Canister in CMBB: Realistic or Hollywood?

[Chad Harrison]

Its a bit late in the game to bring this up, but I think I have lost my patience with canister. How many times have you had a entire full strength platoon in woods only to loose about 30 or them to ONE canister shot? It has happened to me one too many times.

Canister was used in ETO? Okay, thats new to me. Was it really THAT common on both sides? I can believe a few shells floating around. But 12 or 15 shells on one tank? I know someone out there more knowledgeable than myself {there are a lot of you } has a reference to some book somewhere on how it was common. But I have never heard any reference to canister use, especially not on the scale that it is used in CMBB.

Okay, so I assume that BFC had good sources and good reasons to include it {otherwise it would not of made it}, so it being in CMBB is realistic. But is how much damage caused by it realistic? If troops were all standing up in the OPEN I could maybe believe the numbers. But when a T34 rolls up to the woods you are in and gets within 100 meters {which is out of grenade range and any other hand held anti-tank weapon excluding only a scheck; but they were not around in 1941 now where they} and then begins to wipe out everybody in one or two canister shells. I am sorry, but its not a cluster bomb with a small thermal nuclear device attached to razor spewing radioactive space spiders coated in explosive skin. Its a canister shell.

So, I need some help. If I am wrong on all accounts could someone please point me in the right direction for enlightenment {I apologize for not doing a search, but the search function has never worked for me, it just freezes} from a book, a website or previous post. Otherwise, can we get it toned down a bit? In the open sure, but when you are in heavy building or in woods?

Thanks in advance,

Chad

[Michael Dorosh]

Originally posted by Chad Harrison:

Its a bit late in the game to bring this up, but I think I have lost my patience with canister. How many times have you had a entire full strength platoon in woods only to loose about 30 or them to ONE canister shot? It has happened to me one too many times.

Canister was used in ETO? Okay, thats new to me. Was it really THAT common on both sides? I can believe a few shells floating around. But 12 or 15 shells on one tank? I know someone out there more knowledgeable than myself {there are a lot of you } has a reference to some book somewhere on how it was common. But I have never heard any reference to canister use, especially not on the scale that it is used in CMBB.

Okay, so I assume that BFC had good sources and good reasons to include it {otherwise it would not of made it}, so it being in CMBB is realistic. But is how much damage caused by it realistic? If troops were all standing up in the OPEN I could maybe believe the numbers. But when a T34 rolls up to the woods you are in and gets within 100 meters {which is out of grenade range and any other hand held anti-tank weapon excluding only a scheck; but they were not around in 1941 now where they} and then begins to wipe out everybody in one or two canister shells. I am sorry, but its not a cluster bomb with a small thermal nuclear device attached to razor spewing radioactive space spiders coated in explosive skin. Its a canister shell.

So, I need some help. If I am wrong on all accounts could someone please point me in the right direction for enlightenment {I apologize for not doing a search, but the search function has never worked for me, it just freezes} from a book, a website or previous post. Otherwise, can we get it toned down a bit? In the open sure, but when you are in heavy building or in woods?

Thanks in advance,

Chad

[SgtMuhammed]

M.D.

Did you mean to say something?

[LGMB]

Soldier,

Dorosh means what he writes, as it represents the purest contents of his skull- in this case, nothing.

[Chad Harrison]

That cleared up everything Michael, thanks

[Redwolf]

The problem with the canister shots in CMBB is that they are just modeled as higher firepower. But in reality the firepower would be very cover-dependent.

In special, while a canister shot against a sqaud 20 meters away in the open may be 10 times more deadly than HE, against a supressed soldier lying down in a foxhole his helmet towards the shooter it will not be 10 times as effective as HE. But it is in CMBB, the factor seems to be the same.

[ May 29, 2003, 03:17 AM: Message edited by: redwolf ]

[A.E.B]

I know that cannister ammunition was utilised both in Korea and in Vietnam as a method of breaking up Human Wave assaults, and as a method of stripping cover.

However:

* Cannister shells have a very short range compared to HE ammunition.

* Cannister shot damages rifled gun barrels.

* Cannister is far more effective when fired from a shorter barrelled/lower velocity gun (think a 12 gauge compared to a .308 hunting rifle).

The following are the only references to cannister in WWII that I could locate.

The bullets and shells did their usual deadly work, but the 37mm guns added an extra dimension. Their crews employed canister rounds-essentially huge shotgun shells spraying small steel balls, designed specifically to deal with massed infantry in the open. More than one Marine was awed by the devastation wrought by these cannons. One recalled, “It really blows the living hell out of everything around.”

Marine use in Pacific

PICTURE: Closer look to systems of 45 PstK/37 antitank gun. Comparing to German 37 PstK/37 easily reveals the close relation. (Photo taken at Sotamuseo). CLICK THUMBNAIL TO SEE LARGER PIC (68 KB).

