"Was American Artillery more effective and decisive than" Topic

…German Artillery in WW2? If so, why?

Interesting thread here…

link

Armand

American artillery was very good. Excellent equipment, well-trained men, and excellent doctrine. One of the things that probably made the Germans so respectful of American artillery was the willingness of the Americans to expend ammunition in situations where the Germans usually would not. It's true the Americans did have ammunition shortages at times, but they still did a lot more shooting than the Germans.

Undoubtedly. Not only was it better equipped and supplied, it was probably the first field artillery organization in the world to be effectively networked, with radio communications and the doctrine and skills that allowed effective massing of the fires of multiple artillery units in rapid response to a single call for fire.

At Snow Hall at Fort Sill, by the entrance to the building, there used to be a quote painted on the wall, something like, "I don't have to tell you who won the war, because you already know- it was the artillery." The author was George Patton.

Rather ironic that the Americans could expend more ammo than the Germans, seeing as how they had to ship theirs across the ocean, while the Germans only had to rail theirs a few hundred miles at most.

There's a line in Louis Simpson's poem "A Bower of Roses" that captures it best: "For every shell Krupp fired/General Motors sent back four."

I always thought that the scene in "Band of Brothers" where the company rides past the Germans going into captivity was an echo of that- "say hello to FORD! And GENERAL F'IN MOTORS! You etc etc etc, what were you thinking? You've got horses!"

You can't go to a wargaming thread on WWII without finding lavish praise of the German this or that, but the reality is that their technologies and equipment, advanced as they often were, were never sufficient to offset the production capabilities and the organization of their opponents.

Thanks!.

Armand

German artillery was more likely to suffer ammo shortages than american in nwe.

American artillery was well served, well supplies and had very good communication with front line units

In fact, so well supplied that one joke was, "Never have I seen so much ammunition expended without harming anyone except the taxpayer"

It might have been considered lavish, but I never heard a US Army veteran express regret over it. They knew well how many American lives effective artillery support saved.

Logistics wins battles, even clear across an intervening ocean.

Truck-born supply beats horse-drawn almost every time, except possibly in the very, very early days/months of the German attack on Russia, when it was so cold motors on their vehicles froze, and couldn't be restarted, or they were bogged down in the mud. Horses seem to win under those conditions, though I really don't understand how they don't freeze to death too – perhaps some did, since I do recall accounts of the Germans eating horse meat.

time on target

US Field Artillery I think proved itself to be notably more effective than German artillery. The Royal Artillery and its Commonwealth companions likewise I think proved themselves superior to German artillery as well.

Red Army artillery I don't know enough about to judge. I've gotten used to seeing them relegated with a couple of comments, usually about slow responsiveness and poor communications. They did have radio and line communications down to Battery level in the Div Arty Regt, at least as of July 1942. My understanding is they used observed fire, which does require info to be passed back from the observer to the guns to correct fall of shot. I don't think they were straitjacketed to pre-planned fires only, but I don't know for sure.

The US Army did a series of 'Reports of the General Board' on unit experience in the ETO, all of which are available for download at the Combined Arms Research Library (CARL) site. They keep moving the link around, this one works (today anyway);

link

All aspects of the FA are covered, including ammunition supply, material quality, operations and gunnery. They are more circumspect in their appraisal, acknowledging the basic principles the FA was founded on were proven, while recognising that there were limitations. The report of ammunition supply concludes that there was a shortage in the ETO that did materially effect operations, and was caused by various factors including incorrect estimates, physical supply problems and production shortfalls.

The report on communications does recognise the FM radios were good, but still came with compromises. They were heavy (300lbs for the SCR-608 and 170lbs for the SCR-610) and had limited range (10-15 miles for the 608 and up to 5 miles for the 610). The 610 was the set used by Batteries and forward observers and at 170lbs was not ideal for dismounted used as often required.

I can't help but feel that the reputation of the US Field Artillery has grown over the last few years without reference to the limitations that were recognised at the time, and has pretty much pushed all others off the board. I don't understand artillery enough to know whether that opinion is itself flawed. I don't know that there were missions that British and Canadian gunners in NWE particularly simply could not perform that US gunners could. I do know that the amount of non-Div FA units in the ETO is truly staggering and there were more US guns than Br/Cdn ones by far; I don't think that the gunners though were drastically different in their capabilities.

I do find myself wondering also about German artillery. I sometimes seem arguments that it was simply swept aside by allied dominance, yet I also see reports by allied infantry of regularly being shelled by German guns well into 1945. I do think German guns were forced into more diffuse operations, but they were far from totally silenced weren't they?

Artillery is on my 'to understand better' list, but I'm not working through it alphabetically.

Gary

Logistics wins battles, even clear across an intervening ocean.

