|
Contributor :
|
Location :
Australia
Canberra, ACT
Australian War Museum
Coordinates :
Lat : -35.28080 / Long : 149.14890
|
General comments on this surviving gun :
Identical items in the same location :
1
Items covered by this file :
1
|
This Railway heavy gun was vaptured by the Australian 5th Division on August 8th 1918, in Harbonnieres.
|
The entire gun was bring back to Australia, but the craddle was used for tests by the Army. The tube only is surviving nowadays..
|
An old picture of the captured gun in Australia, before the craddle and the tube were separated for the tests.
|
|
Historic context :
In 1914, Germany entered the war with a clear superiority in heavy artillery, including formidable siege guns, with howitzers and mortars of 21 cm, 28 cm, 30.5 cm, and 42 cm, which pounded Belgian, French, and Russian forts before finding new targets in trench warfare. But these terrifying weapons were not very mobile and had to be dismantled into several pieces for transport and then reassembled in special positions set up in advance at a relatively modest distance from their targets due to their relatively short range.
The first naval guns, made available by the immobilization of the German war fleet in the face of Britain's absolute superiority at sea, were converted for long-range land use but retained this lack of mobility, with the heaviest of them even being integrated into imposing concrete positions.
So when the first Heavy Rail-Mounted Artillery (ALVF) appeared on the Verdun and Somme fronts in the summer of 1916, combining power, long range, and mobility, it came as an unpleasant surprise for Kaiser Wilhelm II's armies.
The German General Staff then ordered the construction of rail-mounted guns based on the 15cm, 17cm, 24cm, and 28cm Krupp barrels from the 10 battleships of the old Braunschweig and Deutschland classes. Krupp quickly designed a very good rail mount for the 28cm SK/L 40 tubes, known as the “Eisenbahn und Bettungsschiessgrüst,” consisting of a mount beam mounted on two 5-axle bogies and equipped with an armored shelter. This assembly allowed firing:
- on rails with a limited field of fire of 2 degrees
- on a metal firing platform with a field of fire of 180 degrees
- from a concrete position with a field of fire of 360 degrees
- and later on a removable ‘Voegele’ metal firing platform with a 360-degree field of fire
The barrel was placed in a cradle equipped with a system of two brakes and a hydropneumatic recoil recovery system.
Twenty-one 28cm SK L/40 railway mounts, conventionally named ‘Bruno’, were used between 1917 and 1918. The vast majority of them were assigned to the defense of the Belgian and German coasts, with only two mounts being assigned to the army from the outset and deployed in France in early 1918. One of these guns was captured by the Australians near Amiens in the spring of 1918.
After the armistice, eight mounts were kept in Germany and six were handed over to Belgium. All of them were returned to service in 1940 in the Wehrmacht, sometimes equipped with 28cm tubes with different characteristics, and given specific names (“Bruno” for the pieces that had survived the Great War, “Kürze Bruno” for 28cm SK L/40 tubes taken from other stocks, “Lange Bruno” for the 28cm SK L/45 guns, “Schwere Bruno” for the 28cm Kst L/45 guns, and “Nueue Bruno” for the 28cm L/58 guns).
|
Technical data :
- Complete description : 28cm L/40 railway quick loading gun Bruno
- Design year : 1917
- Calibre : 280.00 mm
- Weight in firing position : 129 tons (tube weight 45.3 tons - platform weight 56.7 tons)
- Weight for transportation : 149 tons on rail mount
- Tube length in calibres : 40.00 total length - (rifled section 29 calibres)
- Grooves : 84 Progressive angle 7 degrees 10 minutes to the right
- Projectile weight : 282 kg
- Initial speed : 740 m/s
- Fire rate : unknown
- Range : 27750 m
- Elevation range : +0 to +45 degrees
- Direction range : 2-degree field on rail, 180 degrees on metal platform, 360 degrees on concrete platform or ‘Voegele’ platform
|
