A Zombie's History of the United States

by Worm Miller

  Alan eventually came up with the twisted but ingenious idea of sending captured zombinated German soldiers back toward the German lines. Seeing the Nazi uniforms, the zombies were allowed to approach until they were close enough that it was too late. German officers, interviewed after the end of the war, spoke about instances where their men had become so paranoid about these zombie decoys that several human German soldiers were accidentally shot when attempting to rejoin their companies. The Nazis were the first Germans to fight zombies since the Hessians, who were employed by King George III during the Revolutionary War.

  Somewhat ironically, but not surprisingly, Alan eventually died at the hands of one of his Berserks while trying to affix a bomb to the creature. When the zombie bit Alan, a fellow officer offered to shoot Alan before the zombination occurred, but Alan declined. He requested that once zombinated, he be added to the ranks of the Berserker Corps. His wish was granted. No records were kept of the individual Berserks, but some have said that zombie Alan was part of the horde that was dropped behind the German defenses on Normandy beaches during Operation Overlord (or D-Day).

  Zombie American Heroes

  I don’t give a damn if they were living, undead, or

  something else…every man who set foot on Omaha

  Beach was a hero.

  —Lt. Gen. Omar Bradley, Commander of the U.S. First Army, 1948

  On September 19, 1944, Pvt. “Bullet Proof ” Waldo Barks, a member of the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment working to take the Nijmegen bridge, in the Netherlands, as part of Operation Market Garden (one of the Allies most famous failures), was found limp on the ground after being hit by a German mortar shell. Barks had earned his nickname due to his amazing ability to dodge enemy fire, but it seemed he was not fast enough to escape this time. Unable to find a heartbeat, the army medic attending to Barks was shocked to discover that Barks’s torso was riddled with what looked like bullet holes, yet Barks hadn’t been shot at Nijmegen and none of the wounds were bleeding. He was even more shocked when eventually Barks sat up, apparently having just been knocked out by the explosion’s shock wave. At this point the jig was up: Barks was a Carrie.

  Waldo Barks was a construction worker from Sacramento, California, who found himself a hybrid after being bitten in a barroom brawl. Desperate to serve his country, he knew he could never pass the physical, so he bribed his examining doctor with $300. He never hurt a member of his own regiment, fighting off his need to feed by stealing blood bags from the medics, and later eating a couple of German prisoners.

  Barks’s situation was not totally uncommon. Most hybrids viewed themselves as patriotic Americans, and many found their way into service either through bribery or lax examination practices. Some recruiters even took what could be called a “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach. If they could control their hunger, hybrids made the ideal soldiers. In fact, four different hybrids were able to conceal their nature long enough to receive the military’s highest decoration, the Medal of Honor. Until now, the full truth behind their achievements has gone untold.

  Sgt. Adam Ludsen

  October 1, 1944. When Sgt. Ludsen’s company was attempting to reopen supply lines through the Mortagne Forest near St. Die, France, they were greeted by German machine-gun fire. Three of Ludsen’s men were killed and six more wounded. Despite the intense machine-gun fire, Ludsen made a solo charge on the nearest German machine-gun, unstopped even after a grenade blew off his left hand. Ludsen killed the gunner and then without hesitation charged into the vortex of enemy fire and stormed another machine gun, again killing the gunner and forcing the surrender of a supporting infantryman.

  The remainder of the German group then concentrated its full force in a desperate effort to kill the seemingly unkillable Ludsen, who proceeded through the woods to find and exterminate five more Germans. Finally, when Ludsen stormed a third machine gun, the remaining German force surrendered, terrified of Ludsen. All told, Ludsen killed nine Germans, removed a specialized German force from the Mortagne Forest, and reopened the supply line.

