Siege Artillery
As long as humans have existed, we have loved to see things go boom and the bigger the boom, the happier we are. Humans love destruction, it’s part of our makeup. With the adoption of gunpowder-based weapons, that destruction amplified. Humans learned how to make bigger and bigger weapons that defied the rules of warfare and caused destruction previously unimagined. Humans have also always looked at cities or territory that someone else has and thought to themselves, “I want that.” When you have leader that loves the big boom and conquest, you get the creation of siege cannons. To satiate the thirst for death, conquest, and destruction, leaders commissioned the construction of cannons that could either destroy city walls with giant cannon balls or artillery weapons that could fire shells tens of miles to hit populated centers, satisfying that ever present need for chaos. This article will focus on notable examples of the largest siege cannons ever produced in history and their use (or lack thereof).
The first cannon we will discuss is the earliest giant example in our little collection, the Basilic. This cannon was used by the Ottoman Turks to shell the walls of Constantinople during their conquest of the city in 1453. The walls of Constantinople were 40 feet tall and around 16 feet thick, so the Ottomans rightly thought they needed some massive cannons and guns to blow through it. The irony of this weapon is that the builder of it, Orban, was a Christian and first offered the cannon to the Byzantines, who had to pass on the offer due to the immense costs of the cannon. Basilic was made of bronze and weighed 40,000 pounds, 27 feet long, and had a cannon mouth diameter of 30 inches. It could hurl cannon balls weighing around 1,200 pounds up to a mile. Gun carriages were non-existent in this time so once the cannon was in place, it could not be moved. It sat upon a mount made of mud and wood to absorb the recoil and had to be taken apart to be loaded. The cannon took so long to load that it could only fire seven times a day, so the real work of destruction was done by the Sultan’s other guns, but the weapon caused terror amongst the defenders. By the end of the 53-day siege, the gun started to develop cracks in the bronze due to the casting technique for such a large gun being primitive (metallurgy was in it’s infancy for siege guns). These cracks eventually led to the cannon destroying itself before the end of the siege.
Our second cannon in this list, is a bombard that could hurl stone cannon balls 2,000 feet every 2-3 minutes, the Pumhart von Steyr (PVS). The PVS was the largest wrought iron by caliber and was developed by the Austrians in the 15th century. The PVS’s ammunition of stone balls were around 31 inches or 800mm and weighed 1,500 pounds. The bombard, while the service history is limited, was used by the Habsburg Empire as a siege bombard in an era when bigger cannons were being employed on a regular basis. If you look at pictures of the bombard, it looks more like a modern mortar with a short barrel and fixed elevated firing angle.
Let’s jump forward in time to the First World War where innovations in weaponry and artillery made killing the enemy easier than ever before. The Imperial German war machine had a particular fascination with large artillery pieces, but one stands out, Big Bertha. Now, Big Bertha was not one cannon, or even a cannon at that, technically. There were 12 Big Berthas, and they were actually howitzers. What’s the difference you might ask? Well, a howitzer has a lower firing velocity but a higher firing angle than a cannon or gun. It can also be used for direct fire on a target or indirect, such as lobbing shells higher up, similar to a mortar, to rain down on a target. The Big Berthas could fire shells weighing at over 1,700 pounds to distances of around 6 miles. These shells could be fitted with a delayed fuse (to explode later instead of on impact) and bury themselves 40 feet or 12 meters into earth and concrete for maximum destruction to fortified emplacements and targets. One Big Bertha shell obliterated an entire French fort during the early phase of war. The Big Berthas were usually utilized in pairs and crewed by 240 men due to the 47-ton weight. Unfortunately for the Big Berthas, although they found success early in the war against the French and Russians, they were unable to be effective against French forts that were made of reinforced concrete and utilized mid to late war construction.
Our last overcompensatingly large artillery are the Schwerer Gustav and Dora guns. These twin cannons were first developed in the 1930s by the Germans to use against the French Maginot Line in the next war (that they were conveniently planning). These particular guns, Gustav and Dora, both did not survive the war and was used very sparingly by the Nazis. Gustav and Dora weighed over 1,300 pounds, could only be moved on a railway, and could fire 800mm 7-ton shells (about half the weight of a passenger train carriage) to ranges of just under 30 miles. To this day, they are both the heaviest gun and the largest caliber gun to ever be used in combat. Although the guns were developed to destroy heavily fortified French forts along the Maginot Line, the blitzkrieg through Belgium meant the guns were not able to be used for their intended purpose, instead they were used against the soviets at Sevastopol. Its shells were so heavy that they were able to destroy a munitions depot 30 meters underground. Other than the Battle of Sevastopol, they weren’t really used, as the logistics to get the gun in place took months and generally arrived too late or had to be moved to avoid capture. Before the end of the war, the Nazis destroyed both guns to prevent them falling into the hands of the dreaded Americans and Soviets.
To wrap up this piece on comically large cannons/guns, let us part with this final thought. What type of man generally wants to make a gun that is bigger than what anyone else has? Is it the same kind of man that wants to have the loudest exhaust on his car, or the largest lift on his already too big pick up truck, or maybe it’s the loudest angriest man in the room? Do you see what I am getting at here? Of course you do.