Why Mortars Killed More Men Than Tanks in WWII
Every war film you have ever seen got it wrong. The camera always finds the tank, the machine gun, the sniper. But the weapon that actually killed the most infantrymen in World War II looked like a piece of plumbing. A metal tube, a base plate, and a set of folding legs. According to US Army casualty data, mortar and artillery fire caused between 64 and 69% of all American combat deaths in the European theater.
Rifles, pistols, machine guns, everything that fires a bullet, 14 to 23%. The most primitive weapon on the battlefield killed more men than everything else combined. And against it, nothing a soldier had been trained to do actually worked. To understand how that is possible, you need to know what it felt like to be on the other end of a mortar.
A veteran of the fighting in France remembered the day he and several other men spotted chickens on a small farm near the front. They were hungry. They went down the open hillside to catch one. The Germans across the river saw them immediately and started dropping mortar rounds.
The men were running faster than the chickens. Not one bird was caught. The veteran put it simply, “Give a good mortar man three rounds, and if you stand still, he can put it down your throat.” Three rounds. That was all it took. Not a battery of heavy guns, not an air strike. One man, one tube, and three shells the size of a thermos flask.
And here is what made it worse. Against artillery, a soldier had a chance. He could hear it coming. He could throw himself flat. Against a rifle, he knew the direction. Against a mortar, he had nothing. No warning, no direction, no time. Just an explosion where a moment ago there was silence. That weapon has been on every battlefield since 1915.
But where did it come from? A civilian engineer in England designed it in a matter of weeks. The military rejected it twice, and then the entire world copied it. In 1914, the Western Front froze. Millions of men dug into the earth and faced each other across a few hundred yards of open ground. Artillery could flatten a trench from miles away, but only if the shells came in at a low enough angle to hit inside it.
Most did not. A howitzer round screaming in from a distance struck at a shallow trajectory. It hit the parapet, the sandbags, the ground in front. But the men crouching at the bottom of a 5-ft ditch were untouched. The problem was geometry. To kill a man in a trench, you needed something that fell straight down.
The Germans figured this out first. They had been watching. During the Russo-Japanese War of 1904, observers saw mortars used at the siege of Port Arthur and came home with ideas. By 1908, they had developed the Minenwerfer, literally mine thrower. Three sizes, heavy, medium, light. When war broke out, they had roughly 160 ready. The British had none.
Here is how badly the British scrambled. In the first 3 months, they managed to produce 75 mortars. Most were dangerous improvisations, workshop devices almost as likely to kill the crew as the enemy. Some units resorted to building catapults. Then, in January 1915, a civilian engineer named Wilfrid Stokes designed something that changed infantry warfare permanently.
His mortar was so simple, it was almost insulting. A smooth metal tube, a base plate to absorb recoil, a bipod to hold it at an angle, a fixed firing pin at the bottom of the tube. Drop a finned shell into the muzzle. It slides down, hits the pin, and launches. No complicated breech, no rifling, no recoil mechanism.
One man could carry the tube. Another carried the plate. A third carried the legs. The whole thing was ready to fire in under a minute. The army rejected it. The shells did not fit existing ammunition stocks. It took the personal intervention of David Lloyd George, then Minister of Munitions, to force it into production.
Stokes received a knighthood for his trouble. And his design became the ancestor of virtually every infantry mortar in the world. Between the wars, a French weapons designer named Edgar Brandt refined the concept. He replaced the crude cylindrical bomb with a streamlined, fin-stabilized teardrop shell. Range and accuracy jumped.
The Brandt mortar became the international standard. The Soviets copied it, the Americans bought it, the Japanese adapted it. By 1939, every major army on Earth was equipped with direct descendants of that same English tube on a French shell. Not one of them fully understood what they had built. The mortar killed so effectively because of three things no other infantry weapon could combine.
Trajectory, speed, and silence. A rifle fires flat. A machine gun fires flat. Even most artillery fires at a relatively shallow angle. A mortar does not. It launches its shell nearly straight up. The round climbs high into the air, arcs over, and comes down almost vertically. That changes everything. Any cover a soldier can hide behind only works against something coming from the side.
A mortar round does not come from the side. It comes from directly above. And against something falling out of the sky, the oldest rule of infantry, get behind cover, stops working. A trench becomes an open-topped box waiting to be filled with shrapnel. Now consider the speed. An 81-mm mortar crew could fire 25 to 30 rounds per minute.
A standard field howitzer managed three to four. One mortar tube put out more rounds in 60 seconds than a heavy gun did in 10 minutes. And mortars never operated alone. A battery of four could saturate a position so fast that by the time the first round landed, a dozen more were already in the air. Allied operational researchers ran the numbers and concluded that a single medium mortar delivered the equivalent firepower of three machine guns.
