Posted on 16 February 2017 at 03:29:49 GMT From my granted limited reading of North African military operations by the British and the Germans, I am under the impression that artillery observers (FAOs) could and did call for fires from what I term (from modern US Army parlance) as direct support artillery units. I consider the artillery support units of both the British and German North African lists to be direct support artillery.
On page 26, under Artillery Support Units, it states that these on-table units function the same as infantry guns on page 24 and that they do not use the artillery support rules on pages 26-27. But on page 26, infantry guns can only receive orders from CO or HQ units, not FAOs.
As a house rule, which we will try in our upcoming games, I am going to treat FAOs as being able to pass fire missions through a CO/HQ for delivery to an artillery support unit, but not to infantry guns. Thus the FAO would function in the same manner as a recce unit (optional rule, page 10) who can provide targeting to a CO or HQ, thus requesting "artillery support against the [enemy] unit during the command phase (FAO)."
Although the rules tend to restrict, in my eyes, artillery support, I believe that FAOs were a little more flexible with on-board (i.e., direct support) artillery than is in the rules.
I'll let you know how it works out.
Jim |