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02:08Guns, the essence of military power.
02:12Artillery is the god of war, so said Joseph Stalin.
02:16Napoleon put it rather differently.
02:18It is with artillery, he said, that war is made.
02:21But both men were making the same point.
02:23It is the big guns that have dominated the battlefield in modern times.
02:27Yet the gun has probably changed less than any other weapon of war
02:30in the six centuries of its existence.
02:32Of course, nowadays it's likely to be breech-loaded, made of steel,
02:35and frequently with tracks and its own engine.
02:38Its ammunition has been revolutionized
02:40and its range and accuracy formidably increased.
02:43But essentially it remains today what it was in the 14th century.
02:46A hollow metal tube closed at one end,
02:48out of which an explosive compound fires a projectile
02:51at whatever target a commander chooses.
02:53And almost from the start, its impact has been devastating.
03:03The ordeal of living through an artillery bombardment
03:06is an experience the survivor never forgets.
03:11I thought at first it wouldn't last very long.
03:14I thought that if you had a concentrated bombardment,
03:18it would only last for two or three minutes.
03:21But it went on for a couple of hours.
03:24And the whole of that time, we heard these shells rushing towards us.
03:29They seemed to be feeling a fiendish joy
03:34as they were coming to destroy us.
03:37I just, after a bit, I just simply waited there,
03:41thinking that sooner or later one of them was bound to hit us,
03:44and that would be that.
03:51It is a feeling of horror.
03:54So all your senses, like hearing and feeling,
03:58they are much stronger than in any ordinary position one is in.
04:02And also the sound, it howls,
04:05and then the crying of the wounded,
04:08and also the total helplessness.
04:11In a normal battle position, one can shoot back,
04:14but here one absolutely can do nothing.
04:17Only wait, wait, and one hopes that the bombardment will not be too long.
04:22Gunfire need not be incessant to set soldiers' nerves trembling,
04:26as the American defenders of Khe Sanh discovered
04:29during its siege by the Viet Cong.
04:31The shelling was sporadic but very effective
04:35because the portion of the hill we occupied,
04:38because of its topography, was only about perhaps 50 by 200 meters.
04:44And in that area we had about 400 men,
04:47so most any place a shell landed, if the men weren't under cover,
04:51we suffered casualties.
04:53And these were big rounds.
04:55The result was that the average private in the trench
04:58could see only his own friends being killed at the moment,
05:03his own companions, as it were.
05:05The net result was a pretty serious morale problem.
05:09He never felt he was getting back, as it were,
05:12at the guy who was shooting at him.
05:16Even in small wars, like the Falklands campaign of 1982,
05:20when neither side deployed many guns,
05:22artillery can still have a deadly impact on morale.
05:26It certainly has a psychological effect, that there is no doubt.
05:29I don't think we killed an awful lot in the Falkland Islands,
05:32but we certainly took a psychological toll of them
05:36to such an extent that they didn't wish to go on.
05:39And, of course, artillery is not just directed
05:41against a soldier eyeball-to-eyeball contact with an enemy.
05:45It is often directed against targets in depth.
05:48And whilst we fired a lot of artillery,
05:51in support of the infantry attacking all the hills around Stanley,
05:55in very close support, often to within 150 meters of our own forces,
06:00the bulk of our effort was devoted to destroying their headquarters,
06:04their logistics and their own gun positions.
06:08And I think this is what caused that sudden surrender
06:11by the Argentines outside Stanley in 1982.
06:18The European discovery of gunpowder at the beginning of the 14th century
06:22launched one of the great technical revolutions of history.
06:25Gunpowder released combat from the limitations of muscle power,
06:29allowed enemy to strike at enemy over distances
06:32greater than could be covered by spear or bow,
06:35and transformed siege craft from a war of nerves to a test of strength.
06:39Traditional siege engines had thrown projectiles
06:42which hit wherever they fell,
06:44but the cannonball could be made to strike accurately
06:46and repeatedly at the foundations.
06:48The appearance of the new gunpowder weapons outside of a siege city
06:52soon came to mean that its fall was at hand.
06:57The most spectacular artillery success of the Middle Ages
07:01took place at Constantinople,
07:03then the largest fortified city in the Western world.
