Shrapnel was excellent for shooting at troops in the open, but it was less effective for blowing gaps in wire obstacles and for destroying fortified emplacements and collapsing trenchworks. It rapidly became clear that it was high explosive that was needed on the Western Front, and not shrapnel, but with the British armaments industry based on a limited requirement of shells for peacetime training and small colonial campaigns, it would be some time before the BEF could have an unlimited supply of the type of shell they wanted. On the outbreak of war there was no high-explosive shell for the eighteen-pounder, and it was not until October 1914 that an experimental high-explosive shell for this gun was issued. Highly effective as it turned out to be, it could not be issued in quantity for some considerable time; even then it often buried itself in the ground before exploding, thus reducing its effect. It was not until 1917 that the British introduced a ‘graze’ fuse, which could be set to explode the shell as soon as it came into contact with the target.
Behind the field artillery, and complementary to it, were the howitzers and the ‘heavies’. In 1914 each division had one brigade (regiment) of eighteen (reduced to sixteen in 1915) 4.5-inch howitzers, which fired a thirty-five-pound shrapnel shell to a range of 7,300 yards. This was an excellent gun, once sufficient high-explosive shells were made available for it, and a few were still in service in the British army until 1944, the only modification of any significance being the addition of pneumatic tyres. The 4.5 had come into service in 1904, but only 192 had been manufactured by 1914, of which 108 were with the BEF, forty-five were in reserve and thirty-nine had gone to Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Some regular and all Territorial Force batteries were initially equipped with older weapons.
A division also had one heavy battery of four sixty-pounder guns. This weapon, dating from 1904, fired a sixty-pound high-explosive or shrapnel shell from a five-inch barrel to a range of 10,300 yards, soon increasing to 12,300 with better ammunition. Again, with industry not geared up to the requirements of total war, only forty-one sixty-pounders had been made by 1914, of which thirteen were in India or Canada. More had to be manufactured quickly, but this was a precision instrument, never designed for mass production. Modifications to enable rapid assembly increased the weight to five tons, too heavy to be drawn by horses, and so wartime versions were towed by traction engines.
Other heavy guns used by the BEF during the war were all howitzers of various types: the biggest was the fifteen-inch, which fired a shell weighing 1,400 pounds out to a maximum range of 10,795 yards, and the one with the longest range was the twelve-inch Mk IV, which could project its 750-pound shell out to 14,350 yards, or more than eight miles.
The ranges of artillery guns are often misunderstood by those who have not been at the receiving end or have not been supported by them, and the diagram on page 123 shows how far each of the various types of gun could reach were it to be allowed to fire from Trafalgar Square – an unlikely scenario, but one which might help the current obsession with the removal of pigeons.
The German army had similar guns with similar capabilities. In 1914 a British infantry division disposed of seventy-six artillery pieces of all types, while a German division had eighty-four, not a great disparity, but the difference was that the German army was much larger than the British, had no shortage of ammunition, and could call on a much greater corps reserve of artillery than could the British.
British casualties from enemy artillery occurred when high-explosive shells collapsed trenches, suffocating the occupants if they were not blown apart first, or when shrapnel was either fired at troops advancing over open ground or exploded directly over a trench. The British army went into the war in soft cloth forage caps, armour on the battlefield having long disappeared except in the French cavalry, which still wore the helmets with horsehair plumes and the back and breastplates in which they had charged Wellington’s squares at Waterloo, with about as much protective effect. The French were the first to issue their infantry with a steel helmet, designed not to stop a rifle bullet (no helmet, then or now, could be made which could stop a bullet and still be light enough to wear) but as a protection against shrapnel and bits blown off trenches. The British followed suit in 1915, initially issuing helmets as trench stores, to be handed over on relief, and then in 1916 making them a personal issue to every man. While exact figures are not available, there is no doubt that the helmet provided protection against spent bullets, splinters and glancing shrapnel, and the incidence of wounds from these sources was considerably less than it would have been without them. Soldiers, then as now, worried most about head wounds (particularly blindness) and having their wedding tackle blown away. The latter anxiety may have been irrational – castration allows a normal life in many respects, and is probably a lot less incapacitating than losing a leg – and in any case not much could be done about it; but the helmet did protect against facial injuries, or men thought it did, which was almost as important.
The roles of the artillery in the BEF were many. One important task was counter-battery fire, in which the position of enemy guns would be identified by sound ranging, from intelligence reports or by guesswork, and British guns would attempt to shell them and make it impossible for them to fire.8 This was particularly important during the lead-up to and during a British advance, for it was enemy artillery that would cause most casualties to the attacker. The guns would attempt to collapse enemy trenches and destroy emplacements and bunkers, particularly those containing machine guns, and shrapnel would be used to keep the enemy infantry from firing on advancing troops. It was also the task of the guns to create gaps in the enemy wire through which our troops could pass, and here the limitations of shrapnel quickly became apparent. It had been thought that shrapnel could cut wire, and in the early days it seemed that it could. In the artillery bombardment before Neuve-Chapelle in March 1915, a forty-minute affair which was the greatest artillery bombardment by the British up to that time, the artillery supporting the Indian Corps cleared away most of the German wire. It failed to do the same thing on the front of the British division attacking at right angles to the Indians, but that was thought to be because the guns had been late into position and not had time to identify the targets properly and range in on them. The truth was that German wire obstacles at that stage of the war were very largely a series of wooden knife-rests with barbed wire attached. The shrapnel blew them out of the way and broke up the wood; it did not actually cut the wire. Later, when wire obstacles were securely fixed to the ground by iron pickets, the flexible wire did not break but simply sprang back into position after being hit by a shrapnel ball. Many of the difficulties for the rest of 1915 and for 1916 were caused by there being insufficient high-explosive shells with an effective fuse to make breaches in the wire.
