Operation Veritable: Artillery Ammo Expenditures.

[JonS]

Originally posted by Wartgamer:

Neutralisation was 'complete' however, and comms throughout the div were rooted, which among other things rendered the German arty that did survive - about 2/3 of the 147-odd pieces supporting the 84th Inf Div - useless.

This number (147) must be the grand total of all howitzers, mortars, ATG, IG and whatever else they had. It was not all artillery like 105mm or 150mm.

As usual, you're wrong. Can you think what the word 'supporting' might be doing there, and what it means?

[Private Bluebottle]

Originally posted by Wartgamer:

But if the troops were already under such indirect fire, I would imagine that the MG fire would have another effect beyond the limited thinking of a 'thickening agent'.

The arrival of MG fire would give the defending troops the impression of proximity of enemy forces.

Actually, it was intended to provide an even greater hinderance to the enemy's ability to move troops, either forwards or rearwards. The MGs would have blanketed the area with a continous rain of rounds, falling nearly vertically. Any position without overhead cover, which had been missed by the heavier weapons would have provided little shelter from such an MG barrage. It was a tactic well developed during the Great War.

[Private Bluebottle]

Originally posted by Wartgamer:

Another item of particular interest during this battle was the issue of rum. During the complete campaign in NW Europe 53 Division issued 2894 gallons of rum; in the seven days of the Reichswald 1228 gallons were consumed!

Weather and circumstance would explain that. Rum was issued as a cold weather supplement (indeed, still is and is available in the ration tables as such, I speak from experience on that one, as I was a Rats clerk for 5 years). The Reichswald battle was rather cold and wet, exactly the time when rum would have been issued.

[Wartgamer]

Actually Alchohol, and cigs, are not what a soldier needs when it is cold. They might make someone 'feel' better, but it worsens the physical condition. Yes, I know about Rum rations and most modern armies think its archaic.

I just thought there was a correlation between increased arty use and increased drinking also.

At this stage of the war, German daily supplies to arty may have been extremely low, perhaps 5-10 rounds per gun. I suppose it may have self-neutralized in 15-30 minutes if it actully fired.

[Wartgamer]

Originally posted by JonS:

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Wartgamer:

Neutralisation was 'complete' however, and comms throughout the div were rooted, which among other things rendered the German arty that did survive - about 2/3 of the 147-odd pieces supporting the 84th Inf Div - useless.

This number (147) must be the grand total of all howitzers, mortars, ATG, IG and whatever else they had. It was not all artillery like 105mm or 150mm.

As usual, you're wrong. Can you think what the word 'supporting' might be doing there, and what it means? </font>

[Michael Dorosh]

Originally posted by Wartgamer:

I just thought there was a correlation between increased arty use and increased drinking also.

?

[Wartgamer]

Originally posted by Private Bluebottle:

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Wartgamer:

But if the troops were already under such indirect fire, I would imagine that the MG fire would have another effect beyond the limited thinking of a 'thickening agent'.

The arrival of MG fire would give the defending troops the impression of proximity of enemy forces.

Actually, it was intended to provide an even greater hinderance to the enemy's ability to move troops, either forwards or rearwards. The MGs would have blanketed the area with a continous rain of rounds, falling nearly vertically. Any position without overhead cover, which had been missed by the heavier weapons would have provided little shelter from such an MG barrage. It was a tactic well developed during the Great War. </font>

[JonS]

Originally posted by Wartgamer:

2000000bullets/188Vickers=10638/600rpm=17.7min

Who wants to point out the n00b error which renders this guys comments worthless?

Edit: Just say 'No!' to the terrs.

[ March 14, 2005, 12:22 PM: Message edited by: JonS ]

[flamingknives]

Cyclic error.

Edit: 'who' should be 'Who' and 'want's' ought to be 'wants'.

You're letting the terrorists get away with it, dammit

[JonS]

A cookie to the guy from Sheffield.

[Wartgamer]

So its 450 RPM? You get an extra 5 minutes? Spread it out to the total area being attacked and the time.

[JonS]

Still wrong, still making the same mistake. n00b.

[flamingknives]

More like 250rpm in 2 minutes, sustained rate.

