Greenhill, 2002, £ 10.95, ISBN 1-85367-510-5, 223 pgs., trade paperback

Book Review: German Secret Weapons of the Second World War

Table of Contents

List of Photographs 7

List of Line Drawings 8

Introduction 9

The V Weapons 17
Vergeltungswaffe 1 17
Reichenberg 27
Vergeltungswaffe 2 28
The A4 design 34
The High Pressure Pump 43
V-4? 51

Aircraft 52
Messerschmitt 163 52
The Luftwaffe's Viper 53
Dornier's Arrow 56
New bombers 57
Jet engines 58
Messerschmitt 262 59
Arado 234 59
The People's Fighter 60

Air-Launched Weapons 62
Recoilless guns 62
Gerat 104 and Sondergerat 113A 64
Bordwaffen 66
Air-to-ground rockets 68
Fritz-X 69
Henschel 293 72
Hs 293 variants 75
Other Henschel designs 80
Anti-ship weapons 83
Hagelkorn 85
Mistel 86
Air-to-air weapons 88
Kurt, Germany's Dambuster? 93 

Air Defence Weapons 95
Bigger and better guns 95
All wind and noise 97
Electric power 98
Anti-aircraft rockets 100
Anti-aircraft missiles 102
Enzian 110
Rheintochter 116
Feuerlilie 120

Artillery 123
The taper-bore guns 123
Gustav and Dora 127
Adam, Eve, Odin, Thor, Loki and Ziu 146
K5 Glatt; the 150km cannon 148
K12; the cross-Channel gun 152
Small shells for big guns 154
Rocket artillery 158
The Rochling shell 162
Other aspects of ammunition design 163

The Sea War 172
Torpedoes 174
New U-Boats 175
Fast attack craft 175
Midget submarines 176

Nuclear and Chemical Warfare 178
The nuclear bomb 178
Chemical warfare 183
Biological warfare 190

Appendices
1. The Special List 192
2. German Code Names 199

Index 219

Sample Artillery pages: 127-8; 145-154 (note: photos occupy pages 129-144)

Gustav and Dora

One of the myths of the 1930s which sustained the French and their allies was the inviolability of the powerful Maginot Line defences. It had its effect upon the Germans, too; their thoughts were directed towards methods of overcoming them. There are, of course, only two solutions to that sort of problem; either you go around it (as the Germans eventually did) or you go through it, and for that option you need some powerful weapons.

In 1935 the Heereswaffenamt sent a query to the Krupps; what size of weapon would be needed to defeat the fortifications of the Maginot Line in the same manner that Krupp's 42cm howitzers had defeated the fortifications of Liege in 1914? The Krupp staff did some calculation and responded with ballistic data for three possible weapons, guns of 70cm (27.5in), 80cm (31.5in) and 100cm (39.3in) calibre. And there the matter briefly rested. 

In March 1936 Adolf Hitler visited the Krupp works, and in the course of his inspection he asked the same question about defeating the Maginot Line. The same figures were given to him, and when he asked about the possible manufacture of such weapons he was told that, whilst difficult, it would not be impossible. Hitler left the matter hanging in the air, but Gustav Krupp von Bohlen and Halbach knew that, if Hitler had a weakness, it was for grandiose engineering projects, and he ordered plans to be drawn up for an 80cm gun. Early in 1937 these were sent to the HWA to see what it thought of the idea, and very rapidly came back with a firm order to build three guns. Work began in the summer of 1937, the first gun to be delivered by the spring of 1940.

It would be well to understand the magnitude of the problem; the ballistic solution for 80cm postulated a concrete-piercing shell weighing 7 tons (7,100kg) and propelled by a cartridge containing 4,631lb (2,100kg) of propellant powder to attain a range of 23.6 miles (38km). Alternatively, it could fire a 4.73-ton (4,800kg) high explosive shell from a 4,939lb (2,240kg) cartridge to a range of 29.2 miles (47km). We are looking at a shell weighing the same as a fully-laden 40-passenger bus, fired by a charge of propellant powder weighing as much as a large Mercedes car. It follows that the gun itself has to be big; more than big, enormous. And somehow it had to be capable of movement to and from the battlefield.