As more and more artillery, and better, more plentiful and role-designed ammunition became available, so methods of artillery support became more complicated and more helpful to the infantry. If the infantry were attacking a specific portion of the enemy trench the artillery could lay down a curtain of shellfire to the left and right, preventing enemy reinforcements from moving into the threatened area. A lifting barrage was one where the artillery fired a continuous stream of shells along a certain line ahead of advancing friendly infantry. Once the infantry reached the limit of the danger area (that is, where shells could affect our own troops), firing stopped and the guns altered their elevation and began firing on another line farther ahead. A more sophisticated method – and a better one because there was no halt in the firing – was where the guns fired on two lines, leapfrogging their fire forward: this was known as the rolling, or creeping, barrage. This, however, required a prodigious amount of artillery, with each gun firing four rounds per minute, reverting to three as the advance progressed. Guns could also leave lanes in their barrage, to allow an undamaged approach for cavalry or tanks, or to facilitate the construction of a road by the Royal Engineers.
There were problems. The lifting or rolling barra
ge left craters, destroyed drainage systems and, particularly where ground had been fought over more than once and when it rained, made crossing the area a real effort for the infantry (although, once fire and movement techniques – about which more later – began to be implemented, it provided more cover for individuals and machine-gun groups). Unless communications between the advancing infantry and the guns, via the observation officers, were perfect, it was very difficult to slow down or speed up the artillery barrage, which was supposed to be moving forward at the same speed as the infantry. If the infantry were held up, either because the defenders had not all been incapacitated or forced to stay below ground, or if the ground was badly cut up, the artillery fire would have moved on well beyond the enemy trenches when the infantry still had a long way to go to reach them. Another problem was that when the infantry had reached the limit of the guns’ range, the guns had to move forward before they could give support once more. Eventually this would be solved by leapfrogging batteries, but in the early days there were simply not enough artillery units for this to be effective.
Prior to a major attack the artillery would bombard the enemy trenches in the hope of so devastating the defenders that the infantry could advance without much opposition. At first this ploy worked, but eventually it fell victim to its own predictability. The Germans dug deeper and deeper into the earth, used more and more concrete, and evacuated most of the troops in their firing line into deep shelters until the bombardment ceased or moved on – as it had to once attacking troops got within a hundred yards or so. Sitting in a dugout while an artillery bombardment was going on overhead was not a form of relaxation. Dugouts and trenches collapsed and some men went mad with the noise, but with a bit of luck the Germans could then man their firing line once more, with the attackers exposed and without artillery support. The British tried various permutations, including a very short bombardment, or even no bombardment at all, and the shelling not of the firing line but of the likely areas for reinforcements, headquarters and stores dumps – the idea of the last tactic being to so disorganise the enemy command structure that the infantry could have a straight fight with what was left on the firing line. The trouble with this method was that until well into the war guns still had to range in, that is, fire at the intended target until they were sure of hitting it, after which the details of range, direction and elevation would be noted for use when the time came. This gave the enemy ample warning that something was up. Predicted fire, where initial ranging is not required, was a very black art indeed, requiring all sorts of meteorological information to be entered on the range table, and it was not perfected until the Battle of Cambrai in late 1917.
The artillery increased enormously as the war went on, although as a percentage of the total manpower only from sixteen per cent in 1914 to eighteen per cent in 1918. In 1914 Britain manufactured ninety-one guns or howitzers; in 1918 industry provided 10,680. In 1914 the Royal Artillery had 554 batteries in all theatres; by 1918 there were 1,796. The artillerymen worked very hard, as manning the guns became a twenty-four hour task. Unlike the infantry, whose soldiers were regularly rotated out of the line, a division’s guns remained in position as long as any part of that division was in the line, and manpower had to be increased to ensure that there were always crews ready and able to man the guns. Even when a whole division was taken out of the line, the guns were often left in action before being sent off to rejoin their parent division days or weeks later. On any one day on the Western Front there could be as many as eighty batteries of artillery on the move, which not only caused all sorts of problems of traffic control, but added to the fatigue of the gunners.
