Heavy Field Howitzers 1914-1915 (III)

The Role of Horses

This piece takes the place of an older article of the same name that, for reasons beyond my ken, fell prey to technical difficulties.

In an age when most artillery pieces were pulled by teams of horses, the weight of a gun or howitzer placed powerful limits on its mobility.  Under normal conditions, a standard team of six ordinary draft horses could reliably handle a load, with a total weight of no more than 2.5 metric tons, that consisted of an artillery piece, a limber stocked with ammunition, and as many as four passengers.  When serving with an army on campaign, such a combination of horses, vehicles, and men could easily march as far, and as fast, as infantry units of the day.  On the battlefield, it could move quickly (“at a trot”) for short periods of time, whether to take up firing positions or to change them.¹

Pulling a load that exceeded the aforementioned limit required additional horsepower.²  This could be achieved by using additional horses, horses of exceptional strength, oxen, or, as was the case of the Indian Army, elephants. Gunners who employed these extraordinary measures, however, soon discovered that teams of horses able to transport heavier pieces between battlefields encountered difficulties when moving them upon battlefields. To put things another way, a team of eight particularly powerful horses pulling a four-ton load lacked the ability to deal with the inevitable irregularities of ground enjoyed by the combination of six-smaller horses and a two-and-a-half-ton load.³

The “weight behind team” of two German artillery pieces of the same caliber

For Further Reading:

Articles about Heavy Field Howitzers

Field and Foot

1. For short descriptions of the use of six-horse teams to pull light eld guns, see, among many others, Henry A. Bethel Modern Artillery in the Field (London: MacMillan, 1911) pages 98-100 and Alexander B. Dyer Handbook for Light Artillery (New York: J. Wyley and Sons, 1900), pages 194-195.

2. Technical data for the two German 105mm pieces come from Hans Linnenkohl Vom Einzelschuß zur Feuerwalze: Der Wettlauf Zwischen Technik und Taktik im Ersten Weltkrieg [From Single Shot to Creeping Barrage: The Race between Technique and Tactics in the First World War] (Koblenz: Bernhard und Graefe, 1990), pages 80 and 86. The figure for “weight of passengers” assumes that each man weighs, on average, 75 kilograms.

3. For a brief description of the trade-os between weight of metal and mobility, see K.K. Knapp “To What Extent May Guns and Howitzers of Greater Calibre than Those of Our Field Artillery Cooperate Usefully in Field Operations, and What Rules Should Govern Their Tactical Employment” Journal of the Royal Artillery Volume 24, Number 7 (October 1907), pages 273-274. For descriptions of the sort of distances that horse-drawn artillery units might cover, and the difficulties faced by the 60-pounder (127mm) heavy gun on the battlefields of 1914, see Archibald F. Becke The Royal Regiment of Artillery at Le Cateau (Woolwich: Royal Artillery Institution, 1919)