A boulder field on top of a hill in northern France, the morning of August 7, 1944. The hill is called Hill 314, named for its height in meters above sea level. It looks east over a valley, north over a small French town called Mortain, and south along a single straight road that runs 8 miles to a place called Saint-Hilaire-du-Harcouët, and from there 15 miles farther to the coast at Avranches.
The road is the reason for the hill, and the hill is the reason this story exists. Sitting in a foxhole near the summit, with a radio whose batteries are already starting to weaken, is a 21-year-old second lieutenant from Indiana named Robert Weiss. Beside him is his sergeant. Below them, in the pre-dawn dark, German tanks are moving along the road.
Weiss can hear them. He cannot see them yet because of the fog, but he can hear them, and he knows that the men they are coming for are the riflemen of the second battalion of the 120th infantry regiment dug in around him on the hilltop, with bazookas and mortars and not much else. What Weiss has that the men around him do not is a small calibrated map and a list of pre-calculated grid coordinates.
The map shows every road, every junction, every cluster of buildings within 15 miles of Hill 314. The grid coordinates have been worked out the day before, target by target, by Weiss and another forward observer named Charles Bartz, with help from a corporal named Frank Deneus. Each coordinate has a number.
When Weiss calls in a number, the fire direction center of the 230th field artillery battalion, 5 miles back across the rolling country, will already know exactly where to send the shells. Weiss does not need to talk the guns onto the target. He does not need to spot rounds and walk them in. He just has to say a number into the handset of his radio, and the fire will fall.
In the next hour, on the lower slopes of the hill, 300 German tanks and the thick part of four panzer divisions are going to come into the valley below him. Adolf Hitler has personally ordered them there. The orders are to drive west to Avranches, cut the American breakout in half, isolate General George Patton’s Third Army in Brittany, and turn the Normandy campaign on its head.
The German divisions committed to the attack are not second-rate units. They include the Second SS Panzer Division Das Reich, the Second Panzer Division, the 116th Panzer Division, the 17th SS Panzergrenadier Division Götz von Berlichingen, and elements of the First SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler.
They have been moving since 1:00 in the morning, in the dark, without preparatory artillery, in order to preserve surprise. They have done it well. The American division they are about to hit, the 30th Infantry Division, the Old Hickory Division from Tennessee and the Carolinas, has only been in this sector for a day and a half.
Most of its men have not had time to dig proper holes. Inside 2 hours of the attack opening, the Germans will be in the streets of Mortain. They will overrun the headquarters of Weiss’s battalion in the town. They will surround Hill 314. The men on the hill, three rifle companies of the second battalion, plus the two forward observer parties, about 700 Americans in total, will be cut off.
They will have no resupply, no relief, no clear line of retreat. By every rule of any war ever fought, those companies should be captured or destroyed by noon on August 7. They are not. By the time the second battalion is finally relieved on the afternoon of August 12, the men on Hill 314 will have held off elements of three panzer divisions for 5 days.
Of the roughly 700 Americans who started the action on the hill, only 357 will be in any condition to walk down it. The southern arm of Hitler’s offensive will have collapsed. The reason the southern arm collapsed will not, in the end, be the riflemen of the second battalion. The reason will be that two lieutenants and one corporal with a radio, sitting on the highest ground for 15 miles in any direction, were able for five straight days to reach back across the country and bring the entire weight of an American corps’s worth of
artillery down on any patch of ground they could see. There was nothing in the German army of 1944 that worked that way. There would not be anything until well after the war. This is the story of how that capability was built, and of why German infantry on the western front in 1944 and 1945 came to tell their interrogators, in different sectors, in different months, in slightly different words, that no artillery they had ever met, including the Soviet barrages they had survived in Russia, was as impossible to live through as the
artillery the Americans were bringing down on them. It is not a story of heavier guns. The German 105-mm howitzer was the equal of the American 105. The German 150-mm outranged the American 155 at certain charges. It is not, in the end, a story of more guns, either, although the Americans did have more by the autumn of 1944.
