I can’t remember who wrote it (I think it may have been Kurt Vonnegut) but someone who had experience shellfire on the receiving end in WW2 described it as being something like “a new kind of weather in which it rains red-hot razor blades”.
This is for anti-personnel shellfire with high explosives, which are set to explode before they hit the ground (showing people with fragments of shell casing).
Always struck me as a most evocative description.
Very close. And Vonnegut it is, inL’histoire du Soldat
How about A BRIDGE TOO FAR ? There is an early scene where we see a walking barrage in action. as the shells land closer and closer and closer.
I appreciate everyone who’se given an answer; you were all quite helpful. Having said that, feel free to continue the discussion if you wish, but I’m going with Sands of Iwo Jima; it’s old enough and tame enough that the viewpoint character to have seen it network television, and since he’s obsessed with his family’s military history and his grandfather has been established as having died on Tarawa, he’d certainly have seen it.
Plus, you know, the Duke.
My two pennorth,dont forget the sound of artillery shells passing overhead through the air which is never shown on films as far as I know.
So he’d recognise the bangy bit from movies but not the wooshy bit.