Japanese Type 92 105 mm Field Gun (Guadalcanal)

So this is a Japanese Type 92 105mm field gun. This is one of the guns that would have fallen into the category of what the American troops on Guadalcanal called Pistol Pete, which was essentially Japanese artillery situated up on Mount Austin that was used for like regular quasi-random harassment fire down onto Henderson Field. Now specifically, this being a Type 92, this was adopted in 1932. The Japanese were looking to adopt, to find, and improved a better 105mm or 100mm class of field gun. They had some previous domestic designs that just weren't really ... well, they were outdated, they were obsolete, and they weren't all that good. So this is actually very closely based on a French Schneider design. The Japanese took Schneider's 1927 model of 105mm gun, made a very few small adjustments, and adopted it as their own as the Type 92. A total of only 200 of these were manufactured. The Japanese discovered that when they put these into use, it turned out they weren't really actually all that useful. The problem was for the same general size, and if you're going to deal with the mobility requirements for a gun like this, you could get a like 150mm howitzer that would have about the same size and weight, be about as difficult to move around, but a lot more effective on target. And so they generally didn't produce many guns in this class at all, and like I said, only about 200 of these. A couple of other things to point out, early production guns had a couple of problems. They did have a creative element where they used a semi-fixed cartridge for the ammunition with two separate powder charges. It would hold a total of 4 kilos of powder, a 1.5 kilo and a 2.5 kilo bag. And by getting rid of one or the other, you could essentially get a low-velocity shell that would allow you to fire at a higher angle of attack. So you could drop shells behind hills. Well, it would allow you to fire missions otherwise that would be impossible with a high-velocity gun. We have a second example of one of these Type 92s here with the breech block frozen open. So you can see the style of breech. This is a rotating interrupted thread breech block. So you'd grab that handle, pull it out, rotate the bolt, rotate the breech, and open it up. There are the interrupted lugs inside. So that's mechanically how the system worked. Of course when it fired, the whole action is going to reciprocate back in this tray to absorb the recoil energy. This is not a semi-automatic action, so it's not going to automatically open the breech at the end of travel to kick out the empty case. That has to be done manually. So production began in 1932, it would run until 1944. These were being made until the end of the war at the Osaka Arsenal, but only in really very small numbers relative to everything else that was being manufactured. What we have here is storage for the trail spades. So essentially when you emplace this gun, what you do is you have three big vertical steel plates that ... are stored in ... that rack. And you bring them back to the trail, the trail element of this is missing, but you'd ... hammer those stakes vertically into the ground to secure the gun from recoil. One of the issues they had with early production versions of this is the trails were actually weak. And fired with full-power ammunition, the trails tended to break. That was something that actually happened to the guns on Guadalcanal. It would eventually be fixed in later production examples, but not until after Guadalcanal. So this is where you would have had the elevation and traverse controls. The optical sight would sit here, pointing through that little hole in the shield. In general, this was a really quite modern gun designed by Schneider. The only thing it was really short of, capability-wide, by World War Two was the ability to be towed at high speed by a truck. The Japanese typically towed these with ... caterpillar artillery tractors. And frankly, there wasn't a lot of high-speed road towing going on in Guadalcanal anyway. So, that is the Japanese Type 92. This particular gun is currently on Guadalcanal. It was recovered off of Mount Austin and put into the display where it currently resides. Hopefully you guys enjoyed this quick little look at a pretty cool, pretty rare war relic that we don't generally see in the United States. Thanks for watching.