75mm pack howitzer was a versatile artillery piece. It came in three versions,
the most common one seen here, the M8 (Airborne).
pre-war vintage M1 had a "box trail" and wooden wheels and was design
to be pulled by a cavalry horse or the artillery crew over friendly ground. Or,
it could be broken down to be packed onto six mules for moving in rough terrain,
as in the Pacific and China-Burma-India theaters and mountainous Itay.
M8 (Airborne) was the M1 box trail design with rubber wheels for jeep transport.
It could be apportioned into seven "paracrates" and dropped from the
skies with paratroopers, or come in on glider and transport planes. It weighed
1,339 pounds, had a range of 9,600 yards, and the crew of four could manage a
prolonged rate of fire of three rounds per minute. They were phased out at the
end of WWII, replaced by the 57mm and 75mm recoilless rifles.
the early 1980s, Tamiya
produced a 24-piece white metal kit of the M8 that could be built in travel or
firing modes, but it's been out of production for some time. Ted
Dyer makes resin versions of all three types, and S-Model
offers the M8 in resin. In 2007, Resicast
released their own resin rendition of an M8.
M8 howitzer, photographed in Koppel, PA, by Kurt Laughlin, is a well-preserved
specimen with its business end retracted for travel mode.