1.
SMS Deutschland (1904)
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SMS Deutschland was the first of five Deutschland-class pre-dreadnought battleships built for the Kaiserliche Marine between 1903 and 1906. She was named after the German name for Germany, and built at the Germaniawerft shipyard in Kiel and she served as the flagship of Prince Heinrich until 1913. Late on the first day of the battle, Deutschland and the other pre-dreadnoughts briefly engaged several British battlecruisers before retreating, after the battle, Deutschland and her three surviving sisters were assigned to coastal defense duties. By 1917, they had withdrawn from combat service completely. Deutschland was used as a ship in Wilhelmshaven until the end of the war. She was struck from the register on 25 January 1920, sold to ship breakers that year. Her bow ornament is preserved at the Eckernförde underwater weapons school, Deutschland was the second naval vessel to bear the name, after SMS Deutschland, and was intended to fight in the German battle line with the other battleships of the Imperial German Navy. She was laid down on 20 July 1903 at the Germaniawerft dockyard in Kiel and her trials lasted from 3 August 1906 until September. The British battleship HMS Dreadnought—armed with ten 12 inch guns—was commissioned in December 1906, Dreadnoughts revolutionary design rendered every capital ship of the German navy obsolete, including Deutschland. Deutschland was 127.6 m long, had a beam of 22.2 m, at a cruising speed of 10 knots, she could steam for 4,850 nautical miles. Deutschlands primary armament consisted of four 28 cm SK L/40 guns in two twin turrets and she was also equipped with fourteen 17 cm guns mounted in casemates, twenty 8.8 cm guns in pivot mounts, and six 45 cm torpedo tubes were submerged in the hull. On 26 September 1906 the ship joined the fleet, when Admiral Prince Heinrich made her his flagship. She was tactically assigned to the II Battle Squadron, though as the flagship she was not subordinate to the Squadron commander. She took part in training exercises in the North Sea in December 1906 before returning to Kiel, on 16 February 1907, the fleet was renamed the High Seas Fleet. Fleet maneuvers in the North Sea followed in early 1907 and again in May–June, a cruise to Norway followed the fleet training in June. After returning from Norway, Deutschland went to Swinemünde, another round of fleet training followed in September 1907. In November, she was taken into drydock for an annual refit, Deutschland participated in fleet maneuvers in February 1908 in the Baltic Sea, in May–June training was conducted off the island fortress of Helgoland in the North Sea. In July 1908, Deutschland and the rest of the fleet sailed into the Atlantic Ocean to conduct training there, during the cruise, Deutschland stopped at Funchal and Santa Cruz de Tenerife
2.
Naval artillery
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Naval artillery is artillery mounted on a warship, originally used only for naval warfare, later also for naval gunfire support against targets on land, and for anti-aircraft use. The idea of artillery dates back to the classical era. Julius Caesar indicates the use of ship-borne catapults against Britons ashore in his Commentarii de Bello Gallico, the dromons of the Byzantine Empire carried catapults and fire-throwers. From the late Middle Ages onwards, warships began to carry cannon of various calibres, the Battle of Arnemuiden, fought between England and France in 1338 at the start of the Hundred Years War, was the first recorded European naval battle using artillery. The English ship Christopher was armed with three cannons and one hand gun, by the 15th century most Mediterranean powers were utilising heavy cannon mounted on the bow or stern of a vessel and designed to bombard fortresses on shore. By mid-century some vessels also carried smaller broadside cannons for bombarding other vessels immediately prior to an attempted boarding and these small guns were anti-personnel weapons and were fired at point blank range to accompany engagement with muskets or bows. From the 1470s both the Portuguese and Venetian navies were experimenting with cannons as anti-ship weapons, in 1489 John of Portugal further contributed to the development of naval artillery by establishing the first standardized teams of trained naval gunners. The 16th century was an era of transition in naval warfare, since ancient times, war at sea had been fought much like that on land, with melee weapons and bows and arrows, but on floating wooden platforms rather than battlefields. Though the introduction of guns was a significant change, it slowly changed the dynamics of ship-to-ship combat. As guns became heavier and able to more powerful gunpowder charges, they needed to be placed lower in the ship. Although some 16th-century galleys mounted broadside cannon, they did so at the expense of rowing positions which sacrificed speed, most early cannon were still placed in the forecastle and aftercastle of a ship where they might be conveniently