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Ammunition
A 105 shell is too small to damage anything substantial, so we did not use Fuze
Delay for that purpose very often. However, someone at the Field Artillery School at Ft
Sill, Oklahoma, noticed that if a shell was fired so that it landed nearly parallel to the
ground, it would skip, or ricochet, and that if it were Fuze Delay, it would explode at the
top of the ricochet, above ground. We tried it for awhile, but according to our observers,
we got a low percentage of ricochets and a high percentage of rounds that dug into the
ground before exploding and lost almost all of the fragmentation effect. I have since
decided that the rocky soil of the Ft Sill range was responsible for the results they got.
Another solution was the Time Fuze. It could be set to burst a certain number of
seconds after the shell was fired, and by looking up the time of flight in the firing tables,
one should be able to determine how to make it burst precisely thirty feet above the
target. However, artillery being an inexact science, it was not precise, and Time Fuze
could not be used close to our own troops, lest the burst occur too soon, before it got to
the enemy.
It was in the middle of the war - toward the end of the Ardennes Campaign, I
think that we started to get HE ammunition with a Proximity Fuze (Pozit, for short).
This little gem contained a radar set that told the shell when it was close enough to the
target to explode. It should have been the ultimate solution to the problem of getting
maximum effect from fragmentation, but it too had glitches. The first ones were too
sensitive, and could be set off by obstacles less substantial than the ground: light aircraft,
for instance, or even raindrops. Once we got a plaintive call in the middle of the night
from another artillery unit which had located between us and our target. There was a
heavy fog, and apparently it was solid enough to set off Pozit Fuzes. Spent fragments
from far overhead had made a sieve out of their CP tent.
We learned not to fire with Proximity Fuse except in dry weather, and when our
observation planes were not in the air.
All in all, we fired a vast number of HE shells. The normal Will Adjust fire
mission was divided into two phases, fire for adjustment and fire for effect. The fire for
adjustment allowed an observer to move the location where the shells landed onto the
area where he thought it was needed. For it we generally fired only one or two howitzers,
to save ammunition. The adjustment might take up to a dozen rounds. After the
adjustment, all twelve of the battalion's howitzers, plus six of the Cannon Company's
would usually fire (except for any howitzers that might be temporarily out of action being
cleaned and serviced). We fired in volleys (all howitzers at once), typically two or three
volleys, or thirty-six to fifty-four rounds altogether. If the target seemed important
enough, we could always call on other battalions to join in the fire for effect.
One day near the end of the war, our infantry ran into unexpected resistance from
a village near the German-Czech border. Surprisingly, we later found, it was defended by
a few dozen fanatical Hitler Jugend - the equivalent of a troop of Boy Scouts - led by
three or four adult SS men. I later saw one of the boys who had been captured, and he
looked not
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