Sherman 105 vs germany medium/heavy tanks

[Apocal]

I was wondering if a Sherman 105 could tackle German tanks and completely destroying or rendering them inoperable? If so is there any historical accounts of this happening in combat?

I came really close to knocking out your Tiger with one in our last H2H game. Fortunately (for you) I decided I wanted more bazookas so I skimped on getting a regular crew. I can't remember if I won or not, but I do remember the hair on the back of my neck rising when I heard your Tiger shift and repositioned my troops just in time to chop the hell out of the platoon acting as it's advance guard.

Good times, good times.

[JasonC]

On battery set up, the training standard in the self propelled US field artillery is to be able to fire the first mission 2 minutes after entering the position. A test that starts with the battery on road in column and ends with a successful fire mission is called a "hip shoot". End to end, that is allotted 5 minutes - 2 to leave road column and pull into position, 2 to lay the battery and announce it ready to fire, and 1 to receive the fire mission, do any ammo processing the mission requires, load them up, and send "rounds out".

In practice, we could do it in 2 minutes (racing, on a dare so to speak, for bragging rights) when we knew the test order was coming and the ammo prep team had their part of it done ahead of time (quick fuzes ready, powder charges ready, etc). That was in 155mm self propelled, M109 howitzers, in a battery of 6 pieces.

When laying a battery rapidly there are several techniques possible, and the best lay and the fastest are not the same thing, The fastest can all be done by the best gunner in the battery.

Understand, the gunner is the guy on the periscoped deflection sight on the left side of the track interior. The fast method is to shoot two azimuths to prominent terrain aiming points. That means put the sight directly on a particular hilltop or building, and call the deflection angle to the battery fire direction center - "gun one, deflection to hill 304, 3468 mils". Then as fast as possible, switch to another and shoot that one - "gun one, deflection to hill 458, 3230 mils". The FDC plots the intersection of back-angles (180 degrees about) from those terrain points - they will intersect right where "gun one"'s sight is.

The other guns in the battery pull in to position "in formation" off gun one - 25 meters left, 50 meters left, etc. Parallel tracks. While they are doing that, the FDC completes its map work, and as soon as it has the intersection point, calls "the battery is laid". All 'tracks then drop their spades (recoil absorption, and keep the guns from moving shot to shot etc).

Meanwhile, the crews of the other guns are going through the slower but more accurate process. Which is to take an optical instrument on a kind of tripod, called a collameter, which is basically a compass dial in a lensed periscope housing, and run it out to some distance away from the gun line. The gunners each put their sight on their collameter and read out the azimuth to that instrument from their position, and (when the chatter flow is clear) report their number to the FDC. The FDC does the same to each collameter from its own position, and shoots another to each gun. This gives the FDC redundant angles for all the triangles it plots to get each gun's position (along with its own, of course).

That slower process can take 10 minutes but usually isn't done in a hurry. If there was any fire urgency the first mission has already gone out on the quick and dirty "gun one" laying of the battery, and the slower process just refines it.

The biggest potential errors in the quick method come from mis IDing terrain features (which is Bad, TM), or more often from having only an approximate azimuth to them because they are not points, but have some breadth to them. Obviously you also need to be able to see 2 points on one gun's horizon that are marked on the battery's maps, and those maps have to be accurate etc.

But you don't need to get it perfect, because you are going to fire spotting rounds and walk in to the target anyway. It is perfectly normal for the first spotting round to be off by 200 yards for a freshly laid battery, and 400 yards off certainly happens. You just correct that with the quick and dirty range estimate - 1 yard off is 1 mil at 1 kilometer distance; if you missed by 400 yards and the range is 10 km you need to move 40 mils. You will still be off, so you just do it again. After 2-3 walks you are close enough for 155s not to care anymore, and you fire for effect.

Some of these techniques were harder in WW II, but not terribly so.

Sure, you'd rather have half an hour to set up the battery, lay each gun, get all the maps accurately marked up with everyone's location, set up the ammo prep operation, etc. And it takes longer with a towed battery than an SP one. But you can get a quick and dirty battery "lay" very quickly when you need to.

