November 5, 2014. The M30 howitzer was put into the service of the Red Army seventy-five years ago this fall. The howitzer, designed in 1938, was serially produced at Plant 9 (a member enterprise of Uralvagonzavod Corporation, then known as Uralmashzavod) starting from 1939.

‘M30 was used not only by the Soviet Army but also by those of many other countries, including Cuba and China. It was a witness to nearly all important wars and armed conflicts in the middle and final decades of the 20th century,’ Uralvagonzavod Corporation says.

The Soviet Government’s plan consisted in making artillery an indispensable part of the armed forces by the early forties. The 122-mm bore was decided upon as the baseline minimum for howitzer division artillery for the adversary’s field fortifications to be destroyed. The new weapon also had to be portable and maneuverable. In 1938, designer Fyodor Petrov started working on the new 122-mm howitzer in Perm, yet the state commissioned Yekaterinburg-based Uralmashzavod with the manufacture of the weapon.

The testing state was over by February 1939, so the M30 was put into the service of the Armed Forces as ‘the 122-mm howitzer of 1938 vintage’ in the fall of the same year. The Perm designers’ development was handed over to Uralmashzavod for mass production: the first 64 howitzers were to be made in the fourth quarter of 1939.