85 minutes.

If you care to measure it like that.

[Wartgamer]

Originally posted by flamingknives:

More like 250rpm in 2 minutes, sustained rate.

85 minutes.

If you care to measure it like that.

If thats the way its fired then fine. Now just try and divide that into the area and the time of the barrage.

The fact is that you would not be able to sustain a 'rain' of bullets into very many areas like some of you imagine.

One gun firing indirect spreads its bullets out so its 2 bullets a second (average)? Dropping into a beaten zone of 50 feet by 15 feet (or is it more)? It would take quite a few guns to just deny one crossroads. And having men run through it one at a time would still allow some movement. The truth was probably that no one was moving anywhere.

Pepperpots. Please. Why not get every rifleman a small wooden fixture for his rifle and have him shoot into the air?

[JonS]

Now just try and divide that into the area and the time of the barrage.

n00b mistake #2. Up to 47 'areas' could be denied/interdicted/suppressed at any given moment. Nothing 'random' about the selection of tgts either.

The truth was probably that no one was moving anywhere.

Well gee whiz - why do you think that might be, n00b?

Oh, wait - you do know:

Pepperpots. Please. Why not get every rifleman [to] shoot into the air?

What do you think 'marching fire' is, n00b?

The only one 'imagining' anything is you. Look, since you don't have a freaking clue, and seemingly have no intention of getting one, why don't you just let it go?

[ March 14, 2005, 02:29 PM: Message edited by: JonS ]

[JonS]

Incidentally, I've just posted a scenario at the depot that deals with a small (very small) part of Op VERITABLE. Best played against the AI.

Edit: oops - scen title is Halvenboom

Regards

JonS

[ March 14, 2005, 02:40 PM: Message edited by: JonS ]

[Wartgamer]

So 4 guns are needed to drop 8 bullets a sec and what area do you think you could really suppress by that? If only your sarcasm could be backed up by math or facts. Wouldn't you then be fully wonderful?

I find it hard to believe that CW people need to hold onto such archaic ideas so vehemently.

I also find it hard to believe that you could converge the firepower of MGs that well. The natural vibration of the weapons negating its own convergence of course. Getting multiple guns to hit the same football field with half of thier bullets being a major achievement.

Why not shoot 188 MGs indirect everday? Its only 60 000 000 bullets a month. Then the Germans would have went nowhere.

Marching Fire is firing from the hip at something other than the air. More like parallel to the ground.

[ March 14, 2005, 02:52 PM: Message edited by: Wartgamer ]

[JonS]

21AG MMGs avgd 2 belts of VIIIZ / gun / day from Jan - Apr '45. Total of 23.3M rnds in '45.

[flamingknives]

Well, it's really going to be 10 rounds a second per gun for short but successive periods and the Vickers was quite heavy and therefore it isn't going to vibrate that much. Vickers MMGs were set up to fire indirect out to 4,100yds, so the divergance can't have been that bad. Do you have any evidence that it was?

[Wartgamer]

Its not only the vibration but round to round velocity deltas, weights and many other things. The bullets will land in a beaten zone just as any arty piece shows dispersion. Being lighter, they probably have a greater chance of being blow off course by the wind. About the best target to attack is a tall wide building. It will catch many rounds. But this is not area denial but target denial.

Its 8.33 bullets a sec average for 125 rpm sustained each gun 4 times. Its not 10. Its a 4 gun battery and that is the average output.

The Vickers bullet is somewhat slower than others isnt it?

[JasonC]

Other means asked "Would it really have matted to the WE if they HAD fired 10X more ammo?"

Yes, I maintain. They probably would have hit well less than 10x as many people, maybe 2x. Firing the same ammo at better targets could easily have raised that back to 10x. The Germans running out of men 5x faster or 3x faster, would materially shorten the war and the casualty bill.

"Your calculations seem to be predicated on the upper edge being the amount of ammo available."

That is correct. I don't assume it, though, I prove it first. No army was able to supply its guns with ammo faster than those guns could shoot it, or even a tenth as fast as they could shoot it. A single field artillery battalion can throw 1000 tons per day - 200 sustained ROF with time for gunners to rest. Divisions might enjoy 500 tons per day for all categories of supply in the most abundant attack supply circumstances, and typically got more like half that. Of which only half at best was ammo. They did not get 4000 tons per day of arty ammo alone, or 800.

