Bombardment in war - how well does it work?

in this video which has been sponsored by the great courses plus but more of that later I'm going to be talking about the effectiveness or perhaps the ineffectiveness of bombardment upon the enemy with bombs and artillery and all that sort of stuff in modern warfare now there was the infamous day of the typhoon yes the day of the typhoon doesn't that sound good on this day and the British were advancing against the Germans but the Germans were trying to account attack and they were sending tanks to the front the British were going forward from the Normandy area and they ruled the skies yes the British have achieved almost total air superiority and though hundreds of sorties were flown with the typhoon ground attack planes and these these had cannons and machine guns as well but they also had rockets eight rockets four on each wing now these are 8-inch rockets so that's eight times eight inch a cruiser at the time typically had about eight 8-inch guns so one of these typhoons coming at you and shooting all its rockets at you was equivalent to being on the receiving end of the a broadside from a cruiser so pretty terrifying I think you'd agree and the day of the typhoon went down and in history as the time when 89 kills were racked up to the RAF or at least 89 kills were claimed by the RAF but then later when inspectors on the ground went forward over the area that had been fought over and looked for these 89 wrecks that have been blasted to smithereens by rockets that's not actually what they found they found 10 that they were pretty confident had been knocked out by rockets there were there were marks of rocket hits on them nothing else that would explain that the The Vic had been knocked out so yes okay so 10 that could be confidently clocked up to rocket hits perhaps others had been hit by rockets but not knocked out or had been towed away so those didn't get to record it but 10 yeah 10 definite kills and another 10 which it seemed had been abandoned whilst being rocketed so there were rocket hits all around the vehicle didn't seem to be really knocked out exactly but clearly it was abandoned the crew and had scarpered so that leaves an awful lot of gap to bring it up to 89 but it seems that a very large number of Germans had just decided to be somewhere else in their tanks you can imagine can't you hear you're in a German tank you got the radio on in your headphones and you hear oh one of my colleagues just been knocked out oh and another and oh and here come typhoons and oh they fly over the top and and what do you do you can just hope that they miss you and then you've lost contact with no load of your guys and you just think I don't want to be here pretty quickly the Germans tweaked that it was the tanks that the RAF were were targeting so if you were in a tank and a load of typhoons turned up suddenly you already didn't want to be there anymore so you would hide or and/or run away and as long as the Germans are busy hiding and running away in their tanks then they're not busy fighting at the front in their tanks so the jobs being done you are effectively depriving the Germans of tank support even if you're not actually hitting the tanks now how often did they have the tacks well it seems that something like one rocket in a hundred might actually hit a tank and that if the Rockets were were fired competently and properly then they were landing within about a hundred and fifty yards of the target trouble is that tanks though terribly large are not 150 yards wide and if you think of a circle of 150 yards in diameter the north all the places in that circle you can put a tank where a rocket is not going to hit it and if you're in the tank of course and the rocket misses even quite nearby you're probably fine you're in an armored box so if you're a crewman in a tank you might think well I'll just stay in solid box yeah but if three typhoons come at you each with one in fours those odds that you your fancy one in four chance if you just sit in your iron box that you're going to be blown up No maybe you'd rather be somewhere else so you might abandon and leg it or you might just drive your tank somewhere else so the day of the typhoon was not anything like as effective in the number of tanks that were actually killed by Rockets and yet it seems that was still fairly effective it knows it's good for morale - when you see you loads of typhoon swirling around overhead not so many German tanks around so you think yeah if you're a British ship for children going forward this seems like a fairly good day in the day of the typhoon even though not only those Rockets actually hit and they said the same could be said of an awful lot of bombardment for instance there was at the same stage in the war there was a 500 yard long viaduct that became a priority target for the RAF and they attacked it over and over again and again afterwards when inspectors went to actually see how many bombs had hit it and they knew how many bombs had been dropped on it they found out that one in eighty two bombs had actually hit the target so you might think well these pilots are a bit rubbish a miss 500 yard long target how difficult can it be don't they practice well yes that they did practice and I'm sure they were a great deal more accurate when they weren't being shot at now imagine let's imagine that the viaduct is strict so there's a pretty obvious line along which you would want to fly you would want to fly directly in line with the viaduct wouldn't you so that your left and right is pretty much catered for and if you're a little bit short along it's not gonna matter you can hit the viaduct anyway because it's 500 yards long yeah but any German gunner with a machine gun is going to work that out unless he's an idiot so all he has to do is aim a stream of bullets along that line straight over the viaduct and anyone trying to