Artillery Fire: History’s Ultimate Killer

In 1914, the German army with over 5 million men was the largest and most highly trained army in Europe. France, with only 60% of Germany's manpower, was hardly a match. But this would be a war of more than just manpower alone. For the first time in history, great industrial powers would go into battle. In the Great War, battlefields would be dominated not by the courage of men, but by the destructive power of arms. From the outset, neither force had expected the long, drawn-out conflict that the Great War became. It was assumed that the new technology offered by the machine gun and the rapid-fire field gun would mean a war could be won more quickly and decisively. But with the new technology came new questions as to how the war should be fought. The French believed that the key to a swift victory lay in their 75mm field gun. The 75mm had revolutionised artillery design and was France's best-kept secret in the lead-up to the war. Some startling innovations made the gun a force to be reckoned with. A new, fast-acting breech block allowed for a high rate of fire. A combined shell and cartridge meant loading could be done in a single movement. And most importantly, a built-in recoil system kept the gun's aim steady after firing. In the 75, the barrel of the gun was separate from the carriage. A trailing section locked the carriage into place. So when the gun was fired, only the barrel moved. Recoil was absorbed by a piston drawing through an oil-filled chamber. The oil acted as a brake and forced a second piston against a compressed air chamber. The compressed air then pushed the barrel back into position. Gunners were protected by a steel shield, allowing them to remain in place during firing. The result was a rate of fire of 15 rounds per minute, higher than anything achieved before. After highly mobile opening battles dominated by field artillery, the opposing forces began digging into their positions. Trenches and dugouts became part of the landscape. And with an unseen enemy, direct fire guns were of little use. The war in the west fell into a deadlock. The hunt was on for the new weapons and tactics which could force a breakthrough. General Douglas Haig, commander of the British Expeditionary Force, still believed that the mobility of cavalry would make it more effective than artillery. But it was the devastating effect of artillery on the landscape that was depriving cavalry of their mobility and speed. German military planners were the first to realize that the new warfare would demand new artillery. Direct fire field guns gave way to howitzers. German howitzers like the 15 cm came as a deadly surprise to the Allies. While field guns fired their shells in flat trajectories, the howitzer threw its shell in a high arc over a greater distance. It was perfect for dropping shells over earthworks and into the depths of trenches. Shells also changed. At the beginning of the war, 70% of all shells were shrapnel. But new high-explosive shells were better suited for bombarding trenches and dugouts. By the end of the war, the majority of shells were high-explosive. The problem for the howitzer gunners was accuracy. Targets were often far behind enemy front lines and out of direct sight. There were indirect fire gun sights, but they depended on hidden observers and maps. Observation balloons, linked to headquarters by telephone, allowed observers to report the positions of targets, but balloons were terribly vulnerable. In 1915, as the prelude to an experiment, British spotter aircraft systematically photographed German lines at Neuve Chapelle. Painstakingly, a mosaic of pictures was constructed, covering a huge strip of the western front. When Haig's First Army unleashed their opening barrage on German forward positions, instead of lasting several days, as was normal, the first barrage lasted only 35 minutes. Then, suddenly, the guns lengthened their range. As British infantry overran enemy front line trenches, a curtain of fire cut off German reinforcements. It was a revolutionary new experiment in the coordination of infantry and artillery. But the second phase of Neuve Chapelle was a disaster. When the front under attack was extended, artillery support failed to cover the wider area. The reason was a shortage of ammunition, a chronic problem that would soon plague both sides. But Neuve Chapelle had shown that a short, intense bombardment could deliver the most valuable asset of all, surprise. Germany took up the lesson and tried it for themselves. At Verdun, the German offensive would be based not on manpower, but on firepower. The aim was complete surprise. It was the greatest concentration of fire the war had yet seen. French trenches were annihilated along a front 15 miles wide. But the French had by now made some innovations of their own, and steadily their defenses stabilized. With the help of reinforcements, they stood firm, and one by one the German howitzers were destroyed. The key to the recovery was long-range artillery, and the innovation was their astonishing accuracy. The remarkable precision of French gunnery was partly due to recent advances in their gun-laying technique. Characteristics of individual guns and weather conditions were now included in laying data. The British too were developing the art of counter-battery fire. Both the sound and the flash of