What cannon fired at Paris?
"Paris gun" in position for loading
The fountain of fire hit...
"The Last Inch", M. Sobol
Heavy guns of the First World War. Oh, these connoisseurs and, in addition, hurried ones. A material was published on VO about heavy German guns of the First World War. Big, there is something to read. And then ... "I must mention" Colossal ". Meanwhile, even a "hedgehog" should be clear that such a tool should not be mentioned, but told about it in much more detail! However, all right... impatience is the property of the devil, and it is he, and no god, who commands people here on earth. It is necessary to fight this quality, and everywhere, and in ... the same bed, and in the comments on VO, "hurry up slowly."
Such is the beginning - out of harm. And now also personal notes regarding this weapon. No, I personally didn’t stand next to him, and I didn’t see him live. It just so happened that, like many other Soviet children, I studied in a normal Soviet school (albeit a special one - with English from the second grade). And somehow we began to study the theme of the First World War. And our “teacher”, apparently, somewhere once out of the corner of her ear, decided to “make happy” us with her erudition and said that the Germans, it turns out, had such a gun “Big Bertha” - and so she fired at Paris. They swallowed everything, and I, a cretin uneducated in the sense of social communications, immediately got up and said, they say, “Marvanna”, you are wrong, “Berta” is a 420-mm howitzer that hit only 16 kilometers, and in Paris from a distance of more than a completely different gun fired at 100 km ... Oh, I shouldn’t have stuck a stick in an anthill, I don’t need to ... “How do you know? I read…” – “I read too!” “Where could you read about it?” - "In the Great Soviet Encyclopedia ..." - "So bring it to us, and we'll see what you've read there!". Well, I brought it, and right there in the lesson, and read aloud "with expression." Our poor teacher was almost paralyzed. And she began to babble that it was impossible to remember everything, that she had read about it for a long time - it was a pitiful sight, I must say. But then I had to history teach much better than the rest, well, it is clear why. However, whatever happens is for the best!
The barrel is raised, now a shot will be heard!
And now it's time for the cannon itself, which fired at Paris. Undoubtedly, it was one of the most unusual artillery pieces ever created. Moreover, it has long fascinated both military historians and lovers of everything unusual. And this gun (the guns, since there were several) is as shrouded in mystery as the "superguns" that misguided artillery genius Gerald Bull designed and built for Saddam Hussein. Perhaps it was thanks to the late Dr. Bull that many of the mysteries of the Paris cannons were solved. Although he was partly just lucky to get at his disposal the unpublished documents of the chief designer of the "Paris guns" Professor Fritz Rauzenberger. The Germans called this gun Wilhelmgeschütze ("Wilhelm's Gun", in honor of their Kaiser, but this is by no means "Big Bertha", which will be discussed separately). But although many saw it, and someone even fired from it, the lack of reliable information gave rise to and perpetuated many myths about what happened with this gun and how. Here it should be remembered that the greatest impetus to the development of such large and long-range guns was given by naval technology. Only battleships were large enough to provide mobile platforms for them, and in land warfare mainly light field guns were used, and large guns with a relatively short range were used only in sieges of fortresses. However, for a long time even naval theorists assumed only short firing ranges in combat, and the sheer size of the guns was necessitated by the need to penetrate ever thicker armor plates.
A Sound of Thunder!
Without a doubt, the main producer weapons in Europe, and therefore all over the world, there was the Krupp company from Essen. Already in 1914, they surprised the world with the infamous "Big Berta" - a 42-centimeter howitzer. This monstrous siege weapon was also the brainchild of Professor Fritz Rausenberger and was a mobile version of the 42 cm Gamma mortar, which itself was an evolution of coastal defense artillery. When fired at high angles, shells from such guns easily pierced the weakly armored decks of approaching enemy battleships, which was proved by the Japanese shelling Russian ships in Port Arthur in 1904.
To assemble such a tool, you needed a crane
Under the conditions of trench warfare, the German army began to use large long-range guns to bombard the rear of the enemy. And since the only guns capable of such work were naval ones, several 38-centimeter barrels intended for the new superdreadnoughts were mounted on land-based carriages. The staff was staffed by sailors Fleet Open Sea. Freed from the limitations of the turret, which did not allow elevation to 20 or 30 degrees, these guns were able to throw their projectiles much further than when they were on ships.
And the barrel had to rest on special supports during assembly ...
