Just for your information.
The largest gun ever built was the "Gustav Gun" built in
Essen, Germany in 1941 by the firm of Friedrich Krupp A.G.
Upholding a tradition of naming heavy cannon after family members,
the Gustav Gun was named after the invalid head of the Krupp family
- Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach. The strategic weapon of its
day, the Gustav Gun was built at the direct order of Adolf Hitler
for the express purpose of crushing Maginot Line forts protecting
the French frontier. To accomplish this, Krupp designed a giant
railway gun weighing 1344 tons with a bore diameter of 800 mm
(31.5") and served by a 500 man crew commanded by a
major-general.
Two types of projectiles were fired using a 3000lb. charge of
smokeless powder: a 10,584 lb. high explosive (HE) shell and a
16,540 lb. concrete-piercing projectile. Craters from the HE shells
measured 30-ft. wide and 30-ft. deep while the concrete piercing
projectile proved capable of penetrating 264-ft. of reinforced
concrete before exploding! Maximum range was 23 miles with HE
shells and 29 miles with concrete piercing projectiles. Muzzle
velocity was approximately 2700 f.p.s.
Three guns were ordered in 1939. Alfried Krupp personally hosted
Hitler and Albert Speer (Minister of Armaments) at the Hugenwald
Proving Ground during formal acceptance trials of the Gustav Gun in
the spring of 1941. In keeping with company tradition, Krupp
refrained from charging for the first gun - 7 million Deutsch Marks
were charged for the second (named Dora after the chief engineer's
wife).
France fell in 1940 without the assistance of the Gustav Gun, so
new targets were sought. Plans to use Gustav against the British
fortress of Gibraltar were scrapped after General Franco refused
permission to fire the gun from Spanish soil. Thus, April 1942
found the Gustav Gun emplaced outside the heavily fortified port
city of Sebastopol in the Soviet Union. Under fire from Gustav and
other heavy artillery, Forts Stalin, Lenin and Maxim Gorki crumbled
and fell. One round from Gustav destroyed a Russion ammunition dump
100 feet below Severnaya Bay; a near miss capsized a large ship in
the harbor. Gustav fired 300 rounds during the siege wearing out
the original barrel in the process. Dora was set up west of
Stalingrad in mid-August but hurriedly withdrawn in September to
avoid capture. Gustav next appeared outside Warsaw, Poland, where
it fired 30 rounds into Warsaw Ghetto during the 1944
uprising.
Dora was blown up by German engineers in April 1945 near
Oberlichtnau, Germany, to avoid capture by the Russian Army. The
incomplete third gun was scrapped at the factory by the British
Army when they captured Essen. Gustav was captured intact by the
U.S. Army near Metzendorf, Germany, in June 1945. Shortly after, it
was cut up for scrap thus ending the story of the Gustav Gun.
Credits: Printed in the American Rifleman, February 1998. Page
26.
