The Great Guns
Once, many years ago, giants roamed the earth. The ground trembled as they passed and when they spoke the trees bowed in subservience. Their terrible voice felled buildings in fortress cities miles away and so great and powerful were they that they were attended by thousands of men who catered to their every need. Such is a novelist’s view of the great railroad cannons of World War II. I can be forgiven the rhetoric; these were machines that will never exist again.
The idea of mounting huge guns aboard railway cars was not new. The Union army transported and fired huge siege mortars from the backs of flatcars during the Civil War while Germany dropped occasional calling cards on Paris in World War I from a railroad cannon nicknamed “Big Bertha.” Nearly every industrialized country at the beginning of the First World War had railroad guns, with some nations (the United States and Germany for example) depending on sailors to service these behemoths. It made sense; these 14-inch cannons were virtually the same guns used on battleships and the U.S. Army would not have a weapon approaching that size (excluding some coastal defense mortars) until the celebrated Atomic Cannon of the 1950s.
The advantage of railroad guns was two-fold. First, they were mobile—anywhere there were tracks or tracks could be laid (for the largest guns, double tracks), the guns could go. Second, they offered range and power. One of the largest, Gustav, fired a seven ton shell over 27,000 yards. The shell, seven times heavier than that fired by the U.S.S. Missouri, was an enormous 12-feet, 4-inches tall. The IJN Yamato, the most formidable warship ever constructed, carried 18-inch guns. Gustav was an 80-cm gun; 31.5-inch. The disadvantage with these huge guns, Gustav in particular, was the very thing that made them potent—their size. Gustav required nearly 2,000 men to install her into position and almost 500 men to go through the complicated ritual of firing her. One round every fifteen minutes was a respectable rate when you consider that so many variables had to be taken into consideration. The air temperature and velocity not only at the site of the firing but the altitude that the shell passed through, had to be calculated, and even the temperature of the charge.. Lest the gun itself become a target, she was supported by a detachment of infantry and two anti-aircraft batteries.
Gustav was conceived in 1935 when the German army, eyeing the Maginot Line, decided that it need something powerful enough to reduce the French forts to powder. What resulted was a 1,300-ton monster that could fire both High Explosive and concrete-piercing rounds. After watching tests at Krupp’s Rugenwald Proving Ground, the Fuehrer announced himself highly pleased with the great gun’s performance. He should have been. The gun’s range with high explosive rounds was 29 miles, and with the heavier concrete-piercing shells, 23 miles.
The war by-passed Gustav’s opportunities much the same way that the German army by-passed the Maginot Line. In fact, that was the problem; if you have a remarkably powerful, but incredibly complex weapon designed for a limited role, where do you use it? Hitler, coincidently, offered a solution.
(Great Guns Continued on Page 5)