Krupp's experiments with a 35,5 cm 52,5 caliber (L52,5) gun made it possible to achieve a firing range of 49 km, which far exceeded the Navy's request for 37 km. Later, when the offensive towards the English Channel stopped, the army began to use 38-centimeter barrels in Dunkirk, Nancy and near Verdun.
Little by little the cannon is gathering...
These experiments revealed what at first glance seemed strange: maximum ranges were best achieved with a barrel elevation of 50 to 55 degrees, and not 45 degrees, as the shooting theory suggested. The reason, as Krupp's technicians quickly realized, was that as the projectile's altitude increased, the earth's atmosphere became thinner. Consequently, at high altitudes, a long-range projectile flies most of its trajectory in very rarefied air, which increases the flight range. And this discovery was of great importance.
And here it is already assembled!
Professor Rausenberger, as technical director of the Krupp firm, proposed to the German High Command an ultra-long-range system with a range of 100 km, firing 21 cm 100 kg projectiles. Hiring as an intermediary his friend Colonel Bauer, head of the High Command of the Ground Forces, he turned to Generals Hindenburg and Ludendorff with a proposal to make and use such a tool. Both generals approved the idea immediately, and Rauzenberger set to work on the cannon. Since the development of the gun was given only fourteen months, while conventional artillery systems required at least five years, Rauzenberger had to look for a solution that would allow him to complete this task as quickly as possible. And then Dr. Otto von Eberhard, Rausenberger's assistant and technical project manager, proposed a solution that seemed to Rausenberger too radical, but ... after thinking, he agreed that there was simply no other way.
High-ranking gentlemen accept the "product"
The fact is that in order to achieve the required range, it was necessary to achieve an initial projectile velocity of 1500 m / s (an experimental gun that fired at 49 km had an initial velocity of 940 m / s). This, as it turned out, could only be achieved with a very long barrel. To speed things up, Rausenberger suggested using 35 cm naval guns intended for the battleship Freya (a Mackensen-class battlecruiser), whose construction was suspended in the fall of 1916 after the lessons of Jutland showed that the battlecruiser concept was not viable. There were nine of these barrels, which was enough for nine guns. Liners 21 m long and 21 cm in caliber were inserted into them, and the chamber was, accordingly, reamed under the 28 cm caliber marine case.
One of the options for the carriage of the "Paris gun". Blocks of weights-counterweights are laid on the breech breech
Later, they were all pressed into the barrels of 38 cm guns. At this point, while development was still in its early stages, the German high command in early 1917 suddenly demanded a 20 km range increase (due to the planned withdrawal of the front line). Rausenberger's team had to recalculate, increasing the muzzle velocity to 1610 m/s to achieve the now incredible range of 120 km.
Cannon "Colossal". Drawing from the book "Artillery", A. M. Volkov. Military publishing house, 1953
But here a new problem arose. To achieve the required initial speed, it was required that the upper part of the barrel be at least 24 m, but Krupp's largest rifled machine could only process 18 m. Therefore, Rauzenberger decided to lengthen the rifled barrel with a smoothbore pipe, which was supposed to be bolted to a flange attached to the muzzle . In fact, there were even three "extension pipes" that could be changed depending on the desired maximum range: a 3-meter pipe, 6-meter and 12-meter.
The result was a trunk that had a total length of up to 34 m: one meter of the shutter behind the trunk itself; charging chamber - 3 m; The 18-meter rifled part and the 12-meter smoothbore part. Another problem was the death of the barrel, from which many heavy guns with long barrels suffered to one degree or another. British heavy naval guns, which were "wire-wrapped", were especially prone to sagging, but straightened up momentarily when fired, so their accuracy was not affected. But the unusually long and thin barrels of the Parisian guns bent under their own weight so much that they deviated by as much as 9 cm near the muzzle. I had to attach a frame with extensions to the barrel to tension the barrel and straighten it before firing. Well, in order to accurately measure the tension parameters, a telescope was fixed on the breech, and several frosted glass disks with a central crosshair were sequentially mounted on the barrel itself. With the correct tension of all cables, these crosshairs should have matched!
Such a unique weapon posed completely unique problems for its creators. For example, with such a huge projectile speed, the copper leading belt simply fell off it. This problem was solved by making shells with ready-made rifling. And since each shell noticeably wore out the barrel, and the rifling itself was erased, each subsequent shell had rifling that was different from the previous one, and, accordingly, its own number! And it was impossible to confuse the shells. This could lead to a rupture of the barrel!
