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The 105mm Howitzer M1 was the US Army’s first attempt to produce a field howitzer to replace the First World War vintage 75mm guns, but despite being standardized, it didn't enter mass production.
The Westervelt Board of 1919 suggested that a 105mm howitzer would be the ideal choice for the main gun of the divisional artillery, but acknowledged that it would be too expensive to fully equip the army with a new weapon. Instead it suggested that a 105mm howitzer should be developed to replace some of the 155m howitzers then in use.
The Ordnanrce Department studied some captured German 105mm howitzers, and then produced its own designs. These all featured a gun that was 22 calibres long, with a horizontal sliding breech block. Four slightly different pilots were produced of the Howitzer, 105mm M1920 on Carriage M1920E. All four carriages had split trails, giving them up to 80 degrees of elevation and 30 degrees of traverse. A fifth pilot carriage, the M1921E, was produced with a box trail, but this reduced the range of movement to 51 degrees elevation and 8 degrees of traverse. The Field Artillery Board rejected all of the M1920E carriages after trials in April 1923, judging them to be too heavy and too clumsy.
The Ordnance Department responded with the Howitzer M1925E on Carriage M1925E, a box-trail design, while the Rock Island Arsenal produced the Howitzer T2 on Carriage T1 and Carriage T2, both using split trails. The second of these impressed the Field Artillery Board, and it was standardised as the Howitzer M1 on Carriage M1 in January 1928.
The Howitzer M1 could fire a 33lb (15kg) shell to a maximum range of 12,000 yards (11,000m). It was designed so that it didn’t need a recoil pit to be dug under it to allow it to fire at high elevations. It had a horizontal breech. The gun rested on a cradle, with part of the recoil mechanism above the barrel. A spring balancing mechanism was placed below the cradle, connecting the area below the trunnions to the rear of the cradle. The carriage had wooden spoked wheels as it was intended for use with horses.
Very few Howitzer M1s were ever built, and it didn’t enter series production. Instead the army continued to use a mix of 75mm and 155mm weapons in the divisional artillery. When work on a new howitzer resumed in the 1930s, the Howitzer M1 design was modified enough to be re-designated as the 105mm Howitzer M2.