How Did the American Soldier Stack Up Against the Enemy in WWII?

Dissonance · October 21, 2015, 7:17pm

I read your post perfectly well. Again, what you are talking about is not field artillery. The German 88mm and the US 90mm were direct fire weapons. That you took the 4:1 shot ratio from a poem and started talking about tanks and armor penetration was rather telling that you were still misunderstanding the point.

And speaking of not having read posts carefully, you will note that I have said “meaningful indirect fire” every single time, not simply “indirect fire”. Any gun can be used for indirect fire; rifles and pistols are capable of and can be used for indirect fire. Tanks can and have been used as bastard artillery by elevating the main gun as much as possible and positioning them on a reverse slope. If you look hard enough you can find old field manual instructions on using volleys of rifle fire into the air as indirect fire. These aren’t particularly effective methods of producing indirect fire as the weapons weren’t designed with indirect fire in mind. Hence my use of the word “meaningful”.

Then you might want to produce some evidence and understand why the virtues of the 88 are irrelevant to the post you responded to. If I can quote your own cite:

Like the US 90mm antiaircraft gun, the 8.8cm Flak was used on occasion in the indirect-fire role to supplement field artillery, but this was undertaken much less by the Germans than the Americans. While an excellent heavy antiaircraft gun, the 8.8cm actually made a very poor artillery piece being a long-barreled gun rather than a howitzer and possessing such a high velocity that it limited fine elevation adjustments when adjusting fire on point targets, especially if firing on targets behind hills and ridges. The Germans also failed to effectively create fire direction centers to employ the “88” as indirect artillery.

Contrary to what one sees in war movies, memoirs, novels, and even official publications after being under “88mm fire” the “88” was not a German field artillery piece. Not to belittle World War II veterans, but to many all German artillery was called “88s” and all German tanks were “Tigers.”

XT · October 21, 2015, 7:55pm

[QUOTE=Nelson Pike]
As for the other artillery pieces and overall technical capacity and organization I will grant we may have been well ahead by mid to late 1944, but I will continue to hold out against the term “spectacular” which was what first move me to comment here.
[/QUOTE]

You’d be what they commonly call ‘wrong’ then. It seems fashionable these days, especially on this board to say that anyone asserting that the US was or is good at anything is simply doing the old USAUSAUSA! schtick. However, sometimes the US was actually ahead of other countries. US artillery during WWII (and after) was one of those times (US logistics were also really good during WWII and one of the outstanding things we got right). It’s a rather long article, but this talks about the differences between the US and German armies wrt artillery, and some of the misconceptions (especially about this wrangle you are in about the 88, which was a direct fire weapon).

In the 1920s, progress on the modernization project was slow due to limited funds, pacifism, and conservative tendencies in the Army, and the availability of surplus weapons. Despite these obstacles some progress was made on designing a new 105mm howitzer and other weapons. In the 1930s, the Field Artillery School kept pushing for the new weapons and the pace of modernization increased despite the effects of the Great Depression. However, there was continued resistance from conservative senior officers to replacing the 75 with a 105 howitzer. As late as 1939, General George C. Marshall still opposed it because of the cost involved. Nevertheless, with encouragement from the artillery school, innovative Artillery and ordnance officers continued in the 30s to experiment with new gun designs — and by the end of the decade prototypes had been developed for the howitzers and guns which saw action in WWII. Also in the 1930s after much debate, a decision was made to begin motorizing the Field Artillery (which was horse-drawn) — and by the end of the decade 75 percent of the division artillery had been motorized.

In May 1940, the Germans easily defeated the French and British with a new type of mobile armored welfare — and including the 105mm howitzer as their main divisional artillery weapon. In June the U.S. War Department finally announced that the U.S. division artillery would be armed with the new 105mm howitzer and the 155mm howitzer. And in 1942, the decision was made to fully motorize the U.S. Field Artillery. When the first American combat troops landed in North Africa in Algeria in November 1942, the First U.S. Infantry Division was armed with the new 105mmm howitzer M2A1 — and by the time the Division landed in Sicily in July 1943, it also had the new 155mm howitzer, M1. Moreover, all of the Division’s artillery was motorized.