pointed in any direction. Early naval artillery was a weapon to deter boarders, because cannon powerful enough to damage ships were heavy enough to destabilize any ship mounting them in an elevated castle. Being a crown industry, cost considerations did not curb the pursuit of the best quality, best innovations, the crown paid wage premiums and bonuses to lure the best European artisans and gunners to advance the industry in Portugal. This made broadsides, coordinated volleys from all the guns on one side of a ship, possible for the first time in history, at least in theory. Ships, such as Mary Rose, carried a mixture of cannon of different types and sizes, many designed for land use, and using incompatible ammunition at different ranges and rates of fire. The Mary Rose, like other ships of the time, was built during a period of development of heavy artillery. The heavy armament was a mix of older-type wrought iron and cast bronze guns, the bronze guns were cast in one piece and rested on four-wheel carriages which were essentially the same as those used until the 19th century. The breech-loaders were cheaper to produce and both easier and faster to reload, but could take less powerful charges than cast bronze guns, the majority of the guns were small iron guns with short range that could be aimed and fired by a single person
3.
Coastal artillery
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Coastal artillery is the branch of the armed forces concerned with operating anti-ship artillery or fixed gun batteries in coastal fortifications. The advent of 20th-century technologies, especially aviation, naval aviation, jet aircraft, and guided missiles, reduced the primacy of cannon, battleships. In countries where coastal artillery has not been disbanded, these forces have acquired amphibious capabilities, in littoral warfare, mobile coastal artillery armed with surface-to-surface missiles still can be used to deny the use of sea lanes. Land-based guns also benefited in most cases from the protection of walls or earth mounds. The Martello tower is an excellent example of a widely used coastal fort which mounted defensive artillery, during the 19th century China also built hundreds of coastal fortresses in an attempt to counter Western naval threats. Coastal artillery could be part of the Navy, or part of the Army, in English-speaking countries, certain coastal artillery positions were sometimes referred to as Land Batteries, distinguishing this form of artillery battery from for example floating batteries. In the United Kingdom, in the later 19th and earlier 20th Centuries, then, following the Spanish–American War and the report of the Endicott Board, U. S. harbor defenses were greatly strengthened and provided with new, rifled artillery and minefield defenses. Shortly thereafter, in 1907, Congress split the field artillery, the first decade of the 20th Century, the United States Marine Corps established the Advanced Base Force. The force was used for setting up and defending advanced bases, during the Siege of Port Arthur, Japanese forces had captured the vantage point on 203 Meter Hill overlooking Port Arthur harbor. The battleship Sevastopol, although hit 5 times by 11-inch shells, after 3 weeks, the Sevastopol was still afloat, having survived 124 torpedoes fired at her while sinking two Japanese destroyers and damaging six other vessels. The Japanese had meanwhile lost the cruiser Takasago to a mine outside the harbor, the Blücher had entered the narrow waters of the Oslofjord, carrying 1,000 soldiers and leading a German invasion fleet. The first salvo from the Norwegian defenders, fired from Oscarsborg Fortress about 1 mile distant, disabled Blüchers main battery, fire from the smaller guns swept her decks and disabled her steering, and she received several torpedo hits before the fires reached her magazines and doomed her. Singapore was defended by its famous large-caliber coastal guns, which included one battery of three 15-inch guns and one with two 15-inch guns, AP shells were designed to penetrate the hulls of heavily armoured warships and were ineffective against personnel. The Japanese defended the island of Betio in the Tarawa atoll with numerous 203 mm coastal guns, in 1943, these were knocked out early in the battle with a combined USN naval and aerial bombardment. Nazi Germany fortified its conquered territories with the Atlantic Wall, the intent was to destroy the Allied landing craft before they could unload. During the Normandy Landings in 1944, shore bombardment was given a high importance, using ships from battleships to destroyers, for example, the Canadians at Juno beach had fire support many times greater than they had had for the Dieppe Raid in 1942. In addition, there were modified landing-craft, eight Landing Craft Gun, twenty-four Landing Craft Tank carried Priest self-propelled howitzers which also fired while they were on the run-in to the beach. Similar arrangements existed at other beaches, on June 25,1944 the American battleship Texas engaged German shore batteries on the Cotentin Peninsula
4.
