Weaponology (2007–…): Season 1, Episode 8 - Artillery - full transcript

You're watching the Military Channel.

Go behind the lines.

One weapon above all others strikes fear into the heart of any fighting soldier.

Artillery is the most powerful and deadly weapon on the battlefield.

There's absolutely nothing you can do against it.

It's so devastating it can destroy whole armies.

It's lethal, it's long-ranged, it's a killer.

On land, at sea, and in the air.

Take cover as we go back in time to reveal the story of big gun artillery.

It's time to go ballistic.

On the battlefield, one weapon can turn the tide of victory.



Artillery can crush an opponent and make you dive for cover like nothing else.

Two rounds, VT in effect.

The US Army's latest recruit, the M777 Ultralight Howitzer,

is the most advanced artillery piece on today's battlefield.

It has all the right characteristics to make it a major player in any modern war
zone.

Laying down deadly fire from 18 miles away.

And it can deliver those shells with deadly accuracy.

Every 30 seconds.

What's more, it combines high-tech alloys and titanium to make a weapon 7,000
pounds lighter than its predecessor.

And so mobile that it can keep pace with any battle.

Wherever it takes place.

It's knowing that that's behind you, that that's supporting you, that the king
of battle is there.

Because it is absolutely precision fire.

The mission of the M777 and artillery through the ages is to batter the enemy
into submission.



And physically smash an opening in their defenses.

To fulfill its mission, those who have shaped artillery design throughout the
history of warfare.

Have always struggled to master these key factors.

Range.

Accuracy.

Rate of fire.

And mobility.

Now, weaponology will unlock the family tree of artillery.

Going back through generations of technology.

To reveal how big guns improve their range and accuracy.

Increased firepower.

And how their mobility grew.

Evolving into one of the finest big hitters on the battlefield.

The M777.

Artillery has a fundamental problem.

It's heavy and complex to operate.

These machines could not complete their mission without their well trained and
expert crews.

Teamwork has made artillery the battle winner it is today.

And has bred a special kind of fighting man.

Down through the years, artillerymen have set themselves apart as soldiers.

It took a certain kind of a soldier to learn the drill.

To learn what to do to man a gun.

Crew drill is really interesting.

It's fun to watch, it's hard to do.

What it is, is a well choreographed military ballet.

Artillery has always needed men to carry and prepare the ammunition.

A crew who can load and fire the gun.

And a chief of the peace.

The man who coordinates it all.

Aiming the weapon.

Giving the order to fire.

And making corrections as necessary.

These well drilled men become part of the machine.

When you're in combat with artillery, all you really concentrate on is doing
your job.

And doing the best you can putting as many rounds down range accurately as
possible.

Down by, set your rear, fire.

With artillery, it's really a team.

Only a team can do that.

You have to have someone to see the target, to find the target, to compute the
data, and to fire the weapon.

Generations earlier, warriors of old are the first to understand the effect of
artillery.

And create machines that could throw projectiles that deliver a mighty punch,
from afar.

It was in the bloody battles of antiquity that the first dynasty of deadly
mechanical pieces starts off the story of artillery.

The Greeks and Romans were the first to use these weapons on land and at sea.

To get the range they needed, they used basic physics and the power of torsion
and torque.

All of the Greek and the Roman machines are torsion artillery.

And they're all about storing torsion energy in skeins of rain.

Early artillery used this stored energy to shoot a projectile as far as
possible.

As the arms pulled back, so the skeins twist and tighten.

They store up tremendous amounts of energy.

It's just waiting for you to hit the trigger.

And the moment you do, that torsion can be released.

The Romans used light field artillery, like the ballista, to fire deadly
projectiles.

Bolts and stone balls pulverize the ranks of the enemy over long distances.

They could shoot, say, a six foot bolt, two, three, four hundred yards.

And this bolt would penetrate the shield wall of the advancing enemy.

Moving up, moving up.

Catapults were one of the most popular and deadly torsion artillery pieces of
their day.

Your key time!

Able to crush enemy fortifications and end sieges.

When they appeared on the battlefield, weapons like the catapult and ballista
sent waves of fear and panic through the enemy ranks.

But they were soon eclipsed by a new medieval beast that took warfare up a gear.

The trebuchet.