fly along that line is going to fly through that stream of bullets so when you are being shot at and you're dinking and swerving and around all over the place trying to avoid being hit you're going to end up doing a bombing run there's a sort of swooping thing like that at an awkward angle and yeah only one in 82 bombs will actually hit the target and but you might think what with artillery surely it's much better with artillery because they're they're set up and they got charts and tables and they can fire shell after shell and and walk things onto the target with Ford observers and it's better right yeah but it's still it might surprise you just how inaccurate an awful lot of artillery was now in an early attack against Germany in 1945 a fairly studied attack it was found that fewer than 5% of the shells fired landed within 50 yards of a point target by point target me it's not an area they're trying to hit that's not a big of an area they're trying to hit a particular gun emplacement or something so against the point target only 5% were getting within 50 yards when the Canadians were attacking what was it Bologna they fired what they managed to I don't have any beef I've actually managed to land six thousand shells within 150 yards of a German AAA battery that had eight guns firing away so that's six fouls and artillery shells lie at landing within roughly the accuracy of a properly fired rocket from a typhoon they managed to knock out just two of those anti-aircraft guns orbiting another way they managed to knock out two of the anti-aircraft guns but here's the you might say surprising thing the other six carried on firing despite two of them being knocked out in this tremendous barrage of thousands of shells coming at them the other six were able somehow to carry on firing so in 19 1945 when the British were going forth that same study I mentioned before calculated that they fired half a million shells in one operation and killed sixty of the enemy half a million shells to kill just 60 of the enemy is beginning to look isn't it there's no this bombardment stuff it's just useless it's just rubbish it doesn't kill anyone well I put it to you that actually killing people should not be the object if you think that something has failed because it didn't hit because it didn't kill then I think you're missing the point the object surely is not to kill people in fact wouldn't it be nice if we could avoid killing people the object is to win the war and you win wars not by killing absolutely everyone on the other side particular something like world war ii just think of a scale what you do is you persuade the enemy to stop fighting so how do you persuade the enemy to stop fighting when you got into surrender so what you would like then is some sort of contagious behavior because though it is occasionally the case that commanders from on high order very large numbers of men to surrender all at once so for instance the obvious example the fall of Singapore British command ordered 60,000 British to surrender and they obeyed orders and they surrendered the biggest erm defeat for the British of all time but usually in a war its small numbers perhaps one platoon accompany at most taking prisoners of small numbers of the enemy and so you've got to find out some localized way of getting guys to surrender because surrendering is contagious whereas death is not contagious if I'm here in a position with a load of my men in my unit and I see over there forward and left of us there's another lot of us and they get attacked by the enemy and they are all killed I don't think to myself yeah dying yeah that's a good idea she would give that a go it's not a contagious behavior people don't die because other people have died but if I see that lot surrender and they they show white flags and then the enemy stops shooting at them and then there's a parley and they're led away and everything seems to be quite allocable and no one is at least while I'm watching mistreated and I think well you all seem to be quite orderly so actually these guys are disciplined enough to accept a surrender and we'll stop shooting if you offed a surrender and ok and so now this seems like a viable behavior maybe we should surrender mean there are an awful lot of them and so we're probably likely to lose and it seems that they will give us an opportunity to surrender so if that opportunity is offered to us then maybe we should take it as well surrendering is a possibly contagious behavior and if you can get more and more guys to surrender then then it's snowballs and then eventually you've won the war hooray so if you can persuade people to surrender rather than killing them it's actually better so maybe we should look more at the psychological effects of bombardment you see it wasn't until about world war 1 that the military finally twigged that the main effect of bombardments is psychological and it was discovered for instance that if you could kill 5 percent of the opposition then the fighting effectiveness of the opposition would be harmed ok so if there are a thousand troops over there and you kill 50 of them then the remaining troops will fight as effectively as just 500 not 950 and if you can kill 10% of them then they're fighting effectiveness goes down to approaching zero of course you can never guarantee this but in the main it goes down to approaching zero now I strongly suspect that that's not because of the actual killing I don't think it's because you've killed 1/10 of them that the others are incapable of carrying on fighting I think it's got far more to do with what you have to do in order to kill 10% of them is what renders the the the other 90% incapable or at least unwilling to resist you so by the time you've hit them with so much ordnance so so many loud bang so many flying splinters of death all over the place you enough to kill 10% of them then the effect of all that