  Cpl. Anthony Risto

  February 19, 1945. On the first day of the Battle of Iwo Jima, Cpl. Risto, armed with a homemade .50 caliber machine gun, charged right into the thickest parts of the fray in a drive across the narrowest part of the island, in order to cut off Mount Suribachi. A fellow soldier later recalled:He stood bolt-upright to draw enemy fire to him and away from those of us who were pinned down, and so he could see the smoke of enemy machine guns and tell where they was. Then he was off following, not fleeing, the gunfire all around him, disappearing and reappearing in mortar explosions, sprinting and firing at the Japs face to face. He killed 20 Japs before he ran out of ammo. Then he took off his helmet and boots; said they was slowing him down. He ran back down to the beach to rearm, then ran back and did the same thing all over again. He did this 8 times, and on every trip back to the beach, he picked up a wounded man and carried him on his shoulders.

  Risto destroyed fifteen enemy installations on the first day of action and killed anywhere from forty to sixty Japanese soldiers single-handedly. Joe Rosenthal, who took the iconic flag-raising picture atop Mount Suribachi, said of Risto, “Running through bullets and not getting hit is like running through rain and not getting wet!” But just like Waldo Barks, two weeks later when Risto was terminated by a sniper bullet to the head during a scouting mission, it was discovered that his body was riddled with bullet holes. In keeping with Rosenthal’s analogy, he did indeed get wet.

  1st Lt. Nathan Morales

  December 27, 1944. While leading his platoon in a savage house-to-house fight through the fortress town of Sigolsheim, France, Morales was hit with a mortar shell, which shredded his left arm and shoulder and destroyed his rifle. He charged alone into the house from which the fire came and killed its two defenders with his knife and teeth. Then he continued leading his platoon in the extremely dangerous task of clearing hostile troops from strong points along the street until he reached a building held by fanatical German troops.

  He charged through a hail of direct fire and jumped through a closed window, his body breaking the glass. A frenzied battle ensued, in which Morales killed six more men and had his gut split open by a German’s sword. When Morales calmly grabbed his intestines and tied them around his own waist so that he wouldn’t trip on them, the remaining German soldiers surrendered, in utter terror.

  Morales and his men cracked the core of enemy resistance in a vital area, but he was relieved of duty now that his men feared serving with him. Morales was relocated to Project Phantom’s Berserker Corps where he fought valiantly on Betio Island until the Berserks accidentally turned on Allied forces and U.S. soldiers began de-animating them. Morales was lost in the crowd, so to speak, and tragically got a bullet to the brain like all the rest.

  Lt. Audie L. Murphy

  Standing at only 5 feet 5 inches tall and weighing 110 pounds at his time of enlistment, Murphy was likely World War II’s most famous soldier, earning every major combat award the military has to offer, and later becoming a minor motion picture star.

  On August 15, 1944, in Southern France, after a German sniper killed Murphy’s best-friend Lattie Tipton—who Murphy later revealed was himself a hybrid—Murphy charged the machine gun nest where the sniper was hidden and killed six men. Then he picked up the nest’s MG-42 and proceeded to kill ten more German soldiers nearby. For this feat he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.

  Then on January 26, 1945, Murphy earned his Medal of Honor in Holtzwihr, France, when he ordered his men to retreat as Germans swarmed the town. Murphy stayed behind and shot the Germans as they emerged from the woods to cross a clearing, until he ran out of ammunition. He then climbed onto a burning tank destroyer and used its machine gun to continue his one-man assault as the German Panzers and mortars exploded the ground around him. He also began calling in air strikes, giving coordinates closer and closer to himself, until he finally called a strike on his exact position.
When the confused man on the other end noted, “That’s right on top of you! How close are they!?” Murphy responded, “Hold the phone! I’ll let you talk to them!” as he jumped from the vehicle and ran into the woods while the ground erupted behind him.

  The U.S. military estimates that Murphy killed fifty Germans that day. He, of course, declined medical attention afterward, claiming there wasn’t a nick on him. Many military higher-ups were aware that Murphy was a hybrid but looked the other way. Murphy had become a valuable symbol and promotional tool. His book To Hell and Back—which became a best seller—originally revealed to the world that Murphy was a Carrie, but his publisher convinced him to omit the information. Murphy married actress Wanda Hendrix in 1949, but she supposedly divorced him upon learning he was a hybrid.

