50 Weapons That Changed Warfare Read online

  The Austrians loaned several of these guns to Germany. Meanwhile, Krupp, Germany’s premier gun-maker, had been developing a true monster — 420 mm (16.8 inch) howitzer. The gun, nicknamed Big Bertha after the wife of Krupp’s proprietor, was hardly as mobile as the Skoda gun. The first version had to be moved by rail, and tracks had to be laid to its firing position. Krupp’s people worked frantically to develop a version that could be towed over roads. On August 12, 1914, nine days after German troops confront Liege, the first Big Bertha arrived. The bombardment of the Belgian forts by the 305 mm Skodas and the 420 mm Krupp began. The huge guns pounded the forts to pieces. By August 16, they had all the forts. The Germans then moved their monster guns to Namur and destroyed those forts.

  The Skoda mortars enjoyed equal success on the Eastern Front, where they pulverized Russian-held forts and field fortifications. On the Western Front, though, the super guns made no other noteworthy appearance until 1918. At that time, March 23, 1918, a 210 mm shell burst in the middle of Paris.

  Ludendorff’s last offensive, intended to end the war before the United States could land a substantial number of troops, had begun on March 21, but the Germans were far from Paris. That shell burst and the many that followed it were supposedly intended to break the French morale. Actually, it seems more likely that it was a project undertaken by German artillery experts to see if it could be done. Officially dubbed Wilhelm Geschutz or William’s gun, the “Paris gun,” also called “Long Max,” was the most complex piece of ordnance ever designed up to that time. It was firing on Paris from 74 miles away — about three times as far as the largest conventional naval gun, a 16 inch rifle, could shoot.

  To build it, the German engineers took the barrel of a 381 mm (15 inch) naval gun, 55 feet, 10 inches long, reamed it out and inserted a 210 mm tube. That second barrel increased the length of the gun by 36 feet, 11 inches, making the finished barrel almost 93 feet long. To that, they added an unrifled tube to the end of the gun, making the whole assembly 112 feet long. It weighed 138 tons.

  To take advantage of this enormous length, the German ballisticians devised a special slow-burning smokeless powder. This was packed into a chamber 15 feet, five inches long. The heat generated by this giant powder charge and the tremendous velocity of the shell, would wear out the barrel rapidly. The gun would have to be rebored every 65 rounds. The weight of each shell, from the first to the 65th was altered to make up for the loss in velocity and accuracy.

  The long, long barrel was braced with a cable truss to keep it from sagging.

  To move it, the gun was disassembled as far a possible, loaded on special railroad cars, and hauled to its firing position, a spot in the forest to which track had been laid. There were at least two of these guns, each emplaced on a massive concrete foundation. At 7:15 a.m., the Germans fired the first shell.

  Three minutes later, the shell landed in Paris. At that range, the guns needed a target as big as a city. The rotation of the earth, air currents, and even air temperatures at various heights up to an altitude of 23 miles had to be considered. “William’s Guns” kept firing from March 23rd until August 9th. They fired 367 shells and killed 256 people, 90 of them when a single shell fell into a crowded church on Good Friday. As a weapon, the Paris guns were useless, wasteful, and cruel. They did, however, help develop techniques that would be used on other giant guns in the next world war.

  In World War II, the Germans took up where they left off and produced the biggest and most powerful gun in all history. The engineers at Krupp, remembering their success against the Belgian forts, began work on two guns that were to blast through France’s Maginot Line. By the time the first was finished, in 1942, the German Army had already flanked the Maginot Line and France had surrendered. The new gun, named Dora, was rushed to the Eastern Front, where the fortress city of Sevastapol was holding out in the Crimea. Marshal Erich von Manstein, the German commander in that sector, called it “a miracle of technical achievement. The barrel must have been 90 feet long and the carriage as high as a two story house.”

  It had a bore of 800 mm (31.5 inches), almost twice that of Big Bertha’s 420 mm. Dora was a gun, not, like Big Bertha, a howitzer. It was capable of long-range, high velocity fire as well as high trajectory bombardment. It could fire five-ton high explosive shells at targets 29 miles away. To penetrate armor and concrete, it used a heavier shell — 7.1 tons — that had a range of only 23 miles.

