Pneumatic mortar—or this one is probably a howitzer.
This report covers:
- Pneumatic mortar
- Ideal for trench warfare
- Howitzer?
- My experience with pneumatic mortars
- Germany
- Big or small—fear them all
- Last word
When Val Gamerman asked me if I would like to write about the Brandt pneumatic mortar of the first World War I jumped at the chance because I had been a 4.2-inch / 107 mm mortar platoon leader in a tank battalion in Germany. More on that in a bit.
Pneumatic mortar
Val somehow acquired a short and soundless video of a pneumatic field gun being primed and fired. If you watch at the end of the 17-second film clip you will see a puff of compressed air being expelled from the mouth of the gun tube. The link below opens a short video that says it is a Brandt mortar but it’s actually a pneumatic breech-loaded howitzer. Click on the link and let’s watch.
https://www.reddit.com/r/airguns/s/zXA0kTGYrz
The video shows four guys pumping with hand pumps but the way guns like the Brandt mortar usually worked was from a high-pressure air tank. That mortar will launch a 60mm / 2.4-inch mortar shell out to about 400 meters. It is similar to and a little more powerful than our M79 or M203 40mm grenade launcher.
pneumatic mortar shell.
Ideal for trench warfare
Such a device is ideal for trench warfare as the combat lines are often just a few hundred yards / meters apart, with the soldiers on both sides in deep trenches. A mortar is an indirect-fire weapon that lobs a shell high but not that far. The four-hundred-meter range of the pneumatic mortar is more than enough range in most instances and the high angle of fire drops the shell down into the trenches.
Being pneumatic, this weapon is quieter than a firearm. It also has no real muzzle flash to draw enemy attention.
Howitzer?
Many references call these weapons howitzer, which are also indirect fire weapons but they don’t shoot shells as high-angled. Howitzers are also called cannons by civilians. They shoot farther than mortars but not as high-angled,
Some of the photos of pneumatic guns like these I’ve seen online do look like howitzers as well as mortars. The first photo with this report is one of those. Howitzers load from the breech and mortars load from the muzzle.
Pneumatic mortars ranged in size up to 12 cm / 4.7 inches. A 20 cm / 7.87-inch gun was planned and even tested but I believe never fielded. And once the war ended all weapons development ended.
My experience with pneumatic mortars
My first Army assignment was to the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment at Fort Lewis, Washington. I had one 4.2-inch mortar in my armored cavalry platoon. The 4.2-inch mortar launches a 24.5 lb. / 11.11kg. high-explosive shell out to over 4,500 yards / 4115 meters. They also shoot high-powered flares, white phosphorous incendiary rounds, chemical rounds like tear gas and nerve agent and others.
When I was with the cavalry in 1970 the Vietnam war was in full swing and US-based units like mine had no money for ammunition, so we usually could not fire our weapons. Hence we needed to find creative ways to train. One of my sergeants located a pneumatic sub-caliber mortar training device and we used it to train.
That unit was a simple smoothbore tube that ran down inside the main mortar gun tube with a high-pressure hose alongside it. When the small practice shell dropped down that tube and tripped open the air valve at the bottom a high-pressure burst of air was released. That lobbed a blue plastic training shell out between 50 and 100 feet. A .22 blank cartridge in the nose of the shell fired when it hit the ground. We built targets out of tin cans and cardboard boxes. It was as close as I ever came to playing with toys in the Army!
Germany
Later in my career I went to Germany where I was the 4.2-inch mortar platoon leader of the Second Battalion, Eighty-First Armor in the First Armor Division “Old Ironsides”. I was assigned to the platoon the day I reported into my unit in Erlangen.
The platoon I took over had failed its ARTEP (Army Training and Evaluation Program) the year before. That is an annual proficiency test that each unit takes. It was a black eye for the battalion and the battalion commander told me it had better not happen again! I trained with that platoon for four months and when we took our next ARTEP we scored second-highest of mortar platoons in the division.
One of my four mortar tracks with part of the crew. We could “hipshoot” rapidly with the gun mounted inside the tracked vehicle as seen here but for the greatest precision we mounted the tube on the ground on a huge baseplate that you see on the left of the tracked vehicle. Once several shots had been fired the recoil of the mortar shell dug that baseplate into the ground, settling the gun in. From then on it was quite accurate.
Two years later when I commanded the company this platoon was a part of, the division commander watched them blow the turret off a target tank several miles away and over a hill! He awarded every platoon member an Impact Army Commendation Medal. It was sheer luck that the mortar shell dropped down into that tank turret and the general knew it but sometimes you award good luck!
Big or small—fear them all
The one thing I learned from my experience with mortars is you don’t want them shooting at you! My 4.2-inchers could jeopardize armored vehicles and fortified positions, but even the little 60 mm mortars the infantry carried were nothing to mess with!
Last word
My final word to all of you today is to remember that today is June third, the day Billy Joe McAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie bridge (song, Ode to Billy Joe).
