8. A Gargantuan Gun
The V3’s site lay six miles inland – estimated to be safe from seaborne commando raids and British Royal Navy guns – and 103 miles from central London. It would house the Vergetlungswaffe 3, German for “Vengeance Weapon 3”. The super guns, whose name was shortened to the V3 Cannons, and also known as “The London Cannons”, were to be aimed at the British capital, which Hitler hoped to destroy. The underground complex was to include over 165 kilometers of tunnels, dug by German workers and slave laborers. The network of tunnels was to be linked to 5 inclined shafts, in which 25 huge gun tubes were to be laid, all aimed at central London. A similar complex would be built nearby, and once both were completed, 50 superguns would wreak havoc upon the enemy capital.
As designed, the V-3 superguns were to fire 10 explosive projectiles that weighed 310 pounds each, with a 55 pound explosive charge. Two batteries were planned, and if they went all out, they would be able to fire 600 rounds per hour, 24 hours a day, and rain devastation down upon and wreck London. As Winston Churchill later commented, if the Nazis had managed to pull it off, it would have been history’s most destructive conventional attack ever launched against a city. The Allies were completely in the dark about the V-3 program, and their intelligence utterly failed to detect the project. Allied reconnaissance flights spotted the activity around the Pas de Calais complex, but analysts assumed that the photos depicted a potential base for the launch of V1 or V2 rockets.
