6 ms·

Artillery Practices by the Major Combatants of WWII

76 points by bluegate010 11y ago

IgorPartola 11y ago
I love that this comes from the perspective of game development. Also, I am surprised elevation wasn't taken into account more by the British and American forces. You'd think that would be one of the bigger issues when doing ballistics.
- hackcasual 11y ago
  Elevation was corrected for by the Americans. They used the British system, but had massive artillery correction tables printed into books based on the myriad of factors.
stcredzero 11y ago
The fact that we in the US had put so much effort into researching and implementing artillery coordination techniques shows how our military was part of a huge national effort to play the international strategic game at the top level, in the early 20th century. Both Churchill and FDR were products of organizations (Navy) that made these ruthless and cold calculations based on technology and pragmatic geopolitics. Whoever put together the requirements for the artillery system, the M1 Garand, the Fletcher class destroyer, and the Flying Fortress was out to build world-beating weapons. In the context of when they were developed, these things read a bit like sci-fi.
- meatysnapper 11y ago
  I'm curious what the differences were for naval support fire between the various combatants.
  - stcredzero 11y ago
    The US had better RADAR and automated fire control than Japan.
- brudgers 11y ago
  The US Civil War shaped American military doctrine regarding the use of firepower about 50 years before the major European combatants began to develop their own doctrines in The Great War. Both Union and Confederacy were moving troops and equipment by rail in the 1860's it was a very modern war in terms of mechanization of logistics as well.
AYBABTME 11y ago
Comparison point, top of line modern artillery round (Excalibur [1]) can be used for somewhat precision strikes nowadays. Often a limiting factor in the feasibility of a fire mission is the proximity of friendly forces, so those kinds of guided artillery shells are useful in that context. The only issue is the cost. Back in the military, firing excalibur shells (or hellfires from drones) was compared to throwing Ferraris on the head of farmers. The device costs more than the cost of paving the road they're digging their IED into. When you're doing those fire missions and thinking about the absurdity... it's an odd thing. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M982_Excalibur https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M982_Excalibur
- sitkack 11y ago
  It would be cheaper to send them a money gram to stop.
  - discodave 11y ago
    There was actually a lot of that during the surge in Iraq. "Here is some money to build stuff and not play nice with the bad guys."
  - wtbob 11y ago
    Yeah, but once you start paying the Danegeld you never get rid of the Dane. Also, in the particular case of Islamists, paying them jizya is likely to encourage them in the long run.
  - avn2109 11y ago
    They tried this in Afghanistan [0], and (spoiler alert) it didn't work. [0] http://www.thenation.com/article/how-us-funds-taliban http://www.thenation.com/article/how-us-funds-taliban
- dba7dba 11y ago
  During the Vietnam conflict, the cost of killing an enemy with iron bombs dropped by planes got very expensive too. Due to lacking quality (not guided munitions), quantity was the path taken to make up for it. This increased # of sorties needed dramatically, increase chance of getting shot down in process, worn out planes faster, etc etc, translating into a very high cost. Pretty sure escalibur shells and hellfires are more cost effective, strangely.
ChuckMcM 11y ago
Not a very well developed thesis on Artillery. If the author is reading, please get a copy of Dunnigan's How to Make War which describes in detail how to calculate the various effectiveness of different artillery strategies. I've got a dog eared copy of the 2nd edition I was using while writing my 'ultimate replacement for Bright's empire' game (unfinished :-) But overall, in the context of war gaming it is an excellent reference. [1] http://www.amazon.com/How-Make-Fourth-Edition-Comprehensive/dp/006009012X http://www.amazon.com/How-Make-Fourth-Edition-Comprehensive/...
- dmix 11y ago
  Do you recommend any war games that are playable on Linux? (web or otherwise) Reading this article makes me want to play one.
  - ievans 11y ago
    I've been very impressed with the modeling in in Wargame: Airland Battle, which is available for Linux via Steam
  - nosuchthing 11y ago
    Starcraft II via Wine [0] http://eu.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/7257017667 http://eu.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/7257017667
  - peejaybee 11y ago
    I have never tried it on Linux, but Steel Panthers: World at War is excellent and has a gold rating at WineHQ. You can find the free version of SPWAW at the SPWAW Depot: http://www.spwaw.com/ http://www.spwaw.com/
  - kanatohodets 11y ago
    If a bit of self promotion is allowed, check out https://github.com/spring1944/spring1944 https://github.com/spring1944/spring1944. It's an RTS, so a little more action oriented than the (typically) more detailed turn based wargames, and a bit larger scale than something like company of heroes, but hopefully fun. Players tend to be around in the evening GMT. Contributions weclome, either in player-hours or pull requests -- hacking in Lua, primarily, with some supporting tools/infra in perl and python.