  To propel each of these projectiles, Dora used 1 3/4 tons of powder. Using high-angle fire against the forts of Sevastopol, Dora sent these enormous shells into outer space, from which they fell on the target with enormous velocity. One shot from Dora penetrated 100 feet of earth and rock to blow up a powder magazine. German tests showed that Dora’s armor piercing shells could penetrate 5 feet of armor plate at 23 miles.

  After pulverizing the Russian forts, Dora was disassembled and sent back to Germany. On June 22, 1942, Dora was renamed Gustav to make Allied intelligence believe Germany now had the second super gun in service. Actually, the would-be Gustav was never completed. While Dora/Gustav was waiting for its next assignment, the Krupp engineers were designing new ammunition. One shell was a dart-shaped discarding-sabot, “light weight” shell of only 2,200 pounds.

  It was to have a range of 90 to 100 miles and allow Dora to bombard England. A second, rocket-assisted shell would have a range of 118 miles. Neither were ever used.

  Dora/Gustav’s last assignment was to bombard Warsaw, where the Polish underground rose up against the Germans as the Red Army was approaching.

  The Soviets stopped their advance to let the Germans destroy Warsaw and all the restless elements in it so they wouldn’t trouble the Red Army when it occupied Poland. Then the Russians captured the biggest of all big guns.

  Dora had been joined at the siege of Sevastopol by two other monster guns.

  Germany built six 600 mm (23.6 inch) mortars of the Karl class, the largest self-propelled artillery pieces ever made. There were six of these cannons, a class that took its name from the first one built. The two at Sevastopol were Eva and Thor, presumably named after Hitler’s mistress, Eva Braun, and a pagan god.

  “Self-propelled” is used loosely — they could travel three miles per hour on level ground for a short distance. For traveling longer distances, Karl-class mortars were slung between two custom-built railroad cars. Each gun had a crew of 109 men.

  Although Dora/Gustav never bombarded England, another gun did. Krupp built a 210 mm weapon that looked like a slightly modernized version of the Paris gun called Kanone 12. Located in northern France, it fired shells into the county of Kent in southern England.

  Germany did not have a complete monopoly on outsized artillery. The United States fielded the biggest-bore gun of the war. Called Little David, it was intended to blast through Germany’s Westwall. (Westwall was what the Allies called the Siegfried Line. The Siegfried Line was actually the name of a World War I fortification that the Allies called the Hindenburg Line.) But, like Dora, when Little David was ready to go into action, the enemy line had already been breached.

  Little David began as a device to test aerial bombs. The U.S. Army ordnance people wanted to drop the bombs on a small target, but no aircraft could reliably hit such a target. So they built a mortar with a 36 inch bore (914 mm) that could lift the bombs high in the air and drop them on the target. Then somebody decided this would be just the thing to destroy German forts.

  Little David weighed 60 tons. It sat in a steel base 18 feet long, 9 feet wide, and 10 feet high that had been installed in a pit. Its barrel was 22 feet long and was installed and removed with the aid of six hydraulic jacks. It was loaded from the muzzle. In place of a breech was a solid steel arc with teeth that fitted the cog wheel used for elevation. To load, the gunners lowered the barrel until it was almost horizontal. It took between 136 and 216 pounds of powder to propel its 3,650-pound shell. The shell’s driving band was engraved to fit the rifling. Machinery lifted the shell from a
truck and inserted in the barrel. It took 25 seconds for the shell to slide down the barrel. Then the barrel was lifted to the proper elevation and a gunner fired the propelling charge with a percussion cap.

  Little David would have undoubtedly smashed any fortification unfortunate enough to be its target. But alas, its gunners never fired a shot in anger.

  Dora/Gustav was undoubtedly better at pounding fortifications than any other weapon. It could put heavier armor-piercing projectiles on a target more accurately than any bombing plane of the time. Its shells were heavier than almost any aerial bomb in the war, and they arrived with a velocity no free falling bomb could achieve and with far more velocity than a dive bomber could give its missile. But the big gun had to be disassembled with special heavy machinery to move any distance. For limited movement around its firing area, it needed four parallel railroad tracks for its 80 railroad wheels to roll on. To operate, maintain, and protect the gun, 4,120 troops commanded by a major general were needed.

