One of Greg’s principal activities as a pilot with 42 Squadron RAF was to observe and direct the fire of artillery batteries. The target might be a hostile battery or something else, such as a strategically important bridge. These exercises were known colloquially, to the airmen at least, as ‘shoots’, and are explained in more detail here. In his shoots, Greg was working with siege batteries of the Royal Garrison Artillery (RGA), such as 213 SB. This article looks more closely at the batteries and their higher organisation. Why siege batteries? And why the Royal Garrison Artillery?
Siege Batteries
To begin at the beginning, a ‘battery’ is in context a grouping of two or more pieces of artillery. These pieces would be ‘guns’ in common parlance – but not necessarily in the parlance of those in the field, who distinguished between:
- Guns properly so called, which had long barrels and fired shells on a low trajectory;
- Howitzers (shorter barrels, higher trajectory); and
- Mortars (very short barrels, highest trajectory).
The siege batteries with which Greg worked were typically equipped with howitzers, usually from 6” to 12” gauge. There would be from two to six howitzers per battery, often with fewer for the larger gauges.
So what of the word ‘siege’? It is tempting to think of the Western Front as being the linear consequence of each side trying to besiege the other. But this wasn’t the origin of the ‘siege’ in ‘siege battery’, which seems to have come from a previous age. In earlier days of artillery, sieges of fortified towns and castles needed heavy artillery. This was to inflict damage on the defensive masonry. So they used guns that were large. Their size meant that they weren’t readily mobile, and the guns were, to one degree or another, dug in or permanent. In this way the name ‘siege battery’ came to mean a group of heavy artillery pieces. The name stuck even with guns that weren’t involved in a siege proper. All this contrasted with field artillery pieces, which had to be small enough to be able to be moved around fairly easily.
Royal Garrison Artillery
The fact that the artillery pieces were so large that they were not readily movable also to some extent underpins the term ‘Garrison’ in ‘Royal Garrison Artillery’.
The Royal Artillery (RA) – more properly the Royal Regiment of Artillery – originated early in the 18th century. A combination of field artillery companies in England and at outposts overseas went to form the new regiment. The RA grew quickly through the rest of that century and the Napoleonic Wars. At the end of the following century, on 1 June 1899[1], it was announced that the Royal Regiment of Artillery would be split into two corps, namely (a) the Royal Horse Artillery and the Royal Field Artillery and (b) the Royal Garrison Artillery.
The RGA’s duties were, as its name suggests, related to defending fixed installations on land, including coastal installations. These duties were undertaken with relatively large artillery pieces that did not need to be moved.
From the Old Duties…
Round about this time, there was an interesting dynamic that led to a reduced demand for coastal defences. As noted in Wikipedia, in an informative article on the Royal Garrison Artillery[2]:
Coast Defence
Fixed artillery (that which is not meant to move, other than for the purpose of aiming) was placed in forts and batteries in locations where they might protect potential targets (ports, cities, etc.) from attack, or from where they might prevent the advance of an enemy. This included forts and batteries intended to protect against military forces on the land, and against naval forces on the sea. Coastal artillery relied primarily on high velocity guns, capable of striking out at ships at a great distance, and penetrating their armour. Inland defensive batteries might have armament better suited for use against personnel.
Mobile (field) artillery pieces were sometimes used that could be quickly re-deployed as required between fortifications that were not permanently manned or armed. Fixed batteries were operated in the early 20th Century by the RGA, including its Militia Artillery and Volunteer Force reservists (often with support from other units, such as engineers operating searchlights for night-time firing).
Conventional wisdom held that a naval force would need a three-to-one advantage over coastal artillery, as the land-based artillery had the advantage of firing from a fixed platform, with resultant advantages in accuracy, especially as range increased. By the start of the 20th century, the increasing size of the capital ships of the world’s largest navies, and of the guns they wielded, was already sounding the death knell of coastal artillery. As the primary armament of battleships and battle-cruisers reached 16 inches, while coastal artillery was typically 6 inch or 9 inch guns, a large naval force, including capital ships, could level coastal batteries from a range that kept them out of reach of answering fire. The advent of artillery had changed the design of fortifications centuries before, spelling the end of high-walled castles.
