FO's or On Map Guns?

[Mad Russian]

Are you talking about M7 Priests? The HT mounted guns I remember were 75mm not 105mm.

No, found them, the T19 Howitzer Motor Carriage. More than 300 of them made so that's quite a few to have in direct fire roles in the US lines.

Good Hunting.

MR

[Ratzki]

The Soviets out produced the Germans by more than four times as many mortars and the Germans split their production between fronts. Which says we probably don't have enough Soviet mortars portrayed in our scenarios. It also says they could afford to use them for direct fire 4 times as much as the Germans could.

I agree entirely, I just did a quick calculation with stats for a Russian Rifle Division in early '41. I took the total number of 82mm Mortars and 76mm Guns and then just divided by 3 to break down by regiment and then by 3 again to come up with what might be an acceptable number for a Battalion sized battle. I came up with a 76mm 4 tube FO at Division level, a 76mm field gun, and 8x 82mm Mortars spread through the Regiment. All this for just 3 companies of infantry. I did not include the 120mm Mortars, or larger artillery. Russian divisions did vary by equipment from one division to another, but I think this would be not far off as a rule of thumb for one Battalion, as far as light artillery is concerned.
Yes once you get to 105mm, it must make one heck of a boom when the shell hits. The American priests were pretty soft skinned, I would think that they avoided H2H encounters with enemy armour.
There was a video with audio somewhere on the net filmed by some Taliban that are on the recieving end of some American 105mm shells. I will see if I can find it, the first time I listened to it with the headset on, I found myself ducking every now and then. Very impressive, the sound scares the crap outa ya.

[Bear]

What got me thinking about it was that I was looking through the German Kavalry purchase screen and noticed that there was 3 81mm FO's for the Kavalry Battalion, but the Aufk. Battalion gets 4x 81mm Mortar units. Now I know that the Aufk.'s mortars are in two sections of 2x 81mm mortars each and the Kavalry's are in batterys of 4 tubes each. Now all is fine and dandy if I am playing a QB, as I just take what I can get, but when designing a scenario I have the flexabilty to edit and choose. So historically, I understand the limitations of the Russian command limited their use and often dictated a more direct fire roll. But for the German side this was not so much of an issue. I was wondering more if German and for that matter, British/American ect. tended to use there light artillery at the Battalion level as more of a direct fire asset, or did they opt. for more of an indirect roll as a general tendancy.

The general arty use by U.S., Brit and Gemany was indirect fire at all command levels.

[captainkije]

My references were to towed guns only. Should have made that clear.

In Russia, most Axis and Russian guns were towed by horse, not truck, tractor, etc. Patton may have run out of gas, but in Russia providing fodder was a big logistics problem.

[Mad Russian]

Having to outrun tanks with horse drawn artillery was also a problem. That's where you find some of the big guns in the front line. Defending themselves instead of others.

Good Hunting.

MR

[Mad Russian]

Not sure about the British but I've read the Americans at times would use regular tank/TD companies in the indirect fire role.

From American sources I've seen it said the Germans would also use the 88 in the indirect role. I can't remember ever reading that from a German source. Seems to me the 88 would be hard to use indirect with the character of the guns ballistics.

I think it's all dependent on mission and situation.

Good Hunting.

MR

[Dog Soldier]

I had a neighbor when I was a lad who used to tell stories of his time in the supply services for the US Army in Italy. He was at Salerno and the breakout after that. Common wisdom he recalled was when running a column of trucks along a narrow road in the hilly Italian county side was what he called "88 snipers". If the first shell was short; the next shell was the opposite, long. Everyone had by then stopped their vehicles and bailed out because they knew the column was bracketed. The third shell always hit the column somewhere. He thought the German 88mm crews were very work man like in they followed this pattern every time he was attacked.

Sounds a lot like indirect fire with an FO. I have no reason to not believe his stories. He was there.

As for the track mounted 105mm guns in direct fire roles, I remember a vivid account of their use this way in a book I read years ago about the fighting around Nancy in the fall of 1944. The Germans were using old fortifications (part of the old WW1 forts that ringed the city?) to stop Patton's 3rd Army. The 105mm guns were called up to help blast the Germans out of these structures. IIRC the account correctly, in the narrator's sector the 105mms appeared behind the American infantry and began systematically destroying strong points one at a time. After the third German position was destroyed by this direct fire, the German infantry began abandoning the more rearward positions when it was obvious they were next on the 105mm gunner's list. As someone else mentioned in this thread, a 105mm shell packs a hell of a punch. Even if you survived the blast, you would be stunned and unable to defend yourself. The impression I got from this was that before bringing these monsters up in a direct fire role, the infantry had to suppress or at least identify any enemy AT that had the range to engage the 105's.