The tubes can throw ammo arbitrarily fast. So the total shots taken are not limited by time, but by shells shipped to the guns. The total effect of the shells that can be shipped to the guns is a function of the quantity of shells, and their average efficiency. You can raise the average efficiency by shooting more at vulnerable and well located targets, and less at well dug in and poorly IDed, general area targets. Of course there is always some mix and one gets some average. But if you make a habit of shooting industrial quantities at the worst efficiencies you will get a poor average efficiency. If instead you shoot most of your ammo at well chosen targets you will get a high efficiency.

And the thing is, well chosen targets are things that come to you, that you have to wait around for to some extent, and that you need the cooperation of other arms to create. By combined arms threats, by observed fire, by possession of points of observation, by local defensive posture after taking something the enemy wants back, etc. When on the other hand you try to force the time and place of expenditure, you will very often incur serious hits to your average ammo efficiency. You have to shoot at this unit, in this 5 hour window. Well, if they are in their cellars then, you won't hit them. If you wait by the guns for the "battery, fire mission" call when the men up front see the enemy, said enemy won't be in their cellars.

"the WE can afford to shoot off more or less what they want."

Nope, not remotely. They have good ammo depth compared to their adversaries, and have enourmous surge artillery firepower. So when they get a really good target and a really urgent occasion (the Bulge e.g.), they can fire a heck of a lot and it will do a ton of damage. But compared to the time available for firing, by all tubes over the whole campaign, they do not remotely have enough to take every shot.

And as soon as you are picking your shots, your average efficiency will depend on whether attrition effiency is part of that picking process. If it isn't, if you fire at random and the enemy also did nothing to adapt, you'd maybe get an average efficiency. In fact, the enemy does adapt. And your poorest shooting will occur at the times when you overconcentrate it, the enemy is in a purely defensive posture, he knows it is coming because you've already been shooting for 4 hours straight, the vulnerable places have already been plastered, etc.

Imagine there were infinite supplies of shells, to be fired as fast as the cannons could be cocked. Then not having to pick when to fire, one would always get an integral of enemy exposure, without any "measure" aka "density" term for weighting when to do it by how vulnerable the enemy was.

But you'd still have an artillery efficiency problem to optimize. It would just shift from when to fire, to the question what target set to fire at. If all your guns were perpetual hoses spraying ammo continually, you would still get more attrition out of their fire, if you directed those hoses on the more vulnerable enemy spots instead of the less vulnerable ones. If you decided that, being rich, you could afford to aim them at his hardest targets instead of his most vulnerable ones, you'd just slow the process of bleeding him. The same inefficiency would still apply.

No matter how rich you are (just so it is finite), it is still possible to get more bang for your bucks rather than less, by buying the relatively cheap stuff that goes a long way, instead of the expensive stuff that doesn't do much for you. And even continually operating you'd be finite - maximum rate of fire times available time. In reality, the true limit is ammo, as described above.

But I thought I'd address the purely theoretical question, because I think it clarifies the real issue. Whatever arty power you have available, do you get the maximum subtraction in enemy strength possible with it, or no? If less than the maximum because you are also pursuing other objectives, at what total cost to your arty efficiency? Are those other objectives really worth a large scale drop in your arty attrition achieved?

When it is, you spend some, still trying to be efficient about it. When it isn't, you don't. What I think happens far too often, though, is commanders simply do not think in these terms, and instead simply look at what their arty can do for them today. Leaving longer term effects to take care of themselves, as presumably deeply averaged and hard to have any real impact on.

I think this is a mistake, and that in particular it asks the wrong things of arty, while failing to maximize the thing it really can do for you. Which is dramatically weaken the enemy you face one month from now, if and really only if, you pay attention to its needs and adapt your other actions to those needs.