A new weapon system called the trebuchet was devised.

This war machine was powered not by twisted fibers or the power of torque, but
now employed gravity.

It was a counterweight that had an arm and as the counterweight would come down,
that arm would fling a projectile.

Using gravity, an army could throw projectiles or even diseased corpses into
castles and take them out one by one.

They were extremely effective at keeping the people on the walls, keeping their
heads down.

They came in on a very high arching trajectory and they'd drop down out in the
sky and land on these guys' heads if they didn't stay out of the way.

Although these weapons are technologically primitive, the earliest generations
of artillerymen understand the devastating psychological value of artillery on
an adversary.

It's psychological. It makes people feel that they're going to lose. It breaks
them down. It drives them to despair.

It's devastating to be under artillery fire.

The very sound of the field artillery, whether it's the whoosh of the rocks on
fire down to today's thunder, it's very frightening.

There's absolutely nothing you can do against it.

Here is a potent weapon.

This deadly psychological power remains unchanged throughout history.

Whether it's a medieval siege with your fortifications crumbling around you or
cowering in a dugout on the battlefield of the Somme, it has the capacity to
break the human spirit, to make men who were brave cry, make men run away.

It can do that in a way that no other weapon can.

It would take another several hundred years before one key invention would give
artillerymen the firepower they really crave.

Say goodbye to your car, Al.

Artillery brings untold mayhem to today's battlefield.

It can crack a fighting man's will, flatten the strongest of defenses, and
deliver a long-range knockout punch.

One key invention, centuries ago, gives field artillery this godly power and
range.

Gunpowder.

Gunpowder rewrites the rules of warfare.

It was far more powerful than anything in use before.

A shot from a cannon travels so fast, by the time you realize it's coming
towards you, you're already dead.

A round iron ball goes through field fortifications, masonry, and ranks of
people.

Nothing can resist the power of gunpowder.

It is the Chinese invention of gunpowder that fast-tracks our weapons family on
its journey of destruction.

Thanks to gunpowder, artillerymen finally get the range and devastating impact
force they had only dreamed of with torsion artillery.

One gunpowder weapon, the cannon, comes to the fore and dominates the
battlefield for centuries.

No other weapon system has had the range or the lethality.

The cannon is a simple marriage of firepower and movement, combining gunpowder's
range with wheels' mobility.

When you say cannon today, what most people think of is a gun tube on a carriage
that has wheels on it and you can pull it.

These cannon will take time to mature and capitalize on gunpowder's heinous
force, but they reign largely unchallenged for generations.

Up until the 1850s, cannons really don't change very much.

They were a bronze tube or an iron tube. They'd fight around.

Advances in metalworking techniques meant that these gun tubes would eventually
become both stronger and lighter.

Because the weight of the barrel could be reduced, the weight of the carriage
could be reduced, and it made possible a new range of effective lighter guns.

But these improved lighter guns are still predominantly muzzle-loaded
smoothbores.

A deadly cargo of powder, then projectile, is rammed down the tube from the
front of the cannon.

At short range, these muzzle-loaders lack nothing in firepower.

A 19th century smoothbore gun can fire clean through a modern automobile engine
block.

Take a bite of your car, Al. Fire!

Great shot. We got her. Did it come out the back? Something came out the back.
Yep.

If you could keep the ball going straight, you could have probably lined the
whole Confederate army up and did a pretty good job on them. The energy is
absolutely unbelievable.

All these cannons and muzzle-loaders had several major drawbacks.

Very importantly, every time you fire, the cannon jumps back. That means you can
never regard them as being a very accurate weapon. Every cannonball will go in a
different place, no matter how hard you try.

What the cannoneer of the 19th century needed was a way to improve the accuracy
of smoothbore cannon.

It was an invention from a distant weaponology cousin that was to revolutionize
the accuracy of modern artillery.

Rifling was the stroke of genius that provides an answer.

It spins the rifle's bullet, making it more gyroscopically stable. The principle
works just as well with artillery.

People realize that if you put rifling in a tube, it spins the bullet, which
makes it more accurate. It goes faster and it goes longer.

It is during the Civil War that these new pieces, like the ordnance rifle, first
take to the field of battle. And the contrast in accuracy was astonishing.