Railway gun
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A railway gun, also called a railroad gun, is a large artillery piece, often surplus naval artillery, mounted on, transported by, and fired from a specially designed railway wagon. Many countries have built railway guns, but the best known are the large Krupp-built pieces used by Germany in World War I, smaller guns were often part of an armoured train. Railway guns have been rendered obsolete by advances in technology and their large size and limited mobility make them vulnerable to attack, and similar payloads can be delivered by aircraft, rocket, or missile. The design of a gun has three issues over and above those of an ordinary artillery piece to consider. The first method of traverse is to rely entirely on movement along a section of track or on a turntable with no provision to traverse the gun on its mount. The second is to traverse the rail car body on its trucks, generally this is limited to a few degrees of traverse to either side unless an elaborate foundation is built with a centre pivot and traversing rollers. The design of the foundation is the limit to the amount of traverse allowed in this latter case. The third choice is to allow the gun mount to rotate with respect to the rail car body. This usually requires the gun to be mounted on a pivot which. There are four methods to absorb the recoil force for railway guns, cradle recoil, top-carriage recoil, sliding recoil. Cradle recoil means that the gun recoils backward in its cradle and it is returned to battery, or the firing position, by either helical springs or by air in a pneumatic recuperator cylinder that is compressed by the force of recoil. This is the most common used for lighter railroad guns. Top-carriage recoil is where the gun is mounted in a carriage that moves on wheels on fixed rails. The gun and upper carriage recoil together, restrained by the hydraulic buffers. Return to battery is effected either by gravity, through the use of inclined rails and it is not well-suited to firing at high elevations because it cannot absorb much of the vertical component of the recoil force. The gun, car body and trucks all recoil together with the friction generated by the sliding on the girders absorbing the recoil force after moving only about 1 to 2 metres to the rear. The sleepers must be jacked up again to allow the gun to roll forward to its firing position and this was often done by handwheels driving gear trains attached to the wheels, or even by electric motors on more modern mounts. Almost all of type of mounts were of the non-traversing type and had to be fired from a curved section of track or turntable
5.
World War I
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World War I, also known as the First World War, the Great War, or the War to End All Wars, was a global war originating in Europe that lasted from 28 July 1914 to 11 November 1918. More than 70 million military personnel, including 60 million Europeans, were mobilised in one of the largest wars in history and it was one of the deadliest conflicts in history, and paved the way for major political changes, including revolutions in many of the nations involved. The war drew in all the worlds great powers, assembled in two opposing alliances, the Allies versus the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary. These alliances were reorganised and expanded as more nations entered the war, Italy, Japan, the trigger for the war was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, by Yugoslav nationalist Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914. This set off a crisis when Austria-Hungary delivered an ultimatum to the Kingdom of Serbia. Within weeks, the powers were at war and the conflict soon spread around the world. On 25 July Russia began mobilisation and on 28 July, the Austro-Hungarians declared war on Serbia, Germany presented an ultimatum to Russia to demobilise, and when this was refused, declared war on Russia on 1 August. Germany then invaded neutral Belgium and Luxembourg before moving towards France, after the German march on Paris was halted, what became known as the Western Front settled into a battle of attrition, with a trench line that changed little until 1917. On the Eastern Front, the Russian army was successful against the Austro-Hungarians, in November 1914, the Ottoman Empire joined the Central Powers, opening fronts in the Caucasus, Mesopotamia and the Sinai. In 1915, Italy joined the Allies and Bulgaria joined the Central Powers, Romania joined the Allies in 1916, after a stunning German offensive along the Western Front in the spring of 1918, the Allies rallied and drove back the Germans in a series of successful offensives. By the end of the war or soon after, the German Empire, Russian Empire, Austro-Hungarian Empire, national borders were redrawn, with several independent nations restored or created, and Germanys colonies were parceled out among the victors. During the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, the Big Four imposed their terms in a series of treaties, the League of Nations was formed with the aim of preventing any repetition of such a conflict. This effort failed, and economic depression, renewed nationalism, weakened successor states, and feelings of humiliation eventually contributed to World War II. From the time of its start until the approach of World War II, at the time, it was also sometimes called the war to end war or the war to end all wars due to its then-unparalleled scale and devastation. In Canada, Macleans magazine in October 1914 wrote, Some wars name themselves, during the interwar period, the war was most often called the World War and the Great War in English-speaking countries. Will become the first world war in the sense of the word. These began in 1815, with the Holy Alliance between Prussia, Russia, and Austria, when Germany was united in 1871, Prussia became part of the new German nation. Soon after, in October 1873, German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck negotiated the League of the Three Emperors between the monarchs of Austria-Hungary, Russia and Germany
6.
