Saturday 16 July 2011

The Largest Gun Ever Built

image credit

In 1939, Adolf Hitler needed to figure out how to get past the French Maginot line, a 1500km defensive wall of fortifications, tank barriers, artillery and machine gun nests running along the French-German and French-Italian borders. Before he figured out to simply run around the line via Belgium, Hitler schemed to destroy it outright.

To that end, he recruited the Friedrich Krupp A.G. company of Essen, Germany, to build him a weapon capable of doing so. By 1941, the Krupp company had designed and built the largest gun of all time, the 'Gustav Gun.'

1 comment(s):

Socramat said...

A 800mm gun to be precise. That's a shot but more or less useless due tu its problem of transportation (need of rail lines)