renders the other 90% stuff it I'm not going to fight I have had enough of this so how can we actually measure fear then well unfortunately there is no reliable way of measuring it you can sell well sure there are correlate topics what about heart rate yeah well heart rate goes up and down and up and down all over the shop you can't keep very high heart rates going for for long periods of time such as the length of time that modern battles tend to last and one man's heart rate may go up and down in quite a different pattern to another's and are you really going to try to measure loads of people's heart rate while that there's a war on it has to be real fear right so it has to be a real war and that experiment it just doesn't work and it doesn't tell you anything what you want to know some men will be absolutely terrified but they will still fight effectively they feel the fear but fight anyway so doesn't actually tell you very much about how they'll behave as soldiers either so it's not that useful some men will run humble stare I will stand and fight and others will just cower in terror now in 1917 a study was done about the danger to men in bombardments and it was found that obviously these figures are very a very convenient round but he was found that if you are standing upright you are ten times more likely to become a casualty if you're in a bombardment than if you're lying on the ground now one of the things you have to do in order to run is stand up so you could try to run through a barrage in order to escape with your life or you could just lie down and statistically you're much more likely to live if you just lie down but of course then you don't feel as though you're in control you just have to lie there and hope that you don't get hit but statistically yeah just lie down it's better but if you get into a trench ah in a trench you're a hundred times safer so if you're immediately next to a trench just jump into the trench but if you're in a bunker you're a thousand times safer so yes if you are in a trench and then it is probably worth moving but only to go deeper underground into the bunker burned of course you get bunker mentality I'm not coming out you feel safe in the bunker and there is something called a a barrage hangover so a load of shells are fired at the enemy and the enemy gets suppressed by those shells and then the barrage stops so do they immediately pop up fresh as daisies or is there this barrage hangover are they now sluggish and delayed in their reactions and less likely to fight do they have a barrage hangover now in world will one what you got was something called the the race to the parapet so you have a load of guys here have been shelled for some while and they're deep in their bunker and you've got a load of guys here in their trenches who have been ordered to attack as soon as they the barrage lifts so the barrage lit these guys start running across no-man's land they've got quite a bit of distance to cover and they've got maybe shell holes and barbed wire and all the rest of it as well and these guys have got a much shorter distance to the parapet but are they going to just set off immediately because when the barrage stops are they convinced it's stopped is this just a lull that is it going to start again any moment and how are they psychologically are these precious daisies no probably not they've just been shelled for ages and they have some problems of their own they may find that they have to dig their way out for instance of their bunker because the trench might have collapsed near the entrance so and then they've got to get into the trench and to go along the trench and find their place and set up the machine guns and clean all the mud and all the damage off them there's a delay and so that was the race to the parapet and whoever got to the parapet first tended to win so in World War one that was the decider a lot of fights in the classic western front trenches no-man's land and all the rest of it now what does a sane man do what immediately a sane man goes now the barrage is lifted we must man the guns and he hastens to the guns but how sane is he how how willing is he to fight well more calculations were done and it was found that if you fired one artillery shell or presumably medium sized it does make a difference son what the size of the shell is one or two every minute and it lands within about 200 yards of a soldier then that'll keep him in cover he won't venture out but to stop him firing back is quite important so to suppress him so much that he doesn't actually head up and fire accurately back you need 6 shells every minute landing within about 200 yards now if you want to cause the enemy's resolve to collapse the step up so is one or two to get them in cover 6 to get them to stop shooting but it's a vast amount of ordnance you need then to cause them to - - of course they resolve to collapse meanwhile can I contrast this with figures from military exercises modern military exercises where troops don't even go to ground unless they've taken 10 to 20 percent casualties whereas it was discovered and we were reminded again in the Falklands but so just one burst of machine-gun fire and and even if there are elite troops like Paris everybody hits the deck when there are actual dirty bits of lead flying about people get much less brave than they do on military exercises so military exercises unfortunately really just don't model reality terribly well now in 1945 when the British attacked the German village of balcan it's 1945 it's just think of what that means for a moment by the time 1945 comes round the British have been going forwards every single day since the Normandy landings and the Germans have been retreating every single day and it's obvious to the British going forward the war's over now so whereas when you were on the Normandy beaches on d-day itself it seemed worth taking a risk to to