SNIPING WITH SHRAPNEL

OBSERVATION for artillery on the coastal plains of the Western Desert was difficult and the Italians had prepared pole OP's at most of their gun positions to make the observing officer's job easier. These consisted simply of a vertical pole from 30 to 40 feet high, to the top of which a seat was attached.

During the investment of Bardia in the first campaign in Cyrenaica the presence of these 'pole sitters' was an embarrassment to our infantry and to others of the King's liege subjects moving about the face of the desert on their lawful occasions. The poles were beyond the range of infantry weapons and their ground line was too undefined for them to be reasonable target for artillery. In any case, ammunition supply was too short to allow of the expenditure necessary for an accurate adjustment of the MPI. Someone at Divisional HQ who had seen shrapnel used in the 1914-18 war thought it was a pity that modern artillery was not armed with shrapnel shell. However, it was found that the 2nd/2nd Field Regiment was equipped with archaic weapons, viz. 4.5-inch howitzers and 18-pdrs, and that the 18-pdrs had shrapnel shell and time fuses.

Orders were given to an 18-pdr battery to detach one gun for 'duck-shooting'. The battery commander's problem was that none of his regular OP officers who had shot shrapnel in peace-time could be spared for a detached role. His command post officer had clues but could not be spared for long periods to conduct shrapnel practice, so it was decided that the CPO should take two subalterns, a gun, some phones, wire and signallers, and conduct a short course in the use of shrapnel with the poles for targets and the subalterns for students.

Rather than waste ammunition and time in attempting to teach the complexities of OT ranging and bracketing for line with air-burst, the GPO decided that it would be better to move the gun and OP for each group of targets and so keep all observation more or less in the line battery-target. This movement of the gun was desirable for the additional reasons that its short range required it to be sited near the forward posts where it could be flash-spotted and fixed quite easily and was correspondingly unpopular with the infantry. The student subalterns became proficient very quickly because the first OP selected by the CPO turned out to be in the general area of a fixed line of a machine gun owned and operated by the King's enemies, and secondly the ease with which a burst in the air could be observed, after weeks of trying to differentiate between a ground burst and a cloud of dust caused by something other than an explosion, was remarkable.

The 18-pdr was employed in this role for some weeks and achieved much success in keeping the pole OPs unoccupied. The opposition eventually made its use uneconomical by replacing live observers with stuffed dummies, and ammunition was too scarce to allow of ranging to an effective burst over a bag of straw. But the desired result had been achieved, as straw-filled bags were not much use to the enemy in the role of FOOs. A few bursts of shrapnel fired in the general direction of the Italian batteries thereafter were sufficient to ensure that observing officers would refrain from going aloft.

By Major J. A. Strong, second-in-command of the 2nd/2nd Australian Field Regiment