Why Germans Hated American Artillery More Than Tanks in WW2

December 17, 1944
Ardennes Forest

Obergefreiter Hans Müller pressed his face into the frozen wall of his foxhole and tried to breathe through dirt.

The earth trembled—not in long, rolling waves like an earthquake, but in rapid, vicious jolts, as if some giant hand were shaking the whole forest by the roots. Snow fell from the branches above in powdery sheets. Somewhere nearby, a man was screaming with the full, ragged strength of a pair of lungs that weren’t going to be breathing much longer.

Hans’s pencil skittered across the page of his small, battered notebook. He couldn’t see what he was writing—his hand shook too much, the paper was spattered with half-frozen mud—but he wrote anyway, because that was the one thing he could still control.

The Americans are not the Russians, he scribbled. It is not the number of shells that terrifies me. It is the speed, the precision, the way death arrives before you can even breathe.

Another blast hit, closer. The foxhole jerked sideways. Clods of icy dirt thudded onto his back. Somewhere up the line, a tree—one of the tall, straight pines that had watched this forest grow for a hundred years—snapped with a sound like a rifle shot and slammed to the ground.

Hans closed his eyes and dug his fingers deeper into the frozen soil. He waited for the next one.

It did not come.

The barrage had lasted maybe thirty seconds.

In that time, the world had ended and restarted.

He lifted his head, slowly. The air was full of dust and powder, sparkling faintly in the dim winter light. Voices floated through it, half-words: Sanitäter, Hilfe, Mutter—

He did not move to help. That was the medic’s job. His hands were still gripping the pencil too tightly, knuckles white, as if the act of letting go might invite the next shell.

He forced his fingers open and looked at the words he’d scrawled. They didn’t capture it. They never did. Years later, when he would come back to this notebook in a small apartment in a country that no longer existed, the lines would be clear enough, but the memory behind them would still be sharper.

It wasn’t like Russian artillery.

He knew Russian artillery.

He’d survived it.

He didn’t know how to survive this.

Two years earlier, Oberjäger Otto Schmidt had stood in a sandy cut of North African earth—a wadi north of Tunis—thinking almost the exact same thought.

Back then, the sky had been bright and brutal, the air hot enough to make mirages flicker along the horizon. Dust coated everything: boots, rifles, teeth. Flies loved the wadi. So did German infantry. It was cover, dug by God instead of shovels.

“We are safe here,” his company commander had said. “They can’t see us from the air. The British don’t know we’re in this position.”

The men had believed him.

Schmidt had spent two bloody years on the Eastern Front before being transferred to Tunisia. He’d watched Russian artillery pummel positions until they were unrecognizable. He’d learned to read its rhythm.

First, ranging shots—wild at first, then bracketing closer. You listened. You moved between salvos. You learned when to get out, when to press yourself flat, when to slip from one shell hole to another.

The Russians needed time. Time to find you. Time to walk their fire onto you.

Time to give you a chance, if you knew what you were doing.

So when the small American aircraft buzzed overhead—a ridiculous little thing, more like a dragonfly than a warplane—no one cared. It had a tiny engine, flimsy wings, and no guns. Schmidt had watched it with idle curiosity as it puttered by, a silver speck against the blue.

“Amerikanischer Clown,” one of the younger soldiers had joked.

Three minutes later, the world exploded.

There was no ranging shot. No bracketing.

Just an instant, weird silence—like the desert inhaling—and then shells slammed into the wadi all at once. Ground bursts kicked up sheets of sand and rock. Air bursts went off overhead, white flashes that spewed shrapnel sideways in perfect, lethal cones.

Men who had been laughing at the airplane were suddenly dismembered mid-sentence. A comrade beside Schmidt simply ceased to exist above the waist, his legs falling over like chopped logs.

Otto had thrown himself flat, more from instinct than thought. Sand blasted into his face. The pressure crushed his lungs. The sound was beyond loud—it was like someone had put a bell over his head and struck it with a hammer.

Half a minute later, it was over.

He lifted his head in a changed world.

Out of 123 men in his company, eleven were alive.

Eleven.

The little airplane, he would later learn, was an L-4 Grasshopper, a glorified Piper Cub with a radio and a pair of eyes in the front seat. It had circled, seen where they were, called someone miles away, and in three minutes had turned what the Russians would have spent an hour killing into smoldering ruin.

At the time, all he knew was that the Americans were cheating.

