This is why I stopped playing...

[The_Capt]

I rarely post to the outer-board anymore, largely because from lengthy experience it generally is a bit of a waste of time....however on this one I will take a bite.

This thread is proof of the challenge with input/feedback from the "general population". This thread, at its root, is putting forward that artillery in-game simulation is inaccurate because it is weak and not realistic from a volume-to-effect perspective.

As per normal there are very few details to go on. "I dropped a bunch of stuff on some guys and they didn't die!" is really not something to go on for a small company to drop everything and chase down.

Now where the customer does come in helpful is in volume. If multiple cries of a problem come up then BFC and its dedicated team of highly paid Beta Testers will conduct a lengthy and encompassing campaign to chase down the problem.

Now back to the issue of this thread. Problem here is with arty there have been cries in both directions. Most have in fact been that arty, mortars specifically are over-powered and too accurate.

When faced with these sorts of things we actually test the guts out of mortars and arty, in buildings, in the open, in bunkers, behind hedgerows, in trenches and foxholes; you name it we ran the tests. We then look at the literature, historical vignettes and technical specs of the weapons in question.

Add to this roughly half of the Beta Team are modern veterans so the cry of "I have been under fire of "insert weapon" really doesn't resonate well. But we take into account RL experiences where applicable but we also recognize none of us were in Normandy in '44 so these types of things are a small part of the assessment.

BFC then decides if it is a burning issue in need of patch inclusion, a future issue that can wait or not an issue.

I won't speak for BFC but from the tests I ran arty was actually pretty damned good, one of the better implimented features of the game. If Steve asked me tomorrow what my advice would be, I would say not to mess with it in favour of other issue that are well known and "on the list".

It is not a requirement for the customer to offer "forensic proof" on every observation or suggestion. But their observation/recommendation is just that; their's. It is the sum of the whole that the BFC team has to wrestle with and often an individual observation is simply not enough to go on. It may have been an outlier or wild-card that happened for any number of reasons. Now if thirty customers come back with the same problem then it gets traction.

[Baneman]

This isn't so much a covered arc issue as it is a hiding issue. AFAIK units with a covered arc don't spot any worse that those without one. But hiding units do spot very poorly, probably worse than they realistically should and it does make ambushes and defense in general overly difficult.

Ok, but I'm not considering units that are/were hiding - in fact, I almost never use Hide now, unless it's an infantryman trying to stay unspotted himself.

Target arcs DO NOT tell a unit to only observe within the arc. They tell a unit to only engage targets within the arc. They affect spotting only in so much as they affect facing.

Ok, fair enough, but spotting is still an issue then - since the stationary unit should still be spotting better than the unit moving into their LOS - especially when it's a dirty great big tank you're (A) expecting and ( have been listening to approach for the last couple of minutes.

Maybe a solution to the Getting-killed-by-the-ambushee-you-didn't-see problem would be to focus the spotting MORE within the arc than currently if, as you say, it doesn't do so now.

After all, if I'm not going to engage something outside the arc, it's not nearly as important as spotting something within the arc that I DO want to ( in fact, NEED to ) engage.

[Zels77]

I rarely post to the outer-board anymore, largely because from lengthy experience it generally is a bit of a waste of time....however on this one I will take a bite.

This thread is proof of the challenge with input/feedback from the "general population". This thread, at its root, is putting forward that artillery in-game simulation is inaccurate because it is weak and not realistic from a volume-to-effect perspective.

As per normal there are very few details to go on. "I dropped a bunch of stuff on some guys and they didn't die!" is really not something to go on for a small company to drop everything and chase down.

Now where the customer does come in helpful is in volume. If multiple cries of a problem come up then BFC and its dedicated team of highly paid Beta Testers will conduct a lengthy and encompassing campaign to chase down the problem.

Now back to the issue of this thread. Problem here is with arty there have been cries in both directions. Most have in fact been that arty, mortars specifically are over-powered and too accurate.

When faced with these sorts of things we actually test the guts out of mortars and arty, in buildings, in the open, in bunkers, behind hedgerows, in trenches and foxholes; you name it we ran the tests. We then look at the literature, historical vignettes and technical specs of the weapons in question.

Add to this roughly half of the Beta Team are modern veterans so the cry of "I have been under fire of "insert weapon" really doesn't resonate well. But we take into account RL experiences where applicable but we also recognize none of us were in Normandy in '44 so these types of things are a small part of the assessment.

