D-20 152-mm gun howitzer

152 mm towed howitzer gun. It was first introduced in the 1955, so in NATO countries it is designated M1955. The D-20 howitzer gun was developed immediately after the end of World War II at the Design Bureau-9 under the direction of Fedor Petrov; it was to replace the pre-war 152-mm ML-20 howitzer of 1937. The length of the gun barrel is 34 caliber length. The D-20 was the first 152-mm system with a semi-automatic wedge bolt with vertical wedge movement. The D-20 is in service in at least 13 countries and was produced under license in China as the Type 66 (or an upgraded version of the Type 66-1). The SAM based on it is known as Type 83 and was first introduced in the mid-1980s.

Yugoslavia also produced the M84 NORA-A howitzer developed on the basis of the D-20, and Serbia designed the 155-mm M84 NORA-A SPS Nora B-52 on a four-axle wheeled chassis FAP-2632.

In early June, during the russian-Ukrainian war, a photo of a russian D-20 howitzer with a torn barrel appeared on social media. Presumably, the charge exploded due to either too long or improper storage.

It is known from open sources that the D-20 howitzers were in service with the so-called 1st and 2nd Army Corps for some time, but in late summer and early fall of 2022, regular units of the Russian army decided to keep the D-20 and its ammunition for themselves.

In general, the D-20 took part in such combat operations:

• The War in the Persian Gulf
• The War in Afghanistan (1979-1989)
• Six-Day War (1967)
• Armed conflict in northern Iraq (2014)
• The russian-Ukrainian War