By the Battle of the Bulge (hereinafter referred to as the Bulge) in December 1944, all American artillery units had been equipped with new American weapons. The new weapons entered the service on the following dates:

105mm howitzer November 1942

155mm howitzer July 1943

155mm gun December 1941

4.5-inch gun

(originally of UK design)

90mm gun 1943

8-inch howitzer 1942

240mm howitzer 1943

(Self Propelled):

105mm howitzer 1943

155mm gun 1944

Thus, in the space of just over two decades and against formidable obstacles, the U.S. Army had managed to replace all of its World War I artillery pieces with new, modern howitzers and guns — and to convert from horse-drawn to motorized artillery. Ian Hogg, the noted British expert on World War II artillery believes the U.S. was so successful with its weapon program because its total focus was on creating new weapons. In contrast the German designers tried to overhaul current service weapons while designing new ones — thus not giving full attention to the new ones.

The American artillery weapons in the Bulge were not retrograde pieces of World War I vintage, but were virtually new — and in fact newer than many of the comparable German weapons of that day. How these new American weapons compared in quality with like weapons in the German Army will be discussed later in this paper.

Artillery weapons and organization in the Bulge

Much to their surprise, the Germans soon learned that they had failed to detect the presence of a second infantry division (the 2nd Infantry Division) in the 99th’s sector. Moreover, the Germans had not anticipated that the Americans could reinforce the area with two additional divisions (the 1st Infantry Division at Butgenbach and the 9th Infantry Division at Monschau) by 19 Dec.

The Germans and American Artillery “Order of Battle” — Elsenborn, 16 Dec. 1944

As the Battle of Elsenborn began on 16 Dec. 1944, the German artillery of 6th Panzer Army greatly outnumbered the guns of the opposing U.S. V Corps elements — 1,222 to 314. (Thus belying the myth that the American artillery always outnumbered the Germans.)

For details on the weapons and organization of the artillery at Elsenborn see Chart A, for German Order of Battle (OB) and Chart B for the American OB. These charts present a picture of the weapons involved (by caliber, type, nomenclature, and assignment), and the artillery organization.

An analysis of the two charts presents some interesting insights:

The division artillery of the Germans and the American infantry divisions were surprisingly similar — both in weapons and organization. Both opted for a 105mm howitzer as the main close support weapon and for a medium howitzer of about 150mm.

At the Corps level there were noticeable differences in both weapons and organization. The Germans had a greater variety of cannon (including some Russian) and a much larger number and variety of rockets and very heavy guns. Organizationally, the Germans had no Corps Artillery Headquarters as such — and their non-divisional artillery was grouped into Volks Artillery Korps (VAKs), Werfer Brigades, and very heavy batteries.

Re the 88s: Chart A shows that the German 88mm guns were obviously not the main close support weapon in the German Army — (that function belonged to the 105mm howitzer). In he entire 6th Panzer Army there were only 216 towed 88s out of a total of 1,222 pieces — and most 88s were flak guns whose main mission was anti-aircraft defense. And note that there were no 88s in any of the German Infantry Divisions (VGDs).

One of the most notable advances in artillery weapons technology in WWII was the proximity fuse. In both of the Great wars, the fuses available for achieving air bursts were quit unsatisfactory — requiring daily registrations and settings at the guns. Needed, was a fuse that would explode the shell when it arrived in the proximity of the target — without registrations and individual settings. The U.S. put some of its best electronic and engineering experts on this very complicated problem. By 1944 the U.S. had built an operational proximity fuse for use against ground targets and the artillerymen called it Pozit or VT (variable time). It consisted of a tiny battery and a transmitter/receiver which sent and received electronic emissions until the shell reached he optimum distance from the target — at which instant it detonated the shell.

Three basic artillery functions

A significant aspect of the American artillery’s performance in the Ardennes (and elsewhere) was not so much in the number of its tubes, but in its excellence in performing the three basic functions of the field artillery: shoot, move, and communicate.

a. The “shoot” or gunnery function.

The Americans called the shooting aspect of their mission gunnery. This function involved al of the activities incident to placing artillery fire on the target. Gunnery in World War II was the area where the American artillery made its most significant contribution — and particularly its use of massed fires.

