Landships II

Quite a lot of "home made" ones. Both the Australians and British had workshops turning these out. The British ones seem in the main to have been made by the Cyclist Company of the RMLI improvising from lengths of cast iron water (or drainage) pipe. I don't have ready access to details of the Australian ones at the moment but there are some photos of these that I'm sure some Australian members of the forum will post.
The British also had some "professionaly" made Japanese mortars

Hi everyone,

Two british officers in Gallipoli. In the foreground are two small trench mortars:




I think one of them is an australian made Garland mortar:



I hope this can help.

Thank you, gents. I have also come across this pic of an Australian mortar in action.

I am interested to learn that the author Compton Mackenzie was at Gallipoli and published his memoirs of the campaign. He makes considerable mention of the Japanese mortars and the ammunition for them, describing the difficulty that the Allied forces experienced in arranging for the two to be in the same place at the same time:

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=2ByaaBx9ChAC&pg=PA36&lpg=PA36&dq=mortars+gallipoli&source=
web&ots=8mo2ndM5AA&sig=_RjGHbKiwWbZJkWBqpiUHGXZdEA&hl=
en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=5&ct=result

According to the diary of an ANZAC soldier, the Japanese mortar projectiles were 26lb. The Osprey book on Gallipoli again mentions the 6 mortars (with inadequate ammunition) and also refers to an action in the Helles sector on June 21st in which 29th and 52nd Dvns took a section of Gully Ravine, greatly assisted by the loan of two (unspecified) French mortars.

-- Edited by James H at 06:18, 2008-09-29

It bears a strong resemblance to the Krupp Trench Howitzer of 1912 right down to the use of a stick bomb. I wonder if it was a Japanese copy?

Although Anthony Saunders is pretty good on many things he's on shaky ground there. There are photos of the Krupp Trench Howitzer (see for example Mortars by Ian Hogg) and it most certainly fired a toffee apple type round. His artists impression is not of a heavy mortar but of the Krupp T H of 1912 - some artists and editors misled (deliberately ?) readers on the scale of the thing and I have a book from 1915 that shows it captioned as "A giant mortar intended to destroy cities"! I have also seen an eye witness account of some one on the receiving end and they are certainly toffee apples.
The Krupp T H was turned down by the German Army in 1912 (they did not envisiage a future war as involving trenches very much) and was offered commercially. From their experience of their war with Russia the Japanese may have been more trench minded. The German army changed its mind in 1914 and began buying the mortar. It proved itself a dangerous pest in early 1915 stimulating many requests for something with which to retaliate.
Although the Krupp TH fired a much bigger round than either the Vickers TH or the 2 inch mortar its range was shorter and it seems to have been replaced by more effective (and conventional) trench mortars sometime in 1915