Why Friendly Fire was (almost) a Good Thing in World War I

~~Video Description~~

Friendly fire has been a problem throughout all of military history, and this was especially the case during the First World War when so many new technologies and techniques were being employed at unprecedented scale. It might be said that the doctrines of the time had outpaced the technology to provide for those doctrines. When it comes to the artillery and its cooperation with the infantry, this effectively meant that friendly fire was an inevitability...but that was by choice. Why? Well, believe it or not, the alternative was much worse...

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~~Timestamps~~
Friendly Fire 00:00
A Demonstration 01:50
Sponsored Message 06:40
Friendly Fire by Design 09:27
Trying to Improve and Training 14:54
How Important Was This Really? 23:52
Reactions 25:10
Ending 28:34

[mrcant]

I recently discovered that my great-grandfather Pte William Cant was possibly one of several 'Other Ranks' killed by friendly artillery fire while serving with the 4th Bn Royal Fusiliers near Arras. The entry in the battalion War Diary for 15.12.1917 reads:

"1st Lieut. Goddard killed while holding front line block on right - Our own artillery was continuously shooting short into this block - 3 OR's killed, 1 OR died of wounds and 5 ORs wounded"

While your fascinating video focuses on friendly fire within the context of the creeping barrage, this and other entries in the War Diary indicate it was a sufficiently frustrating aspect of defensive operations that the duty officer would make a point of mentioning it. My own family had been completely unaware of this, so it is doubtful relatives would have been informed of the circumstances.

[MikeJones-ipzk]

Me in 1914 when my commanding officer asks why my K/D is so high

[johnpoole]

Imagine being an attacking infantryman in WWI. "Our own guns are firing on us! Thank goodness, now we have a chance."

[rodolfomiranda]

A video on artillery trigonomics would be great at explaining some of the difficulties of coordinating a rolling barage

[Bipolar.Baddie]

In the WW1 game Isonzo, staggering your artillery is hugely important when pushing into positions where the enemy has high ground. At the beginning of a push, it's best to use creeping smoking, player controlled mortars, and snipers to dislodge MG nests and spawn points. Once your men reach about the breach the final line towards the objective, you call in your artillery or bomber support. I didn't even know that this was the best way to push in real WW1 combat, I just figured out it through trial and error and learning why some officers on other teams essentially guaranteed a win on offense

[IPlayWithFire]

Erich Maria Remarque in All Quiet on the Western Front has Paul Baumer talk about how demoralizing it is for their lines to receive friendly fire - but only because they knew it meant the gun barrels were wearing out and their side’s heavy barrages couldn’t be sustained much longer. The reduced accuracy was a byproduct of that.

[GeraldLeeRice]

6:40 This sponsor segment was so well executed that I'm leaving this comment to recommend watching it to anyone who plans on skipping it or has already skipped it

[LiverpoolReject]

Artillery and mortar fire still functions this way! We call it danger close and when you are under direct enemy fire, it is worth taking the risk of "friendly fire" every time!

[mustardjar]

i think its less "oh my god they didnt care about friendly fire during ww1! how horrible people they must've been" and more "oh my god they didnt care (as much as we do right now) about friendly fire during ww1! how horrible that war and its circumstances must've been to make people act that way"

[steveh]

If ever there was a prime example in British military history of artillery failing to support the infantry it was the battle of Magersfontein. Even at then, 15 years before WW1, it became obvious that infantry could not advance against magazine loading rifles and would suffer crippling losses, let alone against machine guns. Smoke shells would have offered infantry protection without the risk of friendly fire casualties, if the wind speed/direction assisted.

[kosta]

It's not so much the trigonometry that's the difficult part (that's to do with angles/etc.), it's the aeroballistics of artillery shells that made it so difficult to aim them well.

In a vacuum (i.e. in space), the kinematics of a shell (that is, the mathematics which describe its motion) are relatively simple. Think suvat equations meet F=ma. Actually, technically it's _all_ F=ma, but in 3D and with some calculus thrown in. Transform F=ma into a=F/m, integrate once with respect to time to get velocity, and once more to get displacement. In A-level maths they'd want you to do it algebraically, but some dudes who died before the great war came up with a way to do it numerically. One absolutely ubiquitous method for this is named after two of them - Runge & Kutta. Only problem is it involves pushing a whole lot of numbers through a mathematical meat grinder, which can get a bit tedious if done by hand.

