What large cannon was used in Germany in world war 1?

Answer 1

The most famous large cannon used by the Germans in WWI was "Big Bertha". This was a postwar nickname, taken from the daughter of Alfred Krupp, the German military industrialist whose factory made what the Germans called the "Paris Guns". There were four of these emplaced. These were guns with extremely long barrels - something well over one hundred feet, but they did not fire very large shells. Their remarkable capability was in their range. These guns could fire shells 75 miles into Paris. The shells took about two minutes in flight, and arrived at supersonic speeds, meaning there was no warning shriek of sound before the shells hit, just a sudden explosion. At such a range and without means of correcting their aim, the best these guns could manage was harassing fire, more for its demoralizing terror value, and almost certainly killing civilians almost exclusively. The worst damage done was a hit on a church during services, which killed 120 French civilians. The guns could only fire one shell about every half hour, and after a few hundred rounds had to be returned to the Krupp factory for a new barrel. It took four specially constructed railroad carriages to move the guns, and the crews were about the size of an entire regiment of infantry - something like 3200 men. All in all probably a tremendous waste of resources. But the Germans have always been fascinated by massive artillery pieces. There were a couple of other Krupp guns - I think one was called Thor - that were massive mortars, or siege cannon, firing much bigger and more destructive projectiles that the Paris guns, intended for reducing enemy fortifications, which actually did see some use in the first few weeks of the war, against the Belgian defensive fortifications. These pieces also required trains to move them, and huge crews, and were of little use through the rest of the war.