Plans of modernisation
The introduction of the first QF gun in 1897 - the French built canon
de 75mm Ml. 1897 - meant a true revolution in gun design and involved a mass
re-equipping of almost every army in the world. It was a formidable weapon
that made every other field gun in the world obsolete: every army had to
replaced its artillery park or be entirely outgunned. This re-equipment took
place between 1898 and 1914 and in many countries had not been completed when
World War I broke out. The superiority of the 75mm was due to the combination of the recoil
system, the trail spade, a quick-acting breech, fixed ammunition, the
independent line of sight, abatage, and the use of
an automatic fuze-setter. Most of these mechanisms
were separately utilized prior to 1897 on various guns, but the French Army
put all them together on a field gun, added a shield to protect the gunners
against enemy fire and obtained a weapon that could be brought into action
behind six horses and that had a rate of fire approaching twenty aimed rounds
a minute. At that time the Bulgarian artillery had only a large number of
antiquated 75mm and 87mm Krupp guns of various models. They were screw-breech
black-powder cannons, with no recoil mechanism and shields. Their short
range, lack of shields, and slow rate of fire endangered their crews, while
the black powder revealed their position. The lack of recoil mechanism caused
difficulties in aiming and providing concentrated artillery barrages on enemy
targets. This simply meant that the Bulgarian Artillery needed more modern
weapons. In General Rjaskov emphasized that the
countries near General
Tzenov asserted that the whole Bulgarian not QF
artillery park (324 guns) was absolutely unreliable for these reasons : - one QF battery
was capable of destroying 29 not QF batteries; - in order to secure the fire control in every tactical condition, the
recoil should be minimised through elastic or spring-loaded trail spade : the adaptation of the fixed trail spade required transforming
the tube and the gun-carriage into a QF system, mounting at the same time a
cradle and shields; -
the adaptation of the chamber and tube is required in order to use a brass
cartridge (single piece ammunition) instead
of propelling charge and shell (the old two piece ammunition) and that required the delivery of brass
cartridges and the remodelling of the limbers and caissons of the gun system. General Tzenov added that the
modernization of the whole not QF artillery would cost 14,000 levas per gun, that meant for 324 guns a total amount of 4,536,000 levas, not counting the cost of
the transport of the guns to the factories that had to modify them, the cost
of the cartridges and the cost of the adaptation of
the limbers and the caissons. Moreover the
transformation the weight of the gun should raise to
In order to cut down the expenses, he considered the hypothesis to
change the not QF guns in guns à tir accéléré, adding
spring-loaded trail spade and adapting them to use brass
cartridges. This would cost 5,000 levas per gun, that meant a total amount of 1,620,000 levas, not counting
the cost of the assembly of the parts in Finally he considered also the
hypothesis of supplying modern optical instruments in order to improve the
fire control, with an additional cost of at least 436,000 levas. After this detailed analysis, general Tzenov
suggested to use for the best the not QF guns without making any change and
to increase the QF artillery, adding three or four batteries to every
regiment. He thought that in this way within three or four years Bulgarian
Army would be able to modernize its artillery without rising the military
budget Actually in 1912, at the outbreak of the Balkan war, every artillery
regiment existing in peace formed another regiment armed with not QF guns (2
divisions with 3 six-guns batteries each).
During the war some artillery divisions were rearmed with QF guns captured to
the Turks. After the Interallied War gradually one
division of every not QF artillery regiment received modern Krupp guns and in
September 1915 each artillery brigade had two QF regiments and only one not QF
artillery division. |