Brandt Mle 1935

The Brandt Mle 1935 was a simple and effective weapon, consisting of a smoothbore metal tube fixed to a base plate (to absorb recoil), with a lightweight bipod mount. The team of the Mle 1935 was made of five men: a leader, a firer, an artificer and two suppliers. When a mortar bomb was dropped into the tube, an impact-sensitive primer in the base of the bomb would make contact with a firing pin at the base of the tube, and detonate, igniting a gunpowder charge, which would propel the bomb out of the tube, and towards the target. HE mortar bombs fired by the weapon weighed 1.33 kilograms. A French infantry company in 1940 was allocated one Mle 1935 mortar. This weapon provided a pattern for other light mortars used during World War II. Among the best known is the U.S. 60-mm M2 mortar. Captured examples were used by the Germans as the 6 cm Granatwerfer 225(f). Romania also purchased and license-built the Mle 1935 mortar prior to and during the Second World War. The mortars were produced at the Voina Works in Brașov, with a production rate of 26 pieces per month as of October 1942. Viet Minh also locally produced the mortar 60mm Brandt MLE1935 during the First Indochina War.