Dcal12 said:
I was unaware that in WWII they had the accuracy to launch 1 shell from indirect artillery to strike two guys in a foxhole whether it was a airburst or not.
The point of artillery is that you don't need perfect accuracy to strike two guys in a foxhole. Artillery comes in fast, without warning noise, so unless the guys in the foxhole are already ducking, they are exposed when it goes off. Bombs sometimes had screamers to demoralize the target area as they came in, and Stukas might have them on their wings, but artillery never does. You know artillery is coming when it goes off, and not before.
A 155mm shell has a lethal radius of 50m, a solid casualty radius over 4x that size, and the capability of throwing injuring shrapnel even further. My point of shrapnel flying over my headA 105mm shell drops those numbers to 20 meters and 100 meters, but they're still far larger than the grenades's 5m casualty radius for exposed targets. A casualty radius on 5 meters covers 78.5 square meters of area. A casualty radius of 100 meters covers 31,400 square meters. There's a bit of a gap there. Put in visual terms, a grenade would endanger an area from the goal line to the five yard line of a football field for less than a thrid of the width of the field. A 105mm shell covers over six entire football fields, including the end zones.
If foxhole guys don't get a lucky burst, they get caught with a good chance of injury if they're within 250 meters , and a good chance of death within 50 meters of the blast from a 155mm shell. Even dropping that to 20m and 100m for a 105mm shell, the artillery gives a lot more area of effect than a grenade. Even if the blast doesn't catch them directly, artillery shells were known to collapse foxholes on the defenders, sometimes smothering them, and sometimes forcing them to dig themselves out. Either situation takes them out of the fight. The shockwave from a near miss can take out a tank crew, or knock a soldier senseless. Again, they aren't dead, but they are out of the fight.
The Nebelwerfer rolls 2 dice per model in a target unit because it fires lots of shells with each attack, that burst all over the target area. The Petard Mortar only rolls 1 dice, but for the same reason, though it's a single point of explosion. Shrapnel from artillery is a very dangerous proposition. A squad might throw multiple grenades at once, to increase their chances of hitting the target, but they would never have the entire squad throw at once unless they were newbie fools, because someone should be firing to try and make the target keep their heads down to give the throwers more survivability. Being shot before you throw a live grenade can be hazardous to your buddies if you drop it.
On the flip side, a grenade also has a hard time striking two guys in a foxhole. If you have a height advantage to see the foxhole, which means the guys making the foxhole were untrained newbies, you can throw down into the position with more chance of getting in the foxhole. Otherwise, you're throwing a grenade trying to make it into a hole (possibly a single man hole in WW2 about 3' across) that you can't see, with an object traveling slow enough to be seen and called out by defenders, and hoping the target doesn't see it to knock it into their grenade sump, or have it roll there naturally before it goes off. They may easily simply have to duck, and stand back up immediately after the blast. A near miss from a grenade has the same issues you think of for artillery with ground shape and softness mitigating blast, but to a far larger degree because there is much less force from a 1 pound grenade with less than half a pound of charge than there is in an artillery projectile with several pounds of explosive.
Flamethrowers suffer the same issues. They can fire a stream of burning fuel, but it isn't a very accurate stream, and can have a hard time coming down on people in a foxhole. An enclosed space like a bunker is an ideal target, because the flamethrower can burn out the oxygen, but flamethrowers have no penatration. Anything hit gets burning fuel stuck to it, but you need to hit. While that happens, people are firing at the guy with the flamethrower because they don't want him to have the chance to adjust his fire very well. There's a reason a lot of people earned medals using flamethrowers; it's hard, and very dangerous for the user.