Karl-Gerät
1940s self-propelled siege mortar of German origin
Karl-Gerät (040/041) (lit. 'Karl-device' in German), also known as Mörser Karl, was a World War II German self-propelled siege mortar (Mörser) designed and built by Rheinmetall. Its heaviest munition was a 60 cm (24 in) diameter, 2,170 kg (4,780 lb) shell; the range for its lightest shell of 1,250 kg (2,760 lb) was just over 10 km (6 mi). Each gun had to be accompanied by a crane, a two-piece heavy transport set of railcars, and several modified tanks to carry shells.
Seven guns were built, six of which saw combat between 1941 and 1945. It was used in attacking the Soviet fortresses of Brest-Litovsk and Sevastopol, bombarded Polish resistance fighters in the Warsaw Uprising, participated in the Battle of the Bulge, and was used to try to destroy the Ludendorff Bridge during the Battle of Remagen. One Karl-Gerät has survived; the remainder were scrapped after the war.
Development
In March 1936 Rheinmetall made a proposal for a super-heavy howitzer to attack the Maginot Line. Their initial concept was for a weapon that would be transported by several tracked vehicles and assembled on site, but the lengthy preparation time drove them to change it to a self-propelled weapon in January 1937. Extensive driving trials took place in 1938 and 1939 using the first Neubaufahrzeug tank prototype and a scale model to investigate the extremely high ground pressure and steering of such an enormous vehicle. Firing trials took place in June 1939.
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This entry incorporates text from “Karl-Gerät” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.