save the lives of the fellows around you and and to make sure that this operation succeeds because if this operation fails oh my goodness the stakes the number of people are going to die it really is worth fighting on d-day but by the time 1945 comes around and it's pretty obvious the Germans really have lost now nobody wants to die I mean I'm not saying that their people indeed indeed e on d-day wanted to die but they weren't willing to take risks anymore because ah wouldn't you know the war's almost over the Germans have it's just a few days now surely they're gonna be throwing in the towel no one wants to be the last guy to die meanwhile of course by this time that the Allies have got more than a toehold more than a foothold they've jumped into Europe and they've landed loads and loads of munitions they no longer have to be anything like as conserving of ammunition as once was the case so even though orders were against this sort of thing they would expend vast amounts of ordnance to achieve quite modest aims so the village was defended by only about a hundred and fifty men and they hit it with everything in the kitchen sink they in a ten minute period they fired forty-nine tons of high explosive at it forty nine tons and I've been told that um barrage ease they sound like barking dogs there's the rhythm of both sort of weird and rhythm that barking dogs have and so you've got that that deafening areas and and just causing terror and causing you to go to ground it just goes on forty nine tons and then they were able to bring up a load of mortars and another forty four tons of mortar shells rained down on this village and then they brought up tanks and AAA guns and another 18 tons 18 tonnes they measured that the tanks will to fight off pretty much everything they had and gone back for more another 18 tons of ordnance fired direct into that village and then for an encore a half hour long barrage of another 73 tons of ordnance just crashing into that village so now in World War one if you just take them out of high-explosive use and number of men killed you get one ton per man it took roughly a ton of high explosives to kill a man in World War one so this was a hundred and eighty four tons and there were a hundred and fifty men there so it'll kill everyone right all dead must be I mean nobody could live through that so when the the Dorset's regiment went in the infantry they found no resistance but only twenty-five men had been killed in the bearishness that's a lot that's still 17 percent losses but it's an awful lot less than a hundred percent but those remaining were in no state to offer any resistance at all they their minds had just been shattered by this frankly even at the time it was considered overkill this vast amount of ordnance landing on them had utterly shattered their ability to resist it was found at that period that if they could kill three percent of the opposition with a barrage then what followed was almost always car classed as an easy victory but this was yeah hmm overkill a bit now what stops people fighting back well being dead obviously so but for every man who cannot offer any resistance after the bombardment because he's dead - are so terrified that they can't offer any resistance and about five are too sensible to try they haven't completely lost their wits under normal circumstances obviously balcan was a an extreme example but they are just - that they've done the calculation in their head it's just not worth it if the enemy's got this amount of stuff and then on top of this it's we're going to be attacked by infantry forget it I'll do it I'm so or leave I'm not going to fight so even the sane are very likely to be defeated by by bombardment so it's not useless bombarding because the effect is largely psychological now so far this video has been rather grim and maybe I should lighten the tone a bit so I shall and I shall say its its sponsor time but I thought just mention of this it's a ukulele that has been very kindly sent to me by one of my viewers one michael hart from the US of A thanks Mike it's it's it's glossy and it's got inlay and it goes that was a sea and if some of you are thinking well frankly I wasn't impressed by that ukulele bit of playing there I think if he's going to try to show off oh I can play the ukulele and maybe he should ought to get a bit better than that well in my defense this arrived about two hours ago and I've watched one five-minute video on how to play the ukulele first how to tune it's pretty weird tuning I'm used to pianos and guitars and so forth where well the idea where each string is higher than the one before it but this one starts high then goes low then goes a little bit higher [Music] high/low media slightly higher which confuses the heck out of me anyway possibly this will feature in future videos and maybe I can motivate myself to learn to play it by just saying that I'm not allowed to use it in a future video unless I've learned a new chord or I don't know something new anyway thanks Mike now then oh yes sponsor time that was it and this is multiply the great courses Plus now if 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easy if you just click the link in the description or is easy to do that it's at the top of the description should find it quite easily new stuff is being added monthly oh and news for people in the UK and Australia it is now optimized that's in the past some people had reported that they were having a bit of trouble paying but now it should be smooth and easy optimized in fact and optimized sounds terribly good it means a bit like the word optimal now I of course wanted something to do with artillery because bombardment or whatever and I typed those words in and oh you know what it's like you go into the rabbit hole and anyway I ended up on a course about do-it-yourself engineering in which I saw a very enthusiastic professor who was