The three-inch ordnance rifle, for instance, at 1,500 yards could hit a barn. So
could the 12-pound Napoleon gun. But the 12-pound Napoleon gun was a smoothbore
gun.

And so that may have been able to hit the barn. But with the three-inch ordnance
rifle, you could put the round through the window of the barn.

The industrial revolution in the 19th century and advances in steel technology
means rifled barrels could be mass-produced. And their shots would always fall
in the same place.

You're making steel weapons now that are basically the same. You're going to be
able to standardize the piece of artillery and get the fall of shot basically
standardized.

So that's going to have an effect on the accuracy of the weapon, but also on the
concentration of fire on the target.

One key parallel leap will help take the muzzleloader and convert it into a
fast-firing killer.

Early cannons are loaded from the front. They're muzzleloaders. But with the
development of a means of opening up the breech, the other end of the cannon,
what you can now do is load more rapidly.

And very importantly, you're not trying to force down the barrel the gunpowder
charge and then the projectile on top. Instead, it can all go in in one piece
very quickly.

The idea of breech loading is not new. It was first seen in the 15th century.

The problem was every time they fired, they discovered that the breech was not
very well sealed.

Early breech loaders had a tendency to leak gases at the breech and oftentimes
explode in the face of the gun crew. It's bad enough being killed by the enemy,
but killed by your own gun? That's crazy.

This groundbreaking innovation, seen on virtually every artillery piece to this
day, first appears on the killing fields of the Civil War.

The main breech loading piece of artillery was a British piece. It was the
Whitworth rifle.

The Whitworth design was one of the best. It was designed so that it could be
used as either a muzzleloader or a breech loader.

It had a screw in the back and you undid the screw, the breech would open, you
throw in the round, close it and screw the thing back.

Loading at the rear gave artillerists and cannon cockers added protection.

And it didn't take long before a whole extended family of breech loaders would
emerge, all using different designs.

All provide the gas-tight seal or obturation that was needed to fire safely.

The gun itself is only half the story. The projectiles they fire will rapidly
acquire a new lethality.

Artillery ammunition evolved from a stone or an iron ball to exploding shells.

Early cannon fired the same solid stone projectiles as its predecessors, but a
new variety of deadly metal cannonballs and hollow cast metal balls stuffed with
explosives would emerge.

Smoothbore, normally it shoots a round ball, could be solid shot or shell. Solid
shot is what it says. It's solid, it would batter, smash targets down on
fortified areas.

This is a solid shot. It would be all packaged like this with a powder bag on
the back with your powder charge. We use against buildings, build up
fortifications.

Shells were a thicker wall filled with gunpowder. They have a time fuse. And
they'd fire it out of the tube and the fire would ignite the fuse.

Flies through the air and then it would explode into fragments.

In 1784, Henry Shrapnel, an English artillery officer, would take existing
projectile technology and revolutionize it.

He devises a novel kind of exploding shell, deadly to infantry. And his name has
been linked with death and destruction ever since.

He realized that when this metallic ball full of gunpowder, the fuse in it,
exploded, very often it broke into two or three pieces.

If you added musket balls, it increased the lethality of that weapon, killing
more people on the ground.

The gunner was very expert. He could time it so that it would explode before and
just above the enemy formation, showering the ranks with fragments of steel.

The final major evolution for projectiles was the advent of high explosive,
pioneered by Alfred Nobel from Sweden.

This new kit on the block ensures that when shells land, their power is even
greater.

Following the work of Nobel, who develops dynamites, armies develop high
explosives like cordite.

This material does not burn, it detonates. It's far more effective as an
explosive.

These deadly new shells cause carnage on the field of battle. They would add to
the fearsome reputation of this weapon system.

During World War I, 70% of casualties are the result of artillery. And during
this conflict, artillery would become even more deadly.

World War I is without doubt the war in which artillery is supreme.

One war above all others shows the importance and the evolution of artillery as
an engine of destruction.

The entire First World War is an artillery battle.

World War I is without doubt the war in which artillery is supreme.

Each side pummels the other relentlessly and unceasingly. Artillery has come of
age. Firepower will turn the tables of victory.

It's the power of the gun that will win the day, not the skill of an individual
infantryman.

