Pozit Fuses

[oracledb]

Hey Guys,

 

I am excited about CMFB and looking forward to the release date.  I have enjoyed reading the forum and especially the AAR.  

 

I recently re-read Rick Atkinson’s “The Guns at Last Light” sections covering the Battle if the Bulge.  Atkinson spends several paragraphs discussing the US’s new proximity fuses code named pozit fuses.  Atkinson asserts they were cleared for usage in the Battle of the Bulge and artillery using the fuses helped slow the German advance.   I wondered if this is modeled in the game making certain US artillery more effective?   

 

The book does say the pozit fuses were a small fraction of the artillery fired, so I don't think it is a crucial element to model.  I was just curious if they are modeled.  I will certainly buy the game either way!!

Thanks for any help.

[akd]

Yes, it is an option.  You can buy US arty batteries with VT / Pozit starting in December.

Edited January 17, 2016 by akd

[MikeyD]

There's been some revisionist history coming out these days challenging the common story of the smashing success of VT fuses in the bulge. Stories about how they were restricted to direct observation daytime use, how they tended to detonate too high when over tall trees, and their being a very small proportion of shells fired during the battle. Some artillery units, I understand, preferred to use their traditional timed airburst fuses. Artillery units do tend to be a conservative lot. I hear artillery positively despised those newfangled Xylophon artillery rockets as being the polar-opposite of what a good artilleryman aimed for - precision.

[niall78]

Interesting MickeyD because they are mentioned quite a bit in the modern general history books on the Bulge. I'm about a third of the way through Ardennes 1944: Hitler's Last Gamble by Antony Beevor and fire missions using Pozit Fuses have already been mentioned heavily.

I wonder was it a case of many successful 'standard' fire missions being put down to VT fuses? Especially when many standard rounds are going to tree-burst in any case.

[oracledb]

Great news they are included, thank you for checking.  I am curious if the pozit artillery will have increased lethality for a given burst radius. (In other word an increased probability to disable or kill in the blast.)  Sounds like I will be able to test it out pretty soon.

 

 

[Warts 'n' all]

@ niall78.. I have to admit that by the end of the book I'd lost count of the amount of times Beevor had used the phrase "pozit fuses". It was almost as if he'd never heard of them before, and felt compelled to mention them as often as possible.

[akd]

Great news they are included, thank you for checking.  I am curious if the pozit artillery will have increased lethality for a given burst radius. (In other word an increased probability to disable or kill in the blast.)  Sounds like I will be able to test it out pretty soon.

 

 

Air bursts and their increased lethality are already in the game.  VT just lets you get more consistent air bursts, and to get air burst on the fly rather than pre-planned only.

[John Kettler]

oracledb,

Welcome aboard!

Rick Atkinson is a little off in his nomenclature. It's "POSIT" not "pozit" and was intended as a deceptive measure, the cover story being that it stood for Positive Ignition Timing. This was done to ensure that in the event of a leak, the foe would think of it as merely an improvement over Fuze, Mechanical Time, and not the revolutionary Fuze, VT (Variable Time), which was itself a cover name for one of the great secrets of the War, the radar proximity fuze.
 

Here is an overview of the proximity fuze story, to include employment vs aerial and ground targets. So desperate was the Navy's need for the VT fuze for air defense that when the test batches being fired over the water reached a 50% success rate, the Navy rushed the weapon into production and kept working on it thereafter.

http://www.chinalakemuseum.org/secretcitystories/VT Proximity Fuze History.pdf

And as you can see here, the VT fuze was used without proper release authority (was under Eisenhower's control) amidst a desperate tactical situation at Monschau, Germany on December 16, 1944.

http://www.ww2hc.org/articles/proximityfuse.pdf

MikeyD,

If you've got links on the new info, I'd love to see them. I strongly suspect VT in the game has a much higher success rate than was actually true. Even conventional artillery has duds, after all, and this is much more complicated gear, thus inherently far less reliable. Where the proximity fuze historically massacred the foe, it was used en masse, which tended to overcome such problems. Fuze VT was not made available for ground combat use until a point was reached in the war in which it was felt the Germans couldn't develop countermeasures in time. Those countermeasures were stated to be based on recovering dud VT shells and analyzing the fuzes. To my knowledge, the ground target firing trials were conducted over flat dry ground (have seen the firing trial photos), not over the kind of forestation and strong radar returns from snow and ice of the Ardennes and elsewhere. Given what I know of testing conditions and radar performance, high bursts don't seem all that unusual to me. What's not being said here is that obtaining effective airbursts via Fuze, MT is an iterative process, whereas Fuze, VT could simply be fired to a grid and didn't require anywhere nearly the work it took to deliver effective airbursts the old way. 