This wasn’t how artillery was supposed to work.

Far away, back in a country that still believed victory was possible, a mathematician named Werner Hoffmann sat in a drafty office with a stack of captured documents on his desk and an expression of disbelief on his face.

He was thirty-one years old, thin, with the kind of pinched look people get when they’ve spent more time with numbers than with sunshine. Before the war he’d been a graduate student, tracing elegant curves on chalkboards in Berlin. The Wehrmacht had taken him, put him in a uniform, then decided he’d be more use behind a desk than behind a rifle.

Now he was an artillery officer—on paper. In reality, he was a pair of eyes and a brain assigned to analyze whatever scraps of Allied technical material the intelligence services could get their hands on.

The latest shipment had included American firing tables and field manuals.

He had flipped through the firing tables out of idle curiosity first.

Then he’d stopped, gone back to the beginning, and started again slowly.

“This can’t be right,” he muttered.

The tables weren’t just range charts. They accounted for air temperature, humidity, propellant lot variations, barrel wear, altitude differences. Every variable that could affect where a shell landed had been pre-calculated.

A fire direction officer in the field could look at a few columns, interpolate between figures, and have a firing solution in seconds.

In seconds.

German tables were… adequate. Crude, Hoffmann thought, now that he had a comparison. They gave you a baseline and left the rest to the men in the gun pits and the officers with slide rules under fire.

The Americans had done most of that work already.

He imagined the process: rows of clerks—women, probably; the Allies used women for that sort of thing while Germany burned them as witches of “degenerate modernity”—sitting in offices full of mechanical calculators, punching through equations day after day, week after week, to produce little booklets that could fit into a map case.

The system offended him and impressed him at the same time.

“It is not that they are smarter,” he wrote in a note attached to his report. “It is that they have decided that logistics and mathematics should serve the gunners, not the other way around.”

His report went up the chain. It landed on someone’s desk. It was read, skimmed, summarized, filtered. Somewhere along the line, a major underlined a sentence about “American efficiency” and scrawled in the margin: “We must emphasize training and improvisation to compensate.”

By then, Otto Schmidt was already in Italy, learning that no amount of improvisation could make a horse move faster in mud.

Artillery had always been the “King of Battle,” as the textbooks liked to say.

In the Great War, that king had been clumsy and brutal. Guns had fired according to schedules prepared days in advance. Corrections took hours. Barrages rolled forward like slow-motion tidal waves. Infantry huddled and prayed that the shells from their own side didn’t fall short.

The Americans had watched that war very carefully.

By 1944, their artillery didn’t feel like a king so much as a nervous system.

In a clearing behind the front lines in Normandy, under a camouflage net that sagged with leaves and raindrops, an American fire direction center hummed like a well-tuned engine.

Maps covered tables. Radios hissed and crackled. Men in shirtsleeves leaned over protractors and slide rules. A sergeant with headphones on one ear called out numbers while his pencil scribbled furiously.

“Observer reports enemy infantry moving into hedgerow at grid 27-16. Range 3,800. Adjust right 200 from previous fire mission.”

A lieutenant—the fire direction officer—snapped back numbers without looking up.

“Battery A: charge three, elevation 725. Deflection 4,216. Battery B: charge three, elevation 701. Deflection 4,193. Time fuze 18.5. Time on target, zero-eight-one-two hours.”

An enlisted man repeated the figures into another handset. Somewhere in the distance, thirty-six 105 mm howitzers adjusted their tubes by degrees.

German batteries calculated their own fire. Each gun crew did their best with the data they had, adding small errors as they went. American guns didn’t think alone.

They all thought together, through the FDC.

The fire direction center was a simple idea, in that way infuriating to the enemy: obvious once you saw it, devastating when you didn’t.

Bring all the firing data into one mind. Let that mind coordinate, synchronize, mass.

A forward observer on a hedgerow line—a lieutenant hunched in a ditch, bullets snipping leaves overhead—could key his handset and bring the weight of an entire division, even an entire corps, to bear on a patch of earth he could see and the enemy thought was hidden.

The Germans never quite believed it—until they experienced it.

Lieutenant Friedrich Bauer had been a professional artillery officer before the war, had spent his early twenties teaching conscripts how to lay a gun and read a map. The Eastern Front had turned him into an aficionado of Soviet artillery the way a man might become intimately familiar with the fists of someone who had beaten him half to death.

