Stokes Mortar

The Stokes mortar is a British smoothbore, muzzle-loading trench mortar designed by engineer Wilfred Stokes and adopted by the British Army in 1915, consisting simply of a smooth steel tube mounted on a bipod with a baseplate, into which a crew member dropped a finned bomb that struck a fixed firing pin at the bottom of the tube and launched automatically, a design so simple and lightweight compared with earlier, heavier trench mortars that a small crew could achieve a rapid rate of fire while still being able to move the weapon relatively easily between positions. Its light weight, simplicity and high rate of fire filled a critical gap in British trench warfare artillery between hand-thrown grenades, effective only at very short range, and heavier field artillery, too large and inflexible to respond quickly to close-range trench fighting, and the design proved so effective that it became the conceptual template most infantry mortars worldwide have followed ever since. Refined versions of the basic Stokes drop-fire mortar principle remained in front-line military service, essentially unchanged in concept, for the rest of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.