The guns each side bring to battle are some of the most innovative in 200 years.

They are the forefathers of modern artillery and are the single most important
step in the history of this deity of destruction.

It's time to meet the grandfather of all modern artillery, a revolutionary
killing machine.

When World War I broke out, one of the innovations that appeared on the
battlefield was the quick firing gun.

French 75, the British 18 pounder, the German 77 millimeter rifle.

One gun above all others sows the seed for this deadly firepower family.

It has influenced the design of every generation of field artillery piece since
its debut.

The French 75 millimeter is a new weapon for a new century. Thanks to its rifled
barrel, it's deadly accurate.

Cannoneers of every age strive for accuracy. With accuracy comes the certainty
that your target will be hit and eliminated.

The French 75 also used a revolutionary self-contained shell. It was just a big
bullet.

And by opening the breach and throwing that in there, you could sustain a vast
amount of firepower that could go down range.

The gun can wreak havoc from a safe distance too, over five miles.

It also manages to control one of artillery's greatest enemies, recoil.

At the end of the 19th century, techniques are developed to absorb the energy
every time you fire a gun.

Previously, when you fire it, the gun would jump back. You'd have to wheel it
into place. It means it's very inaccurate.

With the 75's top secret hydropneumatic recoil system, it took less time to
reacquire the target.

The gun doesn't jump back. Instead, it remains stationary and oil and a buffer
push it all back into place.

That means that every time you fire, your shot will go virtually to the same
place.

Accuracy is far greater than has ever been achieved before.

As World War I grinds into bloody stalemate, an ancient form of battle, siege
warfare, returns to haunt Europe.

Both sides are besieging the other.

The machine gun is going to render the battlefield so dangerous for the
infantrymen that they get down in the trenches to protect themselves.

Then the artillery is going to take over the war. And it's going to be one big
artillery barrage after another.

In the massive muddy siege that World War I becomes, what counts more than
anything is sheer destructive firepower.

The ability to blow a target to pieces when it's hit.

In this one crucial area, the 75 and the family of other quick firing guns do
not excel.

As the siege mentality sets in, the guns are going to get bigger and bigger and
bigger.

And at the end of the First World War, you're going to have naval guns of say 16
inches appear on the battlefield.

Siege warfare is about bludgeoning your opponent into submission.

We'll just pound people, pound people. Hopefully someone will get killed. Enough
people get killed, then we can break through.

What does this like no other is big gun artillery.

A larger gun, the howitzer, could deliver that siege busting firepower.

A brother in arms of the cannon, howitzers fire shells in a higher arc, able to
drop on targets from a steeper angle.

As a result of this relentless artillery pounding, men's minds break.

The British in particular coined the expression shell shock because they
believed that this fugue, this withdrawal was caused by the physical effect of
the shell bursting nearby.

Later on it was realized it was psychological. It was the result of suffering
from heavy bombardments. Shell shock is that response to your experience.

As World War II erupts, artillery is even more hard hitting, but has to adapt to
a fast moving war.

Blitzkrieg tactics mean trench warfare is a thing of the past.

All sides have capitalized on the lessons of World War I and boast an extended
family of guns of every kind.

All these guns are wheeled, accurate, fast firing and support the recoil forces
of ever larger munitions.

Legendary artillery pieces are born into this thunderous brethren.

Deadly killing machines capable of delivering a knockout blow from miles away.

Spearheading the Nazi Blitzkrieg was a supreme war machine, the German 88.

Originally intended to blow aircraft out of the sky.

It could fire 34,000 feet into the air.

Its long caliber barrel meant it could hurl a 20 pound projectile at a scorching
2,700 feet per second.

The sheer power meant it could also take on tanks, able to penetrate three
inches of armor at over 1,000 feet.

The sheer power meant it could also take on tanks, able to penetrate three
inches of armor at over 1,500 feet.

Against the soldiers of the 7th Armored Division in the Second World War in the
Western Desert or against the Russians, the 88 was a real tank killer.

What we have here is a couple of things that make it very, very stable.

One of which here is a recuperator and this dampens down the recoil.

One of which here is a recuperator and this dampens down the recoil.

But in addition, you can take off the frontal tires here and right down here you
have the front formation of an acoustic form platform.

