I don’t understand how they can accurately aim artillery. When they fire the whole machine moves a great deal and it would seem any calibration of its position would be lost.
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A million years ago I was a cannon crewman on the M-109 howitzer. An upgraded version is still in use today, but some of my information may be out of date. In my day there was a fire direction center (FDC) – a tracked vehicle – responsible for a battery of artillery, comprised of about 8-12 M-109’s and their support vehicles. A spotter with eyes on the target would call in a strike to the FDC
I never worked in the FDC but I believe they got coded map coordinates in those pre-GPS days. They would do the math to calculate deflection (left/right) and quadrant (up/down), along with the type of shell, fuse, and quantity of powder. They would relay that to the guns in the battery (one at a time) over a landline run between each gun and the FDC, and we would dial in those coordinates, pointing the barrel just where it needed to go.
Incidentally, you’re absolutely correct that if an artillery piece moves when being fired, the second shot will be wildly inaccurate. That’s a huge problem. Sometime in WW1 or maybe WW2 they developed a solution, to put the whole thing on springs. When the gun fires the springs absorb the recoil, but the base of the artillery piece doesn’t move, so all subsequent rounds will fly true. That’s super important because a lot of the time the first shell is just to dial things in.
Once the spotter sees where the first shell hit they call in an adjustment and we’d start blowing the target to smithereens. In the most standard shell configuration the “kill radius” was said to be 50 meters. That means that if you are within 50 meters of detonation you would be wounded too severely to continue fighting. To some extent the shrapnel wasn’t relevant – if you’re that close the percussion can break bones, burst eardrums, and cause traumatic brain injury. Artillery can kill you without so much as scratching you.
If anyone is interested, here are few more recollections. The shell was about 6″ in diameter, maybe 30″ long. There were several types of shell, high explosive, smoke, tear gas, and there was an illumination round that descended slowly with a parachute while burning brilliantly – that one could turn the darkest night so bright you’d throw a shadow. There is also a tactical nuclear round but I never had anything to do with that.
A fuse screwed into the top of the shell, and you could set it for airburst or you could time it to go off after it hit, like if you’re aiming for the inside of a building or bunker. The powder came in a separate container and was a bunch of cotton bags tied together, the more bags you included the further/higher the shell would fly. Every once in a while exhausted troops would add the bags to the breech but they’d forgotten to load the shell so only the powder would go off. That made for a truly spectacular flame thrower – the fire would splash all over the front of the gun and go maybe 20 yards. Really something to see! Well, I thought it was neat but then it never happened on my gun so I didn’t have to deal with the investigation.
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