BFC then decides if it is a burning issue in need of patch inclusion, a future issue that can wait or not an issue.

I won't speak for BFC but from the tests I ran arty was actually pretty damned good, one of the better implimented features of the game. If Steve asked me tomorrow what my advice would be, I would say not to mess with it in favour of other issue that are well known and "on the list".

It is not a requirement for the customer to offer "forensic proof" on every observation or suggestion. But their observation/recommendation is just that; their's. It is the sum of the whole that the BFC team has to wrestle with and often an individual observation is simply not enough to go on. It may have been an outlier or wild-card that happened for any number of reasons. Now if thirty customers come back with the same problem then it gets traction.

Message received, thanks for the response.

[The_Capt]

Message received, thanks for the response.

Zels77 you just made the list. The "Reasonable and Polite" list. On the Internet that is a very short list.

You are welcome, sir.

[Zels77]

Zels77 you just made the list. The "Reasonable and Polite" list. On the Internet that is a very short list.

You are welcome, sir.

I think there are a few blokes who might disagree with you!

[sburke]

I rarely post to the outer-board anymore, largely because from lengthy experience it generally is a bit of a waste of time....however on this one I will take a bite.

Sucker, this thread was just begun as a conspiracy to lure you out into the open.

Seriously though thanks for the well reasoned response.

[tankmajor]

this suppresion thing if you look at 1st fallschirmjaeger at monte cassino and all the ordinance that was flung at them and still they could not be moved after 4 attempts by the allied forces so lets get things into perspective when we talk about a war sim

[Erwin]

Re spotting and arcs: "They affect spotting only in so much as they affect facing."

This is quite important as I usually use arcs to "tell" my guys which direction to look in rather than 360 degrees. I have always assumed that with an arc, everyone is looking in that direction so spotting should be significantly enhanced.

[A Canadian Cat]

However, there seems to be an unwillingness from BF to accept criticism unless it's proven in a court of law.

Ultimately, BF needs to decide whether they still want to make the ultimate wargame, or just one more realistic than the competition has produced.

<snip>

The most frustrating thing for me is not that there are glitches, but that BF seem to spend more time denying there are glitches than addressing them.

Sorry I just do not see it. BFC staff have explained why the game works the way it does many times and why the limitations are what they are. For example the gun elevation issue that has been discovered many times. I have never seen BFC staff in simple denial mode.

And they have made changes in response to issues raised. Consider bogging and immobilization:

http://sorry.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=101135

That was a long discussion which included testing and demonstrating. There was an additional thread (that I could not find - sorry) where the person took the discussion here and found a real bug having to do with bogging on road edges. BFC made changes to fix that bug and tweak the bogging behaviour and we got it in the next patch.

The difference between this thread and my bogging thread is two fold. First I started out with an example and a question. That meant that I was asking for opinions and gathering people's expertise. While this thread just dropped the gloves, pulled the sweater over our heads and started swinging! Yes a little hockey fight analogy for at least a little humour;)

Second I did not scum to lowering myself into a slug fest (I did not re read the whole thing so I sure hope I behaved myself the whole time). Sure there were some annoying posts and I tried to ignore then and instead focus on gathering data to test out things that people discussed on the thread.

So, if you pile on with the original poster expect to get more of the same. But if you have questions about how the game behaves and wonder if it is correct then by all means start a new thread and be prepared to discuss the issues and refrain from lowering your self into the muck.

[TheVulture]

There was an additional thread (that I could not find - sorry) where the person took the discussion here and found a real bug having to do with bogging on road edges. BFC made changes to fix that bug and tweak the bogging behaviour and we got it in the next patch.

Presumably you mean this thread:

http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=101538

and yes, when given clear, reproducible evidence of a problem (rather than occasional anecdotes), the problem usually gets fixed in short order. BFC have always been pretty consistent on this, and pretty consistent in ignoring vague "spotting is broken" style complaints. If you think spotting is broken, set up test scenarios and run them repeatedly to show what the pathological behaviour is and under what circumstances it occurs.

[A Canadian Cat]

Presumably you mean this thread:

http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=101538

Yep that's the one. I don't think I said thanks to you for doing that test - so thanks.

I actually did find that thread using google but failed to recognize it as the one I wanted - flipping through the search results to fast - my bad.

Ian

[JasonC]

I thank JonS for the most interesting post on the board is quite a while. Much of what it says is accurate, some shows the typical maneuver officer myopia. The whole thread shows some of that, and of the illusion that movement takes ground and that doing so is all that matters.

