Steve Weir: New Zealand's Master Gunner

Weir, as the new CRA, was now in command of three field artillery regiments, an anti-tank regiment and an anti-aircraft regiment. 746 gunners were casualties from Crusader and many of the vacant command positions had to be filled by men with limited experience. All the field regiments had new commanding officers and the replacements needed for the losses in guns, vehicles and other equipment were substantial. Weir helped to mitigate these to some extent by ordering a detachment of 6 Field Regiment to salvage what they could from the battlefields around Sidi Resegh. A total of 34 guns and trailers (limbers) were eventually recovered by 16 January.

Divisional Artillery Headquarters moved to Fayid, (near the Suez Canal) in early January 1942. Weir was also promoted to Brigadier on 3 January, becoming the youngest brigadier (at that time) in the New Zealand Division, aged 37. Throughout the month, each of the New Zealand Brigade Groups trained at the Combined Operations Training Centre in nearby Kabrit. The likelihood of any new major 8th Army offensive quickly receded as troops were sent from the Middle East to bolster the deteriorating Allied defences in the Far East.

Weir used this period to settle in as the CRA and consider the lessons learned from Crusader. The New Zealand Division had, by all accounts, fought well in Crusader. Brigadier Howard Kippenberger (GOC 5 Brigade) was visited in hospital shortly afterwards by Auchinleck who told him 'we'd done the finest fighting he'd ever known and he meant it'. It was clear, however, that the New Zealand Division was inexperienced in desert warfare and weak in tactical doctrine. The latter was evident by the continuing problems in co-operation between the infantry, armour (British) and artillery. Weir was particularly concerned by the artillery's decentralisation (under their brigade groups) and his thinking on this was similar to Miles', whom Weir believed had been 'strongly opposed to the decentralisation of artillery and to the breaking up of formations'. Weir considered the New Zealand Artillery to be three good, but separate, regiments and not a divisional entity in itself. 'To get a Div Arty, a further step must be taken to instill [sic] into those Regiments a doctrine and the necessary drill to make them capable of acting as a single fire unit on the Div (or higher) level'. The reason for this situation, Weir believed, was that 'few, if any, [New Zealand Artillery commanders] took the requisite steps to train their own formations in the up-to-date execution of the doctrine of centralised control'.

From 26 February until early March, the New Zealand Division moved to Syria to bolster the defences of the former Vichy French colony, captured by the Allies in 1941. It was feared that a German offensive through the Soviet Caucasus, or a possible attack through Turkey, could succeed in capturing the Mesopotamian and Persian oilfields, which would have grave consequences for the Allied position in the Middle East. As well as preparing defences against a possible invasion, the Division's presence in Syria was to demonstrate Allied strength in the region, complete the construction of Djedeide Fortress and train.

Weir spent some time planning and supervising the construction of fixed defences, as the gunners and infantry near Djedeide were used as labourers to help the engineers. Conditions were arduous with unusually cold weather plus the hard ground making construction work difficult. During this period, Weir received a paper from GHQ that proposed re-organising the Divisional Artillery into regimental groups. Each would consist of a field regiment, an anti-tank battery and a light anti-aircraft battery. This would also mean that the regimental headquarters of the 14th Light Anti-Aircraft and 7th Anti-Tank Regiments would be disbanded. Auchinleck further proposed downgrading the position of CRA to a colonel, with only the support of a single staff officer - in effect making Headquarters Divisional Artillery purely an administrative headquarters. Weir considered that this re-organisation of the artillery was unworkable and 'robbed the Divisional Artillery of its defensive and offensive capability'. In his first official act as CRA, Weir submitted his reasons to paper why this shouldn't be done and presented them to Freyberg, who agreed. The decentralisation of the anti-aircraft and anti-tank regiments in the New Zealand Division was consequently never carried out.

At the Divisional reorganisation and training conferences held in Syria, Freyberg decided that the New Zealand Division would deploy as brigade groups for movement but fight as a complete division. With confirmation of the need to centralise the artillery in action, Weir was determined to take his field regiments to the next step of operating at divisional level under centralised control. He quickly sought and obtained Freyberg's permission to take each field regiment in turn into the Syrian desert and put this doctrine into practice. Each regiment, beginning with 6 Field Regiment, attended a practice camp near Dezzaboui where it 'was initiated into a divisional artillery manoeuvre and deployment drill, communication drill and most important, a divisional artillery fire drill'. The regiments also practised quick barrages, smoke screens and other forms of close support. 'Although the practices were regimental, each Regiment as it passed through the camp had to learn its part and its place in the Divisional Artillery Machine'.

