Will artillery be more flexible this time around?

[Erik Springelkamp]

Should work. biggest troubble is that the Spotter will loose LOS to next barrage place because the first barrages dust and smoke will block the LOS. Only time this can work is if its done before the game starts so its "pre plotted".

And then you can only order in steps of 5 minutes. But maybe this is realistic for a full prep fire barrage, but each battery must hold out for 5 minutes, so either a lot of ammo is needed, or a slower rate of fire.

[Secondbrooks]

Should work. biggest troubble is that the Spotter will loose LOS to next barrage place because the first barrages dust and smoke will block the LOS. Only time this can work is if its done before the game starts so its "pre plotted".

I don't see problem here with CMSF. If fires are swifted in one minute intervals then spotting is usually done for both firemissions. Infact "pre plotted" doesn't work for reason mentioned above, delay between firemissions is just too great and resistance will recover from suppression. Some super fast US light mortars could be different thing, but atleast with Syrians it works well "thanks" to long response times. I've done some pretty massive plans consisting tens of tubes, looks nice when company starts it's assault with support of that kind of firepower. And feels great when my plans fit into situation and i don't just slaugther my company.

Granted i'm not totally sure how much different Normandy will be.

[DaveyJJ]

You have rolling barrages leading the Canadian Scottish's counterattack on Putot-en-Bessin on June 9th against the 12th SS ...

The counter-attack had occurred on the evening of the 8th actually. The 12th had taken Putot-en-Bessin back from the Royal Winnipeg Rifles on the morning of June 8 in a bloody counter-attack after the RWR had caught the defenders off guard June 7.

Late in the evening of the 8th the Canucks struck back ... at 8:30 pm ... with the 1st Battalion, Canadian Scottish Regiment, a squadron of tanks from the 6th Armoured Regiment (the 1st Hussars, who were, btw, the only group in the entirety of D-Day to reach their objectives, with one group pushing down onto the road to the Carpiquet airfield before turing back due to lack of support), the 12th and 13th Field Regiments of the Royal Canadian Artillery (RCA) and part of The Cameron Highlanders of Ottawa (MG). In less than an hour of hard fighting, the Canucks had taken the town back for good.

I only know this particular battle that well because I made a scenario for the hex and chit tactical WW2 wargame Valor & Victory around this specific event. Can't wait for the Commonwealth module to remake it for CMBN.

[Michael Emrys]

If fires are swifted in one minute intervals...

I'm sorry, I don't understand what you mean by 'swifted'. Did you mean to write 'switched'?

Michael

[JonS]

"shifted"?

[Michael Emrys]

That makes sense.

Michael

[Battlefront.com]

Ah... Sewer Movement. MikeyD is correct, there were all sorts of dire predictions about how terrible the game would be if it didn't have it. He is also correct that usage of this feature was extremely low because most people wanted to fight in open terrain with tanks and infantry, not dense urban landscapes. Which meant that the "absolutely essential" feature was in fact nothing of the sort and therefore a waste of development time to implement.

I do hope we can add some more functionality to the artillery modeling over time. There's been some minor, though useful, changes to the modeling for CM:BN. But there's more we would like to do in the future. Which is actually a true statement for pretty much everything that is in the game now. There's no feature that we consider "perfect" and therefore no feature we don't theoretically want to improve given a chance to do so sensibly.

Steve

[Alchenar]

Would it be so difficult to implement delays in pre-planned bombardments?

A scenario where you have to follow a rolling bombardment that you have no control over would be quite interesting.

[Blackcat]

The ability to put down a sufficiently accurate artillery barrage without having a forward observer to register and correct the spotting rounds has been around since the later years of WWI. Yet this ability is not modelled in the games not even in CMSF. Whilst this lack sometimes irritates me I do hope it continues because if it was removed artillery would become too powerful in the game.

[dan/california]

The problem with massive amounts of artillery available to the player is that he knows the fight is THIS map. And therefore distributing shells on all the likely locations makes sense if they are available. For a set piece attacks against known positions this was sometimes done. But in the real world, most of the time, the area of concern is bigger than a CM map and artillery is subject to some level of conservation where firing at maybes is concerned. A division level artillery asset can saturate any given CM sized map, it probably can't do twenty of them a day.

Observed fire at identified enemy assets is a different discussion.

[Michael Emrys]

Hmmm, here's an idea for scenario designers. In any scenario designated as a set piece attack, how about allotting two or three times as much artillery as there would be for any other sort of engagement? Would that be workable and make sense? The scenario should also provide the defender more in terms of mines and other obstacles, bunkers, trenches, etc. since the assumption is that the lines have been static for a while.

Michael

[JonS]

The thing about rolling barrages is that you need to understand what problems they sought to resolve.

