German machine gunners

[MikB]

Think about it logically. For example if a beaten zone is being fired at say 800 yards then rounds will be striking the dirt between about 750 and 850 yards depending on all sorts of factors.

Advancing infantry walking into this barrage will of course be hit in the lower part of their body as they encounter individual rounds at the end of their trajectory.

Regards

TonyE

Of course this could be the case for machine gunners firing on properly-calibrated trajectories from prepared positions over flat and level ground.

Even then, if the density of landing bullets is low enough for an advancing enemy to reach the nearer end of the beaten zone to the MG, those bullets that would reach the far end if unobstructed will still be (I think) about 4 feet higher and would therefore cause more serious wounds on first strike.

But in the bloodiest and most notorious cases, such as the Somme, the machine gunners weren't shooting in such clinical conditions. They were teams of stunned and exhausted men, addled by days or weeks of heavy bombardment, dragging themselves and their guns with ony a few minutes preparation time into ad-hoc positions in disrupted earthworks, shooting over undulating, battered terrain that might look substantially different from when they went into their dugouts. I don't know how easy it would've been to practise such organised shooting in those conditions. I think there'd be a lot of guesswork, wet fingers in the wind, wait till they're within a couple of hundred metres - if not whites-of-eyes - then shoot at the middle height if you can.

I don't think the cool calculation suggested in the original post could have been practised except in unusual circumstances.

Regards,

MikB