Just past midnight on August 7, 1944, a bare French hilltop, the American GIS called Hill 314, named for its elevation in meters, looming over the Norman market town of Mortine. On the crest, in a shallow hole scraped from rocky soil, a 21-year-old second lieutenant lay on his belly with a pair of binoculars and an FM radio strapped to his back.
His name was Robert L. Weiss. He was a forward observer with battery B, 230th Field Artillery Battalion, 30th Infantry Division. He had been on the hill for less than a day. He had never directed a single fire mission in combat. In the dark below him, four German Panza divisions were already moving. Operation Lutic was Adolf Hitler’s last counter offensive in Normandy.
An order from the furer himself to drive west from Mortan to the sea at Avanches split Patton’s third army from the rest of the American line and turn the campaign around in a single stroke. The road from Morta to Avanches, the only main road across the corridor Hitler wanted to seal, ran for 8 mi in plain view of the hilltop where Weiss lay.
Whoever held hill 314 could see and could hit anything that moved on that road. Weiss did not yet understand what he had been handed. He did not yet know that his battalion command post would be overrun in the next 4 hours. He did not yet know that the rifle companies on the hill with him, roughly 700 men of the second battalion, 120th infantry, would be cut off by dawn and surrounded for 6 days.
He did not yet know that his radio, an SCR610 weighing 35 lb in a leather case on his back, was about to become the most important piece of American equipment in Normandy. He knew only what every American forward observer knew. That when he sent his fire mission over the air, the system behind him would do the rest.
Over the next 6 days, working alongside First Lieutenant Charles A. Barts of Battery C. Weiss would call 193 fire missions from that hilltop. Each one would be processed in a fire direction center 5 mi to the west. Each one could be answered at the discretion of the men running that center by 12 guns or by all of them.
Each one could escalate if the target was rich enough and the commander above bold enough all the way to core artillery, every American tube within range of the target. That is what this story is about. Not one man with a radio, the system behind him and the men who built it and what it did to the German army in a hard summer. To understand what Weiss had on his back, you have to go to Fort Sil, Oklahoma 15 years earlier.
In the late 1920s and early 1930s, while every other major army in the world was refining the artillery methods of 1918, three officers in the gunnery department of the field artillery school at Fort Sil were quietly rewriting the rules. Their names show up in every authoritative branch history of the United States Field Artillery.
Major Carlos Brewer, who became director of the gunnery department in the late 1920s and stayed through the early 1930s. Major Orlando Ward, who succeeded him, and Lieutenant Colonel HLC Jones, who came after Ward and codified what the first two had built. The official history posted by the United States Army Field Artillery School describes the division of labor plainly.
Brewer introduced new fire direction techniques so that fire support would be more responsive. Ward developed the fire direction center itself to centralize command and control and to facilitate massing fire from multiple batteries on a single target. Jones improved what they had built and pushed it out through the rest of the field artillery community.
That sentence is dry. The thing it describes was not. If this story matters to you, a like keeps it in front of the men it was built for. Then we keep going. For 300 years, artillery had been a craft. Every gun crew knew its own piece, its own ranges, its own quirks. When a battery was given a target, its commander ran the problem from his own observation post, sometimes with the help of a forward officer with a flag or a field telephone.
When two batteries were ordered to mass fire on the same target, each computed its own data from its own position to that target, and the shells came in raggedly, the closer guns landing seconds before the farther ones. Soldiers in the impact area had time to find cover after the first round, because the first round announced the rest.
What Brewer and Ward and Jones built was a method that made all of that obsolete. The fire direction center was in the end a small room with map boards and slide rules and graphical firing tables and a few men with sharp pencils and good arithmetic. The men in that room held the master plot. Every gun in the battalion was located on it.
Every target reported by every observer was plotted on it. When a fire mission came in over the radio or the telephone, the men in the fire direction center did the geometry and the ballistics for all of the guns at once and sent each battery the firing data it needed. The guns did not have to see the target.
The observers did not have to know the firing data. The fire direction center sat in the middle and did the math. The breakthrough in retrospect is so simple that it is hard to see why no other army went there first. Every gun’s tube referenced not to a hilltop the gunners could see, but to a single shared grid computed in a single shared center served by a single shared set of firing tables.
