The guns of H.I.H. and H.I.H. Siderius:
Land based guns
As noted before, H.I.H. started out by acquiring
large stocks of German WW1 guns, that had been
moved to Holland before the Treaty of Versailles
came into being. Martens mentions a report by the
Dutch Army Inspector of Artillery in 1924, stating
that H.I.H. possessed:
- 22 guns 15cm L42,
- 110 guns 15cm L17,
- 60 howitzers 10cm L10 (possibly a misprint),
- 60 guns 10,5cm L35,
- 50 guns 7,7cm L17.
- 8 AA guns 8,8cm and
- 53 Ehrhardt 2cm AA guns.
H.I.H. however also started developing new guns,
some of which were clearly based on these WW1
leftovers, others were experimental or new guns.
In the 1920s H.I.H. fielded a 20mm machine
cannon, clearly of Ehrhardt extraction. It has
sometimes been referred to as the HAIHA 2cm
(HAIHA being phonetic Dutch for H.I.H. – it was
also the H.I.H. telegram call sign). Interestingly,
the same gun showed up in Rheinmetall brochures
at the time as well, clearly showing the deep links
between the two companies. This gun however,
would be brought to perfection by another offshoot
of Rheinmetall: Solothurn of Switzerland that
produced and successfully sold a large number of
20mm anti-tank rifles and AA guns. Eventually, it
would come home as the German Flak 30 AA gun.
One of the first local orders to H.I.H. must have
been the production of a test battery of 4 pieces of
105mm L22 howitzers for the Dutch army. On May
6th 1925 one of these pieces fired its first round. The
Dutch Army was not extremely satisfied with these
guns. Officials did not find them “the most
modern” types, while their effective range of 9000
metres was considered meagre. Nevertheless, the
guns passed the tests by fulfilling all requirements
and were considered “useful”. But no orders were
ever placed. It is unclear what happened to the 4
howitzers. The Dutch never used them, not even as
an emergency battery in 1940 (and they would have
used them if they had them), which means the
howitzers were probably returned to H.I.H. at
some point. We have no concrete information of
H.I.H. ever selling these guns, though their
specifications turn up in Chinese sources!
Continue to the next page (4 of 8): land based
guns continued
Battery of 4 H.I.H. 105mm L22 howitzers
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