MGM's 1/72
Skoda 24cm Kanone M.16
 

On the Real Thing

The powerful Skoda 24cm Kanone M.16 was developed out of the 38cm M.16 howitzer, so it shared the same firing platform and carriage. (The 38cm M.16 started out as a project, initiated in April 1915 by Skoda, designed to give roughly the same firepower as the big 42cm Howitzer, while at the same time retaining the relative mobility of the famous 30.5cm Mörser M.11.) The largest difference were the length of the barrel, the lower extent of the elevation and the design of the cradle. The breech was the same as on the howitzers, and the construction of the barrel and some other details were also identical. The barrel consisted of twelve parts. The inner tube formed the inner surface with the rifling, the reducer cone and the combustion chamber. From the muzzle the inner tube was covered first by the front outer jacket and behind it by a three­piece inner jacket front, middle and rear. The second largest and heaviest part, the rear middle jacket with the rear part of the barrel with the opening for the breech wedge, encompassed most of the inner jackets and was connected with the front middle jacket by a screw clamp. The gun itself was a reinforced naval gun, 40 calibres long.

After testing nine guns were ordered (plus two replacement barrels and one cradle). Up to the end of the war Skoda was able to manufacture and test-fire only two pieces, one replacement barrel and a cradle. Barrel no. 1 was testfired on November 7, 1916, and barrel no.2 on December 19 of the same year. In 1917 replacement barrel no.3 appeared on the Skoda Bolevec range, together with both repaired barrels nos. 1 and 2 with new inner tubes.

Both this and the 38cm M.16 were among the first generation of heavy artillery designed to be towed by the special Daimler petrol­electric tractors in “trains”, consisting not only of the main gun loads but also of trailers for tools, ammunition, domestic arrangements and so on. A typical M.16 gun train could consist of at least five main loads and 15 other vehicles, all so arranged that the great weights involved would be able to travel over rough terrain albeit slowly but without too many problems.

With a range of 26,3km (muzzle velocity: 750 m/sec) and the 161kg M.16 shell, the main task for these guns was to conduct a harassing and destructive fire on key targets way behind the front, such as road and railway crossings, depots and headquarters. The one-gun batteries consisted of 8 officers, 800 other ranks, 5 horses plus 20 light and heavy trucks with trailers. (The Barrel on the Barrel Car weighed 38 tons, the left Gun Bed Car with Bed 36 tons, the right Gun Bed Car with Bed 37.6 tons, the Carriage Car with Carriage 30.8tons.) The complete gun, once in place, weighed 86 tons, so getting the gun in and out of action was slow and required a great deal of labour and time.

After the war the gun was adopted by the Czechoslovak army, and when the Germans invaded in 1939 they took their six guns into their own service, and used them with effect throughout the war. (However, the old Daimler tractors broke down under the rough conditions on the Eastern Front and had to be replaced with the Sd.Kfz. 9 Famo.) The last two were destroyed by their own crews in May 1945.

Click here to see a beautiful 1/35 scale model of this gun. To find out more, get this small book!
 

The kit comes packed in a small but sturdy card-board box typical of MGM. It has no instructions, save for one sheet of colour photos, showing the built model, which is a bit troublesome, as this is a pretty complicated kit. You can get it together using these pics, but a real plan would have been better. (I got it together using additional photo material, from the book linked to above.)

The kit consists of some 30+ parts, moulded in a yellow, medium-hard resin. There is pretty much moulding flash, but they are in general easily cleaned off. The moulding is good. The parts are OK, although the finish here and there is less than perfect, but it will probably not be noticable in the finished model. But building the kit will entail a lot of smoothing out and sanding.

One oddity with this model is the fact that it comes with the full base box, which is consistent with the kit showing a deployed gun in firing mode, at the same time that the full box was impossible to see, as it was fully buried in the ground, showing only the top base plate. At the same time is this the only way to do it really. This is because the real-life gun depended on a hole into the base-box to take its full recoil. A flat base-plate would quite simply be incorrect. The backside to this, is that the kit requires a diorama to be displayed, a diorama where the baseplate can be buried in the "ground".

The kits of MGM can can be bought through through Smallscale.de, 7th Company or Blitzkrieg Models.

 

Verdict

This is a nice kit, that will surely build into an excellent reliplica of the original. I feel very tempted to do it right away. Recommended!