Big Bertha and Her Cousins: The Super Siege Guns

^{National Archives from War Dept.}

^{The French army’s largest gun, caliber 320 mm (12.6 inches) fires on German positions in 1914.}

Belgium, sandwiched between France and Germany, knew it occupied dangerous real estate. Its territory had been a battleground since Roman times, and now it occupied the space between two large and unfriendly powers – unfriendly to each other, that is, and oblivious to the rights of small neutrals. Of the two, the German Empire, born in 1870 and pursuing an aggressive foreign policy ever since, seemed the greatest danger. The kaiser had been bullying old King Leopold II and his nephew, King Albert I. “You will be either with us or against us,” he told old Leopold. A German officer told Albert’s military attache in 1913 that war was inevitable and that it was “imperative for the weak to side with the strong.”

To discourage an invasion, the Belgians built what some authorities said were the strongest forts in Europe around such vulnerable cities as Liege and Namur. The forts circled each city and were about 2 or 3 miles apart. They were mostly underground, with armor cupolas that could be raised above the surface to fire. Each fort was surrounded by a triangular ditch 30 feet deep. Above each fort was a revolving searchlight that could be lowered beneath the surface. The ring of forts at each city had some 400 guns, not counting the numerous machine guns. And hidden by the turf that covered the forts were thick walls and ceilings of concrete. They were guaranteed to withstand anything that could be hurled from a 210 mm (8.4 inch) gun. The 210 mm was the heaviest in any army, and when the forts were built – between 1888 and 1892 – it was believed to be the heaviest gun that could be used. Years of experience had shown soldiers that there was a practical limit to how much weight horses could pull.

Back then, soldiers had not thought much about the limits of internal combustion engines.

At first, the forts at Liege did hold up the Germans. A staff officer named Erich Ludendorff went up to the front to reconnoiter, discovered an undefended gap in the Belgian forces surrounding Liege, and led German troops into the city. Ludendorff captured the city – the first step on a path that would lead to his becoming German commander‑in‑chief. But the forts were still in Belgian hands.

But Germany had an answer. The Skoda plant of its ally, Austria‑Hungary, had developed a 305 mm (12.2 inch) howitzer that could be disassembled into three pieces and towed by gasoline‑powered tractors. When they arrived at their destination, they could be reassembled and ready to fire in 40 minutes.

The Austrians loaned several of these guns to Germany. Meanwhile, Krupp, Germany’s premier gun‑maker, had been developing a true monster – 420 mm (16.8 inch) howitzer. The gun, nicknamed Big Bertha after the wife of Krupp’s proprietor, was hardly as mobile as the Skoda gun. The first version had to be moved by rail, and tracks had to be laid to its firing position. Krupp’s people worked frantically to develop a version that could be towed over roads. On August 12, 1914, nine days after German troops confront Liege, the first Big Bertha arrived. The bombardment of the Belgian forts by the 305 mm Skodas and the 420 mm Krupp began. The huge guns pounded the forts to pieces. By August 16, they had all the forts. The Germans then moved their monster guns to Namur and destroyed those forts.

The Skoda mortars enjoyed equal success on the Eastern Front, where they pulverized Russian‑held forts and field fortifications. On the Western Front, though, the super guns made no other noteworthy appearance until 1918. At that time, March 23, 1918, a 210 mm shell burst in the middle of Paris.

Ludendorff’s last offensive, intended to end the war before the United States could land a substantial number of troops, had begun on March 21, but the Germans were far from Paris. That shell burst and the many that followed it were supposedly intended to break the French morale. Actually, it seems more likely that it was a project undertaken by German artillery experts to see if it could be done. Officially dubbed Wilhelm Geschutz or William’s gun, the “Paris gun,” also called “Long Max,” was the most complex piece of ordnance ever designed up to that time. It was firing on Paris from 74 miles away – about three times as far as the largest conventional naval gun, a 16 inch rifle, could shoot.

To build it, the German engineers took the barrel of a 381 mm (15 inch) naval gun, 55 feet, 10 inches long, reamed it out and inserted a 210 mm tube. That second barrel increased the length of the gun by 36 feet, 11 inches, making the finished barrel almost 93 feet long. To that, they added an unrifled tube to the end of the gun, making the whole assembly 112 feet long. It weighed 138 tons.

To take advantage of this enormous length, the German ballisticians devised a special slow‑burning smokeless powder. This was packed into a chamber 15 feet, five inches long. The heat generated by this giant powder charge and the tremendous velocity of the shell, would wear out the barrel rapidly. The gun would have to be rebored every 65 rounds. The weight of each shell, from the first to the 65th was altered to make up for the loss in velocity and accuracy.

The long, long barrel was braced with a cable truss to keep it from sagging.

To move it, the gun was disassembled as far a possible, loaded on special railroad cars, and hauled to its firing position, a spot in the forest to which track had been laid. There were at least two of these guns, each emplaced on a massive concrete foundation. At 7:15 a.m., the Germans fired the first shell.

Three minutes later, the shell landed in Paris. At that range, the guns needed a target as big as a city. The rotation of the earth, air currents, and even air temperatures at various heights up to an altitude of 23 miles had to be considered. “William’s Guns” kept firing from March 23rd until August 9th. They fired 367 shells and killed 256 people, 90 of them when a single shell fell into a crowded church on Good Friday. As a weapon, the Paris guns were useless, wasteful, and cruel. They did, however, help develop techniques that would be used on other giant guns in 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.