Massed Fires:

As a result of experiences in WWI, the major powers had seen the need to improve their abilities to mass the fires of their division artillery. However, most nations were bounded by tradition and habit and were slow to make the necessary changes to bring this about. Only the U.S. was willing to make a clean break with the past and to restructure its entire artillery command and control structure in pursuit of a mass fire capability. Leading the way for the Americans was the Field Artillery School at Fort Sill OK, where in the 1920s a group of farsighted, innovative young officers became convinced that achieving such a capability should be a top priority. After much deliberation, they decided that in order to mass the fires of a division it would be necessary to make two major structural changes.

First, fire control within the battalion would have to be centralized at battalion headquarters rather than remain decentralized to the firing batteries. Hence the battalion commander would exercise fire control instead of the firing battery commanders. This idea caused great dismay among older artillery officers who liked the old arrangement and adamantly opposed diluting the authority of the firing battery commander. Despite high-level opposition to their ideas well into the 1930s, the officers at Ft. Sill knew that centralization was key to their success — so insisted on this change.

Secondly, to provide the battalion commander with the means to control the fires of the three batteries, Ft. Sill created a fire direction center (FDC) on the battalion staff to be manned by highly trained gunnery experts. All requests for fire would be funneled to the FDC where they would be processed, and fire commands relayed directly to the firing battery exec at the howitzer position. By 1934 Ft. Sill had developed a prototype FDC and in 1940 an innovative new graphical firing table was invented to help the FDC speed up its calculations. (Boyd Dastrup, King of Battles.)

With war looming in 1941, the war department finally approved the FDC system for the divisions — and FDCs were installed throughout the artillery. Refinements in the system continued to be made at Ft. Sill and in the units from 1941 to 1943. One of the most notable refinements was the time-on-target (TOT) mission in which not only are all batteries concentrated on one target, but the projectiles are programmed to arrive at the target at nearly the same moment. Hence, enemy personnel in the open are engulfed before they can take cover.

Anyway, the US artillery arm was pretty much ‘spectacular’ compared to the other combatants. So much so that the Soviets took a page from the Americans wrt artillery doctrine, especially in the post war period. Things like Time on Target have become pretty much the standard today in ALL artillery arms in most advanced nations today. I encourage you to read the whole article as it goes into quite a bit of detail.

Fuzzy_wuzzy · October 21, 2015, 8:29pm

I haven’t read the thread so apologies if the point has been made; American soldiers fared well enough against the enemy. That is they fared about as well as soldiers from a liberal democracy can be expected to fare whilst fighting in a foreign land. It’s unfair to judge them against the Red Army. The Red Army soldier was fighting for the freedom of his homeland for most of the war. The American soldier was fighting for some sort of concept of freedom and/or freedom of foreign nation states.

It’s probably more apt to judge the US Army against the British. In that contest they did very well. I say that as a Brit.

Nelson_Pike · October 21, 2015, 11:28pm

You are not talking about me, because I have not said or intimated anything of this sort. On the contrary, I have granted that the US may have been superior, just not “spectacularly” so.

A fine article, but it does not make the case for “spectacular”.

To use a tank analogy a Soviet T-34 would dominate a short-barreled German Mark 4, but the Mark 4 would occasionally take out a T-34, especially pointblank. However, a T-34 would so spectacularly outperform a German Mark 1 as to be expected to prevail every time under all conditions. I do not interpret the article to be making the case go that far for US artillery superiority.

Human_Action · October 22, 2015, 12:01am

Without knowing your bar for “spectacular”, I don’t know what you expect us to say. Did the US need orbital lasers to have a “spectacular” artillery arm? A 100:1 edge in casualties inflicted by artillery? Fighting the war from the Atlantic and Pacific coasts with long range gunnery?

Nelson_Pike · October 22, 2015, 12:23am

Dissonance:

And speaking of not having read posts carefully, you will note that I have said “meaningful indirect fire” every single time, not simply “indirect fire”. Any gun can be used for indirect fire; rifles and pistols are capable of and can be used for indirect fire. Tanks can and have been used as bastard artillery by elevating the main gun as much as possible and positioning them on a reverse slope. If you look hard enough you can find old field manual instructions on using volleys of rifle fire into the air as indirect fire. These aren’t particularly effective methods of producing indirect fire as the weapons weren’t designed with indirect fire in mind. Hence my use of the word “meaningful”.Then you might want to produce some evidence and understand why the virtues of the 88 are irrelevant to the post you responded to.