Except a machine gun needed a line of sight. A mortar did not. And then there was the sound, or rather, the absence of it. An artillery shell travels faster than the speed of sound. You hear the shriek and you have a second to react. A rifle bullet cracks past and you instinctively know the direction. But a mortar round moves slowly.
It climbs and falls in near silence. There is no whistle, no warning. The first indication that a mortar round is about to land is the explosion itself. For the men on the receiving end, it was not a weapon they could fight because they could not hear it, could not see it, and could not predict where the next one would fall.
Here is what that meant in practice. A mortar crew sets up behind a hill. A forward observer watches the target. The first round lands 50 yards short. The observer corrects. The second round lands 20 yards left. One more adjustment. The third round lands among the men. And by the time it does, the crew is already dropping shells into the tube as fast as they can feed them.
The target has no muzzle flash to locate, no sound to track, and nowhere to hide. What happens next, what soldiers actually tried to do to survive this, is where the story gets worse. Because every defense they had was useless. And in one forest on the German border, that fact killed more Americans than almost any other single battle of the war.
If you want to see how that played out, hit like and subscribe so you do not miss what comes next. Because what happened in that forest still haunts the men who survived it. A foxhole was the infantryman’s first instinct under fire. Dig in. Get below ground level. It worked against bullets. It worked against artillery, most of the time.
Because shells came in at an angle and the blast went sideways. But a mortar round came down from directly above. It dropped into the foxhole like a stone into a bucket. The one place a soldier was trained to go for safety became the one place that offered none. A wall worked against flat trajectory fire.
A building offered cover from machine guns. Neither stopped a mortar round. The shell simply cleared the obstacle and detonated on the far side. Retreating did nothing either. Without a sound to indicate where the fire was coming from, a man running blindly was just as likely to run toward the next impact as away from it. Counter-battery fire, shooting back at the mortar, was nearly impossible.
A mortar crew operated behind a ridge, behind a wall, behind anything solid enough to block line of sight. The tube weighed under 100 lb, fire 20 rounds, pick it up, move 50 yards, set it down again. By the time the enemy zeroed in on the position, the crew was already gone. But the worst place to be under mortar fire was a forest.
And in the autumn of 1944, the United States Army walked into one. The Hurtgen Forest sat on the German-Belgian border. 50 square miles of dense fir trees, some 100 ft tall, packed so tightly that a man could barely walk between them. The Germans had been there for months. Every section of the forest was pre-registered, numbered, measured, and mapped for their mortar and artillery crews.
The moment American soldiers entered, the coordinates were called in. Shells began falling into the treetops. Here is what a tree burst does. The round strikes a branch or a trunk 60 ft above the ground and detonates in the canopy. The blast sends fragments and splintered timber straight down. A foxhole, which is open on top, becomes a collection point for falling shrapnel.
Men who dug in died. Men who stayed above ground died. There was no correct response. The 22nd Infantry Regiment attacked through the Hurtgen for 18 continuous days. They advanced 6,000 yards. They lost 2,678 men. One soldier for every two yards gained. 86% of the regiment strength. Company Baker went into one attack with 79 men. 54 did not come back.
Ernest Hemingway, who was there, called it Passchendaele with tree bursts. The physical damage was only half of what the mortar did to infantry. The other half was invisible. And it destroyed more soldiers than shrapnel ever could. On September 15th, 1944, Private Eugene Sledge landed on Peleliu with the 1st Marine Division.
He was 21 years old. As the Marines moved off the beach and started inland, the Japanese opened up with heavy mortar fire. The men hit the ground. There was no cover. The shells fell faster and faster until they sounded like one continuous roar. Sledge lay in a shallow depression and waited to die. 35 years later, he still remembered every second.
I thought it would never stop. One was bound to fall directly into my hole. I was out there on the battlefield all by myself, utterly forlorn and helpless. He was not wounded that day, not physically. But something in him changed in those minutes, and it never fully changed back. That was the mortar’s second weapon, not shrapnel. Fear.
The kind of fear that accumulates, that does not go away between barrages, that builds over days and weeks until a man simply stops functioning. The military called it combat fatigue. The numbers behind it were staggering. More than 504,000 American soldiers were lost to psychiatric collapse during the war. That was the equivalent of 50 infantry divisions removed from the fight not by wounds, but by the breaking of the mind.
40% of all medical discharges were psychiatric. One out of every four American casualties was attributed not to enemy fire, but to the stress of enduring it. And the mortar was the single greatest driver of that stress. Not because it was the loudest weapon, not because it caused the worst wounds, but because it was the one weapon a soldier could not prepare for.
A machine gun had a sound. A rifle had a direction. Artillery had a whistle. The mortar had nothing. It simply arrived. And the impossibility of bracing yourself, of doing anything at all to improve your odds, is what broke men faster than any other weapon in the war. Psychiatrist John Appel studied combat exhaustion cases at Monte Cassino and Anzio.