clearly very pleased with these very nice models that he'd made of an Annika and a ballista and a trebuchet the arms the trebuchet were about that long and being a professor that there are two lectures on on the making of these being a professor of course he equations and graphs and so forth of for optimizing your bits of artillery and the like so if you are interested in Italy it's not modern natural it's ancient art okay but its artillery and you're watching a video about artillery so you might be interested in ancient artillery and it's making stuff which I happen to quite like so that's a do-it-yourself engineering which is one of the many many lectures that you can gain access to on the great courses plus my generous sponsor thank you now back to and I've got to get back to the grimness now the grimness of artillery you see after new really is horrible I mean it is it's it's sharp shards of metal being flung left right and center it's incredibly loud noises it's it's terror it's it's something to be avoided if you can but it's also extremely effective it's effective stick if you like but it's always good to have a carrot as well and the character of surrender or scape those are good carrots maybe rather than trying to kill everyone with more and more effective artillery which is the way that a lot of the modern military seems to be going maybe we should be using tactical psychology to to improve our techniques and you could call those techniques a form of technology as opposed in getting people to do what we want to do which is to surrender or at least run away I mean run away is good but surrender is even better because then they don't get to fight another day now if you want to sell a piece of kit to a general today if you can prove its phenomenally accurate and deadly then what a great bit of kit I want one of those oh this drone that drops this amazing missile that can go down a chimney and so forth yeah that's great and that they're really good for killing people and the british army today and certainly the american army and i daresay quite a few other armies like them have become really amazingly good at killing people but not necessarily good at winning wars in afghanistan goes easy I mean we have loads of troops with much better kit and we're up against an ill ed bill coordinated ill-equipped ramshackle forces and yet did the outdid the Allies winter the Coalition wind and the Americans British win I don't think many people would argue that in fact if you if you look at it from the point of view of us a killing scoreboard oh yeah absolutely the British soldiers were killing 20 of the enemy for every one of their own that got killed 20 to 1 oh yeah that's that's that's absolutely definitely victory and yet can you say that the war was a victory maybe we have to look at the psychology of war and and the winning of it rather than the the kit that can just kill people it has often said that if you kill someone in the Taliban or whatever who's of course is someone's uncle is someone's dad is someone's brother what this does is it creates two new recruits to the Taliban in vengeance for that death so killing people it seems to be if anything counterproductive now what do what can we do to make barrages more effective well studying them a bit more and possibly even experiment with in a bit more that may seem like a callous form of experimentation but you've got to get the maximum value out of these things ideally surely you want to be killing the smallest number of people because death is horrible and having the greatest psychological effect so some will say that the short sharp shock is more effective than a more spread out long-term barrage and there are occasions there are contexts in which that seems to be the case however there are other contexts where it seems not to be the case and we've got to work out just when one type of barrage is more appropriate than the other so what you can do is you can train people to sit tight to sit still and the longer you train them to do that the longer they're there barrage hangover will be the longer they will continue to sit still so if you launch a few shells the guys sit tight in there in there in there bunkers in their trenches whatever and you continue to do this they will they will continue okay I'll just sit here I'll just sit here and then they get in a mindset of just sitting there that's what they're gonna do now and then when you do lift the barrage they continue to sit which is usually to your advantage if you're trying to attack them at the time so what do men do during a barrage well it does seem to depend largely on how busy they are and how isolated they are if men are in company and busy they tend to carry on doing whatever it is that they were doing their task has momentum so there are men in the bunker system and they're going through tunnels and they're moving ammunition from one place to another and then some of them are trying to do hack through a wall with pickaxes so they can get into another bit of the of the underground complex and the guys are trying to rig up repairs to the air filtration system because it's getting really foul down there they've got stuff to do and they're with other people who will notice if they've stopped doing whatever it is that they were doing and they'll be officers perhaps supervising them and saying carry on doing the thing that you're doing and so they tend to even as the barrage continues they carry on doing the thing that they're doing meanwhile and in a less regarded room there might be a dozen guys yes they're in company but they're just sitting tight they just sitting tight and they're doing nothing and if an officer comes along and tries to get them to do something there's the thing I need you to do I need to do this right okay right I've got other things to do and off you go ten minutes later but hang on you're all just sitting here I