"It's Ony a Flesh Wound, Sarge: Small-arms incapacitation" Topic

The following piece I wrote for the Nugget is regurgitated here at the request of emkinney.

Why can't I correct the speling mistale in the title? Arrgh.

It's Only a Flesh Wound, Sarge

John D Salt

Some considerable time ago in The Nugget, somebody suggested – and if it wasn't Tim Price, it was someone else – a simple hit location system for man-to-man skirmish games using an ordinary six-sided die. I do not recall the exact mapping of die rolls to body parts, and it does not much matter; it's a clear, simple, easy to understand scheme, which allows for different effects from a hit, and also naturally shows the effect of partial cover (protected body parts cannot be hit) and is easily adapted to show the effects of combat body armour. However, the question arises, is it a good model of reality? Having recently forked out a considerable number of good-looking spondulicks for a copy of Beat Kneubuehl's Wound Ballistics: Basics and Applications, I feel no shame in stealing his table of the percentage area of different body parts, and the relative frequency of hits on them, based on WW2 experience.

Body part       Surface area     WW2 hits
Head and neck       12%            21%
Arms                22%            23%
Thorax              16%            13%
Abdomen             11%            08%
Legs                39%            35%

These number suggest to me that a model allocating one-sixth of hits to the head, one sixth to the arms, one-third to the trunk (thorax and abdomen) and one-third to the legs is really a very good approximation to reality.

Apart from Kneubuehl's splendid book, I have also been doing a good deal of other reading on the cheery topic of wound ballistics, and pottering with Python programs implementing incapacitation models by Sperrazza and Kokinakis and Courtney and Courtney. I do not propose to subject patient readers to the tedium of these, although I will complain about Sperrazza and Kokinakis' model requiring me to type in over four hundred parameters. I will also whinge about the difficulty of finding trustworthy ballistic data for small-arms bullets, although, between Kneubuehl, Jane's Ammunition Handbook, and a bunch of web pages including notably the Hornady cartridges homepage, I have accumulated sufficient snippets to feed the Gavre ballistic drag model I happen to have lying around, also implemented in Python. So far I have data for 45 kinds of rifle bullet and 18 kinds of pistol bullet, covering most of the popular service cartridges of the twentieth century, plus a few oddments such as OO buckshot, flintlock pistols, and the Vetterli rifle.

One of the first practical applications of electronic computers was calculating ballistic tables, so I regard it as nicely traditional to make my laptop spend two and a half a minutes crunching through these numbers to produce velocity-decay tables for all these projectiles, along with a couple of estimates of their wounding power at 100m intervals downrange, using the incapacitation models already mentioned. Courtney and Courtney base their model on the idea of a "one-shot stop", meaning that after being hit the target fired no further shots, struck no further blows, and moved no more than ten feet. The corresponding criterion in Sperrazza and Kokinakis's rather elaborate model is taken to be the "thirty-second assault" criterion.

As a result of all this, and in the spirit of bold simplification, I propose the following table of relative wounding power of different small-arms cartridges.

Rating               5               4              3            2
Rifle bullets  Military rifles   .30 Carbine    .22 Hornet     .22 LR
                                 .32 Marlin 
Pistol bullets   .357 Magnum     10mm Auto      9mm Makarov    .25 ACP
                 .44 Magnum      .45 ACP        9mm Police
                                 .357 SIG       .38 ACP
                                 9mm Parabellum .32 ACP
                                 9mm Steyr
                                 9mm x 21
                                 7.62mm Tokarev
                                 7.65mm Luger
                                 .38 Special
                                 .38 Super ACP
Shotgun pellets  Slug                           Buckshot       Birdshot
Obsolete arms    Miniι bullet    Flintlock ball
                                 Arrow

Subtract one from the ratings given for buck or bird shot over 50m, pistol bullets over 100m, and for micro-calibre (5.45mm or 5.56mm) or intermediate (7.92mm kurz or 7.62mm Kalashnikov) bullets over 400m.

It will at once be noticed that an awful lot of different cartridges are included in the category "Military rifles". That is simply because, based on all the information I have, there is no significant difference in the wounding power of any of these at likely combat ranges (apart from the penalty over 400m for the smaller loads just mentioned).