Domestic ammunition production manufacturing AP-tracer and probably also HE-ammunition for these guns was started in Finland during WW2. Soviet ammunition inventory for these guns included also APCR and canister shells, but as only for Finns to get them was capturing they were extremely rare in Finnish use. Only long-barrel M/42 guns captured by Finnish troops were captured at summer of 1944 (first one was captured in Kuuterselkä battle at mid-June of 1944) and didn’t see Finnish use.

Finish site re captured soviet 37mm and 45mm ATGs

Another Finnish site on WWII ATGs

And that's about it.

Cannister was fired from the guns of UN Shermans, Pershings and Centurions in Korea. In Vietnam I believe that cannister was not widely issued due to accelerated wear to the rifling of tank guns, but the crews made their own cannister rounds anyway.

Against exposed, massed infantry cannister is like firing at 12 gauge at a flock of birds. It is far less lethal in those infantry are prone or have cover.

All I could find.

A.E.B

[John Kettler]

Chad Harrison,

Canister's lethality should, in theory, vary as a function of cover state, cover type and range to the target. Since it is basically a huge version of a shotgun shell, the pattern will be dense, powerful and highly concentrated close in, but will fan out and the projectiles in that pattern will lose energy to air drag and other factors as the pattern continues down range.

I don't have the "shot" specs, so am arguing by analogy here to Civil War ordnance, where the shot

consisted of musket balls. There was also grapeshot, but the shot there was much larger and fewer in number than what we're discussing.

To continue, at point blank range, canister produces what practically amounts to a rod of shot, a rod which spreads out not only from cannon rifling (unless despun) and aggregate air drag, but unique discontinuities on each shot, small weight differences, relative position within the primary disturbed air path (some more protected than others), collisions and consequent rebound, not to mention gravity. This was shown in a smoothbore context in the U.S. on the History Channel which brought in Civil War reenactors who fired canister at various ranges against plywood soldier cutouts representing infantry in Civil War assault formation. Up close, only a few silhouettes were hit, but they were torn to pieces. At somewhat longer range, though, the pattern was fairly uniform and wide, with many targets receiving several hits apiece. Grim! As range lengthened, both the number and concentration of hits dropped drastically. Most targets weren't hit at all. Civil War games with miniatures typically represent the effects by using a conical template whose lethality drops rapidly even as the pattern widens.

It can be deadly up close, but merely a nuisance a few hundred yards out.

Let me digress a moment and talk about the shotgun in combat. Many people think that a shotgun's pattern is so broad that it is only necessary to

point it in the general direction of the target and pull the trigger. Those who've tried this approach on combat shotgun courses in shooter houses have often had the profound shock of emerging with zero hits.

Why? Because the pattern on a standard police shotgun is 4" when fired across a typical room. There are some things which can be done to expand the pattern, such as a duckbill choke which widens the pattern width at the expense of pattern height, but this means giving up aiming accuracy. Bad during room clearing if hostages are present. Great for counterambush work in the jungle, though! To see the effects of range, shot loads, standard chokes, and the effects of buckshot (probably a reasonable subsitute for what's in the canister rounds we're discussing), please see Tony Lesce's THE SHOTGUN IN COMBAT.

To return to the main discussion, the utility of the canister round becomes a function not only of the target's range, its exposure and level of cover, but also of target orientation relative to the arriving projectiles in the pattern. At close range, a canister round fired perpendicularly into

a long column marching four abreast might hit only a handful of men, yet the same round fired down the axis of the march column might incapacitate or kill dozens, with those closest being simply shredded.

Pattern density, hence hit probability, drops rapidly as a function of distance, but depending upon the range and the type of tree cover the canister shot may well go through all but foot plus thick hardwoods. Recall that NATO 7.62mm will go right through a pine telephone pole. My brother watched an M-60 saw one in half during his Air Force Academy training. Redefined his whole understanding of cover! And we haven't even discussed secondary missiles in the form of clouds of splinters, falling branches and the like. And birch trees, quite common in the East, aren't hardwoods!

What that T-34 is spewing is much nastier than its Civil War forebear, with a huge delta in muzzle velocity (hence kinetic energy), shot uniformity and shot density. If your men are standing, bunched up, and in, say, birch woods when the T-34 slams the area with canister, you may incur more casualties as a result of secondary missiles added to the canister than you might were they simply in the open. Because the tank cannon is several meters above the terrain and can thus fire down on your men under certain conditions and geometries, it is possible to imagine situations in which being halted (kneeling) or even prone (hide or pinned) might not provide much protection, as opposed to what would apply against normal infantry fires. My assessment is that the way to survive canister is to be foxholed or entrenched.

