Heavy Field Howitzers 1914-1915 (Part V)
Armies of the First World War
Siege Trains
The last two decades of the nineteenth century saw the development of an international consensus in favor of employing howitzers of various kinds as the principal weapons of siege trains. The leader of this tendency was the British Army, a force which, of all the armies of the great powers of the time, fielded the smallest number of siege artillery pieces. Between 1884 and 1899, a standard siege train of the British Army contained 18 guns and 30 howitzers. In 1900, the removal of all guns from siege trains left the British Army with organizations of that sort that were equipped entirely with howitzers.1
The German Army entered the 1880s with the ability to deploy 672 siege guns and 532 siege howitzers.2 By 1901, however, the ratio of guns to howitzers had shifted in favor of the latter, with official manuals recommending the deployment of siege trains (Belagerungsatrains) in which howitzers outnumbered guns by a factor of two to one. In that same year, a German authority on the subject of fortress warfare, Baron Ernst von Leithner (1852-1914), went so far as to propose the creation of standard ‘siege artillery parks’ (Belagerungsgeschützparks) of 96 artillery pieces, 80 of which would have been howitzers of one sort or another.3 A similar trend could be seen in the evolution of French siege trains. In 1882, a standard siege artillery unit (équipage de siège) of the French Army possessed 130 guns and 42 howitzers.4 By 1902, students at the École Supérieure de Guerre were studying organizations of this sort that were provided with 46 guns and 96 howitzers.5
Siege trains, however, did not so much accompany armies in the field as follow in their wake. Thus, the tendency towards the increase in the number of howitzers assigned to siege trains had no direct influence on the the armament of what was variously known as “heavy field artillery” (artillerie lourde de campagne), “horse-drawn heavy artillery” (bespannte Fußartillerie), “mobile heavy artillery,” “army heavy artillery,” and “heavy artillery.” As its many names suggest, this new category consisted of batteries armed with weapons that, while heavier than those of the field artillery of infantry divisions, were still light enough to be pulled by teams of horses at speeds that allowed them to keep up with armies on campaign. At first, these were mostly siege pieces of the lighter sort: guns with calibers of 120mm or so and howitzers with bores in the vicinity of 150mm. Later, artillery pieces that had been expressly designed for service with the mobile heavy artillery, some of which might be described as “scaled-up field pieces,” began to appear.
Opinions about the proper composition of the mobile heavy artillery varied greatly. Most writers on the subject, however, agreed that it served two main purposes. The first of these, the silencing of hostile field artillery, required weapons capable of firing upon distant targets. The second, the destruction of field fortifications, demanded accuracy and weight of shell. In other words, where one of the definitive missions of army heavy artillery was best fulfilled by guns, the other called for howitzers.
The following page provides links to all of the articles in this series:
Charles Callwell and John Headlam, The History of the Royal Artillery from the Indian Mutiny to the Great War, Volume I (1860-1869), (Woolwich: The Royal Artillery Institution, 1931), p. 193
The number of 532 siege howitzers omits 120 light mortars of a type adopted in 1880. These weapons, which fired projectiles originally designed for 90mm field guns, proved so disappointing that, in 1892, the German authorities withdrew them from service. Linnenkohl, Vom Einzelschuß zur Feuerwalze, p. 154 and Anonymous, ‘Les Nouvelles Formations et la Composition Actuelle de l’Artillerie Allemande’, Revue d’Artillerie, Vol. 19 (1881-1882), pp. 120-22
Willibald Stavenhagen, Grundriss des Festungskrieges (Sondershaufen: Eupel, 1901), pp.18-19
Chaléat, Histoire Technique de l’Artillerie de Terre, Tome II, p. 12
École Supérieure de Guerre, Cours d’Artillerie, Emploi de l’Artillerie dans la Guerre de Siege, (Paris: École Supérieure de Guerre, 1902), p. 119