It is a story of a system, a way of turning a forward observer with a radio into the hand of an enormous coordinated weapon, a way of taking the fire of dozens of guns scattered across miles of country and dropping every shell on the same patch of dirt at the same instant. That system was not built in 1944. It was built 15 years earlier, in peacetime, in southwestern Oklahoma, by a small group of officers in a school that almost nobody in the United States Army cared about.
To see how Hill 314 happened, we have to start there. Fort Sill in 1929 was a tired post. The Field Artillery School had been there since the founding order of 1911, when then Captain Dan Tyler Moore, who had been Theodore Roosevelt’s military aide and sparring partner, had been sent home from the German Field Artillery School at Jüterbog, where he had spent the previous year as the first foreign officer ever admitted, and put in charge of building an American equivalent.
The school had opened in September of 1911. Then the budget cuts of the 1920s had hit it. The horses still pulled the guns. The doctrine in the manuals was still essentially the doctrine of the western front of 1918, in which each battery commander spotted his own rounds from a wooden tower near his own guns and adjusted his fire by eye.
There was no system to coordinate the fire of one battalion with the fire of another. If a forward officer wanted three batteries to fire on the same target at the same time, he had to telephone or ride to each one in turn, give them the data, and hope the data still applied by the time everyone was ready. Most of the time, it did not. The Americans, like every army on earth, were still fighting the previous war.
Into this sleepy school in the late 1920s came a major named Carlos Brewer, who had taught at Fort Sill since 1928 and had been appointed director of the gunnery department. Brewer was not a flashy officer. He was the kind of man who liked mathematics. He had spent the 1920s watching how slow and how clumsy his branch was at the most basic task that any artillery is supposed to perform, which is to put a lot of shells on a small piece of ground at the same instant. He thought he could do better.
He had no money, no special equipment, and no political backing. What he had was a few junior officers who were as obsessed with the problem as he was, and a body of recent graduates who could be persuaded to try things on the practice ranges that no field manual currently allowed.
Brewer attacked the part of the system that he believed was the bottleneck, which was the calculation. Every gun, in order to hit a target, needs a precise angle and a precise elevation, and those numbers depend on where the gun is, where the target is, the weather, the temperature of the propellant, the wear on the barrel, and a dozen other variables.
In 1929, every battery was doing those calculations on its own, with its own officers, using its own slide rules. Brewer asked a question that sounded almost rude inside his branch. Why do we need every battery to compute these numbers separately? What if all the computation happened in one place? What if a single officer, in one tent, with one map and a small team of mathematicians, took the call from the forward observer, did the math once, and sent the answers out to every gun within range simultaneously? It took Brewer and his department about 3 years
to make the idea work on the range. By the spring of 1931, his department was successfully demonstrating massed battalion fire using a new firing chart method. By 1934, under his successor, Major Orlando Ward, the system had been refined to the point that a single tent, which the Americans had begun to call the fire direction center, was the brain of an artillery battalion of 12 guns, and the gun batteries had become its hands.
Ward’s particular addition was insistence that the system be designed so that any battery within range, regardless of which battalion it formally belonged to, could be commanded to fire on any target the fire direction center named. Lieutenant Colonel H. L. C. Jones, Ward’s contemporary, then refined the procedures and pushed them out across the field artillery community in the years that followed.
This was the part nobody else in any other army was doing. The British, the French, the Soviets, the Japanese, the Germans were all either devolving fire control downward to the battery commander or attempting centralization only within a single battalion. The British, by late 1941 and 1942, were independently developing a similar centralizing approach in the North African desert, which they would call the Mike, Uncle, and Victor and William target system with a Mike target massing the guns of a regiment and a Victor target the guns of an entire core. The
British, like the Americans, would eventually be capable of dropping the fire of hundreds of guns on a single point. They synchronized using BBC time pip signals on the radio. By Normandy in 1944, they could lay down a Victor target on a single map reference and put a thousand guns on it.