By the 20th century, fortifications were being designed with as much surrounding embankment by earthworks as possible. While this provided some protection from direct fire, it made defense against infantry more difficult, and did nothing to protect from high trajectory fire landing from above, or from air-bursting explosive shells, which rained the area enclosed by walls with shrapnel. In Bermuda, in the latter part of the 19th Century, where the War Office had expended vast fortunes building up fortifications to protect the Royal Naval Dockyard, it was decided belatedly that the Dockyard’s own fleet of naval vessels could provide a more effective defence. With the advent of the aeroplane, and the missile, fixed artillery was both obsolete and too vulnerable to continue in use. The last coastal artillery was removed from use in the 1950s.
So in the early 20th century, the demands from the traditional duties of the Royal Garrison Artillery were reducing.
…to the New
But then along came the First World War. By this time, the effective range of small arms fire had increased significantly. This put front-line artillery at risk, and caused a major tactical change. Wikipedia picks up the story again:
First World War
From 1914 when the army possessed very little heavy artillery, the RGA grew into a very large component of the British forces on the battlefield, being armed with heavy, large-calibre guns and howitzers that were positioned some way behind the front line and had immense destructive power.
With the new long-range small arms available to the infantry in the era before World War I, artillery fighting in the infantry line was increasingly brought under fire. The solution to this was the principle of standing off and engaging the enemy with indirect fire. Henceforth the artillery would be positioned well behind the infantry battle line, firing at unseen targets, at co-ordinates on a map calculated with geometry and mathematics. As the war developed, the heavy artillery and the techniques of long-range artillery were massively developed. The RGA was often supported by the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) who had devised a system where pilots could use wireless telegraphy to help the artillery hit specific targets. The RFC aircraft carried a wireless set and a map and after identifying the position of an enemy target the pilot was able to transmit messages such as A5, B3, etc. in morse code to an RFC land station attached to heavy artillery units, such as Royal Garrison Artillery Siege Batteries.[3]
Observation of Artillery Fire
Readers of the Greg’s War blog and website will, incidentally, know in much more detail about artillery observation duties of the RFC and RAF. There was wireless transmission of signals from aircraft to a howitzer battery (including position codes such as A5 and B3, which indicate where a shell had burst in relation to its target). And the battery used ground strips to signal to the aircraft. With this two way (if asymmetric) communication, the airborne observer directed the artillery fire onto the target. All this and more is explained here:
A New Role, but a Short Life
So, with the progression of the First World War, the Royal Garrison Artillery found and mastered a new role. This more than made up for their diminished duties in manning coastal defence batteries. Heavier and less mobile artillery pieces – often larger gauge howitzers – would be organised in so-called ‘siege batteries’. The RGA operated them from well behind the lines. These batteries would fire at unseen targets, with vital direction from airborne observers, such as those of 42 Squadron RAF. And for this purpose, the ‘observer’ of the shoot was usually the pilot. The airman with the formal title of ‘Observer’ was fully occupied as a lookout. He was watching for hostile threats from enemy aircraft and elsewhere.
After an extraordinary contribution to the First World War, particularly on the Western Front, the Royal Garrison Artillery didn’t last long as an independent entity. Its war role had gone, and its previous coastal defence duties were not to reemerge. By a Royal Warrant dated 8 January 1924, the army reformed the RGA, the Royal Horse Artillery and the Royal Field Artillery as one corps: and so we are back where we started, with the single corps of the Royal Regiment of Artillery.
But in the almost 25 years of its existence, the Royal Garrison Artillery certainly left its mark. The war on the Western Front has been described as “above all…an artillery war”[4]. And although estimates vary, it has been suggested that either side of 80% of casualties in the First World War were caused by artillery[5].
References
[1] Four months to the day after Greg was born.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Garrison_Artillery
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Garrison_Artillery again, references omitted
[4] Steel and Hart, “Tumult in the Clouds” Hodder/Coronet 1997
[5] https://www.quora.com/What-weapon-caused-most-deaths-during-WW1