The Paris Gun: A long-range siege weapon used during World War I

The Paris Gun (German: Paris-Geschütz / Pariser Kanone) was a type of German long-range siege gun used to bombard Paris during World War I. When the guns were first employed, Parisians believed they had been bombed by a high-altitude Zeppelin because the sound of neither an airplane nor a gun could be heard. The guns were often confused with Big Bertha or the smaller Langer Max cannon, but they were specifically designed as a psychological weapon to attack the morale of the Parisians rather than to destroy the city itself.

Although the famous Krupp-family artillery makers produced the Paris Guns, they were not a great success: the payload was small, the barrel required frequent replacement, and the guns' accuracy was good enough for only city-sized targets. The gun was surrounded by several batteries of standard army artillery to create a noise-screen. The gun was fired from a north-south axis from Crépy-en-Laon, with calculations for the firing made by a Krupp employee named Professor von Eberhardt.

The gun was capable of firing a 106-kilogram (234 lb) shell to a range of 130 kilometres (81 mi) and a maximum altitude of 42.3 km (26.3 mi) - the greatest height reached by a human-made projectile until the first successful V-2 flight test in October 1942. At the start of its 182-second flight, each shell reached a speed of 1,640 m/s (5,904 km/h; 5,381 ft/s; 3,669 mph). The barrel was 37 metres (121 ft) long, featuring an extension intended to improve accuracy and reduce the dispersion of the shells.

The barrel was braced and mounted on a special rail-transportable carriage. The gun was manned by a crew of 80 Imperial Navy sailors under the command of Vice-Admiral Maximilian Rogge, chief of the Ordnance branch of the Admiralty.

Sources: Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons