During the Second World war, Germany prepared for complete flattening of Europe if necessary. The French, having taken a true beating in the First World War, built the Maginot Line in order to defend against the German war machine. This was a huge defense wall complete with underground railways and almost impenetrable steel and concrete Armour. Good old Fuhrer the ordered his indefatigable engineers to build him a gun to destroy the Maginot Line.
Specifications were that the gun should punch trough 7 metres of reinforced concrete, or alternatively, 1 metre (100cm) of steel armor. So the engineers came up with gustav schwerer, the largest rifle ever built(no its not 50cal). The gun could only run on double tracks of railway. It could fire a seven tonne round for 47 kilometres and could punch through 1 metre steel armour at that range as well as pierce a seven metre concrete armour. And yes, it was accurate. This is in 1940s. In 1940s, people had the capacity for this. We here, are yet are to make a simple hand held reliable production rifle.
The gun could not be used becuase the German Wehrmacht blitzkrieg-ed through Belgium and around the Maginot Line into France. This rendered the gun unusable on the original target, but even made the French Maginot Line a war time economic blunder of the century. So our eastern āmaginot lineā with somalia isnt the first attempt. Germans attempted to blow up the gun at the end of the war to prevent the technology from leaking but it was too big to destroy quickly.
80cm(800mm bore) Gustav Schwerer with barrel raised:
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Hitler and his officers look at the gun:
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7100kg armour piercing round next to a panzer:
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Gustav from the front:
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During that time, rockets had not been perfected by many people. Japanese were known to be very good at building accurate and reliable torpedoes, but there wasnāt explosive rockets that could be fired to a remote range to destroy armour. Therefore, armour piercing rounds were important. You could not be safe no matter how much metal you used for protection.
A British 17 pound armour piercing round attempt at punching through a panzer I armour. Notice the unscarred round? It could not get past though:
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why would we want to manufacture an AK when a Bulgaria repro that works as well costs just $534?
you should have mentioned somewhere that it was designed and built by the House of Kruppā¦(perhapps later do a thread on the role Krupp played in arming the German side of the 2nd WWā¦
You dont go into such details. people will ignore if you feed them convoluting details about ministry engineers and satellite companies. Its was something like the current US military industrial complex, but with a lot of strong arm control from Hitler.
may I add that the creation of V2 rocket by Werner von Braun and his german engineers during the war, subsequent building of saturnV rockets for the United States by von Braun, and the resulting technology for ICBM made these rifles unnecessary. Some of the latest attempts to build such guns were done by some Britons commissioned by Saddam Hussein. Saddamās gun remains are in museums in europe.
Mechanical engineering was very good at the time, especially in germany. Only that we didnt have it here. The other problem is that today most people think that all technology is semiconductor electronics (This was far behind what it is today).
Germany was at this time the unsurpassed military superpower during the short time Hitler was in power. The guy was however a little bit crazy and he attempted to attack everyone at the same time. At one point in the middle of the war, He had annexed all countries in continental Europe or had installed puppet dictators in them, defeated and expelled the British back to their Island and was in the process of destroying civilization on the island, in process of annexing Africa from North Africa, and was doing well back home. He invited a fourth great enemy into the war by attacking Soviet union. Germans rolled the red army back took most of stalingrad, and wehrmacht camped thirty kilometres outside Moscow. Then the Russian winter set inā¦
I think Germans fate was tied at the hip with that of Japan. The moment Japan attacked pearl harbor, US had no option but also neutralise Germany whether or not uncle Joe was with them.
Although Hitler had stretched his troops thin, without the lend lease program from USA, nobody can claim for sure when the Soviets would have been able to reverse the German advance.
Russians were very weak, but they live in an environment only they know how to survive. Germans Froze to death. It is also true that absence of either the united states or Russia from the war would have sealed the fate of Europe and subsequently Africa.
Rene, I see you are a history buff. Now let me share a little known fact - in Kenya, many āeducatedā Kikuyus were rooting for Hitler to win the war; that way they thought they would rid themselves of the stupid Brits.
Am not sure they were right, but the Brits were on the winning side so a new strategy had to be devised by the āRika Ria 40ā (the 40 age-group). Mau Mau.
Maybe they didnt understated the ideologies at play well. Camps would have been built everywhere and our 5/4 million population would have been gassed and incinerated. This would be a Germanic country. Especially the cool islands.
Shocks, that is debatable. The fact is, Hitler committed so much to the Eastern front - including about 3,000 aircraft to launch the Brietzkrieg. Unfortunately for him, as Rene says, he didnāt reckon with three things:
The population of the USSR. Stalin could afford to lose 50 million soldiers and still stay standing. He sacrificed about 10 million (and another 10 million civies).
The size of USSR - even today, even after the breakup of the USSR, Russia is the biggest country in the world by land mass.
The Russian winter - the Fourth Army basically froze to death or died of dysentery.
Stalin had killed almost all of the Soviets experienced military officers while consolidating power in the 20s and 30s, by the time Hitler rolled in, Stalin only had an army in name only. But we can give him on his strategy of tactical retreat, where he moved the soviet industry beyond the reach of Hitler.