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Schwerer Gustav
Model of the Dora
Type
Railway gun
Place of origin
Nazi Germany
Service history
In service
1941–1945
Used by
Wehrmacht
Wars
World War II
Production history
Designer
Krupp
Designed
1937
Manufacturer
Krupp
Unit cost
7 million ℛ︁ℳ︁
Produced
1941
No. built
2
Specifications
Mass
1,350 tonnes (1,490 short tons; 1,330 long tons)
Length
47.3 metres (155 ft 2 in)
Barrel length
32.5 metres (106 ft 8 in) L/40.6
Width
7.1 metres (23 ft 4 in)
Height
11.6 metres (38 ft 1 in)
Diameter
300 m
Crew
250 to assemble the gun in 3 days (54 hours), 2,500 to lay track and dig embankments. 2 flak battalions to protect the gun from air attack.
Schwerer Gustav (English: Heavy Gustav) was a German 80-centimetre (31.5 in) railway gun. It was developed in the late 1930s by Krupp in Rügenwalde as siege artillery for the explicit purpose of destroying the main forts of the French Maginot Line, the strongest fortifications in existence at the time. The fully assembled gun weighed nearly 1,350 tonnes (1,490 short tons), and could fire shells weighing 7 t (7.7 short tons) to a range of 47 km (29 mi).[1]
The gun was designed in preparation for the Battle of France, but was not ready for action when that battle began, and in any case the Wehrmacht's Blitzkrieg offensive through Belgium rapidly outflanked and isolated the Maginot Line's static defences, which were then besieged with more conventional heavy guns until French capitulation.[2] Gustav was later deployed in the Soviet Union during the Battle of Sevastopol, part of Operation Barbarossa, where, among other things, it destroyed a munitions depot located roughly 30 m (98 ft) below sea level.[3] The gun was moved to Leningrad, and may have been intended to be used in the Warsaw Uprising like other German heavy siege pieces, but the uprising was crushed before it could be prepared to fire. Gustav was destroyed by the Germans near the end of the war in 1945 to avoid capture by the Soviet Red Army.[4]
Schwerer Gustav was the largest-calibre rifled weapon ever used in combat, and in terms of overall weight, the heaviest mobile artillery piece ever built. It fired the heaviest shells of any artillery piece.[5] It was surpassed in calibre only by the unused British Mallet's Mortar and the American Little David bomb-testing mortar—both at 36 inches (91.5 cm)—but was the only one of the three to be used in combat.
^Zimmer, Gary. "1500-ton Self-Propelled 80m Gun".
^Mary, Jean-Yves (2003). Hommes et ouvrages de la Ligne Maginot (in French). Vol. 3. Alain Hohnadel, Jacques Sicard. Paris: Histoire & collections. ISBN 2-913903-88-6. OCLC 45246733.
^Taube: Eisenbahngeschütz DORA. p.92
^McFadden, Christopher (25 March 2017). "Hitler's Doomed Schwerer Gustav: Largest Gun Mankind Has Ever Built". interestingengineering.com. Retrieved 14 December 2023.
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