chernevik 11y ago
I wonder if the Americans' books of tables were generated by automated computers. You'd think the Germans would find their own way to such a dominant approach -- especially as it was so suited to mobile warfare, which they were reinventing early in the war. An absence of the technical resources to generate the tables would be one explanation for why they didn't.
- hackcasual 11y ago
  I did a little digging, as I'm a huge WWII nerd after reading this article, and it does seem like the Eniac was used to generate artillery tables, but it's not clear if those were the same as used by the centralized firing control.
  - chernevik 11y ago
    Answer, from a link on another comment, seems to be no. http://99div.com/olddirect/american_and_german_field_artillery_in_the_battle_of_the_bulge+cb01biggio+416d65726963616e20616e64204765726d616e206669656c6420617274696c6c65727920696e2074686520426174746c65206f66207468652042756c6765 http://99div.com/olddirect/american_and_german_field_artille... The chief factor seems to have been an American reorganization of artillery in the 20s and 30s, chiefly intended to support centralization of battery fire at a battalion level.
    - dmichulke 11y ago
      Note how Tesla chiefly intends to avoid central battery fire today.
  - kjs3 11y ago
    We had other computers than Eniac that could compute fire control solutions for artillery. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_I_Fire_Control_Computer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_I_Fire_Control_Computer
lmkg 11y ago
As always, the fastest way to perform a calculation is to as much work as possible when the clock isn't running. In this case, pre-compute every possible solution months ahead of time, and have a cabinet full of look-up tables. Another historical sidenote: the American approach to artillery directly drove the development of modern computers. ENIAC, the first digital computer, was originally commissioned as a project for computing gunnery tables. Although, because von Neumann got wind of it, its first actual computation was (I think) numeric integration of fluid dynamics for the H-bomb.
vacri 11y ago
Strange article. "Any good tactical game must account for the difference in artillery practices - based on notes I can't find, a speaker I can't remember, references I can't source, and throwing in some of my own guesswork and conjecture."
- PhasmaFelis 11y ago
  It appears to have been originally posted in June 2000. The internet was still quite a ways from the "all human knowledge within five clicks" state that we take for granted today, along with the assumption that any reasonable statement should be immediately supportable with links.
  - vacri 11y ago
    I'm not demanding links and references - everything I mentioned above was mentioned by the author.
eldude 11y ago
WRT American pre-calculation and its relationship to software... One of the great personal epiphanies of my professional career was the discovery of data pre-computation FLOABW. More specifically, what I'm talking about is data denormalization. I had always been aware of caching techniques, but beyond that, data normalization was so ingrained into my mindset, that storing any piece of data that could otherwise be derived from another seemed like heresy, something only an amateur or fool would do. What really opened my eyes, was when I was forced to build a social network atop MongoDB (ouch), and I had to resolve the incompatibility of relational data, but with atomic write, with no join or transactional support. What I discovered, was that if care was taken to create a canonical representation of the data, a multitude of query-able denormalized derived tables could be utilized, and could in fact offer dramatically superior performance compared to its RDBMS equivalent. What was especially shocking, was how obvious this was in retrospect and how blinded I was by the assumption that perfect data consistency was a requirement for all software. I now view most tasks with the consideration, "What would this look like if we ignored efficiency in favor of raw performance and might that be worth it?"
- toast0 11y ago
  > I now view most tasks with the consideration, "What would this look like if we ignored efficiency in favor of raw performance and might that be worth it?" Raw performance is efficiency. You must consider space efficiency, CPU efficiency, network efficiency, time efficiency, developer efficiency, etc
  - eldude 11y ago
    > Raw performance is efficiency. Efficiency is analogous to velocity, with gains analogous to distance. Highly efficient developers must still travel non-trivial distances to achieve performance gains, and therein lies the core of my epiphany, that performance is not efficiency, and highly efficient developers must spend non-trivial amounts of time to achieve performance gains that may in fact undermine development velocity, CPU efficiency per task, architectural efficiency (DRY), time efficiency (latency), etc...
- SixSigma 11y ago
PhasmaFelis 11y ago
The link seems to have exceeded its bandwidth. The Internet Archive has a version here: https://web.archive.org/web/20141026151912/http://etloh.8m.com/strategy/artil.html https://web.archive.org/web/20141026151912/http://etloh.8m.c... (And it appears to be basically unchanged since June 2000, which explains the lack of sources that some commenters have objected to.)

