Archaic Weapon For An Advanced Age / Real Life

• At first glance the use of biplanes in World War II. However, it should be remembered that most of these would only have been out of date by a few years; for instance, it was only in 1937 that the German Luftwaffe started to replace its biplane fighters (Heinkel He 51 and Arado Ar 68) with Messerschmitt Bf 109 monoplanes. And in the combat environments of the first years of the war, many biplanes could still find an "ecological niche", for instance by flying at night, especially before aircraft-mounted radar became available in sufficient numbers. Some specific examples:
  • Owing to short-sighted defense cuts between the wars, the Royal Navy entered WWII with biplane fighters and bombers to equip its aircraft carriers. Yet the Fairey Swordfish managed to catch most of the Italian Navy in its homeport of Taranto, causing widespread destruction in a night attack the Japanese studied and emulated at Pearl Harbor. A year or so later, it was a carrier-launched Fairey Swordfish biplane that fired the torpedo that crippled the Bismarck, leaving Germany's most modern battleship wide open for the surface fleet to catch up with her. The fact that the German Navy did not finish building any aircraft carriers, thereby allowing British aircraft to operate in the North Atlantic with impunity, obviously was a major factor that enabled the Swordfish to continue to be used in frontline combat missions as long as it did. The last one was built in August 1944! The Swordfish also proved ideal for anti-submarine warfare, as its slow speed gave it good endurance and allowed it to land on the decks of even the smallest escort carriers, something that many of the larger and more advanced bombers could not do.
  • For similar reasons, units like the 588th Night Bomber Regiment (Night Witches) in the Soviet Union could use interwar-era Polikarpov Po-2 biplanes. Though hopelessly obsolete compared to Messerschmitts or even the aforementioned Swordfish, these planes proved to be tremendously maneuverable and capable of extended unpowered gliding, permitting them to approach German positions without any noise beyond the wind in the wings; their low top speed, below the stall speed of German fighters, made them exceptionally difficult to intercept in the air; and their simple but sturdy construction made them exceptionally durable and resilient under enemy fire. Their nightly harassment thus caused the German invaders no end of grief and led to a psychological and morale impact on the Wehrmacht far out of proportion to the actual material losses inflicted. They proved their effectiveness as night bombers again in the Korean War, where the wooden airframe of the "Bedcheck Charlie" gave the venerable biplane another significant advantage in modern warfare - a negligible radar cross-section that made detection no easier than it had been for the Germans, in spite of now-ubiquitous radar systems.
  • Enjoying near-complete daylight air superiority during the first campaigns of the war, the Luftwaffe was able to continue using Henschel Hs 123 biplane dive-bombers as ground-attack aircraft. This type had gone out of production in 1937, but on the Eastern front continued to see active service until 1944.
  • Due to isolationism's effect on American rearmament, front-line US Navy units used biplanes such as the Grumman F3F and the Curtiss SBC Helldiver as late as 1941. Meanwhile, in the Philippine Islands, some of the American and Filipino defenders flew Boeing P-26 Peashooters, with their wire wing braces, fixed landing gear, and open cockpits, against the attacking Japanese forces. Despite their obsolescence, they achieved several victories against Japanese bombers and fighters in the first few weeks of the war.
  • The Royal Italian Air Force's main fighter at the start of the war was another biplane, the Fiat CR.42 Falco (Hawk). This time it was not due to cost considerations (and in fact, it started production in 1939!), but because the brass considered the maneuverability inherent to biplanes a better advantage than the speed and heavier armament of the monoplanes being introduced by the air forces of France, Britain, and Germany at the time. It enjoyed some successes against RAF Hurricanes and Spitfires whenever these were stupid enough to enter into a maneuvered combat, but they truly shone in the hands of the Royal Hungarian Air Force, that deployed them against the Soviets in general and the aforementioned Po-2 in particular, where the Falco's high maneuverability and low low speed allowed it to intercept the Po-2 where more modern designs failed miserably.
  • Being up mainly against the CR.42 and various other maneuverable but slow and undergunned Italian fighters, the British Royal Air Force and Fleet Air Arm could continue to use the Gloster Gladiator biplane fighter in North Africa and the defense of Malta until 1941.
  • When the Second Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1937, the Chinese air force was made up of various biplanes, most prominently the Curtiss Model 68 Hawk III. Although it was outclassed by Japan's Mitsubishi A5M carrier fighter, it was fast and well-armed enough to deal heavy damage to ground and naval targets. Even when China received stronger and faster Polikarpov I-16s from the Soviet Union, nine survived to be used as night fighters in 1940 to defend the wartime capital of Chongqing from Japanese bombers.
