25. A Really Big Gun
In 1942, a German ballistics engineer named August Conders convinced Hitler that he had come up with a design for a supergun that just might knock Britain out of the war. Conders’ design called for a 417-foot barrel, from which an elongated projectile that weighed hundreds of pounds would be fired. As it made its way through the barrel, the shell would be accelerated by the successive detonation of 32 more charges, and exit with a muzzle velocity of 4920 feet per second.
The supergun’s shells would travel almost 100 miles, and as Conders put it to the Fuhrer, if they were placed near the English Channel, the superguns could hit London. 50 such guns that launched 3,000 rounds a day could devastate central London and destroy a 15 square miles area of the British capital. The results from a prototype that used a 20mm gun showed promise, so the go-ahead was given to scale up the research and development for the project to wreck London.
