Chapter 556 556 Cannon
What really caused problems for the German soldiers was the Soviet artillery of a large scale and a wide range of calibers. Stalin personally liked artillery as much as he liked tanks. He personally inquired and ordered the production of no less than 20 types of cannons, including an amazing super train gun.
In 1935, Soviet spies stole a valuable piece of information from a factory safe in Czechoslovakia. This information indicated that Germany was to produce a train carrying a huge cannon at a factory in Czechoslovakia. The massive train car was about the size of a pair of shoes under the body of the cannon to be built.
Then the Soviets used all the forces they could find to find all the blueprints of this German secret weapon, and in the end, they paid off their efforts, they bought a technical engineer at the Krupp factory, and got all the parameters and details of the cannon - excellent - excellent - small - say - more - new - most - fastest - www.uuxs.cc. I even bought a drawing, a complete "super cannon drawing".
Stalin never took his eyes off the drawings after reading them, and he pointed to them and exclaimed to his secretary: "This is the real god of war!" So the great Soviet leader Comrade Stalin ordered the production of the Soviet Union's own superweapon, a super train gun named "Big Pipe" began to be secretly developed and produced in the Soviet Union. Naming this super cannon after his favorite pipe also reflects Stalin's love for this giant cannon.
The caliber of the German train gun reached an astonishing 800 millimeters, and the shell was about the size of a small car. A single shell is more than a ton, can fly tens of kilometers away, and blast a reinforced concrete defensive fortress the size of a football field into ruins.
But something more frustrating for Stalin followed, and the factories of the Soviet Union were unable to complete the production of such artillery: both in terms of steelmaking and precision machining, several factories in the Soviet Union, formed with German assistance, did not have enough strength to complete the manufacture of this super artillery.
You must know that not everyone has the ability to produce super-large-caliber artillery, the Soviet Union did not produce many large-caliber artillery before, and the technology was very immature, so the entire project finally fell into a very embarrassing suspension stage. With the outbreak of the Soviet-German war, this project was again remembered by Stalin, who asked the factory in charge to produce the Soviets' own superweapon before the Germans.
Don't tell him no! The Soviets must surpass their opponents! This is what Stalin tried so hard to prove, and this is what he fought for. He needed a win and a transcendence to add a perfect footnote to his greatness. Driven by this idea, this vigorous cannon-making movement kicked off.
It cannot be said that this campaign was wrong, because in this huge program there were many types of artillery that proved to be very good. For example, the 122-millimeter artillery that stunned the Japanese mountain artillery at Nomenkan, the 85-millimeter anti-aircraft gun, and the various small-caliber mortars that are now regarded as artifacts by the Soviet Red Army. Of course, it cannot be simply said that this cannon-building campaign is right, because after all, there is this super cannon that caused a technological disaster because of wishful thinking.
When the layman gets too involved in the insider's field, there will be many unbelievable jokes, not because of how stupid the person is, but because of the political show born under absolute power: someone once said to Hitler that train guns could be used to fight tanks, and finally Guderian, the director of the armored forces at the time, scolded him. Just imagine that Hitler, who personally supported the development of German armored forces, would believe that a cannon with a caliber of nearly 300 mm could hit a tank, and you will know that it is not Hitler who has become stupid, but the question of whether the person who sells tanks or giant guns to him is not to his liking.
So when the Ukrainian locals peacefully handed over Kyiv to the Germans, the engineers who arrived from Germany saw a huge Soviet-made super cannon. This cannon had a caliber of 810 mm (Stalin insisted that the caliber of Soviet artillery was greater than that of German super-cannons...... With 45 wagons to transport parts and bear the weight of the recoil, the cannon could not pass any known bridges that were being used or built by the Soviet Union, and of course only rails laid with the help of Germany could barely get the 45 trains running.
The personnel who took care of this cannon had a whole regiment, including an anti-aircraft battalion and a vigilance battalion, and an engineer battalion responsible for loading and unloading this super cannon. Of course, the delivery of this cannon from Kyiv to the Soviet-German front was expected to take three months, and then one month to install - if the battle was not over by this time, it would have completed its preparations for firing.
