Yep, the Threadjacker 3000™ is in overdrive as usual.Carl Schwamberger wrote:I can see another thread ought to be split off of this one. Something titled Fire Support - Op Neptune maybe. Will attend to that pending opnions on where it might properly belong.
It may have been a "divisions defense frontage" in some cases...but in terms of the Atlantic Wall defenses it was pretty much a standard two-battalion defense frontage, although those defenses were pretty strong compared to others in the vicinity. So two direct support batteries plus some general support would have been standard for what was there I think? And the "corps artillery in support", or at least the artillery with the corps artillery support mission, was theoretically the coastal artillery (the two battalions of "corps artillery" in LXXXIV AK were part of a task force defensing the western Cotentin). The problem, for the Germans, was that the battery at Pointe du Hoc was unavailable, the battery at Longues was suppressed by naval gunfire, and the Cotentin batteries were either out of range or otherwise occupied. It is curious that the coastal defenses were left so thin there; it may have been the Germans simply didn't think it was a very viable beach to assault en masse?Ok. It looks like they were not set up to reinforce the fires of those six batteries with others in different sectors. 8,000 meters+- of Omaha beach is not too far from a divisions defense frontage. You would ordinarily find 48 howitzers & guns allocated to indirect fire missions on that sort of width. Maybe it is not a large shortfall, tho there does not seem to any effective corps artillery in support. The Pont du Hoc battey of 15 cm guns effectively were out of action. Even with the werfern rockets & extra mortars the fire support looks a bit lite in terms of tubes.
I could have listed them more clearly too.I see there is one Cezch 10 cm bty, not three as I originally read.
My impression is that the Germans mostly used timefire when the ground was unsuitable for point-detonated fusing or when there was a real advantage to using it? The Norman beaches are very hard surfaced and the shingle would make a nice secondary missile effect I would think?There's one crunch - we dont know for sure how many. Was the standard allotment matched to the number of illumination rounds which require time fuzes? Or, was there a larger allowance to include the HE ammo? A second question is if they were correctly set. A miscalculation in the meterological message that morning could leave them with .2 seconds too much time on the clock, leaving them as surface detonations. In any case I'm not at the point of a assumption but am wondering why there are so few refrences to airbursts?
Sure, the Werfer and Goliath were neat technical ideas that were probably too complex a solution for the problem. For both the vulnerable point were the control cable runs and neither worked as intended.Its a bit like the werfen rocket launchers. One starts with visions of massed rocket fires raining down at critical points on the beach. Instead one finds remarks about some hitting here or there but nothing approaching fires that would turly nuetralize the areas they were hitting.
That's a more difficult question. Pluskat's account is unreliable, but he apparently went out sometime after mid-morning to try to re-establish communication with his batteries. OTOH some of the other German observation points, like the radar site at Douvres, stayed in communication for days after being surrounded. In any case they did have about two hours then to fire effectively and they did fire, since they ran out of ammunition. And, given how high that consumption rate was compared to the German defensive norms, it must have been a lot by their reckoning?The question here is how well connected did these OP, or the others, remained with the artillery batterys & to the overall command system? Being able to connect to one or two batterys is not the same as being able to mass multiple batterys, set up long linear targets, methodically shift suppresion attacks about. As noted earlier the regimental commander of this sector was complaining about failing communications at 08:30. Had they been written AARs from the artillery commanders & their comm officers would be facinating reading on this.
Cheers!