9. Hitler’s Super Gun
In 1942, a German ballistics engineer named August Conders convinced Hitler that he had come up with a design for a super gun that just might knock Britain out of the war. Conders’ gun had 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. 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 3000 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. In May, 1943, Albert Speer, the Reich Minister for Armaments and War Production, gave his boss a bit of good news amidst the gloom caused by many of the Fuhrer’s failed endeavors. Hitler was informed that work had begun on the new super guns that could fire hundreds of rounds an hour and hurl their special projectiles over extremely long distances. An underground complex was dug in the Pas de Calais in northern France, across the narrowest stretch of the English Channel that separated Nazi occupied Europe from England.
