Quotes About Artillery

The Army, however, found ways to adapt. It lobbied hard for atomic artillery shells, atomic antiaircraft missiles, atomic land mines.

The moral effect of the thundering of one's own artillery is most extraordinary, and many of us thought that we had never heard any more welcome sound than the deep roaring and crashing that started in at our rear.

Gunners sloshed cans of water to cool their glowing barrels while others struggled from the rear with ninety-six-pound rounds on their shoulders.

They're not shooting at us, they're not shooting at us," one infantry commander insisted, even as French artillery plastered his battalion.

when the barrage reached its crescendo, 224,221 shells in the last 65 minutes, the rumble could be heard as far away as Hampstead Heath in London. More shells were fired by the British this week than they had used in the first 12 months of the war; some gunners bled from the ears after five days of nonstop firing.

Wine makes us proud of our past," said one official. "It gives us courage and hope." How else to explain why vignerons in Champagne rushed into their vineyards to harvest the 1915 vintage even as artillery shells were falling all around?

No one would believe that in this howling waste there could still be men; but steel helmets now appear on all sides out of the trench, and fifty yards from us a machine-gun is already in position and barking. The wire entanglements are torn to pieces. Yet they offer some obstacle. We see the storm-troops coming. Our artillery opens fire. Machine-guns rattle, rifles crack.

General Konstantin Rokossovsky, one of those who were tortured during that time – though not shot despite his Polish origins – later said that purges were even worse for morale than when artillery fired on one's own troops because it would have to have been very accurate artillery fire

sufficiency of artillery depended not only on the number of guns provided but on the width of the front attacked. The guns-per-yards-of-front ratio was crucial; to expand the latter, it was necessary to increase the former, or the infantry would go over the top without adequate support.

1,627,824 shells were fired in the preliminary bombardment on the Somme

It is well known that the Chinese had gunpowder by the thirteenth century and even cast a few cannons. But when Western voyagers reached China in the sixteenth century the Chinese lacked both artillery and firearms, whereas the Europeans had an abundance of both.

You know where the word shrapnel comes from?" "Where?" "An eighteenth-century British guy named Henry Shrapnel." "Really?" "He was a captain in their artillery for eight years. Then he invented an exploding shell, and they promoted him to major. The Duke of Wellington used the shell in the Peninsular Wars, and at the Battle of Waterloo.

Shelling, many felt, was actually worse than bombing, since bombardments were not preceded by an alarm. From 4 September to the end of the year the Wehrmacht's heavy artillery pounded Leningrad 272 times, for up to eighteen hours at a stretch, with a total of over 13,000 shells. (...) The rumour that some shells were filled only with granulated sugar, or held supportive notes from sympathetic German workers, was a soothing invention.

In March 1915, at the Battle of Neuve Chapelle, the British fired more shells in a single 35-minute bombardment than they had during the whole Boer War.

The French Army expended more artillery ammunition in September 1914 than it had done in the whole of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. Total French production of the 75 mm shell in 1914 amounted to 14,000 shells a day, at a time when one single battery of 75 mm guns could easily shoot off 1,000 shells a day.

There were not enough guns and, as a result, their fire was too widely dispersed. Gas, so useful in other attacks, not least to deter the enemy gunners, was not employed in this bombardment, except for a small amount from French 75 mm guns. Many British guns were outranged by many German guns. The ammunition was all too often faulty, either failing to go off or sometimes exploding in the barrels of the guns. The weight of shot was not enough to penetrate the deep German dugouts

In the second week of June, two second-lieutenants were shot by firing squads drawn from their own companies, for allegedly failing to press home their attacks. Orders also went out that battalions abandoning positions or retiring during an attack were to be fired on by their own machine-guns or bombarded by French artillery. Some of these orders were actually obeyed but the resentment they caused far outweighed the influence they had on the front-line soldier.

Italy also demanded that Britain should fund Italy's part in the war and provide the Italian Army with artillery.

Oh, it's hi-hi-yee! for the field artilleree,Shout out your numbers loud and strong,And where'er we go, you will always knowThat those caissons are rolling along.

During the last war, Etienne knew artillerymen who could peer through field glasses and discern their shells' damage by the colors thrown skyward. Gray was stone. Brown was soil. Pink was flesh.

The tide climbs. The moon hangs small and yellow and gibbous. On the rooftops of beachfront hotels to the east, and in the gardens behind them, a half-dozen American artillery units drop incendiary rounds into the mouths of mortars.

My great-grandfather and his two brothers fought at Gettysburg. They were in artillery, and they survived the war, thank goodness. So I revere what they did. I think their motivations were honorable when they undertook the war and participated in it along with other Southerners.

On April 12 lighted tapers were put to the touchholes of the sultan's guns along a four-mile sector, and the world's first concerted artillery bombardment exploded into life.

So, the moral of that story, other than never underestimate an independent bookseller, was that the Continental Army and its commander in chief had a soft spot for Chief Artillery Officer Henry Knox.