The idea of making the enemy "deploy early"

[Dinodawg33]

Wie Gehts Volks

Parallel pursuit logic just seems to be an adaptation of the blitzkrieg philosophy. After looking over some of my books regarding Operation Bagration "parallel pursuit" is closer to "near parallel penetration". Russian forces attacked in several areas each with a relatively broad front. Once the attacks begin to gain ground and tie up German forces, German reserves need to be sent in. After the reserves are commited the Soviet "deep penetration forces" (also referred to as "exploitation forces") attack thru the line on a narrow front with minimal opposition in the German rear areas, keeping a corridor open for other units and supply, with objectives to take rail and road centers in pincer movements by subunits of deep penetration forces on either side of the objective.

In my own opinion, I feel the system needs to be on a regimental level or higher. And as for how to beat it- We can debate that for days and examples will be given for a stand fast and counterattack the flank scenario A+ @Bastogne and F- @Minsk during Bagration. Every operation and battle is different with variables in unit size, composition, morale and fitness as well as enviromental- weather, terrain, and even the amount of daylight (or lack thereof) may have an effect.

The Russians also say "Front lines don't follow roadways." I have heard that from at least 2 different Soviet sources. The Russians had no fear of going cross country to meet thier objectives. I wouldn't either if I were using tanks with crosscountry abilities like the T-34. And from the limited detail maps I have, it doesn't appear the Soviets followed roadways with exploitation forces. OTOH the Germans during the advance on Moscow stayed on the few highways in the same region. The Russians deployed a delaying force in each village. The German infantry would pause, wait for artillery and/or air support, and by the time those units were ready, the Russians would pull back to the next town.

If I seemed to ramble too much please forgive me, I should have gone to sleep hours ago.

Was ist los?

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[John Kettler]

Adam,

There's an account in which a German POW demanded to see the machine gun cannon the British had used against his unit. Was very surprised to see the 25 pdr. ISTR for short bursts, with well-trained crews, it could do 15 rpm x 8 guns per battery = 120 rpm, a veritable hurricane of fire. Ian Hogg, a retired Royal Artillery Master Gunner talks about firing guns as hard and fast as the men could load them, firing for hours on end until the paint blistered off the barrels.

I think it's ill advised, though to compare 25 pdr EFCs with T-72 barrel life. The difference is roughly apples and kumquats. For starters, British tube artillery is designed to be durable, with a total service life of decades. Russian tanks, though, are reckoned to have a combat life expectancy of 24 hours once in battle. This being the case, why worry about designing a long service life into the gun? The gun is smoothbore, not rifled, and is firing at three multiples of the 25 pdr. firing Supercharge.

http://www.junobeach.org/e/4/can-tac-art-tfp-e.htm

The T-72 gun, firing HVAPFSDS, is putting the round out at 1800 m/sec. Russian tank philosophy is entirely different from the West's. Tanks have very short combat lives, and in peacetime, the most extreme measures are taken to minimize wear and tear on them, so much so that a tank company generally has three tanks it can actually practice with. Ours are almost bulletproof in terms of ruggedness and mechanical reliability by comparison. Suvorov says that the Operation Dneiper military extravaganza which so terrified the West was a terrible blow to Russian military readiness, in that all those tanks wore themselves out and had to be completely replaced.

Regards,

John Kettler

[Dinodawg33]

Adam, my apologies- I misquoted what I thought I remembered.

Hitler's Greatest Defeat- The Collapse of Army Group Center June 1944

by Phil Adair ISBN 0-304-35449-X

The amount of ammunition and fuel required for an operation on this scale was prodigious. Stavka had laid down that Fronts should have five first and second basic loads of ammunition, 10 to 20 refills of fuel, and 30 days' rations, but in many cases these targets were not met. One of the greatest dif*ficulties with ammunition was the transportation forward from the railhead to the gun positions where dumps were formed. This caused a problem when the artillery advanced because the ammunition had to be left behind and brought up later. Sergeant M. Fukson, a technical sergeant in an artillery brigade supporting First Baltic Front, tells how this was done: 'For this we got on Lease Lend sixteen Studebakers from America for transporting shells. The Studebakers were powerful vehicles which could travel over marshland and all types of ground. The Soviet roads just couldn't be compared with European ones. There were muddy swamps and so on, but the Front doesn't run along a main road! So the Studebakers helped a lot.' (6)

6. Interview with Mr Fukson at Tel Aviv.

I have heard that phrase before from another Russian source but I don't recall specifically where.

