15cm Kanone M.13

[CharlieC]

The website http://amonio.es/index2.htm has a list of artillery pieces used in the Spanish Civil War. One of these attracted my
attention - it is listed as:

Cañón Krupp de Tiro rapido, 150/27, modelo 1913 (Reglamentario en el Ejercito Español en 1936)

Kosar in his book "Artillerie im 20 Jahrhundert" lists what I think is the same gun as, made by Krupp - the 15cm Kanone M.13

Anyone know how many of these guns were purchased by Spain? Did it see action in the Civil War? The usual search engines produce nothing about it.

Kosar lists the max. range as 12.6 km with a weight of 6700kg so it may have been too heavy to transport easily.

Regards,

Charlie

[Ironmachine]

I don't know if the Cañón Krupp de Tiro rapido, 150/27, modelo 1913 is the same gun as the 15cm Kanone M.13. They could be, as the numbers for weight and maximum range are similar. Here you have some images of the 150/27 so you can compare them with those of the M. 13:

1.jpg

2.png

3.png

The 150/27 was indeed heavy, and for transportations it was disassembled in two loads, gun and carriage.

The gun was licenced to be built in Spain, but I don't know if any were bought directly from Germany or all were built in Spain. It was introduced in the Spanish Army by an order of 8 November 1913.

It was inteded for this gun to equip a group of three batteries in each heavy artillery regiment, but the reality was different and they were never enough guns for that. In July 1936 there were about 30 such guns in Spain (there are small differences in the number of guns available between the sources I have).

They did see action in the Civil War, mostly with the Nationals. They fought from the beggining till the end of the war, being still in service during the Campaña de Cataluña en 1939, though some guns were retired during the war when they become too worn-out.

[CharlieC]

Thank you for the reply.

I think it is the same gun - the image in Kosar's book is rather small but the key features of the gun match your images.
It sounds as if the 150mm guns were heavily used during the war.

Krupp's usual practice was to build an initial batch of guns in Germany and use these as patterns and training guns for the
licence produced guns.

Intriguingly there is an entry in the list I quoted from before:

Cañón "Krupp" reformado 155/26 (Reglamentario en el Ejercito Español en 1936)

I think it's saying that some of the 150mm guns were bored out to 155mm. Certainly 155mm projectiles would be easier to acquire
than 150mm.

Regards,

Charlie

[Ironmachine]

Intriguingly there is an entry in the list I quoted from before:

Cañón "Krupp" reformado 155/26 (Reglamentario en el Ejercito Español en 1936)

I think it's saying that some of the 150mm guns were bored out to 155mm. Certainly 155mm projectiles would be easier to acquire
than 150mm.

That was a project from 1926 to update and upgrade the 150/27, allowing it to use the same ammunition as the Schneider 155/13 gun. The project was carried out so slowly that by July 1936 only one such gun was ready (it was at the Barcelona artillery depot), with another four guns waiting to be reformed at the Trubia factory in Asturias.