"artillery firing up and down hill " Topic

Help!

I need information on smooth bore artillery firing up and down hill. Limits and ranges.
I know of two cases of artillery on hill that could not fire at the howerizers at the bottom.
Neerwinden 1793 Austrian artillery on hill who could not hit French at bottom and Borodino where the Russia got the same treatment.

Thanks
Lord Ghee

I just read about an incident in the Peninsula where the French were on a hill on one side of a river, and were shooting down at British artillery that could not reply due to the elevation difference (and orders not to engage in counter-battery fire). So apparently it cut both ways, depending on circumstances.

link

Hard to do in both cases – easy to bury your rounds (down hill) if the enemy figures out where the dead ground is or over-shoot (uphill)

There were issues during the fight on look out mountain at Chattanooga TN.

@Lord Ghee

"cases of artillery on hill that could not fire at the howerizers at the bottom …. could not hit French at bottom and Borodino where the Russia got the same treatment."

Well, maybe and maybe not ….

The instance from Borodino is not a case of really uphill/downhill. Instead the French were in a ravine, which acted like a trench to provide some cover for them – specifically, a dead ground of some 2 meters.

For a vertical barrier at the target 1.5 meters tall from the height of the bore of the firing piece, the maximum amount of dead ground behind the barrier is given by : 1.5 / tan (29 degrees) = ~2.7 meters. In fact, since there was air resistance, and since the target was below the height of the barrel of the firing piece, the dead ground would be smaller – less than 2 meters.

Since we have a ravine, with sloping sides, not a vertical barrier, it is unlikely that the French were actually within 2 meters of the edge of the ravine. In any case, the dead ground could not have been more than the blast radius of the shells being fired. So, if the Russians were shooting at the French and not hitting them, it was because they were not cutting the fuses correctly. This is possible, but by no means likely.

There is only exactly one, unconfirmed original source for this supposed situation/problem. And this source's provenance is not unproblemmatic.

The materials identified as "Ratch, Artillery Journal, 1861, Number 11" or similar in several secondary sources in French and, especially, English are the General Ratch's "Сведения об Алексее Петровиче Ермолове" ("Information about Aleksey Petrovich Yermolov"). This was published as a transcription of a lecture given by General Ratch. The lecture was based on a series of oral interviews conducted with General Yermolov shortly before General Yermolov's death. It was an essentially biographic work (not a tactical or technical study). General Yermolov was at that time about 85 years old and it had been about 45 years since Borodino. Also, he was not in command of the guns in question, only observing that the French battery was not silenced.

So, this was not something that "Yermolov wrote". It was at best something that the elderly General said, that was reported in lecture, which lecture was transcibed for publication almost half a century after the fact, that our modern authors have picked up on and repeated. From this, many wild and over-amplified and just plain strange comments have been made. For example, see TMP link

I am not really convinced that the situation/problem really existed. The chain of re-quoting may have easily put the wrong context around General Yermolov's words, or even put the wrong words into General Yermolov's mouth. I am thinking it was more likely that the Rusians gunners had been ordered to not engage in counter-battery fire.

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@Margard

Nice introductory article.
Everyone should read this as a backgrounder for artillery discussions.
Thank you very much!

Thanks Seroga--that was a great link!

jeff