Basically, it's a way of guaranteeing a reasonable level of suppression for an attack when the location of the enemy positions is unknow, or not known in sufficient detail. It is also a way of overcoming the inherent inaccuracy of any indirect fire. From a 'enemy-cas-per-shell-fired' POV (where more is better) they are highly wasteful, but then inflicting cas isn't really the point of a barrage. Using 'friendly cas per attack' POV (where less is better) they are great.

But they do take a while to organise (by late WWII we're talking about 12-18 hours for a bde sized attack, including inter-arm planning conferences, selecting infantry objectives, and figuring out how the barrage would relate to the infantry avenues of attack, as well as the time spent calculating bearings and elevation, dumping ammo, and conducting survey to ensure accuracy), they do use a lot of ammo, and they do tend to stifle infantry freedom of action (see: Jary).

Not all Commonwealth formations used them. The 4th Indian Division, for example, studiously avoided them because Tuker - their GOC for a long period - instilled the Division with a strong Light Infantry ethos. IIRC the Canadians in Italy (and I think NWE) eschewed using barrages, though I'm not so sure about why.

On the other hand, 2(NZ)Div in Italy acquired a reputation of something of a fetish for them, and developed templated solutions that meant that standardised barrages for typical tactical situations could be prepared with extraordinary rapidity. OTOH, being a national army as well as a Division meant that senior command positions within that division were remarkably stable, so SOPs were much more fully developed and firmly rooted there than in other formations. I believe there was also a very strong impetus to minimise infantry casualties in order to keep The Div operational, so infantry creativity took a back seat to casualty avoidance.

[MikeyD]

We should be less focused on WWI-style rolling barrages and more on artillery rockets. Classical artillerymen loathed them but the top brass loved them. Especially after August, their use spiked among U.S. forces. They were widely used in the Hurtgen forest, I understand, though the artillery brass had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the party.

[JonS]

Spiked? To a total of 2 battalions by May 1945? Compared to a total of 307 artillery battalions?

[JonS]

Also; quit it with the "WWI-style" pejoratives, or I'll start recommending the exclusion of everything else developed during WWI and used during WWII.

Which would be everything used in WWII.

[Blackcat]

"Using 'friendly cas per attack' POV (where less is better) they are great"

Which is, of course, one of the two reasons why they brought in. The second being to try and ensure that the attack they were supporting was successful, in that the attacking infantry were not shot flat by the defenders emerging from cover after the barrage lifted. On the Somme there are numerous examples of attacks stalling after the infantry lost contact with the barrage and of attacks failing when such a barrage was not used.

Throughout WWII the Brits were always concerned to ensure that the slaughters of WWI could not be repeated. This was particularly true in 1944-45 when British manpower reserves were essentially used up - there were no more men and infantry was in very short supply. Casualty avoidance was thus a strategic and political imperative for the UK in the ETO on and post D-Day. British artillery practice should, I think be viewed, with that in mind.

"But they do take a while to organise (by late WWII we're talking about 12-18 hours for a bde sized attack"

That doesn't strike me as excessive. Battalion Battlegroup size offensive ops in Afghanistan take longer than that today.

"The 4th Indian Division, for example, studiously avoided them "

I am not wholly sure the experience of 4th Indian Division under Tuker is particulalrly relevant. From memory the only offensive battle against first class opposition they fought under him in which as creeping barrage might have been used was the battle for Tunis in the Spring of '43. The division was of course in Italy in 1944-45. Could you point me to some reading which sets out theri experiences then.

One last thought, it is commonly held that US doctrine has always been to fight with firepower rather than lives. However, actual practice in the ETO hardly supports that argument. It is impossible to imagine that the Brits would have fought the Hurtgen Forest campaign, for example, and on D-Day itself the USA preferred to use manpower than all but one of Hobart's "funnies".

[JonS]

"But they do take a while to organise (by late WWII we're talking about 12-18 hours for a bde sized attack"

That doesn't strike me as excessive.

No, me either. But it's substantially longer than a CM battle.

"The 4th Indian Division, for example, studiously avoided them "

I am not wholly sure the experience of 4th Indian Division under Tuker is particularly relevant. From memory the only offensive battle against first class opposition they fought under him in which as creeping barrage might have been used was the battle for Tunis in the Spring of '43. The division was of course in Italy in 1944-45. Could you point me to some reading which sets out their experiences then.

And late 1942, but your list is about right. Still ... North Africa 1942-43 and Italy 1943-45 certainly provides plenty of scope, and other divisions were using them at the same time and in the same places. Try "Firepower" by Bidwell and Graham, or "The development of artillery tactics and equipment" by Pemberton, or "Tug of war" also by Bidwell and Graham.

on D-Day itself the USA preferred to use manpower than all but one of Hobart's "funnies".