07:08In 1453, the Emperor Constantine XI, last of the Caesars,
07:13found himself besieged here by the huge army of the Ottoman Turks
07:17under their young sultan, Mehmed II.
07:22These towering walls were the city's principal defense,
07:26begun originally by the Emperor Theodosius II a thousand years before.
07:30Studded with towers up to 40 feet high,
07:33they stretched 14 miles from the waters of the Golden Horn
07:37to the Sea of Marmara.
07:39They had shrugged off sieges often before,
07:41and they were massive enough to withstand attack
07:43by most contemporary artillery.
07:47But the artillery part that the sultan's army now dragged
07:50within battering range of the city
07:52contained guns bigger and more destructive
07:54than any previously brought to the scene of a siege.
08:00At the Tower of London, another fortress built before the artillery age,
08:04there is a cannon of similar style and power
08:06to those that brought the walls of Theodosius tumbling down.
08:10It was shipped to London in the 1860s as a gift for Queen Victoria.
08:14There's an ironical twist to this story.
08:17The man who designed these great guns was a Hungarian called Urban,
08:21who in the first place offered them to the Christians in Constantinople.
08:25Only when his services had been rejected as being too expensive
08:28did he turn to the Turks.
08:30Now, the Turkish sultan at once recognized what he was being offered,
08:34a war-winning weapon of devastating power.
08:37The weight of these cannon is quite colossal.
08:40The afterpart here, the breech, weighs nearly nine tons,
08:44and the barrel, eight tons.
08:46And there were some that were even heavier.
08:48It's said that it took 60 oxen to drag each of Mehmet's cannon
08:52towards the walls of Constantinople.
08:55There were 200 attendants marching beside them,
08:58and another 250 going on ahead
09:00to smooth out the roads and strengthen the bridges.
09:03This is the kind of shot they would have fired.
09:06These gigantic stone cannonballs weigh a third of a ton each,
09:10and they could travel up to a mile.
09:17Thirteen giant cannon, firing 4,000 times
09:21between April 1st and May 10th, 1453,
09:24overthrew the patient defensive work of centuries.
09:34Soon, guns were appearing which in style
09:37were to set the pattern for the next 400 years.
09:42These, not Mehmet's monsters,
09:44were the weapons of the future.
09:46Pulled by horses, they could match in speed any marching army,
09:50and these were the guns with which Charles VIII of France
09:53blitzkrieged Italy in 1495.
09:57It was as though the cannon
09:59almost immediately found its natural dynamic form.
10:02The new guns displayed certain crucial improvements in design.
10:07They were now provided with elevating devices,
10:10in this case simple wedges,
10:12to allow variation of range.
10:15Twin projections just in front of the point of balance,
10:18called trunnions, allowed the gun to pivot.
10:21These were made possible because gunmakers had now discovered
10:24how to cast the gun in a single piece of bronze.
10:34The new artillery of the Renaissance age was so much improved
10:38that guns for the first time began to decide the outcome of battle.
10:41But the siege remained artillery's main field of action,
10:44and siege gunners steadily learned to perfect their craft.
10:48Cannelure, cutting a furrow along a wall's base,
10:51was a technique that brought many battlements down.
10:55Such techniques were elements in a duel
10:57between gunners and siege engineers,
10:59which was to be fought through a whole range of wars and campaigns,
11:03and which was to last into the present century.
11:07It even marked the outbreak of the First World War.
11:12And a later 20th century artillery siege took place here in northern France
11:18at the opening of the Second World War.
11:20This is part of the Maginot Line,
11:22the chain of concrete forts built by the French in the 1930s
11:26to guard their vulnerable frontier with Germany.
11:30Their armoured casemates and retractable gun turrets
11:33gave these forts the appearance of stranded battleships.
11:36They were to prove not much more useful,
11:39for the Germans made their main thrust in 1940 far to the north,
11:43across the unfortified frontiers of Belgium.
11:46But they did mount a few token attacks on the line itself.
11:50This fort at La Ferté was one of the targets.
11:53The purpose of the attack was partly to keep the French
11:56from transferring its garrison to the battle in the north,
11:58and partly to let Dr Goebbels' film crews
12:01show the German nation the might of the Wehrmacht.
12:05In its pitting of the power of artillery
12:08against the strength of fixed defences,
12:11this was an old-fashioned siege.