I have already gotten into one fight over the word “spectacular(ly)” and I am not going to get into an extended argument over the distinction “meaningful” (your word) and “appropriate” (my word). The Germans clearly thought using the 88mm in indirect fire was, occasionally, appropriate. I have not suggested that this resulted in meaningful damage to the enemy.

Then I guess you writing betrays conceptual confusion, because all you did by referring to the Pershing and Jackson was repeat what I said, and I know both the 88 and 90 were usually employed as direct fire.

the 4-1 shot ratio was a serious point, and I guessed you were using poetry to make your point in order to let everyone know what a literatus you are, a real sophisticate with such a feel for sensitive verse that you can employ it usefully even in a technical dicussion. In any case my technical followup was technically relevant and reasonable.

As for the poetry I do not actually know of any good WWII poems. (I would contend that virtually all memorable poetry since about 1920 is embedded in the lyrics of popular music, but that is a topic for another forum). Maybe you can help me out by suggesting some more.

I do like this from WWI, although I admit has nothing to do with a WWII artillery discussion.

I am banished from the patient men who fight.
They smote my heart to pity, built my pride.
Shoulder to aching shoulder, side by side,
They trudged away from life’s broad wealds of light.
Their wrongs were mine; and ever in my sight
They went arrayed in honour. But they died,–
Not one by one: and mutinous I cried
To those who sent them out into the night.
The darkness tells how vainly I have striven
To free them from the pit where they must dwell
In outcast gloom convulsed and jagged and riven
By grappling guns. Love drove me to rebel.
Love drives me back to grope with them through hell;
And in their tortured eyes I stand forgiven.”

Siegfried Sassoon The War Poems

And I bid you farewell with that.

Nelson_Pike · October 22, 2015, 12:25am

See reply #164.

Dissonance · October 22, 2015, 6:34pm

And again, you are entirely missing the point. There is no semantic debate going on. The post you responded to and bumped this zombie with was talking about the artillery arm. The 88mm is not field artillery, and its virtues as an anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapon are entirely irrelevant to a discussion about US vs. German field artillery arms in WW2.

No, all you are doing yet again is demonstrating that you do not grasp what is being discussed. The 88 and 90 are high velocity direct fire weapons. They are not field artillery; they are AA guns that were later used as AT guns and the main weapons on tanks and tank destroyers. That they were occasionally used in an indirect fire role, a task they were not well suited for, does not make them field artillery.

Again, that you would take the 4-1 shot ratio from a poem and start talking about tanks and armor penetration in a discussion about field artillery shows that you simply do not know what you are talking about. Your follow-up on this line, no matter how technical or reasoned is entirely irrelevant to the discussion and the point of the post that you were trying to rebut. The post was talking about the superiority of the US field artillery arm over the German one. The thickness of the turret armor of the Sherman vs. the Tiger and the armor penetration of the Sherman’s 75 vs. the Panther’s 75mm/L70 have no relevance. You could just as well have responded with a technical follow-up about the MG34 vs. the BAR that you felt was technically relevant and reasonable demonstrating just how superior German light machine guns were and it would have had the same relevance to field artillery: none.

bump · October 22, 2015, 7:10pm

In essence it was the communications and artillery doctrine that made US artillery so effective, not some stupendous capabilities on the part of the guns themselves, or stellar logistics.

Essentially the way the US system worked is that any old Lieutenant or Captain facing enemy troops could call for artillery support, and the system could assign any or all guns in range of the target. Contrast this with the more traditional systems where a regiment only had access to the guns assigned to that regiment, and so on and so forth. And it might be that only the battalion commander had an actual radio, and the companies only had runners to relay information. In practice, this meant that US forces could very easily and quickly call in artillery strikes in quantity, at need.

It’s kind of analogous to the Blitzkrieg strategy; it wasn’t the quality of the tanks, or even the soldiers doing the fighting that made it so effective; it was the actual doctrine that made the difference. In the case of the US artillery, it was a combination of doctrine and the extraordinary (for the time) distribution of radios among small units that enabled that doctrine to be effective.

GregorySStewart · December 29, 2015, 3:31pm

Germans thought that they were better soldiers than Americans. That is not too hard to understand.

