Episode 377 - The Schwerer Gustav

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Hello and welcome to the Lions At Buy Donkeys podcast.

I'm Joe, and with me is Tom and Nate.

We have been appointed to head the local USO planning committee.

And we have about 20 minutes to plan our first event.

Around the table, we sit, drinking entirely too much coffee and have penned some rough ideas on the wall in front of us.

Eli Roth presents Hostel, the stage show, an infinite jest reading group, and the Smell-O version of Solo, the 120 Days of Sodom.

Fellas, how you doing?

I'm all right.

Good.

Personally, I'm going for the Infinite Jest Reading Group.

I will find kindred pretentious people there, dudes in bandanas.

I know you've read it.

I've also read it.

I've read the whole goddamn thing.

I would rather civit myself to Real Life Hostel than read that book again.

It's actually a good book.

It's just, I'm not going to lie, there's definitely some parts that didn't need to be there.

But like, Tom, you've read it.

Yes.

If you boil it down to the part about addiction, it's a phenomenal book.

Much like the man who wrote the book, I hope it dies again.

How in the fuck can we go years making jokes about like appreciating the literature and hating the personality of Yukio fucking Mishima?

And you're like, yes, David Foster Wallace is a terrible book.

Mishima's books are good.

David Foster Wallace's books are good too.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry, Joe.

I will die on this meetingless hill.

Joe, you are wrong.

Like, David Foster Wallace is the literary equivalent for tennis and heroin in the same way that like Dostoevsky is to like, you know, agriculture.

It's like, yes, would you like a book where there is an entire chapter about farming in, but there's also, much like Dostoevsky, long, long, long interludes of guys freaking out, just annoying the shit out of everyone around them.

I never knew what it was that I expected with Dostoevsky.

And then I started reading, and I actually really like Dostoevsky, but it's just like, most of it is just like, oh, a social gathering.

This dude is fucking, just going off on one with this insane idea, and everyone is too polite to be like, dude, can you please shut the fuck up?

Look, like, that's 90% of Dostoevsky's look.

Infinite Jest, much like Thomas Pinchon's masterpiece, Gravity's Rainbow, requires the reader to have patience and like not, you can't just sit and like read it, like blast through it.

You kind of have to like read it and sit and be like, huh, that's really interesting.

And then maybe put the book down.

Who's blasting through a doorstopper like that?

It's not like Brandon Sanderson.

I'm just saying, the book insists on itself.

I don't care for it.

it is guys who are have tote bags are reading in a cafe in a performatively bisexual way that's who's blasting through it they're not absorbing it the book is for dudes who might who much like wallace himself want to be thought of as some progressive thing in reality they're sad boys who beat women go fuck yourself you dead bitch one time you had to spend two weeks uh detailed to being up for the special forces uh the end of the cue course a thing called robin sage when i was in the Q course in the very beginning, the guys who were about to graduate and be Green Berets, you have this whole like, go in and destabilize a foreign government by creating a guerrilla army that's going to commit war crimes exercise.

And we got detailed to be part of like the little opposing force.

They had to be trained, basically.

But then they were like, well, you guys are all captains.

You have too much experience.

We can't let you be the G-men because then if you are, then like you're going to help them too much.

So you're just going to be opt for.

Your job is just to like go be the people who are firing blanks and then get killed in missions.

But there weren't that many missions.

So we lived on some rednecks private trash dump.

I'm not making this up.

We lived in a wooden shack built in a compound where like multiple generations of this family lived and had built homes.

And they had a sign out front that said free dirt and it was spelled D-I-R-T-E.

And

Dirte.

And it was dirty.

Exactly.

And

you could pay them $20 to bring a truck and you could dump a truck bed of trash just

on their land.

We lived in a plywood shack for two weeks with camp stoves and shit like once I think once they let us go into the house and have a shower I brought Neil Sheehan's bright had to roll around in the dirt pile like a hedgehog dude no we just took fucking baby white baths and yeah and just like worked out with like we made weights out of fucking old cinder blocks and shit full-on prison style and I brought three books with me I brought a bright shanning lie by Neil Sheehan the Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky and Infinite Jess by David Foster Wallace and I finished

went out there to kill yourself.

No, I was like, I'm going to be sitting on my ass for three weeks doing fucking nothing.

It was two or three.

I can't remember if it was two or three weeks.

Like, I'm going to be doing nothing, nothing to do all day.

Like, yeah, we work out in the mornings every day, but like, otherwise, what are we going to do?

Wander around the trash dump?

Like, that gets old and boring fast.

So we just read.

Yeah, boys, you want to wander around the trash dump for a while?

There are old boats in the trash dump.

Like, people had come and just dropped their old fucking, like, motor boats and shit.

You climb into the boat and pretend you're on the lake.

You just go up to the boat and you just see all the haunted, weird redneck shit and like pull tap cans of Budweiser.

It was basically like North Carolina's version of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

It was so.

Okay.

So fellas.

Fellas.

We spent the last three weeks talking about feudal peasants, bad teeth.

And a whole lot about being hanged, drawn, and quartered.

Getting ye old Stone Island badging on my tunic.

That's right.

Having my counterfeit kettle, which is a watch for some reason.

So I thought we should take something a little bit more comfortable, a little bit something, you know, more ridiculous, and that is a really big, very stupid cannon.

And that's because today we're talking about Schwer Gustav.

We've actually talked about this before a little bit, several years ago, but that with the amount of tension

something this stupid and huge truly deserves.

And this is normally where I would ask you guys, have you heard of Schwer Gustav?

But pretty much everybody has heard about Heavy Gustav, our lad here.

Or at least you've seen a picture of it.

You kind of can't escape.

Is it the big gun on the train?

It's the giant Nazi rail cannon.

Yeah, yeah, okay.

Hell yeah, we are fucking talking about orc weapons.

For a second, I was hoping that it was actually a guy whose name was Heavy Gustav.

Like, well, Schwer Gustav.

Well, it is named after a guy.

I cannot confirm nor deny he was a particularly heavy Gustav, but he was a Gustav.

I feel like Gustav is a name you expect the guy to be a little bit ponderous.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, that's true.

You expect him to be orb adjacent, at least.

I have to tell this really fast to close out the story before, and I promise I won't interrupt.

Just talk about heavy guys.

One of the other things that happened when forced to live in the trash dump was that the owner basically got the cadre to let them second us to dig a drainage ditch for him so he could put a toilet in?

And he was in a wheelchair, and we had to carry him in his fucking motorized wheelchair so he could supervise us and then, like, basically just yell incomprehensible redneck shit at us while we were like digging the trench with like pickaxes and shovels.

And then when it was done,

yes, yes.

And then when it was done, the guy made his wife go down to the town, like Denton, North Carolina, to buy us a Bo Box from Bojangles as a reward and great big one-gallon jugs of iced tea.

But the way that he said it was, Woman, go on down here and get downboard a Bo box.

That is comprehensive.

If Big Heavy Gustav looked at me, I'm like, what I think of the heavy Gustav, that guy's name, who knows, Rednecks, man.

His name might have been Guth.

It was Gus for sure.

I definitely read it.

You were fucking just living on the trash dump of the North Carolina version of Cotton Hill.

Dude, yes.

He was short, too.

It was so weird.

I love the fact that you were Corvette as a B-Duel labor.

I was a captain in the Army Gentry.

I was

deployed twice.

I was a captain in the army, and I was like, you're also Corvée labor for some random ass redneck.

And also, the cadre have a locked fucking tough box in the little ops center in the redneck's private Baptist church with like everything is handmade and looks like shit, but they have like an easily $100,000.

I can't carry you into that because for some reason he did not build it to be wheelchair accessible.

There was like a $100,000 homemade, fucking gigantic barbecue smoker in there.

And like on the wall, there was like all the lists of like, you know, king of the grill aphorisms that just didn't make sense in English.

They weren't English.

As they say, render unto Gustav.

Yeah.

Anyway, so now I'm done with my interruption.

