Gun Identification and Photo Location

[Chip]

I have this photo of a crew working on a 30,5 cm gun. I have looked around at various websites and cannot locate other pictures or more information about this gun. In many ways, it looks like the 42cm M-Ger?t (Dicke Berta), but the picture is marked otherwise. Can anyone verify the identification of this gun?

Secondly, the photo has a note that it was taken by Rezan or Rozan. I have also had no luck finding out just where this is. Any help would be most appreciated.

Chip

[Guest Rick Research]

Fortress Rozan (or Roshan) on the Narev River was reduced after siege from 18 July and taken by storm on 24 July 1915.

I can't find either on maps either, but the German units involved were XIII Armeekorps: 26 Inf Div (W?rttembergers) with 3rd Inf Div and 4th Guards Inf Div and

detached from Armeegruppe von Gallwitz for the purpose,

as heavy siege artillery (and NONE otherwise listed, so yours is it)

K?stenm?rser Batterie 6.

[Chip]

Thanks for that info Rick. Unfortunately, no date on the back of the photo. There is a message in schrift which I can only partially make out as it is somewhat faint. The uniforms (M07/10) would fit in with that period, but I have no knowledge of whether this gun existed at this particular time.

Chip

P.S. I looked through von Stein's notes and found the "Schwere K?sten-M?rser-Batterie Nr.6" attached to the 6.Armee and armed with one 30,5 cm Mrs.

Edited April 14, 2007 by Chip

[bob lembke]

Thanks for that info Rick. Unfortunately, no date on the back of the photo. There is a message in schrift which I can only partially make out as it is somewhat faint. The uniforms (M07/10) would fit in with that period, but I have no knowledge of whether this gun existed at this particular time.

Chip

P.S. I looked through von Stein's notes and found the "Schwere K?sten-M?rser-Batterie Nr.6" attached to the 6.Armee and armed with one 30,5 cm Mrs.

Yes, the Austrian Skoda 30.5 cm mortars were heavily publicized by the land of Schmaltz=Musik, while the Germans were very secretive about their 30.5 cm guns, made by Krupp, as well as the 42 cm howitzers. (The designation of them as coastal defense artillery was intended to throw off enemy MI if they heard of these; they were designed to bust up the French and Belgian forts.) My grand-father "worked" with these guns in Belgium and later in Russia, and as an old artilleryman he hung about their batteries when he could, and I have letters where he discussed the 30.5 and 42 cm guns with his son, but always in generalities, no specific caliber mentioned, the shell weight roughly described in Centners. With the info in the Antwerpen volume of Schlachten der Weltkrieges, written by the guy he reported to as Id of III. Reservekorps, I can geographically place at least one of the battery firing positions from which he wrote these letters from quite closely.

I am sure some of you have seen some of the many PCs the Austrians published showing their Moto=Moersers in Belgium, and I have seen a letter posted from one of these batteries whose military postmark actually depicted a 30.5 cm mortar. Of course this remarkable gun was one of the few bright spots for the Austro-Hungarians in a generally miserable war for them.

Bob Lembke

[Glenn J]

Chip,

a map showing the assault on the Narew Line including Rozan in late July 1915.

Regards

Glenn

[Chip]

Thanks Bob and Glenn,

I suppose, given the caliber of this gun that it was used on the defenses of Rozan rather than some indiscriminant trench or retreating army. The map really adds to the history behind the photo.

Chip

[bob lembke]

Chip;

The gun was used to reduce the fort, I suspect, not defend it.

Looking at the photo, I am beginning to think it might be the Krupp 42 cm gun. It certainly is a howitzer of a design close to the Dicke Berta, not a mortar. I had thought the German 30.5 cm guns were of a design similar to the Skoda Moto=Moerser, but without the neat transportation system designed by, yes, Dr. Ferdinand Porsche. The 42 cm guns got lighter as time went by; there were a number of models, and I have (in a book), a photo of one with a long barrel!