I hope that helps.

[Kanonier Reichmann]

Very informative Jason. Thanks for sharing your experiences with us.

Regards

KR

[iMolestCats]

I came really close to knocking out your Tiger with one in our last H2H game. Fortunately (for you) I decided I wanted more bazookas so I skimped on getting a regular crew. I can't remember if I won or not, but I do remember the hair on the back of my neck rising when I heard your Tiger shift and repositioned my troops just in time to chop the hell out of the platoon acting as it's advance guard.

Good times, good times.

Yes i do remember that! Very fun game, IIRC it was a draw. Thanks everyone for the great answers. JasonC thank you, i've always been interested in how a battery works, very cool stuff.

[Vanir Ausf B]

the best lay and the fastest are not the same thing

True. Very true.

[winkelried]

Sorry; incorrect. The ground mount M2 105mm howitzer could go up to 66 degrees, but on the WWII-era M7 Priests, the chassis limited the elevation to 35 degrees. The later M7B2 fixed this problem, but the M7B2 did not see service in WWII.

Right. Sorry about that. This was even after the Korean war? Or did the B2 see action there?

There will, of course, be exceptions where things line up just right. But it's going to be a pretty limited situation and a royal PITA for the player to set up unless the game also had some sort of "trajectory guide" that would help you figure out where to place your SPGs to get indirect LOF to a given target. Would this be fun, in theory? Sure. Would it be used very often by players? Probably not, once the novelty of trying it once or twice had worn off. As such, programming time is very much better spent elsewhere.

Low priority - sure. Like to have a Long Tom on-map - since I work on a scenario where a LTs stopped a German armored attack with direct fire so - i'll substitute

[winkelried]

On battery set up, the training standard in the self propelled US field artillery is to be able to fire the first mission 2 minutes after entering the position.

During the cold war we had a procedure, when on the defensive, where the arty would prepare positions in advance (with sticks in the ground and all calculations done) and the SP howitzers would roll in only after the FO placed the request and fired a few volleys (usually within a few minutes) and then drive away quickly to avoid counter-battery fire.

I vaguely remember a discussion in the 70s with an Austrian who served with the Nebelwerfers on the Eastern Front where he described a similar procedure with prepared positions. With the long smoke trails it was important to move out very quickly and to get into the next position fast.

[YankeeDog]

Right. Sorry about that. This was even after the Korean war? Or did the B2 see action there?

I think so, yes. The M7B2 was definitely in service before the end of the Korean War. I don't know definitively whether they were actually deployed there, but it would seem likely.

Stepping back, if improvements were made in this area, I think what I would most like to see would be the ability to somehow designate SPG assets to deploy in "indirect mode" right at the top of a scenario. Possibly, they could even be removed from the map and be modeled as off-map support if the player so chose.

There have been times when I've opened a scenario, looked at the assets given to me, and thought "Gee, I really wish those SPGs were off-map. Indirect fire support much more useful to me than direct fire support in this scenario." It would be nice as battlefield commander to be able to make this choice.

Another way to do it would be only allow indirect fire from SPGs that remain in their setup position. The aforementioned issues with trajectory limitations apply here, though.

[JasonC]

Vanir - :-)

[JasonC]

Yankee Dog - as near as I can tell, priests were used but not very extensively in Korea. Specifically, I have found only 2 battalions equipped with them, vs 29 with towed 105s, 17 with towed 155s, 6 with SP 155s, 3 with towed 8 inch, 1 with SP 8 inch, and 2 near the very end with 6 240mm howitzers each (towed). I have not been able to find the weapon for 3 leftover battalions, so there might be a third - and possibly a few of the ones I record as 105mm towed actually had SP (though they do not have "armored" in their unit name).

They had already started producing the M37 by that time, which is basically a priest on the M24 chassis. And yes, the B2 was meant to allowed higher angle fire specifically to address Korea hill "relief", rather than low trajectory fire. But most of the US arty in Korea was towed, and most of the SP stuff was 155mm, both howitzer and gun.

FWIW...