I might not even interrupt the rest of this episode, but like I couldn't flash back in my mind to living in the trash stub, reading Infinite Chess, among other things, without telling you about, woman, going out of town, get that boy Bobox.

I love the character of Gustav because now I'm just, as we go forward, I'm just going to picture the Nazis building a cannon onto him.

Yeah, well, though Heavy Gus is there.

He's telling they're having to carry him to non-wheelchair accessible parts of the factory.

Yeah, they have to put him on the rail.

So he can yell at them about like fucking building this cannon.

He's a rail-born Gus.

He's in the wheelchair, but he's just like incredibly musculator on like the top half, and he's hand-throwing the shells like a football.

This is what would happen if the Emperor from Warhammer 40K was American.

He looked like the guy who gets fucking his hand broken in casino when he gets caught cheating in the casino.

That's what he looked like, but he, you know, had like diabetes legs.

So Big Ol Gus, as I believe is the name that he would change to if he went to Ellis Island, was the largest gun ever fired in combat.

It was so large, it required two specially built rail lines to move, a crew of well over 2,000 to operate, and a max firing range of 47 kilometers with a shell that, when fired, broke the speed of sound.

Holy shit.

A crew of 2,000?

That's the low end.

It will actually grow from here.

We'll get there, Nate.

Don't worry about it.

It's the kind of stupidity that could only be invented by the Nazi.

Because we have rocket-assisted artillery munitions now.

I don't think their range is quite that far, but it's pretty goddamn far.

And it doesn't require a brigade-sized element for one.

Once again, let me tell you about a little book called Gravity's Rainbow.

Let me tell you something about something called Big Ol' Gus.

I actually brought Gravity's Rainbow with me me to Special Forces Selection because we were allowed to bring one book, and it was a terrible choice because I kept falling asleep and getting yelled at.

It's a great book, but it's not a book to read when you need to stay awake.

I mean, the Schwer Gustav or Big Ol Gus is not the furthest firing gun in history, even by its time, but it was certainly the largest.

Yeah, the furthest firing gun was this backyard project by a Canadian guy with a friend from Iraq who we was best buddies.

Oh, that hadn't happened yet.

Don't worry about it.

Don't worry about our good friend.

Don't worry about our friend the space cannon.

Everybody knows the furthest firing gun is actually something Gus's cousin built to fire potatoes at his backyard.

But like all giant, stupid engineering projects, it was a massive waste of time, resources, and the energy of everyone involved.

But before we get to that, we have to talk about why exactly anyone thought building such a monstrosity was a worthwhile venture.

Yeah, because I was about to ask Joe, like, this feels like a very late World War II, like, last-ditch efforts.

Like, we will build the biggest gun to defeat the West.

It actually predates World War II itself.

There's also the double-tracked self-propelled howitzer that the U.S.

built prototypes for because they're still one of the

railway guns.

These dumb things getting built, you know, sort of like, I guess when you have infinity money and you've retooled your entire economy around, you know, munitions manufacturing, like, you know, the armaments equivalent of the Juicero gets built.

Yeah.

And I mean, when you look at the U.S.

during World War II, which which we're going to be doing like a fair amount in some of our bonus episodes this month, but it kind of doesn't count because America could just kind of manufacture anything it wanted for World War II and it didn't hurt it at all

because it was just the cheat code for Age of Empires.

Like, oh, you want 6,000 fucking planes?

Yeah, you'll have them by tomorrow.

We don't fucking get it.

Yeah, yeah.

You want a juicero who melts people?

Fucking we'll build that for you too.

We've got the stage four wonder that lets you just generate a thousand tanks every turn randomly.

We're gonna spit out so many guses and wheelchairs.

You're gonna have no idea what our gusses will blot out the sun.

But also, once again, big gus is like a fucking rare 40k like card in the card playing game.

I play big gus.

I have to use this much land.

It's somehow both playable by orcs and space marines.

You've activated my trap card.

Big gus.

It's a flight of stairs.

Yeah, but we're talking about later Age of Empires and not Civ 2 rules where like Big Gus, the Landis Connect could somehow destroy a submarine if it was weak enough.

Look, Gus, we don't know who Gus is capable of, but it was a submarine.

The concept of Gustav, or Gus, that being a railway gun, a gun so large it could only be transported with a rail, is not a new idea.

The first railway gun used in combat actually was in the American Civil War.

And much like the ones that had come after, the American version was also massive for its time.

It was a repurposed naval cannon thrown onto a railway casement and brought to bear during the Battle of Savage's Station.

The idea of this goes back even further to the 1800s, where a Russian military engineer kind of first spitballed the idea of, what if we built guns so big man nor animal could drag it?

And that kind of makes sense when you think of the history of artillery as a whole.

It's a siege weapon.

This is what's now known as siege artillery, or what was known when artillery was first invented, just all artillery, A really big cannon.

But as weapons advanced, this turned into something bigger and bigger and bigger.

And they all generally followed the same path.

Put a giant fuck you naval cannon on railroad tracks.

The stretch into World War I, where we get, I guess you could consider it our revolution of railway guns.

And the reason for that is everyone is in on the game, but mostly the French.

Because when the war started, they actually found themselves with a massive shortage of what you could consider field guns, but a huge surplus of coastal defense cannons, which really wouldn't be used thanks to the realities of naval warfare in World War I.

The French just creating like a little model.

It's like, what if we take the gun from the sea and we put it on a train and it is like a big bag shooting a big piece of cheese at our enemies?

Delicious.

So they dragged them out to the front and they mounted them on repurposed rail beds.

Some of these were huge.

They're 20-inch naval guns.

They required crews in the dozens or hundreds to prep, move, load, and fire.

But again, the Germans' penchant for building comically oversized weapons wins the day because they built the Paris gun.

This is probably the first fuck you cannon in human history, really.

It was a gun that was built, surprise, with the sole purpose of hitting Paris from 120 kilometers away.

This worked

because fuck Paris, I suppose.

Now, the Paris gun is something we don't actually know a ton about, thanks to the Germans pretty thoroughly destroying it before it could be captured and studied.

It was a repurposed and tweaked naval cannon that fired so high that its shell was the furthest thing humans flung into space until the Nazis cranked out the V2 a couple decades later.

They do really enjoy novelty oversize

things when it comes to heavy industry, the military.

I recall a bit in Gravity's Rainbow where the protagonist fucking gets on a German boat in the naval, like a naval fleet, and it's like, oh, there's no toilets on any boats.

There's just one toilet ship for the entire fleet and everyone has to go.

That is like, I know it's hyperbole, it's a joke, it's a book, et cetera.

But like, that is so the German mentality.

It's like, no, just, there just needs to be one ship full of toilets.

Similarly, like, there needs to be a one big cannon just to piss off the French, just to fuck up Paris.

Be like, oh, you thought we couldn't?

Well, guess what?

We can.

The Americans had ice cream ships.

Anything's possible.

I mean, that's...

That's so fucking American.

It's not even funny.

It's the same thing.

I'm surprised they weren't burger ships.

I was going to say burger ships, barbecue ships, hot dog ships, just a hot dog ship.

It's shaped like a hot dog and it's full of hot dogs.

The Oscar Meyer battleship.

That's the Gus fleet.

Yeah, exactly.

To compare it to something that the Germans actually did do during World War II was create a toilet on a U-boat that was so complicated that if you used it incorrectly, it would sink the U-boat, which happened.

Killed several people.

But.

Dramatic decompression caused by taking huge shit.

I bricked so hard I killed my homie.

You just have to have a tactical fiber supply for all of the sailors just so no one's like backed up.

Yeah.

Oh my God.

Exactly.

You get the German Kriegsmarine on the most high-protein diet imaginable, so they just never shit.

You get that all-meat diet, so they don't have to shit while they're underway.

The fucking Liver King Super Soldier.

They're all just fucking puce red.

That creates a very different version of the inspection scene from Dustboat.

However, the Paris gun was a bad combination of raw, insane power and classic German overengineering.