12:13But the weight of firepower the Germans deployed
12:16gave the defenders no chance.
12:27After a bombardment by guns of all calibres,
12:30from medium to super-heavy,
12:32the German infantry closed in for the final assault,
12:35much like foot soldiers of the Middle Ages
12:38storming the breach of a city wall.
12:52210 Frenchmen died in this grisly little confrontation.
12:56The battered casemates and toppled cupolas are their memorial.
13:00They also commemorate one of the last episodes in a style of war
13:03which can be traced back in a direct line
13:06to the great set-piece sieges of the medieval world.
13:11But while siege gunners pursued their particular speciality,
13:14field gunners were making their weapons
13:16more directly useful to armies on campaign.
13:23The King's Troop Royal Horse Artillery
13:25is here demonstrating this far more significant role of the gun
13:28during the last five centuries.
13:30This is artillery working as one of the essential tools
13:33of the general in the field
13:35and showing that it can do so at speed.
13:53This may look to us today just colourful ritual,
13:56but nothing better demonstrates the nature of the revolution
13:59that made artillery a dominant battlefield weapon.
14:06Horse artillery provided much colour and dash,
14:09but it was the heavier field guns
14:11which more often brought the action of the day to a decision.
14:22When guns like these fired,
14:24the shock of discharge drove them leaping backwards.
14:27They had to be manhandled into their old position.
14:30They had to be re-aimed at the target by eye between each salvo.
14:34Recoil, running up, relaying, reloading,
14:37this burdensome sequence demanded much of the gunner's strength and skills.
14:44Fire!
14:55Fire!
15:03But the ordeal the gunners had to endure
15:05was as nothing to the carnage they could inflict
15:07when their shot drove home into the enemy's massed ranks.
15:10Solid round shot, not much bigger than a modern tennis ball,
15:14could kill eight or a dozen men at a time.
15:17Disintegrating projectiles, such as canister and grape,
15:20took the same toll on men as birdshot on a flight of cartridges.
15:35As the 19th century drew on
15:37and its satanic mills gave armies, guns and shells in massive quantities,
15:42artillery spoke with ever greater power on battlefields.
15:45On those of the American Civil War, like Gettysburg,
15:48it was the guns that decided the issue.
15:51And it was the guns which now began to work
15:53with terrible effect on landscapes and on cities,
15:56the results by now being faithfully recorded by the camera.
16:00These images of Confederate strongholds,
16:02savaged by artillery and fire, have a very modern look about them.
16:06Fifty years before Flanders,
16:08they are previews of the artillery landscapes of World War I.
16:14The design and shape of these projectiles
16:16give the clue to the next firepower revolution.
16:19Most of them are cast in steel,
16:21filled with high explosive and have mechanical fuses.
16:24Most important, they have become conical.
16:30The reason for that change of shape
16:32is explained by a single word, rifling.
16:35Late 19th century guns had steel barrels cut with spiral grooves
16:40that could keep a conical projectile travelling straight
16:43in a way the old smoothbore cannons did not.
16:46And there were other refinements.
16:48All these guns mark stages in the search for the perfect gun.
16:52The problem was how to select the right elements
16:54from the current technical ferment.
16:58And then, suddenly, one design team got it all together.
17:02In 1897, the French Army's artillery workshops at Putot
17:06produced the world's first truly modern gun.
17:10And this is it, the 75mm,
17:13known to its gunners as the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
17:17Now, all of its features had existed in previous guns,
17:20but never before had they been brought together
17:22with the same degree of mechanical reliability and efficiency.
17:25This gun is as lean, as fast, and as specialised as a greyhound.
17:31For one thing, it was breech-loading,
17:34so that no time was wasted ramming the shell down the barrel.
17:37And the breech mechanism was designed for rapid and complete opening and closing.
17:44Then its shells were propelled by chordite,
17:47the new propellant which left much less fouling in the barrel
17:50than the old black gunpowder,
17:52and caused much less smoke on the battlefield.
17:54The shells were filled with one of the new generation of high explosives,
17:58liddite, and fitted with a time fuse,
18:01accurate to within fractions of a second.
18:05Most importantly, the gun was mounted on a hydraulic platform,
18:09with compressors to absorb the shock of recoil.
