"WWII Artillery Questions" Topic
4 Posts
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Dan Cyr | 22 Apr 2020 7:20 p.m. PST |
Which nations had the ability to call in artillery fire (i.e., during an assault…either for the attacker or defender)? If artillery fire could be called in, from what level of command could do so (squad, platoon, company, battalion)? Could squads or platoons call in company mortar fire? Which nations could do so? Which nations were stuck with pre-planned fire? I'm assuming it came down to what level of command had either radio equipment or trained artillery observers. I'd be interested in sources if you could recommend such for me to research. Thanks. |
Thresher01 | 22 Apr 2020 7:29 p.m. PST |
I suspect that depends upon your definition of "artillery". Certainly, platoons for many countries could call in mortar support. Companies/battalions for larger weapons. Americans, British, and Germans are more flexible. Soviets get tons of artillery, but much of that seems to be weighted for supporting planned, major attacks, from what I've read (no doubt they got some when on defense too), but I have the impression that is far less flexible than for the other nations above. IIRC, there was a lot of discussion about this on the forums, and/or back in the day, when the "Battlefront" rules were released (not Flames of War). Supposedly, they modeled this quite accurately, from what I've read. |
Rudysnelson | 22 Apr 2020 9:23 p.m. PST |
When we designed Fire! Organ! Fewer! Back in the 1980s, we delay a call until hit on target delay based on the use of Fire Direction Control, optics, radios as influencing factors. |
Martin Rapier | 23 Apr 2020 3:24 a.m. PST |
Unlike modern armies, calling in fire was mainly the job of trained observer teams, so e.g. the British battalion mortar platoon has three MFC teams who were attached out to rifle companies as needed. The platoon mortar section was, of course, under the control of the platoon commander though, and in armies with company weapons platoons, the company mortars belonged to the company CO. Artillery units also had dedicated FOO teams, usually one or two per battery, although this stuff varied wildly from one country to another. Although wargamers love to call in artillery on spec, in WW2, the boring reality is that the vast majority of big shoots (multiple artillery battalions) were pre planned and even battery shoots were often pre registered. I have the 1950s British CRA manual, and even in that period the expectation is that most of the divisional and corps artillery is firing pre planned shoots, with on-call batterie allocated to specific manouvre units for targets of opportunity. In Charles MacDonalds 'Company Commander', he does call in artillery fire. But the majority are fire missions he has pre registered, and he calls them in with his field telephone. But, assigning an on-call battery to a specific battalion was pretty common in all armies, even if in the Russian ones the crews often ended operating in very close support due to limited radio comms. The rifle companies could always indicate targets visually with tracer, flares etc. as long as the gun crews could see the indications. |
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