  Marshal von Manstein, who praised Dora, also explained why such guns were always a rarity and now, with guided bombs, rocket-assisted bombs, rocket and jet missiles guided by satellite, are obsolete.

  “The effectiveness of the cannon bore no real relation to all the effort and expense that had gone into making it,” he said.

  The super gun, like the submachine gun and the mass paratrooper attack, is one of those military techniques that were born in the first world war, reached a peak in the second and became obsolete before the end of the Cold War. The last person to be interested in super guns was Saddam Hussein, in the 1980s.

  Any military method espoused by that egotistical military moron was sure to be useless.

  Chapter 32

  Winged Victory: The Airplane

  National Archives from Navy.

  Navy Sky Raiders from the U.S.S. Valley Forge fire 5-inch rockets at Noth Koreans in 1950.

  In August, 1914, the First German Army of General Alexander von Kluck had turned south, trying to envelop the British and French armies facing the rest of the German forces. The move exposed von Kluck’s right flank to attack by the substantial garrison of Paris. A British reconnaissance pilot, chugging over the front in flimsy wood-and-canvas aircraft, noticed the change of front and notified his superiors.

  The French attacked the German right flank. Lord Kitchener, the British commander-in chief, ordered Sir John French, the British field commander, to attack, too, but Sir John moved as if he were wearing lead shoes. Kluck’s troops, facing the French flank attack, became separated from the other German armies.

  John French was finally induced to move, and the British marched for the gap in the German lines. A German reconnaissance pilot, flying in another glorified box kite, noticed the enemy columns heading for the gap. He notified his superiors. The German Great General Staff ordered all field armies to withdraw to a defensible position.

  The Battle of the Marne, almost a non-battle, but one of the decisive battles of the world, was over. The key people were a couple of airmen in machines that few sane people today would consider getting into.

  Only 11 years before this, Orville Wright made the world’s first manned, controlled flight. It lasted just 12 seconds. Ninety years later, airplanes had established themselves as the most important of all military weapons. They had replaced the battleship’s guns as the main weapon of naval warfare. They took over much of the role of artillery in World War II, making possible the Blitzkrieg. They flattened cities. From Orville Wright’s altitude of a few feet and speed of about 7 miles per hour, improvements in planes over the years let the U.S. Air Force’s SR-71 “Blackbird” travel 2,189 miles per hour at an altitude of 86,000 feet — more than 16 miles above the earth’s surface, high enough to qualify its pilot for an astronaut badge.

  Progress after the Wright flight was rapid. The idea of flying was unbear-ably exciting to adventurous spirits. The range, speed, ceiling, and solidity of airplanes grew like Jack’s beanstalk. When the war broke out, pilots no longer had to lie on the wing, like Orville Wright, nor sit out in front of the wing on a totally exposed seat like the 1912 soldiers who made the first trial of a machine gun in an airplane. In 1914, aviators sat in cockpits.

  In the first days of the war, all belligerents ordered their pilots not to engage in air-to-air combat. Planes were for observation only. Some pilots and observers took to the air with pistols, however. (There wasn’t room in most cockpits for bigger weapons.) Some even used bricks on the end of wires to snag enemy observers’ propellers. The authorities gradually relented. They began issuing pistols with oversized magazines and wire cages to catch the ejected cartridge cases so they wouldn’t strike the pilot or a sensitive part of the plane.

  Cockpits got big enough to let observers carry rifles and shotguns. At least one plane was reported to have been downed by a shotgun. German observers took the Mexican-invented Mondragon semiautomatic rifle up, making it the first semiautomatic rifle to see combat.

  Finally, machine guns were allowed, usually manned by the observer in two-seater planes. Machine guns could fire in any direction except straight ahead for fear of striking the propeller. An interrupter gear that coordinated the gun with the propeller solved that problem. Specialized fighter planes to escort the observation craft were developed. Fighter pilots were glamorized as “knights of the air,” but theirs was a nerve-wracking and often short life, even for some of the greatest aces. They confirmed an old airman’s axiom: “There are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there are few old, bold pilots.”

