Development The
Royal Italian Army during the
Great War had employed, alongside the various models of grenade launchers and mortars, the innovative mortar
ML 3 inch Stokes. In the early thirties the
Kingdom of Italy bought the
Brandt 81 mm Mle 1927 directly in France, derived from the Stokes, to equip the troops sent to Ethiopia. Trials concluded that the Brandt was so great a weapon that, in addition to having a significant commercial success, in a few years was built under license or copied in most of the major countries of the world. Even in Italy in fact the company
Costruzioni Elettro-Meccaniche di Saronno, in addition to producing the Brandt license, created an improved version, the
Mortaio da 81 Mod. 35, which proved to be the best of the mortars of the
Royal Italian Army. At the end of the thirties the CEMSA privately developed an enhanced version of
Mod. 35, proposed to the Italian armed forces and on the foreign market, the
CEMSA 81 mm L.P. (
Lunga Portata, or "long-range"). This piece, which faithfully modeled on the setting of the Mod. 35, differed especially for the presence of a cooling system of the barrel.
Use When Italy entered
World War II on June 10, 1940, the Royal Italian Army had roughly 2177 pieces Mod. 35. in service. According to
Pariani, in each infantry
division there must be a
battalion of mortars with two mortars companies of 81mm type; another company was organic to each of the two regiments of infantry. After the
armistice of Cassibile the Mod. 35 was also used by the
National Republican Army of the
Italian Social Republic and remained in service with the
Italian Army until the sixties. During the
Winter War, as part of the Italian military aid to Finland (also including carbines
Carcano Mod. 38) were ordained a hundred Mod. 35, called KRH 81/36-I; the "KRH" acronym is short for
kranaatinheitin ("mortar") in
Finnish; the letters "I" stands for
italialainen ("Italian") and served to distinguish the piece of CEMSA from other derivatives French Brandt and his Polish and
Hungarian products, all purchased by the Nordic country. During the
Continuation War, the same Italian mortars ended up in the hands of the
Wehrmacht, and was renamed
8.1 cm GrW 276 (i). They were joined by 200 mortars delivered in April 1944 by CEMSA to the Germans who occupied northern Italy. ==References==