The equipment was therefore designed so that it could be transported piece-meal on special railway trucks, each part being carefully dimensioned so as to lie within the standard railway loading-gauge limits. The gun portion split into several sections: the breech ring, breech-block, the barrel in two halves, jacket, cradle, trunnions and trunnion bearings, all of which were carried on specially-fitted flatcars. The carriage was split both vertically and longitudinally; the bottom-most layer, the wheeled sub-structure, was simply trundled along in its own train, but the remaining layers which formed the main carriage and upper carriage were moved on more special flatcars. In addition to this caravanserai there were trains of ammunition wagons, crew coaches, machine-shops and a dismantled travelling gantry crane, two anti-aircraft battery trains and a protection and security company. Each gun was accompanied by no less than 1,720 men under the command of a general officer.

On arrival at the firing position a special four-track spur was laid on a curve, so that the gun could be given direction by moving it around the curve. The two outer tracks were laid for the gantry crane. The right and left halves of the bogie sections were pushed into place on the gun tracks, bolted together and anchored. The carriage components were then shunted up to the crane, lifted from their flatcars, transported to the bogies and lowered into place. Once the upper carriage had been fitted, the trunnion bearings were put in position and the cradle and its trunnions fitted. The jacket was then lifted on to the cradle and the rear half of the gun barrel inserted into the jacket. The front half of the barrel was then fitted and locked in place by a massive joint nut (and one can imagine the performance, attempting to line up two halves of a gun barrel weighing well over 100 tons, one half of which is dangling from a crane.) The breech ring was then assembled to the barrel, the breech block inserted, and after some three weeks of work the gun was at last ready to fire. The equipment was some 141 feet (42.97m) measured over its couplings; the gun itself was 106.5 feet (32.48m) long and the entire weapon weighed 1,329 Imperial tons (1,350 tonnes).

In 1940 all that lay in the future. The barrel proved a great deal more difficult to manufacture than had been imagined and the Maginot Line was out-manoeuvred without the assistance of the 80cm gun. It is said, though no authority is quoted, that after the French campaign was over Hitler had some harsh words to say to the Krupp management, hinting that it was required to overpower the fortress of Gibraltar should General Franco prove amenable. But Franco was not amenable, and the Gibraltar project faded away. Nevertheless the gun barrel was completed towards the end of 1940 and successfully proof-fired early in 1941. The rest of the year was spent building the carriage (there had been no point in doing much work on this until the gun was known to be viable) and early in 1942 the first gun was moved to Rugenwalde firing range on the Baltic coast, assembled and fired in the presence of Hitler himself. Once he pronounced himself satisfied, the gun, now named Gustav Gerdt by the Krupp management in honour of the proprietor, was presented by Gustav Krupp to Hitler as the company's contribution to the war effort. And by that time a second gun, named Dora after the wife of Erich Muller the chief designer, was ready for delivery and components for the third gun were under construction.

After its tests at Rugenwalde, Gustav was moved down into southern Russia to join the siege of Sebastopol, It took up a position as Bakhchisary, some 16km north-east of the city, and fired 48 shots at various targets. The most spectacular of these was the concrete-piercing shell which penetrated into an underground magazine at Severnaya Bay and detonated the contents. After Sebastopol fell Gustav was dismantled and shipped back to the factory at Essen to have the barrel re-lined; proof, ballistic tests and the few rounds fired in the siege added up to over 300 shots and the barrel was worn out.

Dora, the second gun, was now sent into action outside Stalingrad. The records of this action are scanty and conflicting but the gun must have been withdrawn after a short stay, since the Soviet counter-attack surrounded the German Sixth Army in a matter of days and there would have been no time to dismantle and move it had it waited until the attack began. Gustav is said to have been sent to join the siege of Leningrad late in 1942, and it has also been stated that one of the two guns was used against the Warsaw uprising in 1944, but it seems probable that the weapons used in these two actions were the Karl 60cm self-propelled howitzer (discussed later in this chapter). Both guns were moved to the Rugenwalde ranges for a training session in 1943, but thereafter they were never seen again until May 1945 when the US Third Army found parts of Gustav in Bavaria. Parts of Dora were later found near Leipzig, and parts of the third gun, which was never completed, were found at the Krupp factory and at Krupp's Meppen proving ground. But from all these parts there was not sufficient to construct a complete gun, and eventually everything was scrapped.

