Chapter 554: The Cannon
What truly caused trouble for the German soldiers was the Soviet Union’s massive and varied collection of cannons. Stalin personally had a great fondness for this type of weapon, an obsession much like Akado’s preference for tanks. He had personally overseen and ordered the production of no less than 20 types of cannons, even including a stunning super railway gun.
In 1935, Soviet spies had stolen a valuable piece of intelligence from a factory safe in Czechoslovakia. This intelligence revealed that Germany was going to produce the carrier train for a giant cannon in a Czechoslovakian factory. The massive railway carriages, beneath the body of the cannon that was to be built, were no bigger than a pair of shoes.
Subsequently, the Soviet Union used all the resources it could find to search for the complete blueprints of this secret German weapon. In the end, their efforts paid off. They bribed a technical engineer at the Krupp factory and obtained all the parameters and details of this great cannon. They even bought a set of blueprints, a complete and intact set of “super cannon blueprints.”
After seeing these blueprints, Stalin could not take his eyes off them. He pointed to the plans and lamented to his secretary, “This is the true god of war!” And so, the great Soviet leader, Comrade Stalin, ordered the production of the Soviet Union’s own super weapon. A super railway gun, named the “Big Pipe,” began secret development and production within the Soviet Union. To name this super cannon after his favorite pipe also reflected Stalin’s fondness for this giant gun.
The caliber of the German railway gun reached a staggering 800mm, and its shells were about the size of a small car. A single shell weighed over a ton and could fly several dozen kilometers to reduce a reinforced concrete fortress the size of a football field to a pile of rubble.
But then came a rather frustrating matter for Stalin. The Soviet factories were simply unable to complete the production of this cannon. Whether it was the level of steelmaking or precision machining, the several factories in the Soviet Union that had been established with German aid did not have sufficient strength to complete the manufacture of this super cannon.
It must be known that not everyone has the ability to produce super-large-caliber artillery. The Soviet Union had not produced many large-caliber cannons before, and its technology was very immature. So the entire project eventually fell into a very embarrassing state of suspension. With the outbreak of the German-Soviet war, this project was remembered by Stalin again. He demanded that the responsible factory produce the Soviets’ own super weapon before the Germans did.
Don’t tell him it can’t be done! The Soviets must surpass their opponents! This was the one point that Stalin desperately wanted to prove, and it was the goal he was striving for. He desperately needed a victory and a moment of surpassing to add a perfect footnote to his greatness. Driven by this thought, this vigorous cannon-building campaign began.
It cannot be said that this campaign was a mistake, because in this massive project, there were many types of cannons that were proven to be very excellent. For example, the 122mm cannon that had beaten the Japanese mountain guns into a daze at Nomonhan; the 85mm anti-aircraft gun, a formidable air defense weapon; and the various small-caliber mortars that the Red Army now revered as divine weapons. Of course, one cannot simply say that this cannon-building campaign was right, because it did, after all, include this super cannon, which was a technological disaster caused by wishful thinking.
When a layman excessively intervenes in an expert’s field, many incredible jokes will appear. It is not that the person in question is extremely stupid, but that it is just a series of political shows born under absolute power. Someone once suggested to Hitler that a railway gun could be used to fight tanks, and was ultimately cursed out by the then-Inspector General of Armored Troops, Guderian, and the matter was dropped. Just imagine, Hitler, who had personally supported the development of the German panzer forces, would actually believe that a cannon with a caliber of nearly 300mm could hit a tank. You know then that it was not that Hitler had become stupid, but a question of whether the person selling him the tank or the giant cannon suited his taste.
And so, when the local Ukrainians peacefully handed over the intact Kiev to the Germans, the German engineers who rushed there saw a huge, Soviet-made super cannon. This cannon had a caliber of 810mm (Stalin insisted that the caliber of the Soviet cannon had to be larger than that of the German super cannon…). It required 45 railway cars to transport its parts and to bear the weight of its recoil. This cannon could not cross any of the known bridges that the Soviet Union was using or building. Of course, only the tracks laid with German help could barely allow these 45 cars to run.
The personnel in charge of this cannon numbered a full regiment, including one anti-aircraft battalion and one security battalion, and an engineer battalion responsible for loading and unloading this super cannon. Of course, it was originally estimated that it would take three months to transport this cannon from Kiev to the German-Soviet front, and then another month to assemble it. If the battle was not over by then, it would have completed its firing preparations.