The British called it a stonk after the Royal Artillery slang. The American innovation, alongside the British one, which the Army Historical Foundation describes as the uniquely American ability of that period, was the Fort Sill fire direction center plus the firing chart, which together meant that the man at the radio asking for the fire could be almost anyone.
He did not need to be a field grade officer with years of experience. He could be a lieutenant. He could be a corporal with mathematical training. He could call the mission and the fire direction center would mass the fires of every battery in range from however many battalions in a matter of minutes. By the early years of the war, the Americans had a name for the killing technique this system enabled.
They called it time on target. The idea was simple to state and difficult to do. An ordinary artillery barrage rises in pitch. The first shells come in. The men on the ground hear them. The men dive for the bottom of their foxholes. Most of the casualties from the barrage are inflicted on the first round or two before everyone is down.
After that, the barrage can go on for an hour without doing much. A time on target mission did not work that way. A time on target mission was calculated so that all of the shells from all of the participating batteries, even when those batteries were miles apart and firing different distances, would arrive on the target within a window of about 3 seconds.
There was no first round. There was no warning whistle. There was no chance to dive. The men on the ground heard the entire weight of three or four or 12 battalions of guns in the same instant. The casualties from a time on target mission were therefore not concentrated in the first round because there was no first round.
They were spread across every man in the target area. Every man who was upright. Every man who was sleeping. Every man who was eating. Every man who was relieving himself behind a tree. That was the system Lieutenant Robert Weiss had at his disposal on the morning of August 7th, 1944, when the German tanks began to move below Hill 314.
The Germans struck Mortain at 1:00 in the morning. The leading tanks of the 2nd SS Panzer Division and the 17th SS Panzer Grenadier Division pushed into the town within the hour. They overran the command post of the 2nd Battalion of the 120th in the streets of Mortain itself and captured the battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Eeds Hardaway.
They cut the road behind the hill. By dawn, the three rifle companies on top of Hill 314, E, G, and K, were surrounded. Captain Reynold C. Erickson, the senior surviving officer in the perimeter, took command of the position. The forward observer parties were the only direct line the men on the hill still had to anyone outside it.
The first major German attempt to take the hill itself came in the pre-dawn hours of August 8th. The German commanders had decided to try the hill in the dark on the theory that the American artillery would be inaccurate at night without visual observation. They were wrong. Weiss and Bartz had spent the previous afternoon plotting what the artillerymen called emergency barrage numbers and normal barrage numbers along every approach road and every assembly area their position commanded.
Each plotted point had a number. When the German infantry came up the slopes, Weiss did not need to spot rounds and adjust them onto the target. He needed only to call a number into the radio. The 230th Field Artillery Battalion’s fire direction center already had the data. The rounds came down on the German formations in the dark with no warning on grids the Germans believed they had reached unobserved.
The German night attacks were broken before they could overrun the perimeter. By the morning of the 8th, Weiss and Bartz had a secondary source. The forward observers on Hill 314 had been given priority access to the heavy artillery of VII Corps. Their fire missions were not limited to the 12 guns of the 230th.
When they called, the Corps’ fire direction net could mass the fires of multiple battalions of 105 and 155 mm howitzers and even of the heavier core level pieces on whatever target the men on the hill named. Over the next four days, those calls were almost continuous. The men on the summit could see for 15 miles.
Every German movement they could see they called in. Every assembly area. Every column on the road. Every artillery battery that revealed itself by firing. Every truck park. The Corps fire direction net put the fires where the lieutenants asked. The conditions on the hill were terrible. The Americans had no food after the second day. They had almost no water.
Their radio batteries weakened steadily and the men of the observer parties scavenged from the dead and the captured. The Germans tried more than once to wipe the observers out specifically. White phosphorus rounds were dropped on the summit. Infantry assaults pressed against the perimeter. At one point in the action, with German troops within rifle distance of his foxhole, Robert Weiss called artillery fire directly onto his own position.
