Well, to elaborate a bit more…
What’s the difference between a howitzer and other artillery?
I was at a museum today (Duxford, UK) and they had a display with both guns (as in big guns on carriages), field guns and howitzers, all looking exactly the same.
Does anyone here know the actual difference? Dictionary.com wasn’t very helpful.
I think the more compelling question is: how’s a whatitzter?
Very good, actually.
Briefly, a howitzer has a shorter barrel. The projectile fired from it travels with more arc.
“A whozitz!”
“A whozitz?”
“A whatzitz!”
“A whatzitz?”
“Who that hiding/
In the treetops?/
It’s that rascal/
The jitterbug…”
Any other differences ? Is it usually smaller caliber or something else ?
(I have always heard, read about military stuff… but never really thought about what a Howitzer was hehe… good question. )
Howitzers are guns intented for high angle fire. A gun with a flat trajectory can’t hit targets that are protected, for example are behind hills. Howitzers handle these things nicely. However, you need a forward observer to correct the aim in order to get good results.
Howitzers usually use bagged powder so that with various combinations of the number of bags and the angle of fire, a large number of combinations are possible.
For example, there is a technique called “time on target” in which a previously sighted in area is bambarded with a large number of projectiles that all land nearly simultaneously with no warning.
Several batteries are all coordinated and the firing pattern worked out with powder charges all prefigured and laid out ready to load. The howitzers first fire at a high angle with a certain charge of bags. Then the angle is lowered and another round fired and so on. I believe that a single piece can have three or four rounds in the air all of which strike the target at the same time because of the different flight times and velocities.
Elderly, hum, maybe even antique artillery pieces were sorted into field, land fort, coastal, and shipboard and then field, land fort, coastal, and shipboard were also divided into mortar, howitzer, and gun (and there were in the 1800s some inbetweenies). Field artillery had to be light enough to go into battle on carriages pulled by horses regardless of whether or not it was a mortar, howitzer, or gun. They might need to be man-handled in the aiming process. Seacoast artillery were also designated: mortar, howitzer and gun but they were seldom moved from place to place, just on their own implacements, tracks, or whatever their set up was, they were the largest and heaviest.
They looked alike to you in the museum because artillery pieces made at the same time in the same country looked fashionably alike. A large field howitzer might look pretty much like one of the medium guns when you saw them on carriages. It was difficult to determine the barrel pressures and effects of the explosions on the various sections on the artillery. If the fashion at the time of manufacture was to double band the back end of the artillery, chances are all the pieces of that time were also double banded - even if the lighter and smaller howitzers might not have needed it. At some times it was fashionable to make the muzzles of the various pieces “bell” out in shape and have an extra band at the very mouth of the piece, well, then all the artillery pieces of the time were done that way regardless of need or effectiveness.
I’m pretty good at identifying artillery of the American Civil War plus a few years before and a few years after, but do have a harder time with Brittish pieces of roughly the same time. IIRC the Brittish pieces seemed to look more alike, maybe more conservative in design? So, if the artillery pieces you saw were elderly, all field pieces then some of the howitzers might have looked like smaller guns.
If they mixed some of the older artillery pieces you might have seen bronze howitzers of the mid-1800s mixed in with early rifled bronze guns and maybe they would not have looked that different. Here in the USA I’ve even seen the bronze guns painted black. The whim of some modern display person, hard to guess what must have been going through their minds.
Jois
And the in the Time-On-Target scenario above, that type of rapid change in load and angle seems a bit much to accomplish in the rather short time it take to toss a round a few miles. The WWII M115 8" Howitzer had a rate of fire of one round per minute, and the newer (only 20 years old) M198 speeds that up to 4 rounds per minute. The Whiz-Bang (literally) M109 Palladin is highly automated and still pops four a minute. The effect of a Battalion TOT is something of awe.
Right and an 8" cannon is pretty big. If a 90 mm shell weighs about 30 lb. and 8" would be about 300 lb. There is also a TOT technique using either bagged powder or fixed ammunition where artillery units scattered over a pretty wide area compute times of fire such that their shells all arrive at the same time. That would doubtless be the 8" piece technique.
And yes, the effect on the target is devastating. Of course you have to know some time in advance in order to get everything all set up.
Just for the hell of it I did some vacuum trajectories for three projectiles fired 1 minute apart. Real artillery shells aren’t fired in a vacuum but I believe that the same scheme will work in the atmosphere using the artillery firing tables. The ranges are approximate within about .2 mi. In actual practice the settings would be better than I used and give equal ranges, but this shows the feasibility. Even for an 8" gun in WWII.
Anyway:
Shell 1 velocity = 1700 fps, elev = 75[sup]o[/sup] range = 10 mi. Time of flight 180 sec.
Shell 2 velocity = 1500 fps, elev = 70[sup]o[/sup], range = 10 mi. Time of flight 120 sec.
Shell 3 velocity = 1200 fps, elev = 42[sup]o[/sup], range = 10 mi. Time of flight 60 sec.
So if 1 is fired at 0 time, 2 at 1 minute and 3 at 2 minutes, voila all will arrive 10 miles away at the same time.
Damn. I guess with today’s counter battery radars and the “shoot-n-scoot” tactics, I had never heard of this ability. 3 minute flight time? Wow.
I’m stunned too. Three minutes in the air seems a hell of a long time and sort of counter-intuitive.
I suppose I’d better go and get my intuition fixed!
Here are some videos of a TOT. Sucks to be them.
A few minor corrections. I was a section chief on both M110 and M109 self-propelled howitzers.
8" rounds fired from the only 8" artillery piece still in the US arsenal weigh approximately 200 lbs. The M198 and M109 are both 155mm guns with their shells weighing in at aprox 100 lbs. (In practice the artillery uses guns and howitzer interchangeably these days).
A 3-minute time of flight is possible. I have fired high angle/low angle missions like the ones estimated by Mr. Simons, but only on the M109. These are very hard to do on the M110 because it takes a while to get sites set up in such huge changes in elevation. In practice the 8" guns rarely shoot such mixed missions. They slow your firing time down dramatically. In addition the maximum rates of fire only really work when your firing at close to loading elevation and your defection (left to right) is not changing.
Time On Target refers to the type of mission, not the effects. Most artillery missions attempts to surround or unsheathed the target in some manner. You normally want all of your shells to explode at the same time.