pdf - WHALE

arsenal twenty-four hours a day for five clays. These were
no ordinary heavy field pieces.
Two mortar regiments - the 1st Heavy Mortar Regiment and
the 70th Mortar Regiment - as well as the 1st and 4th Mortar
Battalions, had been concentrated in front of the fortress under
the special command of Colonel Nieman - altogether 21
batteries with 576 barrels, including the batteries of the 1st
Heavy Mortar regiment with the 11- and 12 1/2 inch high
explosive and incendiary oil shells...
Even these monsters were not the largest pieces deployed
at Sevastopol. Several of the 16 1/2 inch "Big Bertha"
Krupp cannon and their old Austrian Skoda counterparts
were massed against the Russian positions, along with the
even more colossal "Karl" and "Thor" mortars, gigantic
self-propelled 24 inch mortars firing shells that weighed
over two tons.
But even "Karl" was not quite the last word in gunnery.
That last word was stationed at Bakhchisary, in the "Palace of
Gardens" of the ancient residence of the Tartar Khans, and
was called "Dora," or occasionally "Heavy Gustav." It was the
heaviest gun of the last war. Its caliber was 31 1/2 inches.
Sixty railway carriages were needed to transport the parts of
the monster. Its 107-foot barrel ejected high-explosive
projectiles of 4800 kg - i.e., nearly five tons - over a distance
of 29 miles. Or it could hurl even heavier armour-piercing
missiles, weighing seven tons, at targets nearly 24 miles away.
The missile together with its cartridge measured nearly
twenty-six feet in length. Erect that would be about (the)
height of a two-storey house....
These data are sufficient to show that here the
conventional gun had been enlarged to gigantic, almost superdimensional
scale - indeed, to a point where one might
question the economic return obtained from such a weapon.
Yet one single round from "Dora" destroyed an ammunition
dump in Severnaya Bay at Sevastopol although it was situated
100 feet below ground. 30
30 Paul Carrell, Hitler Moves East, 1941-1943 (Ballantine Books, 1971)
pp. 501-503, emphasis added. So horrendous was the bombardment from this
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