"Amateurs study tactics … Professionals study Logistics …"

I can't remember where I read it (Think it was McDonald). But veteran German units in NWE thought there were security leaks. They were used to having 30-40 mins between the start of an attack and the defenders artillery response. Against the Americans, it was like 5 minute.

The german response time was way lower than 30 mins. In theory.
7 mins springs to mind. Can't recall where i got that nunber from though.
British artillery was faster than american.
But fire less concentrated.

British OR concluded arty took so much fire to destroy things but far less to suppress. More frequent bangs suppressed more than less but bigger bangs. I think martin rapier might well have one of john salt's documents with the report in on a web site somewhere.

And smaller shells were considered easier to transport. Hence the preference for the 88mm 25pdr over the 105 as the primary gun. ( But not the only gun ).
You could argue this was biased by ww1 trenches.
There again, ww2 infantry stopped and immediately dug.

Thanks also!…

Armand

That response time was a product of the integrated command and control system. It was revolutionary, an American development of ideas the French Army had pioneered. The effectiveness of the arm was only secondarily a product of sheer numbers of guns or shells. It was really the development of a system the allowed a single fire direction center to mass multiple firing units under the control of a single observer, who did not necessarily have to be affiliated with them, that distinguished it and allowed for the rapid and effective massing of fires.

The best nondoctrinal text to describe the process of developing and implementing the system is Bruce Gubmundsen's "On Artillery."

The german response time was way lower than 30 mins. In theory. 7 mins springs to mind.

In their dreams 30 min. is closer to the truth.

British artillery was faster than american.

Only by seconds.

I guess it also depends upon what you mean by "artillery" and their response times.

I've read that German mortars in Normandy caused about 75% – 80% of Allied casualties in 1944. IIRC, this was in the bocage country, but could have also been in other areas near that too.

A lot of the fields were under German observation, and connected by field telephone to the mortar batteries. Many of the fields were also preregistered too, increasing the effectiveness, and ensuring quick response times vs. enemy units.

IIRC, US artillery had made considerable strides during the pre-war period in speeding (partially automating) computation of fire control solutions.

B

OTOH, the sheer numbers and throw weight of the artillery of the US and GB dwarfed that of the German – particularly in heavy artillery.

I cannot recall the source, but I recall reading a book on Normandy which referenced the interrogation of a German prisoner who had previously served several years on the Eastern Front in which he said that he had never experienced any Soviet artillery fire that was remotely as intense.

B

Go here for a very informative essay on WW2 war production statistics -

PDF link

B

Blutarski, you are right- if you open a pre-WWI gunnery manual, the "firing tables" for various artillery pieces were so exiguous that they are often listed in a single page, with the charge and elevation and very basic technical firing data like drift, time of flight, max ordinate, and the change in range for a given change in elevation. Artillery officers were expected to be highly skilled mathematicians, who could calculate a firing solution from this very basic data using partial differential equations- in the event indirect fire was even necessary. One of the biggest problems the various national artilleries faced in WWI was the sheer attrition of skilled specialists (to say nothing of the challenges of expansion, in the case of the Royal Artillery).

The US Army's solution to it's likely mobilization needs in the 1930s was to seek out a way to speed up and de-skill this calculation. The creation of enormous "tabular firing tables" of 2-400 pages for a given gun was the first step, with highly effective modeling of every characteristic of a shell's ballistics. The data captured in these TFTs allowed fire direction staffs to rapidly calculate firing data, taking known information on conditions such as weather, elevation, powder temperature and gun characteristics to calculate the degree to which the firing data would differ from the standard stated in the TFT using a single sheet of 8 1/2x14" paper (DA Form 4200- worth a look!) and cookbook math. They also used the TFT data to create a set of "graphical firing tables," each of which was a set of calibrated range and elevation data for a given gun and shell/charge combination. The GFT had a sliding sleeve with a line, and you would use a grease pencil to apply a "GFT setting" calculated using the DA4200 to reflect the elevation that would actually be required to hit at a given range.

This represented a huge leap forward from the old system, and it was so conceptually solid that I learned it at Ft Sill and used it as an artillery officer on active duty sixty years after it was invented. It took almost twenty years after the Army introduced the Battery Computer System in the 1970s for the state of the art to reach a point where the electronic system could calculate data more rapidly than a good fire direction center. Even in the ‘90s, every FDC was required to confirm the data calculated by the computer to plus or minus three mils, and to have data on the guns within less than a minute for virtually every type of fire mission.