With the poor detail of maps I have I checked out some new roadway maps of Belarus and compared them to the 5 Bagration maps in my own books.

The initial idea of the thread is getting your opponent to deploy early. And yes standard operating procedure would be to cut the spearhead off at the neck in flank attacks, in order to cut off the supply and the avenue of retreat / withdrawal. Forgive me for bludgeoning Bagration so much but it's something I have plenty of data on, and the Soviet preparations were very significant. It was planned out in several phases. The main bodies initially attacked to a limited depth (6-10 miles) , mainly near Bobryusk, Orsha, and Vitebsk. The majority these thrusts do not appear to follow any significant roadway system. In fact some Rifle Divisions attacked through marsh without any roadways. By the time the Soviets broke thru the main defensive lines the Germans were forces to commit the few reserves available. Thereby deploying early. The Russian exploitation phase then started. (In a way like Patton streaming out of Normandy) These thrusts did follow the main roadways Bobryusk-Minsk, Slomensk-Minsk, and the highway WNW from Vitebsk in the first month of the offensive. And following these groups the encircling and ambush subunits were deployed as the exploitation forces pressed on. The Soviet plan was that the German reserves were already deployed, engaged and unable to react to the exploitation forces as they were soon to be miles to their rear cutting off large parts of Army Group Center from supply and withdrawl

So, by now I've abandoned the initial plot of the thread. And I've twisted and stretched it to pieces.

The parallel pursuit on a CMBB level doesn't sound logical to me. How big would the map need to be to send 2 companies on an end run just out of sight on an opposing company? If they aren't mechanized they wouldn't be in any shape to fight when the time came.

Thanks for putting up with me.

Its time for a hotseat game with my eldest son.

Dean

[JasonC]

The LZ Xray rounds per gun figure are somewhat off, though the total is correct. The reason is there were 12 105mm howitzers supporting, not 6. Initially 6 yes, but a second battery was airlifted in when the fight went hot. Of course a couple of guns dropped out at the end, too. So the firing tubes went from 6 to 12 to 10, averaging 9 or 10 probably, in a time and intensity adjusted sense.

The ammo fired amounts to around 300 tons, which is certainly large for such a small number of firing tubes and in that respect exceptional. The reason is it was about the only truly hot fight in a wide theater in which the US had massive transport capacity - and it was readily able to get the ammo to the tubes in range on C-47 heavy lift helos etc.

As for effectiveness, the NVA lost something like 1500 men in the fighting, maybe 2000. The fire support included many airstrikes and attack helo runs, of course, and the infantry contributed substantial MG and small arms firepower. It would be generous to award even half the total losses to the 105s. Meaning the causalties per round fired probably came in around one per 25 rounds or thereabouts.

Historically anything around 1 in 10 is operationally highly effective, and 1 in 50 often happens without being terribly effective.

Tubes aren't scarce, nor is firing time, and neither limits actual rounds thrown in any sustained campaign. That is instead set in the short run by transport capacity to the guns, especially when the front is moving. And in the long run even that is always saturated by industrial scale shipments and the long run limit is actual shells produced.

Nations make hundreds of millions of shells, laboriously move them like water pressure through a network of transport links, to tubes that act as final "hoses" for delivery, sprayed over the enemy. Per round effectiveness then declines when there is no combined arms threat and the enemy can simply "go deep" and ride it out, and when oversaturation wastes shell power in overkill, trying to get annihilation results that aren't actually available in any event. While per round effectiveness rises on defense, with combined arms threats, and with gradual application of the available shells at rich targets as they happen to expose themselves. That avoids the million-shell wastes of moonscapes created while every living thing is in a cellar or deep bunker or not in the beaten zone or already dead.

Overall, hundreds of millions of shells are chasing on the order of ten million combatants, time integral in both cases. You don't need to get more than about 1 man hit in 10 shells fired to run the enemy out of men, first.

