Somme battle

[pzgr40]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...-battle-interrogations-British-prisoners.html\

I read somewhere another reason was that the artillery bombardment was mainly done with schrapnell shells... quite useless against german troops in deep dug in shelters.

Surprising part in this article is that 50 to 90% of the 20 or 30cm shells failed to explode. I can hardly believe that no forward observer must have noted the lack of heavy fire from the own artillery.

Regards, DJH

 

[TimG]

DJH,

I can't recall which offensive it was in WWI, but in the preceeding 24 hours we, the Allies, put down an artillery barrage of 500,000 rounds. That averages out at about 5+ a second, at that sort of concentration, I can imagine that it would be nigh on impossible for any F.O.O. to identify blinds. Furthermore, we were well aware of the shortcomings of some of our fuzes and they would have probably not thought it worth the effort to report.

TimG

 

[pzgr40/42]

It is very interesting to read about massive amounts of shells being fired within a certain period of time, but when five shells a second are spread over a 10 mile frontage, there is no such thing as a "concentration".
Two major problems regarding the munitions used were the apparent uselessness of shrapnell against the German Drahtsperren and the lack of delayed action fuzes on the heavies.
first problem caused infantry to get stuck in places where, as an infantry man you wouldn't want to get stuck..in front of the enemy's defences. Second problem caused plenty of Gerries and their machineguns being able to man those defences (as very few deep dugouts were destroyed)!!
And as the initial bombardements, as iff to add insult to injury, also proved to be far from concentrated enough (not enough, in it's own right ineffective, shrapnell to cut wire and not enough, in their own right ineffecitve, heavies to destroy the dugouts and their occupants), the results of July first cannot be seen as a surprise.

regards,

Menno

 

[Millsman]

On another forum there was a recent discussion about shell inspection. The Inspectors did not include actual test firing batches of shells. They just checked the shells to specification.

This alone would have revealed how faulty the fuzes were.

Conversely a % of Grenades were test fired and if there was a set % of failures the whole batch was condemned.

John

 

[Millsman]

Just back from the Somme.

Brought back 15lb of shrapnel balls with me (as you do!).

Photos showing variety of sizes. Largest is about 17mm across. Odd one is the bottom right which has wire through the middle. Have a couple of these.

John