World War II
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World War II, also known as the Second World War, was a global war that lasted from 1939 to 1945, although related conflicts began earlier. It involved the vast majority of the worlds countries—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing alliances, the Allies and the Axis. It was the most widespread war in history, and directly involved more than 100 million people from over 30 countries. Marked by mass deaths of civilians, including the Holocaust and the bombing of industrial and population centres. These made World War II the deadliest conflict in human history, from late 1939 to early 1941, in a series of campaigns and treaties, Germany conquered or controlled much of continental Europe, and formed the Axis alliance with Italy and Japan. Under the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union partitioned and annexed territories of their European neighbours, Poland, Finland, Romania and the Baltic states. In December 1941, Japan attacked the United States and European colonies in the Pacific Ocean, and quickly conquered much of the Western Pacific. The Axis advance halted in 1942 when Japan lost the critical Battle of Midway, near Hawaii, in 1944, the Western Allies invaded German-occupied France, while the Soviet Union regained all of its territorial losses and invaded Germany and its allies. During 1944 and 1945 the Japanese suffered major reverses in mainland Asia in South Central China and Burma, while the Allies crippled the Japanese Navy, thus ended the war in Asia, cementing the total victory of the Allies. World War II altered the political alignment and social structure of the world, the United Nations was established to foster international co-operation and prevent future conflicts. The victorious great powers—the United States, the Soviet Union, China, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union and the United States emerged as rival superpowers, setting the stage for the Cold War, which lasted for the next 46 years. Meanwhile, the influence of European great powers waned, while the decolonisation of Asia, most countries whose industries had been damaged moved towards economic recovery. Political integration, especially in Europe, emerged as an effort to end pre-war enmities, the start of the war in Europe is generally held to be 1 September 1939, beginning with the German invasion of Poland, Britain and France declared war on Germany two days later. The dates for the beginning of war in the Pacific include the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War on 7 July 1937, or even the Japanese invasion of Manchuria on 19 September 1931. Others follow the British historian A. J. P. Taylor, who held that the Sino-Japanese War and war in Europe and its colonies occurred simultaneously and this article uses the conventional dating. Other starting dates sometimes used for World War II include the Italian invasion of Abyssinia on 3 October 1935. The British historian Antony Beevor views the beginning of World War II as the Battles of Khalkhin Gol fought between Japan and the forces of Mongolia and the Soviet Union from May to September 1939, the exact date of the wars end is also not universally agreed upon. It was generally accepted at the time that the war ended with the armistice of 14 August 1945, rather than the formal surrender of Japan
7.
