Gunshot Wound to Thigh

[vio4n]

So I have this character in a WWII setting where he's running and is shot in the thigh by a gunman in a tower roughly 24 meters away and at a height of 11.6 meters. The hypotenuse of this triangle of impact I've created is 26.6 meters. The firing range of the machine gun itself can get up to half a mile at average (around 800 meters) so there was

Comments

[anonymous]

Late, but--

As the author you have a lot of freedom here. If you need the wound to be not lethal, I would agree, a single grazing wound makes that most plausible.

Keep in mind, though, that modern rifle bullets--well, actually this particular form was devised around 1905--are long and pointy, to make them more streamlined and retain more velocity at distance, which gives them flatter trajectory, more striking power, and makes it easier to hit things at a distance. This shape--one word for it is "spitzer" type bullets, and yes, they are a German invention originally, from the folks at Mauser-Werke--because they have a long nose that comes to a point, have their center of gravity well to the rear.

When they strike something resisting, they have a tendency to lose stability and yaw--that is, flip end for end--so that the heaviest part is in the front. As the projectile yaws it is exposing much more surface area to the flesh through which it passes, dumping more kinetic energy into it and tearing a much wider hole. Depending on bullet construction, velocity, distance, and so on, the bullet may even break into fragments as it tumbles, creating multiple wound tracks and exit wounds instead of just one, and making the wound much messier and more lethal. Rifles are much more powerful than handguns and tend to make nastier wounds, especially if the bullet yaws (and they do not always do this, and it is not yet fully understood why, nor is the depth of penetration before yaw begins always predictable or consistent) or strikes bone.

At only 25 meters or so--rock-throwing distance--it does seem a little implausible that the character would suffer only a single hit, given that someone with a belt-fed machine gun just unloaded on him. Especially since the circumstances you describe suggest that it's probably an MG42, which fires at a rate of around twenty rounds per second. Perhaps the gunner was drunk and bored and not paying attention to the prisoners (for all that the SS had a reputation for being an elite organization, the SS concentration camp guards tended to be dregs no field commander wanted in his unit, even on the Eastern Front), and decided he didn't want to have to take apart and clean and re-lubricate the machine gun (which would have been a time-consuming, messy, and annoying chore, and absolutely necessary to keep primer residue from accumulating and causing corrosion that could damage the weapon), and instead drew a pistol to fire at the character? The pistol would also have needed to be disassembled and cleaned but that would have been a few minutes work, and not the hour-long drudgery of scrubbing carbon fouling out of the locking roller recesses of an MG42's bolt with toothbrushes and kerosene.