76 points by bluegate010 11y ago

I love that this comes from the perspective of game development. Also, I am surprised elevation wasn't taken into account more by the British and American forces. You'd think that would be one of the bigger issues when doing ballistics.

hackcasual 11y ago
Elevation was corrected for by the Americans. They used the British system, but had massive artillery correction tables printed into books based on the myriad of factors.

stcredzero 11y ago

The fact that we in the US had put so much effort into researching and implementing artillery coordination techniques shows how our military was part of a huge national effort to play the international strategic game at the top level, in the early 20th century. Both Churchill and FDR were products of organizations (Navy) that made these ruthless and cold calculations based on technology and pragmatic geopolitics. Whoever put together the requirements for the artillery system, the M1 Garand, the Fletcher class destroyer, and the Flying Fortress was out to build world-beating weapons. In the context of when they were developed, these things read a bit like sci-fi.

meatysnapper 11y ago
I'm curious what the differences were for naval support fire between the various combatants.
- stcredzero 11y ago
  The US had better RADAR and automated fire control than Japan.
brudgers 11y ago
The US Civil War shaped American military doctrine regarding the use of firepower about 50 years before the major European combatants began to develop their own doctrines in The Great War. Both Union and Confederacy were moving troops and equipment by rail in the 1860's it was a very modern war in terms of mechanization of logistics as well.

AYBABTME 11y ago

Comparison point, top of line modern artillery round (Excalibur [1]) can be used for somewhat precision strikes nowadays. Often a limiting factor in the feasibility of a fire mission is the proximity of friendly forces, so those kinds of guided artillery shells are useful in that context. The only issue is the cost. Back in the military, firing excalibur shells (or hellfires from drones) was compared to throwing Ferraris on the head of farmers. The device costs more than the cost of paving the road they're digging their IED into. When you're doing those fire missions and thinking about the absurdity... it's an odd thing. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M982_Excalibur https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M982_Excalibur

sitkack 11y ago
It would be cheaper to send them a money gram to stop.
- discodave 11y ago
  There was actually a lot of that during the surge in Iraq. "Here is some money to build stuff and not play nice with the bad guys."
- wtbob 11y ago
  Yeah, but once you start paying the Danegeld you never get rid of the Dane. Also, in the particular case of Islamists, paying them jizya is likely to encourage them in the long run.
- avn2109 11y ago
  They tried this in Afghanistan [0], and (spoiler alert) it didn't work. [0] http://www.thenation.com/article/how-us-funds-taliban http://www.thenation.com/article/how-us-funds-taliban
dba7dba 11y ago
During the Vietnam conflict, the cost of killing an enemy with iron bombs dropped by planes got very expensive too. Due to lacking quality (not guided munitions), quantity was the path taken to make up for it. This increased # of sorties needed dramatically, increase chance of getting shot down in process, worn out planes faster, etc etc, translating into a very high cost. Pretty sure escalibur shells and hellfires are more cost effective, strangely.

ChuckMcM 11y ago

Not a very well developed thesis on Artillery. If the author is reading, please get a copy of Dunnigan's How to Make War which describes in detail how to calculate the various effectiveness of different artillery strategies. I've got a dog eared copy of the 2nd edition I was using while writing my 'ultimate replacement for Bright's empire' game (unfinished :-) But overall, in the context of war gaming it is an excellent reference. [1] http://www.amazon.com/How-Make-Fourth-Edition-Comprehensive/dp/006009012X http://www.amazon.com/How-Make-Fourth-Edition-Comprehensive/...

dmix 11y ago
Do you recommend any war games that are playable on Linux? (web or otherwise) Reading this article makes me want to play one.
- ievans 11y ago
  I've been very impressed with the modeling in in Wargame: Airland Battle, which is available for Linux via Steam
- nosuchthing 11y ago
  Starcraft II via Wine [0] http://eu.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/7257017667 http://eu.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/7257017667
- peejaybee 11y ago
  I have never tried it on Linux, but Steel Panthers: World at War is excellent and has a gold rating at WineHQ. You can find the free version of SPWAW at the SPWAW Depot: http://www.spwaw.com/ http://www.spwaw.com/
- kanatohodets 11y ago
  If a bit of self promotion is allowed, check out https://github.com/spring1944/spring1944 https://github.com/spring1944/spring1944. It's an RTS, so a little more action oriented than the (typically) more detailed turn based wargames, and a bit larger scale than something like company of heroes, but hopefully fun. Players tend to be around in the evening GMT. Contributions weclome, either in player-hours or pull requests -- hacking in Lua, primarily, with some supporting tools/infra in perl and python.