After the successful debut of Gustav at Sebastopol a number of grandiose projects were suggested. One was the manufacture a 52cm (20.47-inch) gun to fit on the same mounting and fire a 3,131lb (1,420kg) shell to a range of 68 miles (110km), or a 52/38cm sabot shell to 93 miles (150km) or a 52/38cm rocket-assisted shell to 118 miles (190km) range. This was proposed as a cross-Channel bombardment gun which would have put a considerable stretch of southern England in danger. But the obvious threat of air retaliation, and the impossibility of hiding such a monster weapon, put this project into the discard pile. The next idea was to manufacture a smooth-bore barrel and fire a dart-like `Peenemiinde Arrow Shell' to about 100 miles range, but this idea never got past the drawing board stage.

As a technical achievement Gustav and Dora were remarkable; as practical weapons of war they were a total waste of time, money and manpower which could have been put to better use elsewhere. Each gun cost something in the region of seven million Reichsmarks (approximately £610,000 in 1939) without considering the cost of the ancillaries such as the trains and the special transporter cars, the cranes or even the two air defence batteries. For the price of Gustav you could have had 28 Tiger tanks.

And although these guns were never known to the Allies as anything else but rumours and suggestions, one wonders whether they were quite as secret as they were thought to be. Among my possessions is a notebook written by an officer on an artillery intelligence course in February 1940; on one page he has some figures about potential German guns, amongst which is an 80cm gun firing a 4-ton shell for 29 miles. This was before the gun had even been made; so perhaps it wasn't so secret after all.

Adam, Eve, Odin, Thor, Loki and Ziu

Germany, as you might expect of a country in the heart of a continent and surrounded by potential enemies, owned a respectable collection of railway artillery of various calibres. And yet in 1937 the OberKommando des Heeres authorised development of a self-propelled 60cm howitzer firing a 2,200kg concrete-piercing shell. Surely, one would think, there were several railway guns capable of doing whatever this weapon could do?

But a look at the 1939 map of the Polish-Russian border offers a clue; there were a mere nine railway lines which touched the border in all its 500 miles length. Moreover, of course, the Russian railway gauge was 5ft 6 inches, whilst the German and Polish gauge was 4 feet 8 1/2 inches. Perhaps the invasion of Russia in 1941 was not such a spur-of-the-moment decision as it is sometimes claimed to be.

Design of the weapon was done by Rheinmetall-Borsig, and the prototype was tested in the spring of 1940. The chassis was a massive box carried on a tracked suspension with eight road-wheels on each side. The howitzer was a quite conventional stubby-barrelled weapon using a dual recoil system - the barrel recoiled in its own cradle, and the mounting recoiled along the chassis, both being controlled by hydro-pneumatic cylinders. Tests revealed a few problems with stability and the chassis was re-designed to use 11 road-wheels on each side, suspended on torsion bars which ran across the hull. These were attached to a gearing system so that once the vehicle had arrived at its firing position the torsion bar anchorages were revolved, the wheels raised, and the hull was lowered until it rested on the ground and the suspension was relieved of the firing shock. Propulsion was by a massive 44.5-litre Daimler-Benz V-1 2 diesel engine generating 580bhp, and the whole equipment weighed 120 tonnes.

For all that, the performance was not in the record-breaking class. The 2,200kg anti-concrete shell carried a charge of 240kg of explosive and was propelled by a four-part cartridge weighing only 32kg. The lowest charge pushed the shell to only 3,260 metres and the highest charge to 4,320 metres. It was obvious that this machine was meant to clatter its way close to a fort and then fire half-a-dozen of these great shells to reduce it to rubble. The shell was capable of piercing up to 2.5 metres of reinforced concrete before bursting, and it could also defeat up to 35cm of armour steel. A lighter 1,575kg anti-concrete shell was provided, which gave a maximum range of 6,650 metres, but with rather less penetrative power, and there was also a high explosive shell of similar weight which had a maximum range of 6,580 metres. Both these used a different, five-part, cartridge.

The six service equipments, which were known officially as Gerat 041, less officially as Karl (for General Karl Becker of the OKH who had initiated the design) were delivered to the army in 1940/41 and issued to 628 schwere Artillerie Abteilung (Motoriziert), who promptly christened them Adam, Eve, Thor, Odin, Loki and Ziu. Then they trundled off to Russia in July to batter down the forts at Brest-Litovsk, Lvov and various other strongpoints. Together with Gustav, they attended the siege of Sebastopol in 1942, then Leningrad, and appeared outside Warsaw during the 1944 rising. But the army was less than happy with the performance; it felt, rightly in my opinion, that a weapon as cumbersome as this ought to offer more range in order to compensate.

