Most guns used in an artillery bombardment of WW1?

[sneakyimp]

Can anyone tell me which battle would have featured the most guns used in an artillery bombardment? I vaguely recall reading in one of my books (but don't remember which) about a bombardment featuring some 3000 guns but don't recall which battle. I've also read here that Germany launched a 6,000-gun bombardment on March 21, 1918.

I'm also interested in other superlative bombardments: longest duration, most shells fired, etc.

I would of course very much like to have supporting references for any facts offered here, if possible.

[Khaki]

It might be hard to get an accurate total, as it would depend whether or not trench mortars are included in the statistics.

khaki

[phil andrade]

March 21st 1918 : that's got to be it, surely. Six and a half thousand guns, three and a half thousand mortars.

I'll need to go and reconnoitre bookshelves to provide source for that.

Not a very long affair though ; confined to a few hours, and relying on scale and intensity, and especially gas shell.

Phil (PJA)

[sneakyimp]

It might be hard to get an accurate total, as it would depend whether or not trench mortars are included in the statistics.

khaki

Pinpoint accuracy is not critical. I would imagine that a heavy trench mortar (9.45") should be counted. The projectile weighed around 150lbs and it would certainly contribute to the noise and destruction. Ideally we'd be able to itemize them separately.

This does raise a question. Would trench mortars be referred to as "guns" in the event?

[sneakyimp]

March 21st 1918 : that's got to be it, surely. Six and a half thousand guns, three and a half thousand mortars.

I'll need to go and reconnoitre bookshelves to provide source for that.

Not a very long affair though ; confined to a few hours, and relying on scale and intensity, and especially gas shell.

Phil (PJA)

Wow. One can only imagine the noise! I'm going to sniff around too. Would love to see a reliable source for this. I'm thinking we should maybe start a top-5 list or something. Most guns, most shells, longest bombardment, most guns per yard of front, etc.

[nigelfe]

Define 'bombardment'.

[phil andrade]

The weight of the shells expended is another criterion which needs to be considered.

Here I speak from memory, so forgive failure to authenticate through sources.

The much vaunted British artillery bombardment / barrage on the Somme, leading up to and including the climax on 1st July 1916, entailed the expenditure of about 25,000 tons of shells. This appears feeble by comparison with the figures for 1917 : 107,000 fired in the ten days prior to Third Ypres. Arras and Messines also entailed British guns firing the best part of one hundred thousand tons of shell in the artillery preparation. With this vastly increased weight of munitions came a much better quality of shell, too : lower proportions of duds, more advanced fuses that detonated more effectively on impact etc.

If the British advances were spectacular, those of the French and Germans were, too.

Verdun was the first of its kind in respect of artillery mass. Fourteen hundred Germans guns opening up on 21st February 1916- not a huge number compared with later - but terribly concentrated on a narrow front. I'm sure that I've read in Horne's book THE PRICE OF GLORY that in May 1916 the Germans achieved a concentration of 500 guns on a sector of one mile, which, if true, is mind boggling.

Apparently the Germans fired one million shells in twelve hours on the first day of the battle : imagine the rate of fire that entails!

Phil (PJA)

[sneakyimp]

Define 'bombardment'.

I would define it for my current purposes as "attack by artillery, possibly including trench mortars but most certainly including field guns, heavy artillery, rail guns, howitzers, etc."

[phil andrade]

A bit more in the way of detail here, with some back up :

From Leon Wolff's IN FLANDERS FIELDS , page xvi : In the preparatory bombardment 4,283,550 shells, weighing 107,000 tons, were hurled on to the reclaimed bog-land of Ypres...

I hope I'm right if I state that this emanated from just over three thousand British guns in a ten day period. The frontage was probably about fifteen miles.

From John Terraine's THE SMOKE AND THE FIRE, PAGES 118-19 :

It seemed prodigious, in June 1916, to fire off 1,732,873 rounds in eight days, but a year later, in June 1917 at Messines, the Second Army artillery fired off 3,258,000 rounds in the same period. And in September 1918, in the course of the assault on the Hindenburg Line, the British artillery fired off 943,847 rounds in twenty four hours.

The same source, in Table E on page 127, gives some other artillery statistics :

French Artillery, Battle of the Aisne,

16 April 1917 : 5,350 guns

German Artillery, Battle of Picardy,

21 March 1918 : 6,473 guns [ to which should be added more than half as many mortars]

Western Front, 11 Nov. 1918:

Allied Artillery 21,668 guns

Central Powers 16,181 guns [ in a footnote Terraine reminds us that the Allies had also captured 6,615 German guns since 8 Aug.]

