Fire Support Battle In Normandy

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RichTO90
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Re: DD Tanks

#16

Post by RichTO90 » 01 Nov 2010, 16:03

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.
Yep, the Threadjacker 3000™ is in overdrive as usual. :lol:
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.
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. :D 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?
I see there is one Cezch 10 cm bty, not three as I originally read.
I could have listed them more clearly too.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?

Cheers!
Richard Anderson
Cracking Hitler's Atlantic Wall: the 1st Assault Brigade Royal Engineers on D-Day
Stackpole Books, 2009.

Carl Schwamberger
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Re: DD Tanks

#17

Post by Carl Schwamberger » 01 Nov 2010, 17:06

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.
RichTO90 wrote:Yep, the Threadjacker 3000™ is in overdrive as usual. :lol:
Any opnions on where a 'Fire Support in Amphibious Ops thread should be? i dont want to inadvertently bury it smewhere counter intuative.
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.
RichTO90 wrote: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. :D 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?
Makes me wonder what size the thought a assualt would be??
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?
RichTO90 wrote: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?
My take has been a notable portion of the projectiles were burying in the beach, suppressing fragments & directing the overpressure upwards. Compaction sufficent to resist a vehical tire is not the same as necessary to resist a projectile. Given the size of the beach area, its material, and the weather effects on it, it is likely the surfaces varied widely.

Secondary fragment effects are even more obscure than projectile fragmentation. The one bit I've run across on German projectiles fragmentation patterns was ..'Brief'. True surface bursts dont seem to produce as many secondaries as partial penetrations. In the first case the tendency is to drive the pebbles or shattered rock fragments into the ground or shove them across the surface. But, I'm working a great deal from personal & peer observation here.

In the case of the Shingle There could have been a significant secondary fragment effect, if a significant number of projectiles hit there. Lacking the German firing records, or a post battle shell crater analysis I'm a bit dependant on eyewitness accounts.
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.
RichTO90 wrote: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?
Cheers!
One of the problems I'm wrestling with is lack of good info on German artillery norms for ammo allocations. There is some here for US, British, and Soviet. Extrapolating from those estimates of effects has all sorts of potiential for error, & my several years doing fire planning gave me enough experience to understand the degree of my ignorance. At this point it looks like those six artillery batterys & their 4,800 rounds were inadaquate for either suppressing or nuetralising much of the landing area. I'm a long way from finishing these numbers but it looks like a allout effort to nuetralize the mass of battlaions on the beach would have expended that ammo quantity in less than a hour.


Delta Tank
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Re: DD Tanks

#18

Post by Delta Tank » 01 Nov 2010, 23:29

Carl,

Refresh my memory, because it has been a long time, but if 50% of the rounds burst in the air with time fuzes, it is considered a successful mission? Or am I wrong on that?

Mike

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Re: DD Tanks

#19

Post by Carl Schwamberger » 02 Nov 2010, 00:25

Delta Tank wrote:Carl,

Refresh my memory, because it has been a long time, but if 50% of the rounds burst in the air with time fuzes, it is considered a successful mission? Or am I wrong on that?

Mike
That was the school house standard back in the early 1980s. From experience I can say thats about the best you can do without a lot of extra calculating by the FO & fire direction guys back at the CP. To get all the rounds exploding at the same height you have to to corrections for each individual gun & update them every hour or two as weather conditions change, or your cannon barrel overheats. The ideal height of burst with is something like 50 meters for us. What the Germans of 1944 might have pegged it at I cant say. for the 10.5 cm US projectiles memory tells me the effective casualty radius was 25 meters. (I need to refreash my memory here.) If they all explode in the air you are unlikely to do more than shower the infantry with hot pellets. The number of wounds and concussions drops off to below the casualty threashold. You do still get a morale effect. Scary having all those explosions overhead. Looking at my trusty TFT the you can expect anywhere from two tenths of a second to five tenths of a second flight to travel 100 meters at ranges from 3,000 to 6,000 meters. Depends on the cannon/charge/projectile. So trying to adjust time for height of burst one shot per adjustment gets tedious. Somehow I cant see the infantry commanders or artillery commander having much patience with a FO spending fifteen minutes to perfect his height of burst at 07:00 that morning. Skipping rounds off the dunes & beach for airbursts does not look practical for the Germans.

Looking at the maps it occurs to me that if the German gunners miscalculate/misset time of flight by a full second the projectiles would be exploding over the trenches on the bluff crests, not over the beach :oops:

Aber
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Re: DD Tanks

#20

Post by Aber » 02 Nov 2010, 15:01

Would not the landing craft on the water be a more remunerative target for the artillery than the beach?

