Field ArTillery - US Army Center Of Military History

96 The OrganizaTiOnal hisTOry Of field arTillery
used firing tables and the quadrant, 2 had developed mechanical range finders to adjust
range, but direction remained a problem. During the Russo-Turkish War (1877–78),
the Russians had used a method of laying their coast artillery guns indirectly for direction,
3 and in 1882, a Russian officer published a book discussing the implications of
indirect laying for field artillery. 4 The concept took hold in the United States in 1894,
when the Board on Regulation of Seacoast Artillery Fire was established. Its mission
was to devise methods of aiming several guns on a ship without the gunners actually
having to see the target, recommending telephonic and telegraphic communications
for transmitting the necessary data to the gunners. 5
The last years of the nineteenth century saw rapid technical developments in artillery
materiel, and as a consequence, the degree of accuracy, ranges, and rates of fire
all improved. Artillery pieces could be aimed accurately from concealed positions,
and batteries could be dispersed over greater areas behind front lines and their fires
concentrated on targets at longer ranges. The prototype for modern field artillery guns
in the United States was the French 75-mm. gun, produced in 1897 by the Schneider
firm. An innovative weapon, its features included a built-up construction of alloy
steel, a simple but effective breechblock, a hydropneumatic long-recoil mechanism,
an advanced method of traversing and elevating, and improved ammunition with
a point-detonating fuze. The gun could achieve a maximum range of 6,000 yards
(5,486.4 meters). The design of its sights was revolutionary because it incorporated
provisions for indirect laying and for setting elevation from either side of the piece.
The battery commander could regulate the fire of his battery, which then became
the unit of fire. The French 75-mm. gun, at the time of its introduction, made all
other cannon obsolete. It was more mobile, and it could be fired faster, farther, and
more accurately than any other light field piece of the period. 6
Indirect fire, where the target cannot be seen from the gun position, at first
depended upon an observer who could see both the target and the gun. 7 Using
a gun-mounted panoramic sight that measured horizontal clockwise angles in
mils, 8 the gun layer could direct his line of sight in any direction. From a map, he
2 A quadrant is an instrument for measuring angular elevations. It consists commonly of a graduated
arc of 90° and has a movable index and a sight.
3 “Artillery Practice at Cronstadt,” Army and Navy Journal, 7 Apr 1877, p. 562.
4 J[onathan] B. A. Bailey, Field Artillery and Firepower, rev. ed. (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press,
2004), pp. 211–12. The Russians had practiced indirect laying for field artillery for some time but not
extensively. See Chris[topher] Bellamy, Red God of War (London: Brassey’s Defence Publishers, 1986),
ch. 1. 5 Nesmith, “Quiet Paradigm Change,” Ph.D. diss., pp. 262–63.
6 Handbook of the 75-mm. Gun Materiel (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office,
1918); H. C. Carbaugh, “Present Status of Field Artillery,” Journal of the Military Service Institution of
the United States 20 (May 1897): 500–17.
7 The method of using a line of markers from the gun to a position where the target was clearly
visible had been in use for some time, but it was not suitable for mobile warfare.
8 A mil, shortened from the French word millième meaning one thousandth, is a unit of angular
measurement equal to 1/6400 of the circumference of a circle. Introduced by Switzerland in 1864
and adopted by France in 1879, the millième came into use in America on the sight of the 1902 model
3-inch field gun.