One aspect I have not covered is the reduced wounding power of the round-nosed bullets employed in military rifles before spitzer (spire-pointed) bullets became universal, as discussed in the 1929 Textbook of Small Arms. I suggest that these might be given a rating of 4 instead of the usual 5 when firing spitzers.

Returning to the incapacitation models of Sperrazza and Kokinakis and Courtney and Courtney, one of the unsatisfactory aspects of both of them is that, while they use the language of probability, the numbers they produce are apparently supposed to be interpreted as "incapacitation ratings", rather than probabilities of incapacitation. What this means is that a 50% chance of complete incapacitation or a 100% chance of 50% incapacitation would both be interpreted as an incapacitation rating of 0.5, as would a combined 25% chance of complete incapacitation and 50% chance of 50% incapacitation. My original intention was to use the above table by rolling 1d6 when a figure was hit, and count it as an incapacitation result if the number rolled was equal to or less than the bullet's rating – or, to put it another way, the figure must make a saving throw that exceeds the rating to continue in action. So, for example, a figure hit by a 7.62mm NATO round is out of action on anything but a six. You can use the table that way if you like, but the thought then occurred to me that we can produce the variability of partial incapacitation implicit in the source models while maintaining the same relative wounding powers by rolling not one, but two saving throws, combined with a roll for the body part struck, using the scheme mentioned at the start. Let us consider that the two main functions a combatant has are to move and to fight. A hit in the arm affects the ability to fight; in the legs, the ability to move; and in the head or torso, both. Two successful saves mean no effect, one save means partial loss of function, and no saves means complete loss.

This is probably best illustrated by a worked example. Let us imagine that some unfortunate chap has been hit by a 9mm Parabellum round from close range. The first roll, for hit location, comes up 5, meaning a hit in the leg. Consulting the hitting power table shows that this cartridge has a rating of 3, and as it was fired from under 100m there is no reduction for long range. We now roll two dice for saving throws, needing 4 or better to succeed. These come up 1 and 3, meaning no saves, so the target is rendered entirely incapable of moving – but can still shoot. Incidentally, this illustrates the difference between, say, the "30-second defence" and "30-second assault" criteria used by Sperrazza and Kokinakis; assaulting troops need to be capable of movement to fulfil their mission, whereas defenders can fight and die in place.

For people who care about such things, I have tabulated the probabilities using this scheme of different results from single hits from each kind of projectile – including rating 1 for the case of unlucky long-range hits by .25ACP or birdshot.

     Result                          Rating       
Move        Fight       5       4       3       2       1
No          No         35%     22%     13%      6%      1%
Half        Half       14%     22%     25%     22%     14%
No          OK         23%     15%      8%      4%      1%
Half        OK          9%     15%     17%     15%      9%
OK          No         12%      7%      4%      2%     0.5%
OK          Half        5%      7%      8%      7%      5%
OK          OK          3%     11%     25%     44%     69%

A single hit at any rating can produce any of seven different results, and multiple hits can produce any of nine distinct wound states, ranging from completely incapacitated to fully able. This seems quite a rich set considering the simplicity of the procedures used.

I would suggest that damage be treated as cumulative, so that if a victim receives a second 50% loss of function this makes a 100% loss. If you choose to make the results non-cumulative, be aware that the expected numbers of hits to to produce complete incapacitation then become very large for the lower ratings – about 15 for rating 2 and over 60 for rating 1. While the .25 ACP may be a pretty impuissant round by "Dirty Harry" standards, I doubt that Shin Beth hit squads would employ it if it was really that bad.

To anyone developing a skirmish-level set of rules involving 20th-century firearms, I hope you will consider stealing this system for resolving the effect of bullet hits. Building on the hit location system mentioned at the start, it offers what I think is as numerically accurate a scheme as it is possible to get from the available unclassified data, while still only using a couple of d6s and the familiar mechanism of the saving-throw.

Sources

Michael Courtney and Amy Courtney, Relative incapacitation contributions of pressure wave and wound channel in the Marshall and Sanow data set

William Kokinakis and Joseph Sperrazza, Criteria for Incapacitating Soldiers with Fragments and Flechettes, BRL Report 1269, Jan 1965

Beat P. Kneubuehl (Ed.), Robin M. Coupland, Markus A. Rothschild and Michael J. Thali, Wound Ballistics: Basics and Applications, Springer, Berlin, 2011

Stephen Segletes, Modeling the Penetration Behavior of Rigid Spheres Into Ballistic Gelatin, Army Research Laboratory Technical Report 4393

Jane's Ammunition Handbook, 2003-2004

Textbook of Small Arms, 1929, HMSO (facsimile edition by the Naval and Military Press)

Stanley C. Crist, Small Arms Ammunition for the 21st Century: High-Performance Alternatives to the 5.56 NATO Round, Infantry magazine, May-June 2006

link

hornady.com

falken.us

Crikey.

