Fortunes of war are indeed fickle. Absolutely no one can really know ahead if they will end up in harm’s way. I think of the Englishman so disgusted by World War I he moved to a remote coaling station in the Pacific. Vessels had then begun to burn Bunker-C fuel, not coal, so “nobody will ever bother me here,” he reasoned. But, of course, Midway Island became a major battleground in World War II.
As long as they are tall, buildings that are not strategic and less than dominant can successfully be turned into protected fortress-type structures for use by city survivors. Beirut provides several excellent examples. Survivors there often occupied apartments of high-rise buildings whose top two or three floors had been reduced to rubble, either intentionally or by enemy artillery fire. Layers of ruin above provided excellent protection from artillery or mortar fire, while both giving the impression of being a dead building and giving defenders high ground among protective rubble. But there were other considerations.
Was the building dam aged to the point of near-collapse? Some residents lived in great danger in this type of rubble. Additionally, past six or eight floors, walking up to an apartment on a daily basis becomes a real chore (obviously no elevators ran). Survivors argue both ways. While hauling in food and water was difficult, these buildings offered high-rise inaccessibility in uncontested neighborhoods and provided great security.
Some movement out of the retreat will be unavoidable. Know ahead that leaving the retreat is accompanied by great danger and that this must be planned for. Sending a boy or girl out for essential food, water, or medicine often presents an unacceptable risk, because torture is a common and, many claim, necessary element of urban warfare. I have spoken with German women who lived in Berlin at the time of the Soviet occupation, who recalled that if they were caught out on the street they were raped often six or eight times before escaping and hiding again.
Rubble produced by enemy artillery and air strikes can hinder the movement of attacking infantry while simultaneously providing cover for defenders. Attacking commanders often attempt to minimize this problem by ordering their troops to torch cities. The success of this device depends entirely on the type of construction and nature of building contents. Under the wrong circumstances there is little to be done to save one’s city, urban survivors claim. Some survivors report having been able to remove combustibles while simultaneously putting out fires as they started. Others took shelter in fire-resistant buildings.
With the battle past, some even re-established living quarters in fire-gutted buildings. This doesn’t sound terribly practical, but many of these folks reported living through what seemed like horrible, large, citywide fires.
Sandbagged emplacements are recommended to control fire and to afford some protection from small-arms fire. These can be quite clever, including sandbagged overhead racks, frontal barriers, and floors. Often these structures take on the character of gun emplacements. While those who intend to fight with the urban guerrillas need to know the theory behind these, they are mostly unnecessary for city survivors and will not be covered here, except in passing.
Those interested can secure U.S. Army training manuals on urban warfare as reprints from Paladin Press or in their original form from military manual suppliers. Most military manuals are available in local university libraries where they can be freely copied. Look for anything on combat in built-up places.
Not only is warfare likely in cities where we live, it is also like ly that this warfare will be bitterly fought. Modern commanders know from past experience that a well-prepared and mutually supported position in a city can usually be defended by a small force. Attackers are likely to suffer heavy losses and perhaps even temporary defeat against a smaller defending force.
At one time wise commanders bypassed builtup areas, allowing defenders be gradually starved out. East of the Mississippi and in Europe, urban development is so extensive that this tactic is no longer considered practical.
In this and most other cases, survival has proven possible if we limit our defense to our own immediate area. Personal defense in cities, especially when the distinction between the military and police is blurred, is complex. More about this in subsequent chapters.
Urban warfare is old hat to some and terrifying to others. Recently some good friends in the militia movement argued at great length that because our military has studied warfare in builtup areas, it was planning to attack Citizen America. In that regard, the topic was terrifying to them. More likely our military studies this situation because it is the one that must be dealt with. We who plan to survive in cities also need to study it to know what lies ahead.
If anything, this situation demonstrates that successful city survival is the ability to remain flexible, creative, resourceful, and knowledgeable under city warfare conditions. It’s about knowing how urban warfare will most likely be undertaken and how to pick places least likely to be heavily affected. It’s not about banding together to engage in open, violent urban warfare against a common enemy. People surrounded, identified, and cut off will always eventually be destroyed.
Those reporting the greatest success claim that they husbanded and hoarded all their resources so that, after the enemy had passed, they had the necessary supplies to allow them to hunker down for the long haul—the real work of city survival.
Chapter 3
The Government’s View of Survivalists
“So, you define a modern, practical survivor as being an individual who is not dependent on government for any kind of help or assistance,” a reporter assigned to a nationally known modern men’s magazine quoted back somewhat skeptically.
“Yes,” says I, “but add in the fact that government help is always intervention, not help. They try to put a human face on things but look how many people have been manipulated, ruined, and even murdered by their own government in the 20th century alone.”
It seemed especially curious that he had called from New York—not an especially notorious center of freedom or survivalism or individual liberty.
Judging by the trite little collection of shallowness and trivia he eventually came up with for an interview, the fellow really didn’t get it. Even as brief as it was, his article was shot through with scorn and ridicule toward survivors or anyone who would ever dream of living free. It was the same day the Albanian refugee crisis hit the front page. People are being murdered en masse by their own government and he ridicules anyone who would think of living free from government “help.”
I asked which goods and services he personally depended on that came directly from central authorities.
He didn’t want to hear it, but Mao, Stalin, Lenin, and even Heinrich Himmler, director and early organizer of the Nazi Schutzstaffel (SS), fully recognized that counter-revolutions traditionally have started in the countryside. Himmler believed it could be a good revolution if it was kept entirely under his personal direction, philosophy, and control. Perhaps this is part of the origin of Mao’s and Stalin’s intense paranoia regarding rural freedom-loving survival-type individuals. Yet, keep in mind, Lenin predated any serious SS philosophy by at least 10 years. Why he really feared country folks and wanted to herd everyone into cities is probably lost in history Lenin said it was to industrialize the country. So they became worker bees in his own private hive!