told you ten minutes ago you should be doing the thing why aren't you doing the thing come on do the thing right and they just sit tight maybe if you put a lot of effort into one man or you you I told you our director like oh and you put love effort into getting him to do a thing that he will do the thing but the others will oh great he's doing the thing all just continue to sit tight I've heard this likened to trying to throw drunks out of a bar it takes a huge amount of effort and you can't really motivate them all in one go you have to work on one and then work on the next and then work on the next note the first one then doesn't come back in again huh so there's that mentality there is another mentality which tends to be isolated men if a man is on his own and he's in the barrage that just carries on and it's terrifying you doesn't know what's going on elsewhere he hasn't he's not being too biased by an officer he's not being encouraged by his his his fellows and he's not being given a reason to be brave because generally you need to be seen to be brave because you're putting on a brave face for others you're being brave but there's no yyb Bray's no one's watching me so they quite often lapse into a catatonic state some of them goes limp and some of them go really really tense but they stare into space and they are as soldiers completely useless once they've gone into that state but a lot of people they just sort of adapt now there's the long-term adaption which I've read about many many times I've lost count a number of times I are reading memoirs that I've read of soldiers who slept through a barrage and they're not even deep underground in bunker some of these guys factor usually live in the accounts that I've been reading they usually just in a slit trench out in the open and yet they've slept through a barrage because they've they've been shelled so many times before and they know there's nothing they can do so they just get on with some sleep because you never know if you're in the army and your own campaign you never know when your next opportunity to sleep will be so take the opportunity to sleep and they will sleep through a barrage and possibly what wakes them up is the barrels lifting oh the enemy might be attacking now but there's there's another sort of a more short-term adaption which is that yes when the danger is is close and threatening bang the explosions start around you yes you get the higher heart rate you get the adrenaline you get you're pumped up for action but then if this doesn't lead to anything there's any so long that your body will keep that up for and after a while your body stops making a fuss and I strongly suspect that this is because we are biologically not capable of sustaining that ready for action in this stressful moment state of body because in the environment in which we evolve the EEA the environment of evolutionary adaption back in the Pleistocene there was no threat that was sustained for ages if you're about to fall off a cliff you scramble like crazy and you either fall off the cliff and die or you make it to safety and then you find in which case you've been whore calm down if you're attacked by a tiger yes absolutely you want it you want to be ready for action and to fight like crazy but no Tiger is continually attacking you for hours so there is no point in involving the ability to stay pumped up for hours and hours and so if a bearish goes on for hours and hours troops get used to it and they start coming down now artillery as I say is is horribly effective and and in modern warfare in well in World War two most casualties were caused by artillery it was something like four-fifths during the Mahnomen d breakout period in 1944 between the the Allies and the Germans about 4/5 of casualties we've been caused by artillery because you pinned troops you stopped them moving and then you hit them of artillery and and whilst that's going on other men are not firing their rifles it's the artillery that's doing the work so artillery causes a lot of casualties now during the Falklands conflict that's conflict by the way not Falklands War the Falklands wasn't a war it was a conflict it was called the Falklands crisis until the shooting started and then it was the Falklands conflict no war was ever declared Britain never declared war on Argentina Argentina they declare war on Britain there was no plan by the British to invade Argentina or even to overthrow the fascist hunter that was ordering the the invasion no it was a policing action it was a conflict and it was one that the entire world recognizes even the Russians can I remind you this was 1982 s there was still deep in the Cold War at this point this is long before perestroika and glasnost even the Russians didn't veto it that yeah yeah in the UN actually yeah fair enough yeah the Argentinian fascist hunter probably shouldn't have done that and I realized I'm going on a bit of a tangent here but can I just say thanks thanks New Zealand New Zealand they were the only people just about who came forward to offer us help and I said you want some ships and as I recall the British er politely declined but but yes no your friends are thanks New Zealand that's that's friendship and loyalty I'd like that but anyway the point is that it was a conflict not a war and people and he started calling it a war after the British as one which I think is a little bit because I think they saw the calling to war because it just sounds better to have won a war oh we've carried out a successful policing action we've resolved a military conflict doesn't sound as good as we've won a war so people as far as I know around the world but certainly within Britain started calling it the Falklands War just as soon as the British is one which i think is yeah that's not really that's not really cricket anyway 1982 so during the Falklands conflict there was an attack on wireless Ridge