Krupp Guns
Friedrich Krupp (1787 – 1826) launched the family's metal-based activities, building a small steel-foundry in Essen in 1811. His son, Alfred (1812 – 1887) known as "the Cannon King" invested heavily in new technology to become a significant manufacturer of railway material and locomotives. He also invested in fluidized hotbed technologies (notably the Bessemer process) and acquired many mines in Germany and France. He buildt subsidized housing for his workers and started a program of health and retirement benefits. The company began to make steel cannons in the 1840s - especially for the Russian, Turkish, and Prussian armies. Low non-military demand and government subsidy meant that the company specialized more and more in weapons: by the late 1880s the manufacture of armaments represented around 50% of Krupp's total output. When Alfred started with the firm, it had five employees. At his death twenty thousand people worked for Krupp - making it the world's largest industrial company.
Alfred Krupp (1812 - 1887), son of Friedrich Carl, was born in Essen. His father had spent a considerable fortune in the attempt to cast steel in large blocks: in order to keep the works going at all, the family had to live in extreme frugality, while the youthful director laboured alongside the workmen by day, and carried on his father's experiments at night. For the next fifteen years, the works made barely enough money to cover the workmen's wages.
In 1841, his invention of the spoon-roller brought in enough money for Alfred to enlarge the factory and spend money on casting steel blocks. In 1847 he made his first cannon of cast steel. At the Great Exhibition of 1851 he exhibited a 6 pounder (2.7 kg) cannon made entirely from cast steel, and a solid flawless ingot of steel weighing 2000 pounds (907 kg), more than twice as much as any previously cast.
Krupp's exhibit caused a sensation in the engineering world, and the Essen works at once became famous. In 1851, another successful invention, one for the making of railway wheels, made a profit, which Alfred Krupp devoted partly to enlarging and equipping the factory, and partly to his long-cherished scheme - the construction of a breech-loading cannon of cast steel. Krupp himself strongly believed in the superiority of breech-loaders over muzzle-loaders, on account of the greater accuracy of firing and the saving of time, but this view did not win general acceptance in Germany till after the Franco-Prussian war, Krupp supplied his perfected field-pieces throughout the army. Once the quality of this product gained recognition, the factory developed very rapidly. At the time of Alfred Krupp's death in 1887 he employed 20,200 men; and including those in works outside Essen, his rule extended over 75,000 people.
Big Bertha
Krupp´s most famous gun in World War I was the Dicke Bertha, Big Bertha. This cannon, an indirect-fire field gun, was invented in 1904 but had not been ready to use until 1914, for they were based on naval guns, a part of the Schlieffen Plan to adapt existing technology. Relatively light, mobile pieces of large calibre, in this case 42 cm, would fire at high elevations bringing plunging fire to forts and towns, and so cause them to surrender. There were two types of hydraulic recoil and recuperation platforms, mounted either on railcars or on wheeled trucks, carrying guns called "Kurze Marine Kanone" that were taken from battleships. They could fire a distance of 20 km.
An even bigger Krupp gun called " Kaiser Wilhelm Geschütze," or “Paris Gun”, was based on Big Bertha, but it was not a 42 cm mortar-type howitzer. It was so-named for its sole purpose of shelling Paris from extreme distances starting from March 1918. A behemoth, the Paris Gun - regarded by many as the ancestor to the German V3 - was capable of firing shells into the stratosphere from locations as far as 131km from Paris.
Designed and operated by the German Navy and manufactured by the German munitions firm of Krupp, some seven 210mm guns were made using bored-out 380mm naval guns, each fitted with special 40 metre long inserted barrels. However with only two railway gun mountings actually available just three of the guns were ever in use at any one time, fired from the Forest of Coucy.
Such was the rapid wear and tear of firing its 120kg shells, each requiring a 180kg powder charge, towards Paris - the aim was often wild - that the gun's lining required reboring after approximately 20 shots. Indeed, after every firing the succeeding shell needed to be of slightly greater width.
An undoubted sensation when first deployed at 7.18 on the morning of 21 March 1918, the appearance of heavy shells in Paris caused initial and widespread alarm among its inhabitants which nevertheless quickly subsided. Once fired a shell took 170 seconds to reach Paris, rising as high as 40 km above the earth.
The gun was tested near Cuxhaven, assigning men from the marine regiment at Kiel and fifty technicians to assemble the gun at Crépy-en-Laonnois, 124 kms from Paris.
At the camouflaged site, the director, Vice-Admiral Rogge, chief of ordnance of the Admiralty, assembled his firing crew that included Prof Rausenberger, one of the designers, and naval officers, engineers, ordnance experts, ammunition handlers, medical doctors and corpsmen, in all fifty men to operate the cannon.