A forward observer no longer had to be a gunnery expert. He needed only to identify a target, send map coordinates or a correction from a known point in the standardized fire mission language Brewer and Ward had taught at Fort Sil, and the room behind him would translate his call into firing data for every battery in range. The graphical firing table, introduced in 1939 and refined through the early war years, was what made the math fast enough to matter.
Before the new table came in, computing firing data for a 105 mm howitzer required a tabular range table, several minutes of arithmetic, and a clean piece of paper. With the new device, a man with a sharp pencil could read the data straight off a calibrated slide rule in under 30 seconds. A battalion fire direction center with three computers, each working a different batteries data could produce firing data for a three battery mission in under 2 minutes from the receipt of the call.
The radios were the other half of the breakthrough. Frequency modulated combat radios developed in the 1930s and acquired in quantity by the United States Army before the war were resistant to the kind of atmospheric noise that crippled amplitude modulated radios in heavy weather or over broken terrain. The SCR610 and 619 that forward observers carried into combat in 1944 were the descendants of that pre-war investment.
Sergeant Sassa, working a handset on the rocky soil of hill 314, was speaking on a radio whose underlying technology had been chosen 15 years earlier by men who understood that artillery without communications was artillery without a brain. The man above them all at Fort Sil in those years was Lieutenant Colonel Leslie J. McNair, later a four-star general and commander of Army ground forces.
McNair was the institutional patron of the work. He saw what Brewer and Ward had built and made sure it became doctrine across the field artillery, not just one school’s experiment. McNair was killed by shortfalling American bombs near St. Low on July 25, 1944, 2 weeks before Weiss carried his radio onto Hill 314. He never saw what his school had wrought. There is a grim irony in that.
given his life’s work on accurate fire. What the fire direction center made possible was the technique called time on target. The Americans had a radio code name for it, serenade, but in the field the men just called it to t. The fire direction center counted down to all participating batteries on the same net.
Each battery computed the time of flight from its own guns to the target. Each battery fired the appropriate seconds early so that every shell from every battery, regardless of range or angle, arrived in the impact area at the same instant. The first round and the 100th round landed together. There was no warning.
The defenders did not get to find cover after the opening salvo because there was no opening salvo. There was one salvo, all of it, at once. By the end of the war, an American toot could put down the fires of three battalions in one count or 12 or 20. With a core level mission, all of the guns within range of the target could fire on a single order.
The fire direction center system made it not just possible, but procedurally routine. The first time American massed indirect fire decided a battle in the war was at Elwetar in Tunisia on March 23, 1943. Less than 5 weeks earlier, the same first infantry division had been beaten badly at Casarine Pass by RML’s veterans, and the United States Army’s first reputation in North Africa had been one of green troops, bad leadership, and worse coordination.
The American artillery in those early Tunisian weeks had been particularly criticized in the afteraction reports. Batteries fired at targets they could not see, on data they could not verify, and missed. Elgatar was the answer. The 10th Panza Division, the same division that had broken the French at Sedan in 1940, attacked the first infantry division through a defile in the dry Tunisian hills.
The division commander was Major General Terry Allen. The division artillery commander. The man who actually ran the fires that day was Brigadier General Clif Andress, a quiet professional from the small interwar army who had spent his career thinking about fire support. The battery commanders under him had been trained on the fire direction center system in the years between the wars.
They knew what the system could do when it was given a chance. The German armor cut through one regiment and overran two American batteries in the opening hour. The American forward observers who survived the breakthrough did not run. They went to ground and kept calling. Spotter aircraft from the field artillery worked the German formations from overhead.
The fire direction centers behind the line on radios that did not break down collected the calls and masked the fires. Boyd dastrop in the official center of military history branch history king of battle describes what happened next in dry official pros. Radioequipped observers attached to the infantry and the armor units.
Observers in spotter aircraft overhead and the centralized command structure that Brewer and Ward had built 15 years before. all worked together to mass fire on the panzas and on every target of opportunity. The German armor was chewed apart by accurate observed fire and forced to withdraw.
The Americans had taken the worst of the opening blow and given back something the Germans had not expected. George Patton watched the battle and nearly lost his composure under German shellfire while doing it. Afterward, he found Andress and said something that Andras remembered for the rest of his life.