  Bombing got off to a slow start in World War I, although Italian planes bombed Turkish forces in Libya during the Italo-Turkish War of 1911 to 1912. The Italian aviators carried the bombs in their cockpits and dropped them over the side by hand. The Germans used zeppelins, the dirigible airships invented by Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, to bomb Paris and London. Both sides used small bombers, some armored against ground fire, to attack enemy troops, and towards the end of the war, both sides built large bombers to bombard enemy cities.

  After the “Great War,” most aeronautical progress was made in the civil sector, spurred by air races and adventurous pilots striving to set records. A new school of military theorists sprang up, however, that greatly influenced strategic thinking about airplanes. Giulio Douhet, an Italian general, was the first of these apostles of air power. In Britain, Air Marshal Hugh Trenchard took up the cause, and in the United States, Brigadier General William “Billy” Mitchell. All held that air forces should be as independent of the other armed services as the navy was of the army. Air forces, they said, were not only the equals of the other services; they were far more essential. By bombing enemy countries, they could destroy their infrastructures, break the will of their people, and leave the armies and navies little to do.

  Perhaps strangely, Germany, so ruthless otherwise, never subscribed to this doctrine. Hermann Goering, chief of the Luftwaffe, was a former fighter pilot, an ace in von Richthofen’s circus. He saw fighter and Stuka pilots as knights, but called bomber pilots mere truck drivers. That’s one reason Germany failed so miserably in the Battle of Britain.

  When Germany became bogged down in the Soviet Union, the balance of power in the air shifted to Britain and, a bit later, Britain and the United States.

  The British began daylight raids over Germany, but objectives were out of range of their fighters. The horrendous losses they suffered from enemy fighters made them switch to night raids. But flying over a blacked-out Europe, the flyers frequently missed whole cities. Advanced electronic navigation aids partly rem-edied that trouble, but precision bombing was impossible at night. The British used “carpet bombing,” simply blanketing an area with bombs. The civilian population became as much a military target as an oil refinery or a factory.

  The United States was committed to precision bombing. It had the Norden bomb sight, which reportedly would allow a bombardier to hit a pickle barrel from 10,000 feet. It had the B-17, the “flying fort
ress” with the speed of a fighter plane and ten .50 machine guns. It sent its flying fortresses to knock out the Schweinfurt ball bearing works. The raid was a disaster. Fighters had gotten much faster since the B-17 was adopted, and the 20 mm cannons on the Messerschmitts outranged the .50 machine guns. So did the Germans’ rockets. As for the Norden bombsight, it turned out to be the most overrated military secret since the Montigny Mitrailleuse (a multi-barrel breech-loading gun that was France’s secret weapon at the beginning of the Franco-Prussian War). The U.S. Army Air Forces joined the RAF on night raids and carpet bombing. Long range fighters — the P-47 and the P-51 — arrived to drastically cut bomber losses in both day and night raids.

  There was no doubt that the bombing plane created almost unprecedented devastation. There had been nothing like it since the armies of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane. The air raids on Germany killed 600,000 people and seriously wounded 800,000 more. A single raid on Tokyo and Yokahoma killed 97,000 people, seriously injured 125,000, and burned most of both cities to the ground. Altogether, 668,000 Japanese were killed by American bombers. But in spite of Douhet, Trenchard, Mitchell, and their followers, no civilian populations panicked — not the British in the “Blitz,” not the Germans in the carpet bombing, not the Japanese in the horrendous napalm raids. Two nuclear bombs gave the Japanese Emperor a face-saving excuse to ask for peace. But that might have happened earlier if the allies had dropped their politically correct but essentially meaningless demand for “unconditional surrender.”

  As for effects on the war effort, consider this: In 1942, the British dropped 48,000 tons of bombs on Germany, and the Germans produced 36,804 heavy weapons (tanks, planes, and artillery). In 1943, the British and American dropped 207,600 tons of bombs, and the Germans produced 71,693 heavy weapons. In 1944, the Allies dropped 915,000 tons of bombs and the Germans produced 105,258 weapons.