Krupp
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The Krupp family, a prominent 400-year-old German dynasty from Essen, have become famous for their production of steel, artillery, ammunition, and other armaments. The family business, known as Friedrich Krupp AG, was the largest company in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century and it was important to weapons development and production in both world wars. One of the most powerful dynasties in European history, for 400 years Krupp flourished as the premier weapons manufacturer for Germany. From the Thirty Years War until the end of the Second World War, they produced everything from battleships, U-boats, tanks, howitzers, guns, utilities, the dynasty began in 1587 when a trader named Arndt Krupp moved to Essen and joined the merchants guild. He then began buying vacated real estate from families who fled the city due to the Black Death, over the next three centuries his descendants began producing small guns during the Thirty Years War and over time gradually acquired fulling mills, coal mines, and an iron forge. During the Napoleonic Wars, Friedrich Krupp founded the Gusstahlfabrik and began producing smelted steel in 1816, the foundations were laid for the steel Empire that would come to dominate the world for nearly a century under his son Alfred. Krupp became the manufacturer for the Kingdom of Prussia in 1859. Krupp was also a company that paved the way for workers rights. Widows and orphans were guaranteed pay if their husbands and/or fathers were killed, the company also produced the steel that built the railroads of America, capped the Chrysler Building in 1929, and was the first to travel to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. During the Third Reich, Krupp supported Adolf Hitler and the use of forced labour, after the war Krupp was rebuilt from scratch and again became one of the wealthiest companies in Europe. However a recession in 1967 caused the company severe profit loss, in 1999 the Krupp firm merged with Thyssen AG to form ThyssenKrupp AG, a large industrial conglomerate. Friedrich Krupp launched the familys metal-based activities, building a steel foundry in Essen in 1810. His son Alfred, known as the Cannon King or as Alfred the Great, invested heavily in new technology to become a significant manufacturer of steel rollers and he also invested in fluidized hotbed technologies and acquired many mines in Germany and France. Unusual for the era, he provided social services for his workers, including subsidized housing and health, the company began to make steel cannons in the 1840s—especially for the Russian, Turkish, and Prussian armies. When Alfred started with the firm, it had five employees, at his death twenty thousand people worked for Krupp—making it the worlds largest industrial company and the largest private company in the German empire. Krupps had a Great Krupp Building with an exhibition of guns at the Columbian Exposition in 1893, in the 20th century the company was headed by Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, who assumed the surname of Krupp when he married the Krupp heiress, Bertha Krupp. After Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, the Krupp works became the center for German rearmament. In 1943, by an order from Hitler, the company reverted to a sole-proprietorship, with Gustav
8.
Gun barrel
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A gun barrel is a part of firearms and artillery pieces. The hollow interior of the barrel is called the bore, a gun barrel must be able to hold in the expanding gas produced by the propellants to ensure that optimum muzzle velocity is attained by the projectile as it is being pushed out by the expanding gas. Modern small arms barrels are made of known and tested to withstand the pressures involved. Artillery pieces are made by various techniques providing reliably sufficient strength, early firearms were muzzle-loading, with powder, and then shot loaded from the muzzle, capable of only a low rate of fire. During the 19th century effective mechanical locks were invented that sealed a breech-loading weapon against the escape of propellant gases, the early Chinese, the inventors of gunpowder, used bamboo, a naturally tubular stalk, as the first barrels in gunpowder projectile weapons. Early European guns were made of iron, usually with several strengthening bands of the metal wrapped around circular wrought iron rings. The Chinese were the first to master cast-iron cannon barrels, early cannon barrels were very thick for their caliber. Bore evacuator Bore snake Cannon Muzzle Polygonal rifling Rifling Slug barrel Smoothbore
9.