Its 211 millimeter shells that it fired also happened to destroy the barrel as they were being fired, little by little.

Meaning this massive 21 meter long barrel would need to be switched out after only a couple of shots.

Novelty oversized headspace and timing gauge.

He's putting that on fucking like a crane.

Tom, basically the old, they've changed it, but the old 50 cals, the M2 Browning 50 caliber machine gun, when you changed out the barrels, you had had to set, you use these metal gauges basically to set the headspace and timing.

It was like a task we trained on.

They realized like

they've created new barrels where you don't have to do that anymore because like it's just a thing people fuck up and like it causes the gun to jam.

It can't potentially cause to explode if you fuck it up.

So I'm just imagining this.

You have to have like it basically looks like

it looks like a weird kind of like Pantone palette slider, but with like different space metal gauges that you put in to check the like the between the barrel and the

I guess the assembly.

And it's like i'm just imagining that but on like one of those novelty oversized cranes they've got to have like all the fucking helicopter warning lights on yeah and that's just to change the barrel on the which is also this feels german i do really like uh i don't know if you ever saw this nate but uh when someone went to pull the charging handles back on the m250 calendar the barrel just goes flying off no i haven't seen that but uh there were burn marks all over the fucking clearing pit at fob chirado where people forgot about the ghost round in the mark 19.

the grenade launcher the way that it works, I can't describe it from memory.

It's been so long, but basically, like, you have to recall that there's a certain thing.

Like, you have to fight, you have to basically charge it, fire it, charge it, and then it's charged.

And people forget.

They would charge it, fire it, charge it, fire it again.

And then they do it a second time and fire the grenade launcher into the clearing pit.

Thankfully, the grenade does not go off.

You drive by, and you just see these burn marks all over.

Like, oh, wow, they've been clearing Mark 19s here.

Oh, man.

These are the same soldiers they want to give somebody like the Paris gun to.

Now, this isn't a rifle or a machine gun or something that is built to swap out barrels quickly.

Swapping out guns, parts, barrels, all of which broke and cracked under the stress of firing something so large, required hundreds of men, multiple cranes, and heavy machinery, and would put it out of service for days at a time.

To make things even dumber, the shells that the Paris gun were firing were not that powerful.

Owing to the engineering genius of the Germans who wanted shells to go really, really, really far.

And that was about it.

So obviously the way to do this was with a massive propellant charge.

So the shells, which weighed over 200 pounds, which don't be impressed by that, I promise.

We'll get to the Schwer Gustav, were mostly shielding for its comparatively tiny explosive charge of only 15 pounds of TNT.

The most of that 200 pounds is literally just protection because of how violent this thing was going off.

Just so it didn't get torn apart by the force of the propellant sending it towards its target.

In its entire service life, the Paris gun fired about 300 times.

It was also so inaccurate that aiming it to anything other than the entirety of Paris and pulling the trigger was about as good as you got.

If you tried to hit anything specific, say an actual building purposefully in Paris, you'd probably miss by multiple kilometers.

Obviously, this is like a really, really fucking big

like missile to send.

But like what airspeed velocity like is it actually reaching?

Because if it's that big and that heavy, like drag over that distance means it's like, oh, we could hit Paris.

We could just like it lands slightly outside.

It's not a direct fire weapon.

They'd fire it at an extreme angle.

Hence why it's...

That's why it's 15 pounds of explosive for 200 pounds round.

So it's basically casings and propellant.

It's mostly like the science fiction idea of like rods from God where you drop like tungsten rods from space.

Effectively, it's like, what if you turned a howitzer into a mortar?

Yeah.

I mean, it's firing at a crazy angle.

It doesn't really do a whole lot.

I think the most damage I've seen people give to it is like it killed 200 or so Parisians, which I know sounds really bad.

But in the grand scheme of World War I, that's literally not even a drop of the bucket.

And when you think of the massive amount of resources they poured into this comically large weapon, it's kind of beyond stupid.

Yeah, it was a terror weapon.

They made an even better terror weapon.

They put a little nitrite powder aerosol in it that makes everyone's mistress recommit to their marriage.

The most powerful anti-French weapon ever developed.

Now you just fire the Paris gun at Paris and it just like gently steals your wallet as you board the train.

Why gently?

I don't know.

a pickpocket.

Oh,

okay.

Nobody wants to be like a rough pickpocket.

You know, listen here to that kind of thing.

I'm not here to kick shade pickpockets, but.

I know it has to be Chao Young Fat or Jet Li or like any fucking Hong Kong movie stars.

You know what I'm saying?

Yeah, like exactly.

But World War One comes to an end.

The German Empire shits itself and dies.

And then that pile of shit slowly reforms into Nazi Germany.

who rapidly begins a rearmament program aimed specifically towards a future war against France.

France, meanwhile, is rapidly building its own prelude to failure, the Maginot Line.

Now, my goal one day is to do a series on the Maginot Line and the fall of France, so we're not going to go into it in too much detail here, just as a context so you understand why

we're going to talk about it a little bit more.

Most people are aware of what the Maginot Line was in some capacity, but the line was a series of bunkers and fortified positions along the Franco-German border, which pretty much goes down in history as one of the biggest fuck-ups any military has ever made.

And in my personal opinion, I find it pretty unfair and a pretty big case of hindsight being 2020 in a lot of ways.

Also, simply not understanding the tactical purpose of the Maginot Line, which was not, as it's often believed, to stop a German offensive into France.

Rather, it was to force the Germans into a flanking maneuver through the Low Countries if they ever wanted to invade France again.

Meaning, the goal was to force any German war plan against France to be yet again another massive European war.

Something they, of course, thought that nobody would ever want to do again.

Whoops.

I also find this as a side note very funny because, like, because of the quick failure,

you know, France losing the war very quickly,

once Philippe Pétain was in power, the official position basically boils down to we weren't strong against the Germans because of Lu Wo Guisma, but like 1940s version of it.

So the more things change, the more they stay the same effectively.

But yes, the Maginot line, it wasn't like, oh, it crumbled because it was made out of, I don't know, fucking empty wine bottles.

It's that

empty wine bottles and the piled up corpses of mimes.

It's like, well, they were like, well, they wouldn't want to start another continent-wide war.

They wouldn't invade Belgium.

They've never done that before.

Anyway, they wouldn't invade Belgium and the Netherlands.

They certainly wouldn't want to, you know, kick off another human meat grinder.

We would never, as a people, eh, whatever.

The corpse of a dead mime on the Maginot line, just like cast like in the ground, like the guy jerking off a Pompeii.

French Pompeii is all of the mimes who are slaughtered for the Maginot line.

That's why L'Academy Golier was founded, because in memory of all those dead mimes at the Maginot line.

Yeah.

There's obviously problems with through line and static defense systems that look like they belonged in 1915, but it should be pointed out here that everyone thought the line would be a massive pain in the ass to actually get through, including the Germans.

The reason for this lay largely in just how strong these French fortifications were.

The French state poured so much goddamn time, money, and resources into building the Maginot line to the point that some places had reinforced concrete that was seven meters thick, as well as massive amounts of armor plating, underground reinforcement systems.

So, like all of the Maginot line positions were connected to other ones below ground with a fully functioning train system to shuffle people back and forth, as well as ammunition and casualties.

It was honestly very impressive.

And to underline how solidly a lot of these were built, after France fell, the Maginot line kept being used.

Obviously, the French used it to fight the Germans and lost, but then the Germans themselves manned the Maginot line.

And then so did the Americans later on.

Like, and if you go to France today, there's huge swaths of the Maginot line that still are standing.

The strength of the fortifications were never the problem.

They were as solid as they come.

So, when Hitler ordered the German high command to figure out a way around this problem, they contacted weapon manufacturer Krupp.

Krupp was well known in the world of cranking out massive cannons.

For example, during World War I, they produced the Big Bertha, which is a wonderful name.

Wait, so like Tyson Krupp, like they're still around, you know?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's just like Bayer, you know, famously didn't do anything bad.

Nope.