My allusion to a phenomenal Verdun statistic comes from Alistair Horne's THE PRICE OF GLORY, page 182 :

On 3 May, a day of oppressive heat, over 500 heavy German cannon opened fire along a front of little over a mile.

I emboldened the last phrase, because I'm wondering whether Horne was indulging in some rhetorical exaggeration, or some sleight of hand here. Five hundred heavy guns on a frontage of one mile ? Then again, the horror of Verdun was very much a result of its grotesque concentration.

Editing : It's not the number, but the calibre....five hundred field guns is one thing; five hundred HEAVIES quite another.

Phil (PJA)

[sneakyimp]

The weight of the shells expended is another criterion which needs to be considered.

Here I speak from memory, so forgive failure to authenticate through sources.

The much vaunted British artillery bombardment / barrage on the Somme, leading up to and including the climax on 1st July 1916, entailed the expenditure of about 25,000 tons of shells. This appears feeble by comparison with the figures for 1917 : 107,000 fired in the ten days prior to Third Ypres. Arras and Messines also entailed British guns firing the best part of one hundred thousand tons of shell in the artillery preparation. With this vastly increased weight of munitions came a much better quality of shell, too : lower proportions of duds, more advanced fuses that detonated more effectively on impact etc.

If the British advances were spectacular, those of the French and Germans were, too.

Verdun was the first of its kind in respect of artillery mass. Fourteen hundred Germans guns opening up on 21st February 1916- not a huge number compared with later - but terribly concentrated on a narrow front. I'm sure that I've read in Horne's book THE PRICE OF GLORY that in May 1916 the Germans achieved a concentration of 500 guns on a sector of one mile, which, if true, is mind boggling.

Apparently the Germans fired one million shells in twelve hours on the first day of the battle : imagine the rate of fire that entails!

Phil (PJA)

Thanks for those details. I should be able to corroborate them with some of my books. I'm checking John Keegan's "The First World War" and, having looked up 'artillery' in the index, find the following:

* p. 230: For Gorlice-Tarnow offensive on the Eastern front in 1915, " the Germans accumulated a stock of a million shells," and the Germans and Austrians had a very large superiority in guns, with total artillery strength of 2,228 guns, heavy and light, across a 30-mile front.

* p. 279: At Verdun, Germans had "an enormous concentration of artillery" including 542 heavy guns (13 of the 420mm and 17 of the 305mm) with a stock of 2.5M shells on a front of 8 miles. The passage says "150 guns to each mile" which would imply 8x150=1200 guns.

* p 290: The plan of attack on the Somme was preceded by an "enormous bombardment," to last a week and consume a million shells. Three million shells had been brought up to dumps. The prepratory bombardment was 1,000 field guns, 180 heavy guns, and 245 heavy howitzers (total 1,325). giving a density of one field gun per twenty yards of front and one heavy gun or howitzer to fifty-eight yards.

* p 324: Nivelle assembled a stock of 2,879 guns (1 for each 9 yards of front) and 2,687,000 shells

* p 356: Around Ypres, preceding Preceding the attack on Messines ridge, three and a half million shells had been fired in a bombardment lasting nearly three weeks (was it constantly firing for 3 weeks or was it on-and-off?) which culminated with 19 mines being blown on June 7, 1916

* p 361: Preparation for 3rd Ypres featured a 15-day bombardment of over four million shells that reached its crescendo just before 4am (good lord!) on July 31, 1917.

* p. 376: Ludendorff's bombardment force in the German 1918 offensive amounted to 6,473 field, medium, and heavy guns and 3,532 mortars of varying calibre (!!!) for which over a million rounds of ammunition were assembled. The bombardment plan was for a "brief but crushing deluge of shells, lasting five hours." The length of the front was 50 miles. The citation he provides refers to The Kaiser's Battle by M. Middlebrook, 1978, pp.380-4.

* p. 406: Lundendorff's second phase of the spring 1918 offensive had "the largest concentration of artillery yet assembled...6,000 guns supplied from an ammunition stock of two million shells. All were fired off in a little over four hours on the morning of 27 May against sixteen Allied divisions. The length of the front is not mentioned. Even so, that rate of fire amounts to about 139 shells per second! Imagine what it must have sounded like? The footnote for this is H. Herwig, The First World War, New York, 1997, pp. 400-1.

[sneakyimp]

A bit more in the way of detail here, with some back up :

...

Phil (PJA)

Bless you! Awesome info. I just looked at Peter Hart's The Great War and the index has no entry for artillery or bombardment. I'll see if it offers any additional details from these events. Looks to me like we have our top-5 list right here though.

[phil andrade]

Small wonder that tactics changed as a result of this monstrous firepower.

Men were dispersed. The front lines were thinned. Ferro-concrete replaced sandbags. Shell hole wilderness defined the battlefield instead of trenches. The storm of steel created the empty battlefield.

