The Book of Armaments:
Soviet Heavy Artillery
by Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
July 2021

Like all armies, the Red Army of Workers and Peasants maintained a reserve of heavy artillery regiments for use in positional warfare. By the start of the Great Patriotic War, these included the wonderfully-named “special purpose high-velocity cannon regiments” with long-range guns for use against rear-area targets and in counter-battery fire.

The old cannon inherited from the Tsarist days barely sufficed for corps-level regiments; only new weapons could provide the desired range and firepower. The Artillery Directorate’s first request went to the design bureau of Leningrad’s Bolshevik Plant (the former Obukhov Works) in 1929, for a 152mm cannon “of great and special power.”

The Bolshevik Plant delivered the prototype for cannon B-10 (B for “Bolshevik”) in April 1932. It had an extremely long barrel, and little else – the plant delivered its prototype without a carriage. Prolonged testing failed to reach a satisfactory conclusion, even when the super-long cannon was mounted on a carriage from a Model 1909/30 152mm howitzer. Its rate of fire was too low, it took too long to shift and aim the cannon, and its vertical adjustment was painfully slow.

Showing off the 152mm Br2 long-range cannon of great and special power.

Undismayed, the Artillery Directorate instead broadened the project to include three weapons, all to be mounted on the same carriage: a 152mm cannon with extremely long range, a 203mm howitzer, and a 280mm mortar. This time the request went to Stalingrad’s Barrikady factory as well as the Bolshevik Plant, and each provided a prototype in 1935.

The Bolshevik entry, numbered B-30, arrived with its own carriage, a tracked affair that it shared with the protypes for the two heavier weapons. It did well in tests, while the Barrikady entry, labelled Br-2, shared all the flaws of the B-10 plus it exploded during tests. Therefore, the Artillery Directors chose it for mass production over the B-30, which did somewhat better (it also used the same barrel as the B-10) and failed to explode. A key difference may have been the rifling of the barrel; the Barrikady cannon was created using an expensive borer purchased from Ansaldo in Italy with some of the Soviet Union’s gold reserve, and that purchase had to be justified.

A 152mm Br2 long-range cannon of great and special power outside Moscow, 1941.

The Br-2, predictably, was a failure. Barrel life was only 100 rounds, so some guns had deeper grooves to try to extend their viability. Supposedly this would make them good for 500 shots, but it definitely meant that not only could the Br-2 not fire the same ammunition as the 152mm howitzers, those with deep grooves required special ammunition and could not fire the same rounds as those with shallow grooves.

Only 39 of the Br-2 cannons were manufactured, and of the 38 still available in June 1941 (one had been lost to the Finns in the Winter War), ten were in storage and remained there throughout the Great Patriotic War. The remaining 28 saw sporadic service, but did take part in the Battle of Kursk in 1943 and Seelow Heights in 1945. Their painfully slow rate of fire, easily-worn barrels, difficult traverse (only 8 degrees, often requiring that the entire gun be shifted to change their aim), technical sophistication (requiring a level of crew competence that the Red Army rarely possessed) and need for special ammunition all combined to make them an afterthought.

A 305mm Model 1915 heavy howitzer prepares to blast the Finns. Karelia, June 1944.

But if the cannon was a failure, its tracked carriage was even worse. The concept had seemed sound on paper, to spread the heavy weapon’s weight over the tracks instead of concentrating it at the wheels. It could only move slowly, and if it became mired in mud or stuck in a ditch it was almost impossible to free without dis-assembling the gun. The barrel had to be removed for transport, and a special separate (and tracked) trailer was provided just for the barrel.

In 1955 the remaining Br-2 cannons were modernized, with their tracked carriages scrapped and replaced with conventional wheeled mounts. These continued to serve until the 1970’s.

For shorter-ranged but heavier fire, the old Imperial Army had deployed the French Schneider 280mm Model 1914/15 mortar and 305mm Model 1915 howitzer. The heavy mortar had been ordered from the French firm during the course of the Great War, and apparently only arrived in 1917. The Red Army ended the Civil War with 26 of them in its possession; in June 1941 25 remained in service. Nine of them were lost in the opening weeks of the war; during the siege of Leningrad, both sides deployed the weapon, with the Germans using weapons seized from the defeated French and Polish armies.

