Nomenclature : '75 mm Modele 1897 Fieldgun'

Origin : France

At the end of the XIXth century, three military engineers from the Puteaux Arsenal, le Commandant Deport and Captains Sainte-Claire-Deville and Rimailho, designed this revolutionary gun. The hydro-pneumatic recoil system, the eccentric quick-acting Nordenfeld breech, the whole concept of the gun is an important step in the technical history of the artillery.

This weapon characteristics, particularly its fire rate (up to 18 rounds / minute), its range (8500 m) and its mobility instantaneously transformed the other nations fieldguns into obsloete weapons, letting them just the time to fill that gap before the war beginning.

But such a success could have been fatal to France : before the war, some French Headquarters officers were so convinced by this gun performances that they considered it was 'sufficient for all the missions that could be given to the Artillery in a campaign war', and did not pay attention to the heavy artillery.

Even if the 'canon de 75 mm modele 1897', manufactured by both the state arsenals and the private industry (particularly Schneider), confirmed during the whole war its great performances as an accompaining gun acting against infantry, all the ideas to give it some power in a anti-entranchments mission and in assault preparation were failures.

Its numerous inconditional supporters tried many ways to prove the contrary and proposed solutions such as indirect fire with reduced charge, ricochet fire, and trajectory curvature by the addition of a 'Malandrin' disk to the shell head. These trials were all deceiving, and caused a lot of human losses.

At the war outbreak, there were 4780 such guns available for the Frech Army. In November 1918, there were 5145 such guns in service. The 75 was used by numerous countries during WW1 (USA, Belgium, Romania, etc...) and after, until 1940.

Main characteristics :