WHAT IS A CREEPING BARRAGE?

Pelorus Guardian and Miners' Advocate., Volume 30, Issue 23, 22 March 1918, Page 8

WHAT IS A CREEPING BARRAGE?

CHARGING BEHIND A CURTAIN OF SHELLS. The curtain of shells behind which the great olfcnsvo 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 clam 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 known. Diagrams showing the barrage is lifted and advanced by successive stages make the proposition look simpler than it is. So perfect a barrage moans not merely that hundreds of batteries were continuously supplied with ammunition and fired with the utmost precision according to orders received from moment to moment as the advance progressed, but that instantaneous communication between the artillery observers and tho batteries was kept up under battle conditions.

A battery 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 post. These guns throw a shell weighing between two and three hundred pounds a distance of five or six miles. They are seldom within less than two miles of the German lines. They must be aimed by calculation, corrected by trial and error. For the men who lay them never see the target. They arc dependent on tho telephone wire which connects them with the 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 wireloss with the air-planes high above the battle. This is tho theory. But as a practical matter tho 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 held until the very last moment, the German machine-gunners will have time—between the moment when the shells cease to blast their works and the moment when the infantry are upon them—to 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.B. He worked 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 “foot-slogger'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.”—“Life.”