The Gustav railway gun was built in Essen Germany in 1941 by the firm of Friedrich Krupp A.G. Upholding a tradition of naming heavy cannon family members, the Gustav Gun was named after the invalid head of the Krupp family  Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach. The strategic weapon of its day, the Gustav Gun was built at the direct order of Adolf Hitler for the express purpose of crushing the Maginot Line forts protecting the French frontier. To accomplish this, Krupp designed a giant railway gun weighing 1,344 tons with a bore diameter of 800 mm (31.5”) and served by a 500 man crew commanded by a major-general just for the gun!

Two types of projectiles were fired using a 3,000lb charge of smokeless powder: a 10,584lb high explosive (HE) shell and a 16,540lb concrete piercing projectile. Craters from the HE shells measured 30-ft wide and 30-ft deep while the concrete piercing proved capable of penetrating 264-ft of reinforced concrete before exploding! Maximum range was 23 miles with the HE shells and 29 miles with the concrete piercing. Muzzle velocity was approximately 2700 f.p.s.

Three guns were ordered in 1939. Alfried Krupp personally hosted Hitler and Albert Speer (Minister of Armaments) at the Hugenwald Proving Ground during formal acceptance trials of the Gustav Gun in the spring of 1941. In keeping with company tradition, Krupp refrained from charging for the first gun-7 million Deutsch Marks were charged for the second (named Dora after the chief engineer’s wife). www.5ad.org

 

France fell in 1940 without the assistance of the Gustav Gun, so new targets were required. Plans of the Gustav against the British fortress of Gibraltar were scrapped after General Franco refused permission to fire the gun from Spanish soil. Therefore, April 1942 found the Gustav Gun emplaced outside the heavily fortified port city of Sebastopol in the Soviet Union. Under fire from Gustav and other heavy artillery, Forts Stalin, Lenin and Maxim Gorki crumbled and fell. One round from Gustav destroyed a Russian ammunition dump 100 feet below Severnaya Bay; a near miss capsized a large ship in the harbor. Gustav 300 rounds during the siege wearing out the original barrel in the proses. Dora was set up west of Stalingrad in mid-August but hurriedly withdraw in September to avoid capture. Gustav next appeared outside Warsaw, Poland, where it fired 30 rounds into Warsaw Ghetto during the 1944 uprising.  Wikipedia

 

Dora was blown up by German engineers in April 1945 near Oberlichtnau, Germany, to avoid capture by the Russian Army. The incomplete third gun was scrapped at the factory by the British Army when they captured Essen. Gustav was captured intact by the U.S Army near Metzendorf, Germany in June 1945. Shortly after it was cut up for scrap therefor ending the story of the Gustav Gun. www.5ad.org