After posting a few year's back about having a 'Pom Pom gun' on a land based vehicle i've got my inventor's hat on again Thinking of the German pill boxes how hard would it be to have a bullet that could be fired from say a snipers rifle that could let off smoke when fired into a slit of a pill box (i know some pill boxes could not be fired into) Even like 30 seconds to a minute worth of smoke just to panic and disorientate the defenders for a short time thinking of the beaches on d-day it would of been a big help on certain beaches.
If you can put a smoking bullet in there, you can put a bazooka round or rifle grenade in there. Keep in mind that a pillbox is already an enclosed space full of smoke from firing their own guns. I doubt any extra would panic anyone.
If it were just a bullet sized flare, I'd jump on it , or I'd buried it in much less than 30 seconds.
If you had a sniper rifle you could fire from a lot further away wouldn't you have to be almost on top of the pill box to fire a grenade or bazooka round ? If you had smoke in a different colour it might give them something to think about
I've done a lot of reading on the 30th Division breaching the Siegfried line. The pillboxes were no challenge at all, in themselves. A platoon would fire at the embrasures so the occupants kept their heads down, and somebody else would run up with a flamethrower or satchel charge and kill them. The challenge was that such fixed fortifications were heavily covered by mortar and artillery fire who had pre-zeroed any defilade ahead of the fortifications. So, breaching the westwall was more about counter-battery fire giving them an opportunity to assault each fortification. In any case, I doubt a 30. caliber slug would hold enough smoke to make much of a difference inside of a small room already firing MG42's at 1200 rounds per minute.
Thinking of 'hobarts funnies' and the 'bouncing bomb' surely if they knew the menace of pill boxes some inventor could of devised something
Again, such fixed fortifications were not much a challenge to experienced troops. It was the covering artillery and mortar cover that created the problem. Once you neutralized the artillery so that you could actually approach, the fortifications were easy to knock out. The pillboxes themselves were just hard points in a trench system. The American artillery (once the German artillery was neutralized) would force the German troops from the trenches into the pillbox for cover. They were already in trouble since the trenches helped cover the flanks. Once the embrasures were swept by rifle or MG fire they couldn't even shoot back. They knew the next step was being cooked alive by some PFC with a flamethrower, so it was time to start waving a white flag. Such fortifications raised hell on D-day because the planners assumed the naval guns and air strikes would knock them out before the troops hit the beach. They didn't have much of a plan and the troops were green.
Once one pillbox was neutralized it was usually easy to get the others. While the pillboxes had overlapping fields of fire, they usually didn't have any depth so that after getting the first one, the others could be outflanked and taken from the rear. Re. smoke: I think that a 30 cal. WP round couldn't carry enough of the stuff to make a difference. A better way was to use 4.2 inch mortars to fire WP or regular smoke. This would blind the defenders and allow the infantrymen to get in close.
