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Everyone is scared of artillery.
American artillery was superior to that of any of the other WWII combatants. But that wasn't because the individual guns were superior. I do think the American 155mm was a better gun than any other similar gun. But we could have swapped that for a German 150mm or a Soviet 152mm and American artillery would still have been superior.
It was our ability at communication and our computers.
By the end of the war just about any American on the front with access to a phone or radio could call in accurate fire from dozens if not hundreds of guns.
Americans used mechanical computers that allowed them to be very accurate. without knowing the land and pre-plotting coordinates as the Germans on defense did. Basically they were rolls of paper that adjusted for range, altitude, and all of the other computations needed to put projectiles where they wanted them. All of those calculations had been done in the US by a bunch of human computers.
My point is that when the Germans were afraid of American artillery it wasn't any specific weapon such as the M114 155 mm that they were afraid of.
Not in the same way allied troops feared the German 88mm.
With the M2 machine gun it was that specific weapon that the Germans feared, not how well it was used.
Another weapon the Germans feared was the flying dustbin. The Churchill AVRE tank with the 290mm mortar. German command issued a destroy on sight order for those tanks. German soldiers were less than happy at the thought of 40 pounds or high explosive dropping in their laps.
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