Artillery
Hess and Goebbels Gun Batteries at Dieppe
19 August 1942 One of the most controversial raids of the Second World War was the raid on Dieppe, which took place on 19 August 1942. By the end of the day, thousands of Allies were dead, wounded or taken as prisoners of war. The Dieppe Raid has since been the subject of much debate, but within the overall operation…
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Antitank Warfare in the Spanish Civil War
German Artillerymen of the Condor Legion prepare to fire a Flak 18 88mm cannon onto Republican lines at the Battle of Amposta during the Spanish Civil War; Catalonia, Autumn 1938. Italian 47mm M-35 antitank guns were supplied for the use of the Italian Volunteer Corps only. Spanish troops with a…
The War of the Engineers I
The French engineers who designed the forts were well aware that the rifled, breech-loading guns that were increasingly coming into use in the 1870s were far superior to the cannon that Vauban and his followers had in mind when they designed and built their forts. The difficulty men like SĂ©rĂ©…
The War of the Engineers II
Fort Douaumont (Illustration from Neil Demarco’s The Great War) THE RIPOSTE On the other hand, now that the engineers knew what the new shells could do, coming up with a way to counter them was not all that difficult, at least in theory. Basically, the material that formed the carapace…
The War of the Engineers III
THE INTERNAL DEBATE In order to understand how that came to happen, and why it continued for the first part of the war, it is unfortunately necessary to peer into the labyrinth of the Third Republic, where basically, the army was run by a committee called the Conseil SupĂ©rieure de…
La Spingarda
The drawings depict minors two shells with gunpowder, top «wants the bag inside the bullet“; a queue of bombs “that does not come back to dirieto to take in galley” (the galley was the typical warship used in the Mediterranean from the ninth to the eighteenth century.); Other casing with…
The Final Siege: Antwerp 1914 Part I
42 cm M-Gerät On Saturday, 10 October 1914 Admiral von Schroeder, Antwerp’s new military governor, and General von Beseler, commander of the siege troops that had captured the fortress, watched as the siege corps marched in review, celebrating the capture of the Belgian National Redoubt. The most noteworthy thing about that…