18:12As a result, the gun no longer needed to be realigned after each discharge.
18:17Together, these features gave a quite fantastic rate of fire.
18:28French gunners claimed 15 or 20 rounds a minute,
18:32which is faster than most soldiers can fire a rifle.
18:38It was not long before guns with similar features came into service throughout Europe.
18:44The new guns had one other crucial advantage.
18:47With their vastly increased range, they could now fire over the hill.
18:51It was a major revolution.
18:53Previously, gunners could only engage targets they could see.
18:57Now, they could fire at targets far out of sight.
19:02The French 75mm, and similar guns such as these British 18-pounders,
19:07had no sooner been brought into general service
19:10than they were called into action in earnest in the First World War.
19:13This war's phenomenally destructive character and long duration
19:17were largely the result of the recent artillery revolution.
19:20It was, above all, a gunner's war.
19:27It is part of the mythology of that war
19:30that the machine gun was the great killer of infantry.
19:33Actually, hospital statistics show that two-thirds of all wounds
19:37in all armies were caused by shells.
19:42It was gunfire which broke up the mass infantry attacks from the outset,
19:48and it was largely gunfire which drove infantry
19:51to dig themselves below ground for protection.
19:57More, the new powerful artillery produced an entirely different style
20:03of gunner's war from the face-to-face battles of the 19th century.
20:07With indirect fire, now standard practice,
20:10an entirely new role was created,
20:12that of the forward observation officer, with his signaler far ahead of the guns,
20:17identifying targets from often dangerous observation posts.
20:22The most common, of course, was the infantry trench.
20:26Then, once in Heverton, we found a very good observation post
20:30from which we could see Goncourt, but it was too dangerous.
20:34We should have been killed at once had we been seen.
20:38But fortunately, there was a stump of a tree
20:40sticking about six feet high, left, standing,
20:47and a lot of rubble around
20:49because it had been very much destroyed.
20:52And we decided to call in the camouflage officer,
20:57and within one night, he had taken away the tree,
21:05copied it exactly by camouflage,
21:08and arranged a way of entering it through the ground,
21:12and then we poked our heads up into this tree
21:15and found a little hole and saw all we wanted to see,
21:19and the Germans only looked on it as a broken tree.
21:23And then, of course, ruined villages,
21:27if there was anything left of the houses near the front line,
21:30you could invariably climb to the top floor
21:33and see through the broken tiles of the roof and that kind of thing.
21:38So you took every advantage you could
21:40of anything which was higher than ground level.
21:44One particularly dangerous observation post was the air balloon,
21:48unconcealable from the enemy and therefore a prime target
21:51for his guns or aircraft.
21:53Communication with the ground was by direct telephone line,
21:57the information being then processed and sent back to the gun batteries.
22:01The Royal Flying Corps manned these balloons and also the aircraft,
22:15which were used for the same purpose,
22:17particularly in the later years of the war.
22:19The observer spotted a target on the ground,
22:21located it on his map,
22:23then transmitted the information acquired by Morse code from a trailing aerial.
22:27Once the guns had fired, the airborne observer could signal corrections
22:30if the shells were not falling exactly on target.
22:37The infantryman was the principal victim of the volcanic bombardments of this war,
22:42though if the gunners did their work well,
22:44he was also at times the beneficiary.
22:47One lived in a world where there were continuous explosions.
22:52Every now and again there would be a loud bang in the distance,
22:55rather like Guy Fawkes' Night in England.
22:57You'd see that somebody over there was having fireworks,
23:00and then suddenly the fireworks would break out all around you.
23:04But when a real barrage started,
23:08it made a continuous roar of thunder that completely drowned and destroyed
23:13the casual shell fire of ordinary times.
23:20By the end of the war, they were very accurate indeed.
23:23The artillery put down the shells exactly where they landed.
23:26You actually saw a curtain of shell bursts 200 or 300 yards in front of you,
23:31and you went as far as you could.
23:33It would certainly silence the enemy and make them keep their heads down,
23:37but it might kill them, or it might not.
23:40If it hadn't actually killed them,
23:43you then had to fight a very frightened German
23:46who'd been through a worse experience than you had.
23:54It was artillery that made the landscapes of the First World War,
23:58those sloughs of despond and fields of ruin that survivors never forgot.