You really made a horse’s ass out of me, Patton said. But you also taught me something. Patton would later coin one of the most famous lines about American artillery in the war. I do not have to tell you who won the war, he said in early 1945. You know, the artillery did. The line is often quoted. It is worth taking seriously. Patton was a cavalry officer by training, a tanker by inclination, a man who believed in mobility and shock and personal aggression.
He was not the kind of officer who naturally credited artillery for anything. He told American audiences in 1945 that the artillery had won the war because he had seen it do so in front of him in two theaters. Manton Eddie who commanded the 9inth Infantry Division through North Africa and Sicily and Normandy and later commanded 12th Corps under Patton captured the German verdict in a single sentence that Dastrop quotes in King of Battle.
One Nazi who had served on almost every German front. Eddie said told his interrogators that the American artillery fire was the most deadly that he had experienced. There is one more piece of the system that has to be set on the table before the story moves back to Hill 314, the eye in the sky. Until 1942, every American observation aircraft belonged to the Army Air Forces.
The field artillery had no organic aircraft of its own. When a battalion needed an aerial spotter, it had to request air observation through the air, which controlled the schedule, the aircraft, and the pilots. The Field Artillery Journal of April 1941 described the result with restraint. The artillery never knew when air observation would be available.
The fight to put light aircraft directly under field artillery control was led by Major General Robert M. Danford, the chief of field artillery. His opponent was General Henry H. Arnold, the chief of the army airore, who considered low and slow observation aircraft obsolete in modern war and did not want to surrender any aviation function to another branch.
Edgar reigns in eyes of the artillery, the center of military history’s authoritative study, traced the bureaucratic combat through its full course. Danford won. On June 6, 1942, a war department directive allotted two light aircraft, two pilots, and one mechanic to each field artillery battalion, and the same complement to each artillery group, division artillery headquarters, and core artillery headquarters.
The aircraft were Piper J3 Cubs, reddes designated as L4s in the military inventory. They also flew Aranka L3s, Stinson L5s, and Taylorcraft L2s. The Piper became the workhorse. The army would eventually buy more than 6,300 L4s. The nickname came from Major General Inis P. Swift, who commanded the first cavalry division at Fort Bliss in 1941.
Swift watched one of the little planes bouncing across rough desert terrain during the maneuvers, came over to the pilot after he had landed and said, “You look just like a damned grasshopper.” The name stuck. The Piper L4 became the grasshopper. The Stinson and the Arona and the Taylorcraft inherited the name by association. What the grasshoppers gave the fire direction center was an I500 ft in the air traveling at 60 knots flown by a lieutenant who spoke the same fire mission language as the lieutenant on the ground. From an L4, a pilot could
see across the backside of a ridge to a German artillery park the men in the foxholes could not see. He could see a column of trucks on a road the infantry was about to cross. He could see a MarkV tank hiding under camouflage at the edge of a treeine. And he could call the fire mission himself and the fire direction center 5 or 10 mi behind him would do the math and the rounds would come.
Dastrop quotes a first army afteraction report from Operation Cobra. The July 1944 breakout from Normandy. The presence of air observers over enemy lines. The report stated in its dry official language caused the Germans to curtail their artillery firing to avoid disclosing their batteries. When an L4 was overhead, German gunners often simply stopped shooting.
They preferred to remain hidden than to be ranged in by the system the Grasshopper served. The Germans learned to dread the little planes. They could shoot them down only at the cost of revealing the position that had fired at them, and that cost was high. By the autumn of 1944, the air over American artillery positions belonged in daylight at least to the L4s.
One of the L4 pilots, Major Charles M. Carpenter of the 71st Armored Field Artillery Battalion, Fifth Armored Division, decided in the autumn of 1944 that the L4 was capable of more than observation. He had bazookas mounted on the wing struts of his Piper, three on each side, six total, fired by pull cables that ran into the cockpit. He named the aircraft Rosie the Rocketer and went hunting German armor in Lraine.
He damaged or destroyed several armored vehicles before higher headquarters made him stop. Rosie the Rocketer has been restored and is on display at the American Heritage Museum. Two other men of the same battalion in the spring of 1945 drew pistols from the cockpit of their L4 and forced down a German Feasler Storch observation plane.
It may have been the last air-to-air kill of the European War. Both aircraft were unarmed reconnaissance machines. Both pilots were field artillery officers. The storch went down because two Americans with sidearms refused to fly past it. These were not the main work of the L4s. The main work was correction of fire from 1500 ft above the German lines.
