Super Heavy Artillery tactics against conventional ground targets

I have wondered about this ever since I read about German armored formations in Italy and Normandy suffering heavily from accurately guided Allied Naval artillery. The Axis railguns seem to have been used differently (against fixed fortifications,cities, etc.)

Would a continuous barrage of naval artillery be capable of producing an impenetratable artillery "shield" against larger formations, IE. a regiment or a corps of medium tanks?


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They tried that in WWI and it didnt work altough this artillery screen is essential in a good fighting retreat.

 

Sure, with a big enough CEP you can kill theirs and your troops.

This seems to march straight to standard artillery use, trench warfare doctrine. Pound the enemy, stop, send your attack in. Problem against mobile armoured formations is their mobility, for obvious reasons. Once the battle is joined theirs and yours are usually in the same place on the battlefield. The lines in a wooded valley are a little hard to define from 30 kilometres offshore.

But sure, attacking enemy formations during rallying are an essential phase of standard, open warfare doctrine. Soviets used this to good effect at Kursk. Aerial attacks are also good for this.

German super-artillery was purpose built for siege breaking however. It was designed for breaking land forts like the Maginot Line. Everything about the Wehrmacht doctrine is all about avoiding trench warfare and standard fighting doctrine at all costs. It's about breakthrough and exploitation, with a late emphasis on defensive action.

One of the elements which tossed WW2 into entirely new territory was the rise of urban warfare. I don't think anybody was expecting it in 1939, but it was natural to the Soviets and perhaps not entirely unsuited to SS infrastructure and Fallschirmjäger training.

But I'm not entirely sure what the subject of the thread is. German siege breaking artillery is devastating to individual targets outside typical defensive range, but isn't well suited to area attacks.

 

I'm read that naval artillery helped stop German armored counterattacks against the Allied beachheads in Normandy. Ie. forty or so Mark IV tanks tried to break through and they were stopped by British Antitank guns and naval artillery. 20 of these tanks were left behind.

 

I think we are overlooking American/British artillery's speed in acquring targets. The advantage of advanced communications, accurate guns and large number of FOs was the ability to hit moving targets right up to the rifle line. This ability to use artillery in maneouver warfare on enemy targets right in front of you was of great utility to American and British commanders. Allied troops often called down artillery fire to within 100-200 yards of their foxholes, in extreme situations right on themselves, to repel an attack.

 

I'm come across those accounts and I find that pretty crazy. The Russians and the Germans didn't have that capability?

 

Apparently they didn't. The Soviet arty was really massed fire, with hub to hub weapons firing in sycn onto/into an area. The Germans had highly effective artillery, but lost (or never had) control of Time On Target as the war evolved.

Western allied cannon fire could be directed so that different cannon, at differnent ranges, with differernt trajectories of projectile could be quickly calculated so that the longer range round was in the air on its way before the shorter range round was even fired.

Even our Sherman tanks had the ability to join in the general barrage almost seamlessly through radio controled instructions. This was designed so that all the rounds arrived on the target at the same or nearly the same moment, no matter the size of the cannon which fired the round.

Quite an impressive accomplishment all things considered.

 

The Russians had too much firepower for that to be safelly pulled I believe




Cheers...

 

Rusians didn't have radios below the battalion level, even if their gunners had the ability to do TOT, they didnt have the numbers of radio's needed to allow the system to be as flexible as it was for the western allies. The Russians relied on runners quite a bit actually.

 

Time On Target (TOT), which is firing your guns so that all shells reach the target at the same time is not likely to be used in defensive barrages by naval artillery as it requires a lot of foreplanning, also the effect of the ship moving would add another dimension to an already complex calculation. AFAIK TOT is a very effective way for maximizing shock effect immediately before an attack but actual damage is not very different from what you would get with the same amount of shells in a more traditional fireplan. BTW Prinz Eugen and some other KM ships are reported as having stopped soviet attacks, that I expect included a significant armour component that late in the war, during the Kurland battles.
The Germans never developed TOT tactics and with the high velocity low barrel life of their late war tank guns integrating tanks in the fireplan made little sense. The high velocity 88 was sometimes used for indirect fire but it had an easy to retube 3 piece barrel. The German superheavy artillery were mostly fortification busters or long range interdiction/counterbattery weapons, not lkely to be used for stopping enemy attacks where mortars and field guns were more likely.

Calling artillery fire within 200 meters or even on the observer's position is a desperation measure sometimes used by all combattants, as CEP was roughly similar for everybody it was something to avoid if possible.

 

The key to NGFS is obseravtion. So long as the target is within range of the ship(s) firing and the observation is good a panzer unit is doomed. There are many examples of ships firing 5 to 15" shells on such targets at ranges up to 35,000 yards.
Typically, a 6" US cruiser would deliver over 100 shells in a matter of a minute or two on such a target destroying up to a third of the tanks targetted. Naval gunfire was devastating.