Volkswagen didn't do anything bad.

That's right.

Hugo Boss.

No problems there at all.

The list goes on.

We actually did an episode on those companies.

Go listen to it.

That was a long time ago.

Now, the Big Bertha wasn't a railgun, but it was so big it couldn't be transported in one piece.

Instead, it had to be disassembled and reassembled by a team of men and about five wagons.

It took six hours to set up and could fire about eight to ten rounds per minute, which is quite good for a gun of this size.

And because this is Germany, each wagon was specifically built to carry one very specific piece of cannon.

They were not interchangeable.

It's a very stupid detail.

Because if there's one thing that Germany loves more than Schlager, it's fucking themselves with overeating

problems.

Despite all of this, Big Bertha was actually very effective at smashing fortifications.

They eventually built around 10 of them, and they were the largest pieces of field artillery ever used in combat for quite some time.

So when the men of the German high command said, okay, we want one of those, but a whole lot bigger.

Because after all, the Maginot line were stronger than anything anyone had come up against during World War I.

Remember, the men of the German high command were pretty much like everyone else in every other military high command at the time, staffed with dudes who fought in World War I.

So they only had World War I solutions to their World War I problems.

Big cannon, big cannon, train.

Big bunker, big cannon, bigger cannon, bigger bunker.

Kills a million people.

Shit.

I mean, like, look, you know, the German imagination during World War II was like obsessed with monumentality and like architectural maximalism.

So it's like, it's not surprising.

It's like, oh, what if we made a really big fucking gun and put it on a really big fucking train?

Yep.

Yep.

I mean, not to give their engineering prowess credit, the Schwer Gustav makes sense if you are very stupid and are trying to come up with a very stupid solution to your problem.

Once again, Nate, to bring it back to Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow.

Yep, fair enough.

Except Gustav's rainbow.

At least Schwer Gustav doesn't require your Twink acolyte to be the human pilot of the projectile.

Give them enough time.

They would have put a twink inside the cannon.

We're shooting him directly at Paris.

It's the deadliest weapon.

He would love it there.

We filled him full of poison and we're shooting him directly at Paris.

The most lethal bioweapon known to Parisians.

After all,

what else are kamikaze pilots?

I mean, the Nazis did come up with their own kamikaze pilots.

They just didn't end up using them.

Rumored, they tried to use them like twice, but you know, who's to say you couldn't load a twink into the cannon?

So, Krupp got to work, putting an engineer named Eric Mueller in charge of coming up with an explosive solution to this problem.

He devised that any kind of gun they built would also need to be able to engage the bunkers from far enough away that French artillery on the line would not be able to take them out with a counter battery because the Maginot line was also full of fucking artillery.

Because, of course, it was as a static defense line.

And Mueller figured the catch-22 of anything large enough to be able to do damage to the actual Maginot line bunkers would also be so fucking huge and hard to move it would be too slow to get out of any resulting kill zone so very very strong capable of huge amounts of distance so in Mueller's head is like this cannon is suddenly becoming the largest cannon I've ever conceived After some quick math, Mueller discovered that, yeah, in order to do both of those things, we're going to have to build the biggest cannon the world has ever even drawn on a bar napkin.

It would need to be so big, it wouldn't be able to be like Big Bertha.

Only a rail gun would work.

But any cannon they built this big, which was, it's probably even bigger than you're thinking.

Its eventual weight is estimated because we don't know for sure, but it's estimated at 1,350 tons unloaded.

I should point out.

What?

Would be, yeah, unloaded, would be too goddamn heavy for one standard track of rail.

It would need two.

But the tracks would also have to be stronger than anything currently used in Germany or anywhere else in the world to brace the thing for firing.

So they would also have to build their own railroad tracks.

I noticed this just seeing the Polish army doing registration fires once that they had the self-propelled howitzers and they had like little legs that extended out to like brace it against the ground.

And these were wheeled vehicles, but even then like it it was so I'm just wondering obviously those kinds of things obviously like hydraulics and stuff, but but that didn't really exist to any great degree at the time.

And so, you think, like, the bracing involved must have been absurd.

The

everything about this is just more difficult because of the sheer, yeah, like every aspect of normal, call it artillery firing, is going to become annoying.

And also, like you just described, I mean, like, it's got basically Jupiter gravity.

It just crushes every crack of rail it's on.

It breaks every rail bridge.

It's like an American.

It's like when you have an Abrams going over literally any culvert in South Korea, it's like, whoops, can't collapse it, collapses.

So, I don't know.

It just, to me, it's like everything about this is like, yeah, it just makes sense to assemble it on site and bring it in smaller pieces versus one big thing that has to be on the rails.

You nailed it, which doesn't actually make things easier, as we'll find out.

So, that meant, obviously, anywhere this cannon went, a whole team of laborers would need to lay track in any given direction.

That isn't even getting into the logistics of the gun itself.

The thing from breach to barrel tip would be 47 meters long, which also meant that the barrel would require some kind of superstructure to support it when it was fired, because the barrel itself would need to be cut in two separate pieces.

Do you think that the guys who worked on the crew for this thing, then when they got with their shift, went back to their barracks tent and like brought out a board game version called Giant Gun Simulator?

They were really into like Kinect.

I was going to say, like, erector sets,

you know, like advanced duplo.

I realize this is pan-European, it's not German, but yeah.

Creating the large caliber version of the military Grateful Dead.

It just has like a traveling band of acolytes that travel around with it.

The main difference being that everybody involved in the Schwer Gustav fucking hated it, but we'll get to that point.

We're waiting on John Mayer's opinion on the Schwer Gustav.

No, we are not.

I don't want to know his opinion on the Schwer Gustav.

Am I lifting it right?

Your cannon is a wonderland.

Why, Gustav, why?

It also meant that the barrel was too unstable to be connected to the rest of it when it was being moved.

So here is where Mueller was realizing that this entire thing would need to be broken down into multiple parts.

And that then that would require even more men to move, assemble, reassemble the cannon.

Also, all of these parts would require different wagon trains on the rail.

So now it's going from rail cannon to entire locomotive spanned effort.

Effectively, the John Mayer lyric of I'm bigger than my body gives me credit for is, in fact, an accurate summation of the heavy doosau.

Yeah, John Mayer, time traveler.

Then, of course, comes the ammunition.

Since this new cannon would be dedicated to smashing bunkers rather than terror-bombing Paris, it would actually have to deliver a punch, unlike the Paris gun really did.

Two kinds of ammunitions were designed: a high-explosive and armor-piercing variant.

Though I argue, any explosive this large is inherently armor-piercing.

Yeah.

The high-explosive shell would weigh 10,000 pounds.

What?

And the armor-piercing variant over 15,000.

Jesus Christ.

Now that is just the warhead.

This is an artillery piece.

So it's not one piece.

You have the warhead and the powder charge.

Those were two separate pieces.

I presume there's not any kind of shell casing or any kind of like cartridge because it would just be too big.

Like there's no way to assist.

Oh, yeah, there was.

Of course there was.

So it was just like

a novelty oversized extractor as well.

Like how in the fuck is that going to work?

You actually have two separate cranes.

A different train has to leave the station in the opposite direction to open the breach.

Everything involved here requires the coordinated effort of hundreds of men and multiple cranes.

So you'd have a crane to load in the warhead, a different crane to ward in the powder charge.

And then you would have like the blasting cap at the end.

The breach would then be closed by a different crane.

It would be fired.

And then all of those cranes and people would go back into like coordinated effort to extract the shell.

What if you had an entire brigade-sized element doing the like carnival fucking prize hook grabber claw thing in a machine, except it was like to load a gigantic bullet into a gigantic artillery round into a gigantic pounder?

There was no gas extractor because of how big it was.

So one of the first things they would have to do is everyone would have to like run away to off-gas the cannon so they didn't accidentally poison themselves.

Like, for example, for people who don't know, on modern tanks and self-propelled artillery and even old artillery, there's something called like a bore evacuator that helps you off-gas the barrel so all the combustible fumes don't go rushing back into your face when you drop the breach.

