Ordnance BL 15-pounder

Origins

In the 1880s the Royal Artillery went back to breech-loading, which it had abandoned after trouble with the Armstrong guns of the 1860s. The BL 12-pounder 7 cwt of 1883 was a rifled steel gun of 3-inch caliber with an interrupted-screw breech, firing a twelve-pound shell with a black-powder charge. When cordite replaced black powder in the early 1890s the same gun could throw a heavier projectile, and from 1892 it was issued with a fourteen-pound shrapnel shell and renamed the 15-pounder. It was the standard gun of the field batteries, six to a battery, when the army went to South Africa in 1899, with the lighter 12-pounder 6 cwt serving the horse artillery.

Design & Construction

The 15-pounder was a plain gun on a plain carriage: a steel tube on a wheeled wooden carriage with an iron axle, elevated by a screw, laid by open sights, and drawn by six horses with its limber. It had no recoil system of its own, so each shot threw the whole gun back and the crew had to run it up and relay it, which limited the rate of fire to a round or two a minute. The 1899 pattern added a spade and spring buffer under the trail to check the recoil, which helped. Its only shell was shrapnel, a hollow case of some 200 lead balls burst by a time fuze in the air above the target, which was effective against men in the open and almost useless against trenches or stone walls; the fuzes in use at the start of the war burned out at about 4,000 yards, and a longer fuze reaching the gun's full range of about 6,000 yards was issued during the war. The Boer Krupp and Creusot 75 mm guns fired a shell of about the same weight further, and with high explosive.

Combat Use

The 15-pounder fired in every action of 1899 and 1900, and the gunners earned a reputation for courage that cost them dearly. At the Battle of Magersfontein the batteries bombarded the hill for hours and never found the Boer trenches at its foot. At the Battle of Colenso on 15 December 1899 Colonel Charles Long took the twelve 15-pounders of the 14th and 66th Batteries forward at a trot to within a thousand yards of the Boer lines, where Mauser fire from the hidden trenches cut down the detachments and horses; the survivors fought the guns until their ammunition ran out, and the attempts to rescue them, in which Lieutenant Freddie Roberts, the commander-in-chief's only son, was mortally wounded, won seven Victoria Crosses. Ten of the twelve were left to the Boers. At the Battle of Paardeberg in February 1900 massed 15-pounders, howitzers and naval guns shelled General Cronjé's laager for a week until he surrendered. Through the guerrilla war the gun went out with the mobile columns, and some batteries re-equipped in 1901 with Ehrhardt quick-firers bought in Germany.

Legacy

The war exposed the 15-pounder as a generation behind the French 75 and the Krupp guns the Boers had used, and the Royal Artillery's committees of 1900-1904 produced two new quick-firing guns with proper recoil systems, the 18-pounder for the field batteries and the 13-pounder for the horse artillery, which fought the First World War. The old 15-pounders were converted to quick-firers as the BLC 15-pounder and served the Territorial Force until 1916. Guns captured at Colenso and elsewhere were used by the Boers in turn, and some were recovered at the end of the war. Surviving 15-pounders stand as memorials and in artillery museums in Britain, South Africa, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.