artillery

Men and machines

By the time of the Somme offensive of 1916, the Great War had become shaped by artillery. Villages, woods and fields were reduced to drab wilderness by relentless shellfire and blighted by the squalid apparatus needed to support hordes of soldiers. No Man's Land became so featureless that it was easy to get lost and blunder into the enemy's lines.

The perfection of quick-firing guns that were able to deliver high-explosive shells with accuracy had made such a war possible. The harnessing of economies to the demands of total war since 1914 enabled the deployment of huge numbers of these guns. Munitions stocks were massive; the British army in France received 16 million shells in the second half of 1915. The war had become a clash between machines as much as between men.

New Zealand's artillery war on the Somme

The Great War was halfway through when the big guns roared into life along the New Zealand Division's sector around the Somme in support of a major attack on 15 September 1916.

In the preceding days, field gunners tried to blow gaps in the barbed-wire entanglements in No Man's Land and between trench lines, while howitzers pulverised trenches, lines of communication, machine-gun nests, observation posts and other strong points. New Zealand gunners also fired poison-gas shells for the first time on 12 September.

Targets were identified from balloons or aircraft, or by Forward Observation Officers – artillery officers stationed in the front line. These observers called down concentrated fire from groups of batteries, called crashes, on anything that moved around the German lines, while British heavy guns sought out enemy batteries. At 6 p.m. on the 14th a continuous heavy bombardment began.

Soldiers fire a camouflaged 18-pound field gun at Gallipoli.