Artillery is an important part of the army and the main firepower assault force, with powerful firepower, long range, good accuracy and high mobility capabilities, can carry out fire strikes on ground and surface targets, is one of the most important weapons of destruction in modern warfare. Artillery can be used to support and cover infantry and armored combat operations, but can also be used to coordinate with other classes and services, or to fight with fire independently. Artillery was known as the "God of War" in both World War I and World War II. Their caliber is generally from 20 mm to 200 mm, but there have been some monsters in the artillery in actual combat, their size is huge, the caliber is amazing, the power is even more amazing, which is the next to introduce you to the most representative super heavy railgun of the super large artillery - Gustav.
During the war, the German army in World War II was equipped with a super heavy railway gun with a caliber of up to 800 mm, and the "Gustav" was also the largest caliber artillery in the history of war, and it was also the largest and heaviest land artillery built by humans, and it was also the artillery with the largest shell weight. The Gustav super heavy railroad gun is one of the most incredible weapons wonders of the industrial age.
The Design of the Gustav Super Heavy Railroad Gun dates back to the mid-1930s, and the direct trigger was the Maginot Line, which was built by France on the Franco-German border, which was said to be the world's strongest defense project at that time. After careful study, the German military leadership believed that it was impossible for the German army to break the Maginot Line with the existing equipment of the German army, and it was necessary to use large-caliber train guns. In 1934, the German Army General Command commissioned Krupp to design a heavy siege gun that was powerful enough to destroy a fortress on the Maginot Line, requiring the ability to fire outside the range of the French artillery, the power of the shell to penetrate 7 meters of reinforced concrete or 1 meter thick armored steel plate, and also needed to be fired from a distance where the enemy artillery could not return fire. After 7 years of hard work, Krupp finally succeeded in researching the most terrible train gun in human history, the "Gustav" train gun, and the head of Krupp, Alfred Krupp, decided to name the first gun "Gustav" after his father, and the second gun after the wife of the chief designer Miller.
In the state of combat, the "Gustav" railway gun weighs 1350 tons, is 47.3 meters long, 7.1 meters wide, 11.6 meters high, has a barrel length of 32.5 meters, a pipe diameter of 40.6 times, a maximum elevation angle of 48 degrees, and fires 1 shell in an average of 30 to 45 minutes, which can fire 7.1 tons of armor-piercing shells, with a maximum effective range of 38 kilometers; it can also fire 4.8 tons of high-explosive shells, with a maximum effective range of 47,000 meters. Due to the large size and weight of the "Gustav" train guns, ordinary trains cannot be moved. So the gun mount of the Gustav railway gun was specially designed, with a total of 80 wheels, running on two parallel rails. In order to tow the cannon, Krupp also specially designed two giant locomotives with a power of 1050 horsepower and a speed of 60 kilometers per hour.
But because of the long time of development, the battle against France was over, and by the time Gustav entered service, the tracks of German tanks had already run over all of Europe, and France had raised its hand and surrendered more than a year earlier. Thus, in the entire second world war, its real practical use was only once, in June 1942 during the German siege of the Soviet fortress of Sevastopol.
The Fortress of Sevastopol was a rectangular strip of land that stretched 360 km around the city, and the Soviets built 12 permanent fortress groups in equal configuration in this area, all wrapped in armor plates 200 to 300 mm thick, with 3 layers of permanent fortifications under the turret, each layer of permanent concrete 3000 to 4000 mm thick. The entire fortress is surrounded by permanent concrete armor plates, connected by underground passages and small railways, and numerous bunkers are set up throughout the mountainous part. After a long period of Soviet repairs, the whole of Sevastopol formed an incomparably strong fortress group, whose defensive capabilities were no less powerful than the Maginot Line, and theoretically a fortress that could never be breached from the front.
In the history of human warfare for decades, when attacking fortresses, the attacking side will always concentrate as much as possible on using high-power siege weapons to destroy the fortifications, force the enemy to surrender, or open a gap for the attacking forces to attack. The Germans also decided to adopt this traditional model in the face of the indestructible Sevastopol.
On June 5, 1942, the final German offensive against the fortress of Sevastopol began with an overwhelming artillery attack, because the fortress of Sevastopol was extremely strong, and ordinary artillery could not effectively damage it, so the German army sent the "Gustav" cannon to the front. Because the weight of the Gustav cannon was too large, it was broken down into several parts and transported by three trains to the Sevastopol front. There are 25 carriages alone, and the total length of the trains reaches more than one kilometer. As the most terrible artillery piece ever built, the Gustav was also extremely complex to use and maintain, first of all, its assembly was taken care of by a 300-man engineer battalion, and the installation work alone took a full three weeks. And in order to ensure that the installation work can be carried out safely, more than 2,000 German troops were also mobilized to take charge of the nearby vigilance work. Finally on 7 June, Gustav's cannons began shelling Sevastopol. It can be said that the horror of Gustav's cannon was not even thought of by his designers. Gustav fired at a very slow rate, and each shell fired was accompanied by a great destructive force. It fired 48 rounds back and forth, destroying 5 fortress groups in Sevastopol. After firing 9 rounds in a row, one of the shells penetrated 30 metres above the main ammunition depot in Sevastopol, detonating it. With the help of Gustav's cannon, the third German offensive took only 1 month to destroy all the fortresses, capture the city, capture 100,000 Soviet troops, and completely occupy the southern part of the Soviet Union. After this, the Germans gradually lost the initiative on the battlefield, and Gustav never participated in the battle again.
The war came to an end in April 1945, and the fate of Gustav ended with the end of World War II. The Germans did not want the cannon to fall into the hands of the enemy, completely destroying it, and the destroyed parts were discarded everywhere. On April 22, 1945, the U.S. military found part of the remains of Gustav in the woods 50 kilometers south of Chemnitz, and although it had become scrap iron, the huge size of the parts still stunned the Allied technicians who came to investigate. Another sister cannon, "Dora", also ended similarly to "Gustav". Today, only a few 800 mm heavy artillery shells are displayed in museums in Britain, Poland and other places, which is the only remain of the king of the former king of ten thousand guns.