GUSTAV RAILWAY GUN

The biggest gun ever made

The thinking behind the Gustav gun doesn’t appear to have been too sophisticated. It was big… very big. The barrel alone was over 47 metres long and the whole machine weighed around 1,350 tonnes. The reason it was so big was that it was needed to break through the defences of the heavily fortified Maginot Line, and that meant munitions of a size and weight previously unheard of.

The gun itself was originally commissioned in 1934 by the German Army from Krupp AG, a leading arms manufacturer. It was requested to be completed by the spring of 1940 to launch an assault on the Maginot Line and begin the invasion of France. However, complications in its construction meant it wasn’t ready for test firing until 1941, and it was first deployed in Sevastopol in early 1942.

While Sevastopol was devastated by the German offensive, the Gustav only fired 48 rounds before it wore out its barrel – it had fired 250 in testing already. It also needed 4,000 men to move it into position and 500 men to fire it. After a brief appearance in Warsaw in 1944 to quell an uprising, the gun appears to have been scrapped to avoid its being captured.