the next world war.
In World War II, the Germans took up where they left off and produced the biggest and most powerful gun in all history. The engineers at Krupp, remembering their success against the Belgian forts, began work on two guns that were to blast through France’s Maginot Line. By the time the first was finished, in 1942, the German Army had already flanked the Maginot Line and France had surrendered. The new gun, named Dora, was rushed to the Eastern Front, where the fortress city of Sevastapol was holding out in the Crimea. Marshal Erich von Manstein, the German commander in that sector, called it “a miracle of technical achievement. The barrel must have been 90 feet long and the carriage as high as a two story house.”
It had a bore of 800 mm (31.5 inches), almost twice that of Big Bertha’s 420 mm. Dora was a gun, not, like Big Bertha, a howitzer. It was capable of long-range, high velocity fire as well as high trajectory bombardment. It could fire five-ton high explosive shells at targets 29 miles away. To penetrate armor and concrete, it used a heavier shell — 7.1 tons — that had a range of only 23 miles.
To propel each of these projectiles, Dora used 1 3/4 tons of powder. Using high-angle fire against the forts of Sevastopol, Dora sent these enormous shells into outer space, from which they fell on the target with enormous velocity. One shot from Dora penetrated 100 feet of earth and rock to blow up a powder magazine. German tests showed that Dora’s armor piercing shells could penetrate 5 feet of armor plate at 23 miles.
After pulverizing the Russian forts, Dora was disassembled and sent back to Germany. On June 22, 1942, Dora was renamed Gustav to make Allied intelligence believe Germany now had the second super gun in service. Actually, the would-be Gustav was never completed. While Dora/Gustav was waiting for its next assignment, the Krupp engineers were designing new ammunition. One shell was a dart-shaped discarding-sabot, “light weight” shell of only 2,200 pounds.
It was to have a range of 90 to 100 miles and allow Dora to bombard England. A second, rocket-assisted shell would have a range of 118 miles. Neither were ever used.
Dora/Gustav’s last assignment was to bombard Warsaw, where the Polish underground rose up against the Germans as the Red Army was approaching.
The Soviets stopped their advance to let the Germans destroy Warsaw and all the restless elements in it so they wouldn’t trouble the Red Army when it occupied Poland. Then the Russians captured the biggest of all big guns.
Dora had been joined at the siege of Sevastopol by two other monster guns.
Germany built six 600 mm (23.6 inch) mortars of the Karl class, the largest self-propelled artillery pieces ever made. There were six of these cannons, a class that took its name from the first one built. The two at Sevastopol were Eva and Thor, presumably named after Hitler’s mistress, Eva Braun, and a pagan god.
“Self-propelled” is used loosely — they could travel three miles per hour on level ground for a short distance. For traveling longer distances, Karl-class mortars were slung between two custom-built railroad cars. Each gun had a crew of 109 men.
Although Dora/Gustav never bombarded England, another gun did. Krupp built a 210 mm weapon that looked like a slightly modernized version of the Paris gun called Kanone 12. Located in northern France, it fired shells into the county of Kent in southern England.
Germany did not have a complete monopoly on outsized artillery. The United States fielded the biggest-bore gun of the war. Called Little David, it was intended to blast through Germany’s Westwall. (Westwall was what the Allies called the Siegfried Line. The Siegfried Line was actually the name of a World War I fortification that the Allies called the Hindenburg Line.) But, like Dora, when Little David was ready to go into action, the enemy line had already been breached.
Little David began as a device to test aerial bombs. The U.S. Army ordnance people wanted to drop the bombs on a small target, but no aircraft could reliably hit such a target. So they built a mortar with a 36 inch bore (914 mm) that could lift the bombs high in the air and drop them on the target. Then somebody decided this would be just the thing to destroy German forts.
Little David weighed 60 tons. It sat in a steel base 18 feet long, 9 feet wide, and 10 feet high that had been installed in a pit. Its barrel was 22 feet long and was installed and removed with the aid of six hydraulic jacks. It was loaded from the muzzle. In place of a breech was a solid steel arc with teeth that fitted the cog wheel used for elevation. To load, the gunners lowered the barrel until it was almost horizontal. It took between 136 and 216 pounds of powder to propel its 3,650-pound shell. The shell’s driving band was engraved to fit the rifling. Machinery lifted the shell from a truck and inserted in the barrel. It took 25 seconds for the shell to slide down the barrel. Then the barrel was lifted to the proper elevation and a gunner fired the propelling charge with a percussion cap.
Little David would have undoubtedly smashed any fortification unfortunate enough to be its target. But alas, its gunners never fired a shot in anger.
Dora/Gustav was undoubtedly better at pounding fortifications than any other weapon. It could put heavier armor-piercing projectiles on a target more accurately than any bombing plane of the time. Its shells were heavier than almost any aerial bomb in the war, and they arrived with a velocity no free falling bomb could achieve and with far more velocity than a dive bomber could give its missile. But the big gun had to be disassembled with special heavy machinery to move any distance. For limited movement around its firing area, it needed four parallel railroad tracks for its 80 railroad wheels to roll on. To operate, maintain, and protect the gun, 4,120 troops commanded by a major general were needed.
Marshal von Manstein, who praised Dora, also explained why such guns were always a rarity and now, with guided bombs, rocket-assisted bombs, rocket and jet missiles guided by satellite, are obsolete.
“The effectiveness of the cannon bore no real relation to all the effort and expense that had gone into making it,” he said.
The super gun, like the submachine gun and the mass paratrooper attack, is one of those military techniques that were born in the first world war, reached a peak in the second and became obsolete before the end of the Cold War. The last person to be interested in super guns was Saddam Hussein, in the 1980s.
Any military method espoused by that egotistical military moron was sure to be useless.
Chapter 32
Winged Victory: The Airplane
In August, 1914, the First German Army of General Alexander von Kluck had turned south, trying to envelop the British and French armies facing the rest of the German forces. The move exposed von Kluck’s right flank to attack by the substantial garrison of Paris. A British reconnaissance pilot, chugging over the front in flimsy wood- and-canvas aircraft, noticed the change of front and notified his superiors.
The French attacked the German right flank. Lord Kitchener, the British commander-in chief, ordered Sir John French, the British field commander, to attack, too, but Sir John moved as if he were wearing lead shoes. Kluck’s troops, facing the French flank attack, became separated from the other German armies.
John French was finally induced to move, and the British marched for the gap in the German lines. A German reconnaissance pilot, flying in another glorified box kite, noticed the enemy columns heading for the gap. He notified his superiors. The German Great General Staff ordered all field armies to withdraw to a defensible position.
The Battle of the Marne, almost a non-battle, but one of the decisive battles of the world, was over. The key people were a couple of airmen in machines that few sane people today would consider getting into.
Only 11 years before this, Orville Wright made the world’s first manned, controlled flight. It lasted just 12 seconds. Ninety years later, airplanes had established themselves as the most important of all military weapons. They had replaced the battleship’s guns as the main weapon of naval warfare. They took over much of the role of artillery in World War II, making possible the Blitzkrieg. They flattened cities. From Orville Wright’s altitude of a few feet and speed of about 7 miles per hour, improvements in planes over the years let the U.S. Air Force’s SR-71 “Blackbird” travel 2,189 miles per hour at an altitude of 86,000 feet — more than 16 miles above the earth’s
