Monday 30 July 2018

War Brings Out The Best And Worst,

as well as cunning and ingenuity,


to both sides of the conflict, I was reading about different tactics used to even the odds over the weekend, one committed by us, the British, caught my attention, we deliberately gave heroin to the enemy to make a planned attack go rather well, it happened like this, during the Palestinian Campaign of WWI (1917), the British were in their trenches and the Ottomans were in theirs, but there was little movement, the British learned that the opposing Turks had run out of cigarettes, so the intelligence service of the British Army came up with the idea of throwing cigarettes to the Turks, but they would wrap the packs in paper with slogans encouraging the Ottomans to stop fighting, this didn't work; the Turks would throw the slogans away and enjoy the cigarettes, shortly before a raid was scheduled, the British changed tactics a bit, the cigarettes they threw over the top still had slogans on them, but they also had the added benefit of being heavily laced with heroin, by the time the raid started, the British met essentially no opposition, and yes we really did, you can read more about other tactics used in other conflicts here, there is one thing about this story that I however have not been able to confirm, that is after the war all packets of Turkish cigarettes had a warning printed on them, 'Smoking Kills'.


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