What did survival gear look like for soliders not engaging enemy

[charwo]

I've got an idea about using single use soldiers to drop bombs from hang gliders. But this is not about that per se. I was thinking such solider would have one payload to drop, then either surrender upon landing or try and escape into the woods. They are not to ever engage the enemy or practice any for of tactics, just surrender or disappear into the bush until advancing forces can rescue them. If that's the case, what WWII survival gear would a soldier need to be able to hoof it for a couple of days a week or two at most. Like food rations, a filtering canteen and maybe a ground mat to sleep in? Maybe some medicine, maybe stimulants to book it better? And are there records of how much this kind of survival gear would weigh?

[Wat Tyler]

I would assume in this scenerio weight would be an issue so trying to carry as little as possible would make sense. While I'm not sure the hang glider idea is a starter really but perhaps one thing you could do is to cut up the glider after landing to use as a shelter or groundsheet. With regards to food there were lifeboat rations that could be consumed without any form of heating and could contain a number of items from simple barley sugar sweets , malted milk tablets , biscuits or pemican.
This site gives an insite and there are a number of threads that might help,

https://www.mreinfo.com/forums/viewtopi ... at+rations
https://www.mreinfo.com/forums/viewtopi ... ations+ww2

[charwo]

Well thank you! I didn't know that pemmican was being made industrially. Makes me wonder about military rations. Even Napoleon commissioning canned rations. If Pemmican wasn't a lost art, why not just have a standard field ration of hardtack and Pemmican for the last 200 years? It's not that pemmican can last forever as the first video shows, but that and hardtack store for so long there's very little need for ramp up and ramp down, you can keep a constant trickle of production over a decade or more to control costs.

But I definitely see your point about it not being super viable. This is OSS nonsense that would not get any volunteers on the German side either in Russia or in a hypothetical invasion of Britain, it's more for civilized opponents, where the soldier can be total expendable as a fighting unit, be a big damn hero, then spend the rest of the war/campaign safe as a POW. This is all about making guided munitions without actually killing the pilot.

in this case, it's the Germans bombing the Maginot line with little 500 pound steel tanks of N-Stoff, and the very idea is that it's so insane no one will ever see it coming. Although I could see Churchill taking a shine to something this insane. Other than the Maginot line, I'm not sure what else could be so high value you'd risk using highly trained just short of suicide troops. Maybe the heavy water plants in Norway? The Sub pens in St. Nazaire? I'm not sure how much high level officials normally would countenance using troops designed to become POWs after one mission.

But with that food rations, you'd probably need only two of them. Once you're out, the front will have come to you and you get rescued, or you give yourself up and hope the Geneva conviction is properly followed.

[Wat Tyler]

Tiny 500 pound steel tanks seems to be contradictory and that sounds a awful lot of weight to carry on a hang glider. I would also imagine that it would be more pot luck than anything else when it came to aiming and dropping any bomb. To be honest I'm not actually sure just how far a hang glider can travel although I suppose that varies with thermals , wind and whatever but I suppose it would have to be further than the range of artillery for the idea to work?

[charwo]

Ah, well modern paragliders can fly for hours and at hundreds of kilometers. From the wiki on Paragliding

"Despite not using an engine, paraglider flights can last many hours and cover many hundreds of kilometres, though flights of one to five hours and covering some tens of kilometres are more the norm. By skillful exploitation of sources of lift, the pilot may gain height, often climbing to altitudes of a few thousand metres."

Also from this site on paragliding safety
https://globalparagliding.com/paragliding-weight-limit/

Maximum weight limits are around 500 lbs in total, but that doesn't necessarily limit paraglinders in these situations because they can be launched at speed from airplanes so getting the windage is a hell of a lot easier than normal gliding. AND as a bonus the other factor is landing, and well if you jettison the 500 pound package, you don't have to worry about that weight on landing.

And the idea is super targeted delivery. It's more dive bombing, but with way way way more surprise. The thing I'm thinking about is commando stuff, and that's mostly punking the enemy in a way they could easily crush if they could anticipate but your plan is so bonkers they can't.