The ridiculous thing was that this giant thing had no shells. The Soviet shell production factories did not have such a huge production workshop. In the end, this cannon had an internal user manual that was strictly kept secret by the Kiev factory. It reminded the troops using it that this huge cannon could at most fire about five shots. Any more than that, and there was a danger of the barrel bursting or the whole thing collapsing. Can you imagine a super weapon that had been built at a huge cost could only fire such a pitiful number of five shots?
This thing, which had consumed the painstaking efforts of countless Soviets, was now in Kiev, awaiting the Germans’ disposal. Many generals felt that this thing could be used to attack the Soviet fortress of Sevastopol, but it was clear that getting this thing there was not an easy matter. Whether this bad deal was worth it or not still needed to be analyzed and deduced.
In the original timeline, the Sevastopol fortress, after being built through the efforts of several generations of Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union, had become an impregnable fortress complex. It was full of gun batteries with thick armor, dense bunkers, and a sprawling network of underground fortifications. The Germans had exhausted their strength to capture it.
But at this moment, the fortress complex in the Sevastopol area was not of this scale at all. This was all thanks to the policy of attrition that Germany had been carrying out against the Soviet Union for a full 10 years. The steel plates and armor that were originally intended for building the fortress had mostly been used to lay the Soviet railways, which were now in German hands. And the thick armor for those fortresses was now all on the Soviet battleships. So the entire Sevastopol area was still a defensive works system from the Tsarist Russian era. It was not worth developing an 800mm giant cannon like the “Gustav” for such a place.
At Akado’s behest, the entire German giant cannon construction plan had been a sham. Germany itself had not produced a single cannon with a caliber of over 300mm. The few large-caliber railway guns it had were masterpieces captured from the French army.
Of course, the advantage Germany had gained by abandoning railway guns and large-caliber artillery was a huge increase in the number of 150mm, 105mm, and 75mm field guns. Although the Germans had lost out in terms of unit caliber, in terms of the number of cannons, the German army still maintained a fairly powerful firepower density.
Later, they were supplemented with British 140mm cannons and cannons from France and Belgium. The number of German medium-caliber cannons could completely compete with the great artillery power of the Soviet Union, and they even had a certain advantage in small-caliber field guns.
At the cost of sacrificing some of their artillery advantage, the German panzer forces were larger in number and superior in quality to the Nazi panzer forces of another timeline. At this stage, the German panzer forces were based on the advanced Panther tank, supplemented by an increasing number of Tiger tanks as the core. In terms of performance, they completely surpassed the Panzer III and IV tanks that the Nazis had had.
At the same time, Germany had produced a total of 8,900 Panther tanks. Counting losses and repairs, the German army had over 6,000 Panthers on the front lines. The number of this one type of tank alone had already exceeded the total number of tanks in the Nazi panzer forces at the same time. If one also counted the more than 400 Panzer IIIs that were still in use and the more than 1,700 Tiger tanks, the total number of tanks in the German panzer forces’ frontline combat units was about 8,000. And this number only counted tanks, not other armored combat vehicles.
This data also illustrates from another angle the problem of the German panzer forces’ still-severe shortage of numbers. A full-strength German panzer division should have about 360 tanks, but the actual situation was that the current 29 panzer divisions had an average of only a pitiful 275 tanks. And the infantry armored battalions, which were supposed to be equipped with 45 self-propelled guns or assault guns according to the table of organization, mostly only had about 30 StuG IIIs and some other miscellaneous weapons.
The shortage of resources forced the German army to use whatever they could get their hands on. For example, the Panther tanks that had originally been planned as aid to Romania were eventually replaced with a modified version of the French B1. These tanks were spoils of war captured from the French army and had originally been used as training equipment for tank crews on the German-French border. The captured French fighter planes were also sent as aid to Finland and Turkey. And the Vichy French government was now paying off its war debt to Germany by producing artillery shells and German 105mm howitzers. This was also part of the German-French economic cooperation.
This is the cruel reality of war, to use everything you can find on the battlefield to take the lives of others. Although some weapons have been proven to be obsolete or unsuitable, as long as there is no replacement, or if the replacement is insufficient, then it will continue to be used, until it breaks down and cannot be repaired.
Published: 2025-09-05T01:14:01.000+00:00
Last Edited: 2025-12-26T05:18:01.000+00:00
URL: https://www.patreon.com/caleredhair/posts/mtr-c554-cannon-138142543
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