24:03A British Tommy wrote of Ypres.
24:06Before my eyes spread the martyred city.
24:09A concourse of shattered buildings clustered in the middle distance,
24:13with here and there a broken chimney stack
24:16or a decapitated church spire jutting a little above the rest.
24:21The place looked as though it had been left half finished to the elements,
24:25but this was only the superficial appearance of things,
24:28for every now and then, here and there,
24:31a shell burst among the rubble,
24:34demonstrating clearly the cause of the city's dire condition.
24:38It seemed a miracle that anyone could survive in that terrible place.
24:43Ypres gave its name to the notorious salient
24:47over which the British and Germans fought uninterruptedly for four years.
24:53Of the salient, an infantry officer wrote in 1917,
24:57What confronted us was a lunar landscape of shell craters,
25:01one touching another, filled with water and sludgy clay.
25:07Scattered through the salient were zones of special danger,
25:10subject to constant bombardment,
25:13through which all signs of civilization had been swept away
25:16and through which soldiers always hurried in their eagerness
25:19to reach the refuge of less open ground.
25:28An American officer wrote,
25:30This is a cowering war,
25:33with men huddled in little holes and caves,
25:36praying to escape the blows of giants
25:39who pound the earth with blind hammers.
25:44There are still landscapes on the old western front
25:47which have never recovered from this blind hammering.
25:50This is a fragment of the battlefield of Verdun.
25:53Here in eastern France in 1916,
25:56the French and Germans fought the first pure artillery battle of history.
26:00It lasted ten months.
26:14The Germans, who launched the battle,
26:17called it Operation Execution Place,
26:20and their executioner's tool was the big gun.
26:23Their plan was to destroy the French defenders
26:26by sheer weight of firepower.
26:29But the French defenders refused to be overwhelmed.
26:32They repaid the Germans shell for shell,
26:35so that the enemy would not be able to reach Verdun.
26:38The French defenders refused to be overwhelmed.
26:41They repaid the Germans shell for shell,
26:44so that the infantry of both armies succumbed to a mutual martyrdom.
26:48Men became mere pygmies
26:51under the towering rage of these bombardments.
26:54Some were blown apart and no trace of them ever found.
26:57Others were piteously mutilated by chunks of flying iron.
27:00Dugouts collapsed and buried their garrisons alive.
27:03Men were picked up bodily, thrown into trees,
27:06slammed against walls, or killed even by the flying fragments
27:09of their own comrades' bodies.
27:12This was death, but this was death without a shred of human dignity.
27:15It was death in mud and squalor and excrement and entrails.
27:19Death of men at the mercy of the machine.
27:23Explosions
27:53Explosions
28:23Explosions
28:41Also under intense bombardment throughout the battle
28:44were Verdun's ring of forts, bastions of defense,
28:47which both sides looked upon as specially significant trophies.
28:53The most famous was Fort Douaumont,
28:56turned by the artillery of both nations into a battered hulk
28:59and still preserved in its wartime state as a memorial to the battle
29:03and as a shrine to those who lost their lives there,
29:06many of them permanently entombed in closed-off galleries within the fort.
29:19Its machine gun posts and observation points
29:22still glower at the landscape across which the enemy attacked in 1916.
29:36It's a strange experience to walk through these grim corridors,
29:40once occupied by men whose ordeal was every bit as great
29:43as that of the infantrymen who cowered on the open ground outside.
29:53The French lost the fort to the Germans in the first month of the battle,
29:57after which they did everything in their power to win it back.
30:00Indeed, Fort Douaumont has been described
30:03as the most shelled spot on the surface of the earth.
30:12Imagine what it must have been like in these dark and weeping corridors in 1916.
30:17Today they're empty, but then they were filled with thousands
30:20of war-exhausted, apprehensive men.
30:23When the French launched their first attack in May,
30:26they brought to bear 300 guns on this fort alone.
30:29The air was thick with cordite.
30:32The noise so intense men went deaf.
30:35One survivor said it was like being inside an enormous drum.
30:41In their second attack in October,
30:43the French introduced two enormous railway guns,
30:46whose shells alone weighed one tonne each.
30:49These slammed into the fort with devastating accuracy and precision.
30:53Some burst right through the armour and exploded inside.