This weird Gustav just didn't have one.

They should have like staffed it with like the proto version of the juggalos because they definitely just would have ran up to the barrel and sucked the gas out of it to get hard.

The juggos never would have worked for Nazi Germany, Tom.

Absolutely not.

Evil Juggolos, I don't know.

Don't be fucking ridiculous.

The evil juggolos aren't just Nazis.

Yeah, exactly.

So you just have to, so you effectively have to use like a complex crane assembly to burp the cannon like a baby.

Yeah, it's a giant pneumatic hand to just gently slap it just below the fucking...

Yeah.

Put the cannon on a great big shoulder and just give it some pats.

We have to bring in the giant shoulder that has brought in a different rail line.

Mueller just tired, rubbing his temples.

He's like, I don't know what I'm doing with my life anymore.

Since nothing like this existed on Earth, it also required Krupp to design and build all of the different specialized cranes and winches and everything else used in this entire process.

Anything to move the cannon, to build the cannon, to move the ammunition, to load the ammunition, the rail cars everything was loaded in, even down to the rail lines, which did not exist anywhere, would all need to be designed and built by Krupp.

So that meant that like working on the Schwer Gustav was more like being on the world's most dangerous construction site than an artillery crew.

Mueller saw logistical problems clear as day and was pretty surprised when he reported them to German high command with no real response.

High command waffled a bit because this is Nazi Germany we're talking about here.

Everything flows through Hitler, and Hitler himself suddenly loved the design.

He loved the project and mostly what it looked like because, of course, he did.

The man loved gigantic over-the-top weapons programs.

I have known a lot of people who've done a lot of amphetamines, and if I showed them the plans for a big cannon, I feel like they would have been excited about it too.

That's true.

And not in the way of like, I can steal so much copper wire from this thing.

Hitler's there, like, rubbing his gums, and he's like, my God, it's so big.

He has this

same body control as like Conor McGregor does these days.

Get out there and look at that cannon quick.

Look at the fucking size of it.

Just fucking twitching manically.

Just imagining it's like all these logistical problems being presented, and Hitler just said, Yeah,

then you have to hit him with a Meinführer der cannon is Nicht Geschus.

See, what you do not realize is that no one else thought a cannon this big was possible until I came into the mix.

I went in.

I hit him with the left.

I hit him with the right.

I got the big cannon.

We're going to destroy the Maginal line.

Give me another Pervitan.

The only thing that Conor McGregor would think about if he saw the Shueric Gustav is like, I bet I could do a line the length of that thing

and then punch an old man.

And then do other things he's been found guilty of in a court.

Yes,

rape.

And also, most recently, as of yesterday, send dick pics to Azalea Banks, the most insane person on the internet.

Yep, yep.

As a side note, I feel like that's the last person on earth that you want to send dick pics to, especially if they're unsolicited, because she'll just put a Santeria curse on your dick and it'll never work again.

You won't even be able to pee.

The weirdest part about the whole thing is Azalea Banks is like, oh, don't worry, we've been sending dick, we've been sending unsolicited news to each other since 2016.

The whole thing, and then she just posted the screenshot of it on Twitter and it got deleted by moderation.

I'm just going to say I looked up the Shver Gustav, the enormous cannon, and even just looking at like a scaled model of it, the only thing I can use to describe the aesthetic is Magitek Armor Factory.

Yep.

It's so fucking weird.

You know, when Krupp was asked and Krupp and Mueller were asked for an honest assessment of the weapon's feasibility by Hitler, they just kind of nodded and said, it's really going to, it's going to be great.

It's going to work.

Because the important thing to remember how Nazi Germany Germany worked was Hitler hated being told no, especially when he liked something.

They knew that he was just dying to hear that, hey, this cannon is totally gonna whip ass.

So that's what they told him.

So in 1936, Hitler ordered the construction to begin in full.

Because this weapon is meant to be ready for the invasion of France.

It is not.

They immediately run into problems.

Germany's economy was doing quite well, all things considered at the time, before they nuked it by attempting to fight the entire world.

But its manufacturing sector was already redlighting due to the massive demands that Nazi rearmament brought.

So when Krupp attempted to begin churning out the massive steel plates that would be needed to build the Schwer Gustav, they immediately ran into shortages, flaws because they weren't able to build steel plate to the quality that they needed.

And then He was kind of forced to hit pause on the entire program.

And this is just the manufacturing of the cannon's barrel, mind you.

Not the carriage, not the supporting things, not the cranes, not the ammunitions or the rail cars, but just the barrel.

Because the barrel is the most important part of this thing.

It needs to be able to withstand the force of firing such a massive round.

Hitler originally wanted the thing ready by 1940, but in 1939, Krupp had only just carried out the first test of the cannon, and it was successful.

But it's literally just a cannon on a crane.

Nothing else is built.

On the proving grounds, it easily blasted apart the concrete and armor plating that was demanded of it.

And it did take days to set up correctly due to the length of the barrel.

This is where Krupp decided it would probably have to be cut in half and then reconstructed on site.

Something they did not want to do with the barrel.

But in order for the test to be carried out to a satisfactory level, small tweaks would need to be made in the barrel, in the breach, all those things.

And as a result, tests on the barrel were not declared over and done with until 1941.

I'm kind of enjoying looking at pictures of this because it needs quadruple rails, basically.

Yes.

It needs basically like a not normal size kind of rail, but rather a double-tract on both sides.

Basically, so it's sort of like imagine two rails or two pairs of rails, and it's whatever you want to call it.

It's fucking bogies, whatever the fuck they are.

The things that like.

They are called bogies, yes.

I learned that because of this episode.

Little train wheels.

I mean, it looks like you're doing some sort of, it's like the animation sequence when you build a world wonder in Civ 6, and it's like, oh, this is the scaffolding to build the big dumbass thing, but the scaffolding is part of the assembly.

Yes, the scaffolding is holding it up.

I should also point out at this stage of the project, Krupp was not aware that he would need four rails.

He thought he'd still be good with two.

Yeah, and then Jupiter gravity starts happening.

Everything just crushes.

They put the last bolt and it just collapses.

It digs a hole to China somehow.

It penetrates the entire Earth.

So the entire purpose of this cannon is now moot.

The Germans had swept into France in the beginning of May 1940 and the Battle of France, as it would come to be called, was over by the end of June.

So the whole point of this thing is over and done with.

But Hitler did not cancel the project and instead the cannon, now nicknamed the Schwer Gustaf or Heavy Gustav or Big Ol Gus, named after the senior director of Krupp, which I'm sure he was very happy with, continued in development.

Now, a small side note here about Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Hallbach,

the canon's namesake.

You can kind of see why they went with Gustav on that one, was probably destined to the hangman at the end of World War II for his firm's enthusiastic use of slave labor during the war.

However, the Allies determined that Gustav was too stroked out and riddled with dementia to get strung up.

Something I think we can all agree.

that we disagree with.

Yeah.

Hang that old man.

He gives a shit, man.

Famously, the Nazis and their industrialist partners were really forgiving and understanding of people with disabilities and mental impairments when it came to the decisions they made.

Right?

Right?

Sure, he can't read a clock, but goddamn, can he build a good cannon?

I want to watch the childlike wonder leave his dementia.

I'm just laughing, too, because it's like, yeah, the Nazis just do regular war shit and take France.

They don't need

the enormous cannon on rails.

It's going to become like gigantic logistics problem, challenge, impediment.

But the problem is their top-down top-down structure is led by a guy who's just got an alternate version of Creation's Gucci Gucci playing in his head.

He just goes, one big gun shooting big bullets.

With the cannon of Gustav complete, the company moved on to building its chassis, by which time the whole thing had actually gotten bigger as a result of the powerful canon's test results.

And you know, Krep realizing, oh God, this thing is actually far more powerful than we originally thought.

We suck at math.

For starters, it would need two chassis, Frankenstein together.