The work of the obturator of the "Paris cannon". A - a projectile without an obturating copper belt, B - a projectile with an obturating copper belt. 1 - rifled part of the barrel, 2 - projectile body of reduced diameter, 3 - obturating copper belt, 4 - smooth part of the barrel. Rice. A. Sheps
Another dramatic problem was this: how to seal the barrel when the projectile passes from the rifled part to the smooth one? Conventional projectiles of that period had copper leading bands that cut into the rifling. With a strong impact of the projectile, the rifling of the barrel dug into the relatively soft copper, and when fired, following the rifling, the projectile spun, but since the copper expanded under pressure, the same belt also sealed the barrel! But when moving from the rifled to the smooth part of the barrel of the "Paris gun" in a projectile with ready-made rifling, powder gases would begin to seep through the gaps between them, which would cause a pressure drop (and, consequently, a drop in initial velocity). In addition, by creating turbulence in front of the projectile, these gases also caused it to become unstable as it exited the barrel.
It took months of experimentation with dozens of projectiles with rifling of various shapes to find a simple and elegant solution - the shells received not one, but two belts of finished rifling: one in the front of the hull and the other in the back. The diameter of the projectile body between them was somewhat less than the diameter of the internal fields of the rifling. Between them was a copper ring, which gases, breaking through the rifling in the rear, pressed into the rifling of the front part when moving into a smooth barrel and thereby excluded their harmful effects.
The barrels of the "Paris guns" wore out after about 60-70 shots, after which they were returned to the factory, where they were bored to 224 and 238 mm and supplied with a new set of shells. The firing range at the same time decreased by about 25 km. With each shot, the front of the chamber was extended by about seven centimeters, which required about ten additional kilograms of gunpowder to maintain range.
Shell and powder charge of the "Paris cannon". Next to the scale is a man of average height. Rice. A. Sheps
The photographs of the "Paris guns" that have come down to us show that two types of carriage were used. The first is a box-shaped carriage with a turntable, which allowed it to be moved along an arc to a limited extent due to the rail located at the back. But another type of installation was also known: a round turntable on a concrete support, to which the upper part was attached with bolts.
All operations, such as moving the carriage, lowering and raising the barrel, were performed manually - dozens of people controlled winches and cranes. True, the relatively light weight of the projectile resulted in the fact that the recoil was actually less than that of 38 cm guns, and the sound and shock wave on the ground also decreased due to the fact that the muzzle was very high.
Professor Rausenberger argued that by refitting as many 38 cm barrels as possible, two guns could bombard Paris continuously for a year. His team also planned to install a new barrel on their gun and use reduced drag projectiles, which would increase the range to 142 km, which would be enough to bombard London across the English Channel from Calais.
However, a small caliber and a charge of only 7 kg of explosive did not allow inflicting devastating damage on cities, so in May 1918, the Krupp company was already designing a 30,5-cm system that fired 300-kilogram shells at a distance of 170 km. But ... the November truce in the same 1918 destroyed all hopes of ever building such a weapon.
Destruction on Rue Rivoli in Paris after shelling on March 23-24, 1918
Well, what did the Germans achieve with their guns? 256 Parisians were killed and about 620 wounded, and ... that's it! The destruction of the buildings was also minimal, except for the "lucky hit" in the church of Saint-Gervais, especially compared to the aerial bombardments of the next world war.
The Germans seem to have viewed these guns as psychological or terror weapons. Combined with their offensive on the Western Front, they must have hoped to undermine Parisian morale, business and government activities. But in this, too, they failed, as the Parisians quickly became accustomed to the bombardment and were truly shocked only by the incident at Saint-Gervais.
Frame from the film "The Great Dictator". In it, its director and leading actor Charlie Chaplin ridiculed the accuracy of the fire of the "Paris guns", showing how German artillerymen aimed at Notre Dame Cathedral, but only managed to hit some barn on the outskirts of Paris
Of course, in themselves, these guns were a technological breakthrough. They arose from the highly controversial belief that the shock value of such a new weapon would cause widespread fear and panic, especially when combined with an offensive on the Western Front. It turned out that this is not true! Although given that the aerial bombardment of cities behind enemy lines at that time was still in its infancy, the designers and sponsors of this project can be forgiven for their excessive optimism. Ultimately, for all their undeniable appeal, the "Paris guns" as a strategic weapon failed. Well, the military already in the next world war had to wait for the appearance of the first ballistic missile.
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