155 mM., Lang. Systeem SCHNEIDER (1897 Manual)

This PDF upload is a digitized copy of the original instruction and drill manual for the celebrated 155 mm Long Tom siege gun, a long range weapons system that was the pride and joy of the Boer artillery forces and arguably the spiritual forefather of the formidable 155mm G5 and G6 artillery guns of the modern SADF (now the SANDF). The four Boer Long Tom guns had an effective range of over 9 km (compared to the >45 km range of the modern G5/G6 systems) which allowed them to outrange all the guns fielded by Britain's Royal Artillery and Royal Navy artillery detachments. A more detailed summation of the Long Toms' history is best saved for another photo or illustration upload, but suffice to say that the technical superiority of the Long Toms had a huge and lasting psychological effect on British artillery and garrison forces during the conventional phase of the war (1899-1900), which was dominated by set-piece battles and lengthy sieges in which the Long Tom siege guns were able to operate according to their strengths while minimizing the effects of their shortcomings. Sensationalized by friend and foe alike as a kind of proto-wunderwaffe, the Long Toms were able to strike British encampments, gun positions, and troop concentrations from well beyond effective range of retaliation, throwing 94 lb (43 kg) high explosive or shrapnel airburst shells on target with pinpoint accuracy. With the Long Toms as their weapons system and their numerical inferiority encouraging innovation in tactics, the Boer gunners pioneered the use of indirect fire with standard artillery (ie regular field guns or howitzers, not specialized mortars), a first in the annals of warfare.

As is so often the case with artillery systems, a perfectly designed gun is still only as good as the ammunition it fires, and this was to be the one great flaw of the Boer Long Tom. Their tactical effect in terms of their lethality and destructiveness was continually hindered by faulty shell fuzes until the last few months of conventional fighting. Where one shrapnel or high explosive shell might wreak devastatingly lethal havoc on British encampments and troop concentrations, killing and wounding a score with one blow, another dud shell might harmlessly bury itself in the ground without ever detonating and contribute only the kinetic energy of its impact to the destruction of its passage like an old-fashioned solid-shot cannonball. By the time the issue with the shrapnel airburst fuzes was resolved, there were only a few more set-piece battles left in which the Long Toms would play a decisive role. With their shift to guerrilla war, the Boer commandos still in the field were forced to destroy their Long Toms, as the heavy siege guns were too slow to keep up with the hard-riding, mobile warfare demanded by the new guerrilla tactics. Nevertheless, the lessons the Boers learned from their difficulties with the Long Tom shells were to have a significantly lasting impact a decade and a continent away.

Schneider et Compagnie, the French manufacturer of the Long Tom guns, used the lessons learned from the Boers' combat experience to rectify the fuzing issues of their entire 155 mm shell series in the decade after the South African War. While Schneider's 155 mm range of Model 1877 siege guns and their various derivatives (the Boer Long Tom being just one export variant) were derided by the French artillery officers in 1914 as obsolescent dinosaurs in the era of the quick-firing, modern 75 mm field gun (the celebrated "Soixante-Quinze" of later fame), these 155 mm guns were to soon provide the backbone for French heavy artillery batteries when the fighting on the Western Front bogged down in static trench warfare that necessitated a high proportion of heavy caliber howitzers to effectively counter the German superiority in heavy artillery. On the Western Front, the Long Tom's 155 mm cousins would provide excellent service to the French artillery forces for the duration of the war until replaced by newly designed models of heavy guns.

To return to the document at hand, it is simply the 19-page instructional manual that Schneider et Cie's South African agent (Leon Grundberg, a French Jew) provided to the Boer gunners of the Transvaal's Staatsartillerie. It gives the official name of the artillery system in the ZAR State Artillery's use: "155 mm Lang Systeem Schneider" or in English: "155 mm Long System Schneider". In Europe, these guns were known as "6-inch Creusot BL" guns (BL indicating breechloading, Creusot being their place of manufacture) and were used in this configuration by the armies of Belgium and Romania in addition to the ZAR/Transvaal. The defeated British garrison of Dundee was to give the guns their enduring sobriquet "Long Tom", probably derived from Royal Navy gunners' traditional practice of giving that same nickname to their ship's most powerful cannon. The Boers' 155 mm guns were to gain a great many other nicknames of both British and Boer origin throughout the war as their fame and renown grew.

The instructional manual was translated from the original French to Dutch for the benefit of the Staatsartillerie gunners, and it describes in some detail the method of operation (installation procedure, disassembly, transportation, etc) and the gun drill (verbal commands and gun crew actions for the loading, aiming, and firing of the gun). There are also some very good technical diagrams for the gun, the breech, the gun carriage, the gun platform, the hydraulic recoil system, the elevation system, the accessories kit, the shell types/powder charge/primer tube, the fuze types, and the sighting systems.

While the manual may seem a little sparse on detail, in combination with hands-on instruction and demonstration by Schneider representatives and French artillery advisers in South Africa, it was enough for the Boer gunners to grow proficient in the use of the weapons system in the years before the war.

This copy of the manual was originally retrieved from the State Archives in Pretoria, where someone penned in some of the missing or obscured text. In "Long Tom: the story of the four Long Tom guns in the 2nd Anglo-Boer War", a thesis on the subject published by Major Darrell Hall (formerly of the SADF Artillery), I found the most accessible copy of the manual short of traveling to Pretoria to view the original. Unfortunately the copy reproduced in Hall's thesis is not in the best shape to begin with, and my scan of the thesis reproduction introduced some more distortion due to the curve of the paper near the page binding.

Nevertheless, I think it is still mostly legible and a better set than the handful of scattered scans of the technical diagrams you will find online. If you have any further interest in the Long Toms, I can highly recommend Louis Changuion's "Silence of the Guns" as the definitive and authoritative text on the subject. It is much more comprehensive, far more detailed, and printed in much better quality than Major Hall's thesis, with the sole exception of the instructional manual which I have uploaded here. I will probably be making some illustrations based on the Long Tom in action sometime in the near future too, so you can expect some more commentary from me on the subject.