By Paul Ferraro

Germany had what most game designers (certainly among micro-armor aficionados, anyway) regard as the “typical” system. There are specially trained Forward Observers (FOs) associated with each artillery battalion. The FOs are detailed to be with and travel with advanced elements which are being supported by the particular artillery battalion. For communications back to their artillery, the FOs had either a radio, or in the German case, more often a wire line strung out behind them going ultimately back to the battery. Yes indeed, I did say “wire”. Apparently German artillery was a distant third behind the Luftwaffe and Panzers for radio-communications equipment, and they had a wire-based system which they knew how to make work.

 

The position of the firing battery had to be surveyed to precisely locate it on a map. By survey, I mean the time-consuming whole nine yards of using transits (surveyor’s telescope) and the like along with the hand calculations to get the battery’s precise position on the map. Thereafter, the FOs, survey teams, recon units or whatever, would further survey major terrain features (whenever possible), and further add new “known” positions to the map back at the artillery HQ. These locations became “firing points”.

 

To call for fire, an FO had to scurry off to one of the firing points, and take an angle and range estimate to the potential target from the known firing point. Because of the need to do spotting from known points, and the technical training required to be part of this fairly complex system, only specially trained FOs were ever likely to call for impromptu fire support (I believe). The data was called in to the firing battery over the wire. Human computers back at the battery then did the trigonometric calculations (by hand or maybe with limited slide rule assistance) to calculate where on the map the apparent target was relative to the firing point, and from that then calculate the apparent angle and range to the target from the firing battery. Part of the calculation was to factor in the meteorological data (apparently even a slight cross-wind can hopelessly throw off the accuracy of a shell fired through miles of the troposphere and stratosphere. Other variable also had to be factored in (gun wear, temperature, gun caliber, munitions type, etc. Now the battery was ready to fire one spotting round. Time from initial call-in to first spotting round: Approximately 15 minutes. Then if the spotting round’s explosion was visible to the FO, the FO could correct (i.e., “left 200, down 400 yds”) and another spotting round fired and so on until one fell “close enough”. At this point the FO could do the call for “fire for effect” and the entire battery and/or batteries could open up.

 

One major problem of the above system was that apparently even trained observers tend to have something like 20% errors when estimating ranges from the observer’s position to a target. Along with all the other potentially unrecoverable errors (variable winds, uneven terrain, etc.), this could lead to some pretty wild initial spotting rounds and therefore to even more delay in delivering effective fire.

 

The calculations for subsequent spotting rounds could usually be made much more quickly than for the initial round because it was likely the corrections would be relatively small. Therefore simple linear interpolations could be used to fudge to an adequate firing solution. Given that typical time of flight is something like 30 seconds, and needing several additional minutes for the necessary communications, calculations, and gun laying, I’d guess maybe 3-5 minutes is required for each extra spotting round.

However, when the artillery came down, it landed pretty much where Jerry wanted. In other words, the concept of “drift” should have been largely irrelevant to an impromptu German barrage. On the other hand, however accurate the barrage may have been, given the above process, you have to figure a savvy target might have some idea what was coming.

 

The only really good thing you can say about the above system is that it was much better than what had previously existed. In World War I practice, it was virtually impossible to do impromptu fires unless the firing battery could directly see the target. So in comparison to WWI practice (and to Russians), the German system seemed quite good, and even had some advantages over the British system. (Like accuracy; but I get ahead of myself.)

 

Of course, a battery could always engage in map fire (also known as blind fire) where essentially no reliance is placed upon initial spotting rounds. This apparently tends to result in fairly inaccurate results and tends therefore to be limited to harassing fires. It’s probably reasonable to allow for some sort of “drift” factor in the context of a game when engaging in such fire.

 

There are several optimizations to the above process to speed the delivery of effective fire. First, any previously targeted location could have fires very quickly brought against it because all previous firing data was logged and could be easily re-used (you’d better believe they saved that data, given what a bother it was to calculate). Also, fire could be fairly quickly and accurately delivered against targets located near a known firing point (read that as: “near a previous target”) because the necessary calculations were relatively easy to perform to correct for small target location changes. Consequently, if most of the places the Germans needed to shoot at could be ascertained ahead of time, there is little reason to see why individual German batteries could not fire as effectively as U.S. artillery.

 

In a prepared defense (or in a prepared attack) the battery could in theory have any number of pre-plotted firing points so that effective fire could be quickly delivered as needed. This technique is also known as “registered” fire (the pre-plotted locations being considered “registered”). Even in a hasty defense, defending units probably tended to have at least a few firing points to cover the more obvious lines of attack and could call in fire request via wired phone (a much more reliable communications method than the radios of the day).