Am not sure how much revisionism we're talking about, considering Cole in THE ARDENNES: BATTLE OF THE BULGE, Chapter 25 said:

The proximity fuze, a tightly guarded American secret design for detonating projectiles by external influence in the close vicinity of a target, without explosion by contact, got its first battle test in a ground role during the Ardennes. This fuze, also known as the VT or POZIT fuze, had been prepared for some 210,000 rounds of artillery ammunition on the Continent in December. Most of this stock was antiaircraft artillery ammunition, and the 12th Army Group had proposed to try it out in the so-called Liège River Belt, the cordon of antiaircraft gun battalions which was organized to shoot down the V-weapons in flight to Liège. On 16 December a few field artillery battalions in the First Army had small stocks of the new ammunition, a few had witnessed demonstrations, and a very few had fired it. Two battalions in the VIII Corps artillery had been issued some rounds of VT ammunition, but so far as can be determined none were fired on the first day of the German attack. Actually this highly secret ammunition was employed on only a few occasions prior to the Allied counterattack in early January, and then usually at night or in poor weather when the American gunners could not get sensing for normal time fire missions. The postwar claims as to the value of the much touted

[655]

---

VT fuze in halting the German advance are grossly exaggerated.⁴

What is Reference 4?

[4] As an example see Vannevar Bush, Modern Arms and Free Men (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1949): "The proximity fuze may well have saved Liège," p. 31. The conclusions reached in the text above are based on the rigorous analysis in Royce L. Thompson's Employment of VT Fuzes in the Ardennes Campaign (1950). MS in OCMH files.

I want to read Royce Thompson's analysis!

 
While we're on artillery effectiveness, is there any kind of blast/frag reduction for projectiles landing in substantial snow? Bulge veterans talk about how the snow helped with both blast and frag dampening. It made their misery, if not more bearable, at least somewhat less lethal.

Regards,

John Kettler

 

Edited January 20, 2016 by John Kettler
fleshing out

[Wicky]

 

Rick Atkinson is a little off in his nomenclature. It's "POSIT" not "pozit" 

"Cole in THE ARDENNES: BATTLE OF THE BULGE, Chapter 25 said:

.....This fuze, also known as the VT or POZIT fuze"

 

Why do I sense the usual Kettlerian confusion and pointless argumentation...

[JoMac]

Arty Shell/Barrages are already too potent in CM:BN ( and other WWII titles ), and I already assumed VT  So, it's going to get even worse...Just great.

Joe

Edited January 20, 2016 by JoMc67

[John Kettler]

Wicky,

Lots of times people write "pozit," sometimes "posit," but as you saw, it's really an acronym, POSIT. Cole isn't immune to mistakes, nor am I, but facts are facts. And if anything's usual, that would be your use of sweeping generalizations when writing about me and anything I might say. There is nothing pointless about making an effort to get things right, especially in a community of grogs. Did you forget to pay your annual dues?!

Regards,

John Kettler

 

[MikeyD]

Reminds me of people these days writing 'diesel' when up until recently it was always capitalized 'Deisel', named for mr. Rudolph Diesel, inventor of the Deisel engine. 

[oracledb]

@John: thank you for the welcome and additional details.  I admit I was curious what pozit stood for but have not had the time to research.  I’ve actually lurked for years, I started with CMBB.   However, I am nowhere near the same league as most of you in military history.   I do learn a lot from the games and the forums though, thanks again for the reply.

 

I do not know if heavy snow will affect the blast in the game.  If it is air burst the snow may not help!  

 

@AKD: thank you also.  If I understand you correctly, it sounds like air burst are already available.  The VT/pozit fuses only advantage is to increase the flexibility in calling in air burst and increase the consistency.   This is probably covered in a manual somewhere which I am terrible about not reading.  So feel free to tell me to rtfm.

@Joe: Atkinson book’s section on the fuses gave me the impression artillery was key in stopping the German advance.  So it may be correct that artillery is very effective in the game. 

[John Kettler]

oracledb,

You're welcome. Unless something has changed, and I haven't RTFM for CMFB, fire missions using HE will be point detonating. You have control over the pattern, sheaf spacing and such, but there is no modeling of Fuze, MT, which was the old way of getting airbursts. Nor do you have any control at all over fuzing delay for HE vs ground targets. Smashing trenches, dugouts, pillboxes and such is best done with a very short delay to allow the shell to penetrate the ground or structure before bursting. Such a detonation is far more effective than a surface burst. I'd expect VT shoots would be pretty pricey, since purchase cost is evidently heavily driven by weapon lethality, but also rarity. Make no mistake. VT was pretty scarce when it first saw use in CMFB's time frame. Artillery was indeed critical, and it's not generally known that the paratroopers and glider troops of the 101st in Bastogne, together with Combat Command B had some pretty hefty fire support. Five battalions of field artillery alone. Here's the remarkable story of the 463 Parachute Field Artillery Battalion (75 mm pack howitzers) in action at a critical point during the Battle of the Bulge. Bud_B with a field day with this action.

http://www.historynet.com/world-war-ii-463rd-parachute-field-artillery-battalion-in-the-battle-of-bastogne.htm

Regards,

John Kettler

 

 

Edited January 21, 2016 by John Kettler

[JoMac]

@Joe: Atkinson book’s section on the fuses gave me the impression artillery was key in stopping the German advance.  So it may be correct that artillery is very effective in the game. 

I was actually being sarcastic, oracle...I was trying to remark that Arty is already alittle overmodeled in CM...but anyways.