38cm Kanone Eisenbahn- "Siegfried"
By 1938 Krupp felt that, with the 1936 Programme almost complete and the K12 and K5 designs finished, they had amassed sufficient experience of railway gun design to warrant trying something better, and so design work began on three super heavy weapons. To conserve time two were built around existing barrels that were under construction for naval used, the 38cm SK C/34 being selected for the first. Eight barrels were available; all were modified by enlarging the chamber to fire a new long range shell. Four were taken for coast defence in Norway, where one remains; the other four were mounted as railway gund. These were used for a short time as coast defence guns on the Hel Peninsula in Poland, protecting Danzig, but in early 1942 they were redrawn; the guns were removed from rail mountings and redeployed as coast defence guns on turret mountings on the French coast.

The ordnance was quite conventional, though it appears that it was felt necessary to brace it against droop - something that had not been found necessary in the coast application. The breech mechanism was electrically interlocked to elevating motors so that the gun could only be elevated and depressed if the breech was closed. For traveling, the gun was disconnected from the recoil system and run back 6.00m in its cradle.

The mounting was a box girder structure riding on two sixteen wheel bogies, the gun, in a ring cradle, was trunnioned directly to the side plates. No traverse was available on the mounting as it was intended to use a turntable, but where no turntable was available the gun could be fired from a curved track, when pointing was done by electrically driving the bogies wheels.

Owing to the long wheelbase of the bogies and the requirement that railway gun were to be capable of moving on emergency tracking, only two axles on each eight axle bogie were rigidly mounted in the frames; the outer axles were pivoted, the next pair in were rigid and the inner four were permitted a large amount of sideways movement.

Courtesy from German Artillery of World War II
Ian V.Hogg - Greenhill Books - ISBN 0887403220

Created by one35th - Last updated on  :  Monday, February 13, 2006