Canon de 75 Mle 1897

[CharlieC]

In the thread on the Ford 3 ton tractor I said that the French Army ordered 1500 Ford tanks in late 1918 as light artillery tractors. The war ended before any were delivered. I did say that an artillery tractor needed an artillery piece to tow and one of the guns the Ford tractor was going to be tasked with towing would have been the 75mm Mle 1897 field gun.

The gun would probably have been towed with a limber to carry ammunition but there are no models of the limber and very few drawings. It's beyond my skill set to scratch build or design a limber model. So, I'll stick with a model of the gun only.

I'll do the history of the gun in this post and the model in a subsequent post.

The "Canon de 75mm Mle 1897" was arguably the most famous light field guns. It entered service in 1899 and remained in service with a number of armies until WW2. [Mle is an abbreviation of Modele and 1897 was the year it was accepted for service]. It was the first field gun to have complete recoil absorption so the gun could fire at very high rates since the carriage did not move during firing (under most conditions). A well trained gun crew could fire 20 shots per minute for short periods so a battery of 4 guns could deliver a huge volume of accurate fire. The relatively long barrel gave a max. range of 8500m. - this far outranged the equivalent German gun gun which had a range of about 7000m. The French Army became obsessed with the "Soixante-quinze" and neglected other types of guns such as howitzers (high angle guns). This came back to bite the French Army viciously when WW1 turned into trench warfare on the Western Front.

The Mle 1897 had a flat trajectory and although this might have been useful in 19th century battles was almost useless in trench warfare. There were many problems with ammunition production for the 75 at the start of the war and it was said the 75 killed more more French gunners (from barrel explosions) in 1915 than the Germans ever did. The Mle 1897 served on throughout WW1 and into WW2 with the French Army. The US built the Mle 1897 under licence and it became the standard field gun of the US Army until the start of WW2. As an aside the US had major problems with the Mle 1897 production because the machining of the recoil absorber and recuperator required accuracies not possible in US manufacturing. Or rather, the French machined the parts as best they could then expert tradesmen hand finished the parts to the desired accuracy. The US sewing machine company, Singer, worked out how to machine the parts to high accuracy without the hand finishing.

The French Govt prohibited the export of the Mle 1897 until after WW1 but eventually it did serve in a large number of armies between the wars and into WW2. It was also developed as an mobile anti-aircraft gun on a De Dion Bouton chassis during WW1 and the 75mm tank gun used by US tanks in WW2 was derivative of the Mle 1897.

Images are a couple of surviving Mle 1897s - the multi-coloured one is painted in the US Army camouflage before everything went Olive Drab after WW1.

Regards,

Charlie

[CharlieC]

GPM has published a simple 1:25 model of a 75mm Mle1897 field gun. The model is very minimal with written instructions in Polish and some model images. The model is fairly inaccurate, in particular the gun barrel is too short and slender. I scratch built one from rolled up 80gsm painted with Sanding Sealer and sanded to remove the "steps" in the paper, then painted - wasn't perfect but way better than the original. The sizing was taken from a drawing of the US manufactured gun - it's the same as the French one. There were endless issues with this model in terms of fit and poor engineering of the model but I got it together eventually.

The model colour is probably wrong but there probably were green Mle 1897s in service.

It's very gloomy here today so the images are a bit dull.

Regards,

Charlie

[CharlieC]

Finally, the Ford 3-ton towing an Mle1897 gun.

Although the Ford wasn't produced for France the French Army used the locally produced and similarly size Peugeot agricultural tracked tractor to tow light field guns. The Peugeot tractor seems to have been in use in the 1920s - there are images of it towing 155mm Schneider howitzers so it seems to have been pretty capable although rather slow - 8km/hr top speed. That might be an interesting model because GPM have a 1:25 155mm howitzer model.

Regards,

Charlie

[Don Boose]

Thanks for a lot of good info on this field piece, Charlie. It looks behind your Ford Three Ton prime mover.

Don

[rifleman]

nice work and great information to go with it thank you sir

[Don Boose]

Meant to say, "It looks good behind your Ford Three Ton prime mover."

Don