But the grasshoppers were flown by left tenants of the field artillery and left tenants of the field artillery in the American army of 1944 had been taught at Fort Sill or one of its replacement schools that the war was theirs to win. That is the system Robert Weiss carried on his back onto Hill 314. The defenders on the hill were the second battalion 120th infantry regiment of the 30th infantry division known as Old Hickory.
Their commander was Lieutenant Colonel Eids Hardway. The three rifle companies on the crest were company E under first left tenant Ralph Curley, Company G under first left tenant Ronal Woody Jr. and Company K under first left tenant Joseph Reza. Hardaway himself had been caught down in the town of Mortturn when the German attack hit just past midnight. He never reached the hill.
Captain Reynold Ericson took command of the surrounded position on the crest. The artillery on the hill was Weiss’s team from battery B and Bart’s team from battery C. Both of the 230th Field Artillery Battalion 12 M2 A1 105 mm howitzers in firing positions 5 mi to the west. The battalion commander was Lieutenant Colonel Lewis Vman.
Sergeant Sassa was Weiss’s radio operator. Frank Denius, 19 years old and decorated four times for valor before the war ended, was a sergeant on Bart’s team. Mortaine was the action where he earned the first. When dawn came on August 7, the men on the hill counted the enemy in front of them. The second SS Panza division called Das Reich, the unit that had massacred the village of Oridor Saglane. two months earlier.
The 17th SS Panza Grenadier Division, elements of the first SS Panza Division, the 116th Panza Division, four Panza Divisions, the spearhead of an army group’s counteroffensive, all converging on a thin road through a French valley, and a hilltop full of American infantry sitting directly above that road. The hill was already cut off.
The battalion command post in the town was already overrun. The radios reaching the rest of the division were already in German hands or off the air. Only one radio was still working, the SCR610 on Weiss’s back, and the spare set Barts had with his own team. Weiss called his first fire mission of the siege. Sassa keyed the handset and sent it on the air.
Fire mission, Weiss said, and gave the coordinates. 5 miles to the west in the 230ths fire direction center. Men with sharp pencils plotted the target, ran the geometry, sent firing data to 12 gun positions. Vman, the battalion commander, would later make a three-word reply on the FM net into something of a mantra for the men on the hill.
On the way, he said, and the rounds came. By the second day, Weiss and Barts were calling fire on targets they could see all around the base of the hill. German infantry forming up for assault. Panza columns moving on the road. Mortar teams setting up in the orchards. Each fire mission processed by the fire direction center.
Each fire mission escalating when the target warranted from the 12 guns of the 230th to the 36 guns of the entire 30th division artillery to the massed fires of the 7th core artillery park. White phosphorus was the worst of it for the Germans. The shells burst overhead and rained burning particles down on men in open assembly areas.
Rick Atkinson in the guns at last light describes what the men on the hill watched happen below them. Artillery curtains directed from hill 314 paralyzed as Reich kept the 17th SS Panza Grenadier Division from scaling the hill and prevented a collapse of the southern flank of the 30th division. White phosphorus forced enemy troops into the open.
High explosive then cut them to scraps. The men on the hill were dying, too. Mortar rounds came down on the crest. Snipers worked the slopes. The wounded had no shelter beyond the holes the rifle companies had scraped from the rocky soil. There were no medical supplies after the first day. The water ran out on the third. The Germans called for surrender three times by loudspeaker.
Ericson refused all three times. On the fourth day, the supply problem became critical. C47 transport aircraft attempted to drop ammunition and medical bundles onto the hill. Most of the drops fell into German positions. The wind was wrong. The pilots could not get low enough to be accurate without taking unacceptable losses from German light flack.
The Americans on the ground watched their own supplies arrive in enemy hands. Some bundles landed close enough that men crawled out into the open to drag them in under fire. The wounded continued to die. On the fifth day, the artillery itself tried to deliver supplies to the hill.
The 230th fired smoke shells to mark the drop zone and then fired specially modified 105 mm rounds with their high explosive payloads replaced by morphine and plasma. Most of those shells broke up on impact and scattered their contents across the slopes. Some of the morphine survived, some of the plasma did not. What kept the hill was the radio.