RichTO90
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Re: DD Tanks

#21

Post by RichTO90 » 02 Nov 2010, 15:19

Aber wrote:Would not the landing craft on the water be a more remunerative target for the artillery than the beach?
No. They are a moving target on a larger area. The transport loading area was about 11 kilometers offshore, so the area the "landing craft on the water" occupied could be 11 by 8 kilometers or 88 square kilometers as opposed to the roughly 8 by 0.3 kilometers of beach or 2.4 square kilometers. There are also more targets in the array on the beach...an initial 1,500 men plus over 100 vehicles, plus beached craft versus a few hundred craft.

Cheers!
Richard Anderson
Cracking Hitler's Atlantic Wall: the 1st Assault Brigade Royal Engineers on D-Day
Stackpole Books, 2009.

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Re: DD Tanks

#22

Post by JonS » 02 Nov 2010, 20:25

Carl Schwamberger wrote:At this point it looks like those six artillery batterys & their 4,800 rounds were inadaquate for either suppressing or nuetralising much of the landing area.
Yep, possibly exacerbated by the complete lack of manoeuvre on the part of the Germans. That quantity of rounds might have been sufficient had they mounted attacks*, but instead they seem to have behaved as if they were at the shooting gallery of a town fair.

Jon

* assuming they had the troops to attack with, which they probably didn't anyway :rolleyes:

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Re: DD Tanks

#23

Post by JonS » 02 Nov 2010, 20:27

RichTO90 wrote: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?
There would have been few targets in the entire war more suited to airburst fuzing than OMAHA on the morning of 6 June. Relatively high density of soft targets, no cover, and no space to move - that's the perfect combo for airburst.

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Re: DD Tanks

#24

Post by Carl Schwamberger » 02 Nov 2010, 20:29

Aber wrote:Would not the landing craft on the water be a more remunerative target for the artillery than the beach?
There are lots of descriptions of the landing craft being hit by cannon fire, but they mostly suggest fire from the PAK guns in the bunkers overlooking the beach. That is the witness only recalls one or two incoming rounds every few seconds. When attacking a target with indirect fire weapons & the intent to knock it out commonly a concentration of 4-10 rounds per gun or more is fired from a battery or artillery battalion. If the FO is any good at target location that guarantees a usefull number of effective rounds on target. There are a few refrences on the books about artillery fired at the ships in the loading areas for the landing craft. These lack details such the time, exact location, quantity of impacting projectiles observed... Ellesberg describes 15cm artillery firing on the Gooseberry ships as they were being placed, of course that was several days later.

It is possible the indirect fire artillery had the fire of the individual guns spread out on individual aim points. Thats usefull for harrasing or Suppresive fire, but you dont expect to inflict many casualties that way.

It is also possible a FO could have been adjusting single shots from a single cannon onto a stationary beached landing craft. But thats tedious, time consuming, & distracts the FO from more usefull fire missions. It also requires a trained artillery observer. Your average company or WN (resistance nest) commander would be calling for standardized fire missions on the preplanned targets. Its also probable the craft would be unloaded and pull out before the FO got the cannon dialed in on the target.

So, some of the artillery fires probablly were directed at the landing craft, and probablly mostly when the beached to unload. At that moment the passenger infantry & vehicals are relatively concentrated & vulnerable. The downside is the water and a sand or loose gravel beach suppresses fragment & overpressure effects.

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Re: DD Tanks

#25

Post by JonS » 02 Nov 2010, 20:35

Carl Schwamberger wrote:
Delta Tank wrote:Refresh my memory, because it has been a long time, but if 50% of the rounds burst in the air with time fuzes, it is considered a successful mission? Or am I wrong on that?
That was the school house standard back in the early 1980s. From experience I can say thats about the best you can do without a lot of extra calculating by the FO & fire direction guys back at the CP.
Heh. Personal experience is a funny thing ;)

The way I was taught was:
* adjust with HE PD
* once 'on' switch to 3 guns, 1 rnd HE MT
* * 3 on the deck - up 40 rpt
* * 1 in the air, 2 on the deck - up 20, rpt
* * 2 in the air, 1 on the deck - go to FFE with full bty
* * 3 in the air, 20m HOB - go to FFE with full bty

That's with fairly mechanical calculations, and primitive FO equipment (graduated binos, compass, map, protractor).