[JasonC]

As for why the LZ X Ray fire probably got a middling 1 in 25 effectiveness and what it was doing, the missions were mixed. Some were fired with excellent forward observation and adjustment on large bodies of infantry exposing themselves in massive attacks, and undoubtedly exceeded the average figure by a wide margin. Other shells were fired to protect surrounded American units with a box barrage to keep the enemy off of them, and many of those must have hit empty no man's land that the enemy vacated early in sustained periods of firing. And in addition, when no other urgent targets were being called (during lulls in the close infantry fighting), interdiction and harassment fires were shot at the entire mountain the NVA used as a base area during the fighting, undoubtedly with minimal per round effectiveness, but probably some drain on NVA morale and rest etc.

If effectiveness per round were the relevant measure, the last would have been quite low and pointless, but rounds simply were not scarce, thus there was no need to save them for more exposed targets. But that again is exceptional. In most wars and certainly for all combatants in WW II writ large, at least until very late for the allies, rounds available overall was the firing rate limiter, with target scarcity as the front moved, or limited logistics to move mounds of shells to keep up with the front, occasionally more important and limiting the overall firing time.

Meanwhile in periods of the highest shell availability in logistics terms, the target set was often poor in tactical terms. Overuse against thin targets seeking annihilation, use against tough field fortifications with the targeted forces gone deep, etc. But the artilleries would frequently fire heavily in such periods anyway, because the favorable logistics created by a stationary front and a long build-up time, seemed too good to "throw away" by throttling back the firing until better targets appeared. This was undoubtedly made worse by the tendency of all sides to regard artillery as an aid and auxiliary to the other arms, strictly subordinate to them, and indecisive in itself. So operations were not conducted to give it better chances to shoot well at rich targets, but on the contrary it was given hard targets and undoable tasks and compressed firing schedules, to fit the tactical needs of other arms, plans, and logistical constraints.

Arguably there was considerable blindness in that. Because the war lasted so long and really did require near annihilation of the manpower pools of the losing sides, and indirect HE caused such a high portion of that eventual bloodletting. Increasing the average effectiveness per shell fired by even 50% or so by firing at richer targets and refraining from wasteful shots at lousy ones, might objectively speaking have been far more efficient. But nobody was seriously thinking that way. Maneuver arms drove, firepower arms were in the backseat with a supporting role, in the minds of the commanders on all sides.

[Joachim]

Interesting approach.... but creating favourable targets for the arty IMHO means flsuhing the enemy out of his position. Which takes a great deal of preparation, fuel, rested men, small arms ammo, combat ready tanks - you know the whole thing. Even capturing a good observation point often means capturing one of the most well-protected parts of the enemies line.

And after flushing the enemy out, you gotta know (observe) his line of retreat.

Stealthy FOs are another matter, but given the available radios in WW2 this is quite a risky business.

A moving enemy is vulnerable to all kinds of arms - and he will try to avoid being seen. So you need scouting parties for the arty. Which must be big enough to combat the moving enemy. Cause on a fluid battlefield they will most likely get detected. But if they are big enough to fight, they are just as good in killing (or forcing to surrender) as the arty is.

As the arty is stationary and the other arms are closer to the enemy - who should lead (as in: command) the op?

Will the arty fire at bad targets to prepare for the op?

This quickly results in hen and egg - with a slight disadvantage for the arty regarding who should lead.

Just throwing bricks towards the enemy is so much easier.

Note that this holds for WW2 or WW1. There where times where the arty was _the_ tool on the battlefield.

It's interesting to note in that context that ISTR most corps commanders in the Wehrmacht where from the arty branch (mid-war).

Gruß

Joachim

[JasonC]

Examples of men understanding it and of men not understanding it are not hard to find. You can also find examples of it working without men understanding it as the decisive process, at the time, though some analysts have seen it in hindsight.

Falkenhayn at Verdun - there are objectives close behind the front line for the retention of which the French will be obliged to commit all of their reserves. If so committed at a point of our chosing against our fully concentrated artillery, the French army will bleed to death.