The fire direction center, miles away, took the call without arguing. The rounds came down where he asked. He survived. The German infantry around him did not all survive. The hill held. When elements of the 35th Infantry Division reached the hilltop on the afternoon of August 12, of the roughly 700 Americans who had started the action on August 7, only 357 were able to walk down the hill.
Weiss alone, by his own count later, had called in 193 fire missions during the six days. Captain Erickson and four of his company commanders, Captain Delmont Byrne and First Lieutenants Ralph Curley, Joseph Riza, and Ronald Woody Jr., were each awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. The 2nd Battalion of the 120th received the Presidential Unit Citation.
The entire 30th Infantry Division would not formally receive its Presidential Unit Citation for the Mortain action until March 17, 2020 by executive order, almost 76 years after the battle. What happened on Hill 314 between August 7 and August 12, 1944, was not the result of an exceptional weapon or an exceptional officer or an exceptional unit.
The men on the hill were ordinary American infantry from a National Guard Division that had landed in France barely a month before. The thing that made the difference was the system that allowed two lieutenants and a corporal with a radio to act as the trigger of an enormous distributed weapon. That system, by August of 1944, had been tested up and down the line for a year in Sicily, in Italy, and across Normandy from the beaches inland.
The Germans had been on the receiving end of it from the moment they engaged American forces on the continent and they had been writing about it in their internal reports since the summer. If the men on Hill 314 are someone you would like to keep visible for one more week, the small button below this video does that.
It is the entire reason these people are not yet forgotten. It costs nothing and I will not ask twice. The corporal who plotted those barrage numbers with Weiss and Bartz was a 19-year-old from Athens, Texas named Frank Denius. Denius had been a teenager only months earlier. He was born in January 1925 in Uniontown, Pennsylvania and had grown up in Athens, the small East Texas town his family considered home.
He had been drafted out of the local schools, had landed in Normandy on D plus 3 with the 230th Field Artillery Battalion, had received his first Silver Star for an action on July 17, 1944, and had been promoted from private first class to corporal afterward. By Mortain, he was the chief of detail of First Lieutenant Charles Bartz’s forward observer party.
Before the war was over, he would receive the Silver Star three more times for actions during the breakout from Normandy, the campaign in the Low Countries, and the fighting in Germany. Four Silver Stars in less than a year. He was a quiet, unflashing young man who finished the war as a staff sergeant, came home to Texas, went to law school at the University of Texas, and spent the rest of his life as an attorney in Austin.
He became one of the great benefactors of the University of Texas, particularly its football program, for which the indoor practice field on campus is named in his honor. He died on July 29, 2018 at age 93. Denius’ significance for this story is not just personal. He was, in a quiet way, representative of what made the American artillery system work.
The fire direction center could only mass fires as fast as the man at the radio could call them in. And the man at the radio had to be capable of reading a map under shell fire, identifying a grid coordinate, calculating a correction in his head, and transmitting a coherent fire request without wasting a syllable. The Americans had a great many men who could do this.
They were not, in the main, professional soldiers. They were teenagers and men in their early 20s from Iowa farms and Pennsylvania steel mills and Texas oil fields. They had been through an American public school system that had drilled basic geometry and decimal arithmetic into almost everyone who passed through the eighth grade, and most of them had grown up with country store credit ledgers, farm budgets, machine shop tolerances, baseball box scores.
The number was not strange to them. The number was a tool, and they had been using it since they were children. The Wehrmacht had observers, too, and very good ones. But, the Wehrmacht did not have a system that could translate an observer’s request into the simultaneous fire of several battalions in a matter of minutes.
According to the Army Historical Foundation’s comparison of American and German artillery in the Second World War, the German Army’s typical response time from a call for fire on a target of opportunity to rounds on the target was on the order of 10 to 12 minutes. The American response time, even early in the war, was often under 3 minutes.
By 1944, it was sometimes under 1 minute for pre-registered targets, like the ones Weiss had plotted from Hill 314. The difference is not a difference of equipment. It is a difference of architecture. In the autumn of 1944, the same system met the Germans in a different kind of country and under different conditions.