• Examples from other fields in World War II:
  • Both Great Britain and the Soviet Union had obsolete heavy machine guns left over from World War I. The Russian Maxim and the British Vickers were effectively the same weapon, but one which required two or three men to transport, emplace and fire. It was also water-cooled, so if no water was available the weapon would overheat and become unworkable.^note  Some second-line German units also continued to use pre-1935 vintage MG08 and MG08/15 guns, which as the model numbers indicate, had first been introduced in 1908 and been modified as a lighter gun in 1915. The German MG42 was air-cooled, had a faster rate of fire, could be emplaced in seconds as opposed to fifteen minutes, and used by one man. Both Britain and Russia eventually hit on massing these weapons together to minimize these weaknesses and to provide saturation firepower, effectively using them almost as emplaced artillery and not as tactical infantry MG. British machine-gun battalions proved destructively efficient in Italy, where multiples of 64 Vickers MGs fired together at one section of German front to soften it up for an attack, allowing the attacking infantry to get as close as they could whilst returning fire was suppressed.
  • Close combat in the Burmese jungle often pitted Japanese officers and noncoms armed with swords against machete-armed British soldiers. Or kukri-armed Gurkhas. Or Sikhs with the traditional tulwar sword. Or African troops with native swords from Nigeria, Kenya, etc. Bladed weapons could be silent, deadly, and ultra-effective in close quarters jungle fighting and ambushes, and sword fighting in combat happened even in 1942-45. Also, tribal units and natives fighting alongside British Fourteenth Army and on Borneo used native weapons, such as blowpipes and bows and arrow, to deadly effect in close-quarters jungle fighting.
  • And narrowly averted with Croft's Pikes. Due to a bit of Winston Churchill's hyperbole being taken at face value, the War Office ordered the production of 250,000 steel pikes for the Home Guard. This understandably caused quite a fuss (and did no small degree of harm to the morale of the Home Guard troops), and the weapons were never issued as a result. The whole thing is named for Under-secretary of State for War Henry Page Croft, who tried to defend the decision due to the pike being "a most effective and silent weapon".
  • The Junkers Ju 86 slow medium bomber had been phased out by the Luftwaffe before the war even began, but it then was possible to use it in a reconnaissance role by adding a pressure cabin. These planes then operated at heights that could not be reached by anti-aircraft guns and British fighters. The RAF in North Africa eventually tackled the problem by adapting some Spitfires for high-altitude work, among other things by reducing the armament from eight machine guns to two, and taking the fight directly to the Junkers pilots.
  • Often overlooked is the role actual horse-mounted cavalry played in the war. While dominated by mechanized units, cavalry was still widely used, mostly in the Polish, Balkan and Soviet campaigns (contrary to popular myth, the Poles did not charge tanks on horseback). Horses had the advantage of being able to navigate terrain that bogged down tanks and were not dependent on fuel. Or rather, the fuel they depended on was of the type that grows out of the ground everywhere in Europe. One of the last battles of the European war was comprised of a successful cavalry charge against an enemy that failed to account for them.
  • Chinese warlords often had to carry a sword and obsolete firearms as modern weapons weren't readily available for them.
  • British Army officer Jack Churchill (of no known relation to Winston Spencer Churchill) famously fought with an English longbow and a claymore, reportedly claiming a kill with the former of a German sergeant whose last thoughts were probably something along the lines of "what the Precision F-Strike?". His motto made this even more clear:
  "Any officer who goes into action without his sword is improperly dressed."
• Much fighting in World War I took the form of "trench raids", where soldiers would scramble out of a trench, sprint across the open ground, and drop into an enemy trench. Rifles were cumbersome in the narrow, zig-zagging trenches, and combat was typically at very close quarters. Pistols had limited stopping power and attracted reinforcements by their noise, and any mechanical device was subject to malfunction in the ever-present dirt and muck. Soldiers rapidly discovered that knives, clubs, and other simple melee weapons were frequently the best choices. The classic 1918 trench knife, with its signature brass-knuckles handle, was born in this environment, and the humble shovel (which everyone had with him anyway) rapidly became a favorite as an improvised axe. To this day entrenching tools are often specifically designed to have one edge sharpened for use as a weapon.
• Many people live in places where guns are banned, culturally frowned-upon, or hard to obtain without dealing with the very same dangerous characters one is hoping to avoid. In such places, archaic or improvised weapons often become the best option for those seeking to avoid both victimization and prison. Some examples include sturdy flashlights, pens, canes, socks full of coins, small utility knives, and many others - including the inevitable Torches and Pitchforks.
