I put the Paris Gun up there with the battleship Tirpitz in WWII, for the distraction it created. Look at the resources the Allies tied up trying to get at that big gun, and then in going after a crippled battleship that wasn’t much capable of putting to sea. If there had been an effective way to use these assets. . . . Well, luckily for our side, they couldn’t figure out how. (Assuming noone is from Germany, here.) Think of the further forces brought to bear against them if they HAD become effective.

http://sill-www.army.mil/famag.....26_127.pdf

It’s just so amazing to see the efforts to reconstruct this weapon without seeing it, without seeing any technical publications about it, even without real cooperation.

But note that even in the report he’s saying all the gun did was make the Allies want to fight back. The propaganda battle never ends.

Since the TOC is arranged by paragraph numbers I’ll just tell you that the chapter on the Paris Gun is on book page 723.

I’d never seen this article, but I knew there was a debunked “Expert,” I suppose this is the man. The Paris Gun barrel is regarded as being almost 90 feet, not 120 feet, and no “Near complete gun” was ever captured, only a mounting which was generic to a number of the railroad car guns and believed to be of the type that the Paris Gun used. The experts can’t even say for sure. Of course I’m only saying that from having read about it, while this man is renowned for having NOT read. Nothing existed for him to read. But since noone else knew anything about it between the two world wars, no argument could be offered the man, and he got a lot of mileage out of his Paul Bunyanesque tale.

“. . . .the first ever built that contained within itself a device that told where I he shell had landed—in fact, the gunners could tell where the shell hit before it had actually hit there.” Oh please. But it speaks volumes, the man was strictly a crowd pleaser. Certainly that was one of his many passages of vicarious thrill and wonder offered to the unknowing public of the day.

What is certain is that while the German battleships of the time mounted only a 12 inch gun, it was more effective than the heavier 14 inch guns on the British battlecruisers, which sported less armor than full battleships with smaller guns to help them keep from lumbering slowly behind. Such guns as the 15 inch Langer Max were also used on railroad cars, (Operated by the Navy, commanded by Admirals) and in fact were firing larger shells than the Paris Gun, which started out at about 8 inches. As the article mentioned, the wear factor for a single firing was incredible, and multiple size rounds were carried and the barrel opening regularly measured to ensure they knew just when to step up to the next size. But the barrel wasn’t discarded when it got too large, it was returned to the factory and bored out larger. It would eventually fire a nearly 10 inch shell.

It was the sheer length of the Paris Gun that set it apart, and made it capable of firing a shell some 25 miles into the air to land up to 75 miles away. The inaccuracy at that range was attributed to the Coriolis Effect, the revolution of the Earth itself. The Germans had figured that out, and were trying to compensate.

I hate to argue with his article, but then so many already have. He gives half the number of shells fired as the official estimate of as many as 367. He says 25 shells in one day, officially it never exceeded 20. He mentions multiple guns firing, those would be the “Noise Screen,” firing away as a distraction to make it difficult to find the real gun, not additional Paris Guns. Only one is known to have existed, not the 7 the author claims. But there were many railroad guns in use by the Germans. Brunos fell in the hands of the Belgians after the war, and at the beginning of WWII fired at the Germans, who fired back with other Brunos. One Thedor Otto was captured by the Allies, the others disappeared, as did the Paris Gun.

Although much is known about most of the German railroad car and heavy siege guns, the Paris Gun eluded not just capture and inspection by the Allies, but even mention in any records The Germans are believed to have destroyed it near the end of the war to prevent its’ capture, but what were they using in firing tests at the time of this article as a preliminary to developing rockets? This was further studying the Coriolis Effect that had made it impossible for them to, as the author pretended, “. . . .so equally spaced.”

Ah, but maybe they were firing prototypes for the next generation of guns. While leftover railroad car guns found their way into the Second World War, the Germans did develop the Schwerer Gustav, firing a 31 inch shell through a longer barrel but at shorter range; and the V3 Cannon with a range of over 100 miles that was intended to shell England from France. For all the fears that the Paris Gun would reemerge, Gernany had new weapons that were far worse.

But what of this Colonel Henry Miller? Did he exist? Could he have been part of a disinformation campaign by the American military as they tried to SEEM as though they were on top of things, even as they fell farther and farther behind other countries?

Or could he have been an example of the mendacity of former soldiers after a war? The greatest example of this could be the aftermath of the American Civil War, when exConfederate soldiers traveled the country telling their versions of the war, which could change from night to night to please the differing crowds.

Possibly the most successful post war fictionaire would Mitso Fuchida, the Japanese pilot who spoke the words ‘Tora Tora Tora’ at the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Or at least he SAYS he did, there were no survivors to confirm it. He burst on the scene in the early 1950’s with his romanticized account of the Battle of Midway from the point of view of a star crossed Japanese navy. From stooge senior officers who wouldn’t listen to his dire warnings to technology the Japanese never had, his confirmation of American theories about the Japanese navy were readily available — for a price. Meanwhile, it was the stooge American military historians who wouldn’t listen to the other Japanese survivors who warned that he was feeding them fiction. But why would they listen? He was saying what they wanted to hear.

So was Colonel Miller another Mitso Fuchida, or was he perhaps another Dr. Thomas Dooley? Navy doctor Dooley, in fact, played a huge role in getting the United States into the Vietnam war. His three books of his late 1950’s experiences in the various ‘Domino Effect’ countries, written at the prodding of the CIA, would greatly sway Americans in opposition of allowing Communist rule. The resulting work is largely fiction, depicting a Christian majority oppressed by the Communists when in fact Christians were few and far between in Asia, and fantasizing such colorful events as ‘The Night they Burned the Mountain’ that are in fact known to have never occurred. And yet Dr. Dooley, forced from the Navy for ‘Conduct Unbecoming,’ inspired John F. Kennedy to create the Peace Corps, and the Catholic Church is known to have considered canonizing him as a saint. All for acting as a spokesman for the shadowy world of disinformation.

Ah, but between the fog of war, and the greater fog of postwar, we’ll never know. There’s a highly regarded book on the Paris Gun by Gerald Bull, the renegade scientist who used his knowledge from the joint US-Canadian High Altitude Research Program to design the Iragi Babylon gun that couldn’t be built after his assassination. An assassination that both the Israeli’s and Iranians seek to take credit for. The British claimed to have seized the barrels for the gun that were built in Europe even as the Iraqi’s claimed they were oil pipes. At the time of the Gulf War, the stories were reversed as the British said they were oil pipes and sought the real barrels while the Iraqis said no no, they were right the first time when they said they had the barrels. Regardless of the truth, you’ll hear the version that suits the side that tells it. And much will be told of every version.

And strangely, it well suited both sides to depict the Paris Gun as a miracle weapon: The Germans so they could take credit for building it and the Allies for their fortitude in withstanding it. Instead it was sort of the Scud missile of World War I, feared not so much for its’ power to wage war as the fact that it would lash out as a random act of fate, causing many a soldier and civilian to lose sleep. Far more scary than the idea they could hit the target they were aiming at was the idea that they might hit everything else but.

And the big question here: Colonel Henry Miller, real or imagined? Fool or tool? The possibilities range from his being a creation of the editors of ‘Modern Mechanics’ as they planned their article, or a real artillery officer reporting what they U.S. military THOUGHT they knew about the Paris Gun. We’ll never know, but at least we’ve learned not to fall for hype about weapons of mass destruction.

Haven’t we?

(Big guns or no, it’s late, I’m going to bed.)

PS: Double agents lied about the impact sites in Britain, making the launch crews put the wrong numbers into the guidance system!
(Or was that the V1?)