The country was the Hurtgen Forest, a 50-square-mile patch of dense fir woods, deep ravines, and steep slopes south of Aachen on the German border. The American First Army had been ordered to push through it as part of the broader effort to reach the Rhine. The fighting that resulted from September of 1944 into early February of 1945 would become the longest single battle the United States Army has ever fought, and one of the costliest.
Several American infantry divisions, including the 9th, the 28th, the 4th, the 8th, the 78th, and the 83rd, would be ground down inside the forest. The Germans, defending prepared positions in dense woods that masked observation and limited the use of armor, fought from log bunkers and well-dug foxholes with overhead cover meant to shelter their men from the kind of fire they had survived in Russia.
What the Americans brought into the forest, and what the Germans had not faced in Russia, was the way the canopy itself could be turned into a weapon. American artillery firing standard high-explosive shells with point-detonating contact fuses found that rounds passing through the upper branches of the fir trees often detonated in the canopy itself, 20 to 100 feet above the forest floor.
The result for the men in the foxholes below was an airburst by accident. Steel splinters from the shell, plus a cloud of sharpened wood splinters from the shattered branches, came straight down into positions that had been dug to defeat ground-level explosions and were not prepared for fire from above. Ernest Hemingway, embedded as a war correspondent with the 22nd Infantry Regiment of the 4th Infantry Division during the November fighting in the forest, described the experience to his readers in terms borrowed from the First
World War, calling it Passchendaele with treebursts. Colonel Charles Truman Bucklanam, the regimental commander of the 22nd, a friend of Hemingway’s, summarized the asymmetry as bluntly as any commander has ever summarized a tactical problem. He observed that his troops were combing treebursts out of their hair while the German lay snug in his hole.
The German lay snug in his hole only as long as the canopy held. As the bombardments continued, the upper branches of the fir trees were gradually torn off, and the protective effect of the trees as bursting platforms diminished. But, as that happened, the position of the German infantryman did not improve because the fire missions kept arriving, and the foxholes themselves were now exposed.
By the time the VT fused shells reached the field artillery in late December, the airbursts that had been an accident of the canopy in the autumn became deliberate at any height the gunners chose to set them. There was no longer a tree line that mattered for protection. There was only the height of the burst and the man in the hole below it.
There is a reason the German artillery branch was structured the way it was, and the reason had very little to do with any failure of intelligence or initiative on the part of the men in the German artillery. At the end of the First World War, the Germans had been the masters of massed indirect fire.
Colonel Georg Bruchmüller, nicknamed by his own men Dochbruchmüller, breakthrough Müller, had developed in the late stages of that war an artillery doctrine that emphasized very tightly coordinated fire plans across enormous frontages. His methods had been the high point of First World War artillery science, but the Treaty of Versailles, signed in 1919, had forbidden the new German Reichswehr from possessing heavy artillery and had limited its army to 100,000 men.
The largest piece the Germans were officially permitted was the 105-mm field howitzer. For more than a decade after Versailles, the German artillery school survived in a reduced form, focused on what it was permitted to focus on, which was the work of the individual battery and its commander. Centralized coordination above the battery was largely set aside because the guns to coordinate did not exist.
When Hitler repudiated Versailles in the mid-1930s and the heavy guns came back, the German Army rebuilt its artillery branch quickly, but it built that branch on the institutional habits of the previous 15 years. The battery was the unit of action. The battery commander was the king of his own fire.
There was a second reason, which had to do with simple supply. The Army Historical Foundation comparison documents that the German Fifth Panzer Army’s artillery in Normandy was firing at roughly 10% of the rate of the British artillery facing it across the line, partly because the German production system simply could not keep up with battlefield demand.
The Wehrmacht’s quartermasters could not afford to let a battery commander throw 12 rounds at a target as a registration exercise the way an American battalion could. German fire missions were therefore, of necessity, shorter and stingier. A typical Wehrmacht fire mission against a target of opportunity might be one or two shots per battery, one battery per mission.