The next phase in Weir's plan to restore centralised control was to conduct combined exercises. 'No new theory or additional equipment were required. All that was required was practice upon practice until all officers - battery, regimental and staff - thought and acted automatically in terms of the divisional tie-up'. The first of these combined artillery exercises began on 24 May at Forqloss in central Syria. This involved Divisional Headquarters, 4 Brigade (including its artillery) 6 Field Regiment as well as other commonwealth artillery units.

Weir was also determined to develop the drills for large concentrations of artillery fire that could be rapidly brought down on vehicles and other mobile targets, which usually offered only fleeting opportunities for the guns to effectively engage. Regimental fire concentrations were slow because of the calculations made by each battery to ensure accuracy and the delays in adding the fire of further batteries via the chain of command. Registration and adjusting shots compromised surprise and fast moving targets like vehicles could quickly react and disperse from the target area, before the full weight of fire could take maximum effect. Weir recognised that the standard existing pre-war artillery drills for regimental fire were often unsuitable for the fluid nature of warfare in the desert and something new was needed. He required his regiments to be able to deliver large volumes of fire, simultaneously, impromptu, against any defined point or area and to do this in a matter of minutes. To Weir, divisional artillery was more than just two or three regiments firing alongside each other at the same target; it was another complete step. 'Each regiment does not know its place in the Divisional Artillery machine until it has been told it nor will Artillery officers understand divisional fire control methods until they are faithfully instructed in them'. This was the basis for Weir's development of the 'Murder' and the 'Stonk' divisional fire methods that would be used with devastating effect; first by the New Zealanders and later by the 8th Army, for the remainder of the war.

The 'Murder' (initially known as 'Method A') was a defensive fire method that concentrated all 72 guns of the Divisional Artillery on to a single defined point that had been selected in advance. Once the enemy appeared in its vicinity, all that a forward observer had to do was send the ground coordinates (or nickname) of the target prefixed by the word Murder. All batteries of the division within range would then immediately engage the target using all their guns, without the usual preliminary adjusting rounds from a single barrel. Up to 360 rounds could be brought down on the target within about two minutes.

The 'Stonk' (originally known as the 'Hate') was the other (and best known) innovation whose development began in Syria, and which was later extensively used in North Africa and Italy. It was similar to the Murder except the target was a rectangular area of 1200 x 600 yards (later reduced to a 600 or 525 yards frontage) identified by its centre point and vertical axis, rather than a single converging point. The advantage of the Stonk was that the effects of the fire were roughly even throughout the entire beaten zone whereas the centre of the Murder caught the full impact of the fire, with the effect diminishing further out towards the periphery. Weir described the Stonk as a '�a method of fire, which could be pulled down quickly and neutralise a considerable target area'. The Divisional Artillery, firing seven rounds per gun, could put down 504 rounds in about three minutes with shattering effect, particularly on soft transport or infantry in the open.

The origin of the word Stonk is a subject that has been discussed at length by various writers but it is clear that Weir devised it two months later during the build up to El Alamein. He discussed using this method with Brigadier H.M. Stanford (CCRA XIII Corps) and suggested that the Corps adopt it. For a code name, Weir suggested 'Stank' as it was close to Stanford's name. 'We could not agree over that and so �Stink� was suggested. However, by trying all the vowels we lighted on �Stonk� which appeared to offend nobody and �Stonk� was adopted and initiated into 2nd NZ Div as a fire drill about early August 1942'.

The New Zealand Artillery practised other methods of fire, including smoke screens and the laying of barrages, at Forqloss. The creeping barrage was a First World War technique that had been used only once in the Second World War by the Australians in Syria the previous year. Its use was generally regarded as limited to trench warfare and Weir had earlier discovered the disdain felt by the Royal Artillery for creeping barrages, while attending a course at the Palestine School of Artillery in January 1941. There the Chief Instructor had told him that 'a creeping barrage would never be used in this war'. Weir thought otherwise and revived this technique at Forqloss by practising the creeping barrage both in standard and box form. Weir also trialled a hybrid of the Murder and the Stonk called 'Method B' whereby the regiments concentrated on a rectangular area of only 200 yards frontage (the frontage of a single 25-pounder battery). There is little reference to this after Forqloss, however, and it does not appear to have become a formalised practice such as the Stonk and the Murder became in later battles.