The Red Army had 32 of the 305mm howitzer in service at the end of the Civil War, and still had 31 of them in June 1941. Almost all of these were assigned to heavy artillery regiments in the Orel Military District in June 1941 and so survived the initial German onslaught. They finally saw action in 1944 against the Finnish fortifications on the Karelian Isthmus and then with other Soviet heavy guns against the fortress of Königsberg.

Both the mortar and the howitzer had a relatively short range and glacially slow rate of fire, but remained effective even in 1945 against a stationary target. The Red Army needed a more modern version.

Firing the 210mm Br17 long-range cannon. Note the large and heavy base.

The Artillery Directory requested a 280mm siege mortar at the same time as it sent out specifications for the 152mm cannon that became the Br-2. It was to use the same tracked carriage and as many common parts as possible.

Once again, the Bolshevik and Barrikady plants submitted competing prototypes. The Bolshevik mortar was lighter, offering better range and accuracy; the Artillery Directorate chose the Barrikady entry, the Br-5. The 280mm Model 1939 siege mortar went into production before testing had even been completed, and 48 of them were built before Barrikady shifted to higher-priority weapons in 1940.

Almost immediately, work began on a new, conventional wheeled carriage to replace the tracked version; this was not ready when the war began and had to wait until 1955. The mortar fired very slowly, with a complicated loading procedure involving a great deal of physical labor by the gun crew. It had only a middling range, as expected from a mortar, but delivered 58 kilos of high explosive.

The big tracked mortars saw action in the Winter War, and again in the spring of 1945 against German fortresses at Königsberg, Küstrin and Poznan. After the war they remained in the Soviet inventory until the 1970’s.

Just the base of the 210mm BR17 long-range cannon.

The Red Army’s special purpose high-velocity cannon regiments still needed a long-range cannon to perform their missions, and in 1938 the Soviets agreed to purchase plans for a pair of heavy weapons from the Czech firm of Skoda. These would be a 210mm long-range cannon and a 305mm howitzer, to use the same mount. The plans had not been completed when the Germans took possession of the Skoda Works, but they completed the transfer under the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact.

The Artillery Directorate assigned the project to the Barrikady Works in Stalingrad, which found the plans incomplete and assigned top designer Ilya Ivanov to iron out the difficulties. Ivanov had overseen the mission to Skoda’s offices in Plzen and worked with the Czech engineers to draft the blueprints. The Artillery Directorate had intended to purchase complete guns and ammunition for them from Skoda, and Ivanov now had to simplify the design to match Soviet production capabilities and reduce the use of metals like bronze.

The 210mm Br17 long-range cannon on parade.

The new cannon, designated 210mm Br-17, would be mounted on a fixed base, lowered into a pit dug in the ground. That made it very slow and difficult to move, but kept the firing platform very stable and allowed easy traverse. The cannon had to be broken into two parts to move, plus another load of assorted parts. Rate of fire was very slow (one shot every two minutes) but the range was enormous (over 30 kilometers).

Testing commenced in August 1940 and by June 1941 Barrikady had produced nine of the cannons, but only one was listed as ready for service. Production ceased, as priority went to other, more urgently-needed weapons. No ammunition had been produced for the odd caliber, and that lack also had to be rectified. Not until 1944 did the Br-17 reach the front, with eight of them serving in four two-gun battalions, each attached to a different Special Purpose High Velocity Cannon Regiment. They fired their first shots in anger at Leningrad, helping to break the German siege, and the next year they helped smash the fortifications of Königsberg – one of them was trundled into the front lines to blast German bunkers at a range of 800 meters. All nine were modernized in 1952, but returned in the 1960’s.

The 305mm version faced similar production difficulties; three of them had been delivered by the start of the war. They went to Leningrad in 1941 and fired in defense of the city throughout the siege, but were not taken forward during the subsequent Soviet offensives.

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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 a great many books, games and articles on historical subjects. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife, three children and his dog, Leopold.

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