Artillery fire on a dug in enemy does not annihilate that enemy outright. Check. Also a straw man.

Does this means the only use of artillery fire is to suppress enemy, outgoing fire? No.

What is the unstated minor premise between the two? That taking a designated objective with maneuver forces is the only thing that matters in the war, and the only things that artillery can do to bring it about would be do it themselves or help the infantry do it, today, this instant.

Otherwise put, the unstated minor is that what artillery can do to reach some limited movement objective today, is all it contributes to the war - or that the war happens today.

This is approximately the exact opposite of the truth, about what actually decided WW II operations.

Notice the way the quoted piece refers several times to reaching the objective. It isn't actually stated that the objective is physically occupied by the enemy, although one of the later comments about small arms combat at the end of a movement imagines that it generally is.

The normal reality is that fire persuades the enemy to displace, without anniliating him where he stands, and without suppressing him until a man with a rifle or bayonet runs up to arms length and shoots or stabs him. That's about as common as a fire mission that kills every man present.

Real deployments are all depth and screens and mutually supporting fire positions. Lots of the battlefield is empty, including spots with cover, with only gaps between those covered by fire from locations nearby.

Suppression of a fire nest frequently enables movement through zones where its outgoing plays any important role. This suppression can come from the enemy there just being heads down from shelling. It can also come from dust or smoke from a barrage. It can also come from a masking assault or engagement on another direction keeping that fire next occupied.

Defenders may lose forward OP lines, lose single fire nests, and be forced to withdraw from others because the local defensive fire scheme has become compromised as a result. Or because new positions reached by attackers threaten to cut off other forward defenders, by interdicting their routes (previously covered when the enemy was farther off) by ranged fire.

All of these jockeying movements and concessions are the normal goals of and results from modest movement attempts by maneuver elements. They are generally not seeking to walk straight over the enemy main body by closing with all of it at point blank range. Even when their objective starts out that way, it will rarely be the result - either defender fire will force the attempt to abort before pushing that close, or the defenders will displace, trying to make the attackers hit air.

A perfectly normal result for a not terribly accurate barrage is to inflict a few percent casualties on the defending infantry formation and persuade the rest to fall back to a location less readily observed by the attackers. Attackers then cautious probe into that position, meet at most a few OPs and snipers and ranged flanking fire, and occupy it.

The ground taking in all of that is not in any way more important or more decisive than the few percent casualties inflicted in the process. In the medium term, in fact, the cumulative effect of those losses is the most important thing going on. A month later, the divisions in contact will be burnt out shells of their original strength, not because they were annihilated by fire in one go, nor because infantry stormed their positions with the bayonet in one go, but because losing even a few percent of trench strength per day will step reduce a division to a cadre in that period of time.

And we know from the operations research that 70% plus of those cumulative losses are coming from the artillery, not the rifles and machineguns. And the machineguns are doing most of the rest. And doing it while the other guy is out and moving around, not while he is in his holes. Losses actually inflicted by attacker small arms on a defender in position are a rounding error on overall losses.

Tactical games and maneuver officer perspectives make it look as though this firefight here today is the most important thing in the whole war, and create the expectation that this local firefight at least will be completely decisive, fought to the death and total elimination of one side or the other, tactically, and without much yielding of ground. But the actual war very rarely looked anything like that.

The real role of artillery is in the whole war and not in that teapot. In that whole war, firing off 1000 shells to wound 10 men makes perfect sense. And will decide the war in itself, since armies field hundreds of millions of shells to fire at the enemy's millions of men. Just not today.

And from that wider perspective, the role of the infantry advancing and jockeying described previously is to make the enemy put his head up out of his holes from time to time, and to force him to displace, and to get points of observation from which accurately adjusted indirect fire can be place on his positions. Which over months will bleed him white, whether he holds every phase line or backs away gradually everywhere.

In short it is the infantryman's supreme concern with his supposedly so important daily maneuver mission that is the real sideshow settling nothing - because they can do it a hundred times and kill practically nobody on the enemy side. But hey, if in the process they can create better targets for the redlegs and give them some good "spots", the slow industrial murder that is artillery warfare will still win the war.

FWIW...

[LongLeftFlank]

The JonS post Jason seems to be referring to is here. (Just to save people the trouble)

Re the OP, I feel artillery is very well modeled; as I've said before (though not for a while) it is infantry's response to artillery, and incoming fire of all kinds, that still needs some work in the game.