Jaz
Coming Soon – GLORY – Epic American Civil War Rules!
link

This is pretty fascinating stuff. Thanks for posting it.

I wonder if there are any rule sets out there now that use anything like the wound resolution approach you've described? At first glance, it seems remarkably appealing. I am unaware of any game that uses "OK/Partial/Incapacitated" statuses for separate "Move/Fight" attributes, but I am by no means an expert. I agree with you that it is a rich set of results.

I see you have an affinity for .44 magnum and .357 magnum ammunition and bullets in your table, while in reality they do not cause significantly different damage or trauma than a good 9mm +P or ++P hollow-point, or any 10mm, .40 cal, or .45 cal projectile from a modern handgun regardless of the location struck at least from my limited studies on police incidents.

This of course, applies only to the more modern bullets as the advances in ballistics on various cartridges over the past 15 years has been tremendous. Also, there are some smaller caliber pistol bullets which hit at many times their relative size/mass due to the sheer velocity of the round, like the new 5.7mm PDW and pistol which have muzzle velocities in excess of 2,400 fps (in some cases approaching 3,000 fps).

I like your approach, but I think that with most pistol rounds, you need to take care not to make two specific pistol cartridges the "holy grail" of handguns as they are far from perfect rounds in and of themselves (much harder to control from recoil, longer shot picture interruption, and less "time on target" with the muzzle). Also, while a .22LR cartridge has relatively low mass, it does have surprising velocity and fatalities or incapacitating injuries are quite common because MOST .22LR rounds are hollow point rounds, not slugs or spitzer type rounds.

I do like where you are going with this and your extrapolations to the D6 methodology – the proposed use of three D6 is a very unique idea.

One other suggestion, on Shotguns – if the range is under 10m, I would suggest the rating be bumped up 2 for the two shot categories because of the sheer number of hits which SHOULD occur at that close range. If the range is under 5m, damage is usually so catastrophic to the recipient in my experience that they are incapacitated or dead in virtually every case I've been involved in, or reviewed. Then again, those were mainly homicide cases.

Your research and proposal are excellent, thanks for posting and the links to the source materials is very nice too.

Interesting, I think Shin Beth picked the smaller round due to reduced signature when supressed, the lack of recoil allows good multiple round shot placement and finally ROF. I believe they also used explosive rounds to compensate for the smaller calibre, but most .22 I shot was hollow point, so it packs a punch.

I like the simplicity of the hit table, which also can be used to determine the effects of cover, without tedious modifiers being consulted. If the hit location is covered it means no damage unless the obstacle can be penetrated, woe betide the guy who hides behind a car door!

Having looked at my fathers pictures of shotgun victims, OO buckshot at close range causes truly appalling injuries due to the mass of shot which has had little time to spread so the table should be amended.

Is there any rule for aimed fire? Thinking of centre body mass, which would differentiate between professionals and amateurs.

Oh dear, post a screed and it provokes all sorts of intelligent comments. That'll larn me.

In order to frame my responses, it might help to point out that in my view there's a big difference between what I'll call "military shooting" and "police shooting". At some risk of caricature, we can say that the military are interested in training a large number of people to a basic level of competence, and, while being bound by the Hague and Geneva conventions, can to some extent regard collateral damage as a case of Chobham verdict -- "shouldn't have been there". The police, on the other hand, train fewer people, but to a higher standard (supposedly -- I'm not sure this is true in the UK), are allowed to use ammunition other than plain FMJs, and are obliged to take the greatest possible care that bystanders aren't plinked incidentally. There's also the point that the military are happy to expend thousands of rounds for a hit, and regard rifles as small beer, whereas the police get grumpy if they aren't getting a hit every six shots, and treat anything bigger than a pistol as an elephant gun.

