Artillery in the Boer War (Part I)

Edwardian Armies

A 15-Pounder field gun of the Royal Field Artillery, with crew, team, and limber

In every one of the battles of the Second Boer War (1899-1902) the forces of the British empire were able to bring far more artillery to the battlefield than their Boer adversaries. At Colenso (December 15, 1899), where there were forty-four artillery pieces on the British side, the forces of the South African republics deployed five field guns and a single howitzer.  At Pieters Hill (February 23-27, 1900) the British had  seventy pieces of artillery, the Boers but ten. And at Paardeberg (February 19-27, 1900), the ratio of British to Boer artillery pieces was ninety-one to six.

These battles, however, were not as one-sided as these numbers suggest.  The Boer field guns were much newer than most of their British counterparts.  In particular, where the most common British field guns were variants of a model that had originally been adopted in 1884, the 75mm field guns of the South African republics had been bought from private arms makers in the years between 1896 and 1899.  Thanks to the many small improvements to the gun-founders art that had been made in the intervening years, the latter weapons enjoyed substantial advantages in both range and rate of fire.  (The former was largely a function of fuzes.  The latter resulted from the use of fixed ammunition.)

As a result of this disparity, there were many incidents in which handfuls of Boer field guns were able to get the better of much larger assemblies of the older British guns. On 5 February 1900, at Brakfontaine, a hill north of Spion Koop, three Boer 75mm guns kept thirty British field guns under fire for the better part of the day, during which time the British guns were unable, because of the range, to reply in kind. Although the British force, which included an infantry brigade, took thirty-four casualties in the engagement, the apparent strength of the Boer artillery was enough to deprive the British commander of his will to continue. The next day, he called off his offensive, complaining to his superiors that the Boer positions were too strong to assault and that his artillery had been “outclassed” by the Boer guns.

A far larger part of the problem was a consistent failure on the part of the British to present the Boer artillery with any sort of dilemma. The British generally insisted on fighting a separate counter-battery battle before beginning the infantry attack. If the Boers chose, as they most often did, to keep their guns both silent and well hidden during this bombardment, they risked very little damage as the British shells fell over the countryside. The fact that the Boer guns were usually deployed individually, rather than as complete batteries, caused a further reduction in the ability of such bombardments to inflict damage.

The British failure to make their infantry and artillery work together also made life easier for the Boer infantry. If the British bombarded at long ranges with their heavier guns, the Boers lay on the ground near their dugouts. They knew that, with the exception of the rare shell that happened to land inside a Boer shelter before exploding, there was little danger from the explosive shells fired by such weapons.  (The blast effect of the “lyddite” filling of such shells was so weak that during one bombardment a few brave Boers were seen boiling coffee on the ground outside their dugouts.) If the British got close enough to fire shrapnel from their field guns, the Boers crouched in their shelters, no longer making coffee but still relatively safe from the cones of shrapnel balls flying a few inches above their heads.

If the British had made their artillery and infantry attacks simultaneous, the Boers would have been in a different position. Their gun crews would have faced the difficult choice of firing on the foot soldiers, thus exposing themselves to the fire of the British artillery, or remaining silent, and thus increasing their chances of being overrun. Their infantry would also have faced a “Hobson’s choice.” Had they stood up in their trenches to fire, they would take casualties from shrapnel. Had they remained deep in their trenches, they would allow the British infantry to cross their field of fire unmolested.

British Empire forces often found themselves separated from the Boers by a great deal of open ground.