Heavy Field Howitzers 1914-1915 (Part VI)

Armies of the First World War

John Singer Sergeant, Frederick Sleigh Roberts, 1906

After the Boer War

In the British Army, the experience of the Second Boer War (1899-1902) created a climate of opinion that was particularly favorable to the employment of guns as the principle heavy artillery pieces of armies in the field.  Prior to the Second Boer War, the British Army possessed four heavy batteries.¹  Two of these batteries were armed with howitzers and two with guns.²  After the Second Boer War, the British Army fielded a total of 26 heavy batteries.³  All of these post-war heavy batteries were armed with guns of one sort or another.  Most of these were coast defence weapons that had been converted into heavy field guns. The rest were pieces that, though designed expressly for use as heavy field guns, were the direct descendants of coast defence weapons.  (The coast defence weapons, in turn, were slightly modified versions of weapons that had originally been designed for use on board the warships of the Royal Navy.)⁴

                                Naval Guns Employed by British Heavy Batteries
                                                                    1887-1914

                                              British and French Heavy Field Guns

Nearly all of the heavy field guns issued to British heavy batteries after the Second Boer War were distinguished by their capacity for long-range fire.  That is, they could hit targets at distances that were beyond the reach of comparable heavy guns serving with other armies.  This was largely a result of their maritime provenance, and, in particular, the long barrels and large propellant charges needed to provide the penetrating power and range desired by the naval tacticians of the day.  The newest of the British heavy field guns, however, had not been designed as a naval piece.  On the contrary, the soon-to-be-famous 60-pounder gun had been designed, from the ground up, as a weapon for war on land.  The design characteristics for this weapon, moreover, had been laid down by no less of a person than Frederick Sleigh Roberts (1832-1914), an officer who was both the most famous British soldier of late Victorian era and the British Army’s senior expert on the subject of heavy field artillery.

Roberts first saw heavy artillery fired in anger during the Indian Mutiny of 1857.  In that year, while serving as a subaltern officer of the Bengal Artillery, he was temporarily assigned to a siege battery firing upon the defenses of the fortified city of Delhi.⁵  Twenty-one years later, he made extensive use of heavy guns and howitzers to deal with the many fortified villages he encountered during the course of the Second Afghan War (1878-1880).   These two experiences led Roberts to favor mobility and shell-power over range.⁶ Thus, in the early 1890s, when Roberts served as commander-in-chief of the Indian Army, he encouraged the development of the 30-pounder (102mm) heavy gun .  Adopted in 1892, this “special for India” piece sacrificed the ability to reach distant targets  in order to create a relatively light piece that fired a relatively heavy projectile.⁷  

                                     British 4-inch (102mm) Heavy Field Guns

                                      British 5-inch (127mm) Heavy Field Guns

The experience of the first year Second Boer War, however, caused Roberts to re-arrange his list of desiderata, placing range at the top of the list and mobility at the bottom.⁸  Thus, the  60-pounder (127mm) heavy field gun developed while Roberts was commander-in-chief of the British Army weighed far more than the weapon of the same caliber that had been used by British gunners in the Second Boer War.  (It is worthy of note that, finding the 60-pounder gun too heavy for its purposes, the Indian Army chose to begin a program to re-arm its heavy batteries with a new type of howitzer.)⁹

The following page provides links to all of the articles in this series:

Heavy Field Howitzers

1. All four of the heavy batteries serving in the British Army prior to the Second Boer War were permanently assigned to India.  Because they were designed to serve in the mountainous Northwest Frontier, these units used elephants to pull their artillery pieces and oxen to pull most other vehicles.  For a colorful description of these units on the eve of the Second Boer War, see the second volume of Charles E. Callwell, Stray Recollections (London: Edward Arnold, 1923.) 

2. The guns were 'special for India' 30-pounder (102mm) guns.  The howitzers were 'special for India' 5.4-inch (137mm) howitzers.  For the technical characteristics of these unusual weapons, see Ian Hogg and L.F. Thurston, British Artillery Weapons and Ammunition, 1914-1918, (London: Ian Allen, 1972), pp. 92-95 and 120-21.

3. Between 1903 and 1907, the British Army fielded a dozen heavy batteries – six in India and six at home.  In 1908, it formed 14 additional heavy batteries for assignment, at the rate of one per division, to the infantry divisions of newly formed Territorial Force.  (The Territorial Force batteries were composed of part-time soldiers.  The other batteries were Regular Army units composed of full-time soldiers.)  In addition to the divisional heavy batteries, the Territorial Force also possessed six non-divisional units that were called 'heavy batteries.'  These, however, were sedentary coast-defence units that could only be employed with formations in the field if provided with vehicles, drivers, and some means of locomotion.  John Headlam, The History of the Royal Artillery from the Indian Mutiny to the Great War, Volume II (1899-1914), (Woolwich: The Royal Artillery Institution, 1937), Appendix E

4. The conversion of shipboard weapons into coast defence guns was largely a matter of changing the mounts and, in some instances, the firing mechanisms.  The conversion of coast defence weapons into heavy field guns was largely a matter of providing a suitable traveling carriage. The technical data in the tables describing 4-inch and 5-inch guns comes from Hogg and Thurston, British Artillery Weapons and Ammunition, pp. 92-95, 124-25, 128-29, 235, and 241.

5. George Forrest, The Life of Lord Roberts, (London:  Cassell, 1914), p. 20

6. Callwell and Headlam, The History of the Royal Artillery, Volume I (1860-1869), pp. 272-73

7. Alan Campbell, ‘Roberts, Frederick Sleigh’, in H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, editors, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2004), Volume 47, p. 158 and Hogg and Thurston, British Artillery Weapons and Ammunition, pp. 92-93

8. Campbell, ‘Roberts, Frederick Sleigh’, p. 159

9. Headlam, The History of the Royal Artillery from the Indian Mutiny to the Great War, Volume II (1899-1914), pp. 82-83