An American time-on-target shoot routinely committed 60 rounds across multiple battalions in less than a minute. Even when the German commander had, on paper, the same number of guns within range. He did not have the doctrine to use them as a single weapon, and he did not have the shells to do it if he had.
By the late summer and autumn of 1944, after Mortain, after the Falaise Pocket, after the sprint across France, the Americans had also begun to face a second German problem at scale. American forward observers, by the time their armies reached the German border, were being given fire missions on dispersed German positions the Germans believed had been concealed, and the Americans were finding them.
They were finding them because core-level fire direction nets had grown highly sophisticated at integrating air observation, captured maps, sound ranging, flash spotting, and intercepted radio traffic. The Germans tried to respond by dispersing their formations more widely. The Americans simply called more fire missions on more locations.
The Germans tried to attack at night on the theory that ground observers would fail. The American fire direction centers were already pre-registered on every road and crossroads. The Germans tried to attack in bad weather on the theory that air observers and fighter-bombers would be grounded. The American artillery did not need air observers for pre-registered targets, and bad weather affected accuracy at the margins, but did not stop the system.
By the early spring of 1945, German reports from the 15th Army area noted with weary precision that no method of countering American artillery had so far produced any consistent benefit, and that the most effective tactic was simply to disperse, to dig deep, and to accept that any concentration of force longer than a few minutes would be detected and shelled.
Then, in December of 1944, the system acquired one more piece of equipment that took the survival rate of German troops in the open another long step downward. The piece of equipment was called the variable time fuse. The men in the field called it the funny fuse. The official designation was the VT fuse.
The variable time fuse was a tiny radio transmitter and receiver packed into the nose of an artillery shell that detected its own distance to the ground and detonated the shell at a preset height, usually around 30 feet up. It had been developed beginning in 1940 in a partnership between British scientists and the United States Navy.
By 1943, the Navy was using it against Japanese aircraft in the Pacific, where the cruiser Helena scored the first known combat kill with one on January 5, 1943, against a Val dive bomber off Guadalcanal. The Pentagon, however, refused to release the fuse for use over land in Europe on the grounds that an unexploded shell containing one might fall into German hands and be reverse-engineered for use against Allied bombers.
Through the spring, summer, and autumn of 1944, while Allied infantry was being chewed up in Normandy, in the Hurtgen Forest, and at Aachen, the VT fuse was authorized for anti-aircraft use over land in Britain against the V-1 flying bombs, and from late October for anti-aircraft defense of Antwerp. It was not authorized for ground attack use against German troops.
That changed on December 16, 1944. On the first day of the German Ardennes Offensive, Colonel George Axelson, commanding the 406th Artillery Group near Montchau, decided that the emergency at the front justified breaking the embargo. He ordered his guns to use the VT shells that had been quietly shipped to Europe in advance.
On December 19, 3 days later, General Dwight Eisenhower formally requested clearance for ground attack use. On December 21, the restrictions were lifted. About 200,000 VT fused shells, code named posit for the United States Army, were fired into the German offensive in the weeks that followed. The effect on German infantry was immediate.
A standard contact fused shell, exploding when it struck the ground, dissipated most of its blast and a great deal of its shrapnel into the dirt. A man in a foxhole was reasonably safe from a contact fused round unless it landed almost exactly in the foxhole with him. A VT fused shell did not land. A VT fused shell exploded above the foxhole in the air, and the shrapnel from the burst traveled downward in a cone.
And the man in the foxhole, no matter how deep he had dug it, was inside that cone. Trench cover, log roofs, the sort of overhead protection that German infantry had relied on against Soviet shelling on the Eastern Front, none of it worked against VT airbursts because the explosion was happening above the cover.
General George Patton, after the Battle of the Bulge, wrote a letter to Major General Levin Campbell Jr., the Chief of Army Ordnance, about the effects of the new fuse. The letter is one of the most quoted commander assessments of any single weapon on either side of the entire Second World War. Patton said the new shell with the funny fuse was devastating.
