The infamous German Paris gun blasting away at Paris during the Spring Offensives in an attempt to subjugate the French and their will to keep on fighting.
Though only 21cm in diameter these shells could be fired to a max of about 130 kilometers which meant the accuracy of roughly Paris and its entire surrounding county. The guns could elevate to about 55° and fire a 106 Kilogram round with 7 of explosive filler by shoving 196 Kilogram of propellant up the breech behind the round which had to go through a 36 meter long barrel reaching a muzzle velocity of 1645 meters per second. Max height was recorded as being about 40 kilometers and the time it took for a shell to land was approximately 3 minutes, this forced the gunners to take into account also the rotation of the planet when firing as it was like leading at a moving target.
Development was started by Krupp in 1916 under Artillerie-Konstrukteur (Major) Fritz Rausenberger whom was also responsible for the famous Big Bertha and the first test was held on 20 November 1917 near Cuxhaven with positive results so two more guns were ordered and all were completed before March 1918.
On 23 March 1918 at 07:18 the first shell fell in Paris on the Quai de la Seine and a further 20 shells fell in the city and its suburbs killing 15 people and wounding a further 36, though seemingly small it had a huge impact on Parisian morale whose people tried to flee the city en-masse.
A total of 256 civilians were killed and 620 wounded, of which 88 were killed and 68 wounded when the Paris parish church of Saint-Gervais-Saint-Protais was hit during the Good Friday service on March 29, 1918 in the afternoon.
303 shells were fired in total at the defenseless city and its surroundings of which none were duds, showing the quality of Krupp’s fuses.
On 25 March one of the guns had a catastrophic failure suffering a premature detonation which killed 17 men of its crew.
Also there were numerous problems with the gun’s due to the enormous heat of 2000 celcius and a pressure of 4.800 bar being created when shooting which meant the barrels had to be recalculated after every shot on its diameter and the shells had to be adapted correspondingly by adding copper rings or creating enlarged ones. The guns were by the last days firing 23.2cm shells instead of the original 20.93cm and that’s not even counting the short life span of each barrel which was rated at just 65 shots max.
All three guns were removed and transported back to Germany proper when the war fortunes turned against its Armee and they would be never seen again.