What this elucidates is the sheer inadequacy of the German artillary train and this continued throughout the whole war. Understand that artillary was responsible for over seventy percent of casulties..
Retaining any aspect of the horse system was a grave error as well. Just fixing that after France in 41 while holding the allies at bay was completely within German capability then.
Yet it is obvious Hitler never thought that way and it was easier to go with tradition even when no one spent a dime on cavalry.
We can presume that the French and English were doing the same thing in 1941 and USA truck production changed all that up...
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How good was German artillery in World War II?
An average plan executed today is better than a perfect plan executed tommorow.Jun 11
At the beginning of the war it was recognized as the best in the world. The artillery corps was highly trained and equipped with excellent equipment. Their sound ranging at night was awe-inspiring.
But most of their artillery was horse drawn. A single battery could required up to 100 horses and that mean vets and farriers and hostlers and harnessmakers and leather workers and so on. The amount of extraneous waste was horrific. And they could only travel in a day what a tank could do in an hour.
And an enormous tactical mistake was made to use trained, skilled artillery troops as auxiliary infantry in battle. So these men would go into combat as infanrty and get killed and then they would be replaced by some green soldier who knew very little about artillery.
As time went on, more of the artillery was motorized but much of it was stop-gap: some even included WW1 field artillery on captured gun tractors.
By and large, German artillery lacked the range of the Russian artillery but they captured so many Russian 76mm artillery pieces that German manufacturing made shells for them.
Over time, the Germans could only replace one gun with every two lost so the Germans were always on the losing end. In addition, the older a gun gets, the more its barrel has to be replaced or it is no longer accurate. The Germans called it “cow tails” - the shells would fly out of worn barrels like flapping cow tails and never get anywhere near the target.
As the war was being lost, Hitler demanded that the 88mm flak guns be used as long range artillery and General Hienrici got into a screaming fight with him over it because using an AA gun as field artillery destroys the barrel quickly, making it useless for its real job of fighting planes or targeting tanks. Of course Hitler won that battle.
To increase range of their artillery the Germans developed the first rocket-assisted artillery rounds. This made a huge difference on the battlefield.
Much has been written about the Nebelwerfer and the Sturmgeseutz 3, both of which were real “wunderwaffen” so I will not write about them here.
The German 75mm antitank gun was considered the best weapon of its type of the war. With it’s low profile and wide traverse, it was deadly to enemy tanks at high ranges. Many nations used captured examples after the war.
Note the rubber wheels.
Towards the end, the Germans experimented with cheap, throw-away rockets as artillery where range was added by adding stages. It has some success bombing Antwerp but never really reached a stage where it was successful.