Every German formation that gathered on the slopes was hit by massed American fires. Every Panza column that tried to push west on the road below was hit by massed American fires. The SS commanders threw infantry forward in dispersed order to reduce the artillery effect and the rifle companies on the crest stopped the dispersed attacks with their own small arms while the artillery worked the assembly areas behind them.
Weiss and Barts, working from observation posts a few feet from the cliff edges of the hilltop, called the missions through every hour of daylight and most of the hours of darkness. They slept in shifts. They ate cold rations. The radio batteries ran low and they switched between sets and rationed transmission time and stayed on the air.
The fire missions from Hill 314 were not all 12 gunshots. Many were single battery missions, four guns adjusting on a single target. the bread and butter of a battalion fire direction center. But when a target warranted it, when a Panza company was massing or a battalion of SS infantry was forming up for assault, the fire direction center could and did escalate.
The 36 guns of the 30th division artillery would answer. The core artillery would answer. The neighboring divisions artillery would answer. The system did not care that the lieutenant on the hill was 21 years old and had never directed a mission in combat before August 7. It cared about the coordinates and the call.
By the morning of August 12, the German offensive had broken. Patton’s third army had swung south and east and was closing the file’s pocket from below. The Canadians were closing it from the north. The road from Morta to Avanches that the Panzas had needed to take was a graveyard of burned vehicles. The four German divisions that had attacked across the corridor were withdrawing what was left of them eastward toward the pocket.
They would not all escape. A relief regiment from the 35th Infantry Division reached the base of Hill 314 and climbed to the crest. Of the 700 Americans who had been on the hill at the start, more than 400 were dead or wounded. Atkinson records the relief regiment carrying off 300 dead and wounded with another 370 men walking down on their own.
Among those who walked down were Lieutenant Weiss and Lieutenant Curley Erikson, Captain Delmmont Burn, and Lieutenants Curley, Reza, and Woody. Each received the Distinguished Service Cross. The second battalion of the 120th Infantry received the presidential unit citation formally announced by President Donald J. Trump.
On March 17, 2020, more than 75 years after the action, Weiss received the French Legion of Honor. What is striking about Morton, looking at the afteraction reports, is how little of it was about heroism in the abstract. Weiss and Barts were not particularly aggressive men. They were trained latenants doing trained work.
What they had was a system that worked. The Brewer and Warden and Jones idea codified at Fort Sill in the early 1930s taught the United States Army that one well-placed observer with a working radio and a fire direction center behind him could be worth a regiment. At Morta, two lieutenants with two radios were worth four Panza divisions.
If Mortine was the system at the scale of a hilltop, Elenborn Ridge in December 1944 was the system at the scale of a core. Between the two came Bastonia, which is worth seeing first. Baston was an encircled position. The 101st Airborne Division was cut off in the Belgian crossroads town from December 20 to December 26, 1944. Surrounded on all sides by German armor and infantry.
The division commander, Major General Maxwell Taylor, was in Washington when the German attack began. The acting division commander was Brigadier General Anthony Clement McAuliffe, who was the division artillery commander by his original assignment. What McAuliffe had inside the ring was a curious collection of guns.
The 101st’s organic parachute and glider field artillery battalions, the 321st, the 377th, the 463rd, and the 97th. The 755th Field Artillery Battalion attached from core. The 969th Field Artillery Battalion, one of the African-American colored battalions that would earn a presidential unit citation for the action. Elements of combat command B of the 10th Armored Division.
The acting division artillery commander was Colonel Thomas Sherburn. The fire direction structure inside Bastonia was the same structure that worked at Mortan and that would work at Elenborn. The difference was that Bastonia was encircled. The core level artillery park that should have been behind the division was on the wrong side of the German lines.
Sherburn and his battalion commanders had to work with what they had inside the perimeter, and that meant rationing ammunition by the round. A Field Artillery Journal article published in December 1945 by Lieutenant Colonel William Jesse, who served in the 101st’s artillery during the siege, called Bastonia an artillery classic. What he meant was that the encircled position survived because the men running the fires made every round count.
There was no luxury of mass core fire. There was the discipline of accurate observed fire by trained forward observers called through trained fire direction centers served by gun crews who knew that the next ammunition resupply would not come until the weather cleared. The weather cleared on December 23. C47 transports brought in ammunition by parachute.
