The Schwerer Gustav, The Largest Weapon Ever Made
Explaining The Schwerer Gustav, The Behemoth Nazi Railgun, And How It Was Destroyed
The Schwerer Gustav in action
In the immortal words of American chemist, Walter Hartwell White, “In World War II, the Germans had an artillery piece – it’s the biggest in the world – called the Gustav Gun, and it weighed a thousand tons. And the Gustav was capable of firing a seven-ton shell and hitting a target, accurately, twenty-three miles away. I mean, you could drop bombs on it every day for a month without ever disabling it.”
The Schwerer Gustav gun was the largest caliber rifled weapon ever used in combat. This behemoth was made by Nazi Germany in the late 1930s as a siege artillery meant to destroy the main forts in the French Maginot Line, the strongest fortifications in existence at the time. It took 250 men 54 hours to assemble it and 2500 more to lay down the tracks for this monster of an artillery piece. It weighed in at 1350 tons (almost 3 million pounds) and was 47.3 meters long (over 155 feet long) with a barrel length of 32.5 meters (107 feet). It stood at 11.6 meters (38 feet) tall, had a caliber of 80 centimeters (31 inches), and had a rate of fire of 1 round every 30 to 45 minutes, typically around 14 a day. The rounds of the Gustav gun hit velocities of 820 meters per second (just short of 2700 feet), almost a thousand feet per second faster than the average rifle bullet. These rounds were high explosives, but the Gustav gun also had armor piercing rounds that reached velocities of 720 meters per second (around 2400 feet per second). The maximum range of this gargantuan weapon was around 47000 meters (for the high explosive round, 38000 meters for the armor piercing round).
This gun, despite being larger than life, was disassembled and stored in Chemnitz, Germany in 1943. It stayed out of commission until 1945, when it was destroyed by German troops before US soldiers captured the area, preventing this weapon from being used ever again. During the entirety of its existence, the Schwerer Gustav only shot two rounds before its eventual destruction.
RELATED STORIES:
- https://www.worldwar2facts.org/gustav-gun.html
- https://oldmachinepress.com/2017/05/20/krupp-80-cm-schwerer-gustav-dora-railway-gun
- https://www.sandboxx.us/blog/the-nazi-schwerer-gustav-rail-gun-big-bang-for-the-buck-or-small-spark-for-the-reichsmark/
- https://veteranlife.com/military-history/schwerer-gustav/
- https://heavymachinery.pl/gustav-railway-gun.php
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