Reply To: Italian artillery doctrine

[John D Salt]

Dave Beatty wrote:

Do you know what mechanism was used for a ‘call for fire?’ Did the Italians employ Fire Support Teams as do the Americans: FST consists of an artillery observer (Fire Support Officer = FSO) and a radio communications operator and is normally attached to an infantry battalion or company.

As I said right at the start, I have never been able to find any documents on Italian artillery doctrine; consequently I know next to noting about it. I continue to be exremely disappointed at the dearth of writing on artillery fire control for almost everyone but the British.

The best I can manage at the moment is a couple of snippets from the Handbook on the Italian Army (provisional), US Army Signal Corps, 22 May 1943.

Paragraphs f ang g p. 92:

f. Fire Control and Registration.

Methods are similar to those in use in the American Army, except that targets are normally areas instead of definite points, and the battalion fire direction technique is neither common nor very effectively used.

g. Method of Employment.

The employment of artillery by the Italians is quite normal and the only feature worthy of note is the tendency to site the bulk of their artillery well forward. Artillery personnel have earned a reputation for good shooting and have displayed considerable courage under heavy fire or in direct attack. In many cases artillery firing over open sights has been used against attacking tanks or infantry. Alpini artillery are highly skilled in the manhandling of pack artillery.

Footnote on p. 94:

Wire is normally used from regiment to battalion and battalion to battery. Radio is used to the Artillery Observation-Liaison details with the infantry.

I suspect that there is not much difference in the technicalities of how fire missions were conducted between nationalities, except for the big distinction between those nations that give fire orders, and those that make fire requests. This distinction continues today — last time I looked the NATO call for fire message format included a bit to indicate wether the call for fire (CFF) was an order or a request. It is unclear to me which nations do which, except that British Forward Observation Officers give fire orders, and American Forward Observers make fire requests. I believe the Russians use fire orders, because in most cases the observer is the battery commander, and in any case Russian fire planning is based on having artillery fire lead the infantry through the enemy defences, not responding to requests from lower-level commanders. I always imagine that most countries use fire requests, although for some reason I have the idea in my head that the Danes use fire orders. I also imagine that the American emphasis on control from the FDC was something, like their standard artillery calibres, they borrowed from the French in WW1, when the French developed the idea of “liaison par le haut” and “liaison par le bas” to avoid fratricide as much as anything else. British practice also has FDCs, but they do management by exception when it comes to fire orders, and I think are more in the business of co-ordinating multi-battalion fires. Not many countries in WW2 were as flexible as the Americans and British in co-ordinating multi-battalion shoots, and it must have been annoying for the Italians to have such a heterogenous collection of pieces in the divisional artillery.

As far as I’m aware, the Americans are unusual in having a fire support team attached to every maneouvre company as a standard thing. With anyone else, it will depend on how the organisation of the supporting artillery has been glommed on to the organisation of the supported arm, but with most division organisations I would expect an artillery battalion to support a regiment or a brigade.

All the best,

John.