Bing West
For the past fifteen decades, explosives, not bullets, have inflicted most of the destruction in a land war. In the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, Krupp's breech-loading cannon annihilated the French army. His enormous guns were featured at the World’s Fair in 1876, leading to the sobriquet that artillery was the “king of battle.”
The Germans fired one million shells on the opening day at Verdun in 1916. During World War II, the Red Army fired two million rounds into Berlin, a city about to collapse from airstrikes. In three weeks at Hue City in 1968, one U.S. Army brigade fired 52,000 rounds. The volume of artillery in Vietnam was prodigious. In the two-month incursion into Cambodia in 1970, for instance, 847,558 rounds were expended.
Artillery doesn’t require sophisticated communications, or clearance through several echelons of command in the rear. It responds immediately, 24 hours a day, regardless of weather. Artillery protects your flanks, your rear, and your frontlines. Troops can never have enough fire on call. It is inexpensive and expendable. Fire and forget; force the enemy to remember to duck.
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