Word: artillerymen
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This was the Ukraine in spring: sparkling puddles, shell craters, blistered, blackened tanks, the sullen stench of battle and unburied soldiers. Along the muddy roads, Red Army tractors tugged at stalled trucks and mired cannon. Red artillerymen whipped their foamy horses. Red cavalrymen trotted briskly through the muck, bespattering weary, sweating infantrymen on the way to another battle...
What Voronov did in Finland, after Russia had had her first humiliating but educational reverse, set the pattern for today's battles. First, his artillerymen took positions far in the rear, practiced with replicas of the Finnish strongholds. Then they moved their heavy guns close to the Mannerheim Line. Firing over open sights at individual bunkers they methodically uprooted them, and the infantry moved in. For the feat, Stalin made him Colonel General of Artillery...
...Advance. The dead were avenged. At the height of the German threat, warships, including two British battleships (Warspite, Valiant), shelled the Nazi positions. Allied air forces threw many hundreds of planes at the same positions, flew 2,000 sorties in one day. At the extreme crisis, artillerymen under Lieut. Colonel Hal Muldrow, one of the many Oklahomans, were the only forces facing German tanks and infantrymen. Muldrow stripped his gun crews, gave them rifles and machine guns. The German spearhead was stopped, enveloped, thrown back. Near the northern end of the bridgehead the British stopped a German advance, seized...
They were U.S. paratroopers, specially trained for this kind of jungle blitz. They flopped down hurriedly into the tall Kunai grass of the valley. Australian artillerymen with their guns dropped down after them. The Aussies had had only a week's training and only one practice jump, but they took the leap gamely. Australian pioneers, who had made a five-day trek overland, joined the U.S. and Australian paratroopers...
...France, artillery fire went down 200 yards ahead of troops, who crept within 100 yards waiting for it to lift before attacking. Occasional shorts were inevitable, and infantry learned to expect 2% casualties from its own supporting artillery. Foot soldiers' traditional greeting to artillerymen was two raised fingers, like Winston Churchill's "V" signal...