CMBN infantry can only be in one of 3 basic poses: prone, kneeling, standing. This posture determines its vulnerability, but also its own LOS. I'd guess that in response to tester complaints about prone units who can't see a damn thing, even at close range, Charles tweaked things to make the pixeltroops stay "up" a lot longer than their real life counterparts would do under severe fire (that's also why they fire MGs from the shoulder so much, bizarrely).

This, paired with a ballistics model that tracks every bullet (and fragment), results in units sustaining high casualty rates for extended periods throughout the firefight rather than the "diminishing returns to fire" that should obtain as men rapidly put solid terra firma between them and the identified sources of danger.

The solution I suggest to this is for the men to have a "hit the dirt" reflex to different kinds of incoming. Of course, that might then create visual oddities similar to the "whack a mole" phenomenon you see with, e.g., halftrack gunners popping in and out of their AFVs. Imagine a dozen squaddies prairie-dogging up and down in their foxholes....

[dieseltaylor]

The massive barrages characteristic of Allied doctrine, particularly in Northwest Europe, often left the bulk of German defenders still alive and the core of the defence intact.{49} The skillful application of infantry small-arms fire was still needed to take and hold an objective, no matter the power of the barrage that may have preceded it.

Reading JasonC's piece and particularly noting:

In short it is the infantryman's supreme concern with his supposedly so important daily maneuver mission that is the real sideshow settling nothing - because they can do it a hundred times and kill practically nobody on the enemy side.

As the CM series have dealt with battles in short time spans the argument as to what is effective over the entire war is perhaps not very relevant and the view of the 1940-45 infantry officer is more valid to the short time spans they operated in.

As I mused over the claimed 70% of casualties for the artillery and I wondered if in fact it is a matter of special cases. After all nobody surrenders to a flying shell but hundreds of thousands, if not millions surrendered to infantry and tank formations. And if they had not surrendered then perhaps the claimed ratio for artillery would be less.

I was also struck by how relevant German artillery must have been in Crete in throwing the Commonwealth out. As I understand it the campaign was very much brutal infantry fighting and movement and very little to do with artillery.

Losses actually inflicted by attacker small arms on a defender in position are a rounding error on overall losses.

[John Kettler]

I don't recall the study title, but circa 1985, the U.S. Army did a historical study in which it concluded that at platoon level and below, the sharp end of the infantry, fully 80% of the infantry casualties came from small arms, not artillery and mortar fire. Why? Because the artillery was primarily targeted on more rewarding, deeper relatively static targets, not the hard-to-hit, earth burrowing grunts. It was this study that led to some of the radical smart infantry weapons just now entering the field. You know--the ones you fire over the enemy entrenchments or though the window, whereupon they detonate.

Regards,

John Kettler

[StellarRat]

I think John K. has a point. If artillery were so overwhelming WW I would have been over right away and Iwo Jima would just have been a mopping up operation for the Marines. It seems to me that the big casualties caused by artillery are caused when the enemy is retreating or they're caught by surprise in the open (assembling, on the march, etc...) One also has to keep in mind that during WW II and even now artillery is not exactly safe to be calling in when the enemy is within small arms range. Errors of hundreds of yards are possible.

[Michael Emrys]

I personally think the situation Jason describes, while not exactly uncommon, does not describe all situations and may even not come all that close. What he is describing is a planned—or at least anticipated—retrograde movement by defenders once they recognize that their position has become untenable. It further assumes that such movement will be successful, i.e., not result in too many casualties. This kind of thing probably did in fact frequently occur in the bocage where LOS were acutely limited, but it does depend on troops having a covered path of withdrawal. Having prepared secondary positions, or at least good defensive terrain, to withdraw to is also a big deal. Absent covered retreat routes and good secondary positions, retreating troops were subject to being cut down in the open. In that situation, they might prefer to stay where they are and fight it out to the bitter end or risk surrendering. A lot of variables condition such choices, and troops not behaving rationally (which was often the case) throws additional wild cards into the mix.

Michael

[Bigduke6]

It all comes down to what one considers "decisive". Tacticians will consider unit manuever and soldier skill the critical issues in deciding the battle, operational experts will say formation mobility and relative concentration of force are what makes or breaks a campaign, and strategists will point to available material (and men, who to strategists are just another resource) and the logistical limits on that material as the main factors that determine a war's outcome.

