Submarines and their Weapons - Aircraft of World War II

CHAPTER NINE
Artillery
By the end of the nineteenth century, artillery pieces had already reached a very high
standard of sophistication, being able to hit small targets at ranges of 25km
(15.5 miles) and more. There was really very little left for gunmakers to do save to
make them bigger and yet bigger still, and that is just what the likes of Krupp, long
recognised as masters in the field, did.
Germany had some success with ultra-long-range
artillery during World War I, notably with the socalled
'Paris Gun'. The Imperial German Navy, which
constructed and manned them, called them the
'Kaiser Wilhelm Geschütz', and they were used sporadically
from March to July 1918 during the massive
and so nearly effective German counter-attack in
Picardy to bombard the French capital from the
region north of Soissons over 100km (60 miles) away.
They were 38cm (15in) naval guns, as mounted
aboard the battleships of the day, sleeved down to
21cm (8.25in) with liners whose rifling consisted of
Above: The K5 (E), a 28cm gun mounted on a railway car,
was perhaps the most successful of the 'superguns'.
Left: This 38cm gun, its barrel 45 calibres long, was
derived from a weapon designed for battleships.
deep grooves within which lugs on the shell located,
a method first adopted in the early days of the development
of the rifled gun in the 1840s. This same
method was to be employed in the very long-range
artillery pieces developed in Germany for use in
World War II - the K5 battlefield weapons and the
'strategic' K12, built to fire on England from the
French coast - though the shells of these guns were
rather more sophisticated. Heavily over-charged, they
projected their shell into the stratosphere where,
meeting little air resistance, it could extend its trajectory
considerably. The use of a far heavier charge than
the gun had ever been designed to employ soon
caused the barrel to wear out - it seems that 25cm
(lOin) of rifling was destroyed with every round fired,
and that a barrel's life was just 50 rounds in consequence
- and it then had to be rebored or relined. The
Paris Guns, with three mountings and seven barrels,
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