The biggest guns ever built

The biggest gun ever built was the Gustav gun or Schwerer Gustav. The gun  was built in Essen, Germany in 1941 by the Friedrich Krupp A.G. The firm has a tradition of naming their heavy cannon production with the names of their family members. Giving the name "Gustav" for the cannon was taken from the name of the head of Krupp family - Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach.

The image show that scale of the cannon's crew seen so small compared to the gun. (Picture from: EuroWar)

As one of strategic weaponary at that time, so the manufacturing orders of the Gustav gun are directly issued by Adolf Hitler with the purpose of crushing Maginot Line forts that protecting the French frontier. To achieve these objectives, the Krupp designed a giant railway gun which has a 1,344 tons of weighs  with a total height of 11.58 m (38 ft). The other dimensions included about 47.24 m (155 ft) in length and a width of around 7.01 m (23 ft), with a barrel length of 32.61 m (107 ft) that's need around 2,500 workers were employed for laying its tracks and almost two battalions were guarding the gun all the time against enemy air attack. The gun could fire one round in every 30-40 minutes that served by 500 crew and commanded by a major-general.

Gustav gun. (Picture from:
  WW2Incolor)

The gun was developed with a caliper of either 70 cm (27.56 inch), 80 cm (31.5 inch), or 1 m (39.37 inch), and there are two types of projectiles were fired using a 1.36 ton (3,000 lb) charge of smokeless powder and 4.8 ton (10,584 lb) high explosive (HE) shell with 7.5 ton (16,540 lb) concrete-piercing projectile.

Craters from the HE shells that measured 30 ft (9.14 m) of width and 30 ft deep while the concrete piercing projectile proved capable of penetrating 264 ft (80,47 m) of reinforced concrete before exploding! Maximum range was 23 miles (37.01 km) with HE shells and 29 miles (46.67 km) with concrete piercing projectiles. Its muzzle velocity (MV) was approximately 820 m/s (2,700 ft/s).

An 80 cm shell compared to a Soviet tank.
(Picture from: EuroWar)

A total of three units of cannon that ordered to be built in 1939. Alfried Krupp personally give the first gun to Hitler and Albert Speer (Minister of Armaments and War Production) after successfully through a series of tests in the Proving Ground Hugenwald in the spring of 1941. In keeping with company tradition, Krupp refrained from charging for the first gun. As for the second gun (named Dora after the chief engineer's wife) was sold for 7 million Reichsmark.

At the time France fell to Germany in 1940, the Gustav gun is still in the production stage. So after the cannon finished, Hitler starting sought a new target for it. The initial plan was to use the Gustav gun against the British fortress in Gibraltar, the plan was rejected after General Franco refused give a permission to fire the gun from Spanish soil.

At the April 1942 the Gustav gun mounted outside the heavily guarded port city of Sevastopol in the Soviet Union. After receiving an onslaught of the Gustav and other heavy artillery, Fort Stalin, Lenin and Maxim Gorki shattered and fell. Reportedly, the Gustav was able to fire shells into Severnaya Bay, through the water, through almost 30.48 m (100 ft) of seabed and penetrated into the Soviet's arsenal that protected by a thickness of 30 feet of the invulnerable concrete wall. The Gustav gun was firing about 300 rounds during the siege wearing out the original barrel in the process.

A model of Dora, the second Gustav gun produced 
during World War 2. (Picture from: EuroWar)

The second gun, Dora was set in the west of Stalingrad in mid-August but hurriedly withdrawn in September to avoid capture. In 1944, the Gustav gun next appeared in the outside Warsaw, Poland, where it fired 30 rounds into Warsaw Ghetto.

Finally, the Dora gun was blown up by German engineers in April 1945 near Oberlichtnau, Germany, to avoid capture by the Russian Army. While the unfinished third gun was destroyed by British Army when they conquered Essen. While the Gustav gun captured intact by the U.S. Army near Metzendorf, Germany, in June 1945 and be destroyed shortly after that. Besides of these three guns, German's were actually plans to make a rail gun firing rocket projectiles and another gun that weighed 1,500 tons, but these designs never left the drawing board or were cancelled before any real progress could occur.

Although the legends of these guns are hidden in the Nazi history and now only its models and preserved shells exist in the museums, no one can deny the magnitude of expertise behind the weapon wonder. Built at a time when every country was trying to outdo each other, with acquiring the latest and most destructive artillery in the history of humankind, the Gustav gun was a vista of pure envy of the enemies of the Nazi Germany in WW2. *** [EKA | FROM VARIOUS SOURCES | EUROWAR | WW2INCOLOR | ]

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