The Paris Gun, shown here c. 1918. One of the largest mobile artillery pieces ever built, it was used to shell Paris from a distance of approximately 75 miles from March until August of 1918.
In early spring 1918, with the Russians out of World War I and the remaining Eastern Front forces of the Imperial German Empire in the process of being redeployed to the Western Front to face the Allied Forces, the German Empire deployed a massive piece of artillery in an effort to wage psychological war on the citizens of Paris. By some criteria, the artillery piece in question holds the record of being the largest deployed for combat operations in World War I.
The artillery piece in question was known as the Paris Gun. At the time of its introduction it was initially mistaken by the French for a Zeppelin air raid as the shells it fired came down with no sound. Given that the Zeppelin airships that were bombing Great Britain had occasionally cut their engines when upwind of the target and drifting over the area silently to release their payloads, it was initially thought the shells could have come from a German airship using the same tactic, or perhaps from an airplane that was too high to be seen or heard. It was later learned that the shells were in fact being fired an artillery gun utilizing a 211–238 mm bore to fire a 234 lb artillery shell at a target at a theoretical maximum distance of 81 miles.
The seven so-called Paris Guns were largely developed by Fritz Rausenberger, at the time Krupp's Director of Design. Krupp, a German company renowned for their munitions, had already supplied the Imperial German Army and Navy with arms and armament intended to help them win the war, and in 1917 held the record for the largest gun used in the war when they completed work on the Batterie Pommern (also known as the Lange Max). The Paris Gun was created in a similar mold – it was intended to be a mobile supergun able to bombard a target from extreme range and then be moved to a new location so as to prevent the Allied Forces from retaliating against it. While the gun was effective to a limited extent, its reliance on railroad tracks and the time needed to properly set it up somewhat hampered its effectiveness in combat. Ultimately, the guns were lowered for the last time in August 1918 as the Allied Forces reached a point where they could begin to threaten them. The surrender of the Imperial German Government in November ultimately killed the Paris Gun, the German forces destroying the remaining weapons to keep them out of Allied hands.
The legacy of superguns like the Paris Gun was their influence on future designs, including the 21 cm K 12 (E)railway gun used by the Nazi forces in World War II and in the guns developed for Project HARP and Project Babylon. In addition, the work currently being done on railguns could be seen to trace its origin back to the world wars in that both sides in those conflicts looked for ways to create weapons that could be used to bombard targets from great distance without risk of enemy forces being able to locate and attack their weapons.
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First published in 2006, the Bugle is the monthly newsletter of the English Wikipedia's Military history WikiProject.