• Modern armies still train in the use of hand-to-hand combat, including bayonet usage. Being able to fight effectively in situations where your primary weapon is inoperable or impractical is a useful ability, though the training is usually considered more for building confidence, aggression, and physical conditioning. That said, they have proven decisive in a few battles as recently as The War on Terror: in 2004 elements of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders launched a bayonet charge against Mahdi Army insurgents in Amarah, Iraq, killing 28, and in 2011 the Prince of Wales Royal Regiment's LCPL. Sean Jones earned the Military Cross for leading his bayonet-wielding squad into Taliban machine-gun fire in Helmand Province, Afghanistan.
  • Firearms author Ian V. Hogg noted that despite all the bravado about going in with the bayonet, soldiers would often prefer to throw rocks at each other, something he witnessed personally during the Korean War. A literal Stone Age weapon!^note If somebody throws a small fist-sized rock at you on a battlefield, your first thought will not be "rock", it's going to be "hand-grenade". Therefore you'll get out of its way and expose yourself to more potent weapons.
• Pikes came briefly back into use before and during the American Civil War. John Brown's raid on Harpers' Ferry on October 16-18, 1859 had some of his supporters armed with pikes. In 1862, governor Joe Brown of Georgia ordered 10,000 pikes from the state's mechanics, recognizing that there were not enough guns and ammunition to arm the populace: "The short-range pike and terrible knife, when brought within their proper range, (as they can be almost in a moment) and wielded by a stalwart patriot’s arm, never fail to fire and never waste a single load.” Admittedly their actual distribution and effectiveness was very limited, but it just goes to show that desperation causes people to fall back on old technologies.
• The sword still saw plenty of use, at least for cavalry and officers, well into the 19th century, as did the lance. When most firearms were single-shot, mechanically unreliable, and/or difficult to reload, it was helpful to have a weapon that didn't jam or run out of bullets. Of particular note were the llaneros of southern Venezuela and southeastern New Granada (modern Colombia) during the Spanish American Wars of Independence; the llanero cowboy cavalry fought with fire-hardened wooden lances as their primary weapon and machetes as their sidearms, with no firearms at all. They were so effective that at any given point in the Venezuelan theatre of the war, you can determine which side is winning by looking at whose side the llaneros are on this time. This in the 1810s. After the American Civil War, Frederick Whittaker, a volunteer cavalry officer, stated that in every instance he was aware of, "during the entire course of the war", when cavalry armed with sabres charged against cavalry armed with pistols, the cavalry armed with sabres always won. And this is in the American military, which was notably anti-sword compared to most european militaries.This era ended around the world wars, however; horse cavalry with swords and lances were generally considered obsolete by early WWI (although the Battle of Megido in 1918 was decided by an improvised Canadian cavalry charge)^note Swords, at least, were mostly lost because, in an infantry regiment, they very clearly marked someone as an officer, which made them an easy target for snipers, and swords saw little use in WWII — although the Poles in the early war, and the Germans and Russians down to the end, used rifle-armed cavalry to very good effect. And there was also that one guy with a longbow and a basket-hilted broadsword.
• Interestingly, a British armoured regiment, one that had begun as a cavalry unit, reintroduced locally-procured horses during peace-keeping duties in the former Yugoslavia in The '90s. The reasoning was that horsed cavalry could go where motor vehicles could not, and were ideal for communications with and resupply to outlying patrol outposts, often high on inacessible hillsides, None of this repurposed British cavalry saw combat, however.
• Tomahawks have been used intermittently by American troops since the Revolutionary War. This makes a lot of sense, as a good hatchet has plenty of uses as a utility tool as well as a weapon. They took on particular significance in the urban counterinsurgency operations of The War on Terror, with close-quarters fighting that also involves a lot of breaking of windows and breaching of doors.
• A lot of riot control tactics and equipment are essentially nonlethal versions of medieval European warfare. For starters, their basic equipment is armor and a shield. The tactics are downright ancient, as modern riot control tactics center around a less-organized version of Roman shield-walls. Watch a riot squad deploy in the 'four forward, four up' shield arrangement and it looks like a tiny testudo formation.
• Many American states have separate hunting seasons for "primitive weapons" such as black-powder firearms, keeping rifled muskets popular with hunters who wish to extend their season. Gun manufacturers have even produced modern high-performance hunting rifles that are loaded from the front in order to allow them to be used in "primitive" weapon hunting seasons.