Book Rec and Military Reflection
Was re-reading Shelford Bidwell and Dominick Graham's Fire Power last night. This is a well-written account of how the British Army incorporated artillery firepower into its methods of making war between 1904 (the beginning of its experience with quick-firing artillery) and the end of the Second World War.
It's relatively heavy going, and not a coffee-table technoporn book - it goes into fairly deep discussion of how the British Army's artillery handling methods evolved in the First World War - trigonometry and mapping early on, sound-ranging and flash spotting later in the war (for locating enemy artillery-pieces that couldn't be seen from the British line), protective "creeping" barrages1 and the eventual development of unregistered 'shooting off the map' which enabled surprise attacks to be delivered without notice2 - and then, after much confusion and misdirection between the wars and into the early forties, rediscovered and reapplied even more effectively with the improvements in command and control that wireless communication brought in World War Two.
The First World War chapters may be an eye-opener for some people, especially those brought up on the "butchers and bunglers" or "Blackadder" views of the British in World War One. Both authors were artillerymen themselves, and much of what they write is from experience. The chapters on command and control in the Second World War are of great interest - reading them, it's clear that the French and British outnumbered Nazi Germany on the ground in 1940 and had more and possibly better tanks, but that the French command system was so inefficient - and the French generals so paralysed by fear and shock - that this more than made up for the material superiority. "Blitzkrieg" was in fact a word scarcely used by the Germans - what happened in France in 1940 could perhaps more accurately be described by the phrase "Shock and Awe".
It's interesting to consider that the rash, overconfident, attack-obsessed generals of the First World War French Army might - if pulled forward through time - have made a better fist of wielding their nation's sword and beating Nazi Germany than their Second World War counterparts. At the very least they would not have been afraid, because the flavour I get is that fear was 90% of what beat France in 1940. A very similar thing was said by Wellington about Napoleon - that he believed his opponent's system to be weak and his reputation to be the bulk of his capability, and that not fearing both, he had a chance against the man. And ultimately he was right.
1. This is why you see so many accounts of British soldiers walking to their goals - not because they're the victims of insane parade-ground discipline but because there's usually a wall of exploding steel in front of them keeping their opponents' heads down. Where the conditions were bad and the infantry "lost" the barrage, or the barrage was shifted forward too fast for the conditions, that's when things went bad. For further discussion, see Prior and Wilson The Somme, UNSW Press.
2. Having enough shells to do the job properly is important. This in turn depends on industry back home, and how geared-up it is to serve the needs of the army. The French and Germans, unlike the British, had been gearing up for a rematch of the Franco-Prussian war ever since it ended, and even they sometimes ran short. Civilian parsimony meant that British industry could not at first supply the Army's needs, in terms of either guns or reliable shells to fire from them, a thing that had only begun to be resolved halfway through 1917.
The big problem with which the British were faced is that until mid-1918, there still wasn't quite enough artillery to properly support two major attacks at once. So you could blast a gap, say, 3000 yards wide and 1500 yards deep, kill a lot of Germans at acceptable cost to yourself and then fortify what you'd taken ("bite-and-hold"), but it took time to re-site the guns for the next 'bite', and in that time the enemy had shifted his reserves and stiffened his defences. Towards the end of the war, a new attack could be begun the instant the first was beginning to bog down, and no shifting of reserves to cope was possible. The British pounded the Germans like this for a hundred continuous days, from 8/8/1918 to the end of the war. Had British industry been up to it, and had parsimonious, pacifistic politicians not strangled the Army budget year after year leading up to the war, the same thing might have been done a year or two earlier.
It's relatively heavy going, and not a coffee-table technoporn book - it goes into fairly deep discussion of how the British Army's artillery handling methods evolved in the First World War - trigonometry and mapping early on, sound-ranging and flash spotting later in the war (for locating enemy artillery-pieces that couldn't be seen from the British line), protective "creeping" barrages1 and the eventual development of unregistered 'shooting off the map' which enabled surprise attacks to be delivered without notice2 - and then, after much confusion and misdirection between the wars and into the early forties, rediscovered and reapplied even more effectively with the improvements in command and control that wireless communication brought in World War Two.
The First World War chapters may be an eye-opener for some people, especially those brought up on the "butchers and bunglers" or "Blackadder" views of the British in World War One. Both authors were artillerymen themselves, and much of what they write is from experience. The chapters on command and control in the Second World War are of great interest - reading them, it's clear that the French and British outnumbered Nazi Germany on the ground in 1940 and had more and possibly better tanks, but that the French command system was so inefficient - and the French generals so paralysed by fear and shock - that this more than made up for the material superiority. "Blitzkrieg" was in fact a word scarcely used by the Germans - what happened in France in 1940 could perhaps more accurately be described by the phrase "Shock and Awe".
It's interesting to consider that the rash, overconfident, attack-obsessed generals of the First World War French Army might - if pulled forward through time - have made a better fist of wielding their nation's sword and beating Nazi Germany than their Second World War counterparts. At the very least they would not have been afraid, because the flavour I get is that fear was 90% of what beat France in 1940. A very similar thing was said by Wellington about Napoleon - that he believed his opponent's system to be weak and his reputation to be the bulk of his capability, and that not fearing both, he had a chance against the man. And ultimately he was right.
1. This is why you see so many accounts of British soldiers walking to their goals - not because they're the victims of insane parade-ground discipline but because there's usually a wall of exploding steel in front of them keeping their opponents' heads down. Where the conditions were bad and the infantry "lost" the barrage, or the barrage was shifted forward too fast for the conditions, that's when things went bad. For further discussion, see Prior and Wilson The Somme, UNSW Press.
2. Having enough shells to do the job properly is important. This in turn depends on industry back home, and how geared-up it is to serve the needs of the army. The French and Germans, unlike the British, had been gearing up for a rematch of the Franco-Prussian war ever since it ended, and even they sometimes ran short. Civilian parsimony meant that British industry could not at first supply the Army's needs, in terms of either guns or reliable shells to fire from them, a thing that had only begun to be resolved halfway through 1917.
The big problem with which the British were faced is that until mid-1918, there still wasn't quite enough artillery to properly support two major attacks at once. So you could blast a gap, say, 3000 yards wide and 1500 yards deep, kill a lot of Germans at acceptable cost to yourself and then fortify what you'd taken ("bite-and-hold"), but it took time to re-site the guns for the next 'bite', and in that time the enemy had shifted his reserves and stiffened his defences. Towards the end of the war, a new attack could be begun the instant the first was beginning to bog down, and no shifting of reserves to cope was possible. The British pounded the Germans like this for a hundred continuous days, from 8/8/1918 to the end of the war. Had British industry been up to it, and had parsimonious, pacifistic politicians not strangled the Army budget year after year leading up to the war, the same thing might have been done a year or two earlier.