"Indirect artillery fire 1914-15" Topic

I have recently been reading up on the early war. As far as I can tell indirect fire was almost non-existent during this period. However som sources credit the german artillery during 1914 for good offensive performance, allthough it is difficult to see whether any indirect fire was used.
In 1915 Mackensens Gorlice Tarnow offensive seems to have achieved high concentrations of artillery with indirect artillery fire – was this a first and when did the other nations start performing it in action?

All major armies artillery were trained to use indirect fire, though some in only a rudimentary fashion. Medium & heavy guns used it in the opening phases of the war against the French & Belgian forts.

Field artillery doctrine was mostly aimed at field conditions where the necessary signalling links to forward observers would be slow to establish or simply not available. In a moving battle artillery needed to be able to bring down fire quickly and accurately on enemy troops and that could only be done at ranges that allowed firing over direct sights or directed by observers close to the gun line.

Gunners did have the training to use indirect fire but, while the battle was fast moving and unpredictable, it wasn't an appropriate doctrine for field artillery.

They even used machineguns for indirect fire, as I recall.

The British were using it during the Boer War. I don't think they stopped for WW1

x42

Perhaps indirect small arms fire is what was meant.

During the Franco-Prussian war indirect small-arms fire was still in use. But studies of the results concluded it was very ineffective.

This paper addresses the development of indirect artillery fire in the Russo-Japanese war a beyond:

PDF link

For example it states the the US codified indirect fire in 1907.

Here is a link:
link

Hopefully to the section of the book "Tactics" with the direct reference to the use of indirect infantry fire or indirect rifle fire.

Thx for the responses – but from my reading, even though indirect artillery fire was invented earlier, and used against fortresses, it seemed not to be part of standard tactics during the early part of the war.

And since I am on a kick:

This is from "Infantry Fire Tactics" ~1885
link

This sites German source finding indirect rifle fire ineffective and costly in ammunition.

But to my knowledge, indirect artillery was consistently used since the 16th Century. Hard to explain howitzers and mortars otherwise.

You can do direct fire with mortars and howitzers; it's just high-angle fire.

A big reason for high-angle fire was yo get projectiles _over_ walls instead of into them, and into the roofs of buildings. Much more effective for setting fires.

All major powers on the Western Front used indirect fire during the opening weeks of the war. The big difference was that fire direction had to be much closer to the batteries than occurred later in the war. This meant that batteries were laid in enfilade positions that were less able to hide the gun flashes in daylight because the batteries had to be close to the forward observers.

Later in the war, the number and types of guns and howitzers increased dramatically. Communication nets were used, with multiple sources of fire mission requests (telephone, ground-based wireless, aerial wireless, physical messages, signals of various kinds, etc) being collated together and parcelled out.

Robert

What Robert said.

Thx for the replies, but it seems at odds with a lot of the litterature around. Specifically diehard first link states that only 10% of french guns were not 75 – which were completely unsuited for anything but direct fire support over open sights. It also states that the british did not plan for indirect fire to any degree.

The following also states that the british army mainly used fire over open sights until 1915

link

Sparta – It does not surprise me that you find many errors in the studies of WW1. Most are written by 'historians' who have very limited knowledge of warfare and make incorrect assumptions based on partial understanding or even complete misinterpretation of the facts. Another group assume that WW1 was similar to WW2 and come up with even more misinterpretations. The problem is that it is difficult to know fact from fiction.

As has been stated above, gunners were trained to use indirect fire well before WW1, the guns were equipped with sights that allowed that training to be used (and yes, even French 75's had them available).

The difference is that training is not doctrine and doctrine is not tactics. Tactics are often influenced by situations and sometimes, no matter how well trained a unit is, it is in a position where only one tactic is available to them (for any of a variety of reasons).

The quotes in your link show that the author has got some of his facts mixed up but correctly refers to the 1912/13 manoeuvres as being a shambles. This was largely due to the 'old school' making it impossible for the ideas being tried out to work.

Gildas – I think you express my sentiments exactly. I have gotten the expression that although indirect fire was technically feasible, it was seldomly performed in the start of the war.

I have unsuccesfully tried to find anything about the russian artillery doctrine.

As far as I've been able to work out from snippets, battle diaries and comments the Germans used observed fire as a matter of course if they had the time and resources to do so AND where they expected it to achieve better results than piling on direct fire. Getting both together seems to have been uncommon.

Being on the offensive strategically they were sometimes able to mass artillery out of sight and engage enemy positions by surprise and without the risk of counterbattery fire. While my reading isn't even vaguely comprehensive I haven't yet found an instance of the observers being that far from the guns – though details are rarely clear enough to be certain.

Russian artillery was supposed to be their best arm and reckoned competent and dashing so it isn't unreasonable to assume that they were much the same as the British & French. In a practical sense they were not as successful because their logistics were weak and they found it difficult to keep up heavy fire because of the unreliability of ammo replacement.