Mix & Match Medium Mortars

Firing Foreign Ammunition

An 82mm mortar of the Red Army (Public Domain)

Decades ago, in the Age of Abba, Senior Drill Instructor Staff Sergeant Beck, a veteran of America’s war in Vietnam, told my platoon-mates and me that, while a Soviet 82^mm mortar could fire ammunition built for American medium mortars, the US 81^mm piece could not use projectiles built for its Commie counterpart. Earlier this morning, I asked a large language model to help me determine the truth of this claim. To be more precise, I requested that it look for manuals, pamphlets, or circulars that told soldiers what kinds of foreign ammunition, if any, they could use in their own mortars.

The program failed to find what I was seeking. It did, however, point me in the direction of a catalogue of firing tables produced by the German Army of the Second World War. These included several that described the ballistics of projectiles fired by mortars built for armies not their own.

• H.Dv. 119/948 Provisional firing table for German projectiles fired from a Yugoslav 81^mm mortar.

• H.Dv. 119/950 Provisional firing table for French projectiles fired with French propellant charges from a Soviet 82^mm mortar.

• H.Dv. 119/952 Firing table for firing German projectiles from a Czechoslovak 8^cm mortar.

• H.Dv. 119/954 Firing table for both German and Polish projectiles fired from a German 8^cm mortar.

• H.Dv. 119/957 Firing table for German high-explosive and smoke shells fired from a French 81^mm mortar.

• H.Dv. 119/958 Provisional firing table for firing German projectiles from a Soviet 82^mm mortar.

• H.Dv. 119/959 Provisional firing table for firing Dutch and German projectiles from the Dutch 81^mm mortar.

• H.Dv. 119/4939 Firing table for Yugoslav 81^mm projectiles (both standard and cast steel) fired with Italian propellant charges from a German 8^cm mortar.

The existence of these firing tables convinces me that lots of medium mortars could fire ammunition built for their cross-border siblings. In particular, the publication of H.Dv. 119/958 tells me that the Soviet 82^mm mortar could, in fact, fire projectiles built for the German 8^cm mortar.

Alas, none of the firing tables in this catalogue records the results of tests in which someone fired a Soviet 82^mm mortar bomb from the barrel of one of its capitalist cousins.

So, the quest continues!

An 82mm mortar shell captured by US Marines during the Vietnam War (US National Archives)

Sources

The collection of references to firing tables can be found on the German Digital Library (Deutsche Digital Bibliothek). (Alas, in sharp contrast to such proper digital libraries as Gallica and Polona, this website hosts few digital documents. In other words, if ‘truth in advertising’ laws applied to government departments, it would be called the ‘German Digital Card Catalogue’ or the ‘German Digital Finding Aid’.)

Used-to-be-a-tree versions of the actual firing tables can be found somewhere in the bowels of the German Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv).

Note

H.Dv. stands for Heeres Dienstvorschrift, which I translate as ‘army service manual’.

For Further Reading

75mm Rifled Mortars

Firing Mortars in the Jungle