He knew what heavy fire looked like. He knew how long it took.

In Normandy, near Saint-Lô, he discovered he knew nothing.

He had been setting up his battery in what he thought was an ideal position: behind a low ridge, masked from the sea, good fields of fire inland. The ground was firm enough to keep the wheels from sinking. The horses, frothing and wide-eyed, had been unhitched and led back.

His men had gone through the familiar routine: unlimber, dig in, set trails, check elevations. The guns pointed toward the bocage, where American infantry was feeling for openings.

It was late afternoon. The air smelled of crushed vegetation and cordite.

He heard the first American salvos in the distance—dull, flat booms like someone slamming a giant door. He measured the time between sound and arrival of shells on the German front, counted under his breath.

“Five seconds… eight… ten… there.”

The barrage landed on the forward positions, where it ought to. Dirt geysered. Trees swayed.

He reached for his maps, ready to calculate counter-battery fire. The Americans had shown some of their guns now. He could get rough coordinates, maybe silence a few of them.

He got as far as marking a likely gun flash on the map when the shells started falling on him.

Not a creeping barrage. Not a slowly corrected adjustment.

Just—impact.

Guns, prime movers, the horses behind the tree line, the ammo dump. All at once.

The first round destroyed a trail gun in a single, enormous blossom of smoke and flame. The second detonated in the middle of the ammunition stack, setting off a chain of sympathetic explosions that turned the clearing into a furnace.

Bauer had thrown himself flat behind a low rise and felt the heat roll over him like the breath of some monstrous animal.

It wasn’t that they had found him. Russian guns found him too.

It was that they had found him in less time than it took his own battery to find its own range.

After the war, when he read someone’s translation of an American field manual describing the FDC and the pre-calculated tables, he’d scrawled in the margin: No artillery system could operate so fast.

Then he remembered Saint-Lô and crossed out the “no.”

It wasn’t just speed.

It was style.

Time on target—T.O.T.—became the whispered phrase in German accounts, the three letters that meant “we didn’t even have time to be afraid.”

Every army used spotters. Every army fired ranging shots. The classic pattern was as familiar to a veteran as the sound of his own heartbeat: a single shell landing somewhere near the target, then another closer in, then a short pause while adjustments were made. You heard the first one, maybe the second. Your body reacted.

Hit the ground.

Dive into the nearest shell hole.

Run for the dugout.

Time on target robbed you of that reflex.

The Americans calculated the flight time of their shells from multiple batteries, all at different ranges. They did the math so that, if one shell took thirty seconds to arc from gun to target and another took twenty-four, the first would be fired six seconds earlier.

On the receiving end, you heard nothing.

Then, for three seconds, the world turned into a storm of supersonic metal.

Later research would show that two thirds of all artillery casualties occurred in the first few seconds of a barrage—when men were still standing, still walking, still talking.

T.O.T. made sure that’s when the shells arrived.

In the Ardennes, Hans Müller’s foxhole caught only the tail end of such a strike. Up the line, in positions that had seemed safe ten seconds before, men had been caught mid-step, mid-sentence, mid-thought.

Stabsfeldwebel Kurt Zimmermann, writing by candle stump that night in a half-collapsed bunker, tried to make sense of it.

It is not artillery as we understand it, he scribbled. It is something new. You hear nothing and then the world ends.

He underlined “nothing.”

Because that was what frightened him most.

In the middle of that intricate, invisible machine, things were surprisingly ordinary.

Major Ben Collins of the U.S. Army had never thought of himself as the kind of man who could terrify people he’d never met. He’d grown up in Ohio, quiet and polite, the sort of boy who said “sir” to his elders without being told. He’d gone to college, discovered a knack for mathematics, and joined the Army when the world went mad.

Now he stood in an orchard in Normandy, up to his ankles in mud and spent shell casings, listening to his gunners work their 105s while he kept one eye on a map and one ear on a radio.

“Red One, this is Red Four,” came a voice in his headset. “I’ve got Krauts reinforcing that hedgerow at 31-22. Can you give them something to think about?”

“Copy, Red Four,” Collins replied. His hand already moved on the map, pencil tapping. He knew that voice. Lieutenant Joe Harris. Good man. Liked to push a little too far forward. “Stand by for gift delivery.”

He flipped a page on a firing table, found the range and elevation. His brain was the final link in a chain that had started months ago in a building full of clacking Friden calculators in Kansas.

