Creusot 155 mm Long Tom

Origins

After the Jameson Raid of 1896 the Transvaal government set out to arm itself against Britain. Besides Mauser rifles it ordered modern artillery from Krupp in Germany and from Schneider et Cie of Le Creusot in France, and in 1897 it bought from Creusot four 155 mm siege guns, with several thousand shells, to arm the forts it was building around Pretoria and Johannesburg. The guns arrived in 1898. They were the heaviest weapons in southern Africa, and when war came in October 1899 the Staatsartillerie, the Transvaal's small regular artillery corps, did not leave them in the forts but took them to the front. British soldiers at Ladysmith, who had never expected to be shelled by anything so large, named them Long Toms, and the name stuck to all four.

Design & Construction

The Long Tom was a breech-loading steel gun of 155 mm (6.1 inch) caliber with a barrel about 4.2 meters long, mounted on a wheeled siege carriage with a firing platform. The barrel alone weighed about two and a half tons and the whole gun in action something over six; the Boers moved each one with a team of sixteen or more oxen, and on the worst ground with two teams. It fired a shell of about 94 pounds, either common shell filled with black powder or shrapnel, to a range usually given as around 10,000 meters, roughly six miles, though the Boers rarely found targets so far off. Loading was slow, a round every few minutes, and the gun needed a prepared platform. What made it so hard to answer was that the British field artillery of 1899, the Ordnance BL 15-pounder and the Royal Horse Artillery 12-pounder, could reach only about 6,000 yards and could not touch a Long Tom placed on a hilltop two miles beyond the British lines.

Combat Use

One Long Tom went to Natal and opened fire on Ladysmith from Pepworth Hill on 30 October 1899, and later shelled the town from Bulwana; another sat in front of Kimberley; a third went to Mafeking, where it fired on Baden-Powell's garrison for months. The guns' slow fire did more to wear the besieged down than to kill them, but they drove the garrisons into dugouts and announced each shell with a puff of smoke that gave the inhabitants time to take cover. The Royal Navy's answer was to land 4.7-inch guns on makeshift carriages designed by Captain Percy Scott, which could reach the Boer positions, and on the night of 7-8 December 1899 a raiding party from Ladysmith blew off the muzzle of the Long Tom on Gun Hill with guncotton; the Boers repaired it at the Pretoria railway works and sent it back to the war. Long Toms followed the commandos through the retreat of 1900 and were fired at the British in the eastern Transvaal, but as the guerrilla war began the Boers had no way to move them, and by the spring of 1901 they had destroyed all four to keep them out of British hands.

Legacy

The Long Toms were the most famous guns of the war and the first heavy artillery the British Army had faced in the field since the Crimea. They showed that a mobile enemy with a few long-range pieces could dominate a siege, and the British answer, bringing heavy naval guns ashore and then designing proper heavy field artillery of their own, was a step toward the siege trains of the First World War. No Long Tom survives whole. Fragments, breech pieces and the Boer-made repair of the Gun Hill gun are relics in South African museums, and the name was later borrowed for the American 155 mm guns of the twentieth century.