Responsiveness of Red Army artillery

[John D Salt]

I recently finished reading Glantz & Orenstein's translation of the Soviet General Staff Study on the Battle for Kursk (published by those unutterable swine at Frank Cass, who know exactly how to get money out of my wallet).

One numerical snippet I found interesting is on page 175, under the heading "The planning and control of fire":

"Particularly serious attention was devoted to the accuracy and rapidity of the opening of fire. This was ensured by ranging, control, and verification of the readiness of artillery units to carry out the planned fire. The army and formation artillery commanders and their staffs usually carried out the verification. As a result of these checks and subsequent work on correcting problems, the opening of fire, which at first continued for 10-15 minutes and sometimes for as much as 40 minutes, was brought down to 40-90 seconds in a number of units. As a rule, prepared fire was opened 1.5-3 minutes after it was called for and the opening of unplanned fire took 4-7 minutes."

Although I have often heard claims that Soviet artillery was unresponsive compared to Western gunners, these times seem pretty good to me. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a lot of data available about the response times other armies might expect.

All the best,

John.

[Bone_Vulture]

Could these response times be for a larger formation, which the player's forces are thought to be a part of?

[JasonC]

I agree, it is good. I've seen German reports of their own artillery responding in 10-20 minutes, and thus helping against the second wave of an attack, as completely normal. With the infantry and front line heavy weapons left to stop the first wave themselves. I think the Russians improved on this score dramatically, from 1941 and early 1942, to the time of Kursk, and kept that improvement to the end of the war.

A response time for planned fire means a registration or concentration - in CM terms, fire at a TRP. The response time for unplanned fire is about what CM gives for 76mm guns and 120mm mortars. To get the low end, you'd need vets, which few take in QBs due to price but are readily available to scenario designers. The message to them is that is perfectly realistic.

I think part of the conceptual issue here is that three things are often conflated - (1) the time between a fire request and the arrival of shells, (2) unit "ownership" or authorization over artillery fires, and (3) whether and when reactive fire was used in "demand pull" fashion, and when instead an overall "command push" fire plan was used instead. All get linguistically lumped into the topic "responsiveness", and measured against an ideal type set by much more recent practices in the west.

Then at the game design level, the realities of all three issues have to get shoehorned into just a few variables the game can set, and the incentives about uses those variables then provide. These are the response times, for QBs the rariety settings and point costs and QB arty budget limits), and finally the decisions of players and designers.

Start with the history. If you also read the Battle of Moscow study, you will see they had serious problems that far back. Few units had enough trained personnel to employ indirect fire effectively (know trig, read a map, not rocket science - but still personnel limited at that time). The lower level guns were frequently employed direct, and suffered heavily in consequence (this is mainly a matter of the divisional 76s but not exclusively). The Russian staff was aware of the problem, but it was not trivial to solve it given shortages of trained men.

A large part of the solution was centralization of artillery assets. The Russians kept the bulk of their serious arty (122mm and up) at army level in separate formations and assigned it downward for particular operations. This put army level staffs in the driver's seat, and maximized the use of scarce personnel. This was also extended to weapon types we consider tactical (and that are so in effective range terms), to let higher commanders shift the weapon mix along the line. Lots of independent anti tank regiments and brigades with 76mm, independent 120mm mortar regiments, all of the rockets.

This was an ownership and control of assets issue - in CM terms, whether you get the module at all in support of your fight, rather than anything to do with response time. It is not like they got on the horn and made a request to army for fire support. The army assigned higher units to areas of the front, subordinated them to particular RDs on a temporary basis, gave them independent fire objectives sometimes. The guns weren't "owned" by any captain with a phone. But when an asset was assigned to dedicated support in your sector, it was on the other end of the phone as readily as the lower level stuff.

Reactive fire from higher level guns wasn't slow, it was rare. Compared to all possible uses of higher level guns, I mean. Army level 122mm guns would frequently be using their range to conduct counterbattery or interdiction. Big howitzers and the rockets would frequently be the backbone of big "command push" shoots planned out as in WW I, designed to have operational effects - not tactically applied 20 rounds at a time to support one battalion.

In CM, these modules always have high delay times, unless they are TRP fired. That isn't accurate historically, but it may set up incentives to use them in more like the historical manner. The prices are docked for lack of responsiveness. As a result, the big modules are cheap when rariety doesn't inflate them. But only work with fire plans or TRPs, in practice.

Compared to the real deal, the two things we probably do least often in CM that were very common in reality is use 76mm modules for reactive fire (because they are just plain wimpy in CM, people prefer 120s), and use of 122mm howitzers for reactive fire while attacking. They were quite common, but because they were split between a few divisional batteries and a lot of corps level ones to allocate their fires (assign FOs as present or not in any given fight), in CM they have higher rariety than the 76s and significantly longer response times. Neither is really accurate as history.

Scenario designers can get around these limitations by not paying much attention to point costs, by freely using veteran or better 122mm howitzers to get reasonable delay times, by assigning a lot of 76mm modules whether people like them or not, perhaps upping their ammo to the 150 round level to make up for modest in game effectiveness per round. They might also consider including a few TRPs for attackers to simulate some flexibility in fire plans, in scenarios there are a lot of supporting guns with long delays in CM terms.

[Zveroboy]

Is the Soviet staff study worth buying if I already have Glantz and House book on the battle of Kursk ?

[kipanderson]

John, hi,

“Although I have often heard claims that Soviet artillery was unresponsive compared to Western gunners, these times seem pretty good to me. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a lot of data available about the response times other armies might expect.”

Absolutely… I had a semi-battle with Steve about this before CMBB trying to get him to lower the response times for Soviet artillery to something closer to that of the other powers. By 43. After I read it in the study I reacted exactly the same way.

(Makes me laugh that we must be equally sad old men to read this stuff… )

I have not yet read the artillery section in new Glantz book Colossus Reborn, will do so over the next few days in the hope he may comment on the matter.

The Soviets will certainly have known the extreme need for quick response times, and once a line was set up, there seems little reason they could not come close to matching others… time will tell.

Great data…

All the best,

Kip.

[JasonC]

Zver - the staff studies are quite different documents. Glantz is just the translator for those, of Russian officer analysis. They include things like all the force ratios they calculated, planning and reasoning, investigative reports on the role and performance of various arms. There are ones on the battle of Moscow, on Kursk, and on Bagration iirc. Glantz in his own volume on Kursk is instead giving a history, with force and deployment info and a combat narrative etc.

[Zveroboy]

Thanks Jason.

Personally I think Glantz book on Kursk is top notch, probably the most interesting and detailed book I have read from him, with his book on the initial period of war.

[John D Salt]

Originally posted by kipanderson:

[snips]

(Makes me laugh that we must be equally sad old men to read this stuff… )

HAH! I think we can guess who is the sadder, given that YOU are the evil man who introduced me to the wallet-hoovering range of Frank Cass publications.

All the best,

John.