Why did they hate mortars?

[David Davis]

I have read many memoirs of men who fought in the infantry in the Great War. Most of them mention that the German trench mortars or minenwerfers were universally feared and hated. So much so, that if a minenwerfer crew were captured they would be given short shrift by the assaulting infantry.

What I would like to know is why these weapons were so univerally hated and feared when the infantry had to put up with five-nines and other ordinance which I would have thought were more effective. It wasn't all one-sided either. At Mametz Wood in 1916, after a barrage by British mortar fire, a cry of "You murdering Welsh ********!" rose up from the German positions!

[squirrel]

A relatively short range, low velocity weapon, with a large explosive charge and which could be seen coming and the explosion of which could be devastating. Both sides feared them.

[David B]

Not only that but they dropped down practically vertically and cleaned up trenches much more effectively than even a howitzer shell.

[SiegeGunner]

Often as unpopular with the firing side as with those on the receiving end, as TMs, being short-range weapons, tended to be sited in or very close to the forward positions and were likely to provoke often disproportionate retaliation. There also seems to have been a perception on both sides that TMs were somehow more 'close up and personal', in the sense that they were often called for by the opposition's local sector commander, who knew the lie of the land more intimately than the more distant artillery, and who very likely had quite specific targets in mind.

[squirrel]

Latrines in the front line were often targeted as they looked similar to trench mortar emplacements.

[Chasemuseum]

Because mortar crews tended to draw retaliatory fire, within the AIF they were known as “the duck board harriers” and the “shoot and skoot mob.” As an old mortar crew member (1970s), we always trained to be extremely mobile, to drive rapidly between base plate positions and to relocate as soon as we fired a serial. Over the last few years the Australian Army has been selling off “old model” vehicles including mortar crew Land-Rovers. It makes me feel very old as these luxury vehicles with individual seats and seat belts never existed in my day. We regularly had people injured falling out the back of our landrovers tearing along rough tracks.

In the Great War the 3-inch Stokes (the grand-daddy of all modern mortars) only had a 800yard (about 780m) range and sighting was lining up a painted line along the top of the tube to the target and using a clinometer on the tube to measure the angle. The standard bomb had 3 detachable booster charges. The most common HE shell only used a time pistol as a fuse. This looked a bit like a mills grenade mechanism with the lever coming free and starting the fuse when the bomb left the barrel. The bomb was that slow, that it was visible throughout the flight, and so aerodynamically poor that it would tumble end over end. The time of flight would have been about 5 seconds so people on the receiving end would have watched and had that gut churning sickly feeling of “Oh f…”

Cheers

RT