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Re: DD Tanks

#26

Post by Carl Schwamberger » 02 Nov 2010, 20:46

JonS wrote:
RichTO90 wrote: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?
There would have been few targets in the entire war more suited to airburst fuzing than OMAHA on the morning of 6 June. Relatively high density of soft targets, no cover, and no space to move - that's the perfect combo for airburst.
My thought exactly. Which is one reason I went looking for descriptions of it. Flipping at random through the books last night I was again struck by how the indirect fire of the German artillery does not fit my old long standing assumptions for its effect.

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Re: DD Tanks

#27

Post by Carl Schwamberger » 02 Nov 2010, 21:11

JonS wrote:
Carl Schwamberger wrote:
Delta Tank wrote:Refresh my memory, because it has been a long time, but if 50% of the rounds burst in the air with time fuzes, it is considered a successful mission? Or am I wrong on that?
That was the school house standard back in the early 1980s. From experience I can say thats about the best you can do without a lot of extra calculating by the FO & fire direction guys back at the CP.
Heh. Personal experience is a funny thing ;)

The way I was taught was:
* adjust with HE PD
* once 'on' switch to 3 guns, 1 rnd HE MT
* * 3 on the deck - up 40 rpt
* * 1 in the air, 2 on the deck - up 20, rpt
* * 2 in the air, 1 on the deck - go to FFE with full bty
* * 3 in the air, 20m HOB - go to FFE with full bty

That's with fairly mechanical calculations, and primitive FO equipment (graduated binos, compass, map, protractor).
That nails how we were taught at FAOBC in 1983. I wont play with adding up seconds per step here. With the students that was a fifteen minute process on a good day. A crackerjack FO & a god NCO or officer doing the computations at the OP (old style) or at the battery (late war style) might by cutting corners reduce that to a long five minutes. If the target is on one of the Planned Targets the defenders had one can chop out the first step and hope to get it to air & graze burst combination on the first try. That cuts it down to just three minutes or maybe two if the battery is set for a mission with time fuzes.

The trick is even with a planned target the odds of proper HoB combination of the first try are not all that. A change of a few degrees in powder temperature, wind direction/speed, or even a change in the propellant manufactoring batch can throw the HoB & range off by just enough, & the clock continues while the corrections are applied. Or should I say the enemy infantry continues slipping over the seawall ....

Had I time to burn, the topo maps would be dug out and the vertical interval between the beach and battery positions would be found. I doubt the bluff crests presented a problem for the German artillery, but I've been wrong before. Fortunately I've got renumerative work to attend to.

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Re: DD Tanks

#28

Post by JonS » 02 Nov 2010, 22:30

Carl Schwamberger wrote:The trick is even with a planned target the odds of proper HoB combination of the first try are not all that. A change of a few degrees in powder temperature, wind direction/speed, or even a change in the propellant manufactoring batch can throw the HoB & range off by just enough, & the clock continues while the corrections are applied. Or should I say the enemy infantry continues slipping over the seawall ...
Sure, but that applies to any target engaged with MT fuzes, and yet they were and are used successfully. Besides, the adjusting rounds aren't going to be totally ineffective, and it isn't necessary to kill everyone - just enough to create the effect you're after (like, isolating any elements that have filtered across while they're counter attacked, etc).
Had I time to burn, the topo maps would be dug out and the vertical interval between the beach and battery positions would be found. I doubt the bluff crests presented a problem for the German artillery, but I've been wrong before.
Yeah, I wondered about cresting issues too, but based on the photos I've seen I doubt they'd have been a huge issue ... at least not for the howitzers. The diff-alt and gradient between the beach just doesn't look that great until you get right up to the base of the bluffs. I also have to assume (ha!) that the German gunners weren't so inept as to position their guns and hows in places to give themselves massive blind spots on the beach they're supposed to have as their primary or only target! ISTR that a reasonable number were actrually off to the flanks, and could therefore enfilade the beaches to a degree, which would greatly reduce any potential cresting, but I'd need to check that.

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Re: DD Tanks

#29

Post by RichTO90 » 03 Nov 2010, 03:36

Carl Schwamberger wrote:Any opnions on where a 'Fire Support in Amphibious Ops thread should be? i dont want to inadvertently bury it smewhere counter intuative.
USA 1919-1945?
Makes me wonder what size the thought a assualt would be??
Well, previous they had experienced multi-division invasions in North Africa, Sicily, and two in Italy. So I suspect they expected a multi-division attack of up to 8 divisions. But they only had so many resources to oppose them with.
My take has been a notable portion of the projectiles were burying in the beach, suppressing fragments & directing the overpressure upwards. Compaction sufficent to resist a vehical tire is not the same as necessary to resist a projectile. Given the size of the beach area, its material, and the weather effects on it, it is likely the surfaces varied widely.
Granted, but again they had to run with what they had and what was feasible for them to use. TM-E 30-451:

"61. Methods of fire.—German artillery makes extensive use of ricochet fire. In this type of fire the Germans set their shell fuzes so that the shells will strike the ground, and ricochet into the air and burst. 'They also employ time-fuze fire, which they try to regulate so that- their shells will burst about 40 to 50 feet above the ground."

