Description: These highly destructive weapons, of which a great variety of models and sizes were in use by the different armies during the World War, were evolved from the crude mortars which have been used since the earliest days of gunpowder for lobbing projectiles into an enemy's lines at high angles and short ranges.
The wooden "Coehorn" mortars used by Grant's army at Vicksburg and Petersburg, in the Ciivl War, were weapons of the primitive but quite effective earlier type. They depended for their range entirely upon the amount of powder used in the firing charge. Between such crude mortars and the accurate little rifled piece which we see before us, there is a wide difference.
A trench mortar of this size has a range of between 170 and 1200 yards and its projectile, filled with high explosive, is very deadly.
The Germans, especially, made great use of trench mortars, or "minenwerfers," as they called them, and these were fitted not only with elevating and traversing mechanism but with oil and spring recoil buffers.
Some of the larger German mortars fired a shell containing 220 pounds of high explosive, which would make a crater 20 feet deep and more than 30 feet across; large enough to engulf a good sized house.
- Excerpt from: The World War through the stereoscope a visualized, vitalized history of the greatest conflict of all the ages / / edited by Major Joseph Mills Hanson.
- Published/Created by: Meadville, Pa.; New York, N.Y.; Chicago, Ill.; London, England:
- Keystone View Company, photographed between 1914 and 1918, published 1923
- Repository: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA
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