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A $2 wristwatch. That's what stood between a routine artillery barrage and the most devastating fire coordination technique of the entire war.
Summer of 1944, Normandy. German officers captured near Saint-Lô kept using the same word to describe American artillery: unfair. Not about the tanks. Not about the air force. The artillery — the one arm where both sides carried nearly identical guns, identical calibers, identical ranges.
But the shells arrived differently.
They arrived all at once. Without warning. Without a ranging shot. Without a single second to drop flat. Hundreds of rounds from dozens of batteries, miles apart, hitting the same grid square in a three-second window. German veterans of Kursk and Stalingrad said they had never experienced anything like it.
The technique was called Time on Target. It required every man pulling a lanyard to fire at a precise, computed second. Which meant every gunner needed to know exactly what time it was. One army gave every soldier a watch. The other gave watches only to officers.
What that difference meant when it collided with
