The rest of this article examines the several components of the American and German artillery systems with an eye to showing how this transformation took place and describing its impact. Army corrected twenty years of neglect by civilian authorities. This fact may be startling since at the beginning of World War II, American artillery was armed with obsolete French guns that were transported via horses and unreliable trucks. Viewing the Italian campaign, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel commented, “The enemy’s tremendous superiority in artillery, and even more in the air, has broken the front open.” During the Normandy campaign, Rommel added, “Also in evidence is their great superiority in artillery and outstandingly large supply of ammunition.” By any reasonable standard, especially during the latter part of World War II, the American artillery arm was very clearly superior to that of the Germans. That was clear to thoughtful observers at the time. The approach from the beginning was to build a better system and it worked. American artillerymen did not try to combat the enemy’s artillery by building bigger guns.
Any analysis that does not examine all components of the system, and acknowledge that interference with any part of it can sharply reduce its effectiveness, is incomplete.Ī component by component examination of American and German artillery shows that almost from the beginning of America’s participation in the conflict the U.S. The gun is the most visible part, but the whole system must work well to make the gun effective. In other words, artillery is a system with a number of interacting components. Finally, the guns must be protected from counter-battery fire or other interdiction. There must be a sufficient supply of all of the above to meet the needs of the maneuver units or other forces the batteries are supporting. The guns must have effective prime movers or be mounted on tracked vehicles. Those fire direction centers must be able to co-ordinate with other artillery units to mass fires as needed. Effective artillery requires fire direction centers that can accurately place fires and rapidly shift them from one target to another.
It must have a good means of identifying and accurately locating a target and needs well-schooled forward observers who are in close contact not only with the batteries, but with the troops they are working with. There must be a sufficient supply of standard guns so that the units being supported can know what fires they can expect. To be fully effective, an artillery arm must be well supplied with suitable ammunition. Nevertheless, evaluating an army’s artillery requires a good deal more than looking at the standard guns that it deploys. Army to equip two of its field artillery battalions with captured German pieces to take advantage of the enemy ammunition stocks captured in France. The German 105mm was sufficiently similar to the American 105mm howitzer, and there were enough similarities overall between each army’s guns to allow the U.S. The American guns were a bit heavier than their German counterparts and generally had a longer range. Army and German Wehrmacht in World War II. (National Archives)Īt first glance, there seems to be little difference between the artillery branches of the U.S. ground forces entered combat in 1942, both of these pieces were being replaced by modern and much more effective guns. Army’s primary field artillery pieces were the French-designed M1897 75mm gun and M1918 155mm howitzer (above). Dennis At the beginning of World War II, the U.S.