
Why did Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 include a UN-banned booby trap? - maydemir
https://www.polygon.com/videos/2020/9/6/21420064/tony-hawk-pro-skater-2-pungee-pit-investigation
======
eesmith
I could have sworn I first read about punji sticks as a kid in the late 1970s
when reading a book my grandparents had about WWII.

My memory was that it was an account by a soldier fighting in the Pacific
Theater - I think in the Philippines, as resistance against the Japanese. I
further seem to recall that it was the US soldiers who made the pit, but I'm
less sure about that. And I think it was a Reader's Digest book.

But looking now, I can't find mention of it, other than this second-hand
account at [https://www.quora.com/What-was-hand-to-hand-combat-like-
in-t...](https://www.quora.com/What-was-hand-to-hand-combat-like-in-the-
Pacific-Theater-of-World-War-Two/answer/Kevin-Edward-Kline) .

> My grandfather was a combat medic in the Pacific Theater ... He said his
> greatest worries about the Japanese wasn’t H2H, but was instead booby traps
> (punji sticks and trip-wires, in particular), ambushes, and deception. They
> were great at using every natural and terrain-based advantage, turning the
> long battles like Okinawa into a literal meat grinder.

Note that I can't find mention of those pits, including in text like "Okinawa
- The Last Battle" at
[https://archive.org/stream/OkinawaTheLastBattle/OkinawaTheLa...](https://archive.org/stream/OkinawaTheLastBattle/OkinawaTheLastBattle_djvu.txt)
which do mention booby traps.

Now, their use in WWII might have gone under a different name, so, ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
?

