Just watching and listening to this..........

[Cameljockey 3]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Si1hxVYlDqw

[Von Paulus 8]

Now let's imagine a barrage before a big push....

[carrick58 23]

I have been on the receiveing end and its not fun. Albeit, the calibere was small. The best I can remember they were 122 Rockets ( 50 or 100 lbs war head someone said ?) bad concussion sucks the air out from around you then all u can in hale is dirt and smoke. All you hear is a roaring sound then ya cant hear at all for awhile. On another occassion. Motar fire dirt and smoke less of a concussion ( none were close maybe 200 to 300 yds 81 or 82 MM ? ) You can hear a trumping noise of fireing if close enough. Also at different times, Recoilless Rifle never heard it coming in 75mm ? Some one said that dug up a part of the shell. The ground shakes, concussion sucks all the air out nothing to in hale but dirt and smoke cant hear a thing for a while However, the y burst up and out so it must be spot on.

There it is. Guess only the young and dumb can put themselves in that position.

[VonGuber 2]

I'm not sure what I'm looking at here, perhaps some of you combat veterans could explain. There appears to be a battery firing from just over the swale, left of center. Then I hear a series of thumps, each followed almost immediately be the tearing sound of an incoming round and its explosion. That implies that the counterbattery guns are very close, probably mortars, but I didn't think they made that kind of sound coming in. They are also not very accurate, never coming close to the firing battery. Indeed, two rounds fall very close to the "observer" (?), who doesn't even twitch. Who's shooting at whom? Or is it just staged bulls**t?

 

Almost certainly howitzer fire. One has to remember that because of the (possibly) high trajectory of the projectile, that it can be in the air longer than it takes for the report of the gun to travel to the target. It really depends on the range and angle of fire, though. The thing that makes me wonder about the authenticity of this clip is that the rounds land one at a time, and it looks like some editing has been done in between rounds. In my day we didn't fire CB one round at a time.

 

I don't pretend to know what current doctrine is, but in my day we would have fired at least a platoon-1 on a target like that, more likely a whole battery would fire. That means that no less than 4 tubes (and more likely 8...) would fire simultaneously on a given target in order to cover the target area as much as possible, considering error probabilities and such. As far as accuracy goes, those shots weren't that bad for initial, unadjusted rounds. With an observed adjustment, a second volley could spoil the entire day for anyone out there, but then again, counter-battery fire isn't always observed unless you've got eyes in the sky somewhere. Most of the time it's fired at locations triangulated from radar observations, i.e., radar sees their rounds in the air and then a location is calculated from two or more such observations.

 

I don't doubt that the impacts are real, but I'm guessing that this was staged as a training film for the... er... target audience.

[Bullethead 12]

My $0.02...

 

The 1st series of bangs and dust clouds was the terrorist battery firing. So that's the target for the counterbattery. Shortly thereafter, you see a series of shells impacting the target area. The 1st round is slap on target, the rest are scattered all over the area.

 

Note that there are obvious edits in the film, where 1 cloud of dust from a counterbattery round hasn't quite dissipated, and then the screen is suddenly clear and the next round comes in. This to me means you can't trust anything in what you hear, so it's hard to tell what to make out of it. So in what follows, I just say what the video shows, but the reality might well be different.

 

For the counterbattery fire, you can hear the gun firing, then the shell approaching, then seen and hear the impact. The time of flight is no more than 2 seconds, so I'd assume the counterbattery guns were just across the valley on the opposite hill and using direct fire. I'd have to assume it was a single 155mm howitzer from the sound of the firing, the size of the shell bursts, the fact that you can hear them coming (assuming you can trust the audio), and the long time between shots. It was long enough for the dust to settle. If a full battery had been firing, it would have been multiple impacts all over the hillside simultaneously. Definitely not mortars, although incoming arty doesn't sound much like in this video. It's got way more chest-vibrating bass in it, but I'm willing to call that a limitation of Youtube.

 

So, here are the obvious questions: Why was only the 1st round on target? That was the 1st shot, so the gunners knew where to shoot and could have hit it more often if they'd wanted to. What else were they shooting at? Especially given the long time between subsequent shots. And why was there a remote camera there at all? Sure, it picked up the terrorist battery (looked and sounded like rockets), but with direct fire, the counterbattery gun across the way could see all that for itself.

 

As to what counterbattery fire really looks like from the enemy's POV, here are some examples from my personal scalp collection. These were of course team efforts, but I had a hand in them, so they're part of the karma I still have to work off. All 3 of these wrecks of 122mm 2S1 SP-howitzers of the same battalion, which were located SW of Al Jarah, the western Palestinian ghetto of Kuwait City. All were taken out by the same salvo of 155mm DPICM. The differing amounts of destruction is due to the amount of ammo they had inside when we hit them. #1 is still recognizable but obviously has a "gas bloating". #2 is opened up like a peeled banana. I still have some huge ball bearings out of this ones turret ring. #3 is totally blown to bits, leaving just the engine block and the bottoms of the tracks in place, with the rest strewn about 100m in all directions.

 

Remember, this was counterbattery. They got the 1st shot (but didn't get a 2nd shot). In this context, note the angle of the gun tube in #1, back over its shoulder. This battery was facing WNW and we came at them from the SSE, essentially in their rear. But this didn't faze them--they shot at us from where they were. And here's the thing. Our initial salvo wiped out all 3 batteries of this battalion except for 1 gun. That crew drove out of their dug-in position and headed towards us about 1/2 mile, away from where they knew we'd hit, and started shooting at us again. So we had to smack them individually. Definitely some hardcore bastids there.

 

I hope to drink with them all in Valhalla. Worthy foes