World War I Battlefield Artillery Tactics

As the First World War bogged down across Europe resulting in the establishment of trench systems, artillery began to grow in military importance. Never before had the use of artillery been so vital, and to this day the ferocity, duration and widespread use of artillery across the trenches of Europe has never been replicated. Featuring specially commissioned full-colour artwork, this groundbreaking study explains and illustrates the enormous advances in the use of artillery that took place between 1914 and 1918, the central part artillery played in World War I and how it was used throughout the war, with particular emphasis on the Western Front.

A year-by-year examination of key WWI battles and how the ongoing advances in artillery shaped strategy, tactics, and oprations; includes battlefield maps! World War I is often said to have been an artillery war, yet the decisive role artillery played in shaping military decisions—and therefor the war itself—has rarely been examined. Artillery in the Great War traces the development of this all-important technology, the differing approaches to its use, the many innovations it underwent on both sides, and how those approaches and innovations in turn effected key battles such as the Battle of the Somme. This highly readable and informative history is perfect for any reader interested in understanding the legacy of World War I, or the evolution of modern warfare.

Includes the First World War Illustrations Pack – 73 battle plans and diagrams and 198 photos Lt.-Gen. Wilhelm Balck was a Prussian General, whose service during the First World War with the 51st Division gained him the highest German honour, the coveted Pour le Mérite. Balck was also a noted military writer, in this most valuable study the author discusses the development of tactics within the German Army during World War I. The treatise was considered so valuable that it was immediately translated into English by the U.S. General Service School and widely read. In his native Germany Black’s works greatly influenced post-war German thinking about tactics and strategy in the military circles that would become the officer corps of the Wehrmacht.

This thesis examines the evolution of artillery tactics in World War II using General J. Lawton Collins’ U.S. VII Corps as a case study. This study first reviews artillery doctrine and tactics during World War I and during the 1920s and 1930s, in which time future leaders like General Collins were military students. In 1943, General Collins commanded an infantry division on Guadalcanal where he was one of the first American generals to implement the Army’s new doctrine of fire direction centers (FDCs) and massed fires using time on targets (TOTs). Collins then was selected to command the U.S. VII Corps for the invasion of Normandy and the subsequent breakout during OPERATION COBRA. From Normandy to the end of the war, Collins continued to hone his use of artillery based on his experience during the eleven-month campaign in Northwest Europe, contributing to his reputation as the best corps commander in World War II. This study looks at Army doctrine in 1944 to judge Collins’ artillery tactics and concludes that he used established doctrine and that his tactics are the foundation for today’s artillery tactics.

The regular armies which marched off to war in 1914 were composed of massed riflemen, screened by cavalry and supported by artillery; their leaders expected a quick and decisive outcome, achieved by sweeping manoeuvre, bold leadership and skill at arms. Eighteen months later the whole nature of field armies and their tactics had changed utterly. In sophisticated trench systems forming a battlefield a few miles wide and 400 miles long, conscript armies sheltered from massive long-range bombardment, wielding new weapons according to new tactical doctrines. This first of two richly illustrated studies explains in detail the specifics of that extraordinary transformation, complete with ten full colour plates of uniforms and equipment.

In King of Battle: Artillery in World War I a distinguished array of authors examines the centrepiece of battle in the Great War, artillery. Going beyond tables of calibres and ranges, they look at organization, training, personnel, doctrine, and technologies.

Fairly or unfairly, the stalemate on the First World War’s Western Front is often attributed to the intellectual stagnation of the era’s military officers. This paper traces the development (or absence of development) of combined arms and fire & maneuver tactics and doctrine in the period prior to WW I, focusing on the Russo-Japanese War. The Western armies that entered the Great War seemingly ignored many of the hard-learned lessons and observations of pre-war conflicts. Though World War I armies were later credited with developing revolutionary wartime tactical-level advances, many scholars claim that this phase of tactical evolution followed an earlier period of intellectual stagnation that resulted in the stalemate on the war’s Western Front. This stalemate, they claim, could have been avoided by heeding the admonitions of pre-war conflicts and incorporating the burgeoning effects of technology into military tactics and doctrine. Some go even further and fault the military leadership with incompetence and foolishness for not adapting to the requirements of modern war. The Russo-Japanese War showed the necessity for combined arms techniques and fire and maneuver tactics on the modern battlefield. Specifically, the war showed the need for: (1) the adoption of dispersed, irregular formations; (2) the employment of fire and maneuver techniques and small unit-tactics, including base of fire techniques; (3) the transition to indirect-fire artillery support to ensure the survivability of the batteries, and; (4) the necessity for combined arms tactics to increase the survivability of assaulting infantry and compensate for the dispersion of infantry firepower.

Historians have portrayed British participation in World War I as a series of tragic debacles, with lines of men mown down by machine guns, with untried new military technology, and incompetent generals who threw their troops into improvised and unsuccessful attacks. In this book a renowned military historian studies the evolution of British infantry tactics during the war and challenges this interpretation, showing that while the British army's plans and technologies failed persistently during the improvised first half of the war, the army gradually improved its technique, technology, and, eventually, its' self-assurance. By the time of its successful sustained offensive in the fall of 1918, says Paddy Griffith, the British army was demonstrating a battlefield skill and mobility that would rarely be surpassed even during World War II. Evaluating the great gap that exists between theory and practice, between textbook and bullet-swept mudfield, Griffith argues that many battles were carefully planned to exploit advanced tactics and to avoid casualties, but that breakthrough was simply impossible under the conditions of the time. According to Griffith, the British were already masters of "storm troop tactics" by the end of 1916, and in several important respects were further ahead than the Germans would be even in 1918. In fields such as the timing and orchestration of all-arms assaults, predicted artillery fire, "Commando-style" trench raiding, the use of light machine guns, or the barrage fire of heavy machine guns, the British led the world. Although British generals were not military geniuses, says Griffith, they should at least be credited for effectively inventing much of the twentieth-century's art of war.