And then coming back here, this thing folds down like this and then this spike
is fitted into this hole up there and is driven into the ground like this.

And this then becomes a very stable platform for both anti-aircraft and anti-
tank use.

The United States also boasted a hard-hitting gun of its own, derived from a
World War I French piece.

The American Long Tom, the 155mm Howitzer, was a very effective weapon system.

It was designed to be fairly mobile despite its size and it was used very, very
effectively against fixed defenses or against troops in the open.

A 95 pound projectile could be fired over 15 miles and it had 10 wheels for
transportation from location to location.

All these weapons have a problem. How to keep up with modern combat. A fluid
battlefield constantly on the move.

World War II is a war of movement.

So a lot of artillery now in the Second World War is towed with an artillery
tractor, something that's wheeled that can move this stuff around very easily on
the battlefield.

Even when towed, artillery doesn't have the mobility it requires for the pace of
rolling war.

A tactical need emerges for an ultramobile artillery system.

A new beast evolves, the self-propelled gun, whose distant relatives first
appear in tiny numbers at the end of World War I.

The self-propelled gun becomes sort of the quintessential artillery piece of the
Second World War.

Guns go from being towed to being actually self-propelled. They are put onto
motorized carriages.

That means that they are now far more mobile. They can keep up with the tanks.
We now have all the elements we need for maneuver warfare.

The Americans create the priest and the British devise the sexton gun. These
allied war horses take the standard artillery tubes and hit the road.

The American gun is the 105 millimeter gun. The sexton gun was a 25 pounder. You
could also go to the self-propelled 155 that the Americans had.

These mechanized guns could finally keep up with their tracked cousins.

It wasn't just on the ground that artillery showed its ability to keep pace with
every aspect of mobile warfare.

2,700 pounds went screaming out of these guns and hit a target 23 miles away and
there was no stopping it.

Field artillery has evolved into one of the most feared weapons on the
battlefield, increasing its firepower, psychological impact and its mobility.

It wasn't just on land that artillery showed its versatility. It has also been
used in the military as a weapon.

It wasn't just on land that artillery showed its versatility. It has had to
learn how to fly as well as fight.

In World War II, guns even took to the skies, taking the battle to the enemy and
a family of air-portable hard-hitters is born.

Artillery had always been quite a flexible arm and what happened in the Second
World War was an extension of that.

During the bitter fighting of D-Day and then Operation Market Garden in 1944,
allied airborne units dropped deep behind enemy lines in the drive to the heart
of Occupy Europe.

Once troops are being taken by glider to battle, so some guns were made small
enough to fit in gliders.

Sending directly to where they're required, 6 pounder, 17 pound anti-tank guns,
40 millimeter anti-aircraft guns and even the 75 millimeter Pak-Hau itself.

This highly portable firepower would prove to be invaluable to the airborne
infantry, cut off in hostile territory.

All the artillery types dropped where they were required to support the
beleaguered airborne forces.

Leap forward a generation and we see the legacy of these air-portable weapons.

In the Vietnam War, artillery had to fly and fight for its life.

But with the invention of the helicopter, guns could be delivered to the most
difficult of terrain.

Time and again, artillery pieces and fire teams were thrown into the thick of
the action to provide hard ball backup for the infantry.

In battles like the siege of Quezon, it was the artillery that saved the day,
providing accurate counter battery fire and protecting troops.

It is artillery that provided that wall of steel that prevented the closure of
the enemy.

To this day, being able to transport your big guns across country, over the
battlefield, even over entire continents is just as important and can turn the
tide of victory.

But this ear-shattering god of war doesn't just fight on land or fly onto the
battlefield.

Any machine that can take the awesome recoil forces becomes a potential
firepower platform.

During World War II, artillery first appears in limited numbers on aircraft of
all sides as a specialist means of eliminating armor and fortifications.

If you could find an aircraft strong enough, mounting an artillery piece on a
plane became a very real proposition.

However, the difficulty of hitting a moving target means their role is limited
to specific operations.

But what if you could hit your mark again and again every 30 seconds with a
heavyweight shell fired from 23 miles away without the enemy even catching sight
of you?

It's time to witness the birth of the world's largest firing platform and the
biggest weapon system of the artillery weaponology tree, the battleship.

