18. Surprise.—A sudden effective fire is known to have a particularly demoralizing effect on the enemy; it is often advantageous, therefore, to seek for surprise effects of this sort by temporarily withholding fire.
19. Unsteady Firing.—Wild, unsteady fire causes little or no loss, and tends to encourage the enemy by inducing a belief in his mind that his opponent is shaken. It is therefore worse than useless against good troops. If firing tends to become wild, it should be stopped, and only resumed under strict control and detailed orders.
Section 45.—Description and Recognition of Targets.
1. Importance of Good Description.—(i) Owing to the difficulty of discerning service targets beyond close range with the naked eye, collective fire cannot be effective unless the objective is described by the fire-unit commander in such a way that every individual of his unit can immediately recognize the target or point of aim indicated, and unless men are also trained to recognize targets and to bring fire to bear upon them immediately they are indicated. These three conditions—good indication of targets, immediate recognition of targets, and instant opening of accurate fire—are essential if full effect is to be obtained from fire, especially when directed at fleeting targets, such as troops in movement.
(ii) Bad description of targets or delay in opening fire due to this or other causes will lead to loss of fire effect, which may prove disastrous in critical phases of action. For example, bad description at the best will result in recognition of the target by some instead of all the men in an unit, as well as in delay in opening fire, which in the case of fleeting targets will render fire partly or wholly ineffective. Bad description may result in part or the whole of an unit mistaking another aiming-point near it for the target described, with total loss of fire effect due to firing at the wrong target. It may result in part or the whole of an unit becoming confused and not firing at all. It is clear, therefore, that good description and quick recognition of targets is essential for fire effect at longer ranges, and that these duties form a vitally important part of the training of fire-unit commanders and men.
2. Need of System in describing Targets.—As service targets, such as a fold in the ground or a patch of open ground, will often be without any definite feature to distinguish them from similar aiming-points near them, or to locate their position exactly, and as targets generally will be difficult to describe on ground devoid of prominent or well-marked features, it is necessary to adopt a system of description which will enable fire-unit commanders to indicate the most difficult aiming-points to their men clearly by some consistent method.
3. Description Points.—A good system of indicating targets is by description-points, consisting of natural or other features of the ground in the frontage allotted to an unit. If targets cannot be indicated sufficiently accurately by description-points alone, supplementary methods, known respectively as the Finger-breadth and Clock-face methods, may be used in connection with description-points, as described in paras. 7 and 8. As a rule the former of these supplementary methods only will be employed, and both will seldom be employed together in combination with description-points.
4. Selecting Description-Points.—(i) Company officers will select description-points when occupying a position or at the conclusion of movement. The number of description-points necessary will depend on the nature of the ground, and whether it has much or little detail in the shape of prominent natural and other features; but points should be selected so as to facilitate the indication of targets in all parts of the field of fire.
(ii) The most prominent objects should be chosen. They should be in the distance or middle of the field of fire, and as far off as possible. No two points, if it can be avoided, should be similar—as, for instance, two church spires or clumps of trees. The points should be at least two hands’ breadth apart. Each point should be named, and the name by which it is to be known should be communicated to fire-unit commanders and the men of their units.
(iii) There will usually be more time for selecting description-points in defence than in attack. For example, [Fig. 46] illustrates a field of fire in front of a defensive position, in which almost every feature of ground has been named and the range of all prominent objects taken. Such preparation will be impossible, and to a great extent unnecessary, in attack, when time for even a short preliminary reconnaissance may not always be available. Company, platoon, and section commanders should therefore be trained to select a few good description-points as quickly as possible, and indicate them by suitable names to their commands.