120 mm Schneider-Canet M1897 long gun was a heavy artillery piece manufactured by the French company

Schneider-Creusot Schneider et Cie, also known as Schneider-Creusot for its birthplace in the French town of Le Creusot, was a historic French iron and steel-mill company which became a major arms manufacturer. In the 1960s, it was taken over by the Belgian Empain ...

. It was a slow firing gun without a recoil mechanism but with significant range and weight of the shell. Serbia ordered 17 pieces in 1897. However, only 16 were delivered in 1902. Serbia entered the

First Balkan War The First Balkan War ( sr, Први балкански рат, ''Prvi balkanski rat''; bg, Балканска война; el, Αʹ Βαλκανικός πόλεμος; tr, Birinci Balkan Savaşı) lasted from October 1912 to May 1913 and invo ...

with 15 pieces (6 batteries), since one gun was destroyed during the exercises before the war. It was used in the First and

Second Balkan War The Second Balkan War was a conflict which broke out when Bulgaria, dissatisfied with its share of the spoils of the First Balkan War, attacked its former allies, Serbia and Greece, on 16 ( O.S.) / 29 (N.S.) June 1913. Serbian and Greek armies r ...

s and in the first phase of the

First World War World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...

(1914-1915). Most of the surviving pieces were abandoned and destroyed before the Serbian retreat to Albania. Bulgaria also ordered this type in 1897, and received 24 pieces and used them in the Balkan and First World Wars. Serbian type (L/26) and Bulgarian (L/28) were slightly different in respect of the breech lock while in other aspects they were identical.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:120 mm Schneider-Canet M1897 long gun 120 mm artillery Artillery of France Artillery of Serbia Artillery of Bulgaria Schneider Electric World War I guns