The Christmas Day attack by the 15th Panza Grenadier Division and the 26th Vulks Grenadier Division was broken in part by the 463rd Parachute Field Artillery Battalion under Lieutenant Colonel John T. Kooper firing in direct lay against German tanks that had broken through the perimeter near the village of Hemrule. A parachute field artillery battalion firing in direct lay against tanks at 300 yds was not what the doctrine envisioned.
It was what the situation demanded. The crews did it. The Christmas Day attacks failed. The relief force from Patton’s third army spearheaded by the fourth armored division broke through to Bastonia on December 26. The doctrine had worked even when the core level structure could not reach the division. There is one more sequence from the opening days of the bulge that belongs in this story.
On December 16, 1944, the first day of the German offensive, an artillery forward observation team from one of the 371st Field Artillery Battalions batteries was positioned in the Belgian village of Lanzerath just south of the boundary between the 99th Infantry Division and the 14th Cavalry Group.
The team was a lieutenant named Warren Springer, a sergeant named Peter Gaki, a technician named Willard Whibbon, and a technician named Billy Queen. Four men, one radio. They found themselves alongside the intelligence and reconnaissance platoon of the 394th Infantry Regiment commanded by First Lieutenant Lyall Bu Jr.
in a position that the German Third Parachute Division proceeded to attack with a regiment of infantry. The I and R platoon was 18 men. Springer’s artillery team made it 22. They held the position for almost the entire day, killing or wounding a substantial fraction of the attacking German regiment until they were overrun in the early evening.
Queen was killed. The rest were captured. The four artillerymen, like the 18 infantrymen of the I and R platoon, would each later receive the distinguished service cross for the action. The platoon and Springer’s team together delayed the German third parachute division for the better part of a day on the opening day of the Arden offensive.
What that delay brought in the long arithmetic of the bulge was the time for the 99th division behind them to reach Elenborn Ridge and dig in. The men who held the position were rifle troops and one artillery team. The artillery team’s radio was the one that called fires onto the attacking Germans through the day.
Someone in your family lived a piece of this war. Maybe you grew up hearing the stories. Maybe he never spoke of them. Either way, his name belongs in the comments. His branch, his unit, his theater. The names are slipping away faster than most people realize. His does not have to. When the Germans launched the Arden’s counteroffensive on December 16, 1944, the four American divisions on the northern shoulder of the Bulge fought from a piece of high ground called Elenborn Ridge.
The divisions were the 99th, the 2nd, the 1st, and the 9th in various combinations across the line. Behind them sat what the Army Historical Foundation, working from official records, has described as 348 tubes, plus a battalion of 4.2 in chemical mortars, all under the control of one man. The man was Brigadier General Clif Andress, the same officer who had run first division artillery at Elgetta 20 months earlier.
He was now the assistant division commander of the first infantry division controlling the core level mass fires from a position across the lake from the ridge itself. The core artillery commander above him was brigadier general John Hines. 348 tubes is a number that has to be taken slowly. It means 12 battalions of 105 mm and 155 mm howitzers plus heavier core level pieces plus the mortar battalion all on the same radio nets.
All served by the same fire direction structure, all able to fire on the same target on a single order. The decisive mass fires came on December 21 and 22 at a village called Dom Bkenbach when the 12th SS Panza division and supporting Vulks grenaders attacked the 26th infantry regiment of the first division.
Andrus controlling the fires from a command post across the lake at Bhutenbach masked as many as 12 battalions on German assembly areas as the attack formed. The M1 155 mm howitzer battalions fired approximately 10,000 rounds on December 22 alone. The German experience of this fire was not abstract. A major of the 12th Vogs Grenadier Division, captured later and interrogated by first army staff, told his American interrogators that he had been in the German army since 1939.
He had served on the Eastern Front. He had been in heavy barges before. “We old soldiers,” the major said, had seen many a heavy barrage, but never before anything like this. On December 26th, the 246th Volk Grenadier Division attempted one last attack against the 99th Division on the ridge. The standard accounts of the battle put it in plain language.
The attack was mowed down virtually at the moment of its start by the artillery concentration of an entire American army corps. The position became, in the words of the official records, virtually unassalable. Elsenborn was also where a new American weapon entered the European war. The VT fuse called the proximity fuse or the variable time fuse in the records was a small radio transmitter and receiver in the nose of the shell.