His conclusion was as blunt as it was hopeless. Practically all men in rifle battalions who are not otherwise disabled ultimately become psychiatric casualties. It was not a question of courage, it was arithmetic. Enough days under mortar fire and every man reached a limit. In the Hurtgen Forest, soldiers began shooting themselves.
Lieutenant Paul Fussell, an infantry officer, reported that hundreds chose the left hand or the left foot. The brighter ones used a sandbag to muffle the shot and avoid powder burns near the bullet hole. The army set up special hospital wards designated SIW, self-inflicted wound. When those men recovered, most were court-martialed.
Six months in the stockade, then back to the line. The mortar destroyed bodies and minds in equal measure. And yet no army on Earth reduced its use. They did the opposite. They built more in quantities that dwarfed every other infantry weapon ever made. A tank required a factory with precision machine tools, hardened steel plate, a trained assembly line, and months of production time.
A field gun needed a rifled barrel machine to tight tolerances. A mortar required no precision machining and no specialized steel. Any metalworking shop in the world could produce one. And every army in the war understood this. The Soviet Union built 230,000 mortars in 1942 alone. That was more than every other major power combined in the same year.
A Soviet artillery division carried over 100 heavy 120 mm mortars organized into dedicated mortar brigades. A concentration of indirect firepower that no other army matched at that scale. By the final months of the war, Soviet infantry units had so many mortars available that they used them as a substitute for artillery rather than waiting for gun batteries to arrive.
The Japanese solved a different problem the same way. Their tanks were obsolete. Their artillery was limited. The Imperial Navy consumed most of the industrial budget. So the army compensated with light infantry and mortars. The Type 89 50 mm mortar weighed 10 lb. It fired a round out to 700 yd, and it was everywhere.
A single Japanese rifle company fielded as many as 12 of them. Four times the number in an equivalent American unit. After the fighting on Guadalcanal, Marine Colonel Merritt Edson, the man who led the famous Raiders, insisted the Americans desperately needed something equivalent. Allied soldiers who met the Type 89 in combat universally hated it.
Not because it was powerful, because there were so many of them and they never stopped firing. But the most remarkable story of mortar production happened on the Eastern Front. In the opening months of Barbarossa, the Germans captured enormous quantities of Soviet equipment, including thousands of 120 mm PM-38 mortars and the ammunition to go with them.
They turned the weapons around and used them against their former owners without a single modification. Soviet mortar, Soviet shells, German crews. And the weapon worked so well that Berlin ordered an exact copy into production. The Granatwerfer 42 rolled off German assembly lines, around 8,500 built, and in many units, it replaced the infantry gun entirely.
Germany even manufactured 5.4 million rounds of its own ammunition for a weapon it had copied from its enemy. Britain, which had never used a 120 mm mortar, began producing them specifically to ship to the Soviets under Lend-Lease. On every front, in every theater, the mortar had become the centerpiece of infantry combat.
And when everything else ran out, some men found ways to use the mortar shell itself that should not have been possible. Okinawa, April 13th, 1945, 3:00 in the morning. Technical Sergeant Buford Anderson was a mortaman with the 381st Infantry, 96th Division. His unit held a saddle between two ridgelines on Kakazu Ridge.
They had been attacking the Japanese positions for days without progress. Now the Japanese were attacking back. A column of 75 soldiers came up the south slope in the dark. Grenades, knee mortars, satchel charges. They hit Anderson’s flank. His squad was wounded, every one of them. He ordered them into an old Okinawan tomb for cover.
Then he stepped out alone. He was 5 ft 7, 130 lb. He had an M1 carbine with one magazine. Anderson emptied the magazine into the column at point-blank range. When it was empty, he grabbed an unexploded Japanese mortar round off the ground and threw it back at them. It detonated in their midst.
Then he found a crate of American mortar shells. He pulled the safety pins. He slammed the tail fins against a rock to arm them, and he threw them one after another into the advancing Japanese, reloading and firing his carbine between throws. The man was using mortar rounds as hand grenades. By dawn, the Japanese had pulled back. 25 of them were dead.
Several machine guns and knee mortars were destroyed. Anderson was bleeding badly from a shrapnel wound. He refused evacuation. Instead, he walked to his company commander and reported what had happened. His information allowed American artillery to wipe out the remaining attackers. On Memorial Day, 1946, President Harry Truman presented Buford Anderson with the Medal of Honor on the White House lawn.
He was one of five men from the 96th Division to receive it during the war. He never talked about it much. Most people in the California town where he later served as mayor had no idea he had earned it. The mortar was the simplest weapon of World War II. A tube, a plate, and a set of legs. It cost a fraction of a tank.
Any factory could build one. Any three men could carry it. It made no sound that could save you. It cleared every wall, every ridge, every trench. It broke bodies in the open and minds in the dark. And it killed more infantrymen than tanks, machine guns, and snipers combined. Not because it was sophisticated, because against it, nothing worked.
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