Carl Schwamberger wrote:Your work is clearly defined then!
Yeah, of course my real interest is the Normandy Campaign as a whole, but I keep wandering down interesting sidelines. Which slows things up since I also have to work for a living.
Yes I'm very familar with Ward & the US artillery. I spent ten years of my USMC career in artillery units. Locally there is a collection of the Field Artillery Journal going back to 1919. I've waded thru 15% of that.
Have you read "Fort Sill and the Golden Age of the Field Artillery"? It is an unpublished manuscript by Russell A. Gugelar, who was working on a bio of Ward circa 1976-1981. A copy should be in the library at Sill. Not a lot of technical info, but a lot on the people involved. A lot of sharp people, but a few duds too (Jay McKelvie was one).
Also located a complete set of the Journal of the Royal Arillery. That illustrates a large part of the problem. On my third pass thru that library in 2003 I found it was no longer listed in the librarys cataloge. It was still on the shelf, but whoever was responsible for converting the librarys indexes from card to computer blew it. The libraians were nonplussed when I showed them three periodicals absent from their records. This was the Breckenridge Library at Quantico, which has been a research & archivial library for many decades. Its a common problem I've found in the last decade. Enough of that back to topic.
Yep, this country seems to specialize in destroying its archival memory. AFAIK the old ORO Library (the 1950s Johns Hopkins group that include Van Loan Naisawald - speaking of artillery history - amongst others, that then became RAC) was disposed of when RAC was acquired by ATT. And yes, "disposed of" means in a dumpster. Of course considering how much of that stuff was still probably classified it makes you wonder about security procedures too. Anyway, the upshot is that there is no single complete collection of that body of work left AFAIK. Sad really, that's why we're always reinventing the wheel.
Specificly what I am looking for are the technical details for the computation of firing data, communications, and survey. Then, both the doctrine and actual battlefield practice for the tactical procedures. A couple examples of what these questions cover:
a. Did the Werhmacht artillery automaticly extend telephone wire communication circuts between the battalions of the corps artillery & the divsion artillery, or was this done only on order? When done which units were responsible for placing the wire & switchboards?
b. Was the French Group Post established at the battalion level only, or at the larger groups of divsion & corps artillery?
c. What were the real differences in response time between the Rumanian & Wehrmacht artillery? (This question is connected to the previous two.)
Thats a tiny sample. I'm planning a vist to the library at Ft Sill, hopefully next year. The librarians seem to have identified some original documents (translating titles from Russian & German is problematic) so we will see.
I'll be interested to see what you find.
I've still a long way to go in reviewing books on the subject, but none so far have the necessary depth. Plus I'm finding too many technical errors to have any confidence in most of them. Your remark about popular historiesrepating cannards applies here too. Biographys have some usefull bits but thats just a handfull of pieces from the 1000 piece puzzle box. Web sites are proving useless. Lots of vague soft data & little hard information, plus a thousand & one suspected errors. I've turned up just two with usefull information.
Thanks for listening to me whine. I'm going to find some cheese to have with it.
Beware of websites, 90 percent are useless through either through inadvertant or deliberate errors AFAICS. Well, I did my whining too, so we're even.