They may have been trying the former. As you mention, timefire could have been problematic given the geometry and close proximity of the German defenses to the attackers.
Secondary fragment effects are even more obscure than projectile fragmentation. The one bit I've run across on German projectiles fragmentation patterns was ..'Brief'. True surface bursts dont seem to produce as many secondaries as partial penetrations. In the first case the tendency is to drive the pebbles or shattered rock fragments into the ground or shove them across the surface. But, I'm working a great deal from personal & peer observation here.

In the case of the Shingle There could have been a significant secondary fragment effect, if a significant number of projectiles hit there. Lacking the German firing records, or a post battle shell crater analysis I'm a bit dependant on eyewitness accounts.
I differ to you on that.
One of the problems I'm wrestling with is lack of good info on German artillery norms for ammo allocations. There is some here for US, British, and Soviet. Extrapolating from those estimates of effects has all sorts of potiential for error, & my several years doing fire planning gave me enough experience to understand the degree of my ignorance. At this point it looks like those six artillery batterys & their 4,800 rounds were inadaquate for either suppressing or nuetralising much of the landing area. I'm a long way from finishing these numbers but it looks like a allout effort to nuetralize the mass of battlaions on the beach would have expended that ammo quantity in less than a hour.
The norm was the Erste Ausstattung, which corresponds, more or less, to the American unit of fire. The most careful examination of the subject I am aware of is LTC Jakob Jung, Consumption of Ammunition by Land Forces Since 1939, Bergisch Gladbach, FRG, 1986. I don't know if it was ever generally published, although it was available in an English translation; we got it via BG Franz Uhle-Wettler, who was a close friend of Trevor, when we did the Ardennes Combat Simulation Database back in 1989.

The interesting thing of course is that despite excellent survey of the target area and battery sites, good observation, decent communications, a fair amount of artillery for the force being supported, and an expenditure of ammunition far in excess of their norms in an all out defense, the German field artillery didn't have much of an impact on OMAHA, nor did it on any of the other beaches. I'm not sure if that says something about the defensive setup, lack of proper fusing, or simply poor German doctrine?

BTW, have you checked the US Army Ordnance Terminal Ballistics volumes for data relevent to your study? They are available at CARL now as PDFs:

http://cgsc.cdmhost.com/cdm4/item_viewe ... X=1&REC=13
http://cgsc.cdmhost.com/cdm4/item_viewe ... X=1&REC=14
http://cgsc.cdmhost.com/cdm4/document.p ... 375&REC=15

Cheers!
Richard Anderson
Cracking Hitler's Atlantic Wall: the 1st Assault Brigade Royal Engineers on D-Day
Stackpole Books, 2009.

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Re: DD Tanks

#30

Post by RichTO90 » 03 Nov 2010, 03:50

JonS wrote:Yeah, I wondered about cresting issues too, but based on the photos I've seen I doubt they'd have been a huge issue ... at least not for the howitzers. The diff-alt and gradient between the beach just doesn't look that great until you get right up to the base of the bluffs. I also have to assume (ha!) that the German gunners weren't so inept as to position their guns and hows in places to give themselves massive blind spots on the beach they're supposed to have as their primary or only target! ISTR that a reasonable number were actrually off to the flanks, and could therefore enfilade the beaches to a degree, which would greatly reduce any potential cresting, but I'd need to check that.
I doubt they would have had that many problems. The batteries at Maisy certainly not, the 15cm battery at Longueville probably not (8.6 km to Les Moulins at about a 30-40 degree angle from parallel to the beach, Vierville is 5.5 km and closer to 60-70 degrees), the Houtteville battery is more problematic, 4.3 km to Les Moulins and about 80 degrees from the beach, but is easier versus Vierville, the Montigny battery is abouut the same as Longueville, but a bit closer to the beaches, while the Formigny battery is about in the same circumstances as the Houtteville one. Essentially the two Maisy batteries are in enar enfilade of the beaches, while the other four batteries are disposed so that at least two can easily fire on each half of the beach without a problem.

Cheers!
Richard Anderson
Cracking Hitler's Atlantic Wall: the 1st Assault Brigade Royal Engineers on D-Day
Stackpole Books, 2009.

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