Americans were largely conscripts. They started the war late from the German point of view, and their fighting showed it in Africa.
The Nazi propaganda machine told them that the money-hungry Americans were just not good soldier material.
German commanders completely misunderstood American strategy. The German commanders, after years of fighting the Russians, expected the Americans to attack every single time they were afforded a weakness, and in account after account, these officers criticized the Americans for NOT taking advantage of situations on the ground.
(The US was willing to trade materiel for life. They would rather wait and build up artillery, air supremacy, and weaken the supply lines of the enemy prior to attacking, so as to reduce overall casualties.)

On the other hand each and every soldier and officer in Germany were awe struck at the material advantages the Americans brought into the war.

A German soldier, captured at Normandy was brought to Utah beach for transport to England, and he asked his American captor “Where are the horses?” It was beyond his comprehension that the American army could run without horses at all.

Another German soldier was dumb struck when he realized that his Americans were attacking France, and they brought their own food with them. All of it! Germans were expected to feed themselves, at least partially, locally.

A Luftwaffe pilot complained that he was forced to fight with a two year old 109, but every Mustang he encountered was brand new!

Every German realized that the US was fighting “A rich man’s war.” It was part of their propaganda. They were told that the US was fighting at the behest of Jewish bankers or so that France and England could pay back their loans. Germans were at once jealous of the material advantages the US brought into the war, and fearful of them. Many men on the Atlantic wall who somehow made it through D Day told interviewers that the onslaught was far greater than anything they saw on the Eastern front.

Because the Americans fought the war they could best win, with material advantages in almost every category, and air superiority or air supremacy over the battle field, it is easy for the German soldier to feel that if everything were even they would have prevailed.

But that is not the nature of war, now. Is it?

bump · December 29, 2015, 4:53pm

I think there was some notion that the US used firepower as a substitute for soldiering skill, and to some extent, they were right. Who wouldn’t do that if given the chance?

But it can’t be denied that the German training and replacement programs were light-years ahead of the US ones. German officers were trained longer and more intensively than the US ones, and so were their NCOs. On top of that, their replacement scheme had a system of in-theater advanced divisional training camps and a system for rebuilding units instead of feeding replacements into existing units piecemeal.

This meant was that a German unit would be pulled out of action, and THEN the replacements would be added as primary groups (groups of soldiers with personal relationships who fight for each other) formed in the advanced training camps to existing units, rather than as individuals who would be ostracized when the shooting started.

So German units would basically get a set of soldiers who were trained in the techniques and dangers experienced by their division, and who were already formed into primary groups as part of that training. The formation of primary groups is the hardest and most integral thing to having effective soldiers, and the Germans had a system that fostered that.

The US system, by comparison, fed individual soldiers straight from branch school into fighting units as individuals. These replacements tended to have short lifespans as they weren’t trained in local techniques and dangers, and were therefore shunned by the existing primary groups, making them even more likely to get killed.

Some units, like the US airborne divisions, did a great job of creating primary groups among their soldiers, but were equally hamstrung by the atrocious replacement system.

In the final analysis, this meant that the German troops were more motivated and better trained, and man for man, were more effective than any other troops in the war, Allied or Axis. But there weren’t enough of them to fight the wars they had started.

Human_Action · December 29, 2015, 5:05pm

As historian Mark West put it, “Had the Germans been given a free hand to devise a replacement system…, one that would do the Americans the most harm and the least good, they could not have done a better job”.

rat_avatar · December 29, 2015, 10:44pm

And far more Axis lives were lost on the Eastern front and many German’s remember this.

Cite: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/05/eastern-front-greater-role-d-day-german-memories
The western world downplayed the Russian contribution to wining the war due to cold war propaganda but the reality is that the western front was by far the lesser.
Edit…freaking zombies!!!

handsomeharry · December 30, 2015, 4:11pm

Of course, he said this after giving a 20 minute speech to American soldiers, with no enemy soldiers present!

ralfy · November 3, 2016, 10:43am

Or you can mention this to him:

bump · November 3, 2016, 1:58pm

Not quite… in 1918, US doctrine was outdated by the standards of the British and French, and got a lot of US troops killed in costly frontal attacks. (see Belleau Wood for an example). We learned pretty quickly, but the contention that we were well trained and unwilling to rush headlong into battle is flat out wrong.