  Battle of Ramree Island

  I never heard so many men screaming at once.

  —Anonymous soldier, about Battle of Ramree Island, 1945

  In January 1945, a company of zombie Berserks were dispatched to assist the British Indian Army and the Royal Navy in Operation Mastodon, an amphibious assault to capture the strategic port of Kyaukpyu, located at the northern tip of Ramree Island, which lies off the coast of Burma (officially the Republic of the Union of Myanmar).

  The British had been resistant about embracing the Berserks, but the United States had been having such great success utilizing the zombies on Japanese occupied islands (zombies were especially useful when released into the labyrinthine tunnels the Japanese had constructed on many islands), that British command specifically asked for the Berserks.

  On January 21, the battleship HMS Queen Elizabeth opened fire with her main battery on Kyaukpyu, joined by the light cruiser HMS Phoebe, while planes from the escort carrier HMS Ameer strafed the beaches. An hour later the 71st Indian Infantry Brigade landed unopposed and secured the beachhead, but the Japanese garrison put up tenacious resistance, holding them to the beach. When the 36th Indian Infantry Brigade landed, with Royal Air Force and Royal Marine units, the Marines outflanked the Japanese stronghold and the nine hundred defenders abandoned their base and fled to join a larger battalion of Japanese soldiers on the other side of the island.

  The route forced the Japanese to cross nine miles of mangrove swamps, and as they struggled through the thick forests, the British forces encircled the area of the swamp-land. Repeated calls were made for the Japanese to surrender, but the Japanese held their ground. Unwilling to risk British lives by entering the swamp and pursuing the Japanese, the Berserks were eventually dispatched during the cover of night, dropped from a plane in large crates, which burst open upon hitting the ground. One British soldier recalled years later: That night was the most horrible that I ever experienced. The scattered and muffled rifle shots in the pitch black swamp punctuated by the screams of wounded Japs being torn apart by the Yank beasts made a cacophony of hell that I never heard likes of before. Or after. At dawn the vultures arrived to clean up what the Berserks had left. Of about 1,000 Jap soldiers that went in the swamps, only 20 were found alive.

  These numbers are not necessarily accurate. Though only twenty Japanese soldiers were eventually captured, many more very likely escaped the blockade unharmed. Though even at half that estimate, the number of zombie-caused casualties still makes the Ramree Island incident the worst zombie-inflicted single-day massacre in history (compare it to the scant 189 humans that died at the Alamo).

  Invasion of Japan

  If forced to I will gladly turn Japan into an entire nation of zombies.

  —Gen. Douglas MacArthur, 1945

  By May 1945, Hitler was dead and Germany had surrendered, yet the war still raged on for America in the Pacific Theater. The Imperial Japanese Navy’s capabilities were all but crippled, yet the empire showed no signs of giving up; they were in this until the bitter end.

  An outright invasion of Japan was looking to be a necessary reality, and it would be no small task. Comprising two separate parts, Operation Olympic and Operation Coronet, Operation Downfall was set to begin in October 1945, with Olympic intended to capture Kyushu, the southernmost main island of Japan. Japan made a foreboding target, both physically and psychologically. Physically, there were few beaches suitable for an invasion, Kyushu being the best of the extremely limited options. The Japanese were well aware of this too, which meant Kyushu’s beach would be heavily defended. Psychologically, it was impossible to guess how the Japanese citizens would react. The German people had grown weary from the war, ready for it to end long before it officially did. The Japanese were cut from a different cloth. Even if the Japanese military were soundly defeated, the Allies knew there was a very plausible chance that fanatical Japanese citizens would rise against them as well. Hitler had merely been a powerful demagogue to the Germans, but Emperor Hirohito was an arahitogami, a divine being.