Heh. That's a whole separate discussion (see esp. Appendix C)

[Battlefront.com]

That doesn't strike me as excessive. Battalion Battlegroup size offensive ops in Afghanistan take longer than that today.

Ah, be very careful to not compare current ops in a COIN environment with a full tempo conventional war. There are more dissimilarities at all levels than there are similarities.

However, in this case there is an interesting correlation to keep in mind. In Afghanistan a large operation involving a battalion or higher is quite uncommon. The vast majority of operations are routine, low level actions and reactions. Very little special planning is needed for these because of that.

The same was true for WW2. The vast majority of combat was conducted "on the fly" with very little in the way of complex preparations. This is understandable because both sides were fighting very hard to gain the the initiative. Initiative is very rarely gained by a set piece battle. What a set piece battle can do, however, is break a deadlock so that initiative can be gained in subsequent actions.

This is the primary problem the Allies had for June and July. They would find themselves deadlocked, they would regroup and reorganize, then make a major concerted push only to get far less out of it than intended. The complex, preplanned portions of the attack would be limited to the first few hours, or perhaps day, of the operation. After that it was almost entirely on the fly combat. The preplanned portion failed to significantly degrade the German's defensive capabilities, and so the exploitation forces ground themselves against determined resistance for little further gain. Which is why these operations are mostly considered "failures" in and of themselves. The best that can be said for most of these operations is that they seriously degraded the German's manpower and equipment reserves, which eventually meant they literally couldn't man their lines.

Steve

[Michael Emrys]

Also; quit it with the "WWI-style" pejoratives, or I'll start recommending the exclusion of everything else developed during WWI and used during WWII.

Which would be everything used in WWII.

Ahem. Radar, jets, A-bomb, just to name the first three that popped into my head. And if you try to claim that they were just further developments of already existing technologies I am going to call foul.

Michael

[Secondbrooks]

I'm sorry, I don't understand what you mean by 'swifted'. Did you mean to write 'switched'?

Michael

err... Yeah. Swifted isn't probably even words

Like JonS said: shifted.

Steve: True. From opposite point of view: One major success Finns had at -44 was that when they finally were able to start resisting Soviet offences and halt it's progress creating rather stabile front line. Which ment that Finns got artillery working at full potential. And when artillery started to work Soviets pretty literally started to bang their heads into wall. Firepower up to 200 tubes could be consentrated in 5 minutes to places where enemy presence was detected, all this by lone FO. Radio intelligence found out that whole batallions were rendered useless with-in minutes. More often Soviet units were repelled already at their assembly area than they managed to get into contact with Finnish front lines.

But earlier when fighting was more mobile, artillery just couldn't back infantry enough even when tubes were there. Soviet didn't seem to be needing to advance but few kilometers per day to render this kind of firepower useless. So system seems to pretty fragile for changes in situation. Well, Finnish method was rather raw at that point of time (it basically still was under testing), if fighting would have continued for longer use of artillery could have become more agile than it now was, but not much. I'd think.

[JonS]

Ahem. Radar, jets, A-bomb, just to name the first three that popped into my head.

Applicability to CM?

[Blackcat]

JonS,

Thanks for the reading list. I have placed my order for "Cracking Hitler's Atlantic Wall" (even though Amazon's pricing seems dodgy) and am looking into the others.

All the best

P.S. "Firepower" by Bidwell and Graham" appears to be a very short internet article, am I missing something?

[Blackcat]

The best that can be said for most of these operations is that they seriously degraded the German's manpower and equipment reserves, which eventually meant they literally couldn't man their lines.

Steve

Crumbs, Steve, not that I would disagree with the substance of what you said but that don't half sound like Haig in 1916 - "the wearing out fight".

[JonS]

(even though Amazon's pricing seems dodgy)

For a number of reasons (including Amazon reaching out and retrospectively deleting users eBooks from their Kindles) I prefer to use The Book Depository, who have free postage worldwide.

P.S. "Firepower" by Bidwell and Graham" appears to be a very short internet article, am I missing something?

No, it should be a fairly substantial book. You should be able to find a second hand copy around fairly easily.

Edit: the Pemberton book you will have a lot of trouble tracking down. Although, MLRS do sell a reprint.

[Blackcat]

For a number of reasons (including Amazon reaching out and retrospectively deleting users eBooks from their Kindles) I prefer to use The Book Depository, who have free postage worldwide.

No, it should be a fairly substantial book. You should be able to find a second hand copy around fairly easily.

Edit: the Pemberton book you will have a lot of trouble tracking down. Although, MLRS do sell a reprint.

OK, OK, got FirePower and Tug of War ordered from Pen and Sword. The Pemberton at £45 is going to have to wait until next month's pension cheque arrives. Many thanks.