An example of men fully equipped to do it, failing to because they hopelessly misunderstood the process - the allies at the winter line in Italy, the fight for Cassino et al. The allies had a huge advantage in HE firepower and logistic thruput. They proceeded to waste it in epic prep barrages seeking instant breakthrough, after each of which they committed large bodies of their own infantry to attack, each losing far more than was inflicted, and each so long after the barrage that the Germans could spend the one in their cellars and still fight effectively etc.

They had L-5 spotting planes and complete command of the air, and the Germans had numerous battalion level positions and company strongpoints across the entire line. The Germans also had a doctrine stressing instant counterattack to regain any ground lost, even at the cost of momentarily giving up their defensive cover edge. Rather than probing for weakness continually while executing as much German infantry as possible on a long time scale, instead the allies fired off their HE in great individual set-tos, bouncing rubble forty times over, compressed into a time scale of hours instead of deliberately spread over weeks to hit the best targets at vulnerable times etc.

Examples of fights won that way despite lack of understanding of the process by those using it - the US push to St. Lo and breakthrough, which did not work as a single big push (though there was a final one, of course, in Cobra), but as a continual bleeding of the Germans of their available trench infantry strength. Or the northern shoulder Bulge fight, largely won by the artillery concentration at Elsenborn and the blizzard of 155mm HE is was able to put down on each German attack.

Yes there were times when instead maneuver bagged so many at once that it exceeded those performances in efficiency terms. But if you examine them, you will find they either feature particularly incapable opponents doing everything wrong, or are preceeded by attrition fighting that reduce the losing side's ability to hold a line in sufficient strength to stop it.

The single most refuted idea in the whole war, was that you could win all of it with one clean breakthrough in one big push.

FWIW...

[Tero]

By Joachim

And after flushing the enemy out, you gotta know (observe) his line of retreat. Stealthy FOs are another matter, but given the available radios in WW2 this is quite a risky business.

By 1944 the Red Army had become quite proficient in triangulating and hitting practically instantly FO's using radios.

As the arty is stationary and the other arms are closer to the enemy - who should lead (as in: command) the op?

That depends how expendable your infantry manpower is.

Will the arty fire at bad targets to prepare for the op?

That depends on the enemy preparations. Defenders did/do use fake positions as arty magnets. Attackers did/do use diversionary fire missions to make the defender mask the true point of attack. And if the attacker is not sure how the defence is laid out he may use exorbitant amounts of ordnance to blast turf with rolling barrages just to make sure they hit something.

[Joachim]

... guess I'm getting a bit closer to those who understand....

So a "small" scale attack by inf/armor should not flush the defenders out of cover but lure them out. Either by taking decisive ground or by threatening to do so.

Case a) You don't take that ground, just force the defender to a counterattack. The arty then fires at that counterattack and stalls it. Nice idea. Will they hit the right target? The arty does the killing, but the other branches are the live bait - and do risk friendly fire as they are out of cover, too. Needs a lot of trust. If you tell the attackers they are just bait - don't expect them doing a good job. If not... well don't expect them to do a good job once they find out themselves after a few of those attacks. Don't expect them to perform any good offensive op after that. Expect some to ask questions after massive blue on blue comes in.

Case

You take ground which is important. If the ground is so important, you might find yourself in a nice arty barrage once you try to take it.

Yet probably the biggest obstacle is that if you want to apply small scale inf/armor ops to trigger big arty bombardments, the level of those commanding the arty is probably well above those actually seeing the small scale objectives. Read: Those important points may not exist on those maps used for the big picture considered by some HQ in the rear.

Now this does not mean I think the theory is bad. It is the application of Blitzkrieg and encirclement (or threat of it) into an arty context. Force the defender to move and thus lose his advantage.

In CM.... I'd use it anytime vs a defending AI trying to recapture a lost flag

[JasonC]

It isn't a matter of mere bait, it is simply combined arms. The enemy is presented a dilemma with no good reply, and then he is gored on the particular horn of his choosing.

If he leaves thin fronts, continual probes lick at them and take ground bite by bite, levering him out of his positions.

If he stands to defend strongly, every place he does so he holds, but is plastered. And not while he is deep in his holes or unlocated, but reactively while actually fighting.

It is the operational-scale equivalent of bounding overwatch. The point of which isn't to protect a movement on the one hand or mere bait to get something to fire at on the other. It is just fire and movement basic principles.