Ultimately though, from what I’ve read, the big things separating German troops in WWII from Allied ones were training, specifically officer and NCO training (both MUCH longer and more comprehensive than US training), and cultural differences that made German troops somewhat more amenable to the hierarchical military command structure and to endure hardship. These differences made the German army, man for man, more effective than the Allied armies.

In particular, the officer training was very different than the US equivalent. German officers were ALWAYS chosen from the ranks- aspirants had to have 15 months of service and 2 months of field experience, and were subject to a rigorous selection process beyond that, centered on leadership and learning aptitude; merely having a college degree didn’t come close to cutting it as far as being commissioned in the Wehrmacht.

In addition, they had a very well thought out tactical doctrine that they promulgated at all levels- they had a tactical doctrine manual (Manual of Troop Leadership) nicknamed “Tante Friede” (Aunt Frieda) that allowed their officers to learn on the job effectively and once they had that down, they could riff off of it depending on conditions.

As far as enlisted soldiers were concerned, the Germans did a far better job of creating and fostering what are called “primary groups”, meaning the small clusters of men who live and fight together as comrades. These groups are who they fight for, and who they look to for support. By fostering this, they increased the effectiveness of their soldiers by quite a bit vs. the Allies, who tended to let these groups form organically, and without any direction or cultivation.

Corry_El · November 3, 2016, 3:27pm

I agree with the conclusion as a whole. The US artillery arm as a whole, equipment of all kinds not only the guns, organization, doctrine was probably generally the best of any army in WWII (that’s not going to be unanimously accepted by partisans of either the Germans nor the British, but I personally agree it was true). Another point on the equipment side which may or may not have been mentioned is US artillery’s use of radio proximity fuses from late in 1944 (used in USN shipboard AA guns from early '43, and also from that year in land AA guns, particularly heavily in 1944 v V-1’s). But as to general performance of artillery Rommel mentioned it as a strong point of even the green US Army forces in Tunisia.

I would quibble with lack of ‘meaningful’ use of either 88’s or US Army 90mm as indirect fire artillery. 88mm Flak was often used as indirect fire artillery all the way back to the Legion Condor 88mm Flak 18 equipped unit F/88 in the Spanish Civil War. The missions of these guns can be seen in “Flak Artillery of the Legion Condor” by Molina and Garcia. There were frequent artillery missions, especially including counter battery fire against opposing artillery because of their relatively long range.

US 90mm likewise was often used as artillery, compared to relatively rarely against enemy tanks. The US 90mm units in the 10th AAA Group in Korea never seem to have engaged enemy a/c and NK tanks in only a handful of cases (the 68th Bn claimed a few firing across the Naktong River in the Pusan Perimeter campaign). They were basically field artillery units equipped with M2 90mm AA guns. It was discussed at the time whether to streamline 90mm AA bn organization (wrt to directors, radar, etc and their personnel) to reflect this reality.

AA guns were limited as field pieces because they were bigger and heavier for a given caliber, and though they could fire at high elevations like a howitzer their ammunition didn’t allow for variable charges to be used. And there were potential command and control issues because AA guns were organizationally separate, under AA commands in US case, and German heavy flak belonged to the Luftwaffe not the army, but these issues seem to have been minimized where there was a need to. The possible advantage of A AA guns was when they had mechanically assisted loaders for superior burst fire capability (eg. the M2 90mm) to field pieces. Their sights did allow for indirect ground fire. The procedures for US 90mm can be seen in this field manual:
http://www.benning.army.mil/Library/content/Virtual/ArmyPubs/fm%204-126_1943_antiaircraft%20artillery%20field%20manual%20service%20of%20the%20piece%2090-mm%20antiaircraft%20gun%20on%20m1a1%20mount_oct_1943.pdf

dropzone · November 3, 2016, 11:48pm

Sights? An 88 used in indirect fire would mean the shell would travel through the stratosphere!

dropzone · November 3, 2016, 11:50pm

Closer to the ground, I always liked a mortar for indirect fire. How did ours (Allies) compare?

dropzone · November 3, 2016, 11:54pm

And it’s not a zombie. It’s a discussion I’ve been following for 15 years.

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How Did the American Soldier Stack Up Against the Enemy in WWII?

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