2015 $3.25 Sir Winfred Stokes (WWI)

This mint souvenir sheet of five $3.25 stamps was issued by Grenada in 2015 as part of a WWI Centennial series dedicated to the Stokes Mortar. The five stamps depict Sir Wilfred Stokes himself, soldiers operating the mortar in the trenches, King George V inspecting the weapon, and troops loading and firing the mortar in battlefield conditions. The selvage panels surrounding the stamps include historical text explaining the mortar's weight, crew, range, and construction, making the sheet as informative as it is visually rich. The sheet number 1019 appears in the lower right corner.

Sir Frederick Wilfred Scott Stokes was a civil engineer from Liverpool who served as managing director of Ransomes and Rapier, a mechanical engineering firm in Ipswich. He was not a military man, but when the stalemate of trench warfare made clear that British soldiers needed a portable weapon capable of lobbing shells into enemy trenches, he went to work. His design — a simple smoothbore steel tube mounted on a bipod with a base plate — could be broken into three sections and carried by a small crew. When a bomb was dropped into the tube, a primer at its base struck a firing pin and launched it toward the target. The mortar weighed about 108 pounds assembled, had a range of around 800 yards, and could fire up to ten rounds per minute. Stokes received a knighthood in 1917 for the invention.

The Stokes Mortar was first used in combat at the Battle of Loos in 1915, initially to fire smoke shells. Though it was rejected by the War Office at first, the intervention of David Lloyd George — then Minister of Munitions — pushed it into production. It was soon adopted by the British, Commonwealth, and American armies and became one of the most important infantry support weapons of the war. Its basic design was so sound that it remained the template for light mortars used in World War II and beyond.