Nazi Germany created the the largest, heaviest artillery piece ever used in combat.
Here s What You Need To Remember: Due to complications in building such a massive gun, the
Schwerer Gustav was not used against the Maginot Line, though it did see action against the Red Army.
Leading up to the Second World War, one of the obstacles that loomed large in the eyes of the German High Command was the French Maginot Line. The Line was one of the strongest defensive fortifications ever built and among the longest: it stretched from the French-Swiss-German border in the South, all the way to the French side of the English Channel to the North.
Both the South and the North employed such weapons during the war.
The most famous even infamous examples of large artillery pieces mounted on railway cars occurred during the Second World War, when Germany employed these gigantic weapons in the sieges of Leningrad and Sevastopol. During the latter siege, the Germans had to build a special railway spur along with four semi-circular tracks for the gun’s car to transverse, while it took twenty-five cars stretching nearly a mile to transport the Schwerer Gustav to the Crimea.
A crew of 250 was also required to assemble the gun over the course of three days, but another 2,500 men to lay track and dig the embankments for the super-weapon. Yet, over the course of a month, the artillery gun with its thirty-one-inch caliber barrel leveled the defenses at Sevastopol, allowing the city to be captured.