The WW1 Mortar So Simple a Child Could Use It—And That’s What Terrified Generals

In the bloody stalemate of the Western Front, one weapon changed everything—not because it was advanced, but because it was brutally simple. The Stokes mortar, invented by British engineer Sir Wilfred Stokes in 1915, was so intuitive that, as one officer grimly joked, “a child could fire it after five minutes of training.” Made of just three steel tubes and a baseplate, it lobbed high-explosive shells into enemy trenches at a rate of 20 rounds per minute, turning every infantry squad into its own artillery unit.

Unlike complex, immobile heavy mortars of the era, the Stokes was light, portable, and deadly accurate—and could be assembled in the mud of no man’s land. Generals feared its democratization of firepower: for the first time, frontline soldiers didn’t need to wait for distant batteries to respond. They could strike back—immediately, relentlessly, and with terrifying autonomy.

Discover how this humble tube—often ignored in grand war narratives—became the grandfather of all modern mortars and gave ordinary troops unprecedented destructive power in the trenches of WW1.

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