Still, if you're the military - getting people to churn numbers for you isn't a problem

The real problem occurs once you introduce the aerodynamics. Left to their own devices, shells try to tip over. Any sort of angle of attack produces a boatload of pitching moment which makes them tumble. So they get spun up. This sort of solves the pitching moment problem, but introduces a bunch of other dynamics. For one thing, it doesn't make the pitching moment disappear, it converts it into precession. That causes a spiral motion you might have seen in long range vapour trails. Additionally, as the shell slows down, the pitching moment reduces a lot, but the spin rate reduces only a little. This can then cause the shell to pitch up significantly more later on in its parabola, so the lift it produces can become quite significant, causing a lot of drift. On top of all that, the Magnus effect comes into play, which can stabilise or destabilise, depending on the design. In terms of dynamic stability, the Magnus moment in particular only has to change a tiny bit to completely destroy a shell's performance.

Strictly speaking, throwing all those aerodynamic effects into the equations of motion, while more difficult than ignoring them, is more than doable. It's just a bunch of extra terms and fiddle factors.

The truly hard part is figuring out what those fiddle factors are. Not only are they difficult to measure (near-impossible at that time), they change with both speed and pitch angle.

Pretty much the best they could reliably do at the time was drag. Everything else was out of the question. That's why they did range testing instead. They'd fire shells, see where they land, and produce ballistic tables on that basis. Those ballistic tables would then be generalised and built into huge mechanical ballistic computers, as implemented on ships, but I imagine for artillery pieces they were just tables in manuals. Maybe those manuals were given to officers and the crew were just given absolute aim instructions - any historians familiar with artillery please chime in.

Anyway, as you can imagine, designing shells using rules of thumb and obtaining ballistic tables in limited conditions isn't conducive to accuracy in the field.

It was only during the cold war ('50s - '80s) that very reliable methods for measuring the complete aeroballistic picture were widely implemented, and only in the '90s that computer modelling methods became inexpensive enough to widely adopt for these purposes.

[charlesphillips]

One point you missed is quality of the shells. WW1 used vastly more shells that had been anticipated and so desperate measure were taken to increase shell production. This damaged quality and many of the drop shorts were defective ammunition not a mistake by the gunners.

[BS_heckla]

From playing Foxhole, Artillery is great at breaking enemy defensive structures and decent at killing/suppressing infantry. Friendly fire happens a lot in that game and you get much of what you'd expect in a WW1 scenario, mostly disjointed communications. Anywhere from messaging the arty squad, "You're killing us" to going directly to them and asking them to stop/move forward. It's quite a game that simulates these battles decently. It would be hard to demonstrate in a video like The Great War game. But it fundamentally works the same, though in Foxhole it's more for buildings/AI. You'd generally be condoned in Foxhole if you are artying trenches/infantry, as it leads to tons of friendly fire, lots of mad players xD.

[BorderBirds]

Yo dude, I stayed with your channel ever since you showed off the difference between the actual loaded musket vs a blank charge and your channel recently has taken a turn toward these kind of history questions and I love these videos… but I also would like you getting out in the field more too because that is what originally got you that sweet sweet YouTube cash

[KingOfStopMotion]

Bradon trying not to laugh his butt off during the Exter ad is hilarious.

[leslielively]

Normally I hate sponsored what nots but this guy does adds well

[kalechips]

Thank you so much for fulfilling your promise of talking about friendly fire during WWI, and so quickly!

[Brenticus]

Your recent videos on the Great War are some of my favorites. The video game was actually an excellent way to get a visual for what you’d be explaining. Love it!

[NickRatnieks]

The book "England, Their England" written in 1933 by A G Macdonell ( a Scotsman born in India who was an artilleryman) is a satirical book about the English but has a great first chapter which describes the Great War experience. It appears whenever the men were shelled they concluded it was their own artillery falling short. To combat this invincible belief, artillerymen were posted into the trenches but this made no difference to the ingrained belief system out in the front lines! A classic book on the English- as they were in the first half of the 20th century.

[schiznit]

Small thanks for being articulate on a serious subject.