chernevik 11y ago

I wonder if the Americans' books of tables were generated by automated computers. You'd think the Germans would find their own way to such a dominant approach -- especially as it was so suited to mobile warfare, which they were reinventing early in the war. An absence of the technical resources to generate the tables would be one explanation for why they didn't.

hackcasual 11y ago
I did a little digging, as I'm a huge WWII nerd after reading this article, and it does seem like the Eniac was used to generate artillery tables, but it's not clear if those were the same as used by the centralized firing control.
- chernevik 11y ago
  Answer, from a link on another comment, seems to be no. http://99div.com/olddirect/american_and_german_field_artillery_in_the_battle_of_the_bulge+cb01biggio+416d65726963616e20616e64204765726d616e206669656c6420617274696c6c65727920696e2074686520426174746c65206f66207468652042756c6765 http://99div.com/olddirect/american_and_german_field_artille... The chief factor seems to have been an American reorganization of artillery in the 20s and 30s, chiefly intended to support centralization of battery fire at a battalion level.
  - dmichulke 11y ago
    Note how Tesla chiefly intends to avoid central battery fire today.
- kjs3 11y ago
  We had other computers than Eniac that could compute fire control solutions for artillery. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_I_Fire_Control_Computer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_I_Fire_Control_Computer

lmkg 11y ago

As always, the fastest way to perform a calculation is to as much work as possible when the clock isn't running. In this case, pre-compute every possible solution months ahead of time, and have a cabinet full of look-up tables. Another historical sidenote: the American approach to artillery directly drove the development of modern computers. ENIAC, the first digital computer, was originally commissioned as a project for computing gunnery tables. Although, because von Neumann got wind of it, its first actual computation was (I think) numeric integration of fluid dynamics for the H-bomb.

vacri 11y ago

Strange article. "Any good tactical game must account for the difference in artillery practices - based on notes I can't find, a speaker I can't remember, references I can't source, and throwing in some of my own guesswork and conjecture."

PhasmaFelis 11y ago
It appears to have been originally posted in June 2000. The internet was still quite a ways from the "all human knowledge within five clicks" state that we take for granted today, along with the assumption that any reasonable statement should be immediately supportable with links.
- vacri 11y ago
  I'm not demanding links and references - everything I mentioned above was mentioned by the author.

eldude 11y ago

WRT American pre-calculation and its relationship to software... One of the great personal epiphanies of my professional career was the discovery of data pre-computation FLOABW. More specifically, what I'm talking about is data denormalization. I had always been aware of caching techniques, but beyond that, data normalization was so ingrained into my mindset, that storing any piece of data that could otherwise be derived from another seemed like heresy, something only an amateur or fool would do. What really opened my eyes, was when I was forced to build a social network atop MongoDB (ouch), and I had to resolve the incompatibility of relational data, but with atomic write, with no join or transactional support. What I discovered, was that if care was taken to create a canonical representation of the data, a multitude of query-able denormalized derived tables could be utilized, and could in fact offer dramatically superior performance compared to its RDBMS equivalent. What was especially shocking, was how obvious this was in retrospect and how blinded I was by the assumption that perfect data consistency was a requirement for all software. I now view most tasks with the consideration, "What would this look like if we ignored efficiency in favor of raw performance and might that be worth it?"

toast0 11y ago
> I now view most tasks with the consideration, "What would this look like if we ignored efficiency in favor of raw performance and might that be worth it?" Raw performance is efficiency. You must consider space efficiency, CPU efficiency, network efficiency, time efficiency, developer efficiency, etc
- eldude 11y ago
  > Raw performance is efficiency. Efficiency is analogous to velocity, with gains analogous to distance. Highly efficient developers must still travel non-trivial distances to achieve performance gains, and therein lies the core of my epiphany, that performance is not efficiency, and highly efficient developers must spend non-trivial amounts of time to achieve performance gains that may in fact undermine development velocity, CPU efficiency per task, architectural efficiency (DRY), time efficiency (latency), etc...
SixSigma 11y ago

PhasmaFelis 11y ago

The link seems to have exceeded its bandwidth. The Internet Archive has a version here: https://web.archive.org/web/20141026151912/http://etloh.8m.com/strategy/artil.html https://web.archive.org/web/20141026151912/http://etloh.8m.c... (And it appears to be basically unchanged since June 2000, which explains the lack of sources that some commenters have objected to.)