He described one fire mission against a German battalion attempting to cross the Sauer River near Echternach in late December. The mission, by his count, killed 702 men. He wrote that he believed when other armies eventually obtained the fuse, the methods of land warfare would have to be revised. And he added that he was glad that the Americans had thought of it first.
In another wartime letter, Patton put it more simply. He said that the funny fuse won the Battle of the Bulge for them. The letter is in the Patton papers. The quotation is real. The most concentrated demonstration of the VT fuse and the underlying American fire control system during the Ardennes campaign, and the one that has become best known to historians, was the defense of the small Belgian crossroads town of Bastogne during the last week of December 1944.
The 101st Airborne Division holding the perimeter under Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe had been encircled by elements of multiple German divisions. The town was a critical road hub on the German axis of advance, and the German plan depended on taking it quickly. They did not take it.
One of the reasons they did not was that the 101st was supported inside the perimeter by a substantial concentration of artillery, including the 321st Glider Field Artillery Battalion under Lieutenant Colonel Edward Carmichael, the 377th Parachute Field Artillery Battalion under Lieutenant Colonel Harry Elkins, the 907th Glider Field Artillery Battalion under Lieutenant Colonel Clarence Nelson, and the 463rd Parachute Field Artillery Battalion under Lieutenant Colonel John Cooper, plus the towed tank destroyers of the 705th Tank Destroyer Battalion. The
463rd was an unusual case. Originally slated to join the 17th Airborne Division and not formally part of the 101st, Cooper had volunteered his battalion to McAuliffe within 45 minutes of hearing that the 101st was being rushed to Belgium, and the battalion had reached Hemroulle, just outside Bastogne, in time to be inside the encirclement when the Germans closed it on December 20.
As the perimeter contracted under German pressure, the artillery battalions inside it found themselves with overlapping fields of fire across every approach. Whatever direction the Germans came from, multiple battalions could mass on them. By December 23, with the weather clearing enough for resupply by air, ammunition began to arrive in quantity.
By December 26, when the relief column from Lieutenant General George Patton’s Third Army broke through the southern German line and reached the perimeter, the gun batteries inside Bastogne had spent days dropping massed fires, increasingly with VT fused shells after the embargo lifted on December 21, on every German unit that attempted to close on the town.
The German 26th Volksgrenadier Division, the Panzer Lehr Division, and the 15th Panzergrenadier Division all left battalion-sized formations dead in the snow on the Bastogne approaches. American fire control inside Bastogne was, by the accounts of all sides, the precise capability the Wehrmacht had no answer for.
A thin defending force, properly anchored to a fire direction net with overlapping artillery battalions, could deny ground to a much larger attacker by simply punishing every attempt at concentration the attacker made. If your father or your grandfather served in the Second World War, anywhere in the world, in any branch, I would consider it a kindness if you wrote his name in the comments, the unit, the place, anything you remember.
The official records have most of the dates. They do not have the small things. The small things are kept by the families, and they deserve to be written down somewhere besides a drawer. The most useful evidence of what American artillery actually did to the German Army in the last year of the war is not a single dramatic statement.
It is a body of after-action reports, prisoner of war interrogations, and post-war interviews that the Allied intelligence services accumulated through 1944 and 1945, and that the United States Army then expanded, beginning in 1945, into the Foreign Military Studies Project. Foreign Military Studies was a program in which captured German officers, by then prisoners of war in American custody, were paid to write monographs about their experience for the benefit of the United States Army.
The studies range from the level of theater commanders down to the level of regimental staff officers. They are now held at the United States Army Center of Military History and at the National Archives, and they have been worked through by historians ever since. What those documents show, again and again, is that the American artillery problem was not one the Wehrmacht had a doctrinal answer for, did not have the equipment to match, did not have the supply of shells to imitate, and at the speed it was happening did not have time
to learn. It is not that the Germans, at any level, failed to notice. They noticed. Their reports describe the American fire patterns with careful, almost respectful, professional detail. What the reports cannot do is propose a counter that worked. There is a particular line in the post-war literature about American artillery in Normandy that historians keep returning to, and it concerns the destruction of the Panzer Lehr Division during Operation Cobra in late July of 1944.
