Napoleon said “Artillery kills soldiers”.
I have read that during WWII, more casualties were inflicted by artillery than anything else.
“...I have read that during WWII, more casualties were inflicted by artillery than anything else.” [yarddog, post 41]
Consensus on these numbers isn’t stable.
For decades, most authorities concluded that machine guns killed more soldiers on the Western Front during World War One than any other weapon. Since the 1970s, those estimates have shifted toward artillery being the number one killer in that conflict.
Uncertainties may never go lower, because tens of thousands were killed in action who are still officially missing: bodies dismembered beyond recognition by shelling, buried under rubble from shelling, unrecoverable due to loss of ground, buried in the field in emergency circumstances, ID tags torn off by weapons fire, remains impossible to identify due to decomposition, etc. Cause of death was often impossible to determine.
I do not have to tell you who won the war. You know, the artillery did.
– Gen George S. Patton