Shell (projectile)
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A shell is a payload-carrying projectile that, as opposed to shot, contains an explosive or other filling, though modern usage sometimes includes large solid projectiles properly termed shot. Solid shot may contain a pyrotechnic compound if a tracer or spotting charge is used, originally, it was called a bombshell, but shell has come to be unambiguous in a military context. Words cognate with grenade are still used for an artillery or mortar projectile in some European languages, shells are usually large-calibre projectiles fired by artillery, combat vehicles, and warships. Shells usually have the shape of a cylinder topped by a nose for good aerodynamic performance, possibly with a tapering base. Solid cannonballs did not need a fuse, but hollow munitions filled with something such as gunpowder to fragment the ball, needed a fuse, percussion fuses with a spherical projectile presented a challenge because there was no way of ensuring that the impact mechanism hit the target. Therefore, shells needed a fuse that was ignited before or during firing. The earliest record of shells being used in combat was by the Republic of Venice at Jadra in 1376, shells with fuses were used at the 1421 siege of St Boniface in Corsica. These were two hollowed hemispheres of stone or bronze held together by an iron hoop, as described in their book, these hollow, gunpowder-packed shells were made of cast iron. At least since the 16th Century grenades made of ceramics or glass were in use in Central Europe, a hoard of several hundred ceramic greandes were discovered during building works in front of a bastion of the Bavarian City of Ingolstadt, Germany dated to the 17th Century. Lots of the grenades obtained their orignal blackpowder loads and igniters, most probably the grenades were intentionally dumped the moat of the bastion before the year 1723. Early powder burning fuses had to be loaded fuse down to be ignited by firing or a portfire put down the barrel to light the fuse, other shells were wrapped in bitumen cloth, which would ignite during the firing and in turn ignite a powder fuse. Nevertheless, shells came into use in the 16th Century. By the 18th Century, it was known that the fuse towards the muzzle could be lit by the flash through the windage between the shell and the barrel, the use of exploding shells from field artillery became relatively commonplace from early in the 19th century. Until the mid 19th century, shells remained as simple exploding spheres that used gunpowder and they were usually made of cast iron, but bronze, lead, brass and even glass shell casings were experimented with. The word bomb encompassed them at the time, as heard in the lyrics of The Star-Spangled Banner, typically, the thickness of the metal body was about a sixth of their diameter and they were about two thirds the weight of solid shot of the same calibre. To ensure that shells were loaded with their fuses towards the muzzle, in 1819, a committee of British artillery officers recognised that they were essential stores and in 1830 Britain standardised sabot thickness as a half inch. The sabot was also intended to reduce jamming during loading, despite the use of exploding shell, the use of smoothbore cannons, firing spherical projectiles of shot, remained the dominant artillery method until the 1850s. By the late 18th century, artillery could use canister shot to defend itself from infantry or cavalry attack and this involved loading a tin or canvas container filled with small iron or lead balls instead of the usual cannonball
10.
Caliber
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In guns, particularly firearms, caliber or calibre is the approximate internal diameter of the barrel, or the diameter of the projectile it fires, in hundredths or sometimes thousandths of an inch. For example, a 45 caliber firearm has a diameter of.45 of an inch. Barrel diameters can also be expressed using metric dimensions, as in 9mm pistol, when the barrel diameter is given in inches, the abbreviation cal can be used. Good performance requires a bullet to closely match the diameter of a barrel to ensure a good seal. While modern cartridges and cartridge firearms are referred to by the cartridge name. Firearm calibers outside the range of 17 to 50 exist, but are rarely encountered. Larger calibers, such as.577.585.600.700, the.950 JDJ is the only known cartridge beyond 79 caliber used in a rifle. Referring to artillery, caliber is used to describe the length as multiples of the bore diameter. A 5-inch 50 calibre gun has a diameter of 5 in. The main guns of the USS Missouri are 1650 caliber, makers of early cartridge arms had to invent methods of naming the cartridges, since no established convention existed then. One of the early established cartridge arms was the Spencer repeating rifle, later various derivatives were created using the same basic cartridge, but with smaller-diameter bullets, these were named by the cartridge diameter at the base and mouth. The original No.56 became the. 56-56, and the smaller versions. 56-52. 56-50, the. 56-52, the most common of the new calibers, used a 50-cal bullet. Optionally, the weight in grains was designated, e. g. 45-70-405. Variations on these methods persist today, with new cartridges such as the.204 Ruger, metric diameters for small arms refer to cartridge dimensions and are expressed with an × between the bore diameter and the length of the cartridge case, for example,7. 62×51 NATO. This indicates that the diameter is 7. 62mm, loaded in a case 51mm long. Similarly, the 6. 5×55 Swedish cartridge has a diameter of 6.5 mm. An exception to rule is the proprietary cartridge used by U. S. maker Lazzeroni. The following table lists commonly used calibers where both metric and imperial are used as equivalents
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