Re: Guided Mortar Rounds

From: Tarjei T. Jensen (tarjei_at_online.no)
Date: 02/20/05 

To: sci-military-moderated@moderators.isc.org
Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2005 11:55:25 +0100

Thomas Schoene wrote:
> This is a project for the US miliyary, which has been using 60mm mortars
> more or less continuously since WW2 (certainly since Vietnam). Obviously,
> their assessment of the weapon's effectiveness differs from yours.

Not only me. That is probably why quite a few european armies use the Carl
Gustav 84mm recoilless gun. We could not afford enough of those, so we used
US recolless rifles. 57 and 106mm (I seem to remember that the 105mm gun was
labeled as 106mm in order to avoid confusion).

On the other hand one could organize the 81mm mortars in such a way that
they are rapidly available. Sort of like the Germans did during WWII. I
suppose that the Americans as well as the British compensated for missing
firepower by adding a lot more 60mm mortars.

According to "Raising Churchill's Army", the WWII German infantry batallions
had a substantial number of 81 or 120mm mortars. If my memory servers me
right it was either eight 81mm mortars or four (six?) 120mm mortars. It
might be that they had 12 81mm mortars. The index of the book is not
detailed enough for me to locate the place where this is discussed.

greetings,

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