The division’s commander, General Leutnant Fritz Bayerlein, gave a post-war interrogation on what had happened to his unit in those days. Cobra opened on July 25 with the most concentrated American carpet bombing of the entire campaign in the West, with about 1,500 heavy bombers and several hundred fighter bombers committed to the bombardment, and the Panzer Lehr was directly underneath it.
Bayerlein later estimated that the bombing accounted for roughly half of his casualties. He attributed roughly 30% more to American artillery, which fell on the survivors as they tried to reorganize. The remaining 20% he assigned to other weapons. The exact percentages are Bayerlein’s own. Whatever the precise numbers, the point his account makes is consistent with what the operational records of the rest of the campaign will show.
The Americans were able to follow up an air strike or an armored attack with sustained, accurate, large-scale artillery in a way that prevented German formations from regrouping after the initial blow had landed. Every time a column tried to form up, a fire mission found it. This pattern shows up at the level of the medical statistics for the war.
The United States Army Surgeon General’s Office, in its post-war wound ballistics studies and in the work that grew out of the Operations Research Office, found that across the European theater, fragmentation from artillery and mortar shells, not small arms fire, was the dominant cause of battle wounds inflicted on both sides.
Studies of casualty data from the Western Front in 1944 and 1945 consistently put fragmentation, dominated by artillery and mortar fire, as the cause of well over half of all battlefield wounds, and in many sectors, substantially more. The typical German infantryman on the Western Front in the last winter of the war was not most likely to be hit by a rifle bullet, by a grenade, by a tank shell, or by a fighter bomber.
He was most likely to be hit by the explosion of an American artillery shell that had not been aimed at him personally, but had been called down on the patch of ground he happened to be occupying. The Germans had built one of the great armies of human history. They had built it on doctrine and on training and on the personal capability of their officers and non-commissioned officers.
They had not built it to fight under the kind of artillery the Americans brought to France in 1944. No one had ever built an army to fight under that. The American system had been an accident of peacetime poverty, an answer to a budget problem, a quiet experiment in centralization conducted by majors at a forgotten school in Oklahoma.
By the time it met the Wehrmacht, it had become something the Wehrmacht had no doctrinal answer for. Robert Weiss, the lieutenant on Hill 314, survived the war. He went home to Indiana and later moved to Oregon, where he founded a law firm and practiced business and tax law for decades. Almost half a century after the battle, he wrote a memoir of his August on the hill called Fire Mission, published in 1998.
He returned to Mortain more than once for the anniversaries. Charles Barts also survived the war. Frank Dinius lived until 2018. The men of the rifle companies who had held the perimeter around the observers, those of them who survived, scattered after the war into the small lives that veterans of large wars usually return to.
Most of them never wrote anything down. The hill itself is still there. It is a small park now, with a memorial chapel built in stone, with stained glass panels inside that name the men who held the position from August 7 to August 12, 1944. There are still traces of the foxholes around the summit. The view on a clear day runs for 15 miles.
That is the answer to the question we started with. Why did German infantry on the Western Front say American artillery was impossible to survive? They said it because the system that had been quietly built at Fort Sill in the late 1920s and early 1930s, refined through the late 30s, equipped with the variable time fuse in the winter of 1944, and put into the hands of teenagers and young men with radios on hill tops and in steeples and in attic windows from Normandy to the Rhine, did something no other army in the world had built itself
to do. It allowed an ordinary American forward observer, sometimes a corporal, sometimes a lieutenant, sometimes a sergeant, almost never a senior officer, to call down the entire weight of an army’s guns onto a patch of ground, and to do it before the men on that ground had any time to consider what was about to happen to them.
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