Take the Italy winter line example as a case for it. Clark's Raincoat - 200,000 shells fired in 2 days, with the enemy barely located let alone in heavy contact yet. Then infantry attack broad front into German arty, and sea saw infantry fighting in his ground, with the arty already fired off. Tactically, they hit a village with 4 artillery battalions for an hour and a half, then infantry walks in - the arty is by then over. Rapido - 16 battalions of arty fire 1000 rounds a minute 2 1/2 hours before the main infantry attack - and in a fog, because that is supposed to be breakthrough day. Every advance mets intact MGs anyway, exchange rate achieved 8 to 1 against. Cassino in February, 200,000 shells fired in 2 weeks, marginally better than 2 days but mostly making rubble and rearranging it artistically. 250 bombers hitting an abby with 600 tons in one day, follow up delayed for hours even starting, from miles away and very difficult ones. Next the town, medium and heavy bombers with full loads for 3 hours, 750 tons, immediately followed by 200,000 rounds of artillery fired as fast as the cannons could be cocked, right onto the still boiling inferno of dust. There were in fact only 300 German FJ in the town at the time, and half of them survived in the cellars.

These are collosal misuses of the firepower arms. The same missions from the mediums could have been directed at battalion areas and located guns with L-5 spotting over weeks, and would have bleed the Germans far more. All those hundred thousand shell barrages in hours utterly failed to create any decisive anything, and didn't even protect the maneuver elements from losses in their attacks. And they didn't bleed the Germans a tenth as much as the same expenditure delivered reactively by actual front line spotters, would have. But the highest muckity mucks wanted a way to shape the battle and instinctively reached for the one big show set-to they could watch and comprehend, directing it at observable terrain objectives they could take home like a scalp.

The actual winning tactics were continual infiltration coupled with observed barrage, probe and counterattacking the counterattacks, and running the defenders out of men on the same sector by rotating units through that sector, instead of spastically attack with a flat line of units, each assigned frontage and each flailing uselessly until exhausted, after which (just as the enemy opposite nearly runs out of men there) the attack shifts to try some new spot in the eternal hope that it is weaker than the last. Even though you just spent gobs of blood weakening the last and the place you hit next is untouched and prepared.

Attrition can be done intelligently, or it can happen to idiots in spite of themselves. At the winter line, it was the latter, and a major reason why is the firepower arms were misused chasing a chimera of rapid breakthrough. Properly applied that same firepower and a bit of infiltration at night and probing repeatedly along the same frontages, would have run the Germans out of manpower 2-3 times as fast and at least 5 times as cheaply in allied blood.

Anyway. Falkenhayn, Petain, they understood this stuff in WW I (not everyone did then, mind). The art of it has been lost in slanders, that can't tell it apart from the "one big push" attempts stubbornly repeated.

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[costard]

Your limits are defined by the availability of resources - materials and labour. In the case of the US in WW2, not really relevant. As JC points out, its the supply chain that limits availability of rounds for guns.

Copper, tin, oil, nitrates, tool steel. Fuses and primers.

[JasonC]

Labor not an issue, the process was automated enough everywhere that materials were the rate limiter, or logistics to use what was made. Copper is quite expensive and is used in huge amounts in shell production. Metals generally. Explosives strains the same nitrate sources used for fertilizer and therefore indirectly there is a tradeoff between shells and food output. Tubes are cheap but need to be planned in the right quantity for actual achieved shell output on the one hand, and battle losses on the other. Logistics links compete for metal inputs and have to carry all other output as well. Where these different bottlenecks bind hardest depends on the power and the period of the war. In addition there is planning efficiency for all of it - many got nowhere near the output the inputs were theoretically capable of producing.

For the US the overall bind was shipping space to move anything and everything thousands of miles by sea in short spans of time, using a merchant marine that started relatively small and was under serious attack by uboats until mid 1943, preventing its expansion before that date. That left only a year of shipping time before the main land campaign commenced in Europe and two years of it all told - with a ton of shipping available at the moment the uboats were basically tamed worth 2 years, later stuff on average only 1, to the end of the war. Shipments arriving in the last few months can be dropped as irrelevant to the outcome. Distances were enourmous and the demands were in every theater, down to including support to allies for basic foodstuffs for their civilian populations.