I do not claim to know how BFC modeled canister in CMBB, but canister is much more than mere firepower score, for we're also talking about substantial ability in certain range brackets to penetrate and even destroy some types of cover, but farther out, the cover will actually work again. In between, the canister shot may or may not penetrate, and quite a bit is likely to bounce in all sorts of directions. The modeling problem may thus be termed nontrivial--and that's absent target orientation, depth and vertical displacement relative to the canister shot pattern.

For example, troops on flat ground are almost certainly better off than those on an ascending slope, since the slope will enhance effectiveness by converting more of the over and short shot into hits, not to mention subjecting more men in the formation to the pattern. In effect, the beaten zone grows, and so do casualties.

I don't consider this even remotely definitive, for I lack critical data, but I do believe it may provide at least some insight into the actual dynamics which may be causing your frustration.

Regards,

John Kettler

[ May 29, 2003, 06:12 AM: Message edited by: John Kettler ]

[rexford]

If infantry are in the woods, the cannister effect will be reduced due to:

1. lying down instead of standing up decreases target area, and cannister will spread out vertically so some of the balls will fly over a standing man and many may miss a lying one

2. infantry will be spread out laterally, which means one has to compare spread of cannister to spread of infantry on the ground

3. trees will take hits and absorb cannister energy, and occasionally bounce balls here and there

[Beta1]

Isnt there also an issue here due to the abstraction of squads in CM?

I was under the impression that a suad marker in CM represented a group of men spread out over a range over tens of meters. Grasping at memory I seem to remember 20m being suggested somewhere but please correst that if I'm wrong.

I have lost numerous squads to cannister rounds at close range (mostly courtesy of maroule...) and I cant help wondering how these rounds are hitting everyone on a front up to 20m after only about 20m of flight.... Thats a hell of a lot of spread over that distance...

[flamingknives]

I was under the impression that Vietnam 'canister' rounds were quite differnet to those used in WWII. Instead of a large quantity of shot, they consisted of a bundle of flechettes. The effect of these was devastating to say the least - they were used to strip foliage and cover away from VC positions and against human wave attacks. In one instance, two rounds of 152mm flechette (M551 sheridan) were credited with almost 100 kills

[Redwolf]

rexford,

do you have any info whether a canister pellet would penetrate a WW2 steel helmet?

[Andreas]

Originally posted by Beta1:

I have lost numerous squads to cannister rounds at close range (mostly courtesy of maroule...) and I cant help wondering how these rounds are hitting everyone on a front up to 20m after only about 20m of flight.... Thats a hell of a lot of spread over that distance...

One thing I am still not quite certain about (or have forgotten) is whether incapicated in CM does not just include KIA/WIA but also panicked individuals who are in such a state that they will not recover until the end of the CM battle. These are the cases which von Mellenthin refers to show up in the evening at the field kitchen, or who trundle back to the aid post with some made-up injury (see e.g. Ellis description of the disintegration of 34th US Division in the Rapido bridgehead). So a squad hit by one round of cannister while jogging around in the open could just be deemed to have completely lost its cohesion, beyond the ability to rally it in 35+ or whatever turns you have, if those cases were also included.

[Mouse]

Along a similar, but not the same vein, I recall reading in "A Dark and Bloody Ground" (Hurtgen Forest) that the US forces trying to attack through the woods found that with arty shells dropping into the trees, the "drop and flatten" response was the wrong thing to do.

It was found that remaining standing rather than going prone when tree bursts occurred was preferable due to the increased "soldier surface area" exposed when prone. Upright, your helmet gave you a larger precentage exposure cover against the high speed wood splinters, if I explained it well. Of course, the rounds that made it through the branches to ground impact would chew you up from a different shrapnel vector, but you're kind of damned if you do, damned if you don't.

One cannister ball impacting a tree with sufficient force would launch a small storm of splinters. A cannister round's worth would make for a fairly deadly hail of splinters that would radiate out in a cone shape from each cannister balls impact. Nasty.

It may be that "close is good enough" for targeting cannister in wooded terrain, and BTS's (or is it BFC's) approximation also is "good enough".

To bring up other, er, sprite-based Squad Leader-ish WWII tactical level war games from a nuclear-powered game company, IIRC the cannister was fairly deadly in that game as well on the Eastern Front.

[ May 29, 2003, 09:53 AM: Message edited by: Mouse ]

[MikeyD]

Canister came as a surprise to everybody when CMBB came out. Even the 'experts' were sent scrambling for their references, but after much debate the consensus was BFC got it right. Chalk-up another one to the A-team.

