Why artillery, Russia’s ‘god of war’, couldn’t crush the Ukrainians & what it means for India

New Delhi: The year was 1943. Blows from 3,000 gun barrels per mile, packed along a 25-mile front, fell together on the darkness-cloaked frontlines around Orel between the Oka and Orlik rivers in Ukraine. The savage bombardment, which marked the beginning of the Soviet Union's counter-offensive at Kursk in the summer, exceeded the shelling in the great battles of El Alamein and Verdun by a factor of five and ten. Major-General Peter Petrovich Sabennikoff watched the effects of the artillery with pleasure: "The Germans dance when she sings." Faced with endless bombardment, historian A. V. Griniev noted, some German soldiers…