But I had thought that the gun was physically larger. But the shell and chamber bore seems, to me, closer to 16.5 " than 12". The 16.5" shell came in a number of variants, not hard as they were made in small batches. My grand-father mentioned two shell weights for different ranges. The fort-buster shell had, I believe, two explosive charge chambers, each fuzed with a seperate time fuze. Heavy-walled, really armored, it could be fired at 70 degree elevation and probably go up 5 miles, falling that distance, with a weight of perhaps 2550 lbs., it surely could punch thru a lot of fort.

At a very interesting attack at Verdun 42 cm guns, possibly with shot-out barrels, dropped shorts on the German troops assembled for an attack, paralizing (sp?) the survivors of the assembled assault troops, but they eventually were rallyed and successfully attacked.

How was the designation of the photo as a 30.5 cm gun made? Printed, hand-scrawl?

Bob Lembke

[Chip]

Bob,

Perhaps I worded that incorrectly. I should have said "against" the defenses rather than "on", which would have made my meaning more clear. I knew what I meant.

The pencil inscription on both the front and the back of the photo look to be from the period.

Chip

[bob lembke]

Chip;

The more that I look at the photo, the more sure I am that it is a 42 cm. I have a German book on the 30.5 and 42 cm guns, and the author got into the Krupp archives, and I can't recall ever seeing such a 30.5 cm gun; I think that the only howitzer in that range was a 28 cm, and the gun pictured certainly is a larger caliber. I have never seen a photo of an Austrian or German 30.5 cm gun with a gun shield.

Note the perspective of the photo. It clearly was made with a shorter-than-normal focal length lens, i.e., a wide-angle lens, and the front part of the gun appears smaller than it was. Note the considerable difference in the apparent size of the men on the trail and the breech portion of the gun. Compared to the men standing near to the breech, the shell and breech certainly appear larger than 12".

I have seen many photos of Austrian 30.5 cm guns, and have a few, but I have rarely seen a photo of a German 42 cm, except for the archive photos in the book that I mentioned, which are for some reason quite poor in quality, unsharp. (Incidentally, the Austrians also seem to have come out with a 42 cm gun in 1916.) I suspect that the German sense of military secrecy suppressed the taking of photos of this gun. Two notes: On secrecy, my father's correspondence never directly mentions Flammenwerfer, but hints at the weapon, as in grousing on getting oil on everything; likewise, my grand-father sometimes wrote surprising military secrets, but never mentioned the specific calibers of the big guns, which he discussed often in oblique ways, calling them "very heavy" and "the heaviest". My father, a student in 1914, once wrote and asked if a "52 cm" gun would be useful for shelling the UK, and g-f wrote back that such a caliber would be impratical. I once found a full-length book by a senior Italian naval officer in the National Library in Vienna; the sole topic of the book, published about 1915, was that a 42 cm gun was impossible, and had to be rumor or dis-information. The author wrote a very learned and silly book, relying in part on 15th century ballistic data to "prove" that such a big gun was impossible.

Bob Lembke

[JensF.]

What we see in this picture is indeed a 42 cm "M-Ger?t" in use.

[bob lembke]

What we see in this picture is indeed a 42 cm "M-Ger?t" in use.

Yes, I have just seen another photo of the 42 cm gun, with some of the trail details, which match this gun; the gun in the picture is certainly not a 30.5 cm mortar, Austrian or German. The extreme size of the gun in the photo is disguised by the short focal length of the lens the photographer used. The mistake was probably made because of the publicity that the Austrians gave their 30.5 cm guns, in contrast to the secrecy and deception of the Germans in regard to their 30.5 and 42 cm guns. This factor led my father to make a similar mistake in identification of a large Austrian gun at Gallipoli. While photo PCs of the Austrian guns are common, I have never seen an early-war photo PC of the 42 cm gun (in its several models, as Jens refers to), and I have some art PCs that are very inaccurate and may even may be intentional in order to deceive the enemy as to the characteristics of the 42 cm guns.