In May 1942 the army suggested that a smaller calibre and lighter projectile might be a sensible exchange, and asked for a design of 54cm barrel which could be interchanged on the same mountings. This was duly done and six 54cm barrels provided, but instead of completely changing over, it seems that the barrels were fitted as and when the range was desired. If the heavy shell was of greater importance in a particular tactical situation, then the 60cm barrel was used; where range was the primary consideration, the 54cm barrel was fitted. At the end of the war two of these weapons were captured by the US Army; one had a 60cm barrel while the other had a 54cm barrel. The 54cm version fired a 1,600kg anti-concrete shell to 10,500 metres range using a 57kg propelling charge. It also fired a 1,270kg high explosive shell to 12,500 metres. The rate of fire with either was about 6 to 8 rounds per hour.

On the face of it Gerat 041 was another case of giantism, but given the paucity of railway communications on the Eastern Front and the strength of some of the border fortresses, they were a practical solution to a tactical difficulty. At any rate, they seem to have been in steady, if not continuous, employment throughout the war.

K5 Glatt; the 150km cannon

One of the better German artillery designs was the 28cm K5(E) railway gun, some 28 of which were built between 1936 and 1945 and which became more or less the standard German railway piece, used in every theatre of war. One attained fame as Anzio Annie', firing into the Allied beach-head at Anzio; it was actually called Leopold by the German gunners who operated it, and it now stands on a short length of track in the display area of Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland in the USA. (Another is on display in a museum at Cap Gris Nez in France.)

The K5(E) had one unconventional feature, which had been first explored in the Paris Gun of the First World War, and that was the use of ribbed shells in conjunction with very deep rifling grooves. The gun was rifled with 12 grooves of 7mm depth, and the shells all had 12 curved ribs on their exterior which matched the curvature of the rifling. Loading was therefore a critical business, to ensure that the ribs entered the rifling grooves, and the gas sealing was taken care of by a wide copper sealing band behind the ribs.

Good as the K5(E) was - and it fired a 563lb (255kg) shell to a range of 38.6 miles (62km) - there were those who felt it could stand some improvement, and it soon became the vehicle for a number of innovative designs. The first of these was a shell with rocket assistance. A rocket-assisted shell had been devised for the standard 15cm howitzer; it was not particularly successful but it enabled a number of problems to be identified and solved, so that the shell for the K5(E) was a much better article. The interior of the shell was divided into two compartments by a steel plate just below the shoulder. This carried two impact fuzes and had a central hole from which a blast pipe ran down to the base of the shell. The nozzle was sealed by another steel plate. The rear section, around the blast pipe, was filled with high explosive, an insulating jacket being placed around the pipe. The nose section was filled with solid rocket propellant and the nose carried a time fuze permanently set to 19 seconds.

The shell was loaded in the normal way and fired by the normal cartridge; the time fuze ignited the rocket after 19 seconds of flight, just as the shell was approaching the peak of its trajectory. The rocket's blast went down the pipe and blew off the sealing plate, and the thrust accelerated the shell and extended the trajectory. On impact, the two fuzes inside the shell sensed the sudden deceleration and detonated the explosive payload. The shell weighed 248kg, slightly less than the standard shell, and achieved a maximum range of 53.7 miles (86.5km).

The only defect of this projectile was occasional inaccuracy. At the instant of the rocket's ignition, the shell might be perfectly aligned with the trajectory, or it might be yawing slightly off it, and if so the thrust of the rocket would drive the shell further off the trajectory in the direction of the yaw. As a result half the shells were likely to fall in a rectangle some 3.5km long and 200 metres wide around the target, while the worst cases could land over 13km away.

As we have already seen, the research station at Peenemunde owned a supersonic wind tunnel, and when not concerned with rockets it did other ballistic research for the HWA.

There, Engineer Gessner had developed a long finned shell to be fired from a smooth-bore version of the K5 gun, calling it the Peenemunde Pfeilgeschoss (`Peenemunde Arrow Shell', or PPG). The dart-like shell was 4.7 inches (120mm) in diameter, with four fins at the rear and a three-piece sabot around the waist, both these items being of 31 cm calibre to fit in the bore; the gun was thereafter known as the K5 Glatt (glatt means smooth). The 28cm rifled barrel was reamed out to 31cm smooth-bore and a special propelling charge launched the shell at 5,000ft/sec (1,525m/sec) velocity. As it left the bore the three-piece sabot fell clear and the dart went to a maximum range of 93.8 miles (151km).The body of the shell was loaded with 55lb (25kg) of high explosive and had an impact fuze screwed into the nose.

