YC Chen wrote:Hmm... I'm just not sure if he still didn't mix them after 50+ years.
The 10.5cm light howitzer and the 10.5cm gun ("type 19") are certainly two totally different types. Now I want to know if the 10.5cm light howitzer resembles any Austrian guns from WWI or inter-war era.
Information on the 10.5cm L/37gun "Type 19" is very limited. The only thing I can say now is it appears several times in KMT military documents (the KMT central army in the south also wanted to adopt it as their standard weapon).
Keep digging...
NO, the Chinese 10,5cm light howitzer on Bohler carriage was not in use anywhere else and was not an ex-Austrian army weapon. The calibre was different anyway. It was a completely new weapon. It should not have been hard for this steel factory to produce new artillery barrels in those days. The factory was probably excellently equipped with ex-Bohler stuff as I wrote on the other thread. So it is possible that this weapon was devised by the Bohler staff in Mukden, using their own equipment brought over from Kapfenberg.
There is one other possibility. As there were so many ex-German and other weapons around and being traded all over the world after WW1 it is also possible that the barrels were from the 10,5cm lFh16, fitted by Mukden on the Bohler carriage. Just some speculation but still also very feasible. It would have made a functional weapon and the box trail carriage had room for a howitzer type elevation.
Now the L37 gun. Nothing else existed in the Austrian or German inventory duting WW1 and nothing came in to service in the 20s. There was a 104mm L36,5 Skoda field gun and the Austrian staff in Mukden must have known it. Most likely possibility is they developed the Chinese weapon from that Skoda one.
The only other weapons close were the Krupp 10,5cm Feldkanone M14, a L35 weapon and the Rheinmetall 10,5cm L35 of 1913. The Dutch trader and (from 1923) producer of artillery HIH (owned by Rheinmetall and indirectly by Krupp) held 60 R'metall L35 barrels and other parts of the gun in stock in Holland. There is no record of them selling these weapons, but they did of course sell artillery to China. HIH designed and offered several 10,5 cm field guns in the 1920s, one of them L40 and the other one L35 calibre. The latter was offered to the Dutch Army. It had a recoil cylinder on top of the barrel.
But I have not records at all of HIH contacts with Mukden nor Bohler.
Digging is fun!
by YC Chen on 30 Jun 2012 04:14 
). I remember reading somewhere in Chinese sources that the time of Chinese navy buying HIH naval guns was about 1930. So maybe the HIH technology was somehow transfered to Mukden by KMT central army? Hmm...
. I'm glad you like these lovely things. 