Geographical Work with the Army in France: Discussion Author(s): Major-General Franks, Colonel Hedley, Charles Close, Colonel Jack and Colonel Beazeley Source: The Geographical Journal, Vol. 54, No. 1 (Jul., 1919), pp. 23-28 Published by: geographicalj Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1780288 Accessed: 31-05-2016 21:57 UTC Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers), Wiley are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Geographical Journal This content downloaded from 143.89.105.150 on Tue, 31 May 2016 21:57:56 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms GEOGRAPHICAL WORK WITH THE ARMY IN FRANCE 23 there were instances of the location of hostile batteries on the unsupported testimony of the air photograph. Such are the outlines of our most interesting work at the Front. In conclusion I should like to add that the original and in valuable nucleus of regular officers and of trained surveyors from the Ordnance Survey gathered together over 4000 comrades of the new army, whose zeal and ability were one of the main factors in such success as we were able to obtain. Before the paper the President said: To-night is eminently a soldier's night, and the particular phase of geography with which we are to deal is military surveying, which may contribute to geography in many ways. In this hall there have been many lectures on the results of military surveys in far-off lands, in Africa and in Asia, where much geographical work has been done with the object of showing the generals in command for the first time where it is that they have to conduct their campaign. Such work often covers large areas and results in the only maps we possess. It must be something like forty years since I gave a lecture in this hall on the geographical results of an Afghan campaign. To-night the subject is somewhat different. Military surveying on a campaign has become specialized, as will reveal itself in the course of the lecture. Lieut.-Colonel Winterbotham then read the paper printed above^ and a discussion followed. The President : From the very interesting address which has been given us by Colonel Winterbotham you must have deduced this conclusion: that whatever may have been the deficiencies generally of many departments at the front?and there is no doubt that there were many-?the particular department which included the business of surveying proved to be both efflcient and useful. And for that efficiency and usefulness I have every reason to know that the Army is indebted very greatly to the energy and ability of the lecturer. A main object of this very highly specialized system of surveying was to locate the enemy's guns. It would be very interesting to know how far Colonel Winter? botham and his able assistants were successful in realizing the ideals which they set before them, and as we have here to-night Major-General Franks, the Inspector- General of Artillery, I will ask him to tell you precisely what he considers to have been the outcome of the system described by Colonel Winterbotham. Major-General Franks : I should like to say that for a very long time in France I was working in very close co-operation with Colonel Winterbotham who has given such an extremely interesting lecture. I, of course, saw the picture from the gunner's point of view?but we are still very good friends I I think, speaking as a gunner, it is hard to say really what we owe to the Royal Engineers and the Ordnance Survey in this war. There are not many gunners here to-night, or you would hear a very big round of applause. When we started out to war our methods were very different from what they are at present. Now-a-days we have long got away from the time when gunners fought with their guns in the open. You get your gun down in a hollow and hide it away, and the enemy does the same. In 1914 our methods were dis- tinctly primitive as compared with what they are now. The first job, as a rule, was to find the enemy gun, but the enemy very soon found that he had to hide This content downloaded from 143.89.105.150 on Tue, 31 May 2016 21:57:56 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 24 GEOGRAPHICAL WORK WITH THE ARMY IN FRANCE his guns. One used to get little maps from the most enterprising and gallant airmen. The airman would fly over the battery and drop a sheet of paper on which was a little sketch, occasionally showing a cross-road, a hedge, a church, and an enemy battery marked in one corner. You took that, plotted it on to your own map, made out where you thought the enemy battery was, calculated the angles and range, found a church spire for an aiming point, and. started off. In the meantime the airman had gone back and was sitting over the enemy battery ready to tell you what happened, and correct your fire till you got it right on to the battery. Probably the first thing we found out was that the map was wrong, and that is what Colonel Winterbotham and the Royal Engineers have been putting right for us all through the war. When the map showed an enemy battery position 400 or 500 yards out, it was very difficult to hit it. Flash spotting, to which Colonel Winterbotham has referred, was one of the quite early developments. It was practically all done at night. I think flash spotting was first started down in the region of Bethune in 1915. We used to get up on the spoil heaps from the mines, with instruments for measuring angles and a rough telephone system, so that two operators a distance apart could try to get their instruments on to the same flash at the same time. And from those very rough beginnings in 1915 we got down to most perfect and marvellously accurate results before the end of the war. Those again were borne out by the sound-ranging, of which Colonel Winterbotham has also spoken, the results of which were absolutely astounding. You can all remember the great battle of Messines, which was rather a typical stereotyped battle of its kind. We were preparing some time for that battle, and one of the most important things we had to do was to locate every German gun and get it picketed or knocked out. There were hundreds of German guns in front of us, and between the air photographs, the Field Survey work, flash spotting at night, and sound ranging, we got on to the German guns and knocked them about so badly that they gave us very little trouble indeed during that battle. After the battle it was a very great pleasure to us to go and see our handiwork. We went over all those German battery positions and compared them with the records which had been worked out and mapped, for day by day during the battle fresh counter-battery maps were brought out, showing the positions as they shifted, and we found on comparing results with what we could see on the ground that we had got over 90 per cent. of the German guns absolutely accurately located. And what was most wonderful of all was that wherever there was a doubt about the position of a battery, in every ease the sound- rangers were right : they had beaten everybody in accuracy. There is one thing Colonel Winterbotham did not mention in regard to the mapping work that was done for us, and that was the marvellous barrage maps. Everybody knows what a barrage is, and in those old stereotyped battles of Arras, Vimy, Messines, and the battles of Flanders in 1917, the infantry advanced by regular steps of about 100 yards at a time under a barrage. For a big battle these barrage lines had to be arranged so that there were no gaps in them, otherwise German machine-guns would have escaped. We had to have barrage maps covering a front of some 10 or 15 miles, showing lifts of 100 or 200 yards every four minutes, we will say, for a period of several hours at a time. When the plans of 4he battle had been made the Artillery plans had to be made, the lifts of this enormously long line of guns covering a front of about 15 miles all had to be accurately mapped, and these maps produced and issued down to Platoon Commanders, so that every officer went into battle with a regular map in front of him of exactly what he had to do from zero hour This content downloaded from 143.89.105.150 on Tue, 31 May 2016 21:57:56 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms GEOGRAPHICAL WORK WITH THE ARMY IN FRANCE 25 when the attack started until six or seven hours later when his job was finished.