attacking guns were used to calculate the distance of the battery. Within minutes of German gunners opening fire, they themselves became the target. Artillery was a more accurate and powerful weapon than ever before, but it had never been less mobile. The problem of artillery transport had become critical. Behind the front, the terrain was shattered for miles. Guns were heavier than ever, and the pulling power of the artillery even worse, maintaining supplies of fodder was becoming a logistical nightmare. For the British, forage had become the largest single item of supplies sent to the front, larger even than ammunition. The answer was an American invention, the Holt Caterpillar tractor. The petrol-driven Holt tractor revolutionised the logistics of artillery transport. Not only could guns and ammunition be towed over devastated terrain, but the guns could be heavier than ever before. By June 1916, the Allies were desperate for a breakthrough. They planned for a huge offensive on the Somme, where British and French lines met. After a preliminary bombardment on well-dug-in German lines, General Haig employed a new tactic, the creeping barrage. Artillery fire, moving forward in stages, landed just ahead of the advancing infantry. But the technique required precise timing by artillery and infantry. As the first lines of advancing infantry met with heavy machine-gun fire, tragically, the artillery barrage moved forward too quickly. While command decisions travelled through a long chain of intermediaries, the infantry were slaughtered in their thousands. What was intended as a breakthrough for the Allies became one of the bloodiest battles in history, with over a million casualties on both sides. In the search for a new innovation which could bring about a decisive win, both sides turned once more towards weaponry. Artillery was now being supplemented with mortars. Mortars fire a heavy shell at a high angle over short distances. Because of their light weight, they were a very portable source of heavy firepower. More and more these deadly weapons were placed in the hands of the infantry. With the development of the light mortar, the submachine gun, the hand grenade, and the flamethrower, the very nature of the infantryman was undergoing a revolution. The result was a new breed, the stormtrooper. For one of the last great German offensives of the war, Chief of Staff General Erich von Ludendorff armed his stormtroopers with striking new tactics. Area targets were to be avoided. Guns concentrated on enemy artillery, observation posts, command centres, communications and reserve troop concentrations. Instead of advancing in lines, units pushed through wherever they could force an opening. Pockets of resistance were simply bypassed. Although the stormtrooper offensives won for Germany a string of dramatic breakthroughs, and were a clear precursor of things to come, it was not enough. By October 1918, the German economy was close to collapse. With starvation and growing political turmoil at home, the German army, whose supply lines were stretched to the limit, was forced to surrender. Even with the advent of the tank, the ultimate war machine, neither force had been able to fully exploit the new technology to achieve decisive victory. But with the end of the war, it was time to see what lessons had been learned. The lessons of the First World War had far-reaching effects for all of the powers involved. Years of trench deadlock could change the very nature of guns and tactics. The new warfare would be a war of manoeuvre. It had only been a matter of time before the introduction of fully mobile artillery. By combining protection, mobility and firepower, the tank was going where artillery support had never gone. Into the thick of the fighting. In the new Soviet Union, the Red Army saw no contradiction between a war of manoeuvre and the full use of artillery. Red Army Chief of Staff, Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, saw modern warfare as a war of manoeuvre, fought with every mobile technology. Aircraft, motorised infantry and artillery. With such vast frontiers, the Soviets needed flexibility of response more than anything else. In France, artillery was still seen as the decisive weapon. But French generals prepared for a static conflict, one in which the positional tactics of the Great War would again be the order of the day. Ironically, the French armed forces were well equipped for mobile war. By the late 1930s, France had a force of tanks greater than any other in Europe. Their quality too was exceptional. But they saw the tank primarily as an infantry support weapon. France's commitment to static defensive warfare was written in concrete on the very landscape. They planned for positional war, fought from behind the Maginot Line. In Germany, the new regime of Adolf Hitler had revolutionary plans. Hitler and his specialist in army warfare, Heinz Guderian, were convinced that the defensive era of the field gun was over. The new age was the age of mobility. By 1936, the German rearmament was in full swing. With the Spanish Civil War, Hitler was presented a golden opportunity to test German technology and tactics. Hitler was confident that his aid to Franco's rebels would be tolerated by the Western powers. They would never intervene on the side of a socialist republic. While victory for Franco would mean a