When I wrote this article, I was coming from a perspective of "military shooting". So:

Jovian1 wrote:

I see you have an affinity for .44 magnum and .357 magnum ammunition and bullets in your table, while in reality they do not cause significantly different damage or trauma than a good 9mm +P or ++P hollow-point, or any 10mm, .40 cal, or .45 cal projectile from a modern handgun regardless of the location struck at least from my limited studies on police incidents.

I would love to be able to say "reality, schmeality, I'm just banding the objective numbers given by the execution of my computer model". But this would not be entirely true, because, yes, I did decide, when drawing the line between rating 5 and rating 4 that these were the two rounds that should get the dreaded 5. Probably I was influenced by watching "Dirty Harry" for the .44, and, for the .357, the recollection of a marvellously larger-than-life landlord of my favourite pub in Bedford, Vic Widdowson of the George and Dragon, who used to shoot .357 Magnum with extraordinry expertise. Objectively, the model I ran did not give enormous differences between the two Magnums (Magna?) and the best rounds in the next category down, but one has to draw the line somewhere, and these were the top two on model results.

Now, the model doesn't deal with the question of hollow-points, so rounds are scored solely on the basis of mass, calibre, and impact velocity. It would be nice to have a numerical model that showed the difference between the different patterns of wound tract that one sees with different projectiles, which might be characterised as:

High-velocity blunt fragment: Big hole initially, getting smaller.
Round-nosed non-expanding bullet: Small hole all the way through ("icepick").
Expanding bullet: Small hole initially, getting larger.
Tumbling bullet (spitzer): Small hole initially, large hole on tumbling, then small hole again with the bullet movng base-first.
Fragmenting bullet: Small hole spreading out into lots of other small holes, equivalent to a large hole.

As far as I have been able to ascertain from the unclassified literature, no such model exists; but if one could characterise the diameter of the wound tract with penetration depth, the Courtney & Courtney model could I think be modified to take this into account.

Jovian1 again:

This of course, applies only to the more modern bullets as the advances in ballistics on various cartridges over the past 15 years has been tremendous.

I always think that the advances in small-arms ammunition technology have been pretty negligible since about 1898, but this might be just another difference between "military" and "police" shooting.

Jovian1 again:

I like your approach, but I think that with most pistol rounds, you need to take care not to make two specific pistol cartridges the "holy grail" of handguns as they are far from perfect rounds in and of themselves (much harder to control from recoil, longer shot picture interruption, and less "time on target" with the muzzle).

I assure you, having had the bones in my right hand crushed by Vic Widdowson's handshake, I do not underestimate the formidable physical characteristics a shooter requires in order to be able to shoot .357 Magnum accurately. My model considered only what happens, in broad terms, when a bullet hits a human target. Getting the hit in the first place is another, and perhaps even more interesting, question. I've never seen wargames rules that allow for flinching in shooters who can't control their weapons properly, but this is a factor in both "military" and "police" shooting. When we did pokey-drill with our SLRs, it was to teach us to be strong little soldiers who could hold the weapon firm and tight and so not get the massive bruising of the shoulder that results if you don't. Looking at lots of the pics from Afghanistan, I'm sure lots of soldiers aren't holding their weapons properly, but with 5.56mm they can probably get away with it.

Jovian1 yet again, will the man never stop making pertinent comments:

One other suggestion, on Shotguns – if the range is under 10m, I would suggest the rating be bumped up 2 for the two shot categories because of the sheer number of hits which SHOULD occur at that close range. If the range is under 5m, damage is usually so catastrophic to the recipient in my experience that they are incapacitated or dead in virtually every case I've been involved in, or reviewed.

and Milites, also very much to the point:

Having looked at my fathers pictures of shotgun victims, OO buckshot at close range causes truly appalling injuries due to the mass of shot which has had little time to spread so the table should be amended.

See, the table reflects the results from the model -- for a single pellet impact. I would roll a separate result for each pellet impact. It's pretty easy to see, on these numbers, that only three or four hits from 00 buck would be very unlikely to leave the target capable of much. It would doubtless be interesting to consider the interaction of range and target difficulty (size and fleetingness) with choke, and so determine the number of hits; but I haven't attempted it yet.

Jovian1 again:

Then again, those were mainly homicide cases.

Yeah, well, you'd expect to be talking about dead people ;-)

Milites again:

I think Shin Beth picked the smaller round due to reduced signature when supressed, the lack of recoil allows good multiple round shot placement and finally ROF. I believe they also used explosive rounds to compensate for the smaller calibre, but most .22 I shot was hollow point, so it packs a punch.