“Battery A: six rounds H.E., fuze quick, charge three, deflection 4-2-1-9, elevation six-eight-three. Battery B: same deflection, elevation six-seven-eight. Fire for effect. Time on target zero-nine-two-two.”

“Gifts inbound,” he told Harris. “Three minutes. Keep your head down.”

“You know I like to watch the fireworks, Major,” Harris said.

“Not from standing up, you don’t.”

He passed the numbers to the gun chiefs. The guns elevated, traversed. Men shoved 105 mm shells into hot breeches with practiced motions. A whistle blast. “Fire!”

The howitzers spoke, six at a time, their reports rolling back across the orchard like overlapping thunder. Empty shells clanged on the ground.

Three minutes later, a hedgerow a thousand yards away dissolved in a burst of earth and leaves.

On the other side of that hedgerow, German soldiers who had survived the Russians stared around at a landscape rearranged without warning and decided, some of them, that they had had enough of the war.

If the German irregularity and improvisation had any ally, it was the horse.

Artillery is hungry. It eats shells and distance. Without trucks, it eats hay.

Even in 1945, Germany used over a million horses. Elegant, noble animals broken into vehicles. Many a gunner patted the neck of the animal that pulled his gun and had the uneasy feeling that the horse understood better than the officers what they were both being used for.

Horses did not respond well to artillery.

The first concussion of incoming shells made them rear and scream. Limbering up under fire took time—a long, thrashing, panicked time. Getting a battery out of a bad position could take hours in mud and snow.

In contrast, American batteries were fully motorized. Trucks rolled up. Guns hooked on. Engines turned over. Half an hour after firing their last rounds, a battery could be several miles away, already dug in again, tubes leveled, ready to fire once more.

One German gunner near Aachen watched, through his field glasses, an American battery do just that. The American guns had fired, answered a fire mission, then—in what seemed like the same breath—packed up, rumbled off, and reappeared on a distant ridge.

By the time he’d wrestled his own horses into harness, the enemy was already somewhere else.

He lowered the glasses and spat.

“How do you fight that?” he asked his sergeant.

“You don’t,” the sergeant replied. “You endure it and hope someone in Berlin knows what they’re doing.”

No one in Berlin knew what they were doing.

They knew how to design excellent tanks.

They did not know how to build enough trucks.

Then came the fuse.

If artillery is the king, then fuses are the king’s timing.

Conventional fuses came in two flavors: contact and time.

Contact fuses did what it said on the tin. Shell hits ground, shell goes off. Simple, reliable, good for smashing dugouts and fortifications.

Time fuses were trickier. You set them so the shell would explode in the air above the target, showering men and material below with shrapnel. Done right, they were devastating. Done wrong, they burst too high, too low, too late, too early—harmless flashes or, worse, dangerous to your own side.

Time fuses required calculations: how long the shell would be in the air, how high above the ground it needed to be when it detonated. You could get close with tables and experience.

Close wasn’t good enough.

The British and Americans had been working on something else.

The proximity fuse—Variable Time fuse, VT—hid a tiny radar set in the nose of the shell. As the round flew, it emitted radio waves. When those waves bounced back from the ground or a target at the right strength—meaning the shell was now within a specific distance of something solid—it triggered detonation.

No guesswork. No turning dials based on range estimations.

The shell decided for itself when to explode.

It was originally designed for anti-aircraft use. Ships used it to blow apart incoming planes with terrifying efficiency. For a long time, it was kept away from ground use for fear that an unexploded shell would be recovered by the enemy and the secret compromised.

By December 1944, with the Ardennes aflame and the German offensive threatening to tear apart the Allied line, those fears were set aside.

They started issuing VT-fused shells to American batteries supporting ground troops, especially in the forests.

Hans Müller met the VT fuse without knowing its name.

He and his comrades had dug their foxholes deep, learning how to burrow into the Belgian soil like moles. They’d roofed some positions with logs, covered them with earth and snow. They’d survived tree bursts before—conventional shells set to explode in the branches, sending wooden splinters and hot metal raining down.

They had learned to read those, too. The way the shriek rose, the subtle change in the tone as the shell came in at a shallow angle to burst above.

On the morning of December 17, when they heard the first hints of incoming, they did what veterans did: they flattened themselves, calculated unconsciously how long they had, and took what cover they could.

The shells arrived differently.

