"Effective Ranges in World War II- Best Sources of Info" Topic

Does anyone know where to get the best info on effective weapon ranges for World War II? There are a lot of sources out there that give maximum range (which seems pretty pointless- so a 75mm L/70 can shoot out to 10km, I want to know what the range they actually fought it at was) and there are a lot of penetration charts that go to an arbitrary distance for all weapons (either 1500 yards or 2000 yards).

Was there effective combat beyond 2000 yards? Some of the larger weapons, especially late war, seem to be effective beyond 2000yards.

Was early war tank combat pretty much within 1000 yards?

I'm looking for the straight skinny.

Effective range for weapons performance does not mean the same thing as "the range at which they actually fought".

The former is sometimes available in technical manuals. The latter is sometimes available in post-war combat analyses.

Allen

There is a big difference as to what a weapon's range could be based on it's technical ability, and what ranges the weapons were actually used at in combat. Think of the differences between the German 88 and the 75mm infantry gun. Very different technical capabilities and very different uses.

Effective ranges for direct fire was more a function of the sighting, open sights, or optics equipment. That's why most weapons engaged in direct fire below 1000 yards. The technical ability to get a round on target beyond 1000 yards was hard to do in most cases, especially if the target was moving. Of course the 88 could snipe at extreme ranges, but that was not the norm. Then there is the terrain issue as well. In the wide open desert and the open steppes had many elevation changes making extreme long range direct fire less common than you would think.

I'm a big fan of lots of elevation changes and terrain on the table top to keep WW II action in the 300-500 yard ranges. Or less.

Mike

When being shown the JS2 at a Soviet parade by a Soviet General, who bragged about the range of the gun, Patton remarked (paraphrase here) "If one of my crew opened fire at anything more than 700 yards, I'd have the SoB's tried for cowardice".

It doesn't do any good to have an effective range of 2000 yards if you cannot see more than 500 yards because of the terrain, which was often true in NW Europe.

Thanks myxemail. That is helpful.

Allen,

Well, assuming I'm not a complete moppet and know full well that terrain limits engagement range, and that maximum range, effective range and combat effective range aren't the same, what sources do you recommend as good and which should I avoid?

I have already mentioned a few doctrinal opening ranges from WW2 RA anti-tank gunnery policy in a previous post about British "tank destroyer" doctrine.

For historical surveys of the ranges of tank engagements, I can think of Benn and Shephard, Gee, Hardison, and Zaloga and Ness.

WO 291/1212, "Ranges of engagement in the ATk battle" was published in December 1951 by E. Benn and R. W. Shephard. Shephard is one of the authors of "Applied Operations Research" (Plenum Press, New York, 1988, by Shephard, Hartley, Haysman, Thorpe and Bathe) which includes a problem based on this study and a table giving what appears to be the original raw data gleaned from unit war diaries.

The formula

P = 1 – exp (–R/K)

was found to be a good expression for the proportion, P, of engagements that occur at ranges of less than R yards.

For NW Europe, K is about 950 yards.

90% of engagements occur at less than 2200 yards;
80% of engagements occur at less than 1500 yards;
50% of engagements occur at less than 650 yards.

AORG Memo no. C6, "A survey of tank warfare in Europe from D-Day to 12 August 1944", by H.G. Gee, May 1952 (available at the PRO as WO 291/1218), is based on 112 tank vs. tank actions fought by 21 AG. It gives the mean engagement ranges for this sample as 405 yards (standard deviation 380) in close country, and 1204 yards (standard deviation 735) in open country.

BRL Memo no. 798, "Data on World War II tank engagements involving the US Third and Fourth Armored Divisions", by D. C. Hardison, June 1954, is based on 86 tank vs. tank and tank vs. anti-tank engagements fought by the divisions mentioned. It gives the average ranges at which tanks were destroyed, in yards, as follows:

Allied tanks__Enemy tanks__Place
476____________N/A_______Vicinity Stollberg
959____________733_______Roer to Rhein
1000___________833_______Belgian Bulge
1260___________936_______Vicinity Arracourt
1116___________831_______Sarre
731____________915_______Relief of Bastogne

The overall mean casualty ranges are given as 946 yds for Allied and 893 yds for enemy tanks. The distribution of combat ranges was found to fit approximately to a Pearson
III distribution.