My understanding is that the Shin Beth method involves getting multiple shooters really close, so that they can get nultiple head and body shots. The choice of an otherwise "feeble" calibre means that they minimise the collateral damage risk -- not just innocent bystanders, but with multiple shooters their own team-mates. El Al sky-marshalls also favour the calibre because the lack of over-penetration means you are unlikely to punch .25 holes in the pressurised fuselage of an airliner. I believe that US sky-marshalls prefer fragmenting ammunition for the same reason.

More form Milites:

I like the simplicity of the hit table, which also can be used to determine the effects of cover, without tedious modifiers being consulted. If the hit location is covered it means no damage unless the obstacle can be penetrated, woe betide the guy who hides behind a car door!

Another nice point about the payoffs between, say, hollow-points and jacketed rounds. A car door might make a frangible round frange quite harmlessly, but fail to stop an otherwise-less-damaging semi-jacketed bullet. There should be nicely gameable aspects in having players in a gunfight game choose between high incapacitation probability and good barrier penetration when choosing their handgun loads.

Milites again:

Is there any rule for aimed fire? Thinking of centre body mass, which would differentiate between professionals and amateurs.

What you see is all there is -- I didn't develop a whole set of rules, just ideas for modelling the effect of a single bullet hit. I would think it necessary to have some rule like this to deal with close-range shotgun hits, where one would expect all the pellets to strike the same, or adjacent, body-parts.

That apart, I think we're once more looking at a difference between "military" and "police" shooting. The military always teach riflemen to aim centre mass, as any hit is a good hit, and combat experience tends to show that hits are distributed pretty uniformly over the body, but the rozzers might get into refinements like the Cincinatti double-tap (two in the chest, two in the head, in case he's wearing body armour). For the sake of a rule, I'd suggest that when a suitably-qualified marksman scores a hit under favourable circumstances, roll 2d6 for hit location, and the shooter gets to pick the location he wants.

The GURPS mechanic for choosing target is pretty reasonable.
You get a minus to hit, except body.
A highly proficient shooter aiming at the body from short range would probably end up with no effective minus as only critical miss would actually miss.
A highly proficient marksman at close range shooting a snap shot at close range at someone's head would still be pretty likely to hit but still have some motive to go for a body shot.
Bad shooters are always best just concentrating on hitting.

GURPS has a 3d6 hit location for shooting.
Like this
link

or
link

I was struck by the WW2 table of hits percentage by location and am curious ofthe source. From my own experience (ex-RAMC field hospital), the figures seem improbably weighted to the head. Is out possible these have come from wounding figures and fail to include his that delivered lethal effects?

Also, I can't help feeling that the hit location should outer at least some debt to the skill of the shooter and not be left entirely to chance.

I'm working on a rules-set for near future urban warfare at the moment that abstracts hit location to lethal, potentially-lethal and non-lethal hits as,.again, my own experience suggests that a bad hit to the arm will make a soldier pretty much as useless in a fight as one to the leg or torso. Bleeding out and in agony looks pretty much the same no matter where the blood is coming from (especially when you remember the human body's capacity to contain internal bleeding).

precintomega wrote:

I was struck by the WW2 table of hits percentage by location and am curious ofthe source. From my own experience (ex-RAMC field hospital), the figures seem improbably weighted to the head. Is out possible these have come from wounding figures and fail to include his that delivered lethal effects?

I got those figures, as stated, from Kneubeuhl et al's "Wound Ballistics", but the source they quote (which I have not seen) is G W Beebe and M B deBakey, "Battle Casualties", C C Thomas, Springfield IL, 1952.

The sort of survivor bias you mention would surely have produced a weighting against head hits, rather than in its favour. I imagine that head hits would be more likely overall that the presented area of the head would suggest because it may be in some situations the only body part exposed outside cover, whereas one is unlikely to expose just an arm or a leg unless deliberately seeking a "blighty wound".

Also, I can't help feeling that the hit location should outer at least some debt to the skill of the shooter and not be left entirely to chance.

Given the number of bullets required to secure a single hit in all military and much police shooting, I think that sort of thing should be limited to very expert shooters in very calm circumstances, or calm shooters at extremely close (arm's length) ranges. There's a reason practically everyone is trained to aim centre mass.