Development of this shell began in 1940 but was slow; the successful design described above was, in fact, the third attempt and it demanded some high-grade steel for the long body to withstand the acceleration inside the gun. It was not until late in 1944 that issues began, and records of their use appear not to exist. It has been reported that a few rounds were fired against the Americans in the final weeks of the war but there is no confirmation of this. It is perhaps worth noting that a similar but smaller projectile was under development for the 10.5cm anti-aircraft gun in an attempt to reduce the time of flight and increase the practical ceiling; a velocity of 3,125ft/sec (952m/sec) was achieved but there are no figures available on its altitude performance.

Although not directly connected with the K5(E) gun, one further development can be conveniently considered here, and that is the athodyd shell of Dr. Tromsdorff. The drawback of the rocket shell, as Tromsdorff saw it, was the need to carry both components of the propulsive power, the fuel and the oxygen-carrier; since the shell was flying through the air, with unlimited oxygen on tap as it were, he opted to develop a jet-propelled projectile which, like the engine of the V-1 missile, would only require to carry its fuel.

There were a number of designs developed by Tromsdorff at the Hillersleben Proving Ground from 1935 onwards. In general, his projectile consisted of an inner unit containing fuel (carbon disulphide) and shaped so as to form, in conjunction with the outer wall of orthodox shell shape, an air-flow channel and combustion chamber. Distance pieces provided the correct spacing, and there was provision for attaching an orthodox driving band. The liquid container had to contain baffles in order to prevent the liquid `taking control' of the projectile by moving during flight. A capsule of carbon dioxide was fitted into the liquid container and punctured when the shell was fired, and the released gas forced the liquid through orifices in the combustion chamber wall, assisted by centrifugal force from the shell's spin. Ignition was due to compression of the air and fuel at supersonic velocities, and the resulting blast passed out of the rear of the combustion chamber and added thrust to the shell.

By 1945 a number of projectiles had been made and fired successfully, though they were only experimental and carried no explosive filling. Nevertheless, a 15cm shell had been fired at a muzzle velocity of 1,000m/sec and it had been calculated that it would be possible to reach 180km with it. Ranges of 200km for a 21cm gun and 400km from a 28cm gun such as the K5(E) were theoretically possible. The principal problem appears to have been fitting in the explosive payload and making it worth firing; the postulated 28cm shell would have carried only 13kg of high explosive instead of the 30kg or so normally found in conventional shells of this calibre. Various reports in the period since 1945 have suggested that further research into the athodyd shell has been carried out in Soviet Russia and in the USA, but that this question of finding room for a worthwhile payload has not yet been satisfactorily solved.

K12; the cross-Channel gun

In 1918 the German Navy built the Kaiser Wilhelm Geschutz, popularly called the `Paris Gun' because it was used solely to bombard the city of Paris from gun positions in the Forest de Gobain some 70 miles away. (One of the minor incidental mysteries of the First World War is what happened to the Paris Gun? It was withdrawn in the face of the Allied advance in the autumn of 1918 and was never seen again. The Allied Disarmament Commission searched high and low and questioned everybody they met, to no avail.)

The Navy was somewhat smug about this super-gun, and the Army somewhat put out. And in the 1920s Army planners decided that Something Must be Done to relegate the Paris Gun to second place in the history books. Design studies took place, and when, in the early 1930s, the political climate became favourable, work began in earnest. The major question was that of achieving the very high velocity needed to get the shell into the stratosphere, where the air resistance was negligible and where the shell could thus achieve most of its range.

The same technique had been employed in the Paris Gun though at a terrible cost in erosive wear; the rifling wore away at a rate of about ten inches for every shot fired, and after fifty shots the barrel had to be replaced. To combat this wear problem the shells for the Paris Gun were made in a numbered series, each slightly greater in diameter than its predecessor, so as to compensate for the wear; and it is said that one gun was destroyed by inadvertently loading a shell out of numerical order and trying to fire a shell which was too big for the state of the barrel.

