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Ammunition
Next to HE shell, the most commonly used ammunition was White Phosphorus
(WP). WP shells contained enough explosive to rupture the shell case and spray out a
load of burning phosphorus, which created a cloud of dense white smoke and also set
fire to anything combustible: wooden buildings, gas tanks on vehicles, and the like.
Tanks were supposed to be particularly vulnerable to WP shells which landed near them.
Then there was Smoke shell, which was fired with a time fuze. Unlike HE and
WP, Smoke was not designed to cause injury or destruction. The shell was constructed
with an internal charge only strong enough to knock off the nose cone and kick out three
canisters which broke open in the air and released huge clouds of smoke, dense but
harmless. It was primarily intended for smoke screens, so the enemy could not see what
was going on, but it had other uses also.
The basic color of smoke was white, but it also came in a few bright colors: red,
green, yellow, and violet. The colored smoke was sometimes used to mark our own front
lines for friendly aircraft, so they would not strafe or bomb the wrong people.
[Note: On the first day of Operation Cobra, when we broke out in Normandy, this
method was used, but disastrously, because the wind blew the smoke back past our own
forward positions, and the error was compounded when each successive wave used the
drifting smoke from the bombs of the wave before as a marker.]
Sometimes when an observer had trouble seeing where the first round of an
adjustment had landed, we would fire a round of smoke high in the air, where he could
hardly miss it.
And one day in the Normandy hedgerows, I called Lt Wagner, FO from C
Battery, on the radio and asked where he was. He said, "Wait," several times, and it was
obvious he was having trouble finding himself on the map. Finally he said, "Fire one
round of red smoke at Concentration 392. "
Obviously he needed to identify one point on the map so that he could get
oriented, so I asked the FDC to fire the red smoke. A few minutes later came the choked
message, "Cease firing! I am at Concentration 392."
Much later, somewhere in either northern France or the Rhineland, The 358th
Infantry was making an Approach March (a march made when you are not in contact
with the enemy, but may run into him at any time). They had been gone for several hours
without checking in on the radio, and Division Headquarters was frantic to know where
they were and how they were progressing. They put the squeeze on the 344th FA Bn,
who supported the 358th, to find out, but their S-2 couldn't raise any of their LnOs or FOs
on the radio.
Finally, in desperation, they picked a road junction they were sure was well ahead
of the infantry and started firing one round of smoke at every minute. Half an hour later,
they got an indignant message: "Find out who's firing that stupid smoke and make them
stop. It's holding up the whole regiment. "
A variation of the Smoke shell was the Propaganda shell. It was created by
unscrewing the nose of an ordinary smoke shell, removing the smoke canisters, and
stuffing it with tightly folded leaflets. When the shell goes off, about sixty feet above the
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