The closer you get to the strategic level, the more decisive artillery becomes. LLF makes a valid point that no one surrenders to a flying shell fragment, for that you need troops, but on the other hand, you pound men with artillery long enough, you will make them inclined to surrender if you offer them an opportunity. This is because artillery more than the other arms is unanswerable by the other arms. They must endure what the artillery hands out.

The impact (get it?) of artillery is not just the people it kills or maims or even forces the heads down of during the battle, or even over the course of several weeks or months. Artillery has the capacity of convincing its targets their resistance is futile. Other arms can do that too, for instance tanks can convince infantry armed just with rifles to quit.

Convince a man his prolonged resistance is futile and he will only die at the end, when his body too stops a random bit of flying metal, and there is only unit discipline left to keep him fighting. Outside of movies, there are very, very few groups of men on Earth can see their buddies struck down by something they can't respond to, over time, and not start wondering if unit cohesion and obeying senior ranks is all just an idiotic conspiracy that will get them killed for no reason.

And that is how you get giant units surrendering to small ones: the men in the giant units have become convinced if they resist further they would throw away their lives pointlessly. Artillery, or in the modern day simply the generic category indirect fire weapon, is the arm that does the lion's share of that work.

I guess the way to account for all this in a CM setting would be for the scenario designer to account for how much a unit had suffered casualties during previous days and months, when he built the scenario. Even a veteran infantry unit that has had a couple of casualties over say the last week, will fight far more effectively than a veteran infantry unit that has suffered 1/3 of its number casualties over the last month. True the survivors are now skilled at surviving, but frankly, a good part of that is simply choosing to ignore orders that would obviously get them killed or maimed if those orders were followed. And lots of times the junior officers, who share the same risks, are complicit. Perhaps if one is designing a battles where a unit has been in the line a long time, one should tweak unit motivation or leadership values somehow to account for a larger chance of unit insubordinance in battered units. I'm not saying it would be easy.

Of course, it's not just artillery that can convince soldiers of the futility of their mission. You send men into a region and tell them "your patrols will make the locals friendly and make the locals hate the guerillas, and we will win", and even if those patrols produce no friendly casualties at all, if the guerillas keep showing up sooner or later the soldiers are going to start thinking their patrol mission is a crock.

If, in fact, at best the patrols are doing nothing, and possibly they are antagonizing the local population, and in any case those patrols are putting friendly soldier lives at risk for no clear purpose, then the men performing those patrols will become less effective just as inevitably as if random artilery rounds were chipping away at men effective numbers. The process will not be as quick, obviously, as suffering drip-drip casualties from indirect because one's unit is in the line. Death or severe injury to his friends is the still the best weapon against a soldier's motivation.

But continued "failure" can undermine unit morale and motivation just like accumulated artillery casualities. We have seen that in just about any counter-insurgency operation in the last century. Of course, the tacticians will say, "Not so, even at the ends of the counter-insurgencies the Americans in Vietnam or the Russians in Afghanistan fought effectively." To which I would respond, look at the units involved and in both cases you will see that as those conflicts wore on, the commanders relied more and more on picked troops who had volunteered for duty, and tried to keep the conscripted regulars out of the heavy fighting. Which in turn reduced the number of soldiers that count be effectively used against the insurgency. This is a direct outcome of falling motivation and morale because the average soldiers perceived the conflict as futile.

My point is, artillery or more generally random bits of flying metal over time create a sense of futility in the enemy during a war better than any other weapon. True, these days it's most often roadside bombs or guided munitions, but I would argue the basic strategy has been unchanged for close to a century: If you hit the other guy with enough explosives over a period of months or even years, eventually he will quit and your side will win.

A side note on the Cold War: In my youth I was a NATO Fulda Gap guy who was supposed to give his life halting the Big Red Machine. Now, as a tiring old man fate has placed me in an office with a former Red Army guy who, funnily enough, was in the service roughly at the same time as I was. His job was to help attack NATO. We were both in tactical intell/recon so we've had plenty to chat about over the years.

Our considered opinion is we have no idea who would have won World War Three but we are absolutely sure neither of us would have lasted a month. Further, it seems pretty clear that our never having to fight each other is more down to luck than the wisdom of statesmen. In retrospect, we were told a lot of lies by our superiors at the time, clearly they were more interested in getting us ready to try and kill each other than telling us the truth.