Problems of this sort needed to be avoided, and it was decided that the new gun would be rifled with a few deep grooves and the shell would be given curved ribs or splines which would locate in these grooves so as to produce the desired spin on the shell, with the rotational acceleration spread over the entire shell body instead of being concentrated into the narrow area of a conventional driving band. Again, this same technique had been used in 1918, though with shallower grooves. Sealing of the propellant gas behind the shell would be done by a copper band, in the place usually occupied by the driving band, backed up by graphite and asbestos packing. To test this idea a number of smaller barrels were made up with various rifling profiles, and tested in 1935, as a result of which an eightgroove barrel was selected.

The mounting was fairly simple; it was to be a railway gun, and thus a box-like carriage supported on double bogies was designed. The main box structure rested upon two sub-frames, and each of these had two bogies beneath it, the front sub-frame two eight-wheelers and the rear two tenwheelers. The gun was carried in a cradle with a hydro-pneumatic recoil system; but since the recoil force was expected to be fairly substantial, the entire box structure with gun was able to recoil over the two sub-frames, again controlled by hydro-pneumatic braking cylinders.

The gun was 33 metres (105.25 feet) long, and posed a few problems of its own. Firstly, elevating such an enormous length of tube was going to cause it to bend under its own weight, so an extensive bracing system had to be attached to keep the barrel straight. Secondly, elevating such a mass of metal needed some precision in setting the position of the trunnions so as to get a reasonable distribution of weight, and so the trunnions were set as far forward as possible and the breech area made as heavy as possible. This, in turn, meant that when the gun was elevated there was not sufficient room between the breech and the track below for it to recoil; therefore, before firing, the box structure and gun had to be lifted one metre above the sub-frames by hydraulic jacks. And since it was not possible to load the gun when it was in the `up' position, it had to be lowered and raised again between shots.

The first barrel was proof-fired in 1937, and the first complete equipment was tested in 1938 and put into service in March 1939 as the K12(V). The Army was quite pleased with the performance; it fired a 107.5kg shell to a maximum range of 115,000 metres (71.46 miles), thus out-performing the Paris Gun. But it was less pleased with the performance of jacking the gun mounting up and down between each shot, and asked Krupp if something could be done about it. Krupp therefore did some further research into the application of hydraulic balancing rams under the gun cradle and found that it was possible to operate these at much higher pressures than had been previously thought practical. The barrel could thus be shifted forward in the cradle and balanced, and so provide sufficient space behind the breech to permit the full recoil stroke without striking the ground and without having to jack the structure up. The mounting was then redesigned accordingly and a second gun built as the K12(N) and issued in the summer of 1940. No more were ever made.

Both guns were issued to Eisenbahn Batterie 701, and the K12(V) was taken down to the French coast and directed against England. Several shells landed in the Dover area, but the greatest range attained appears to have been with a round which fell at Rainham, near Chatham in Kent, which was 88km (55 miles) from the nearest point on the French coast.

It is of interest, and illustrative of the problems confronting technical intelligence specialists, to read the summary of a report, written in February 1941, on the fragments found at Rainham:

`The examination of fragments of a German long-range shell which fell at Rainham, Kent, has shown the probable calibre of the gun to be 22cm. It is possible, however, that the calibre may be of the lower and more standard size of 21cm, the apparent value of 22cm being due to the general expansion of the shell body prior to fracture.

`The shell is of a special "rifled" design in the sense that undercut and nearly longitudinal slots are machined in the external surface to accommodate soft iron skids which are machined to engage with the rifling of the gun and serve as the driving band of the shell.

`The shell weight computed for a diameter of 22cm is in the order of 235lb, including 33lb of high explosive. The shell walls are rather thinner than might have been anticipated but this is offset by the fact that the material of the shell body was a good quality alloy steel (containing chromium, molybdenum and vanadium) heat-treated to give a yield point exceeding 50 tons per square inch. Muzzle velocity of the shell is probably not less than 4,000ft/sec. Shells of similar calibre have been fired into south-east coastal areas, as also have shells of still larger calibre (11 or 12 inches).'

The actual figures, determined after the war, were 21cm calibre, 237lb weight and 4,922ft/sec muzzle velocity, indicating a fairly accurate piece of deduction from a few rusty scraps of steel.

One gun was captured by the Allies in Holland in 1945 and subjected to a very close examination. The general opinion of the British experts was the same as that of the Krupp engineers who designed and built the weapon: as a practical gun it was nonsense, but as a technical exercise and ballistic research tool it was invaluable. But at 1,500,000 Reichsmarks it was an expensive tool. 

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