Very few authors, save for the specialists, devote enough attention to the mechanics of gunnery, which is a shame, because one of the chief technical problems of WWI was changing indirect fire from a rare, boutique specialty to something every artilleryman could perform. One of the best studies I have ever seen, if you're interested, is Shelford Bidwell's "Fire-Power." Its section on WWI, which spends a lot of time discussing how the British basically re-surveyed Northern France to create gridded maps for indirect fire, deserves to be regarded as a classic.

Hi nine pound round,
Thanks for that background info. I'm thrilled to confirm that I wasn't just dreaming it.

;-)

B

It's the section on WWI, which spends a lot of time discussing how the British basically re-surveyed Northern France to create gridded maps for indirect fire, deserves to be regarded as a classic.

That appears to be a determining factor for artillery effectiveness in WWII. The British and Americans were able to conduct extensive photo recon and get the data to the artillery units very quickly to do those surveys and calculations. If you know where something is and it's within range you can hit it. The longer a battery is in one area and the more it fires missions the more effective it will become.

Another measure of effectiveness is how quickly they could effectively go into action after relocating to a new area which took advance planning. The Allies were mostly motorized and Germans mostly horse drawn for much of the war. The Germans had a tough time in Russia in areas like the Ukraine where there are vast areas that do not have identifiable terrain, maps or the ability to conduct photo recons. The same situation was in N. Africa. Air Spotters made artillery even more effective, something the Germans mostly lacked.

But like Blutarski'slink shows, if you don't have the ammo you won't be very effective.

Wolfhag

If it can't shoot, move or communicate … you have a very large, very heavy paperweight …

There are five requirements for accurate predicted fire. From memory, they are:
1. Accurate firing unit location
2. Accurate target location
3. Accurate meteorological information
4. Accurate weapon and ammunition information
5. Accurate computational procedures

Of these, the hardest by far for laymen to understand is the requirement for an accurate firing unit location and directional control. It feels intuitive: of course you know where you are on the map. But the key point is not just knowing where you are and where the target is- it's the degree of precision with which you can assign both target and firing unit to points on the same datum. The better the quality of the survey (and the more firing units that share "common survey," I.e., surveyed locations on the same datum), the better your ability to mass multiple firing units on a single target.

Nine Pound,
I concur. I'll attempt to recall my short training as an FO. When attempting to locate exactly where I am can be an issue and is normally a map and compass exercise (I still get lost sometimes).

This is is how we did it in the previous millennium: Also, giving corrections can be tricky if I'm not in line (facing the same compass direction) with the firing battery. From my perspective, I might say "drop 200" but if the battery drops 200 the round may actually go to the left from my perspective. I forget if it's the battery or FO that's supposed to account for that.

Before going out on patrols you'd get with the battery commander and map out Terrain Reference Points (pre-registered) along your patrol route. As you patrolled you'd let the battery commander know the next TRP you'd be approaching so he could have a gun already layed on it. If you need immediate arty support you'd call in an offset from the TRP. Under ideal conditions, there could be a round in the air only seconds after the call. The battery commander, knowing the TOF to the target, would announce "splash" which meant to take cover as the round will impact in a few seconds. The longer the battery has been in place the better it works. Just make sure you are working off the same TRP's as they were frequently changed.

You'd also use TRP offsets to report your location and not grid coordinates as the enemy will have the same map and be listening in.

Wolfhag

German artillery seemed like a relatively ignored arm of the Army especially in terms of key components of communications, motorisation and logistics.

Germans also placed too little a value on reconnaissance. Even from the start of the war many infantry divisions only had a recce company. Later even Panzer units either divested reconnaissance assets (eg Panzer Brigades) or used them as a rapid response force.

There wasn't much in the way of independent recce capability either unlike US cavalry groups or British independent armoured car regiments.

Meanwhile the allies had not only reconnaissance units but also artillery observation aircraft and all backed up by superb communication and fire direction systems.

Thus there would not be as much intel being generated for the German artillery especially at divisional level as it would for allied.

And what intel was being generated couldn't be processed as effectively as the American one.

"Add" or "drop", like all corrections, are relative to the direction of the observer- it's the job of the fire direction center to plot and calculate the changes correctly.

The method you're discussing is called a "shift from a known point," a doctrinal means of calculating adjustments based on a previously agreed-upon position- "target" is the artillery term for something you're calling indirect fire one, while "target reference point" is an infantry term used for direct fire. But your recollection of how targets can be preplanned and priority shifted as you move is essentially correct- although fire planning (at least in the Army) was always done through the fire support elements at each echelon, and it was the fire direction center that you spoke to on the call for fire.

Amazing the stuff you remember after two decades have passed.

Thanks, but it's actually more like 5 decades ago. I remembered that and yesterday I left my wallet by the checkout stand at the grocery store.

Steve

Yes, all that sounds about right Nine pound round … You were a mortar crewman, IIRC ?

Field artillery officer.