For Russia the limit was explosives output. 40% of production capacity was lost in the first year of the war. Lend lease helped, both directly and by supplying food to the army, but basically to feed the guns they had to starve the countryside, which they were stripping of manpower for the army anyway. Agricultural production therefore fell 40%. As long as huge portions of the population were in German occupied areas, that was manageable - not that those so occupied were any better off, they were worse (other than the Baltics). But as areas were reconquered, undernutrition was widespread and millions of the old and infirm died of inadequate food supply and its effects. The army got first call on important food and was spared. Note that Russia also misplanned the size of its arty park and had many more guns that it could feed, as a result. This helped a bit with their other great bottleneck, low transport capacity from railhead to the guns - by one horse wagon, 1000 pounds at a time. That is one reason the Russians continued to favor smaller caliber pieces than most relied on, for much of their throwweight.

For the Germans there were multiple bottlenecks, but transport capacity off the rail net was probably the single tightest. The infantry were supply by rail and horse. The truck fleet was a chaos of hundreds of types with poor maintenance and impossible spare parts demands, by western standards. The Germans made relatively few tubes, in part because losses of them in the first half of the war had been low, from continual offensive stance and operational success. As they lost large areas of ground, they also lost large numbers of tubes. They ramped production but it was still an issue, since IDs often lost their guns along with their horseflesh in long retreats, when the front moved too fast. On the production side, metals were in high demand from lots of other uses, and were not allocated particularly well. And on nitrates they expended huge amounts on rocket weapons (which use many times as much of the stuff per pound of payload delivered), and made it up with diluted forms and the like. I'd say the main practical bottleneck was planning chaos and misallocation, from multiple overlapping fiefdoms etc.

In the case of Britain, it came to rely on the US for much of its food, to produce enough explosive. But it could and did draw on the whole world. So in the end food shortfalls hit India late in the war, rather than England at the height of it. Transport flexibility let the hit be allocated where it was felt the least, from the standpoint of those doing the deciding, but there was never enough. The main consumer of explosives, though, was not the artillery, long out of action on any scale anyway, but the bombing campaign over Germany. That mode of delivery added its own bottlenecks on the rate explosive could be delivered, because heavy bombers are very expensive in all resource categories, and have a long lead time to get the fleet built up enough (against losses etc) to deliver explosive at a given rate, and sustain that rate. Metals were a secondary concern because of their multiple competing draws. Merchant shipping was the largest, naval shipping important, tank fleets important. If you decide to use a certain tonnage for bombs or shells, you have to draw it from those uses.

[Joachim]

Again I read from your post and the examples that proper arty use is a command and comms problem. The massive amounts of tubes were directed by higher ups (corps, army) while getting the enemy out of its holes without conduction a major op is small scale front line HQ (btn, rgt, maybe division). what the higher HQs did was massive use of arty at their disposal and then massive use of inf at their disposal without much local coordination.

The correct application of the theory would mean either

a) giving good access to large amounts of tubes to local COs. Well.... guess there would be abuse that would well exceed the available supplies

implement a parallel system of FOs working together with the local COs. Well.... "parallel commands" ain't a good idea.

c) borg. Which might work today, but not then.

d) attention to detail from higher HQ. Ie the HQ picks an area under special supervision. Some risks, but possbily the best (read: least bad) solution.

As stated, I like the idea. I only see the involved risks for failure.

[JasonC]

The procedure is easy - you push FOs - who are *artillery* officers from their individual artillery battalion - forward and down and let them pick their targets. They accompany infantry battalion commanders and are fully briefed on their planned actions, which are probe after probe trying to grab tactically useful bits of terrain. Same with L-5s directing deeper or counterbattery fires.

Higher HQs trying to direct huge numbers of guns at once instead, just means the targets are all deep in their best shelters after the first few flights of shells, and essentially all the rest of the firepower is completely wasted. Not understanding how the support arm actually functions or what it needs, they make inappropriate demands on it, trying to bludgeon everything into their own personal intentions, instead of respecting the actual needs of the arms they control. Which is the essence of pigheaded stupidity in tactics, from time immemorial.

