Field Artillery or Giant Dora: Technical Mastery or Folly?

All, Just finished a new book by Ian Hogg entitled'German Artillery of World War Two' Greenhill Books, London, 1997.

The last entry in the Railway Artillery chapter is the story of the 80cm Kanon in Eisenbahnlafette 'Gustav Gerat'. The very same giant gun that crushed Sevastapol from a distance of 16km with 48 shots, requiring a crew of 1,420, specialized railway wagons, equipment and commanded by a Generalmajor.

I got to thinking how could all this exotic military technology effort been used to help the average soldat. So I did some arithmetic and came up with the following: The giant gun in field action weights 2,976,750 lbs. The standard infantry division 105mm field gun (le FH 18 10.5cm) weights 4,377 lbs. If the 'Gustav' had not been made the materials, money and effort that went into this monster gun could have made 680 divisional artillery pieces which the Whermacht so sorely needed.

Well, what do you think? Looking forward to your responses! Ken Weiler Sterling, Virginia

i just finished reading 'The Arms of Krupp' by william manchester they talk about that gun, although i seem to recall they had a different name for it. despite the reports of the guns great success, the reality of it, according to some reports, was that it wasn't nearly as effective as to be worth the effort to use it.

on the other hand, a similar gun was used on the belgian forts in WWI with great effect, each hit basically destroying an entire fort. only problem was, the movement of the gun had been delayed by three days due to a tunnel being blown up. three extremely valuable days for the french... (but alas, that is WWI and out of scope of this news group).

they probably would have been better off with lots more 105's. one problem the manchester cites is that the Krupp engineers liked to tinker with lots of new designs, rather than concentrating on building large numbers of a proven design. speer also stated in his memoirs that, in retrospect, they had far too many research projects going, hence completing none of them, when they should have picked a few and concentrated on those. good thing for the allies they didn't :O

The essential difference between 1914 and 1942 was that there were far more fixed fortifications in the WWI era than there were in WWII. By far, the biggest problem with a monster gun like the 80cm K(E) was that there were so few worthy targets to engage with it. The original design of the K(E) was postulated in response to the French fascination with fixed fortifications in their Maginot Line. The obvious idea to dig the French out of their holes was to simply blast them out with titanic pieces of artillery.

Military thought had simply outpaced concrete bunkers and big guns by 1940. As the Germans so easily proved, the best way to destroy the Maginot line was not to disassemble it laboriously with gigantic cannon

Hi Ken,

couldn't agree more with you !

The purpose of 'Gustav Gerat': to send massive explosive projectiles to destroy bunkers deep dug-in could just as well have been accomplished by the use of bombs dropped by bomber planes.

The english used for example their Lancasters most successfully in the 'Dam Buster' raid, by the 617th division. Clearly, with the use of bomber planes, a skilled and well trained crew and with good accuracy there was, and never has been, no need for these monstruous big guns.

Came to think of one thing: where goes the practical limit of the size of a gun/howitzer till it is more useful to use bomber planes for the task to deliver a huge amount of explosives to the target ?

/ Patrik

Patrik, Thanks for your interesting and thoughtful reply to my posting.

I could not agree more on your recommendation of the use of air delivered munitions to demolish fixed military emplacements. However, we must keep in mind that the Krupp company was asked by Hitler in 1935 to study the feasability of manufacturing and deployment of guns of this caliber with a view to demolishing the Maginot fortifications along the eastern French boarder. That was quite awhile before the Luftwaffe had that kind of heavy lift capacity to do the work that was done by the 80cm guns in 1942.

Thanks again for your reply and I do look forward to talking with you in the future! Ken Weiler Sterling, Virginia

Ed, Thanks for your thoughtful and detailed response to my posting. Regarding the number of 80cm guns constructed, here's what I have found.

The Krupp works assembled two complete 80cm K (E) rail guns, the 'Gustav' Gerat and the 'Dora' Gerat (named after the wife of the designer! quaint, eh?). There were components for a third under construction, but was never finished.

Ken Weiler Sterling, Virginia