Infantry tactics - covering fire with BAR or skirmish line?

[JasonC]

Broadsword - it will run into two of them. It need not run into all of them. Fair question.

[altipueri]

Thanks JasonC.

So the answer is : Yes the US did use skirmish line form of advance because it was a reasonable response to the German keyhole/pencil type of defence.

And if the skirmish line does get caught in the open by a machine gun with wide arc of fire they get chewed up.

[Erwin]

That's a reason to keep a lot of distance between men in a skirmish line, so it's hard to get more than a few b4 the others go to ground.

Even when split into teams, our troops of a team stay a bit too close to each other. Maybe if we get formation orders one day, we can have a "SKIRMISH" order that makes them separate more.

[JasonC]

altipueri - yes, the skirmish line approach will expose more men at once if the defenders are in "up" positions, meaning locations with wide visibility over the whole area. The attackers then just have to trust that going to ground where they are and firing back with all weapons can suppress the shooters quickly. The attackers can potentially lose more men on first trigger pull to a well set up kill zone that uses wide field of fire, "up" positions.

They deliberately run that risk in the belief that such defenses are at bottom weaker and easier for attacking firepower to deal with, than a more interlocked defensive scheme that shelters the defenders from attacker firepower more effectively. Naturally, they can still try to avoid the skirmish line walking right through likely kill zone areas - but in the nature of a skirmish line, it will send some people over lots of the terrain. (A column like approach can pick a specific covered route more than a wide line can, etc. But the skirmish line doesn't have to walk straight across a wide open field etc).