Essential to the use of cannon were artillery spotters. It was necessary to "sight in" each target visually, seeing where the previous shot had landed in order to correct the aim and hit the target. The plan was to use a German spy in Paris who would report by telegram through Switzerland. It would take about four hours to learn where each shot had landed, according to plan.
The Paris Cannon could fire only 65 rounds before the barrel was worn out. Therefore, each projectile was graduated in size to compensate for the wear on the bore, and serially numbered, since the calibre increased with each shot. There was no sabot, or driving band around the projectile; it would melt in the heat and pressure. So each shot had grooves matching the rifling built into it, exactly reproduced on the steel casing of the giant bullets. The calibre varied from 21 to 23.5 cm, the length from 95 to 111 cms. Each weighed about 100 kgs and cost 35,000 Reichsmarks. There were no duds. The fancy fuses always worked.
The gunners had a new experience with the Paris Cannon. The old range tables were no good in calculating shots through the upper atmosphere. Because of bad calculation of the height of the first shot, it landed in a clergyman's garden, eleven kilometres beyond where it was aimed. It was necessary to take the rarified atmosphere and the curvature of the earth into account.
The ideal angle of the cannon was not 45 degrees, but 52 degrees. At an apogee of 40 kms, it could shoot a distance of 124 kms, taking 3 1/2 minutes for the shell to land.
The ideal angle of the cannon was not 45 degrees, but 52 degrees. At an apogee of 40 kms, it could shoot a distance of 124 kms, taking 3 1/2 minutes for the shell to land.
The axis of the barrel had to be reset after each shot, bent straight with block and tackle, and verified by telescopic sight layer by layer until mathematically correct. The powder was kept at 15 degrees C, the responsibility of a gunnery officer. Three hundredweight of gunpowder, shaped like bundles of spaghetti in combustible silk bags, produced at 5000 atmospheres of pressure, a muzzle velocity of 1800 meters per second, that is, nearly 6,000 feet per second, twice as fast as a high-powered rifle. It was ignited through the giant screw breech by a friction device much like a cigarette lighter.
Each shot was reported to General Headquarters by Vice-Admiral Rogge, using telephone cable from Crépy. A wealthy German gentleman, resident in Paris for 20 years, Baptiste Martin, reported the results in code by telephone to a lady on the Swiss frontier. Then a peasant driving a cart took it across into Switzerland, where it was phoned to Basel, then telegraphed to Germany. Sometimes it took only half an hour to get the results to GHQ. For example: "23rd March, 7 hrs 20'15 Quay de la Seine No.6, 2 dead, 9 wounded, taxi wrecked." The French thought it was high-altitude bombers. Cavalry searched the woods around Paris. In the effort to find out what was happening, agents were dropped behind the German lines. Evacuation began in anticipation of German occupation of the city.
It was called "the chef d'oeuvre of secret service work," this arrangement of an observer in Paris and agents on the border with Switzerland, with coordination in Basel, Berne, Zürich, Neuchâtel, and Berlin. A spy at the French GHQ reported that all was working well, the camouflage perfect. The gun was part of a stage set made of canvas, wires and nets, concealing blockhouses, hutments, cranes, rails, magazines, and people. Aviators saw only brown and green speckled forest. Spotter airplanes using sound-ranging and flash-spotting techniques tried to find the Paris Gun, but the Germans mounted ninety other smaller guns around the big cannon as masking batteries, firing simultaneously to fool the spotters.
On Good Friday, 1918, the Church of St Gervais was hit, killing 91 and injuring 100. A truce was declared for the funeral on Easter Sunday. On Easter Monday at 24.01 hrs, the shelling began again.
On 9 August, the last shot was fired on Paris, the 19th round from the fourth and final barrel. The third barrel had exploded on its third shot, killing 17 men. All 320 rounds fired had fallen on Paris, 180 in the city centre, 140 in the outskirts of Paris, causing incalculable damage.
Casualties of the gun's use ran to 256 deaths and 620 wounded, with 88 killed and 68 wounded on Good Friday 1918 alone when a shell landed on the church of St. Sepulchre, causing its collapse while a service was in progress.
The Paris Gun was nevertheless a notable propaganda success at home in Germany. The Allies searched in vain for the guns during the German retreat of August 1918 onwards and after the armistice, but in vain. No example of the Paris Gun has been located then or since although U.S. forces located one of the gun's spare mountings.
After World War I, In the 1930s, Krupp developed two 80cm railway guns, the “Schwerer Gustav” and the “Dora”. These guns were the largest artillery pieces ever fielded by an army during wartime, and weighed almost 1,344 tons. They could fire a 7-ton shell over a distance of 37 kilometres. However, they proved extremely inaccurate in Sevastopol during the prolonged shelling, and were more a massive logistical liability than an artillery asset.
More crucial to the operations of the German military was Krupp's development of the famed 88 mm anti-aircraft cannon, a famous weapon that became a deadly anti-tank weapon as well.