And now rather than the two rail lines, the reinforced ones that they already knew they were going to have to build, the chassis would now be supported by eight bogies, or those little train wheels for us on railheads, on each side.

Meaning, like Nate said, there would actually be four rail lines now.

Just to make this thing work, the Germans would have to build more rail infrastructure than the entire United States has at any given point of its lifespan.

Once in the the carriers, the Gustav's cannon would only be able to move up or down, as the superstructure would not allow lateral movement.

If the gun needed to be moved side to side, well then, the entire thing would be moved very slowly on the rail line, which was facilitated by making the railway curve gently at 15 degrees to make aiming possible.

This is quite literally like that joke, like, I don't do push-ups.

I push the earth down.

But it's a cannon, so you could be like, oh no, we don't traverse the cannon.

Yeah.

We traverse the whole thing.

Yeah, exactly.

It's like the railway engineer version of my finger is the safety.

It's like the earth and the rail lines is my traverse.

I just build track in a fucking angle.

If I need to move it that way, if I have to move it laterally.

Just imagine what it's like sitting at the engineering room as like Mueller keeps running in with new designs and stapling them to the wall.

They're like, you know, I think being conscripted is better than working for him.

Yeah, I was going to say that the Eastern Front's looking pretty sweet right now, all things considered.

Yep.

Then came the crew.

This is probably my favorite part.

Like I said before, this thing was more of a deadly construction site than a gun crew.

250 men would be required to load, aim, and fire the Gustav minimum.

But that was only the smallest part of the gun's operation.

Because of the kind of rail lines used and the configuration they required, anywhere it went would require a full railroad to be built ahead of time just for the gustoff itself crews would also need to build a different parallel track system to supply the gun with ammo heavy machinery multiple cranes and replacement parts because this is important something on that massive cannon broke pretty much every time it was fired during testing.

Well, I love this.

It's just like, we need to move this thing like 40 meters that way to actually actually be able to range this target.

And they're like, oh, cool.

We'll just start building Clapham Junction in that direction.

Everywhere you go.

You have to.

It's just like, oh, just eight lines of rail, you know, some walkways.

Tired Fortnite guy hopping across the frontier.

Shit.

A shitty caustic kiosk that's always out of the stuff you want.

Just everywhere you go.

Non-stop.

Just follow this to its natural endpoint of like, oh, we ended up having to build a city around the cannon.

So we just have the city cannon now.

But then there's two warring factions of railway builders and we create the crying of fucking marginal line.

Yep.

Yeah, this is the heavy munitions equivalent of playing, like refusing to concede a match of gay chicken and instead just getting married to a dude and living your entire life.

It's not gay.

We got buried.

Exactly.

You know, on our deathbed, we'd be like, gay.

This is actually why the army had to get rid of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, because there's so many people falling into the deepest pits of gay chickens like now we've adopted kids and we're married and we love each other bro

oh you know what infantrymen are competitive just saying you know to certain boys like oh oh you think i'm gonna quit no heart sergeant

i'm here for the competitive edge suddenly you're making plans to go visit vineyards and buying a lot of rattan furniture uh you guys are going on leave to steige together i've never heard of this yeah

because of things constantly breaking because of the assembly, the disassembly, everything else, there was required to be a team of Krupp engineers and scientists on scene to inspect the gun after it was taken apart, before it was put back together, after it was put back together, and before

and after every single shot fired so they could figure out just what broke and how it could be fixed.

This is not to mention the crews of men operating the several specialized cranes at once to assemble, disassemble, load, unload, and off-gas the barrel.

And not to mention all the men required to run the whole rail line, because there's now like eight different purposely designed rail cars to carry all of the pieces of the Gustav.

By the end, it was figured, eh, we need at least, bare minimum, 2,500 men.

What they needed was Remember, Joe, the guy from the train robbery from the live show who's just like hand-pumping the card?

They just need like five of that guy.

Yeah, and they have the same politics.

That guy was a Confederate.

Yeah, there you go.

And also, remember, they're digging, like, leveling off ground.

They're laying rail lines.

It would take weeks to prep an area before Gustav could even be moved into place.

I feel like this is the era of big bombing raids and aerial reconnaissance.

Yeah.

Oh, don't worry, baby.

We're getting there.

You're like, hey, they seem to be building another clap junction somewhere.

I wonder what's going on.

Nate brings up a very good point.

This is, by definition, the biggest sitting duck ever.

Right?

Mysteriously, just loads of Australians just appear around the cannon.

Yeah, it's like, it'd be one thing if it was just, it was rail lines, because, I mean, that's got a purpose regardless.

But when it's a certain kind of weird rail lines, constantly like, wow, every time they've built like this, you know,

insane rail line labyrinth.

horrible fucking like pave the earth, they've brought a big-ass gun out and shot huge rounds of things.

It sort of becomes like, I bet they're doing that again.

I noticed the construction.

It looks like, it looks like the enemy civilization is building their next fucking world one that's going to let them advance to the next age and age of empires.

I should probably fuck that thing up.

Well, don't worry, the Nazis were ready for that.

Because, like I said, this is quite literally the definition of a sitting duck.

So, to protect it, two entire battalions of anti-aircraft artillery would travel with the Gustav at all times.

In late 1941, Hitler and the head of Nazi armament, Albert Speer, both attended the final test of the completed Gustav.

And in true Nazi fashion, Krupp made sure to hide the very complex and labor-intensive setup from them.

Instead of explaining how long it took for them to set it up and fire, and that once the place they chose for firing was prepared for weeks ahead of time by labor crews, and then the next 54 hours were spent actually building the thing, when Hitler and Speer showed up, it was already built and loaded.

So they just sought fire, which they loved, of course.

Like, ooh, big cannon.

Look, I would also love this if I just showed up and there was a cannon the size of God firing into the distance.

Yeah, you would be cloudy.

That would be very entertaining.

Fucking Hitler watching Stoltz, Deernación, and goddamn Inglorious Bastards.

You would be fucking doing the exact same thing.

It is

all wood.

It's just, it's very impractical.

Yeah, nobody told them, like, by the way, it took us like three months to prepare for this just

to make this thing fire once.

That isn't to say Hitler didn't understand or or know about the realities of the cannons.

He was informed of them every step of the way.

He's a famous micromanager.

And not to mention, he approved the design and Mueller hid nothing from him.

It's just an example of him creating a system where everyone lied to him because he hated hearing the truth.

When that truth was like, hey, this shit is kind of dumb.

And it barely works.

And maybe we shouldn't waste any time or resources on it.

Maybe instead we should try building more planes.

He just, big cannon go off.

Hitler collapse.

Gustav is a go.

One One big gun shooting big bullets.

That's right.

Instead, Gustav, officially inducted for service into the Nazi military.

And fun fact here, Krupp built this for free.

He requested no payment from the government, which was something of a company policy at the time.

That's because his thing was, we'll build you one, you'll love it, and then you pay for all the other ones.

Yeah, he's doing the Coke dealer thing.

It's like, first one's on me, then all the rest when you come back, you got to pay.

Yep.

Building dumb shit shit for the love of the sport, effectively.

And Hitler did order multiple other versions of the Gustav, for which the company would be paid about $25 million per cannon, which is a lot of money back then, of course.

And not to mention, remember, Krupp used slave labor during World War II, so labor costs are free.

Yep.

I'm just imagining having to gently dissuade Hitler from ordering a naval version of this.

Hold that thought, actually.

You want to see a boat do a backflip, mate?

It's just doing the GTA thing of flying through the air while firing a cannon.

You've got a fucked up cat marin just rocket jumping across the English Channel.

Hold that thought for later.

And with that, Gustav was sent to war.

Several years after its entire purpose was conquered without it.

At the time, the Nazis were having a hard time cracking the Soviet defenses of Sevastopol, home of the Soviet Black Fleet.

The Soviets had fortified the city accordingly to its importance with tons of reinforced bunkers, underground complexes, trench lines, creating a 40-kilometer perimeter and resulting in a horrific bloody stalemate.

