The Book of Armaments:
German Long-Range Cannon
by Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
June 2021

The 105mm field howitzers and 150mm heavy howitzers assigned to German divisional artillery regiments gave them enormous firepower, but at the cost of limited range. For fire missions requiring longer range, like counter-battery fire, interdiction and bombardment of rear-area targets such as ammunition dumps, the Germans like most armies depended on separate batteries of long-range cannon.

The old Imperial Army and the Weimar Republic’s Reichswehr had deployed the 10cm K17 for this role, a long-barreled cannon produced by Krupp at the end of the Great War. The Versailles Treaty specifically prohibited this weapon to the Reichswehr, which still managed to hide some of them away as did the Austrians. The cannon had good range and accuracy, but was large and unwieldly and could only be moved if broken into two loads. It saw action as a coast-defense gun during the Second World War, but as a field piece it had been superseded by a new weapon.

In the mid-1920’s the Weimar Republic’s Reichswehr began secret design work on new artillery, which included most of the heavy weapons that would arm the Wehrmacht. Once Nazi Germany’s Wehrmacht commenced open re-armament, it ordered a new long-range cannon. The 10cm K18 (actually a 105mm weapon, but the Imperial Army, Reichswehr and Wehrmacht all rounded off the calibers of their long-range cannon, unlike their other artillery) was a joint production by Krupp, which provided the carriage, and Rheinmetall, which provided the barrel. It shared the same carriage as the 150mm sFH18 heavy howitzer, ordered at the same time, but like the earlier 10cm K17 it could only be drawn by horses if broken into two loads. In practice that proved possible only on well-paved roads and the 10cm K18 required a prime mover; even then it still had to be broken into two loads.

A 10cm K17 on coastal defense duty in Norway.

It offered considerably greater range than the howitzers (19,000 meters) along with very good elevation and traverse. Because of its flatter trajectory, it couldn’t provide the same blast effects as the 105mm howitzer and so was less effective against personnel targets or entrenchments. With its high muzzle velocity and flat trajectory, the 10cm K18 had excellent performance as an anti-tank gun, capable of shredding the new Soviet T34 and KV1 tanks. Its great size and prodigious recoil made it unsuitable for regular deployment in that role.

By September 1939, the German Army had received 401 of the new long-range cannons, rising to 760 by the time of the June 1941 assault on the Soviet Union. In panzer divisions, one battery of the heavy howitzer battalion (four guns) would usually be replaced by a battery of 10cm K18 long-range cannon, but not all divisions had this change while some infantry divisions received the battery. Production continued until April 1945, with 1,914 of them put into service.

Production tailed off in the autumn of 1939, as the 10cm K18’s range proved disappointing. Seeking longer range, the German Army ordered an improved model in 1940. The 10cm K18/40 could fire the same ammunition accurately out to 21,000 meters, thanks to a longer barrel, but only 10 of them were built; the long barrel made it even heavier and more difficult to transport than the previous model and the Wehrmacht already had a cannon with extreme range that it could barely move. The unmodified 10cm K18 returned to the assembly line in late 1940 and no replacement appeared before the end of the war.

New recruits in the just-annexed city of Posen (Poznan) are addressed under the shadow of evil, and two 10cm K18 long-range cannon, 1939.

The Reichswehr and Wehrmacht inherited a number of 15cm K16 long-range cannon of Great War vintage. For its time it had an impressive range, and in the positional warfare of the Western Front its relative immobility was not considered a serious drawback. That became a problem by the 1930’s, when the German Army wished to execute more free-wheeling mobile operations, and the Army ordered a modern replacement.

That was the 15cm K18, ordered in 1933 but only accepted for service in 1938 to replace the 15cm K16. Rheinmetall won the contract for both barrel and carriage over their rivals at Krupp, and turned in a rather dated design. It indeed provided enormous range, at 24,000 meters, with multiple types of ammunition including an armor-piercing round that could have penetrated a battleship’s hide. The 15cm K18 had a glacial rate of fire (two rounds per minute), was almost impossible to move and took hours to emplace for firing. Unlike more modern guns with a split-trail carriage, the 15cm K18 had an old-fashioned box carriage the limited its traverse to just 11 degrees, which was actually worse than the K16 model. To allay that, Rheinmetall provided a turntable that in theory would provide a full 360-degree traverse, but this took a great deal of preparation to use and it meant that the cannon had to be broken into three separate loads for transport. The 15cm K18’s range made it a useful coast-defense or fortress weapon, but it had no place in mobile operations and only 101 of them were made before production ceased.

A 150mm K18 long-range cannon in action, southern Russia, August 1942.

The old 15cm K16 could fire out to 22,000 meters – one of the longest ranges of any artillery piece of the time other than massive railroad-mounted guns – and after the 15cm K18’s disappointing performance some of these were taken out of storage and mounted on the carriage from the 210mm M18 heavy howitzer. That was only a stopgap, and the German Army’s Weapons Office turned to a weapon designed by Krupp for Turkey. The 15cm K39 had a split-trail carriage and offered better traverse and equivalent range, but weighed only slightly less than the K18 and needed a turntable for full traverse as well, requiring that it had to be broken into three loads for transport. But it was in production in September 1939, with only two guns having been delivered to the Turks, and the German Army took over the rest of the order, accepting about 60 guns of this model. A number of them served with panzer divisions during the 1941 campaign in Russia, but they fired Turkish-designed ammunition and were only slightly more mobile than the 15cm K18. That winter they were withdrawn from front-line service and re-assigned to the Atlantic Wall fortifications.

You can order The Book of Armaments: Eastern Front Artillery right here.

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Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and NASA Journalist in Space finalist, he has published eleventy-million books, games and articles on historical subjects. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife, three children, his dog Leopold and Egbert the pet turkey.

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