30:57Finally, the German commander, realising that not even here,
31:01the lowest levels of the fort were safe anymore,
31:04had no option but to require his men to withdraw.
31:09It has been estimated that Fort Douaumont
31:12claimed the lives of 100,000 men.
31:16Many of the French who died there
31:19are buried in the vast cemetery that has been constructed nearby.
31:28A French officer wrote of those who took part in the Battle of Verdun.
31:32They will not be able to make us do it again another day.
31:36That would be to misconstrue the price of our effort.
31:40They will have to resort to men who have not lived out these days.
31:56The iron face of the First World War
31:59could not altogether stare down the gunner's jaunty pride in his horsemanship
32:03and spectacular panache in bringing his guns into action.
32:08No gunner could forget that Napoleon,
32:11greatest of generals, had been a gunner
32:14and there were many would-be Napoleons in all armies of the Great War.
32:21In the official order of precedence that determines
32:24the British army's hierarchy of regiments and corps,
32:27the Royal Horse Artillery, when on parade with guns,
32:30takes first place over all others.
32:33The King's Troop Royal Horse Artillery
32:36in the public sense is the British army's right of the line.
32:39Here it is rehearsing on a murky London morning in khaki uniforms
32:42scarcely different from those in which it fought
32:45at the epics of Neary and Le Cateau in 1914.
32:49No great occasion, whether the opening of Parliament,
32:52the Queen's birthday, or the visit of some foreign dignitary,
32:55is conceivable without the horse artillery's distinctive contribution.
33:07Hey, stop!
33:11Number one!
33:18There are other symbols of the Royal Artillery's corporate pride.
33:22Glittering trophies of past victories or tokens of gunner piety
33:26brought out from the richest collection owned by any British regiment
33:29to decorate the dining table of the Woolwich Mess,
33:32the gunner's ancient London home.
33:35At the end of the room, the Royal Artillery Band plays throughout the evening.
33:46Dinner over and the table cleared,
33:48the port circulates in preparation for the drinking of the loyal toast
33:52in a manner unique to the Royal Regiment of Artillery.
33:56Thank you very much, Mr. Pink.
34:06Gentlemen, the Queen, our Captain General.
34:26THE END
34:56THE END
35:12Another tradition is unique to British gunners.
35:15The colours they venerate are the guns they serve in battle.
35:18Gunners, therefore, guard their guns with their lives
35:21and in doing so, they come to love them as totems of their own identity.
35:25Perhaps no gun has attracted as much affection as the 25-pounder,
35:29the British Army's standard field gun in the Second World War.
35:33The Australians felt the same affection for it,
35:36though perhaps a little less when manhandling it
35:38over the ridges of the Owen Stanley Range in New Guinea in 1942.
35:44The 25-pounder's first great success was in Eritrea,
35:48where in 1941, at the Battle of Cairn,
35:50it helped to rout a well-dug-in Italian army.
35:53Cairn created an immediate bond between gunners and gun.
35:58It was a weapon that we picked up suddenly
36:01and within seven days, we were using it on the enemy.
36:05Now, the 25-pounder was a great gun.
36:08It was a wonderful weapon.
36:10The story of the gunner is the story of the gun.
36:13We towed it around the world, we dragged it, we lived in its service,
36:17we supported it, we cleaned it,
36:20and when nothing else was left, we unreluctantly blew it up.
36:25Now, there was nothing better than a 25-pounder.
36:28Not in my book, anyway.
36:30She was a beautiful weapon.
36:34By contrast, there is no worse blow to artillery pride
36:37than being overrun by a far more powerful enemy,
36:40with the grim choice of either fighting your guns into the ground
36:43or destroying them.
36:44This happened in the Western Desert in June 1942
36:47to the same 25-pounder regiment which had fought so superbly in Eritrea.
36:54The action has gone into history
36:56as the Battle of the Knightsbridge Cauldron.
36:59It's a long time since the cauldron,
37:02but I can still remember quite vividly
37:05the shells hitting the gun position,
37:08the soft vehicles in the rear going up in flames,
37:15the screams of the men on the guns,
37:19the smoke and noise,
37:22which was pretty terrifying.