The Soviet leadership lied more and more shamelessly, and the NATO lies were smaller and better-packaged. But then the Soviet soldiery always suspected it was being systemically lied to, while us NATO guys for the most part believed what we were told and did not question the morality of our superiors. So we are not sure which of us, when we were Cold Warriors, was the more falsely-motivated.

I think I can say for the both of us that the Cold War, in retrospect, looks like a giant scam run by both sides' governments to spend an obscene, ridiculous amount of money on weapons instead of schools and hospitals - at a time when nobody had any intention of attacking any one, on either side, not statesmen or average citizens.

The idea, on both sides, seems to have been to make sure a substantial flow of money kept going to military programs in a time of peace, and screw the general population. We do not see big differences on either side about how government colluded with the arms industry to make this happen.

[dieseltaylor]

Agree muchly.

[JonS]

I think John K. has a point. If artillery were so overwhelming WW I would have been over right away and Iwo Jima would just have been a mopping up operation for the Marines.

Not really. I think you may have misunderstood the point Jason was making.

Generally, battles aren't as bloody as people assume, because people don't like dying and commanders don't like having their command destroyed.

An infantry attack without artillery support will generally fail. An infantry attack with well integrated artillery support (including CB) will generally succeed. And it'll succeed because it presents the opposing force with an insurmountable dilemma; either emerge to engage the enemy infantry and be destroyed by their artillery, or hide from the artillery and be destroyed by the infantry. Knowing that, commanders will pull back, losing a few men in the initial phases of the battle, a few more while withdrawing, a few to artillery at various times, and perhaps a few to infantry weapons.

The point here is that artillery doesn't have to wipe out everything it touches - it just has to threaten to wipe out everything it touches. If you carry a big enough stick, you don't have to actually hit anyone with it to get them to do what you want, as long as they know that you're fully prepared to hit them if needs be and that it'll bloody hurt when you do. Do that over and over and over, day after day after day, and you have the American campaign in Normandy: multiple, continual small-ish scale attacks, each of which inflicted a few casualties on the locally defending German unit and gained perhaps a field or two. But across the whole front the Germans were losing more than two infantry battalions every single day. Just to the slow, drip-drip-drip of casualties in onesies and twosies in hundreds of locations every day.

A similar dynamic applies to close air support. It's often noted that Allied tactical airforces in NWE destroyed very few German armoured vehicles, despite the extraordinary claims the flyboys made. But in most respects it doesn't matter whether they did or didn't destroy anything on any given mission. The Germans knew that, given the opportunity, the Allied tactical airforces really would pummel German ground forces. So the Germans denied them the chance. They moved by night, they moved under cover on secondary routes, they scattered at the first sign of Allied air activity, and they expended an extraordinary amount of effort on camouflage. From the Allied point of view all of that additional Clausewitzian friction is a pretty big win at the operational level. And sometimes those measures still weren't enough and some German tanks, trucks, guns, and headquarters were destroyed, reminding the Germans that they had to impose even more friction on themselves. The friction wasn't the intended effect of the tac airforces, but it was an undeniable effect of them.

Jon

Note: I've used 'generally' quite deliberately here. Individual context matters a lot, and nothing is guaranteed in the realm of human affairs. Yes, there were bloody battles which saw huge chunks of whole battalions wiped out (Example: Op JUPITER and Op SPRING). Yes, there were 'silent' attacks that succeeded brilliantly (Example: the series of night attacks conducted by 2(NZ)Div advancing towards Sidi Rezeg in Nov 1941). And yes, there were well planned and supported attacks that nevertheless failed (Example: Op SPRING). But the thing about those is that they're remembered largely because their outcome was so unusual. Generally, the expected outcome was the opposite of what happened in those battles.

[Chek]

Nicely put Bigduke.The truth always gets it first.

[The_Capt]

Well let me chime in. I disagree with JasonC (not a new thing) on a lot of issues but his point that most "combat" was a low level grind rings true. However the ends of that grind being an attrition-to-victory affair I am afraid we will never agree on.

The aim of Normandy was operational breakout. A breakout that would enable operational manoeuvre and encirclement of the Germans. This was the money shot that would lead to (hopefully) the strategic effect of mass surrender on the Western Front. This was partially accomplished, blame thrown around with abandon but lets not lose sight of the overall plan.

Dwight and the boys never planned to "slug it out hedgerow by hedgerow until they are attrited to death". In some areas that is how it turned out but this was never the "plan".

