WHAT IS A CREEPING BARRAGE?

Taihape Daily Times, 1 November 1917, Page 2

WHAT IS A CREEPING BARRAGE?

CHARGING BEHIND A CURTAIN OP SHELLS. The curtain of shells behind which the great offensive of the Somme was carried out, last summer, has reached a new perfection, in General Horne's “creeping barrage” Barrage is a French word meaning dam or barrier. The “creeping barrage” is literally a moving dam of shells aimed to fall a few hundred feet in front of charging infantry and keeping pace with their advance.. In June last, British troops, including a large proportion of Australians and New Zealanders, advanced on Messines, which they captured under the most complete artillery support the war had town. Diagrams showing how the barrage is lifted apd advanc'd by successive stages make the pro position look simpler than it is. So perfect a barrage means not merely that hundreds of batteries were continuously supplied with ammunition and fired with the utmost precision according to orders received from moment to monmnt as the advance progressed but that instantaneous communication between the artillery observers and the batteries, was kept up under battle conditions. A battf.y of eight inch howitzers forming a single unit is connected with three other batteries of four guns each. For each four batteries there is an ammunition supply station and an observation post. These guns throw a shell sighing between two and three hundred pounds a distance of five or “f 03 - Thcy are sc hlom within less fhan two miles of the German linos, joy must be aimed by calculation, corrected by trial and error. For the ' li,J L ’ b! r-i - ever see tho'tarA : -any are dependent on the tele-

phone wire which connects them with th officer at the observation post who can see and report where the shells are falling. The ideal observation post is well concealed and protected by a bombproof and in communication by wireless with the airplanes high above the battle. This is the theory. But as a practical matter the observation officer is likely to find himself stationed on a shell-swept ridge with a field telephone clamped to his head and his eyes glued to a pair of binoculars. One British captain of artillery lay flat-on his stomach watching the fall of his batteries shells and telephoning corrections while exposed -to constant shrapnel fire for thirty-six hours. His eyes had begun to fail, but he couldn’t quit —the artillery must support the infantry and support it with scientific precision. ‘ If the elevation at which the guns are firing is held too long, the charging infantry will enter the area in which its own shells are falling. If the elevation is not hold until the very last moment, the German machine-gun-ners will have time —between the moment when the shells cease to blast their works and the moment when the infantry are upon them —drag their machine, guns out of their deep dug outs and direct a disastrous fire, both direct and enfilading, through the narrow' slits in their emplacements of concrete and steel. The development of the creeping barrage is attributed by the British to Lieutenant-General Henry Sinclair, Horne, C. 8., He w’orkod out with the French at the battle of the Somme his theory of protecting infantry with a mechanical moving screen of steel after the usual artillery preparation was complete, and thus gained the sobriquet of the “footslogger’s (infantryman’s) friend. ’ ’ Perhaps some idea of the artillery equipment required for such operations as these is conveyed by the statement that the British alone have four hundred artillery officers of the rank of general. ’ ’