Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

Cairns Post (Qld. : 1909 - 1954), Tuesday 17 December 1918, page 3

GERMAN LONG-RANGE GUN.

An Australian's Impressions.

-Sapper George Foulds Gilmore, of

the 6th Field Company, Australian Engineers, son of Mr. and Mrs. John Gilmore, of Cairns (late of Wolfram), in a letter dated September 8th, gives the following interesting account of the German long-range gun.

Yesterday morning we got word that "Big Bertha," the gun which shelled Paris, was lying in a wood

about five kilometres from here. Such a chance was not to be missed; so after an early tea, McNulty, Nicolson, Sefton and myself got bikes from the company sergent-major and set out to find the nine days' wonder. After asking umteen military police and traffic controllers, we found her. And what a sight? She was such a big thing that we did not know which part to start first.

Atter a glance around we made for the barrel, which had fallen down
from the mounting and carriage. Di-mensions: 15 inch bore, 44 feet long, external bias, 4 feet at large end, tapering to 2 feet 3 inches. There was

quite 14 feet of the barrel (breechend) lying scatered about in huge

fragments, tons weight each. The barrel was mounted on a huge steel

emplacement, no doubt the main base is composed of concrete, in massive form, too. The steel emplacement is in the form of a circle, 40 feet in di-ameter, and is very masively con-structed. The rail, for swinging the gun on to an object, is a monstrous affair, and allows the gun to be swung fifty degrees each way, which, with the range the gun no doubt has, should give it a shelling area of seventy to a hundred miles wide by seventy miles range. The carriage is torn apart and everything is in a terrible condition. The Hun made sure before he left it that the gun would not be of any use to his ene-mies. He must have used a tremend-ous amount of explosives in its de-struction. He had three full gauge railway tracks running into it and no doubt spent labor and money unstint-ingly in its erection and maintainance. For it would, and did, take a small army of men, or supermen, to handle it. It had six main cranks, each using three men, coupled to the trail, which swung the gun on to the position with the trail. Each of those cranks

had brass piping for hand rollers, piping 12 feet 4 inches in diameter, and 3 feet 4 inches long, and Sefton managed to get the second last of these off; all the others had been col-lared by souvenir hunters, and we are turning it into serviette rings, of which I will send you and mother three. They will not be very flash, but it is some distinction to have a souvenir from "Big Bertha."

There is always a crowd of from one to two hundred Aussies around the gun, and the clatter and noise is wonderful. One would think coming on it unexpectedly that we had a big workshop there. The Aussies have everything that is anyway moveable at all. All that is left is pieces weigh-ing not less than a quarter of a ton.

The news of the week in book form.

Read the "Northern Herald."