Heavy Field Howitzers (XI)

Armies of the First World War

The third attempt to breathe new life into the 155mm light siege howitzer of 1881 was also the simplest. Rather than trying to create a heavy field howitzer, the author of the third conversion, Louis Jean François Filloux sought only to replace the carriage and platform of the original piece.

The light siege howitzer of 1881 made use of a carriage that relied upon friction to absorb most, but not all, of the rearward forces generated each time the piece was fired. The remainder of the recoil pushed the piece out of battery, which required that the gunners manhandle it back in place before the next round could be fired. (To help with the latter task, the gunners placed small wheels under the carriage.)

As might be expected, this procedure both consumed a lot of time and required that the carriage rest upon a relatively long platform. (The length of the platform used with the Model 1881 light siege howitzer depended upon the size of the propellant charge being used. Thus, when the piece was placed on a smaller platform, whether pre-fabricated or improvised, it could not make use of larger charges. This, in turn, reduced the distance that the shells it fired could travel.)

Filloux replaced the existing pre-fabricated platform with one fitted with a pair of ramps and a hydraulic brake. Each time the piece fired, the upward movement of the carriage along the ramps combined with the resistance provided by hydraulic brake to accommodate nearly all of the rearward thrust. Once the rearward momentum was spent, the ramps guided the carriage back into battery.

As might be expected, the new approach to the handling of recoil required changes to the carriage as well as the platform. The most noticeable of these were the spring-mounted disks, located on each side of the front part of the carriage, that connected the carriage to the ramps on the platform.

Captain Filloux proposed his design to the French ordnance authorities in 1903. The latter, however, did not authorize production of the weapon until nine years had passed. As a result, the hundred or so of the Model 1881 siege howitzers transformed into Model 1881-1912 siege howitzers in the years between 1912 and the summer of 1914, were already obsolescent when delivered to the units of garrison artillery (artillerie à pied) that were to employ them.

Nonetheless, the increase in the rate of fire that resulted from Filloux’s design, from one round every two minutes to one round every 45 seconds, would prove valuable in the first two years of the First World War, when the Filloux light siege howitzer was the best weapon of its class available to the artillery of the Third Republic.

Sources: Jules Challéat, L'artillerie de terre en France pendant un siècle : histoire technique (1816-1919): Tome II, 1880-1910 (Paris: Charles-Lavauzelle, 1935), pages 400 and 401; École Militaire de Génie, Cours d'artillerie. 2e partie, Caractéristiques des matériels en service (Fontainebleu: Lithographie de l’école, 1914) , pages 50 through 54; France, Ministère de la Guerre, Règlement sur le service des bouches à feu de siège et place, 2e Partie, Matériel (Paris: Charles Lavauzelle, 1896), pages 35 through 40; and France, Ministère de l'armement et des fabrications de guerre, Renseignements sur les matériels d'artillerie de tous calibres en service sur les champs de bataille des armées françaises (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1918), pages 141 and 144.

Note on links: The first link on this page will take you to Léonore, the official database of the Légion d’Honneur. (This is a great source for brief biographies of French soldiers.) Subsequent links take you to digital copies of books made available by Gallica, which I usually describe as “Google Books done right.”