The 15 cm sFH 93 was a German howitzer which served in a number of colonial conflicts, the Balkan Wars and World War I. History The 15 cm sFH 93 was designed and built by Krupp and entered service in 1893. The sFH 93 was designed with the lessons of the Franco-Prussian and Russo-Turkish war in mind where field guns with smaller shells and limited elevation had difficulty overcoming fortifications. What was needed was a howitzer capable of high-angle fire which could fire a large shell to drop inside the walls of enemy fortifications. The sFH 93 was fairly conventional for its time and most nations had similar pieces, including a similar 15 cm Krupp field mortar introduced by the Netherlands in 1882. However, its lack of recoil mechanism made it dated and by the time the First World War broke out it had been largely replaced. The majority of military planners before the First World War were wedded to the concept of fighting an offensive war of rapid maneuver which in a time before mechanization meant a focus on cavalry and light horse artillery firing shrapnel shells. Although the majority of combatants had heavy field artillery prior to the outbreak of the First World War, none had adequate numbers of heavy guns in service, nor had they foreseen the growing importance of heavy artillery once the Western Front stagnated and trench warfare set in. The theorists hadn't foreseen that trenches, barbed wire, and machine guns had robbed them of the mobility they had been counting on and like in the Franco-Prussian and Russo-Turkish war the need for high-angle heavy artillery reasserted itself. Since aircraft of the period were not yet capable of carrying large diameter bombs the burden of delivering heavy firepower fell on the artillery. The combatants scrambled to find anything that could fire a heavy shell and that meant emptying the fortresses and scouring the depots for guns held in reserve. It also meant converting coastal artillery and naval guns to siege guns by either giving them simple field carriages or mounting the larger pieces on rail carriages. Although largely replaced by the German Army before the First World War the sFH 93 was brought back into service because of a combination of higher than expected losses of field artillery and insufficient numbers of heavy guns which led to them being brought out of reserve and issued