The Cult of the French '75'

Edwardian Armies

During the first three months of the First World War, everywhere that German met Frenchman on the field of battle, the story was the same.  The French 75mm field guns were able to fire further, faster, and more accurately than the German 77mm weapon of the same class.  On occasion, this led to stunning local success.[1] For most practical purposes, however, these advantages didn't matter.  While the German gunners had the tactical sense to put their shells where they would have the most impact on the larger battle, the French gunners were rarely in a position to effectively cooperate with their infantry.[2]

In addition to advantages born of long hours spent playing tactical decision games of various sorts, German gunners also benefitted from their large inventory of heavy field howitzers.  In the mobile warfare of 1914, German weapons of this sort were often able to outrange the soixante-quinze (“75”), striking at French field batteries unable to reply in kind.  Even when they were within the "firing fan" of French field guns, German howitzer crews protected themselves, and their weapons, by hiding in hollows in the ground.  The French field guns could reach some of these defilade positions.  The relatively flat trajectories traced by their shells, after all, were still parabolas of a sort.  In many instances, however, the 75mm shells flew over their targets.[3]

When, in the fall of 1914, mobile warfare gave way to trench warfare, the benefits of a large howitzer park increased considerably.   The more obvious advantage was the howitzer was the weight of its shell.  A howitzer fired a much bigger projectile than a gun of the same size.  Less obvious, but equally significant, was the ability of howitzers to strike the type of targets most often found in trench warfare.

The greater size (and therefore volume) of howitzer shells allowed howitzers to deliver a larger amount of explosive with each round fired.  This not only meant that direct hits did more damage, but also that near misses stood a greater chance of doing harm to the occupants of a trench as well as to the structural integrity of the trench itself.  This greater "weight of metal" (the expression should be "weight of explosive") more than compensated for the somewhat slower rate of fire of howitzers.

In October of 1914, the French War Ministry officially recognized its need to field artillery weapons more powerful than the 75mm field gun.  However, rather than obtain copies of a serviceable 155mm howitzer that had been adopted in 1904, or procure any of the many state-of-the-art howitzers advertised in the catalog of the Schneider works, the French authorities armed batteries with obsolete siege weapons, most of which were heavy guns designed in the 1870s.  This exercise in improvisation left the factories free to produce additional field guns.[4]

The French disdain for howitzers stemmed, in part, from the many virtues of the 75mm field gun.  In the years following the unveiling of that weapon in 1901, these advantaged convinced many French artillery officers that the 75mm light field gun should be the only weapon used in the field artillery regiments assigned to infantry divisions and army corps.  Indeed, when presented with the fact that the German artillery had increased the proportion of howitzers in its infantry divisions, these soixantequinzeboutistes went so far as to claim that the Germans only did this to compensate for the inferiority of their 77mm field guns vis-à-vis their French counterparts.[5]

At the heart of soixantequinzeboutisme was the belief that the 75mm field gun could perform all of the tasks that a field artillery unit could expect to encounter in mobile warfare.  When firing shrapnel shells at infantry in the open, the French field gun produced a hail of shrapnel bullets of unparalleled size and power.   When firing high explosive shells against enemy batteries on open ground, the higher rate of fire of the 75mm field gun more than compensated for the relatively small size of its projectiles.  Even when firing at enemy batteries in defilade, only cases in which the howitzer proved superior were those in which the target was hiding behind a particularly steep slope.[6]

In 1912 and 1913, reports from the battlefields of the Balkans Wars challenged the faith of the soixantequinzeboutistes.  The fire of shrapnel shells fired by field guns, the observers noted, while deadly to batteries deployed in the open, did little, if any, damage to batteries dug into the ground.  However, rather than causing French gunners to embrace the howitzer, this realization created a powerful desire for field guns of a heavier sort.  Thus, on the eve of the outbreak of the First World War, the French War Ministry placed orders for a 105mm heavy field gun, an artillery piece that might well be described as a scaled-up version of the 75mm weapon it had loved so well. [7]

Note: For many examples of the (frequently cringe-worthy) celebration of the 75mm field gun in French popular culture, visit Pierre Fontanon et le Canon de 75.

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[1] For examples, see Gascouin, L'Évolution de l'Artillerie Pendant la Guerre, (Paris:  Flammarion, 1920), pages 70-93.

[2] Fréderic Georges Hérr, L'Artillerie, Ce Qu'elle a Été, Ce Qu'elle Est, Ce Qu'elle Doit Etre, (Paris:  Berger Levrault, eds., 1924), page 26.  For a description of a German artillery battalion in action in 1914, see A. Seeger, "Our Baptism of Fire", The Field Artillery Journal, Vol. V, No. 4 (October-December 1915), pages 659-673.  For excellent descriptions of the encounter battles of 1914, see the series of articles written by Alfred Higgins Burne for The Fighting Forces: "The Battle of Rossignol" (October 1931), "The Battle of Virton" (April 1931), "The Battle of Ethe" (October 1929.)

[3] Fréderic Georges Hérr, L'Artillerie, Ce Qu'elle a Été, Ce Qu'elle Est, Ce Qu'elle Doit Etre (Paris:  Berger Levrault, eds., 1924), page 14

[4] Hérr, L'Artillerie, pages 17, 31, and 3

[5] Hérr, L'Artillerie, pages 15 and 16

[6] Sauterau de Part, "Note sur les programmes d'obusiers légers et artillerie lourde mobile," dated December, 1911, Archives de Guerre, Carton 4b22.

[7] G. Bellenger, "Notes sur l’Emploi de l'Artillerie dans la Campagne des Balkans", Revue d'Artillerie, November, 1913, pp. 85-100; Fréderic Georges Herr, Sur le Théatre de la Guerre des Balkans, Mon Journal de Route, (Paris:  Berger-Levrault, 1913), page 96; and Herr, l'Artillerie, page 20