37:24The thing that sticks in my mind is this tremendous flash of a gun,
37:28not very far away,
37:29and then this horrific noise of armored piecing shells flying past,
37:34guns, shields being burst to bits,
37:37layers collapsing with limbs all over the place
37:41and livers falling out of the side,
37:44and another man immediately pulling them aside
37:47and jumping into the laying seat.
37:49From the time that we were joined, the gunners,
37:52we were taught that it was a tragedy and a disgrace to spike a gun,
37:59but as a last resort, this is the thing you must do.
38:03And so on the fourth gun, which is the one that I was firing,
38:08I eventually took out, I put a shell in the breech and fired,
38:13but the charge was faulty.
38:14The tanks were coming in very close.
38:16There was something like 50 yards away,
38:18and German infantry were advancing on the flanks,
38:22and so I could do no more than take out the breech mechanism,
38:26which I hid in the slit trench which we had dug during the morning.
38:32So I don't think that particular 25-pounder would have been any use to anybody.
38:38Normandy, invaded by the Allies in June 1944,
38:42challenged the Allied artillery to find and destroy the German garrison
38:46in a landscape ideally suited to defence.
38:50And new mobility was part of the answer.
38:53While most of the German artillery remained horse-drawn,
38:56even the Allies' heavy guns were now mounted on pneumatic-tyre carriages
39:00pulled by four-wheel drive tractors or big lorries.
39:09Moved at speed, they could also be rapidly deployed and brought into action.
39:18Some guns had now become armoured vehicles,
39:21self-propelled pieces which provided the mechanised units
39:24with their artillery support.
39:26One of them, the Sexton, mounted the famous 25-pounder
39:30on the equally famous Sherman tank chassis.
39:35But radio was the greatest step forward in artillery communications.
39:39Its universal adoption freed gunners from depending on vulnerable telephone cables.
39:46The nerve centre of the system was here, in the artillery command post,
39:50where fire orders were worked out from target information received.
39:54It came from a variety of sources.
39:59From air observation post officers
40:01circling the battlefield in Auster spotter aircraft.
40:05From sound-ranging microphones buried in the earth
40:08that could plot an enemy's gun position to within 15 yards.
40:15And from artillerymen out forward with the infantry.
40:18As the infantry advanced, so too did the forward observers,
40:22keeping in constant touch with the gunner command posts
40:25through their man-packed radios.
40:29Target information collected by the radio network
40:32allowed the command post officer to orchestrate the mass of guns at his disposal
40:36into a whirlwind of fire.
40:47Russian soldiers have long been devotees of artillery.
40:50In World War II, they fielded more guns than any other army.
40:55Here, Stalin's god of war celebrates a Soviet triumph.
41:04The Red Army pushed to extremes the technique of massing artillery
41:08on a chosen front of attack for an overwhelming preliminary bombardment.
41:13The aim was to eliminate all resistance
41:15and then rush a torrent of tanks and infantry through the gap in the enemy line.
41:19These tempests of gunnery underlay the Russian victories
41:22of Stalingrad, Kursk, and Berlin.
41:30But different campaigns, as always in history, produced different techniques.
41:34In Vietnam, set-piece bombardments were quite inappropriate
41:38to the fluid, will-o'-the-wisp fighting.
41:41What the artillery did provide to the infantry and the other maneuver forces
41:46was the same thing that it has provided since time immemorial,
41:50and that is simply that we provided a big morale boost to the infantry types.
41:57Whenever the infantry would be held up by perhaps only one or two enemy soldiers
42:02shooting at them with small arms,
42:05rather than continue to be held up and taking any unnecessary casualties,
42:09the first thing that the infantry would think of is, where's the artillery?
42:13And in several instances, this was artillery used in a direct fire role
42:18against a house or some other structure.
42:21And we would fire the weapon, and the building and its inhabitants would be destroyed,
42:26allowing the infantry to move on and continue with their operations.
42:32In one of the units to which I was assigned,
42:34our mission was to provide fire support to a reconnaissance insert.
42:40This would be a group of infantry types
42:42who would be inserted a fair distance from an operational base,
42:46primarily to collect information on enemy movements.
42:50They were out there in small numbers,
42:52very limited self-defense capability on their own.
42:55So what they had to rely upon, and what gave them that morale boost,
42:59was the artillery.
43:01We were there from rain or shine,
43:03unlike Air Force assets that in some cases could not fly.