Both the negative exponential (Shephard) and Pearson III (Hardison) distributions have long tails, meaning that there are many enegagements at short ranges and very few at very long ranges. There, are, though, rare cases of engagements at extremely long ranges.

The greatest ranges mentioned for any action in those listed by the above studies are:

Shephard: 4,800 yards (118 actions)
Gee: 3,000 yards (112 actions)
Hardison: 3,500 yards (86 actions)

"Red Army Handbook 1939-1945", by S. J. Zaloga and L. S. Ness, 1998 (Alan Sutton, Thrupp) gives on page 179 a table of the ranges in metres at which Soviet tanks and assault guns were knocked out by 75mm and 88mm guns in 1943-44, as follows:

Range_______75mm gun_____88mm gun
100-200_______10.0%_________4.0%
200-400_______26.1%________14.0%
400-600_______33.5%________18.0%
600-800_______14.5%________31.2%
800-1000_______7.0%________13.5%
1000-1200______4.5%_________8.5%
1200-1400______3.6%_________7.6%
1400-1600______0.4%_________2.0%
1600-1800______0.4%_________0.7%
1800-2000______0.0%_________0.5%

The original has omitted the line for 600-800 metres, so I have calculated the entries for that line by subtracting the sum of each column from 100%.

For infantry engagements, work by Rowland and Speight, based if I recall aright on the "Chinese Eye" series of experiments, shows that attacking infantry typically unmask at about 300 metres.

Jane's Infantry Weapons for 1975 contains a couple of graphs showing the expected range of rifle and MG engagements, although the source is not given apart from a vague reference to "US statisticians".

For rifles,

About 30% of engagements take place at 100 metres or less
About 72% of engagements take place at 200 metres or less
About 88% of engagements take place at 300 metres or less
About 97% of engagements take place at 400 metres or less

For MGs,

About 50% of engagements take place at 750 metres or less
About 80% of engagements take place at 1200 metres or less
About 95% of engagements take place at 1600 metres or less

I hope that answers the question.

All the best,

John.

For NW Europe, K is about 950 yards.

90% of engagements occur at less than 2200 yards;
80% of engagements occur at less than 1500 yards;
50% of engagements occur at less than 650 yards.

John, when I worked in the Canadian MBT replacement project requirements section (I was involed with turret ergonomics, stealth, and STANO) in 1988/89, we had a document that had been recently done for us on average LOS in the area of Europe CENTAG (the Canadian brigade was CENTAG's reserve) operations. I've lost the document, but it was pretty close to what you present here.
--
Tim

This is very useful information. Seems a 6' x 4' table would be satisfactory for a scale of 1' = 25yds. This is something with which ODGW is experimenting for its new infantry rules, Meine Truppen.

"t doesn't do any good to have an effective range of 2000 yards if you cannot see more than 500 yards because of the terrain, which was often true in NW Europe."

but it might make a difference if the round had slowed down at 500 yards. a bigger/better round will still be going at optimal speed out to 2000 yards which should ensure a higher likelihood of a kill.

John D. Salt -- Again, thank you sir! You always provide more than I expect, but plenty of information to chew on for hours.

I appreciate your efforts.

- Bob

More related to infantry combat, but you might want to give Men Against Fire by S.L.A. "Slam" Marshall a look

You are brilliant John D Salt! Thanks for this concise and useful information.

The Germans during WWII did tests on actual weapons (including captured ones) and the Doyle (Panzer truppen etc. also some Osperys) reproduce many of the charts.

Good info on ranges and hit chances.

I used these table for Combat Command's gunnery charts.

