The howitzer is named after a Hussite cannon built to fire into crowds
During the Hussite Wars of the 1420s and 1430s, Czech rebels used stubby cannons called houfnice, from the Czech word for crowd, to fire at massed infantry and spook charging cavalry horses. The name passed through German as haubitze and Dutch as houwitser before reaching English, and it now labels much of modern artillery.
A howitzer sits between the flat-shooting field gun and the steeply lobbing mortar, able to fire both below and above 45 degrees, a dividing line also expressed as 800 mils. American doctrine formalises the split: guns fire only between 0 and 45 degrees of elevation, mortars only between 45 and 90, and howitzers across the whole range. The word first surfaces in a German document of 1440, spelled aufeniz.
The first weapons recognised as howitzers emerged in the late 16th century for sieges, lobbing gunpowder-filled iron shells over fortress walls. Unlike mortars, which fired at one fixed angle and varied range only through powder charges, howitzers could be aimed at many angles, making them trickier to handle but far more flexible. From the mid-18th century lighter field howitzers travelled with armies, prized mainly because field guns of the day fired only solid shot. Russia's licorne of 1758 stayed in service for a century, and France's Canon obusier de 12 fought in the American Civil War as the 12-pounder Napoleon.
Rifling cut both ways. From 1859 European armies swapped smoothbore field howitzers for rifled field guns whose longer reach could reproduce many of their effects. In sieges the reverse happened: in the 1860s officers found rifled siege howitzers better at breaching walls, and categories multiplied, from light pieces near 150 mm to heavy ones of 240 to 270 mm by the 1880s, and finally super-heavy weapons such as Germany's Big Bertha, moved in several loads and assembled on site.
Mechanics favoured the design. A howitzer weighing about a ton could hurl 15 kg shells from a 105 mm barrel, where a 75 mm field gun of similar weight managed around 8 kg. When the First World War settled into trenches, armies needed steeply descending fire to reach dug-in positions, and Germany began the war with far more howitzers than France. Since then the line between gun and howitzer has blurred; the United States has called gun-howitzers howitzers since the Second World War, while the British call comparable weapons guns.
Source: Howitzer