power friendly to Germany at the gates of the Mediterranean. German forces had learned a lot. Rigid First World War artillery tactics had been totally abandoned. More and more, artillery became an integrated part of a fighting unit, attacking targets whenever they presented themselves. But the Soviets were also learning from the Spanish conflict. Red Army advisors to the Communists realized that to counter the threat of fascist tanks, there was no need for special artillery. Ordinary direct fire field guns could do the job just as well. They also learned that the indirect fire of massed artillery still had value on the battlefield. In the future, all Soviet field artillery would have an anti-tank role. And the Red Army would retain the capability for massed indirect fire. On these doctrines would soon depend the very survival of the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, US Army instructors were concentrating on fire control. The aim was to escape the inflexible confines of centralized command, whilst retaining a massed fire capability. Fire direction centers were created, capable of pinpointing scattered targets located by a single observer. By now, Europe was facing the grim reality of war. Hitler's mechanized armies had invaded Poland, introducing the world to its blitzkrieg tactics. The new form of combat was based around fast, mobile operations, stressing the cooperation and flexibility of all arms, including air support. Long-range indirect fire guns had given way to the tactical bomber, the ultimate in maneuverable firepower. To the Allied powers, the success of blitzkrieg on Poland seemed possible only because of the weakness of the Polish armed forces. When Britain and France finally declared war on Germany, few realized that blitzkrieg was war of a new and entirely different kind. As France waited, apparently secure, behind her Maginot Line, the war in the West fell into the familiar Great War pattern, fixed emplacements and sporadic artillery duels. Then came the shock. On May 10, 1940, the panzers bypassing the Maginot Line struck through the Ardennes forest, previously thought to be impossible. France was totally unprepared for a war fought with concentrated, fast-moving armor. French heavy artillery was obsolete and lacked mobility. Their failure to use forward observation and radio links meant that too often the guns were responding to a situation already long changed. Worst of all, the French were deficient in anti-tank guns. They were forced to rely on out-of-date technology. And unlike Red Army gunners, few French artillerymen were either trained to fight tanks or equipped with armor-piercing ammunition. In little over a month, Paris had fallen and the British had evacuated at Dunkerque. Soon, Hitler would be able to turn his attentions to his most cherished ambition. The assault on the Soviet Union. Hitler lined up a massive invasion force to attack the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa. In a three-pronged assault, the German army would aim towards Leningrad in the north, Kiev and Ukraine in the south, and Moscow in the center. The blitzkrieg tactics that had been so successful on the Western Front would again be employed. As the panzers swept over Soviet frontiers, their supporting artillery was already with them. Throughout, the emphasis was on forward observation. Amongst this massive array of artillery was the gun that would become the most feared of German heavy mobile artillery. The 17-centimeter K-18. The K-18 outranged all comparable Allied guns. It also featured a unique dual-recoil system, which kept the platform exceptionally steady during firing. The Red Army was unprepared for the onslaught. In the first weeks, the German Army Group Center alone had taken nearly 300,000 prisoners and destroyed over 2,500 tanks. In spite of the panzers' dramatic tactical successes, all was not going to plan. In France and in Poland, blitzkrieg had shattered the will of the defenders. But all over the Eastern Front, Red Army units hopelessly cut off but stubbornly refused to surrender. While mopping up operations were costing the Germans precious time, large Red Army formations were pulling back and regrouping. They launched a series of furious counter-offensives. German high command began to realize that there was more to the Red Army than they were aware of. German gunners were also encountering a new and terrifying tank, the T-34. Against the T-34, standard anti-tank guns were almost useless. The only hope for a unit which encountered a T-34 was to call up the most powerful anti-tank gun in the German arsenal, the famous 88mm. The 88 had originated as a heavy anti-aircraft gun during the Spanish Civil War. But because Germany was producing the 88 in such vast numbers, it could also be used as an effective anti-tank weapon. After the offensive in the east stalled, Hitler took personal command. By late September 1941, Germany had encircled Leningrad and taken Kiev. The offensive against Moscow resumed, but by now it was October. As the week's war on, rain turned to snow. While the Wehrmacht battled in conditions for which it was totally unprepared, the Red Army, under General Georgi Zhukov, was preparing to attack. And the Soviets were now armed with a new force in artillery, the rocket-firing Katyusha. Mounted on multiple launchers, the Katyusha was to become one of