These guns in a direct fire role were not used in a "run and gun" role. The targets were well identified, the artillery commander or his aide had consulted or reconnoitered the area with the friendly infantry, and they knew where to position their guns and what were the priority targets. In all cases there were no surprises as the infantry has already been engaged for some time without success, thus the need to bring up these big guns to "plow the road".

Dog Soldier

[Ratzki]

I found the video clip. The first couple rounds of US counterfire make me jump. You want to have headphones on to get a good effect. I can only immagine a whole battery or several battery's of this stuff dancin' all around me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4G0OTXVs3c

[JasonC]

To Ratzki - the 75mm infantry guns were usually used for direct fire. But they were also used more extensively in the first half of the war than later, when the Germans were attacking rather than defending. In the second half of the war, their life expectancy in the field was short and they didn't much matter.

The main German artillery weapons were the divisional artillery 105s and 150s and the 81mm mortars at battalion and company levels. Everything else was an afterthought by comparison, as the ammo usage figures make clear. As in, over 100 million 105 shells fired, 75 million 81mm shells fired, 30 million 150 shells fired. Nothing else get into 7 digits and only a few items hit the million mark.

The 81s were used at both company and battalion from mid war. Initially they were used mostly at battalion level but they were pretty quickly pushed down to company level in 2 tube sections, while a battery was retained at battalion level in addition.

The range of an 81mm is only about 2 kilometers. They were most often used indirect from defilade, but that is short enough they were always in the tactical zone. Incidentally the blast effect of 81s is considerably underrepresented in the game - while the blast effects of the largest HE (150mm plus) is overrepresented.

In real life, a modest number of 81mm rounds indirect would pin all infantry in a wide area. Pin more than actually directly kill or wound, to be sure, but 30 meters or so around each round, and an area of several hundred meters on a side, easily, with a modest barrage.

Also, the rate of fire of light mortars is so high, the number of tubes provided at a given tactical level is almost immaterial for the firepower achieved. 2 tubes can throw all the ammo you can get to them, in a matter of minutes. Having 4 or 6 tubes in a full battery may increase the impact of the first few rounds or, more often, just cover a wider area. But it doesn't increase the number of rounds that can be thrown, since that is always set by the number of rounds available, which is a supply issue not a tubes issue.

Ammo per mortar in tactical deployments tends to be limited because they are typically man-packed to the tubes, at least over the final mile or so.

Ammo to div arty can be trucked in, or for the horse supply part of the German and Russian armies, railed to dumps safely behind lines and horse wagon "lighter-ed" to the guns themselves. The second does limit the thruput to the guns compared to trucked ammo, of course. But both greatly exceed what can be man packed to mortars up in the tactical zone. The mortars then make up for limited ammo getting to each by lots of opportunities to use them.

In CM, the problem with the FO representations is the undermodeled shells. You wind up plastering a very small area for 2 minutes solid to inflict realistic levels of suppression, and then run dry quickly as a result. There is no question the on map mortars hit harder per shell in the game, because they will typically put 1 shell out of 3 very close to the point of aim, and that is what the low blast shells need to inflict pins. A single minute of on map fire by one mortar can thus pin a single point target. With a typical load, a medium mortar can hit 4 targets in succession this way; a pair of them can thus suppress a company-sized force in about five minutes.

It is much more MM work, though...

Personally I don't take the light mortars as FOs if ever given a chance. (The Brit 3 inch module in CMAK is the only exception - it is the only affordable allied FO in many cases). FOs under 105mm caliber just aren't worth it, they don't act as FO artillery needs to in a tactical sense. If a scenario designer bumped the ammo on a light mortar FO by a factor of 2 or more, it would be effective, but not "as is". (It'd be most realistic if that were combined with "area wide" targeting, required).

The medium mortars on map, on the other hand, I find very effective, and 2 of them per company - along with HMGs of course - form the basis of all my CM heavy weapons groups. Their highest value is pinning or killing guns, but even used a minute each on ordinary infantry targets they give sufficient bang for the CM point buck and are quite effective.

One man's opinion...

[Ratzki]

Jason, what if you doubled the number of FO's under 105mm in a scenario. Do you think this would offset the poorer performance of the FO artillery shells and be a bit more responsive as there would be 2 on the table. Would 2 not get you to the amount of shells that you feel would be more representative, and increase the abitlty to place some form of suppression on the enemy more effectively. Or even halve the amount of ammo and quad up the FO's.