an example: - YouTube from the series Band of Brothers.
The infantry company is in over their heads and the guy gets on the radio and calls in artillery and says “left one, right three”. I assume those are coordinates on some type of grid map.
The artillery is being fired from miles away. If the guy calling it in is off by a bit, those shells are gonna come down on his own people. How did they do that? I know that ideally you’d have a spotter, and I think call in a test shot, then radio back the adjustments before the full barrage. But in a situation like the scene above, there’s no time for that. Was there some technique, some guy who’s job was to somehow keep track of where his infantry company was as they moved around the countryside? I can see making estimates of where you are to within a miles or so, but how in the world, with a map and compass can you know to within a few hundred meters?
One more thing. I’ve asked this elsewhere, and thus far i’ve gotten a few responses telling me about Newtonian physics. I understand that. The artillery guys are gonna hit the coordinates they’re asked to hit. I’m trying to understand how the infantry guys are able to judge where they are in relation to the enemy so precisely.
Ok, this is a guess, but I think a pretty good one. They had good maps in WWII. They probably started with an initial location based on the map, then incrementally adjusted the position.
I dont know the answer, but there is another scene in Band of Brothers that may be relevant: they had very good maps.
During the soldier’s training in England, there’s a scene where the incompetant officer (played by the actor from the sit-com Friends) misreads the map, and leads his squad to the wrong field. The grid on the map was detailed enough to distinguish one farmer’s field from another.
Certainly, the standard maps sold to the public in England (called Ordinance Survey maps) or in the US (called USGS quadrangle maps) are detailed enough for this. But I don’t know whether soldiers on the move through occupied Europe had accurate maps available.
They actually had somewhat superior maps. The allies still had all the old pre-1930s cadastral and ordnance survey maps, which provided extremely good information on geography/geology. They were, of course, somewhat out of date, so they were updated by teams of British cartographers utilising aerial photographs, often taken just a few weeks before troops moved into the area. So oddly enough the allies often had marginally better maps of the area than the Germans, and almost always better maps than what was available for their home soil, which of course hadn’t been updated since the war started at the very latest and was very rarely based upon aerial photographs.
In a nutshell: it’s Hollywood. In an on-the-fly artillery mission a spotting round would be fired on a map coordinate radioed by the forward observer who would then provide adjustments based on where the spotting round fell and call for a fire for effect. Generally the only time a barrage would be fired without having a spotting round or rounds to adjust on would be onto a pre-plotted fire zone in front of defensive positions.
Assuming that page’s information is correct, the maps don’t seem to be the key factor; the British had the same detailed maps but had to go through the spotting/adjusting phase. The precalculated settings are what gave the US improved accuracy. But even though it’s not explicitly mentioned on that page, I can’t imagine that the US completely did away with artillery spotting.
I’m going to agree with Dissonance and assume that the artillery sequence was abbreviated. There was less than 30 seconds from the coordinates being called in and the shells falling, after all. It’s possible that giving an immediate “fire for effect” order meant “screw spotting, just open fire!”, though.
I don’t see how any of what you quoted contradicts what I said. Perhaps you can be more specific?
The British and the Americans had the same maps. But the British weren’t all that accurate; they made up for this in volume of fire, “blanketing a large area around the target, as well as the target itself.” The Americans were able to achieve better accuracy with those maps because they had more detailed calculations at the ready with which to aim their guns.
The cite verifies that the initial location was determined from the map. I’m absolutely sure that if the Forward Observers reported that all artillery was missing the target that the artillery would be adjusted based on the FO reports.
The US Army in WWII probably had the best artillery in the world. The Germans feared American artillery, much more than any other branch-“Long Tom” howitzers could destroy a panzer division quite effectively.
The coordination of infantry with precision artillery barrages was pioneered by Gen. Nivelle (France, WWI)-it was called a “creeping barrage”-the guns would be aimed so that the shells would land ahead of advancing troops, and as the troops moved up, the impact point wold be adjusted forward.
Unfortunately, the Germans got wind of this, and pulled their roops back (escaped destruction). And Nivelle’s troops mutinied.
Another answer, besides the excellent ones already given, is that they did get hit themselves, quite often. That it was mostly due to unit location and communication issues rather than map, trig, and equipment issues is a testament to the quality of the above methods, but even they had their limits.
IIRC, and srzss05 should be able to verify, is that when a unit settles in for the night the commander will figure out his exact position and set up pre-planned artillery missions, including FPF (Final Protective Fire) which is a last-resort sort of barrage extremely close to the defensive positions.
There have been many instances when the fluid nature of battle has meant that an FO has had to call down artillery on their own position. These people usually win very important medals. Posthumously.