It bounced a signal off the ground and detonated the round automatically at roughly 20 ft of altitude without any timing setting by the gunner. Against troops in foxholes, an air burst at 20 ft was lethal in a way that ground bursts were not. The men in the holes had no overhead cover from it.
The VT fuse had been forbidden for ground use until December 1944 because the United States Navy and the Army Ordinance Department did not want the technology to fall into German hands and be reverse engineered. Colonel George Axelson of the 46th Artillery Group, according to the documentary record, made the first unauthorized ground use of the VT Fuse on December 16, 1944, the opening day of the Bulge.
Eisenhower formally lifted all restrictions on December 21. Patton recorded the result a few days later in the diary entries that were later published as War as I knew it. On the night of December 25 and 26, Patton wrote, “We used the new proximity fuse on a number of Germans near Ectan and actually killed 700 of them.
The combination of toot and VT was the killing blow. A toot shoot put every shell in the impact area at the same instant. A VT fuse burst each shell 20 ft above the men in their holes. There was no opening salvo to take cover from. There was no overhead protection to hide under. The men in the foxholes who in earlier wars had been almost untouchable by indirect fire were now exposed to a weapon designed to kill them where they stood.
What General de Artillery Carl Tahalter wrote about American artillery after the war is worth quoting verbatim because the verbatim is stronger than any popular paraphrase. Tohalt, a senior German artilleryman, wrote a long professional assessment for the December 1945 issue of the Field Artillery Journal, the American Branch’s Professional Magazine.
He had no reason to flatter the men who had beaten him. It was immediately obvious to a German artillerist committed against the Americans, Tohalt wrote, that he was facing a large number of medium pieces with a still larger amount of ammunition, a very small number of heavy pieces, but an overwhelming air force. Division artillery concentrations, Thhalt went on, are accurate and flexible, and fires are delivered with speed.
The fact that all American artillery is motorized is good. It is the most mobile artillery of all first rate powers. In technology, the American excels. The standardization of pieces, the quality of ammunition, the quality of communications equipment, and the adjustment of fires on battalion and division artillery level are superior.
That is a German general officer writing 5 months after the German surrender, telling his American counterparts what they had built. He did not have to write any of that. He chose to. He also chose to be honest where the system fell short. CPS and army, Thalter wrote, do not have enough control over division artillery.
He had personally watched American batteries, he said, fire hundreds of rounds, not one of which caused a German casualty. The American gunners were technically excellent, the procedures were superior, and the volume of fire was overwhelming, but the system above the division level did not always know what to do with what it had. Targets of opportunity at the operational level were sometimes missed.
Concentrations were sometimes inefficient. That criticism is worth taking seriously because it shows the German professional respect was earned, not flattery. The halter was not writing propaganda. He was writing as a defeated professional to a victorious counterpart in the trade journal of the winning branch and telling the truth as he had seen it.
There is one comparison that has to be made before this story closes. The American forward observer doctrine was not unique because the FO existed. Every army had observers. The British had excellent observers, well-trained and well equipped. The Germans had observers whose technical skill on the gunnery side was second to no one’s. What made the American approach different was the institutional choice about where the authority to mass fire would sit.
The British put that authority high. A British division had to coordinate mass fire requests through the division artillery headquarters and often through core. The arrangement was very good when it worked and the British fire plan for the opening barrage of operation plunder fired from the western bank of the rine at the same hours as the American flashoint preparation was a masterpiece of staff work.
But it was not built for the lieutenant on the hill calling mass fires on his own initiative. It was built for the planned fire program executed on schedule. The Germans put the authority higher still. German artillery requests typically had to climb a regimental and divisional chain before they could be answered at scale.
German gunners were as accurate as anyone in the world. German fire direction on the battery and battalion level was as good as anyone’s. But when an infantry company commander needed mass core fire on a target his left tenant could see, the call had to travel through more headquarters than the target would wait for. By the time the answer came, the target was gone.
American doctrine cut out the climb. The lieutenant on the hill called the mission. The fire direction center sorted out who fired. The shells arrived. If the battery’s fire was not enough, the battalion’s fire would come. If the battalion’s fire was not enough, the divisions would come. If the division’s fire was not enough, the core would come.