  Operation Overlord, which began with the famous Normandy beach landings and spanned three months in 1944, had 210,000 casualties, 125,847 of those American. The casualty prognostications for Operation Downfall were jaw dropping. For just Operation Olympic, the most optimistic estimates put the American casualty toll at around 30,000, with the less optimistic estimates going upward of 450,000. If Operation Coronet were to last weeks after that, the Joint Chiefs of Staff estimated that the total combined casualties could reach an almost inconceivable 1.2 million. These were not numbers Gen. Eisenhower or President Harry Truman found acceptable. So, with orders from on high, Gen. George Marshall—future winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for his European reconstruction intuitive, the Marshall Plan—began looking into the tactical use of a new ultra-top-secret weapon: the Death’s Head.

  The Death’s Head was an untested bomb designed by Project Phantom’s Dr. Neil Moore, which, if dropped into a heavily populated area, could hypothetically zombinate thousands of people simultaneously. Affectionately known as the “Bombie,” the Death’s Head worked by dispersing a concentrated cloud of the zombie contagion into the air upon impact. In theory, the concentrated contagion would not need to enter a wound, but could simply be absorbed by any exposed skin. Death’s Head quite clearly was biological warfare, and thus was strictly prohibited by the Geneva Protocol (a 1925 treaty prohibiting the use of chemical or biological weapons during war). Conveniently, though, both Japan and the United States had failed to sign the Geneva Protocol.

  Death’s Head bombings were planned for four major Japanese cities, including Tokyo. If Japan had been exposed to that magnitude of zombination, zombism would surely have spread to the Asian mainland during the ensuing panic, and to a wildly unprepared human population. It would have been an outbreak the likes of which history has never seen. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed. For those who decried President Truman’s authorization of the atom bomb, it may have been some consolation to know how much worse things could have been.

  The atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, preventing the need of Operation Downfall or of the Death’s Head. The long war was finally over. The brave soldiers could finally come home and receive their hero’s welcome…the human soldiers that is. Despite all the sacrifices they made, hybrids were forced back into hiding. They at least fared better than the Berserker Corps. With Col. Howard Alan gone, the Berserks lost their guardian. Gen. Eisenhower ordered the entire Berserker Corps de-animated and Project Phantom closed.

  Excerpts from Felix De Waldon’s personal sketchbook, 1947. Compositional studies for a proposed memorial to the WWII Berserker Corps. Conceived in the wake of his successful sculptural depiction of Rosenthal’s iconic Iwo Jima flag-raising photograph, now known as the Marine Corp War Memorial. This lifesize sculpture was to have been installed on the grounds of Arlington National Cemetery.

  Unfortunately, it was not the last we would see of weaponized zombies.

  NINE

  The Dead Menace ZOMBIES DURING THE COLD WAR ERA

  He who trusts in the zombie bomb will sooner or later perish by the zombie bomb or something worse.

&nbs
p; —Henry A. Wallace, 33rd Vice President of the United States, 1949

  During the restructuring of Europe following the end of World War II, a division arose between the Soviet Union and the other Allies. The USSR, it turned out, was not eager to give back the territories that it had spent twenty million soldiers to acquire, and the Allies were, of course, not eager for the Soviets to keep them. Moving unilaterally, the USSR annexed many of the Eastern European countries it occupied, converting them into Soviet Socialist Republics while maintaining the remaining nations as satellite states. The Eastern Bloc was born and the Cold War began.

  The USSR and the United States, the two most powerful countries in the world, were now pitted against each other in an epic stalemate that would abstractly lead to several military conflicts, including two major American wars, and an apocalyptic arms race that would keep the entire world nervously holding its breath for four decades. The Soviets were the perfect enemy for postwar America. Our fear pushed us to extremes, good and bad: leaping forward triumphantly to new heights in scientific achievement, while also leaping backward shamefully to familiar lows in paranoia and irrational persecution of our own citizens.

  Socially the era was a spectrum of both prosperity and turmoil for America, as the rose-colored idealism of the 1950s gave way to the counterculture and civil rights movements in the 1960s. The country was being cleaved in two. The melting pot was finally boiling over. Long-festering issues came clashing together, each demanding action and attention—issues of race, gender, fringe politics, sexual orientation, and yes…