#RMA/13227 Gunner George Pitt
ROYAL MARINE ARTILLERY, HOWITZER BRIGADE
TWENTY-YEAR-OLD GEORGE PITT, FROM ACTON in West London, had joined the Navy before the war at the age of 16 after a brief career as an instrument maker. Immediately designated as a gunner, for the first year of the war he had been on the battleship HMS Monarch.
After a brief spell at home in 1915, George returned to the Royal Marine Artillery, in which he had served before going to sea, and in January 1916 joined the Royal Marine Artillery Howitzer Brigade in France. This consisted of massive 15in howitzers with a range of some 5½ miles that operated as individual units, with a large crew of sixty men. Each individual shell weighed the equivalent of eight or nine average men, and the guns themselves required a number of tractors to be moved. Fashioned between the Coventry Works and the Royal Navy, they were, quite simply, monsters.
In mid-April the gun team went through a complicated process of loading tractors, the howitzer train and their equipment and overseeing its move down to the south coast. On the transport, horse boxes had been fashioned to keep the giant components of their howitzer under cover for the journey to the front. It was not until the beginning of the following month that the laborious process of parking it had been finished. The scale of operations meant that May in its entirety was spent working from 8am until 5pm, making magazines, digging trenches for cables, and fashioning dugouts for their own guns and others belonging to the Royal Marine Artillery.
A 15in howitzer of the kind used by George Pitt’s gun team in the Royal Marine Artillery. (Authors’ collection)
Finally, in the middle of June, George and his fellow gunners were ready to carry out the back-breaking work of collecting giant shells. It took two days to sort out the ammunition, ‘most of it being coated with dry linseed oil, making weight and other markings mostly indecipherable’. A total of 200 rounds was received. By 25th June George and the crew were registering their howitzer on Mouquet Farm, which at the time was a German headquarters and a target for 1st July. Other objectives in their sights before the beginning of the attack were Thiepval and St Pierre Divion, before work was hampered by a damaged air cylinder that put the gun out of action for two days, causing George and his men to fire their ammunition from a different gun instead.
The howitzers’ deadly rounds were fired in bursts of an hour or two, eight to twelve rounds at a time, on 1st July, although it was difficult to observe what they were hitting as so many guns were firing at the same time. With no gun of their own in working order, George Pitt and the rest of his team became bona fide workhorses well into August. While the other gun crews continued to fire their behemoth guns, George could do little more than carry out a supporting role, helping to lay platforms for the ones that were still operational and reinforcing roads ready for the progression of their tractors. When it came to moving, George assisted with making sure that stores were sent to the workshop out of the way, and that gun parts and platforms were clean and debris free. A spare ammunition wagon was fashioned into a makeshift travelling store and armourer’s workshop.
Shell of the type used by the Royal Marine Artillery. (Authors’ collection)
On 20th August George Pitt and several personnel were dispatched to help the 70th Siege Battery of the Royal Garrison Artillery. For five days they prepared gun positions and dugouts under fire. On the last of them three of the Royal Marine Artillery men were in direct range of German shells. One had to be evacuated with shellshock, another was slightly wounded and George Pitt was killed instantly by a German shell. The 20 year old was laid to rest at Mesnil Communal Cemetery Extension, plot II.D.14.