The authority to escalate sat in the same room as the gun batteries on the same radio net as the forward observer, and the decision could be made in seconds. That is what Brewer and Ward and Jones had built. The choice to push the authority down was the choice the United States Army made and it was the choice that produced the artillery that Tolty was writing about in December 1945.
By the spring of 1945, the system was at its industrial peak. On March 24, 1945 at 0 hours, the United States 9th Army opened its share of the Allied crossing of the Rine. The operation was cenamed flashoint, an American operation nested inside the larger British operation plunder. Lieutenant General William H. Simpson commanded the 9inth Army.
Major General John B. Anderson commanded the 16th Corps that made the crossing. 2,70 American guns served by 40,000 American artillerymen opened fire at 1:00 in the morning. In roughly an hour of preparation, those guns fired 65,261 rounds onto the eastern bank of the river. 1500 heavy bombers added their loads behind the artillery preparation.
The guns were laid by fire direction centers using the same procedures Brewer and Ward had developed at Fort Sil in the early 1930s. The forward observers were left tenants on the western bank with binoculars and radios calling adjustments onto German positions across the water. The L4s of the 9th Army’s organic aviation were in the air over the river when the light came up.
The VT fuses were in the noses of the shells. What that means in practical terms is that a single American field army in March 1945 could put more guns into a single preparation than the entire German artillery arm could field on the Western Front. The doctrine Brewer and Ward had drawn on a chalkboard at Fort Sil in the early 1930s had become an industrial weapon.
A field artillery battalion in 1933 had been an experimental unit of the small interwar army, scraping by on depression budgets. A field artillery battalion in March 1945 was a wheel of a machine that could shut down a Vermacht Corps in an hour. The men carrying the calls forward were still lieutenants with radios. Some of them were still 21 years old.
Some of them were carrying the same M1938 binoculars, the same M2 compasses, the same SCR610 and SCR619 radios that Weiss had carried on Hill 3147 months earlier. The title at the top of this video, the line about a lieutenant firing 300 guns at once from a single radio call, is the doctrine made into an image.
The honest answer is that no single named fire mission in the documented record matches that image exactly. What Brewer and Ward and Jones built at Fort Sill was a system that made it possible. The fifth core artillery park behind Elsenborn Ridge with its 348 tubes under the control of one assistant division commander was the system at the scale the title describes.
The lieutenants on hill 314 calling mass fires that escalated from 12 guns to 36 guns to all the guns of seventh core that could reach the target were the system at the human scale. There is a closing question worth setting on the table. Why did the United States alone among the major combatants of World War II build this kind of artillery? The honest answer is that the United States in the 1930s had a small army and a generation of professional officers with time on their hands.
Brewer and Ward and Jones were not famous men. They did not write best-selling memoirs. They built a method, taught it to a generation of young officers and went home. By the time the war began, every reserve and national guard field artillery battalion in the country was being trained on their system. By the time the war was over, the system had become the heart of American ground combat power.
The men who carried that system into combat were not chiefly the men in the rooms behind the lines, although those men were essential. The men who carried it were the lieutenants like Weiss and Barts, 21 and 22 and 23 years old with 35B radios on their backs and the authority through that radio to summon the fires of an army. Robert L.
Weiss of Battery B, 230th Field Artillery Battalion, 30th Infantry Division, survived the siege and the war. He returned home, went into business, and spent decades putting on paper what had happened on Hill 314. In 2002, his memoir, Fire Mission: The Siege at Morta, Normandy, August 1944, was published by Bird Street Press.
His name is in the record because he wrote it there himself. Charles A. Barts of Battery C lived through the war as well. So did Frank Dinius, who finished the war with four decorations for valor before he was 21 years old. The men of the second battalion of the 120th Infantry, the rifle companies who held the crest, while the lieutenants called the fires, took the worst of the casualties.
400 Americans killed or wounded out of 700 in 6 days on an unnamed French hilltop above a road that had to be held. What they bought was a road the German panzas could not use. What they bought was the right side of the file’s pocket. What they bought in the long arithmetic of the war was the closing of the German army in Normandy and the beginning of the campaign that would put American soldiers across the Rine 7 months later.
If you stayed with this story to the end, a like keeps it visible to the men who need to find it. Subscribe if you want more like it. Their names belong in the record. That is why we tell these stories.
