometimes be temperamental under battlefield conditions (forcing gunners to figure things out the old fashioned way). And these things are directing guns up to 155mm. The 406mm guns on the Iowa Class could be firing all day to the point the barrels glow red, and their fire-control computer will never malfunction.
- It is frequently said that a sign of a well-disciplined infantry unit on the assault is the fact that they will take casualties from their own artillery. The reason is simple: artillery's suppressive effect on the enemy lasts only for as long as the guns are firing, and the enemy will be able to fight again soon after the guns stop. A good unit will try to get in as close as possible while the artillery is still firing and probably take a few casualties in the process.
- The US military radio jargon for this is "danger close",note which is shorthand for, "we're inside the lethal radius of the ordnance we want you to drop but do it anyway because the shit is really hitting the fan, and it's not like this could get any worse, so bring the rain!" The protocol for “danger close” strikes is that the very first round is fired long i.e. just a little too far behind the target. After this, the Forward Observer calls out minute adjustments in barrel azimuth and elevation, making the next few rounds land closer and closer until they hit the target precisely.
- In basically every war in that has involved tanks, one tactic to deal with hostile soldiers boarding and swarming friendly tanks is to fire machine guns and cannister shot at the friendly tank. If the friendly tank has enough armor, the bullets will bounce off the friendly tank while mincing the enemy infantry. This tactic is usually referred to as Delousing.