As for canister lethality, you've got to admit facing a 7.62mm caliber canister shot at under 100m would be deadly! I remember conversations with an old WWII jungle fighter, and he was extremely impressed with the effectiveeness of canister shot from his little 37mm gun! If your infantry is facing tanks at under 100m it sounds like you've already got problems.

As for high canister loads in tanks, remember T-34s were used for dedicated infantry support, and as the war progressed the number of German tank encounters decreased rapidly. So the main function was as infantry killers.

[Michael Dorosh]

Originally posted by rexford:

If infantry are in the woods, the cannister effect will be reduced due to:

1. lying down instead of standing up decreases target area, and cannister will spread out vertically so some of the balls will fly over a standing man and many may miss a lying one

2. infantry will be spread out laterally, which means one has to compare spread of cannister to spread of infantry on the ground

3. trees will take hits and absorb cannister energy, and occasionally bounce balls here and there

Come on, Lorrin, where's the rest of your post!

[Redwolf]

Mikeyd, nobody in this thread questioned that the lethality of the canister shots should be as much as it is for exposed or half-exposed targets.

However, from the charateristics of the shot I expect that cover has a bigger effect on canister shots than on other shots (bullets, HE shrapnel which doesn't neccessarily from front). In special, behind behind a (single) tree should be substancially better against canister than HE. Being in a trench, helmet to shooter, I expect the canister pellets to be stopped by earth or the helmet much easier than 7.62mm bullets.

In CMBB the cover divider for cover effect is the same for all firepower and blast effects.

[MikeyD]

I suspect a cannon's lead(?) canister ball fired from 100m would go through a steel pot helmet as though it were a paper bag. Maybe at 200m+ it might just dent the helmet but I wouldn't want to be the one wearing it at the time. I know German helmets were tougher than U.S. helmets, but I doubt they were that tough.

I thought the debate was about whether the game's use of Russian canister was historically accurate, not just about safety margins while crouching in a grove of birch trees.

[Redwolf]

The canister pellet is substancially slower than a rifle bullet, defintivly tumbles a lot meaning it doesn't arrive sharp end first and it has big wind resistance and is usually steel, not lead.

The assumption that it could penetrate a German helmet at 100 meters but not at 200 sounds like pure speculation to me, sorry.

Even if it penetrates the helmet then the other cover (plants, earth) will degrade its effectivity more than that of a rifle bullet.

[Mouse]

Originally posted by Michael Dorosh:

Come on, Lorrin, where's the rest of your post!

Maybe he's researching rolled homogeneous helmets versus face-hardened helmets vs hemlets with bolt-on cast armor plates...

[JasonC]

Most of the shells showing up as canister in Russian tanks was shrapnel, not canister. True shrapnel should have about the effect of HE - realistically, less effect once the cover gets to 50% or so. True canister rounds should be rarer than they are now, and the shrapnel can just be lumped in with HE if BTS doesn't want the added modeling problem.

The present effectiveness of the canister is ridiculous. I can use the same "ooh its so nasty" story telling to argue MG42s should kill everything they look at, but they rightly don't. 5m of woods stop 85% of MG 42 fire, when those are 3500 Joule full power rounds.

The firepower should be more like 250 per round, akin to a well armed full squad firing at 50m. That would be enough to make them effective in close combat, without any of the instant build clearing characteristics we see right now. As for area effect, it should be the same as for squad or MG firepower.

[demoss]

I swear sometimes I think I'm playing a different game than everybody else is. I've only seen canister rip a squad (ONE) apart when it was moving in the open. Sure, they haven't LIKED it under other circumstances, but it hasn't exactly been devastating.

[tar]

I've only really had one memorable close encounter with cannister. In one shot it took out a 10-man squad hiding in foxholes!

I was also in a QB against the AI when, at the end of the game, it was firing cannister ineffectively at my forces at ranges of over 150m.

[tar]

I also have one other meta-observation about cannister in CMBB, which perhaps has some bearing on the effectiveness issue.

If this was such an effective anti-infantry weapon, why was it not more widely adopted? It clearly wasn't new technology and it would not have been hard to manufacture either. If it was truly devastating, then why wasn't it fielded by more armies. Certainly the Germans had no problems copying the bazooka.

I would suspect that although a very useful ammo type, it was probably not nearly as effective as it seems to be in CMBB.

[Elmar Bijlsma]

Keep in mind the effect on a rifled barrel that cannister has. Kiss any accuracy goodbye even after a few shots. Apparently the Rusians weren't that bothered about it (what with their infantry killing fixation) but the Brits for example thought AT capability the prime feature of tanks so would think a wonky barrel a bad thing. The US has a more middle of the road approach but since they used cannister for their 37s I assume it wa to make up for it's HE capability. A 75mm would be more capable and not be needing the aditinal boost of cannister for inf. killing.

That's what I think, anyway.