The Paris Guns of World War One
These monsters bombarded the city from 70 miles away.
The three original super guns with which the Imperial German army bombarded Paris from the woods of Crepy from March 1918 to the end of World War I.
On March 23 at 7:20 am in the area of the Quai de Seine in Paris a sudden thump of an explosion blew in windows and rocked buildings. Less than an hour later a second mysterious explosion occurred a mile away that killed eight Parisian civilians and wounded a dozen more. Paris was under artillery fire for the first time in the 20th Century.
The Paris Gun (s), also known as the Wilhelm Geschuetz (after Kaiser Wilhelm II), it is frequently confused with its immediate predecessor, the Lange Max (Long Max) and also with the Big Berthas - giant howitzers used by the Germans to smash the Belgian frontier fortresses, notably that at Liege in 1914. The guns were built, operated, and later thought destroyed in near total secrecy.
The Paris Guns were a weapon like the world has never seen before or since. The guns were built by the Krupps works to a design by Professor Eberhardt, an early researcher into space travel. The guns were reworked from new German navy 15inch guns meant for battleships. A sleeved insert was installed that reduced the huge rifles diameter down to 8.26 inches. After 65 shells had been fired, each of progressively larger caliber to allow for wear, the barrel was rebored to a caliber of 240 mm They were designed to hurl a 94-kg (228 pound) shell to a range of 130 km and a maximum altitude of 40 km - the greatest height reached by a human-made object until the V-2 rocket flights in 1942. At the start of its 170-second trajectory, each shell from the Paris Gun reached a speed of 1,600 km/s (almost five times the speed of sound). The shell spent 3/4 of its distance in the air traveling through the vacuum of space above the atmosphere of the earth. The distance involved in the travel of the shell was so great that the rotation of the earth was substantial enough to affect trajectory calculations. Indeed it propelled the first man-made object to reach the stratosphere at 7:10 a.m. on March 23, 1918 when it was first fired. The shell stood nearly three feet tall and used a twelve foot long powder charge. The gun itself, which weighed 256 tons and had a 34 m (111 foot) long barrel. As a military weapon the gun not a great success: the explosive load was too small, the shells inaccurate, and the guns could not achieve a good enough rate of fire to be effective. They were best remembered as a psychological warfare tool.
The guns weapon crew was made up of 80 German Kriegsmarine sailors in unmarked army uniforms under the command of an admiral. They traveled on a specially equipped set of trains and were not allowed to speak to or mingle with the army troops surrounding their positions. Every time the weapons fired in anger, a specially coordinated artillery barrage of smaller guns was set off to mask the noise and blast from Allied spotters.
Only after the shell fragments had been collected was it realized that the explosion had come from a shell. French artillery experts attached to the Parisian military district headquarters believed they were fired from a Zeppelin airship for several days before they found out the truth. Aerial spotters in the Crépy-en Laon area saw the huge German guns in action. After the first shells hit, The bombardment continued for a week until good Friday March 29th when at the Church of St Gervias a shell struck during services, collapsing the roof on its parishioners killing some 88. The German bombardment stopped for one day to allow the city of Lights to bury its dead and brace for the next incoming rounds
The flaws in the weapon's experimental design became apparent in use. One of the monsters blew up while firing, killing five crewmen. The other two soon wore out and had to have their liners replaced after some 65 rounds each.
A total of 367 shells were fired, killing 256 people and wounding 620, as well as causing considerable damage to property. Twenty shells were fired on a good day. With the German emplacements only seven miles behind the front lines heavy French 15 inch railway guns soon began searching it out. While taking increasing counter battery fire, the big guns were dismantled on May 1st and moved to another firing location. From the second location they roared from 27 May until 11 June and were moved again after being located by British airplanes. The third site in July and fourth in August lasted only four days each before being discovered and taking return fire. The last location was only able to fire 14 rounds before being discovered. With the guns further use seen as impractical the worn out guns were shipped back to Germany for the remainder of the war.
The guns were taken back to Germany in August 1918 as Allied advances threatened its security. These super guns were never captured by the Allies and their continued existence was hidden. One spare mounting was captured by American troops near Chateau-Thierry, but no gun was ever found. They were claimed to be completely destroyed by the Germans after the war however this is thought by some sources as to have not occurred until as late as the end of the 1920's.
The Paris guns were an inspiration of the genius Dr Gerald Bull in his work on advanced artillery. He researched the history of the Paris Gun and published an extensive book about it in. His work on the unfinished Iraqi super gun for Saddam Hussein in the 1980's was influenced by the lessons taught him by Dr Eberhardt's huge cannon. To this day no production artillery piece has fired a shell to a greater distance.