The Nazis decided their giant supervillain cannon was exactly what they needed to blast apart the Soviet defenses where everything else had failed, including a different massive gun, a 400mm siege mortar nicknamed Karl, built by Krupp's main competitor, Renmithal.

However, the process of getting the Gustav there would not be an easy one.

The Gustav train left Germany in May 1942 and did not arrive in its position for a month, which was fine because the ground crews on site needed to work a full five weeks day and night to build all of the tracks needed to get it there.

Once that was done, ground crews cut a full eight meter deep trench into the ground to give both themselves and Gustav some cover from the Soviets.

Then the Gustav's carriages arrived, which started at five, if you remember.

We're now up to 28 rail carriages, carrying all the pieces that needed to be put together.

Not to mention the cranes that they would need to do it.

Building the kin itself took another three days, and by the time it was all done on June 5th, nearly 4,000 men had taken part in the operation.

The Gustav then began to fire with the assistance of several spotter aircraft to guide in its rounds, and depending on what source you use, it was either a rousing success or completely pointless.

If you use common sense here and look at the Battle of Sevastopol in a larger picture, you can come to the conclusion that the impact that this one cannon had during a battle where there was literally hundreds of thousands of soldiers and over 1,000 other pieces of artillery that fired 300,000 tons of explosives at Sevastopol, they were probably more important than Gustav.

Bearing in mind here that Gustav only fired 47 rounds during its deployment to Sevastopol, and the reason for that was because it blew out its barrel.

Uh-oh.

Now, this was a fuck-up on Kroup's part.

The barrels have a short lifespan for obvious reasons.

These things are firing massive, massive shells.

The concussive force is enough to blow most things apart.

And I think the barrels only have a lifespan of like 300 rounds tops.

And that is after being tested and retested after every single shot.

Sometimes the barrel lifespans can be shorter because there are flaws in manufacturing.

But for some reason, Krupp had used the original test barrel and sent it with it, which already had about 200 rounds put through it.

I'm just imagining like what this thing must have sounded like when it fired.

We unfortunately don't know.

But probably just about the loudest thing humanity would explode until about 1945.

Like imagine how fucking terrifying it would have been to be in Sevastopol and like, obviously there's artillery going off all the time and then hearing this thing firing.

That was another thing that the Nazis thought of as well.

They're like, if we fire the doomsday cannon, they're going to hear the difference.

Yeah.

So when they fired it, they timed it to fire with other artillery barrages to try to drown out the sound of the earth shattering.

Yeah.

Also, like people just didn't know what a sonic boom was.

So hearing it break the sound barrier, you'd be like, what the fuck is going on to be fair that probably scared the shit out of mueller in testing as well yeah he's like oh god what did i do i'm just laughing because i can recall a situation where somebody was inspecting people before they went on guard duty at a base at afghanistan and had them open the bolts of their m4s and one of the guard soldiers that was there had a blue training bolt in his weapon which is a non-firing bolt that's impressive and this is like the enormous heavy gun equivalent of that you put the test barrel in it's like you basically gave it to them with 10 HP left.

Yeah, exactly.

Like the Gustav came to the field with a status ailment.

And the Germans could not deploy a white mage with a Tsuna to handle it.

I hate it when my huge rail cannon has a weird green tint because it had poison cast on it.

The Soviet magician cast poison.

Yeah, exactly.

The entire time the cannon's being wheeled into place, it's just going,

the screen is flashing on the.

Actually, no, it's the Germans we're talking about, so it's going to be making the damage noise from fucking, what is it called?

Dark Castlevania.

Dark Souls.

Yeah, yeah.

The Dark Souls taking damage noise.

Moon.wav.

Mond.wav.

We're going to have to splice that sound right here.

Now, there's also the other issue that they ran into, and that is

these rounds are so big, and the powder charges are so big.

They only can carry with them about 50 rounds anywhere they go.

And that requires a completely different train carriage.

So they also just sort of ran out of ammo.

There's also the problem of Gustav's horrible inaccuracy, something they hadn't actually tested because they're more worried about building something that could fire without blowing up and killing everyone within about a grid square.

So of the 47 rounds fired, about 10 landed in an area that you could consider a damaging radius at what they were shooting at.

Some landed way off target.

With that, the Gustav's deployment to the front line was over.

And it needed to be shipped all the way back to Germany to be repaired.

There, most of the cannon shock absorbers all had to be replaced.

The barrel had to be replaced.

There's cracks in the carriage from withstanding the shockwave of the cannon going off.

They also developed a different carriage so the next time they sent out, they could bring a spare barrel with them so it could be replaced on site.

And despite all of Krupp's work, The best they could do was make a barrel with a lifespan of, like I said, about 300 shells since they had developed the cannon that kills itself.

Then it was taken out and tested again and again with Hitler in the audience because he loved the giant stupid thing and he was completely obsessed with it after its first quote successful deployment.

Afterwards it was sent towards Leningrad to help with the Nazi offensive there.

However, it was never fired in combat at Leningrad despite all of the effort actually having put into putting it in place.

And then at the last second is like, nah.

And now here's where things get kind of strange.

Krupp was supposed to build several of these things for the Nazis.

However, there is no evidence to suggest that he did.

Owing to the war going obviously badly, we know how it ends, the needed materials for such a monster became rarer and rarer, and they were needed for other, much more important things.

But since the Nazis were never ones to, you know, prioritize important engineering works during the dying days of the war, they still continued to work on the massive cannons and other projects.

Some sources say that the Nazis did complete a sister gun to Gustav, nicknaming it the Dora.

However, there's no physical evidence for this, and something this large would leave, by definition, a fuckload of physical evidence.

Hola, yo soy Dora, can you say Liebenschraum?

Oh God.

Instead, the Dora might actually be something else.

The Dora story might have something to do with German soldiers themselves hating the Gustav.

They fucking hate it.

And this we do have evidence for.

Soldiers that worked on the Gustav constantly complained about it for all of the reasons you can imagine.

And because of that, instead of calling the Gustav the Gustav, they instead nicknamed it Dora as an insult.

There are several pictures of Americans and Russians capturing what is claimed to be.

either pieces of Gustav or Dora, but oftentimes the cannon in the Dora picture and the Gustav picture, depending on how it's labeled, is much smaller.

It's actually a Nazi K-12 gun, of which two were built.

And I say much smaller because in this context, the K-12 is still a fucking railway cannon.

It's still huge.

But in comparison to the Gustav, it is a baby little cannon.

And the mix-up is quite understandable for the average soldier, right?

They see a giant railway gun.

They've heard about the giant railway gun.

It must be the giant railway gun.

Gustav would only see action allegedly one more time.

But again, we don't have a lot of evidence for it.

And it also is really weird to be deployed this way.

It's a siege gun.

It's meant to be used to break an enemy's defenses where other things could not be used and did not work.

And some sources say that Gustav was brought into action to suppress the Warsaw Uprising, which does not make a lot of sense.

If that did happen, it wasn't used very often during that, maybe fired one or two rounds.

The Warsaw operation, I don't think, would have lasted long enough for them to deploy it and set it up.

That's what I think as well.

Because again, it takes like a month to get the fucking thing in position.

Sources are incredibly thin on Warsaw.

I think what is more likely is another big gun, like a K-12.

was used at Warsaw and was mistakenly credited to Gustav, but it there's no evidence.

There's no pictures of it there.

Like there's pictures of Gustav at Sevastopol.

There's no pictures of it at Warsaw because it probably wasn't used.

And the Nazis love taking pictures of shit.

Especially things like this.

It's like purpose-built for that.

However, just because Gustav wouldn't see combat again didn't mean the Nazis were done planning for the future.

And this is where your joke about it slapping it on a boat kind of come into play.

Not that they used it on a boat, though.

They had other dumb projects.

For example, there was Langer Gustav or Longer Gustav, whose entire idea was, what if we built Gustav 2.0 that could fire across the English channel?

Bigger, longer, uncut Gustav.

Exactly.

That implies that definitionally the first Gustav is circumcised.