Naval gunnery grew from a tactical need to dominate the waves.

By World War II, an artillery behemoth ruled the oceans.

Thousands of tons of metal and some of the biggest guns around meant the
battleship was unsurpassed in terms of floating firepower.

But firing guns at sea was different from firing guns on land.

Artillery at sea is a vastly more complex problem than it is on land.

The firing platform itself, the battleship, has to hit another moving target
while it's pitching and rolling and moving around on basically one big one-
dimensional chessboard, the ocean.

Few ships could master gunnery at sea more impressively than the massive Iowa-
class U.S. battleships of World War II.

Of which America's most decorated is the USS New Jersey.

Her nine 16-inch guns were a sight to behold.

The firepower of the battleship New Jersey is simply awesome to witness.

The blast from one of these 2,700-pound shells from each of the three guns into
three turrets was truly a spectacle to see.

When she fired, she literally lit up the entire horizon.

Operating just one of the three turrets on a metal muster of this size required
vast manpower.

One turret on an Iowa-class battleship such as the New Jersey here required 77
men to fully man it.

You had 27 in the turret itself and all the others would be down in the powder
magazines or throughout the barbed feeding up the shells.

The firing process mixed a complex combination of well-trained crew drill and,
unlike most landlocked artillery, mechanization.

Right now we're in turret one of the battleship New Jersey. This is a 16-inch
Mark VII gun.

This is the breech and when the shell is fired, the gun begins to go back to
battery or a five-degree loading angle.

At that point, a new shell comes up and the shell is loaded.

At that point, a new shell comes up from below.

The breech is open and the shell is rammed home with a rammer.

Three bags of powder come out of this hoist right here and they're rammed home.

And then another three bags come down from the door onto the spanning tray into
the gun.

The rammer is rejected, the breech block is closed, and the gun is fired.

This happens every 30 seconds.

With 1930s technology, there is no computers involved. It's all analog
technology and hard training.

It's an amazing demonstration of gunnery.

It's probably the absolute epitome of gunnery evolution.

2,700 pounds went screaming out of these guns and hit a target 23 miles away and
there was no stopping it.

As with field artillery, 19th century advances in rifling and breech loading
fast-forward naval gunnery at sea to this level of long-range lethality.

Rifling was starting in the 1860s to be seen as a way to impart spin to a shell
rather than a cannonball.

That, along with the evolution of stronger and stronger steels and other metals,
allowed the guns to really become more effective and efficient.

A generation of all-big-gun battleships would first come to blows in World War
I.

As guns with rifling could now fire miles over the horizon, sighting your
target, aiming your guns, and correcting fall of shot became a matter of life
and death.

Battleships had to spot their target beyond the horizon using high-powered
optical rangefinders or aircraft.

With the use of observation aircraft, a battleship could see and eliminate its
prey before it had time to react.

But ironically, it was aircraft that would spell the end of the battleship.

Aircraft from carriers eliminate targets on land and at sea with ease.

The USS New Jersey would be one of several Iowa-class battleships pressed back
into service when her nation needed her.

Despite the slow decline of these floating fortresses, they had shown that their
big guns could keep pace with the changing nature of the modern age of warfare.

However, a family of supersized land-based guns would not be so successful.

It wasn't that effective. It was more of a terror weapon than anything else.

Bigger and bigger guns have adapted with apparent ease to almost all the
spectrum of war, gaining range and power, firing ever more deadly munitions, and
taking to the air and the sea.

However, attempts to build guns of supersized power have shown that not every
step on our evolutionary journey has resulted in weaponology success.

Meet the black sheep of the artillery family, guns that cost a fortune, promised
so much, but end up as junk metal.

During the Great War, both sides attempted to mount ever larger guns on railway
carriages.

On paper, super guns make sense. In the siege warfare of World War I, these big
hitters were seen as critical in breaking the stalemate.

The super gun now can take an enormous round and project it hundreds of miles.

In World War I, the Germans created one of the biggest super guns of the time,
the Paris gun.

It could fire from a forest called Crepe into Paris some 80-something miles
away.

The French didn't know what was hitting them. They thought it was a zeppelin
dropping bombs on them, except it was a clear sky. They couldn't see the
zeppelin. They realized then it was an artillery piece that was shooting at
them.