Terrian isn't relevant of gun accuracy, some battlefields offer long lines of sight other don't, you still need proper acuracy numbers. (US wartime publication gave average kill ranges in 50 tank engagements from WWII. It ranged from 790 yards for 7.5L38 v. Pz IV to 1100 yards for 7.6L58 v. all German tanks).

TomT

Let's go back to basics: define "effective range."

The Germans during WWII did tests on actual weapons (including captured ones) and the Doyle (Panzer truppen etc. also some Osperys) reproduce many of the charts.Good info on ranges and hit chances.

German accuracy tables just doubled the gun dispersion numbers. There's no basis in reality to those numbers. They don't take into account any aiming errors.

Working from a bottom-up approach (lots of raw data as input) isn't going to get you any better correspondence to real-world results. All it does is overload you with data that you have to make arbitrary assumptions about how to use.

Better to start with the results you want and create a system to deliver them.

Well, assuming I'm not a complete moppet and know full well that terrain limits engagement range, and that maximum range, effective range and combat effective range aren't the same, what sources do you recommend as good and which should I avoid?

I love this guy. Perfect!

Allied tanks__Enemy tanks__Place
476____________N/A_______Vicinity Stollberg
959____________733_______Roer to Rhein
1000___________833_______Belgian Bulge
1260___________936_______Vicinity Arracourt
1116___________831_______Sarre
731____________915_______Relief of Bastogne

The overall mean casualty ranges are given as 946 yds for Allied and 893 yds for enemy tanks. The distribution of combat ranges was found to fit approximately to a Pearson
III distribution.

Both the negative exponential (Shephard) and Pearson III (Hardison) distributions have long tails, meaning that there are many enegagements at short ranges and very few at very long ranges. There, are, though, rare cases of engagements at extremely long ranges.

This makes it the single most useless statistic I have come across in my life. For example – 3 tanks are knocked out at 100 yards and a fourth at 1,600. The "average range" is thus 400 yards. ?

Data tables are nice, but common tactical sense is too.

Why do you want to give away your position by shooting at stuff 2000 yards away?

That just gets the enemy to drop all his artillery on you while standing off at distance and really doesn't do anything for you at all.

Direct fire weapons are reasonably inaccurate at 2000 yards while on call artillery done off a theatre survey grid can be quite alarmingly accurate. Not exactly a fair exchange.

huevans wrote:

This makes it the single most useless statistic I have come across in my life. For example – 3 tanks are knocked out at 100 yards and a fourth at 1,600. The "average range" is thus 400 yards. Bleeped text?

To be clear, the data points to which the distributions were fitted were the ranges of enaggements, not the ranges of individual kills within engagements. In most cases it seems that kills occurred at closely similar ranges, although looking down the comments in Hardison's data there are a few cases where a rnage of ranges (if you see what I mean) is reported. In one case, an action consisting of several separate thrusts on different axes was divided into multiple engagements.

I'm not sure why you consider it "useless" to give both a probability distribution and its first moment, especially in the case of the negative exponential, where the first moment alone describes the distribution completely.

Michael Dorosh wrote:

Data tables are nice, but common tactical sense is too.

Why do you want to give away your position by shooting at stuff 2000 yards away?

Indeed so -- hence the doctrinal fire-opening rnages for the RA alluded to previously -- but it seems from these figures that that kind of tactical sense was not enormously widespread, at least among tank crews. The ranges of engagement seem in most cases to be quite close to the maximum visibility permitted by the terrain. Ronnie Shephard concludes that tank commanders appear to open fire as soon as targets are available.

I hope that gunners would be more professional, and, after all, they have a much greater incentive to make sure that their shots count, as they can't just close the lid and drive off somewhere else when the HE starts falling.

All the best,

John.

Numbers alone don't take the reactive nature of warfare into account. Troops didn't expose themselves to the enemy until the last hundred yards because they knew they could get their head shot off that way. As a result most kills were made within 100 yards. We wargamers extrapolate that to mean that nobody engaged beyond 100 yards, and set our troop ranges appropriately, thus making it safe to expose your troops to the enemy beyond 100 yards…