I mean, if you look at the picture, you can't see any tapered tip.

So fair enough.

Yeah.

Gustav, canonically and canically uncircumcised.

Or Gustav has like a flared end of it.

You need a really big mole for that one.

I'm getting a reverse circumcision where they're making my foreskin longer.

I need a barrel shroud.

You're the SME on weird body mod shit.

I'm sure someone's done that.

Yep.

Yep.

As dumb as this sounds, and it is, they actually did begin construction on longer Gustoff, but it had to be scrapped due to the Royal Air Force bombing its construction facilities.

But my personal favorite of all of these dumb Gustoff plans is going back to Nate's joke about the boat, and that is using it as a main cannon for a tank.

What?

So build a tank out of it?

More like build.

It's not fair to call it a tank.

It's not really fair to call it a self-propelled gun.

It was more of just like a vehicle, an armored vehicle that could hypothetically transport the gustoff.

It was called the Land Kreutzer Monster.

And it was also designed by Krupp.

That's a fucking Persona 4 ass name.

It's a Persona 4 monster, like quite literally, in a way.

I feel like he was just trying really, really hard to get the Gustav design shoehorn into

wherever he could figure out a way to do it because Krupp pitched this and a different super massive tank.

Like, and when I say super massive tank, I mean it.

So he also pitched the Land Kreutzer Rut,

which weighed a thousand tons.

Jesus Christ.

Like, you know, this thing, very, you know, I suppose infamously does not work that well.

And they keep, you know, trying to force it.

It's fascinating.

I love, as a former tank crewman, I do love a tank that breaks after every time you shoot it.

I love it.

That's what the tank crews crave.

A tank that kills them.

The Germans trying to invent the first ever suicide tank.

Yep.

Where it kills the enemy and everyone inside it.

Hitler, of course, loved these designs.

And they started rough work on them, but like the Land Kreutzer monster was more of just a drawing.

They never actually started building it.

Unfortunately, for me and everyone else who loves incredibly stupid tanks, that's as far as it got.

Though Krupp did go on to build a prototype for a different cartoonish super tank, the Panzer Mouse, which is also very stupid, could barely move, but it did succeed in drawing more resources and wasting them, so who's to say it's a bad idea?

In the end, the Gustav was destroyed by the Germans before it could be captured, and its pieces were studied by both sides of the war.

In closing, was the Gustav worth all of the time, the manpower, and the ever-important resources that the Nazis dumped into it?

No!

Of course.

Of course the fucking was it.

Like, in total, how many times did this, like, actually fire in a non-test setting?

47 times that we're aware of.

Fuck's sake.

There's only enough evidence to say for sure that it was fired 47 times at Sevastopol.

There is a period where it was supposed to be transported to Stalingrad for the funniest possible outcome.

A whole bunch of like Romanian, Hungarian, and other like German conscripts try to run up the tip of the barrel to escape their executions from the Soviets.

They would try to climb in the barrel and be shot out into Stalingrad like a fucking gymnast.

I feel like for the amount of effort that went into this, you could have just given all of the guys on the cruise a small piece of metal and had them just run at the front lines.

It would have been more efficient to give everybody a a spear and recreate a phalanx, I think.

Yeah, exactly.

SIF2 is actually telling the truth.

You can win the Battle of Sebastopol if you have enough spearmen.

That's true.

I feel like

they are going to fire Romanians via cannon into my city is like a modern-day conspiracy theory that a Russian friend would send you.

Yeah, exactly.

This is just something the Reform Party actually believes in Britain.

They've run out of boats and they're firing via cannon from the city.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The Eurocrats, they weren't happy with the channel tunnel.

They'd have to have another way to get Romanians into our country with huge cannon on rails.

So, fellas, we do a thing on this show called Questions from the Legion.

If you'd like to ask us a question, you can support the show on Patreon.

You can ask us in our Patreon DMs.

You can ask us in the Discord.

You'll also have access to.

You can load it into a railway candidate and fire it over the English channel, and we will answer it on air, especially if it is in Romanian.

Today's question is, you've discovered something that looks remarkably similar to a death note.

However, upon closer inspection, the cover is brown.

Intrigued, you open it and read the rules and discover this book does not kill people whose names are written in it, but rather 30 seconds after you write their name down, they will completely evacuate their bowels over the course of the next five full minutes.

They will also not be able to stop shitting themselves for the next 72 hours should they eat something after the initial shitting.

Whose name are you writing in the poop note first?

Oh, I have to think about this.

That's so much poop.

I mean, look, I think just making this very easy, since we've already talked about this Dirkius episode, I would write Conor McGregor's name in it.

Yeah, that's a solid answer, but it's like, I will not be shitting my pants after being written in the poop note.

I eat extremely fibrous fruits and loads of meat, so my excrement is very impacted.

I would say Donald Trump because he would just keep eating.

He would just keep eating McDonald's.

It would be like one of those things of like sourdough that's been going for 100 years in someone's fruits.

You know what I mean?

Like he would keep eating mcdonald's and keep shitting himself and resetting the cycle over and over again he's the human equivalent of forever soup yeah exactly there's a stew that's been cooking in guyana for 150 years there's donald trump shitting himself and eating mcdonald's non-stop

they have like a full crew of men just shoveling around the clock like like the ones that built the gusta but to keep his asshole clean give the poop notebook to donald trump because he has so people with petty grievances from like they snubbed him at fucking you know like outside of cats in the 80s and he's still still mad about at the end of a week every american citizen would be uncontrollably shitting themselves due to the various grievances that we visited upon the emperor of shitting himself i like on that vein i think uh rfk jr would be very funny but my real answer is emmanuel macron not for any personal petty reasons but that i think his reaction would be so funny i mean

yeah why not any world leader is a good plug-in here nobody is too good to be not be put on the poop note but my thing with macron is that like I feel like he will somehow try to make it like out like this is actually an incredibly masculine and powerful thing to do to be shitting yourself for like five minutes straight.

Meanwhile, his wife is powdering him and babying, putting a diaper on him and putting him to bed without supper.

Or in turn also slapping him.

Yeah, slapping him too.

All things are possible.

Well, fellas, that is an episode of this podcast.

But you host other podcasts.

Plug those podcasts.

Trash Future, what a hell of a way to dad.

Kill James Bond, No Gods, No Mayors.

I'm involved in some capacity.

All of them have free episodes.

All of them have bonus episodes on Patreon.

Beneath Skin, the show about the history of everything told to the history of tattooing.

You can also buy my books on beneath the skin shop.com.

And also, by the time you're listening to this, you can come and play my weekly pub quiz in Dalston in the Haggerson every Tuesday at 7:30 p.m.

So if you enjoy facts about the divorce between the now King Charles and Princess Diana, or what is the capital of Mongolia,

come play my pub quiz.

Weirdly, the answer to both of those questions is Yulan Batar.

I have no idea why.

I feel like Yulan Batar sounds like some really, really, really posh boarding school girl that Charles would have cheated on Diana with.

And the dog's name is Stacy.

This is the only podcast that I host, but you're already listening to it.

Thank you for that.

Consider supporting us on Patreon.

This five bucks gets you years and years and years of bonus content, e-books, audiobooks, Discord access, questions in the Legion, you name it.

Also, live show tickets are now available for our show, October 4th at the Flying Duck in Glasgow.

Get your tickets.

We'll be there.

We'll have merch, jokes, japes, possibly a crime or two.

Maybe a Gustoff.

We don't know.

Maybe a big gus.

We're unaware.

But we'll see you there.

It's also, there's like, it's like 150 tickets.

Please buy them.

It's a large venue.

I'm really trying to not, you know, have like the forming to 50 empty seats.

It would make us feel really good if all 150 were full.

Also, tell your friends about the show.

It's the only way the words about the show gets out.

We don't have marketing.

We're not a part of any network.

So again, if you know someone who likes history, load this podcast into your personal Schwer Gustav and you fire it at them and they will listen to it and they will like it or else.

Until next time, do cocaine off of a large cannon.