There was no sense, even in their experienced ears, of where the shells were going to burst. No slightly-too-high explosions, no wasted detonations. They arrived and bloomed at just the right height above the foxholes, over the trenches, in the spaces where men thought they were safe.

The air itself seemed to shred.

Tree bursts that had once been survivable if you were dug in properly became executioners. Sharp metal scythed sideways, penetrating thin log roofs and the exposed backs of men lying prone.

Afterward, Hans sat shaking in his hole and wrote, with the kind of flat, stunned understatement that only those who’ve been there can muster: The shells exploded in the air over us as if they knew exactly where we were.

German soldiers feared American tanks, of course.

Sudden, brutal steel animals, snorting diesel and belching fire. Sherman and Pershing, their silhouettes unfamiliar at first, then burned into memory. You could see a tank. You could hear it coming. It terrified you, but you could shoot at it. You could lay a mine. You could, in a pinch, hurl a magnetic charge and pray.

Artillery was different.

You rarely saw the guns that killed you. The shells came from beyond the horizon, from over the hill, from forests you’d never be allowed to set foot in. A dozen different units might not know the other existed except that, one day, their fates intersected at a map grid and for three seconds they shared an apocalypse.

In foxholes and dugouts from Italy to the Ardennes, German letters and diaries repeated the same refrain.

I do not fear the tanks as much as the artillery.

Tanks you could account for. Artillery made a mockery of the idea that you could control anything.

In a small Bavarian town in 1957, two veterans—one German, one American—sat in a bar with beers in front of them and tried to find words for what the war had been.

The German, a former Feldwebel, had fought in Normandy and the Bulge. The American, a former artillery officer, had been in the 4th Division’s guns.

They had met by chance, through a mutual acquaintance, and discovered they had once tried to kill each other over the same patch of hedgerow.

“You know what we hated most?” the German said, fingers wrapped around his glass. “The tanks? With their armor and their cannon?”

The American thought of the way his infantrymen looked at Shermans when things went bad and shook his head.

“No,” the German said. “Those we could see. No, what we hated, what made us pray to a God most of us didn’t believe in anymore, was when one of those little planes showed up. Your Grasshopper. Or when we heard nothing at all and then… all hell.”

He gestured with his hand, an explosion in the air between them.

The American nodded slowly.

“That was us,” he said quietly.

The German studied him.

“How did you do it?” he asked. Not accusing. Not angry. Just curious, like Hoffmann with his tables.

The American thought about explaining the firing tables and the fire direction centers, the radios that weighed less and worked better, the way the U.S. industrial machine had churned out shells and trucks and wire and calculators while Germany had built beautiful tanks and run out of fuel for them.

Instead, he said, “We did a lot of math before we ever fired a shot. And we had people like me behind maps instead of rifles.”

“And little airplanes,” the German said.

“And little airplanes,” the American agreed.

They sat in silence for a moment.

“You hated us too, didn’t you?” the German asked. “Our artillery?”

The American sipped his beer, remembering Russian-made guns in German hands in the Hürtgen Forest, the way trees snapped and men disappeared under splinters. Remembering even his own gunners flinching when counter-battery found them.

“I respected it,” he said.

The German nodded.

“And we feared yours,” he replied. “More than we feared your tanks. Tanks were only dangerous if they got to you. Your artillery was dangerous if you were anywhere within a map square.”

He smiled, thin and weary, and raised his glass.

“To the King of Battle,” he said.

The American raised his own.

“And to the men who stood under his crown,” he added.

They drank. Outside, the evening settled over a country that had once echoed with the sound of guns and now hummed with the much gentler noise of traffic and distant trains.

Hans Müller, now older and soft around the middle, would later sit at a desk in that country and re-read his notebook from December 17, 1944. The pencil marks had faded, but the memory hadn’t.

He would think about frozen foxholes and the sudden, precise arrival of shells. About Russian barrages that rumbled and built and could be escaped by skill, and American barrages that seemed to come from nowhere on demand.

He would tell his grandson, one day, when the boy asked him about the war:

“We did not lose because their tanks were better. We lost because their artillery meant no place was safe.”

The boy would look at pictures of Shermans in books and nod solemnly, impressed by the big guns and steel.

Hans would think of a harmless-looking little Grasshopper circling overhead, the soft murmur of an American officer into a radio, the slight adjustment of a gun barrel miles away—and then that three-second window where a whole world could end—and decide not to correct him.

Some things you had to have been there to understand.