I read something recently (somewhere) about a couple on German guns used in Russia during WW2. I had always thought that "The Paris gun" of WW1 was the biggest but this article claimed differently.

There were several mentioned in the article, all mobile railway guns:

1.) "Anzio Annie" which shelled the beach-head in Anzio, Sicily in 1943 and then backed into a railway tunnel to avoid detection from the air.

2.) The "Thor" gun, which I think was more of a gigantic mortar used during the seige of Leningrad, 42-44?

3.) The "Dora" gun. Used during the seige of Sabestapol in 1942-43? This last one was so fucking big as to defy logic. like the "Guns of Navarone" on wheels. From what I recall it took a whole train to make it, as it had to be assembled on site by a crew of 2500 soldiers. I don't remember the weight of the shells but they were absolutely massive. I also remember that it was more of a psycological warfare tool than anything else as it was fired less than a hundred times and was entirely impractical.

Footnote:

More recent history had the development of the HARP (High Altitude Research Project) gun in Canada by Gerald Bull. That was two WW2 16 inch naval guns attached end-to-end, and could send small packages into low-Earth orbit. (well so could the Paris gun) upon his assassination by the Israeli's in the 1990's he was working on a gun code-named Babylon that was to be put in a hollowed-out mountain and shot 300 miles into Israel. Then the Germans siezed the parts labled "Patroleum pipe". A scaled-down model of this was tested and DID work.

I have also seen pictures of a gun Hitler was building when we over-ran France that was to bombard London. Except this gun used a whole series of flammable gas combustion chambers to move the projectile up the barrel. Some say it would have worked.

The one thing I can say is that the Germans always had a fetish for size!

Swaz