I'm working on a rules-set for near future urban warfare at the moment that abstracts hit location to lethal, potentially-lethal and non-lethal hits as,.again, my own experience suggests that a bad hit to the arm will make a soldier pretty much as useless in a fight as one to the leg or torso.

I think that depends on the mental state of the soldier. There are plenty of incidents from medal citations and police shooting records that show cases of individuals carrying on after multiple hits; I can think of two VCs won by British anti-tank gunners who continued to fight their guns after having an arm shot off.

Hatcher used to identify three different mental states that would affect how easily-to-incapacitate a person might be. One might call these "bystander", "fighter" and "fanatic", and I suspect they might correlate quite well with the colour-coded mental states Grossman uses. In the case of someone bimbling along with mind in neutral, any hit may well be a promptly incapacitating hit, as they were'nt planning on being in a gunfight in the first place. Someone more mentally prepared for a fight might be able to carry on for a while after wounding if absolutely necessary, but would more logically expect to stay under cover until treated and evacuated. The rotating-eyeball fanatic, however, under the influence of drugs, religion, adrenaline or suicidal despair, will continue to fight until rendered physically incapable of doing so.

Bleeding out and in agony looks pretty much the same no matter where the blood is coming from (especially when you remember the human body's capacity to contain internal bleeding).

This is true, but I have not discussed lethality anywhere; the entire piece was about prompt incapacitation, since that's what the blokes in the firefight care about. Whether the target dies is obviously not entirely independent of incapacitation, but it is possible for a person with lethal injuries to continue to fight for some time, just as it is possible for someone to be promptly incapacitated by injuries that are not life-threatening or even permanently disabling.

I have not been able to find any good numerical models of bullet lethality, but at some point I should probably try to study the differences between Kokinakis and Sperrazza's "30-second" and "5-minute" criteria, which at least might give some clue as to the progression of incapacitation over time.

I think it would add to a skirmish game to include the application of first aid, and the aim of both first field dressings and products like Quik-Clot is to prevent bleeding -- there's not much else, apart from clearing the airway, one would normally expect a first-aider to do in combat.

Do let us know how your rules work out -- and I'd be especially interested if you discover any numerical data on which to base the lethality mechanisms.

All the best,

John.

John,

I always enjoy and admire your TMP posts (and I used to be a subscriber to THE NUGGET, too).
Are you familiar with Michael Korns' 1966 MODERN WAR IN MINIATURE and, from a few years later, his WWII rules called SUTC? MWIM has a a lot of data and references and had a section in the back showing how it might be used as a game. SUTC was his WWII rules set based upon the MWIM data.
He had some data and some game mechanics dealing with your subject, if I remember correctly.
SUTC was a seminal influence for me in my early wargaming days, and I am always glad to share it and give Korns the credit I think he deserves. If you are unfamiliar with it and would like to see it in PDF, contact me at nedz AT mindspring DOT com (substituting @ for AT and . for DOT of course), and I will send it to you.
– Ned Zuparko
Los Gatos, California USA

Ned and I--with several others-used to play SUTC--a double blind skirmish game--that, for instance, had hit locations by percentage very close to the chart John posted re hits by percentage of body--
Caution--the gamers will not find the masses of charts or modifiers that every recent skirmish game has--and this is to the good as those recent games, with their charts and modifiers drag the game down
Our goal in SUTC was only partially about doing the most "professional" game--who cared that Korns' weapons stats were off or strange (gee, only 15 or so shots for a MG34 in a 30 second turn--or only one hand grenade toss--and nothing about the time it takes to dig a foxhole or cutting wire--we let the umpire figure this--I include stray farm animals (yep, they shoot at cows also) and have included a "suspected target" rule not to mention grenade duds and other--nut not very much else
The thrust of these type of umpired games is not about the percentages of kills or hits on parts of the anatomy--it is about the player's ability (or lack ) to make decisions on the empty battlefield--some gamers hide through the game fearing the worst--well, they can't lean on the usual of seeing the other figures (the usual that you can see them but cannot yet spot them) In a word, if you turn right at the wrong time--well goodnight--and as this is a role playing game, well the usual "Mr Rico, Mr Rico, there's a million of them" is part of the "intelligence" you will get--and they will shoot at each other
I shot my own Reich Marshal in a certain game and did not make it under the wire into Switzerland