There were about 40 - 60 thousand British and French troops killed, including Gurkhas, and about 10 thousand ANZACs.
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“Blaming the troops” seems to have been a common WWI complaint, and the superiority of regulars over militia an even older trope. However, it does not seem that the Gallipoli Campaign failed because of the unwillingness of soldiers to advance under fire, so it’s not clear how better “quality” troops would have done any better.
In any case, if the troops who failed to advance were “poor”, it wasn’t because they were all colonials.
To add to what’s been said so far, the quality of shore bombardment varied. One US admiral, Richard Connolly, earned the nickname “Close-in Connolly” (and the lasting gratitude of the Marines) for his insistence on bringing his big ships in – perilously close to running aground – because he believed that hitting ground targets accurately was possible only at close ranges.
Also, the USS Texas famously completed a fire mission in France that was nominally outsider the range of her guns by intentionally flooding some compartments to tilt the ship and elevate the guns higher:
[QUOTE=Wikipedia]
After that, she retired to Plymouth to rearm, returning to the French coast on 11 June. From then until 15 June, she supported the army in its advance inland. By 15 June, the troops had advanced to the edge of Texas’s gun range; her last fire support mission was so far inland that to get the needed range, the starboard torpedo blister was flooded with water to provide a list of two degrees which gave the guns enough elevation to complete the fire mission.
[/QUOTE]
I expect naval gunfire was more effective when the commanders employed that sort of creativity and dedication to mission than when they regarded it as a distraction from fighting sea battles against other battleships.
Also, although it was sort of a “reverse landing,” naval gunfire (mostly from destroyers) is credited with spanking German tanks that were trying to roll up the Dunkirk beach. Toward the end of the evacuation, the German tanks (then lightly armored, by later WWII standards) hove into view and were promptly taken under fire by the relatively large, high velocity naval guns of the British and French destroyers.
Concur. The blame for Gallipoli should be apportioned between the planners in the UK and the general officers on the scene, in whatever proportion one desires, with any leftover blame assigned to their operational staffs.
The specific point was about the landings and the early few days where they failed to dislodge the Turks, not the entire campaign.
That landing employed troops from ANZAC’s primarily. The ANZAC’s had several documented problem, fire discipline, leadership at NCO and Junior officer level as well as coordination between various units and sub units, all of which hampered the . Bravery and willingness to advance was never an issue. It was (by Ian Hamilton for instance) stated that a British or Indian division would have dislodged the Turks. I do not think that is necessarily the case, though it would have been a tougher fight (and the communication problems would have remained).
I agree with you wrt to the militia and regulars being an old trope. Incidentally, later in the war, the Australian Corps was considered the best in the Commonwealth. One of the reasons was a policy of rotating units out of combat after a certain amount of time and then refitting them with fresh blood, ensuring that most regiments and battalions were built around an experienced core.
later ships had 45 degree guns. The 14" guns of the Texas had a muzzle velocity of 2600 fps with a range of 20.45 miles and the Missouri 16" guns had a muzzle velocity of 2500 fps with a range of 23.64 miles.
With regard to the discussion about aerial rockets on the previous page, I read somewhere that one study found that only about 4% of those rockets actually hit their targets, but that the rockets were very effective against the morale of ground troops.
For the Iowa class “The guns could be elevated from −5 degrees to +45 degrees.”
And the analog computer indeed took air resistance into account. I wonder if temperature was considered in that calculation. Link
What about those “Stalin Organs” that the Russians had? They were basically unguided missiles-but they fired a lot of them. German soldiers said that they were terrified of them…but only when used as a mass attack-if only a few were there, you could get out of the line of fire easily.
The thing with MBRLs like the Katyusha is that all of their payload arrives essentially at once. With a tube artillery battery, sure they can fire a lot more shells, and a lot more accurately, but you have to wait for the individual guns to reload. In that interval, a lot of troops will be able to find cover after the first shell hits. Especially if you’re only firing a few of the battery’s guns to pin down the range.
With all of the rockets hitting at once though, there’s no time to reach cover. If those rockets have submunitions, the effect is that you can put an awful lot of ordnance over a very big area. Per the wiki for the Russian BM-21 122mm MBRL system, a battalion of 18 trucks can put 720 rockets on an area in ~20 seconds.
I can’t pin down a definitive cite for the weapon system’s nickname of “Grid Eliminator”, so called for its supposed ability to kill just about anything in a 1 km by 1km map grid. Given equal dispersal, that’s ~1400 sq m per rocket, or a square about 35-40 m on an edge. For a 40-50 pound payload. Make the payload sub-munitions, and I can see how the nickname originated. The American MLRS earned it’s nickname from the Iraqis of “Steel Rain” for similar reasons.
That would be General Sir Ian Hamilton, Commander in Chief of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force. Not a disinterested commentator. In any case, only one paragraph of his first dispatch deals with the Aus/NZ soldiers:
“The moment the boats touched land the Australians’ turn had come. Like lightning they leapt ashore, and each man as he did so went straight as his bayonet at the enemy. So vigorous was the onslaught that the Turks made no attempt to withstand it and fled from ridge to ridge pursued by the Australian infantry”
The bulk of the report deals with organization, the Navy, and the English and French soldiers, since they made up most of his force.
Well, in the context of my comment about aerial rockets being inaccurate, the main difference is that airplanes of the day were sharply limited in the payloads that they could carry, whereas Katyusha rocket launchers could be massed in huge numbers at the point of attack – and trucks carrying reloads could be parked right behind them. So they were used differently – aerial rockets, being few in number (typically eight were carried under the wings) were aimed at specific targets, like individual bunkers or vehicles, and thus the low accuracy indicates poor performance. The Katyushas were used to blanket an area, and not really aimed at something specific such that a miss could even be determined.
That’s militarily effective for two reasons. As you say, the simultaneous (or near-simultaneous) arrival of explosives and shrapnel offers the best chance to catch large numbers of enemies exposed in the open and harm them. However, there’s also the psychological effect (on those that aren’t killed or wounded) of artillery to consider. The US military has conducted studies of the effects of artillery barrages. One problem is that, while prolonged bombardment (and in some wars, notably WWI, artillery barrages would go one continuously hour after hour literally for days on end) can wear down the morale of people hiding in trenches and foxholes, it’s also common that (surviving) people become inured to the effects and lose their fear. After all, “they’ve been shelling us for days and I’m still unharmed.”
The US military studies I’ve see cited concluded that the way to get the best psychological effect out of artillery bombardment would be to deliver a large number of bangs in a short span of time. This almost invariably creates a sense of overwhelming fear and the urge to lie low immediately, without going on long enough for troops to become accustomed to it. This temporarily makes a unit combat-ineffective (presumably you then do something militarily useful with the short span of time you’ve bought, like advance across open ground while they’re still hiding and counting their fingers and toes). Interestingly, the size of the bangs is less important than the number of them. That’s one of the reasons cluster munitions and submunitions were developed – lots of small bangs filling the area is much more deterring than a few big booms.
Although the American studies took place after WWII, and thus did not influence the development of the Katyushas, they definitely exploit the same principles those studies revealed. (Note ralph124c’s comment about how if there were only a few bangs, they were not feared as much).