[Joachim]

FOs may pick their targets - but those targets are not out in the open. For your concept to work, you need someone to get them into the open. And this is done by the PBI and the tanks. Which have local COs forward and down. FOs and those must cooperate.

The procedure might be easy - but this cooperation is not. Who leads? Arty FO or local CO? Which consequences for the other?

[JasonC]

Asked and answered. Infantry battalions are probing continually seeking tactically useful pieces of ground. Artillery FOs are directly attached to them but are not repeat not reduced to doing whatever the maneuver element commander tells them to do. They pick their own targets as the IBs conduct their probes.

I am beating my head against a brick wall, there is no point in continuing this.

[cool breeze]

I get you, thanks!

[Joachim]

Asked and answered. Infantry battalions are probing continually seeking tactically useful pieces of ground. Artillery FOs are directly attached to them but are not repeat not reduced to doing whatever the maneuver element commander tells them to do. They pick their own targets as the IBs conduct their probes.

I am beating my head against a brick wall, there is no point in continuing this.

Well, you only stated the arty part. Within the context of the PBI probing anyway this thing finally makes sense.

Now it doesn't even look like a revolution anymore.

[Cuirassier]

It's been awhile since I've looked closely at this thread, but after doing some reading on Kursk, I want to revisit it.

IIRC, Some argued that forcing an enemy to deploy early gains no fire effects. Others said the opposite.

Looking at the opening stages of Kursk (4th Panzer Army sectory), maybe forcing the enemy to deploy early could generate some useful fire effects. Here is my reasoning:

When 48th Panzerkorps and 2nd SS Panzerkorps began their reconnaissance in force, they committed a line of grenadier battalions and limited armor, as far as I know. No significant artillery was used. I'm assuming the main assault groupings were in defilade waiting to gain assembly room for the assault the next day. Thus the Soviet outpost line only had LOS to the leading skirmish line of 4th Panzer Army.

Once driven back past the ridge overlooking the German assembly areas by the skirmish line, the Soviets lost LOS to these areas. The Soviets fired a counter-preparation anyway, with seemingly limited results. I'm assuming this is because of the wide German deployment, lack of LOS to the German side of the field to adjust the fires and relative inflexibility of the Soviet artillery system (eg directed by Division to Corps commanders, not platoon, company commanders).

But imagine a similar scenario where the Soviet outpost line forces the premature deployment of the German assault forces. Now the Soviets see more battalions, both of infantry and armor, to shoot at and have the LOS to call down more accurate fires. I would think the per shell effectiveness would increase in comparison to the blind fire counter-preparation that actually occurred. So forcing the enemy to deploy early gives the defending artillery and the FO's guiding the artillery more enemy to chew on. Now, this isn't because the attacking force isn't in column, but because the attacking force is prematurely committed, with lots of it in sight of the guns.

I still need to look into this further and want more numbers, details etc. But its an initial thought.

[undead reindeer cavalry]

favorable fire effects come from limited range of artillery, not target density. when attacker is forced to deploy his arty prematurely against a fake position, that artillery may not be available against the actual main positions some km later (out of range, needs to redeploy). defending arty's role in the causality is mostly just that it makes the attacker deploy early by firing at his lead elements. similarily it is easy to mess causality in situations where defending arty fires at enemy assembly points and causes messed deployment.

the real effect of premature deployment is that it drains time and energy, breaks coordination, slows tempo and so forth.

[Tero]

By JasonC

Artillery FOs are directly attached to them but are not repeat not reduced to doing whatever the maneuver element commander tells them to do.

Which army are you talking about ?

If the FO's are directly attached to support the maneuver elements they can not fire as they please (or cherry pick fire missions at their own discretion) for the simple reason the plan the FO's were/are in on rarely survives contact. If the directly attached FO's are not reduced to doing whatever the maneuver element commander tells them to do the overall planning of the mission (offensive or defensive) is not sound. The Red Army paid dearly for the lessons in arty co-operation before they got the mix right.

They pick their own targets as the IBs conduct their probes.

That is a patent solution to invite friendly fire incidents. Not to mention the wasted resources which are expended in firing "suspected enemy positions" and the like.