We are told that when people beheld the bombardment of the German lines prior to the Battle of the Somme, they were awestruck and wondered how men could survive under it. The British guns fired 1.7 million shells. By the end of the war, they would have expended more than 170,000,000. That has a striking arithmetical symmetry : the shells fired in preparation for the Somme offensive accounted for one per cent of the total that the Royal Artillery were to expend in the course of the war.

What I find remarkable about that table from Terraine's book is the enormous French artillery effort. The Nivelle Offensive deployed 5,350 guns : vastly more than the British ever amassed.

Phil (PJA)

[sneakyimp]

Small wonder that tactics changed as a result of this monstrous firepower.

Men were dispersed. The front lines were thinned. Ferro-concrete replaced sandbags. Shell hole wilderness defined the battlefield instead of trenches. The storm of steel created the empty battlefield.

We are told that when people beheld the bombardment of the German lines prior to the Battle of the Somme, they were awestruck and wondered how men could survive under it. The British guns fired 1.7 million shells. By the end of the war, they would have expended more than 170,000,000. That has a striking arithmetical symmetry : the shells fired in preparation for the Somme offensive accounted for one per cent of the total that the Royal Artillery were to expend in the course of the war.

What I find remarkable about that table from Terraine's book is the enormous French artillery effort. The Nivelle Offensive deployed 5,350 guns : vastly more than the British ever amassed.

Phil (PJA)

A nice post! Which Terraine book are you speaking of? I've got General Jack's Diary which is really great.

[phil andrade]

THE SMOKE AND THE FIRE

One of several books written by John Terraine with the aim of changing popular perception of the Great War.

The impact of his work on the historiography is hard to exaggerate.

Quite apart from the numbers of guns deployed in these immense artillery concentrations, the mind boggles at the amount of resources deployed to make them work.

By the time the French were attacking in their local offensives in later 1917, they were using nearly as many gunners as infantrymen. What this implied in terms of engineering, transport, aerial observation and equine logistics is something else.

Phil (PJA)

[nigelfe]

The problem is that 'bombardment' was not an omnibus term.

The 'barrage' was not a 'bombardment'. Self-evidently 'counter-bombardment' is not the same as 'bombardment'. What about defensive fire against enemy counter-attacks? 'Registration', etc, when used may have been vital for any of these but were of themselves 'bombardment'. Hence the need to clearly define what is being meant by bombardment.

Hence my question about a definitions.

[phil andrade]

Your observation and comments have merit.

But, for whatever reasons, guns were deployed in stupendous numbers, sometimes on very narrow frontages.

Alistair Horne's reference to five hundred HEAVY guns being used to batter a one mile sector of the French defences on the West Bank of the Meuse in the Verdun fighting of early May 1915 strikes me as questionable. Perhaps he meant that their fire was directed onto a very short stretch of front.....I think that is different from massing the guns themselves along a distance of barely one mile.

If memory serves me, he British achieved their greatest concentration of artillery in the Flanders fighting of 1917, when they used one gun for every five and a half yards of front : and that alludes to guns of all calibers.

Editing here : Yes, I definitely need some help here trying to figure out what criteria are used. For example, if 1,500 guns are arrayed on a frontage of fifteen miles, but direct their fire to converge on a sector five miles long, what is the concentration : 100 guns per mile, or 300 ? Also, there are some very significant contradictions : take the footnotes that our original poster attaches to one of his replies, where he cites Keegan's figure of 2,879 guns used by Nivelle in his offensive, and Terraine's figure of 5,350 for the same operation that I cited. Bearing in mind how much of their industrial capacity the French lost by virtue of German occupation of North East France, it is astonishing how much artillery might they managed to assemble. If Terraine's figure for April 1917 is correct, the French ordnance far outweighed that of the British.

Further editing : Other things that challenge the imagination are the difficulties and hazards of actually getting all these guns into position, protecting and camouflaging them, along with the massive amount of ammunition that needed to be stored close at hand. Hardly consistent with secrecy, let alone surprise. The fate of the horses involved doesn't bear thinking about. Digging of emplacements and the physical effort involved in siting, loading and firing the guns, especially in difficult weather conditions, more so if under counter battery fire and facing the prospect of gas. The nature of the soil and the lie of the land must have been of great importance, and the difficulties of recoil and subsequent re- laying of the pieces greatly enhanced if conditions were unfavourable. Casualties amongst gunners will reflect how hazardous their role could be. Does memory serve me if I state that at some point in the Verdun fighting the French scored a lucky hit on a German ammunition dump and 450,000 shells blew up ? Why put so many shells in one place ? Perhaps this is another apocryphal account.

Phil (PJA)