MGM's 1/72
Skoda 38cm Haubitze M.16
 

On the Real Thing

The 38cm Haubitze M.16 was one of the famous Big Guns of Skoda, which made such an impression during WW1. It started out as a project, initiated in April 1915 by Skoda, designed to give roughly the same firepower as the big 42cm Howitzer, while at the same time retaining the relative mobility of the famous 30.5cm Mörser M.11.

(All this explains a number of similarities between this gun and, on one hand, the 42cm Howitzer, and on the other, the 30.5cm Mörser.) The first test shots were fired already in January 1916, and it was used first in combat in May that year, on the Italian Front. The two first guns ("Gudrun" and "Barbara") were used in support of the Austro-Hungarian Spring Offensive at the hotly contested Isonzo River, already an old battleground. It proved a success, and the Austro-Hungarian High Command soon ordered an additional 14 M.16 Howitzers. They were used on all fronts with telling effect, and at the end of the war, the Austro-Hungarian Army had ten of these monsters in service.

The M.16 weighed some 81.7 tons in firing position. (It was always transported in a disassembled state. It took some 6-8 hours to assemble and deploy the piece, which also required the digging down and siting of the big base box.) It could shoot a 740kg heavy shell some 15.000 meters. The maximum rate of fire was 5 rounds per minute. Parts of this gun was also used as a basis for the 24cm Kanone M.16.

Click here to get more info, and to see photos of a surviving gun. To find out even more, get this book!
 

The kit comes packed in a small but sturdy card-board box typical of MGM. It has no instructions, save for one sheet of photos, showing the built model, which is a bit troublesome, as this is a pretty complicated kit. You can get it together using these pics, but a real plan would actually have been much better.

The kit consists of some 25+ parts, moulded in a yellow, medium-hard resin. There is pretty much moulding flash, but they are in general easily cleaned off. The moulding is good. The parts are also fine, although the finish here and there is less than perfect, and parts of the barrel feels a little bit crude, but it will probably not be too noticable in the finished model. The rivets are ok, but a little big.

What can seem odd at first, is the fact that the kit comes with the full base box, which is consistent with the kit showing a deployed gun in firing mode, at the same time that you could not see the full box, as it was fully buried in the ground, showing only the top base plate. But if you think about, is this the only way to do it really, because the real-life howitzer was fully dependant on a hole into the base-box to take the full recoil. A flat base-plate would quite simply be incorrect. The backside to this, is that the kit cries out for a diorama to be displayed, a diorama with ground work where the baseplate can be buried in the "ground". (The kit also comes with one round ammo: one cartridge and one grenade.)

The accuracy of the kit seems high, as far as I can tell.

The kits of MGM can can be bought through through 7th Company  in Portugal, Smallscale.de in Germany, or Blitzkrieg Models in the UK.
 

Verdict

This is a nice kit, that will surely build into a very fine reliplica of the original. MGM has again showed his originality and courage, in doing such an unusual subject. Well done Michel Gores!