the most feared weapons on the Eastern Front. To the beleaguered Soviet Union, they were a blessing. Artillery ammunition, rejected as substandard, could make an effective Katyusha warhead. In the face of fierce assaults from Zhukov's armies, Germany began to suffer their first defeats at the hands of the Soviets. In the center, the German high command came to accept that they had little hope of immediate success. Moscow would not be taken that winter. German intelligence assessed the situation. They were confident that the Soviets were too weak to carry out a large-scale offensive. But in early December, Zhukov struck. The Red Army, in the center, fought the Germans back as far as Smolensk. It would be the following May before Hitler would again regain the initiative in the East. But while he remained preoccupied with the Soviet Union, there had been dramatic developments elsewhere. When Mussolini was defeated by the British in North Africa, Hitler dispatched General Erwin Rommel to lead the Axis forces in securing the new front. Rommel had inflicted heavy defeats along the North African coast, forcing the Allies to retreat to a defensive line at El Alamein. Churchill's confidence in his commanders in North Africa was at a low. But the tide was about to turn. On August 13, 1942, a new leader, General Bernard Montgomery, arrived in Cairo. Montgomery brought experienced leadership and a complete change in British tactics. He was determined to exploit Allied material superiority to the full. The key was defense in depth and the deployment of massed artillery. The backbone of Montgomery's field artillery was the British 25-pounder. Early in the North African campaign, the 25-pounder gun howitzer had become the standard field artillery piece. Its ingenious circular platform allowed the gun to be traversed through a full 360 degrees, a vital asset in anti-tank fighting. The British had purpose-built anti-tank guns too. New 17-pounders had arrived in Egypt in large numbers. But even such formidable firepower was considered by Montgomery to be insufficient. He ordered his artillery defenses to be strengthened by deploying tanks buried in hull-down positions, making them less vulnerable. When Rommel launched his offensive, his force of 200 German and Italian tanks drove straight into a death trap. After three days, Rommel withdrew his surviving tanks. But Montgomery refused to follow up with an immediate counterattack. The strength of his army lay in defense. His objective was to wear down the attackers first, to achieve overwhelming material superiority. Over the next three weeks, Montgomery continued to build up his resources until he was confident that they could destroy the enemy outright. Rommel's forces, now heavily outnumbered, were also far from their base. Their supply lines stretched almost 1,000 miles. When finally Montgomery gave the order to attack, his traditional textbook tactics paid off. The Battle of El Alamein opened with 825 pounders and 48 medium guns bombarding German artillery. Then the Allies switched to hammer the Axis forward positions. The plan was to contain the enemy armor while gradually crumbling the infantry. The British fired over a million rounds before charging. The effect on German and Italian morale was devastating. As the battle raged, both sides suffered heavy losses. But by now, Rommel could not afford such losses. Finally, Montgomery ordered his forces to destroy the last line of German anti-tank defenses. After 12 days of battle, British command of the air and overwhelming firepower had reduced the Afrika Korps to a mere 35 tanks. Hitler eventually allowed his broken forces to withdraw. El Alamein was a turning point in North Africa. Over the following months, the Allies would, one by one, regain the coastal areas. Back on the Eastern Front, the scale of defeat for Germany was to be much greater. Within weeks of Rommel's defeat at El Alamein, the entire 6th Army of Field Marshal von Paulus was surrounded at Stalingrad. The starving remnants of a force of 600,000 men surrendered to the Red Army. Stalingrad was a disaster, but the Wehrmacht was by no means a spent force. Germany still held the line from which they had launched their 1942 offensive. At Kursk, Hitler would make one more attempt to regain the strategic initiative. Kursk was to be assaulted by the most powerful armored spearheads Germany had ever assembled. Half its entire tank strength on the Eastern Front. But Soviet intelligence was aware of the impending offensive. At Kursk, the Soviet defense zone was in places 100 miles deep. When Germany attacked, they would plunge headlong into the most sophisticated system of anti-tank defenses in the history of warfare. Zhukov's reorganization had changed the face of the Red Army. Tank forces had been restructured into tank armies. Anti-tank regiments had been combined into brigades. And artillery breakthrough divisions had been created. At Kursk, the density of Soviet artillery reached 148 guns per kilometer of front. There were changes in the deployment of rockets, too. Katyusha batteries, instead of being dispersed, were concentrated into four divisions. Each one capable of delivering a salvo of over 3,000 rockets in one devastating punch. The panzers had driven straight into a cauldron of fire. Kursk became the greatest battle of the war. After raging for eight days, Hitler