For the population of Paris, they knew the Germans could fire on their city and
cause death, and that was a real blow to morale.

But its shells were relatively small and caused little material damage.

It wasn't that effective. It was more of a terror weapon than anything else.

During the Second World War, massive railway guns continued to evolve.

Hitler and his Nazi war machine, impressed with their propaganda impact, would
take the railway gun and max out the technology with massive designs.

The K-5 was one of the most numerous. Over 20 of these 218-ton monsters were
produced.

It's a 11-inch gun. They were actually made to shoot the Maginot Line, but in
the event, what happened was, of course, the Germans went around the Maginot
Line so they didn't have to use them.

Despite this, K-5 still served on all fronts, firing their 562-pound shells over
30 miles and packing a mighty punch.

In the Battle of Anzio in 1944, the Germans wheeled out the K-5 to shell the
embattled Allied beachhead.

Its firepower would inspire an even bigger flight of fantasy.

Those guns were very, very good guns, and they were very accurate guns.

The Germans thought, well, if it's good, we can go better. They went out to 800
millimeters, 36 inches.

In line with Hitler's maniacal vision, he would order the construction of a
monster gun, the largest the world had ever seen.

Two of them were made, called Gustav and Dora, and took five years to build.

The Dora and Gustav guns are massive guns. They actually had to go across two
railway tracks in the way that they were transported around.

It took six weeks, 5,000 men to enplace the gun. It had a firing crew of 500
men.

The gun weighed a staggering 1,350 tons, moved on 80 wheels, and was as high as
a three-story house.

Despite millions of Reich marks of investment, only the Dora saw service in the
siege of Sevastopol in 1942.

The Dora and Gustav are a real extreme example of something probably just
slightly too big to have any real operational use.

They drained resources and took soldiers from the front line.

It had a major general for a gun captain, so in my own little way, I like to
think it helped us win World War II.

By the end of World War II, railway artillery begins to recede.

It is just so big and so heavy that the mobility is probably one of the things
that reduces the effect of railway artillery.

This didn't stop the United States from building one of the most deadly cannons
ever, fit for the nuclear age and designed during the Cold War.

47 tons of metal went into the 280-millimeter cannon Atomic Annie.

The result, a gun that fired an 800-pound, 15-kiloton nuclear projectile over
seven miles.

History's first atomic artillery shell explosion, shot Grable, occurred on May
25, 1953.

Annie's nuclear shell burst with precision accuracy over the designated target
area, about 500 feet above the ground.

When it fired, it caused an explosion equivalent to 15,000 tons of conventional
TNT.

But it had one fundamental flaw.

The problem is, it was meant for Europe, and you can't fire 15 kilotons in
Europe without killing a whole lot of Europeans.

The other thing about it, it was huge.

Remember, when you get off the Ottoman in Germany, the road goes from being this
big down to being this big.

The other thing about it was, look, the Russians were a lot of things, but they
weren't stupid.

So they always had this thing targeted. So it's dumb.

More than anything else, these maxed-out super guns were ordered for their
psychological value, as their astonishing lack of practical mobility and slow
rate of fire was clear to see.

Super guns are really more of a psychological weapon than they are a real weapon
of war.

Ultimately, artillery has two effects on the battlefield.

One is psychological. The other is the physical destruction it causes.

It could not achieve this without crew drill and the fundamental physics behind
gunpowder artillery.

We still have a pressure vessel, an explosion, and a projectile.

And it's that system that has continued to bring firepower to the battlefield.

It has evolved into a war winner. It's lethal, it's long-range, and the
technology has progressed to such a point where it's a killer.

Today, one gun epitomizes everything that has been learned down the years about
artillery.

The M777 is the supreme incarnation of deadly cannon firepower, able to lay down
steel rain from massive ranges.

Its accuracy and rate of fire is awesome, and its ultralight construction allows
it to shoot and then scoot.

Drawn together, the branches on its tree reflect its genesis. Gunpowder
increased range.

The cannon dominated the battlefield. Rifling and breech loading increased the
cannon's accuracy and rate of fire, while mobile artillery reached new heights,
evolving into the ultimate artillery piece.

Weaponologically, the M777 ultralight howitzer is the top of the tree.