Kaiser Wilhelm Geschutz
The Kaiser Wilhelm Geschütz, literally the Emperor Wilhelm Gun, was an artillery piece with which the Germans bombarded Paris from March to August 1918 during WW I. It can be considered a supergun.
Also called "The Paris Gun" and "Large Max" and named in honour of the German leader Wilhelm II, it is often confused with Big Bertha, the howitzer used by the Germans against the Liège forts in 1914, and indeed the French called it by this name as well.
The German objective was for a psychological weapon to attack the morale of the Parisians; not to destroy the city itself.
The gun was designed by Professor Rausenberger for Krupp. The weapon had a 210mm calibre, with a 45m-long barrel braced along its length to prevent muzzle droop, it weighed 256 tons. It used 200kg of propellant to propel the 120kg projectile on its 170 second and 120 km trajectory to Paris.
Originally conceived as a naval weapon, the gun was manned by a crew of 80 Kriegsmarine sailors under the command of an admiral, and was surrounded by several batteries of standard army artillery to create a "noise-screen" around the big gun so that it could not be located by French and British spotters.
The projectile reached a maximum height of almost 40km, making it the first man-made object ever to reach the altitude of the stratosphere, thus virtually eliminating drag from air resistance, allowing the shell to reach super-sonic speed and achieve a phenomenal range of over 80 miles. Not until liquid-fuel ballistic missiles were developed 30 years later was this accomplishment equaled and finally surpassed. The shells were propelled at such high velocity that each successive shot wore away a considerable amount of steel from the rifle bore, and each shell was sequentially numbered according to its increasing diameter, and had to be fired in numeric order lest the projectile lodge in the bore and the gun explode. After 20 shots the entire gun barrel had to be removed and replaced with a new one.
The Paris Gun was the largest gun ever built for its time, only to be surpassed in WW2 by machines such as the Schwere Gustav or the V3 complex of Mimoyecques.
The gun was fired from the Forest of Coucy and the first shell landed at 7.18 a.m. on March 21, 1918. Only when sufficient shell fragments had been collected was it realized that the explosion had come from a shell.
A total of 367 shells were fired, killing 250 people and wounding 620, as well as causing considerable damage to property.
The gun was taken back to Germany in August 1918 as Allied advances threatened its security. The gun was never seen by the Allies; towards the end of the war it was completely destroyed by the Germans. Because of this the figures stated for the weapon's size, range and performance vary widely depending on the source - not even the number of shells fired is certain.