called off the offensive. Of the 2,700 German tanks thrown into the salient, 90% were destroyed. The panzer armies in the east would never recover. With so many resources tied up on the eastern front, it was time for the Allies in the west to make their long-awaited move. On June 6, 1944, the Allies launched their invasion of France, heading for the north coast beaches of Normandy. But they were met by formidable obstacles and the fiercest resistance. Ever since the conquest of France, Germany had been fortifying the French coastline. Rommel had been switched to the western front, and he immediately ordered the reinforcement of the Atlantic Wall. Behind these defenses were at least 40 German divisions, 12 of them army. Operation Overlord opened with RAF heavy bombers pounding the coastal guns of the Atlantic Wall. As the aircraft left off, the guns of 200 Allied warships began their bombardment. With a range of up to 16 miles, naval guns would provide some of the most precise and effective artillery bombardments of Operation Overlord. As the Allied landing craft approached the beaches, they revealed startling innovations. Many were equipped with their own artillery. The infantry had immediate close support fire from guns, mortars and multiple rocket launchers. The bombardment was so great that in many places Allied troops were ashore before the German gunners could recover. For 12 days, the Allies continued to pour men and equipment into Normandy. With railways wrecked and Allied fighter bombers making roads impassable in daylight, the Germans were unable to strike with battle-ready formations. The invasion of France had been achieved by overwhelming material superiority. But the Germans themselves had, throughout the invasion, their own formidable secret weapon. A long-range, unmanned jet. The 400 miles per hour V1. Between June and mid-July 1944, 4,000 V1s were fired at England, inflicting heavy civilian casualties. Of these, only a fraction were destroyed by anti-aircraft guns. The reason was simple. The V1 flew too high for light guns and too low and too fast for most heavy guns. In a massive operation, British anti-aircraft defences were mobilised to meet the new threat. And a tactic was adopted, which was to have a remarkable degree of success. Instead of ringing the major cities with guns, the entire defensive effort was moved to the coast. Over 400 heavy and 1,000 light guns were manned by British and American crews along a defensive line known as the Diver Belt. Because the defences faced out to sea, fighter cover could be held back as a last-resort defence, minimising confusion. It also meant that the British could use their own ground-to-air rockets. These, in mass batteries of 64 twin projectors, were fired in salvos, producing a screen of shrapnel. By the end of August, V1 kills had reached 74%. But there was a new German threat, the V2 rocket. The V2 launching system was small, simple to erect and very mobile. British bombers struck time after time at German launch sites in the Netherlands, but without success. The rockets themselves were a vast improvement over their predecessors. As the V2 descended, it travelled at supersonic speed, far faster than could be tracked and faster than a gun could be traversed. The British response was the establishment of a mobile radar unit in the Netherlands itself. Early detection of a rocket on launching was the only hope. But even that failed. Some 500 V2s hit London, again taking many civilian lives. Rocket attacks ceased only when the German missile regiment withdrew in the face of the Allied advance. Despite these sporadic German attacks, the Normandy landings and the subsequent battles spelled the beginning of the end for the German army. By the beginning of 1945, the combined Allied armies were massing for the final assault on the Third Reich. Now, on every front, Germany was on the defensive. As the Western Allies approached the frontiers of the fatherland, in the east, the advance of the Red Army was gathering momentum. It had been agreed by Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill that the final drive into Berlin would be carried out by the Soviets. Accordingly, the Western Allies would halt their advance on the Elbe. For Marshal Zhukov's final assault on Berlin, seven million shells had been brought to the front. They were to feed over 16,000 Soviet guns. Alongside mortars and Katyushas, there were large numbers of howitzers, the 122mm, the 152mm and the 203mm. After heavy fighting, Zhukov's armour had reached the village of Silo on the outskirts of Berlin. On 20th April 1945, the assault began on the city itself. In one day alone, more than 42,000 Soviet artillery pieces fired over two million shells. Some buildings were hit over a thousand times. In urban warfare, Soviet artillery tactics showed terrifying ingenuity. An enemy-occupied building was just shrouded in smoke by a team of two light guns. Then, behind the screen, a 203mm howitzer, manhandled into position, would blast the building into its foundations. Over the war years, the world would see the greatest concentrations of artillery ever manced. It was unlikely that there would ever be such vast arrays of guns again. After 1945, in the face of modern warfare, artillery would change. But the First and Second World Wars would see artillery at its most important point in history.