It's ridiculous that this huge guy doesn't have shells, the Soviet shell production plant doesn't have such a huge production workshop, and finally this cannon has a strictly confidential internal instruction manual of the Kiev factory, which reminds the troops who use it that this huge cannon can only fire about 5 cannons at most, and any more may produce the danger of exploding or disintegrating and collapsing. Can you imagine a superweapon that cost a lot of money to build, and can only shoot 5 shots?
This thing, which cost countless Soviet people, is now waiting in Kyiv for the Germans to deal with. Many generals felt that they could use this thing to attack the Soviet fortress of Sevastopol, but obviously it was not easy to get this thing there, and whether this bad debt was worth it or not had to be analyzed and deduced.
In the original time and space, the Sevastopol fortress was built by generations of efforts of Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union, and became an impregnable fortress group. It was littered with heavily armored batteries, dense bunkers, and underground fortifications that the Germans struggled to capture.
However, at this moment the fortress complex in the Sevastopol region did not have such a size at all, thanks to the fatigue policy of Germany against the Soviet Union for 10 years. Most of the steel plates and armor originally used to build the fortress were used to lay the Soviet railways, which had become the property of Germany. And the heavy armor used in those fortresses is now installed on Soviet battleships, so the entire Sevastopol region is still a system of fortifications of the Tsarist Russian era, and it is not worth developing an 800 mm caliber cannon "Gustav" for such a place.
At the behest of Accardo, the entire German cannon construction program was a hoax, and Germany itself did not even produce a single cannon with a caliber of more than 300 mm, and several large-caliber train guns were the masterpieces of the captured French army.
Of course, Germany's abandonment of train guns also has the advantage of large-caliber artillery, which is a huge increase in the number of German 150 mm caliber guns, 105 mm caliber guns, and 75 mm caliber field guns. Although the Germans lost in terms of unit caliber, the Germans still maintained a fairly strong density of fire in terms of the number of artillery.
Later, the British 140 mm caliber artillery was supplemented, the French and Belgian cannons were added, and the number of German medium-caliber artillery could completely compete with the Soviet Union, a major artillery country, and even had a certain advantage in small-caliber field artillery.
At the cost of sacrificing some of their artillery superiority, the German armored forces were much larger and qualitatively superior than the Nazi armored forces in another time and space. At this stage, the German armored forces are based on the advanced Leopard tank, with more and more Tiger tanks as the core, and the performance completely surpasses the No. 3 tank and No. 4 tank in the hands of the Nazis.
At the same time, at this moment, Germany has produced a total of 8,900 Leopard tanks, counting the number of losses and repairs, the German army has more than 6,000 Leopard tanks on the front, and the number of this tank alone has exceeded the total number of tanks of the Nazi armored forces in the same period. If you count the more than 400 No. 3 tanks and more than 1,700 Tiger tanks still in use, the total number of tanks in the front-line combat of the German armored forces is about 8,000. This count is only for tanks and does not include other armored combat vehicles.
With such a large scale of various types of tanks were scattered in the country, North Africa, Britain, the Soviet-German front and other regions, with the No. 3 assault gun, the No. 2 modified self-propelled anti-tank gun, and the Leopard tank destroyer, the entire 13 armored corps of the Third Reich were formed, 29 armored divisions, and another 51 infantry self-propelled artillery battalions.
This number also illustrates the problem that the number of German armored forces is still insufficient. The German Panzer Division should have about 360 tanks at full strength, but the reality is that the average number of tanks in the current 29 Panzer Divisions is only a measly 275. The infantry armored battalion, which should be equipped with 45 self-propelled guns or assault guns, has only about 30 No. 3 assault guns and other messy weapons.
The lack of resources forced the German army to seize what to use, such as the Leopard tanks originally planned for aid to Romania were eventually replaced with French B1 modifications. These tanks were trophies captured by the Germans and captured by the French army, and were originally used as equipment for training tank crews in the German-French border area. Captured French fighter jets were also sent to Finland and Turkey as aid, and the French Vichy government now relied on the production of artillery shells and German 105mm howitzers to pay off its war debts to Germany as part of Franco-German economic cooperation.
This is the brutal war of using what can be found on the battlefield to take the lives of others. Although some weapons have proven to be backward or unsuitable, as long as there is no substitute for it, or as long as there is not enough substitute for it, it will continue to be used until it is broken and repaired. R1148