Assembly of the Schwerer Gustav 80cm railway gun

Schwerer Gustav was a German 80-centimetre railway gun. It was developed in the late 1930s by Krupp in Rügenwalde as siege artillery for the explicit purpose of destroying the main forts of the French Maginot Line, the strongest fortifications in existence at the time. The fully assembled gun weighed nearly 1,350 tonnes , and could fire shells weighing 7 t to a range of 47 km.

The gun was designed in preparation for the Battle of France, but was not ready for action when that battle began, and in any case the Wehrmacht's Blitzkrieg offensive through Belgium rapidly outflanked and isolated the Maginot Line's static defenses, which were then besieged with more conventional heavy guns until French capitulation. Gustav was later deployed in the Soviet Union during the Battle of Sevastopol, part of Operation Barbarossa, where, among other things, it destroyed a munitions depot located roughly 30 m below ground level.

The gun was moved to Leningrad, and may have been intended to be used in the Warsaw Uprising like other German heavy siege pieces, but the uprising was crushed before it could be prepared to fire. Gustav was destroyed by the Germans near the end of the war in 1945 to avoid capture by the Soviet Red Army.

Schwerer Gustav was the largest-caliber rifled weapon ever used in combat and, in terms of overall weight, the heaviest mobile artillery piece ever built. It fired the heaviest shells of any artillery piece. It took a crew of 250 men a total of 54 hours to assemble the gun, with ten times that number needed to lay track and dig embankments. Two Flak battalions were also assigned to protect the gun from air attack.

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