43:07We were always there, and we were their security blanket, if you will.
43:14In all the mechanized armies that garrison NATO's central front in Germany in the 1980s,
43:19artillery has been completely integrated
43:21into the pattern of high-speed armored operations for which NATO forces train.
43:29This, here in service with the British Army,
43:31is the American-built M110,
43:34conceived on the same principle as the Sexton of World War II,
43:37but far more mobile,
43:39and mounting the nuclear-capable 210mm howitzer.
43:45This is the M109,
43:47an American-built 155mm howitzer,
43:50also used by the British Army.
43:59The men manning this vehicle might be the crew of a naval gun turret.
44:03Certainly the techniques of laying and loading
44:06are the same as those of gunnery at Jutland and later Gulf.
44:11But the power the gun packs,
44:13which too is nuclear-capable,
44:15makes it a weapon of the future rather than the past.
44:18It belongs to a trend that makes artillery
44:20a more formidable battlefield weapon than ever before.
44:27I think that probably the 1980s
44:30are the most exciting time that the field artillery has ever had
44:36since the turn of the century.
44:38And this gets back to when we first had indirect fires
44:42with the French 75 that all of us used in World War I.
44:45Today, we're in an era where technology has given us the microchip,
44:50and the electronic industry has added precision
44:55to our communications, to our guidance,
44:57to the entire way that we operate.
45:03Long gone is the time where we are depending upon
45:06the human eyesight to acquire targets
45:08with a forward observer that would be with the infantryman or the tanker.
45:13We still use him, but he has enhanced optics,
45:16night-vision devices, etc.
45:18But more importantly, we have counter-battery radars
45:22that can look 30 to 40 kilometers deep into the enemy's rear
45:26to detect artillery firing at us.
45:30In addition, the remotely piloted vehicle that the Israelis used in Lebanon
45:36is an example of the technology we're working with.
45:40And again, satellites.
45:43Satellites are, of course, used in a strategic sense,
45:47but all of the technology that we have
45:49certainly will allow us to use satellites in the tactical battle
45:55and not just a strategic battle.
45:57So I think those things will provide us overabundance of artillery targets,
46:04and all we have to do is have the munitions and the wherewithal to attack.
46:11This is the kind of wherewithal now available,
46:14the MLRS, or Multiple Launch Rocket System.
46:18Derived from a Russian design of the Second World War,
46:20it concentrates the firepower of 18 orthodox artillery systems
46:24into a single unit.
46:26Its crew of three can bring it to its firing point,
46:29launch all its rockets, and be off again in less than a minute.
46:39The MLRS perpetuates and extends the timeless roles of artillery in war.
46:45In battle, the artillery has always had two roles.
46:49In defense, its purpose is to destroy the impetus of the enemy's attacks.
46:54And in attack, its task is to destroy the enemy's will to resist.
47:00Just that.
47:01And whether you consider the medieval wars,
47:04or the Napoleonic wars,
47:06or the great wars that followed them,
47:08those two tasks have remained.
47:11And whether you think about missiles with homing heads,
47:15or shells that can find their own way to the target,
47:18or any of the other emerging technologies,
47:21those two tasks still remain,
47:23and there is no other arm on the battlefield that can perform them.
47:27But today, in fact, we are thinking less about battles
47:31than about deterring war as a whole.
47:34And in that context, too,
47:36the formidable power of the artillery,
47:38its destructive effect,
47:40and what I can only call the authority of the guns,
47:44represent one of the most effective deterrents of them all.
47:54For the future, for years now,
47:56artillery has had this kind of ultimate power.
47:59This is an atomic cannon of 30 years ago.
48:02The power of its equivalent 30 years hence is unimaginable.
48:09Meanwhile, conventional artillery continues to grow
48:12in mobility, rate of fire, range, precision, destructive power,
48:17making battlefields more and more dangerous
48:19for the human being to inhabit.
48:21But artillery now threatens to carry its power beyond the battlefield,
48:25and perhaps to put the future of the world into the barrel of a gun.
48:30It is with artillery, said Napoleon, that war is made.
48:34Would he today,
48:36contemplating how the weapon he valued so highly
48:39has grown to overawe its creators,
48:41feel that war should not be made at all?
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