Simon Forty - Artillery Warfare, 1939–1945

Blitzkrieg in Poland: German horse-drawn artillery struggles up a riverbank. For all the superiority of German weaponsTigers, Panthers, MG42s and Nebelwerfertheir successes came from an army whose weapons were little better than those used at the end of World War I. However, the Germans had, in the meantime, learnt their lessons and Nazism provided the political will to do what Kaiser Bill couldnt.

M y late father-in-law, Barry Hook, was a gunner who fought through World War II first in France, then the North African Desert and finally into Germany. As a Territorial Army officer and a volunteer, he felt less inhibited than career soldiers and was prepared to say his piece to anyone. Typical of a veteran, most of his stories were humorous pokes at providence or his own side, but they often highlighted important issues: the problem when two out of three officers awaiting a coloured flare signal proved to be colour blind; the ire of the tank unit whose abandoned vehicle was acquired, fixed and used as protection for FOOs on a barren hill in the desert that was zeroed in by the German guns; or the occasion when a fed-up superior insisted Barry follow orders and place his guns at a specific map reference only to find that it did rain in the desert and that 4.5-inch guns can prove very difficult to retrieve when sunk in wet sand.

How did he know it would rain that night? The facetious It always rains on my birthday, Sir, made for a good story, but in reality he knew about the potential problem of setting up a gun position in a wadi because he was a careful, thoughtful man. You have to be when youre a gunner. Apart from the obvious wartime difficultiesair attack, counter-battery fire, minefields, etcyou have to be on top of the three-dimensional mathematical puzzle whose solution might not just be one shell hitting the right target at the right time, but the fire of a concentration of many guns that has to achieve surprise as well as accuracy in order to negate a counterattack or lead the way for your own troops in a creeping barrage.

The mathematics of how to achieve this is not to be found within this book. For those who want to understand the complexities of hitting targets I recommend Stig Mobergs excellent Gunfire! British Artillery in World War II . After reading it I expect youll wonderas I didhow anyone hit anything by indirect fire. That they did was proved time and time again in every theatre, and there can be no doubt that artillery dominated the battlefields of Europe in World War II causing most casualties andin the case of the Western Allies and the Red Armynegating any German superiority in equipment or hardened positions prepared during five years of predatory occupation. The Atlantic Wall, for example, with all its concrete bunkers and heavy guns, lasted for less than 24 hours at the point it was attacked. Once over the coastal barrier, Allied artillery dominated the defence of the Normandy lodgment and contributed significantly in the offensives that followed.

This mainly photographic survey of artillery in 193945 seeks to highlight the key points relating to the various types of artillery used, referencing contemporary literature to show the equipment and tactics that were employed.

Gun While it may generically mean all projectile weapons, in artillery terms a gun usually refers to a weapon with a high muzzle velocity that uses a single propellant charge, cannot fire above 45 degrees and has a longer range than a howitzer. However, by World War II most of the field artillery could be better classed as gun-howitzers.