Artillery is a "force multiplier". It is designed to change the attacker-defender ratio without massing more troops, which is often ineffective anyway. Like minewarfare for the defender, arty is designed to "make more of what you have" on the battlefield. It was never, in WWII a "system of decision", in modern times that may change but back in WWII it was volume in support of ground manoeuvre plain and simple. This was an extension of the Lessons Learned in WWI where they tried to use arty as a stand alone system and failed miserably.

Now when artillery is added, IF the ratios still are not enough in favour of an attacker then the slow grind begins.

In the case at the front of this thread, I suspect (but cannot be sure without more detail) that CPT Mike's timing is what hurt him. If you drop a bunch of arty are not following up very closely with infantry assault you will find that the survivors have time to sort themselves up and shoot back. With box standard arty it took a lot to hammer troops under cover into submission. However if they are forced to take cover, are taking hits and when it clears and they lift their heads up they are staring at a gun barrel it definitely changed the equation.

Arty is not designed to spook the enemy, make them give ground and slowly bleed (this is a secondary virtue-out-of-bad outcome). It is designed to provide suppression and therefore freedom for manouevre, which arguably is the point for any massing of fires at all levels of warfare.

[dieseltaylor]

Courtesy of Mr Salt. Plenty of detail and it should be noted bocage was in the highest category of terrain for neutralising shellfire.

WO 291/946 Effects of bombardment – present state of knowledge.

This summary was published in 1946.

Against men in slit trenches, 25-pdr groundburst must hit the trench or parapet to be effective. If firing 1000 25-pdr shells into a 300 ´ 300 yard box with 100 men in it in slit trenches, the expected number of casualties would be nine.

Four kinds of effect from bombardment are distinguished:

Lethal: Killing or incapacitating personnel.

Material: Destroying weapons and equipment.

Neutralisation: Preventing the enemy from observing or using his weapons for the duration of the bombardment.

Morale effects: Reduction in effectiveness lasting after the bombardment has ceased.

Two possible morale effects are mentioned. "Sensitization" means that greater weights of bombardment have progressively more morale effect. The existence of this effect was supported by "abundant evidence".

"Habituation" means the lowering of morale effect by men getting used to small bombardments. The occurrence of this was "more difficult to support by adequate evidence".

The "minimum effective density" of a bombardment is 0.3 lbs/sq yd for 25-pdr shell. "If the enemy is in protected positions such as pillboxes or concrete gun casemates instead of in open positions the state of affairs is different. No projectile which cannot pierce the protection has any

noticeable effect. The neutralising, morale and lethal effects do not exist until the material effect is achieved."

Experience on the Normandy beaches suggested that one 81mm mortar had the same casualty-causing effect as 1 MG. Casualties were weapon were one-and-a-half times more on Omaha than the British beaches, where they were in turn four times greater than on Utah. The difference is attributed to

greater effectiveness of preliminary bombardment.

Morale effect (lasting after the bombardment ceases) "...can only be achieved against enemy in open positions, unless the duration is about 8 hours or more, in which case lightly protected positions may be affected especially if retaliation is impossible."

On open positions a bombardment intensity of 0.1 lb/sq yd/hour in 25-pdr equivalents produces collapse in about 4 hours; 1.0 lb/sq yd/hour in about ¼ hour.

Neutralising effect, in NW Europe, on an enemy in open positions, was achieved with a bombardment intensity of 0.02–0.08 lb/sq yd/hr. in 25-pdr equivalents.

Lethal effect: A density of 0.1 lb/sq yd causes 2% casualties on targets in slit trenches, about 20% on targets in the open.

Material effect: A density of 0.1 lb/sq yd damages about 1½% of weapons or guns in pits, 20% of soft vehicles in the open.

There does seem to be some confusion in figures but apparently the minimum measured period of a stonk was 15 minutes. Possibly anything less does not have the time to work on the recipients nerves and for him to consider how he feels about matters. : )

[altipueri]

So about 110 rounds for a casualty in slit trenches.

One of you clever chaps could set up a QB, place some victims in holes and stonk them.

[The_Capt]

So about 110 rounds for a casualty in slit trenches.

One of you clever chaps could set up a QB, place some victims in holes and stonk them.

Don't need to already know the answer. CM needs nowhere near that level of fire to create a casualty. IIRC a one minute pounding (so maybe 10 rounds) with a light mortar will cripple a Regular squad in the open. Arty in CM in the open is deadly.