Fall of Empires/Franz Josef’s Armies
Austro-Hungarian Artillery
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
March 2022

Formed in 1868 as a political concession to the Hungarian nationalist faction, the Royal Hungarian Honvédség began as a militia force, matched in the other half of the Dual Monarchy by the Imperial-Royal Austrian Landwehr. Over the decades that followed, the two national parliaments in Vienna and Budapest proved much more willing to vote funds for their own armies than for the Empire’s Common Army, and they steadily grew in sizer and capability.

Austria-Hungary’s conscription totals were based on numbers negotiated between the Delegations, the members of the respective parliaments who met every ten years to set budgets and handle other joint business. They were not based on a proportion of the Empire’s population, and so as the population exploded in the late 19th Century Austria-Hungary’s military manpower steadily fell behind that of her rivals.

In 1912, the Delegations finally agreed to modernize the conscript quotas. One of the concessions granted to the Hungarians raised the Honvédség and Landwehr to the same status as the Common Army – Austria-Hungary would now have three regular armies, each of them fielding complete divisions with their own artillery.

The national armies had received their own field guns in 1909, and now added still more of them to flesh out their detachments into full-fledged artillery regiments, plus howitzers to fully equip their divisions to the same standard as the Common Army. New guns began to be issued to the Landwehr or Honvédség in March 1913, with new regiments and batteries set up and filled by gunners, officers and instructors detached from Common Army artillery units. Not until April 1914 were the new artillery regiments declared ready for service and assigned to their divisions. Partial mobilization began on 25 July, spreading to full mobilization of the Dual Monarchy’s armed forces on 31 July. That meant that the Landwehr and Honvédség divisions and their staffs never conducted exercises with their artillery regiments.

Austro-Hungarian artillery in August 1914 simply wasn’t very good. The gunners were professional and well-trained, but that couldn’t make up for the enormous deficit in materiel. Decades of heller-pinching had equipped the batteries with weapons obsolete they day of their introduction, badly out-ranged by Russian guns and tossing softer shells on top of it.

Most Austrian commanders made up for that deficit as best they could, by rolling the guns right into the front line just like the Archduke Charles at Aspern a century earlier. But some did not, sending the infantry forward in crazed frontal assaults without any artillery support at all, leaving the batteries at the end of their march columns and never deploying them. And all of those formations were from the Landwehr or Honvédség. You fight the way you train, and the national armies had never trained with their artillery at all.

Both Honvéd and Landwehr regiments received the Common Army’s standard light field gun, the 8 cm Feldkanone M.5 (8cm/M5 on the playing piece). Introduced in 1905, the gun was rugged and reasonably lightweight, following the same design pattern as similar field guns of the period like the German 77mm and French 75mm weapons.

Its metallurgy, however, lagged a generation or more behind its contemporaries. Austrian field artillery and light howitzers of the period had barrels cast of an alloy known as steel-bronze rather than the high-quality steel used everywhere else. While many sources claim that Austrian industry could not produce high-quality steel, this is patently false – the Skoda Works, citing just one example, made fine steel weapons for the Imperial and Royal Navy and also exported them. The Army selected the steel-bronze barrels because they were significantly cheaper than steel. They lacked the strength to allow use of shells with increased propellant, but on the other hand their steel-bronze was much more resistant to wear and corrosion than steel.

An 8cm/M5 on the Isonzo front, 1916.

In tests they seemed to perform almost as well as steel weapons, but the 8cm field gun – the actual caliber was 76.5mm – didn’t match the capabilities of contemporary light field guns, with shorter range and a somewhat smaller round. It only had two types of ammunition, a high-explosive round filled with 120 grams of ammonal, a cheaper (of course) alternative to the TNT used by most other nations. The high explosive round for the German 77mm field gun, by comparison, carried 190 grams of TNT. The other round carried shrapnel, but the lightweight balls inside the shell did not have a wide spread pattern nor the mass to do much damage.

As the war progressed, better ammunition became available and gun crews learned to dig the piece in to raise the angle of fire and thus increase its range. But thanks to the steel-bronze barrel’s weaknesses only so much could be done to provide more powerful charges. Worse, repeated firings showed the barrels far more ready to droop when heated compared to true steel barrels.

Some batteries still had the older Model 9cm M75/96, an even less capable piece modernized almost two decades before the outbreak of the Great War. The M1875 had replaced the muzzle-loading 4 pfd. Feldkanone M.1863, a bronze rifled muzzle-loader that served – with distinction – at Königgrätz and Custoza in 1866. While it was a breech-loader, it retained the bronze barrel. Modernization in 1898 retained the bronze barrel but theoretically the added touchhole would allow it to accept ammunition with more powerful charges. Most guns used in 1914 added a shield, but it still was not a quick-firing piece (meaning it had no shock absorbers to minimize recoil, and the gun had to be re-sighted after every shot). It did have a spade brake to greatly reduce but not eliminate recoil, but this only worked if the spade brake were dug into the ground (which meant that it had to be dug in all over again for the next shot). This was a mid-century cannon with no place on the battlefields of 1914; it does not appear in Fall of Empires or Franz Josef’s Armies.

Austro-Hungarian divisional howitzer regiments went to war with the 10cm Feldhaubitze M99, a Skoda-made weapon with a steel-bronze barrel. The weapon entered service in 1903, already hopelessly out of date. It had no recoil mechanism, only the same nearly-useless spade brake as the M75/96, and a bronze-steel barrel limiting rate of fire and ability to handle oversized charges. It was badly out-ranged by the opposing Russian 122mm howitzer, but Austrian doctrine and training in August 1914 did not encourage indirect fire. To compensate for the range disadvantage, the howitzers usually appeared in the front lines just like the field guns.

Skoda, the manufacturer, had been trying for years to interest the Army in a replacement. Skoda and Böhler submitted designs in early 1914 for a new weapon, but a choice had not been made when Austria-Hungary went to war. The Army, forced to make an immediate choice, picked the Skoda entry as more ready to enter emergency production. Skoda delivered as promised and the first examples reached the front by late 1914, with most batteries re-equipped by springtime though the older M.99 remained in service until the end of the war.

The new weapon was a modern light howitzer with a steel barrel and bronze liner that hopefully would combine the handful of good qualities of steel-bronze technology (increased barrel longevity, and ease of cleaning) with the strength of high-quality steel. That inner bronze liner would only be fitted to early production models, with steel barrels soon becoming the standard for what became the 10cm Feldhaubitze M.14, a weapon that would remain the standard light field howitzer for several armies (Italy, Poland and Romania among others) in the Second World War.

In game terms the M.14 is a much greater increase in capability over the M.99 than the pieces imply, as it’s allowed to deploy indirect fire where the old howitzer is not.

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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 an unknowable number of books, games and articles on historical subjects. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife, three children and his dog, Leopold. Leopold knows the number.

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