"French Artillery Doctrine in WWI" Topic

"The Infantry Cannot Do with a Gun Less" is an excellent overview of the evolution of BEF artillery doctrine during WWI, drawing largely on primary sources (the appendices reproducing documents are huge. While it touches on German artillery techniques, it almost completely ignores French artillery technique.

Is there an equivalent overview of the evolution of French artillery doctrine? English would be preferable.

Check out Bruce Gudmundsson's book 'On Artillery'.

Robert

Field Marshal Pétain is quoted as saying "Artillery conquers, infantry occupies". I have not found a book solely on the French artillery doctrine. You could start with the Osprey book "WW1 Battlefield Artillery Tactics" as an opener. I know that Osprey were also publishing a book on the French 75mm, but I have not bought this yet so I cannot say what it covers. I have several histories on the French Army in WW1 and they usually cover the move away from the doctrine of mobile warfare to trench/siege warfare. Artillery in Robert Doughty's book "Pyrrhic Victory" has several references, covering about twenty pages in total.

From my reading on WW1, pre-war French emphasis was focused upon maneuver warfare and, as a consequence, great attention was paid to the excellent, highly mobile and modern rapid-fire 'soixante-neuf'. Very large numbers of this 75mm gun were produced to outfit the army. However, relatively little attention was paid to medium and heavy guns and howitzers. By 1915, the lack of such weapons at the front to counter the much more numerous large caliber German artillery assumed crisis proportions.

Steps taken by the French to redress the problem were two-fold: first, all modern medium/heavy artillery weapons that could be spared from the French fortress network were withdrawn and converted for field use; second, great numbers of obsolete medium/heavy artillery of the 'deBange' system were taken from reserve stocks and made as suitable as possible for use by the army. Fortunately, large stocks of ammunition for these obsolete guns were still available in the arsenals.

These obsolete weapons, while serviceable, were usually out-ranged by the more modrn German guns. They also lacked on-carriage recuperators to absorb recoil, requiring the gun to be re-laid upon its target after every discharge; this reduced affective rate of fire to about one-half that of their German adversaries. A large proportion of the French artillery park at Verdun consisted of such elderly types.

Fortunately, French industry was able to design and deliver ample numbers of modern medium/heavy artillery weapons before the old 'deBange' guns had become completely worn out. My GUESS is that the transition would have been sometime in mid- to late 1917. French artillery from that point improved greatly in power and gained a reputation for very high effectiveness.

Hope this helps.

B

A minor detail, Blutarski, … the gun was the 'soixante-quinze'.

'Soixante-neuf' tends to arise in another context. Easily confused, I'm sure (what were you thinking about?).

Thank you, laretenue.
For someone with family relations living in France, I am woefully ignorant of the language (studied German in school).

Allow me to take this opportunity to offer some additional thoughts on French artillery in the early WW1 period.

As I understand it, the 'soixante-quinze' represented the vast majority of guns in the artillery park of the French army at the beginning of the war. Its terrific rate of fire coupled with 'rafale' fire tactics developed to take advantage thereof enabled a battery to saturate any given 100 x 200 meter zone in very short order, making any infantry attack through such a zone certainly very costly and almost certainly impossible to carry through.

The principal fault of the French 75mm, which was a field gun, was its lack of elevation. This meant that (a) that it was unable to effectively engages targets sheltering behind defilade and (b) unable to take advantage of defiladed positions from which to fire. The German opponent was, by contrast, fairly well equipped with high angle of fire howitzers, in a range of calibers, able to both fire from defilades positions and reach targets sheltering behind defilade. This was an early problem for the French army, as it possessed comparatively very few modern howitzers in 1914.

B

French industry was already producing heavier howitzers before the war started – for external export. The 1910 152mm Schneider for example.

Robert