Except that it doesnt have to be defensive and not to mention you dismissed the whole senario as ”hollywood”
Yes but wanted to make it clear that it wasn’t as if there was a grid system of lefts and rights, and numbers.
Gosh, no, that’s just not correct at all.
When I was in the Forces we were asked a zillion times to orient ourselves with just a compass and a map. This wasn’t advanced infantry training, it’s basic military training, and even the biggest dumbass could learn it. It’s not hard at all once you get the hang of it, as long as you have a good map. I dunno why you think it would be difficult.
So in other words generally the only time there wouldn’t be spotting rounds in an unplanned fire mission in WW2 was into a pre-plotted defensive zone; which is what we both just said.
Stupid question:
How long did it take for artillery to a) set/reset for preplanned zones of fire, and b) for entirely new, ad-hoc coordinates?
Hell, even as Boy Scouts, if we knew where we were at all, we knew exactly where we were- way closer than 300 meters, at any rate.
With a good compass, and an accurate map, you can pretty much figure out where you are with great accuracy and without much trouble.
I always heard the greatest danger to a rifle platoon was a lieutenant with a map and compass. There is also a lot of “we weren’t lost, just temporarily misoriented”!
Don’t know how those old sayings ever got started.
Hollywood.
You may be right! Didn’t Jamie Harris say something disparaging about Lt’s with map and compass in “The Lost Battalion”?
Veering off topic slightly, Wikipedia’s entry about friendly fire says “An estimated 75,000 French soldiers were casualties of friendly artillery in the four years of World War I”.
Apparently, you aren’t familiar with large-scale topographical maps. You might be thinking of a map as the folded paper thing you buy at a gas station and keep in your car- with just the roads marked on them, and little dots for small towns.
But we are talking here about a totally different kind of map, called a topographical map… The kind that hikers, boy scouts, and, yes, soldiers use.
Check out this site:
http://www.digital-topo-maps.com/topo-maps.php
Zoom in on where you live, click on the link “My Topo”— and look at the details.
If you’ve never seen a topo map before, it may surprise you.
Every single building is shown, every hill, every stream. .It is easy to know where you are just by reading the map and matching the details you see on the paper to what you see in the field.
If you don’t know how to read contour lines (the squiggly lines that represent the hills and valleys)–it’s easy to learn: the closer the lines are to each other, the steeper the terrain is.
It only takes a day or so of practice to learn how to identify your location on the map to within a hundred yards or so.
If you’re young enough that you can’t remember when there was no internet and no GPS, it may surprise you to know that paper maps work just fine. 
Famous Bill Maudlin cartoon:
You don’t just ‘call in the artillery’ unless it is bore-sighted (already set up to hit a certain position which was done when you were set up to defend)
What you did was call in spotter rounds. People would watch these rounds and provide feedback and when they hit the right spot then the artillery would ‘fire for effect’ which is the full strike.
To get them in the right position initially to see the spotter rounds, they used grids/maps.
My brother-in-law was a forward observer (directed spotter rounds) in Vietnam
nm my last post 
They probubly just sent a text.
Just spent the past month at Army Reconnaissance Course, and I assure you those Soldiers knew where they were to within a few meters. I had a GPS strapped to my wrist, and I rarely used it because of the accuracy of the topo maps.
And yes you can always call for fire without a spotting round. Adjust fire is too slow to be effective in most circumstances. It is useful for hitting fixed positions, but if it can move it’s not going to stay around for the full barrage.
A tangent: see Joe Haldeman’s short story “Counterpoint” (first published in a collection of his stories, Infinite Dreams) for some insights into artillery spotting in the Vietnam War era. Haldeman served as a combat engineer in Vietnam.
Band name!
My understanding is that the reason American artillery was so feared in WWII was not particularly because of superior guns or even numbers of guns (although the GIs usually had plenty of guns), but because of the organization and philosophy of the US arty units. Unlike most other combatant armies, American artillery units were trained to, and permitted to, coordinate with almost any friendly units for fire missions. So instead of 69th divisional artillery only serving the 69th division headquarters, or even any subunits of the division, its fire could be called down by almost any American units in range. This greatly multiplied the number of eyes finding targets – the enemy kept getting spotted – and the number of times fire missions could be called in.
Coupled with the superabundance of ammunition the Americans typically had, US units dumped a lot more shells quite liberally on a lot more targets a lot more often and with less waiting for orders from higher up.
This caused Germans to believe the Americans had vastly more artillery than was the case. It wasn’t so much many more guns though, just that the way they were used led to a lot more steel on target than the Germans expected.