It has been calculated that the Royal Artillery fired over 170 million rounds on the Western Front between 1914 and 1918. If only one per cent of those were duds that failed to explode (and the real figure was much higher), then it is not surprising that even today somebody is killed in France or Belgium every year by unexploded shells from the Great War.9
It is not possible to distinguish between deaths and wounds caused by bullets fired from machine guns and those caused by rifle rounds, but machine guns were one of the most valuable weapons available to both sides. Armies had long sought a weapon that could project a steady stream of bullets across the battlefield to increase the firepower of the infantry and compensate for inferior numbers. During the Napoleonic Wars the Royal Navy produced a seven-barrelled musket, but it fired all seven barrels at once and, while devastating at close range, took a long time to reload. Trials were held using a number of muskets attached to carts and fired one after the other in rapid succession, but the reloading time and the inherent inaccuracy of smooth-bore weapons ensured that the experiment came to naught. The French were the first, in the Franco-Prussian War, to bring a practical machine gun into service; but the mitrailleuse was regarded as an artillery weapon, and was anyway so secret that it played little part in the war. The Gatling, which came into the British service in 1871, was useful against mass charges by unsophisticated enemies encountered in colonial campaigns, but was hand-cranked and liable to jam at awkward moments. In 1884 Hiram Maxim, an American, invented a machine gun that used the recoil of the weapon to load, fire and eject the empty case. It was on his principle that all subsequent machine guns were based. The British army introduced the Maxim into service in 1891 (well in advance of the German army), and as the Maxim, Vickers-Maxim and Vickers, it remained in service with only a few modifications until the early 1960s – almost a record for any firearm.10 The British Vickers Mark I, as the gun eventually became, was mounted on a tripod and could fire at a cyclical rate of 500 rounds per minute.11 This was slightly slower than the German Maxim or the French Hotchkiss at 600 rounds per minute, but the Vickers was more robust and less liable to stoppages. Ammunition came in canvas belts of 250 rounds, and as the very high rate of fire caused the barrel to overheat, it was surrounded by a jacket into which water was poured as a coolant. The jacket held around seven pints of water, and as the heating of the barrel turned the water to steam, a tube ran from the jacket to a can, in which the steam condensed back into water that could be used to refill the jacket. A perk of being a machine-gunner was that there was always hot water to make tea. The gun, including the tripod and sights, weighed seventy-three pounds, and each box of ammunition, holding a belt of 250 rounds, weighed a further twenty-two pounds. Each gun team of six men had thirty-two boxes as first-line ammunition, and the total weight of gun and ammunition came to 777 pounds, or just over a third of a ton, without counting the water. The Vickers could, at a pinch, be carried by its crew for short distances, but conveyance was normally by mules. Each infantry battalion started the war with two guns, which operated as a section and had a reserve ammunition supply of four boxes and 15,000 loose rounds in a section cart that was horse- or mule-drawn. A further 10,000 rounds per gun were held in the divisional ammunition column. The Vickers fired the same calibre of ammunition as did the infantry rifle, which simplified manufacture and storage, and meant that in a crisis the machine-gun crews could get ammunition from the riflemen.
As the machine guns of cavalry regiments had to be able to keep up with the troops they were supporting, cavalry machine guns were carried on horses rather than mules. A horse is less good at weight-carrying than is a mule, and so the cavalry was issued with the French Hotchkiss, which was air-cooled and lighter than the Vickers but more prone to stoppages.
A machine gun was not intended to put a number of rounds into the same target, who could quite as efficiently, and a lot more cheaply, be killed by one bullet as by five. The idea was to lay down of a belt of fire across which no enemy could pass unscathed. The weapon was not aimed directly at an enemy soldier; rather, it was sited in a defilade position so that it could produce enfilade fire and thus make full use of its rate of fire and range. It was not fired in the hosepipe fashion so often seen in films, but laid on a fixed line that may have had some traverse to the left and right. No two bullets fired from a machine gun fol
low exactly the same trajectory. They deviate according to the wind, minute variations in the propellant, expansion of the barrel during firing, and vibration of the weapon. When a burst is fired from a machine gun, gravity acts on each bullet, which eventually strikes the ground. A bullet will fall slightly to the right or to the left of those preceding it, a little ahead or a little behind. The area of ground so struck is called the beaten zone. The size of the beaten zone varies according to the range at which the gun is being fired. A Vickers could fire accurately up to 2,800 yards, or well over one and a half miles, and on level ground the beaten zone at that range was twenty-eight yards wide and 215 yards long, centred on the target. In simple terms, anything in that area and not under cover was liable to be hit. The shorter the range the narrower and longer was the beaten zone, and at a fairly typical (for trench warfare) range of 600 yards the beaten zone was three yards wide and 250 yards long. These figures presuppose level ground from gun to target, and they varied if the ground sloped up or down away from the gun. Firing at a target on a one-in-eight, or seven-degree, slope, rising from the gun, reduced the length of the beaten zone to twenty-five yards, and firing downhill correspondingly lengthened it. Range tables were provided which contained all this information, including the adjustments necessary for wind. The longer the range to the target the higher the gun had to be elevated, and firing over the heads of our own advancing infantry was perfectly possible, although the plunging nature of the fire shortened the beaten zone.
Mud, Blood and Poppycock: Britain and the Great War (Cassel Military) Page 14