and this was defended by Argentinians and they were entrenched and they were hit by artillery now they suffered something getting on for 20 percent losses from artillery and almost all their losses were from artillery and just and to to balance with the the Paris who were attacking them about half of their losses were also to artillery the same artillery that the British artillery oops well twas ever thus but they it was a victory for the the Paris going forwards but the Paris didn't actually have to do a huge amount with bullets and bayonets they just had to get there and they round up any prisoners or I will secure the position because an awful lot of the Argentinians had bugged out that is just a leg dip that wasn't the bug that was that the phrase used at the time they'd bit scarpered they'd gone and they did this largely because of an unintentional lull in the parish by the way I think one of the reasons that the barrage was quite so deadly was that artillery between 1945 and 1982 had got quite a bit more accurate and another being that the Argentinian trenches weren't that great and they weren't quite the marvelous structures that the the British and Germans were digging in in in Flanders in World War one but I think it was partly because this soil wasn't so deep anyway and mostly up to most of the casualties on both sides were caused by artillery and it was the lull which got the Argentinians to to escape and yet there are other examples versus when they when the British were attacking Rio de Castilla no kit castell de Rio big apartment in Italy and despite going back to World War two now they did what was called a bite and hold attack and they fired the usual number about four thousand shells at the enemy and then stormed in on mass and were repulsed by the determined German defenders who saw them off so the British then regrouped and rather than just repeat the same thing let's try a different approach so this time they fired just one shell every three minutes for seven hours so imagine you're on the receiving end of a shell every three minutes for hour after hour after hour and you know the British are out there and you know they're gonna try again what do you do well a second assault was was organized and in they went and they met almost no resistance at all I think two Germans had stayed back to fight but the others were too surrendering all the vast majority had just done and why they'd gone they'd gone because they could one shell every three minutes it's just a constant reminder you're in danger you're in danger the next one might get you the next one might get you the next one might get you the next all that one got someone the next one might get you but after a shell has come over there's a gap a gap where you feel reasonably safe you balance the equation in your head I'm probably more safe coming out of my trench and legging it in the open and getting away then I am staying where I am waiting to be attacked and this is what happened it was an easy victory when the British went in after that thing so 140 artillery shells in that case had achieved what 4,000 had not earlier in the same day now during World was one and two the British developed things called suppression charts and these were fairly fairly widely used and got I am told by towards the end of World War two actually pretty good because the British were getting actually quite good at tactical psychology by the end of World War two and these were charts that are too human might look at and the planners might look at and they gave you indications of how many shells of what caliber needed to be fired with what rapidity and land within so many yards of a certain kind of target to achieve a certain kind of effect of me to getting them to sit tight suppression or whatever and these were acted upon but it seems that then the Cold War started and it was all about the Russians coming across in huge numbers and it was all about what ordnance can be get to knock out their tanks at what speed it was all about machines and killing and and attrition wearing the enemy down by just killing lots of him that all came back into the thinking and the advances that the British had made in tactical psychology it seems were largely thrown away and people stopped using these suppression charts now in let's go back to Afghanistan if you are going to try to win a war like that and you use methods divided device for another war you probably find that they won't work served well in World War 1 it was all about massing load of troops here and a huge amount of ordnance and crushing that on top of the enemy and then jumping on him before he had a chance to pull himself back together again but there there was a very definite frontline the enemies that modern armies have been finding themselves up against don't fight with a front line somewhere and aren't organized in the way that that the large armies were organized with a huge chain of command where large that high commanders could could order large numbers of troops to move or surrender or do whatever if you're up against small numbers of insurgents with no front lines and you mass excuse your had a firepower in one place well then they don't operate there they go somewhere else unfortunately the approach doesn't work so that is what I have to say for the moment about bombardments [Music] the man you

Channel: Lindybeige

Views: 368,841

Rating: 4.9159536 out of 5

Keywords: bombard, bombardment, artillery, barrage, barage, stonk, effectiveness, war, warfare, weapons, battles, psychology, military, tactical, mental, psychological, effect, morale, resolve, cohesion, falklands, ww1, ww2

Id: 1UTsPHBLjKk

Length: 43min 31sec (2611 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 30 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Festoniaful]

I think his video on Batlle Fatigue should be mentioned after watching his video, great as always!