As to these big guns being used in Russia, I will paraphrase a letter of my grand-father's from a Russian winter from memory: "Yes, I finally have a billet. But it is as cold as Hell, the house has no windows; when we took this town we had to use my big guns, and they broke every window in town. And I left my cute little stove in Belgium." The "big guns" were not actually "his", but he said that in his letters sometimes; he was in charge of the supply of all artillery and infantry ammunition to his army corps, both in Belgium and in Russia, and as an old artilleryman he seems to have hung about the firing positions of these guns as much as possible, wrote letters from these positions during actions, some of which I have, and generally was rather possessive of them. (I have not specifically mentioned the Russian town and date of the letter, and the exact text; I would rather not see it in print before I publish my own book on my father and grand-father.)

Chip, photos of these 42 cm guns in action seem to be very scarce. As to them breaking windows, I have seen reports of them being fired in urban areas in Belgium, and breaking the windows for two blocks about the gun. As to where they landed, a shell might destroy a house or two, but I am sure the detonation of the explosion broke windows for quite a distance. I have heard reports of these guns being fired electrically so to allow the firing crew to be some distance away.

Bob Lembke

[JensF.]

Here are more pics of the "Dicke Bertha":

http://www.landships.freeservers.com/42cm_bigbertha.htm

[bob lembke]

Hi, JensF;

Very interesting and largely correct discussion of this gun and related matters. I can see a few things that I feel are not quite correct, but I don't want to get into a big discussion, especially as the authors give absolutely no sources. I will say that I have seen a variety of shell weights quoted, and they all are heavier than those given in the article. However, the weight cited may well have been that of one of the seemingly large assortment of shells made for this gun. (One source is a letter written by my grand-father from the location of a battery of these guns firing on a Belgian fort. As he was a Feuerwerk=Offizier and the Id of the Generalkommando of III. Reservekorps, and so was responsible for supplying the shells to these guns, and 30.5 cm mortars as well, so he must had a good idea of their weight.)

But the article and photos are very informative and must be largely correct. A lot of rubbish is written on such topics. I would be very interested in seeing their sources.

Bob Lembke

[JensF.]

The 42 cm shells? No problem, here they come:

[JensF.]

And the "light" one:

[bob lembke]

JensF;

Very interesting. Clearly from your information, not surprisingly, the shell weight is strongly dependent on shell wall thickness, as solid steel is clearly heavier than powder. The one shell weight that I cited, 2550 lbs, is for a heavily "armored" shell, with thick walls and a massive nose, meant for plunging deep into a fort before exploding. In one case, both fuzes failed, and the shell ended up skidding down a corridor deep underground in a Belgian fort. I read a description of the structures that that shell went thru, which could be reconstructed, as the shell had not exploded, and the penetration was quite impressive.

The shells in your posts are H. E. (high explosive), and would have thinner walls, as the weight of powder tossed on the target was in most cases the thing that you would want to maximize, in most H. E. applications for such a gun, where typically explosive power would be of more importance than weight of fragmentation. Being hit with a fragment from either shell would usually be a definitive "lights out".

My grand-father told my father that already in 1914 they had two weights of shells for use against the forts, giving different ranges. Since for "fort-busting" you would want to maximize the angle of the high-angle fire, for penetration, it would be more effective to try to keep the angle of fire as close to the 70 degrees that the gun could shoot at, and get more range with a lighter shell, rather than reduce the elevation to, say, 55 or 60 degrees with a heavier shell, and risk the shell rickoshaying (how is that spelt?) off a steel or concrete coupola or other feature and burst elsewhere.

The book that you scan seems to be of the period, rather than recent, and of course is in English. Can you give a citation for that book? Clearly it is over 200 pages and must have many goodies between its covers.

Bob Lembke

[JensF.]

Hi Bob,

it is also important which fuse setting you use. The Bodenz?nder 10 could be used without delay, single or double delay. Against fortresses they usually used short or long delay, because when the shell penetrates some cm of concrete before exploding the effect is much higher. The book I have is called "Notes on german shells" from the british intelligence from 1918 and has got about 220 pages.