The modern version of this debate is over the role of the firepower arms (air especially, these days) in modern integrated doctrine. Do they support maneuver objectives exclusively? Or can they have a more decisive role, particularly with modern smart firepower? Can maneuver elements work to maximum fire opportunities rather than the other way around? I think the answer is, at the least, that either strategy is possible. It is not obvious that the firepower-centric one isn't simply superior, under modern technical conditions.

But that takes us far beyond WW II and Veritable.

[JasonC]

If I may use a combined arms analogy: you could ask of your tanks, what can they do for me today? My infantry is going to be attacking. They might get held up by MGs. I should send my tanks to KO his MGs. Or they might be held up by guns. Worse, guns that kill tanks might be protecting MGs that kill infantry. To save the infantry, I must send all my tanks at these guns, exchange them off whatever the cost, then take out those MGs. This may reduce the effectiveness of my tanks against MGs in some abstract sense, because I will lose some of them. But I must help the infantry, and today, so I spend tanks and exchange off enemy guns whatever the efficiency.

In other words, subordination of the tanks to the infantry, asking only what they can do for the infantry, rapidly leads to a tactical consequence, that one reinforces *failure*. The places the tanks are doing the worst, you send more tanks.

If instead one asks what is the most tanks can do for me, not what can they do for the infantry today, then a very different optimization problem arises, and a quite different strategy for using tanks presents itself. I could reinforce success. I could send tanks where tanks are having the easiest go of it. Where there are no guns to stop them. Yes, this leaves my infantry elsewhere essentially unassisted. But I may rapidly find that my tanks, reinforcing success, can eliminate all guns and all MGs along select routes - the selection not being made by me, but by the enemy and by opportunities as they arise.

Instead of a command push reinforcing of failure, I use an opportunity pull reinforcing of success. Instead of asking what tanks can dofor infantry today, I ask how I can get the most out of my tanks.

If you apply the same logic to artillery, it dictates shooting at the best targets when those present themselves, with the operational objective, not of aiding the infantry today, but of bleeding the enemy white by the end of the month. Which will help the infantry far more, in the long run. Because without his infantry strength staying above some threshold, the enemy cannot hold a line. You should not send more and more shells, the harder the enemy target and the more thoroughly he is dug in. That is reinforcing failure applied to artillery targeting.

Just as reinforcing success with tanks can lead to not needing to charge a lot of MGs, the enemy having inadequate infantry a month from now can lead to not needing to attack a lot of prepared positions.

I hope this is interesting.

[Private Bluebottle]

Originally posted by Wartgamer:

Actually Alchohol, and cigs, are not what a soldier needs when it is cold. They might make someone 'feel' better, but it worsens the physical condition. Yes, I know about Rum rations and most modern armies think its archaic.

Really? Rum as I said was still on the Ration Tables for the British and Australian Armies as of at least 10 years ago. It is an excellent "pick me up" for cold weather, when used in moderation and thats the point, it is issued at the rate of one "tot" (about 50 ml) per man, per day. Perhaps you'd care to provide a quote or a reference to support your claim?

I just thought there was a correlation between increased arty use and increased drinking also.

Nope. None. Again, care to provide a quote or a reference to back your assertion.

At this stage of the war, German daily supplies to arty may have been extremely low, perhaps 5-10 rounds per gun. I suppose it may have self-neutralized in 15-30 minutes if it actully fired.

Funny, one of the thing always noted by Allied veterans was that the Germans always had excellent and plentiful supplies of artillery rounds. Perhaps not on the lavish scale they themselves enjoyed but enough to be noticeable.

[JonS]

Originally posted by Private Bluebottle:

it is issued at the rate of one "tot" (about 50 ml) per man, per day.

Oddly enough, 1228 gallons in 7 days works out to one tot / man / day in an inf div.

[melb_will]

Oh god, i'm going to do something here that I really shouldn't. I'm going to agree with Wartgamer.

There is medical evidence that for a man on the edge of hypothermia, that's where body temperature is hovering just above 35degreesC any alcohol will

a, temporarily make him feel better

b, alcohol produces a dysregulation of the thermoregulatory system, so if you are in a cold environment it will make you colder. Or interestingly, if you are in a hot environment it will make you hotter.

Now i know 50ml isn't much, which is why there is the disclaimer they have to be near hypothermia first.

Cheers

Will