38 cm SK L/45 gun
The 38 cm SK L/45 "Max", also called Langer Max was a German long-range, heavy siege and coast-defense gun used during the First World War. Originally a naval gun, it was also adapted for land service when it became clear that some of the ships for which it was intended would be delayed and that it would be very useful on the Western Front.
The first guns saw service in fixed positions but the lengthy preparation time required for the concrete emplacements was a serious problem and a railroad mount was designed to increase the gun's mobility. The latter variants participated in the 1918 German spring offensives and the Second Battle of the Marne. One gun, Batterie Pommern, was captured in Koekelare by the Belgians at the end of the war and the seven surviving guns were destroyed in 1921 and 1922.
Design
They were originally designed as the main armament of the s but were deployed in fixed and semi-portable concrete emplacements that took weeks to build. One obvious change made for land service was the placement of a large folding counterweight just forward of the trunnions to counteract the preponderance of weight towards the breech. This, although heavy, was simpler than adding equilibrators to perform the same function. It folded to lower the gun's height while travelling.To meet the demand for more mobility and a faster emplacement time, Krupp designed a combination railroad and firing platform mounting at the end of 1917 using guns released by the hulking of and. This mount allowed the gun to fire from any suitable section of track and from a fixed emplacement. The E. u. B. mount used a combination of cradle and rolling recoil systems to absorb the recoil forces when firing from rails. It could traverse a total of 2° for fine aiming adjustments, coarser adjustments had to be made by moving the carriage. The gun had to be loaded at zero elevation and so had to be re-aimed for every shot. One major problem when firing from rails was that the lengthy recoil movement of the gun prevented elevation past 18° 30' lest the breech hit the ground when firing, which limited range to. Nicknamed Max, the gun's barrel and railway-transportable carriage was used in the famed Paris Gun. Some guns were also emplaced in the Pommern '''' and Deutschland coastal defence batteries on the Flanders coast protecting occupied Ostend.
The first fixed emplacements used concrete and required a month or more to build. The Germans began construction of some during the winter of 1917–1918 in preparation for their Spring Offensive. From May 1918 they used a removable steel box in lieu of the concrete that shortened the construction time, although the exact amount is unknown. Miller quotes three weeks as the time necessary to build the steel version from captured German manuals. The emplacement consisted of a central rotating platform, the main approach track and two auxiliary tracks on each side for the gantry crane necessary to assemble the emplacement, and an outer circular track to handle the ammunition. The central platform had railroad track on one axis and the actual firing mount on the other. All that was necessary to emplace the E. u. B. mount was to center it on the platform, jack it up, remove the trucks, and rotate the platform 90° and lower the mount to be bolted to the platform.
Ammunition
When used as a rolling mount, an extension of the carriage was fitted over the rear trucks to allow the ammunition car behind the mount to place ammunition on the shot truck which was then manually run up to the breech for loading. In an emplacement this extension was removed and ammunition hoisted up through a hatch on the floor of the mount, between the shot truck rails, from an ammunition car on the outer track and then lowered onto the shot truck. An estimated twelve men were required to ram the shell. It used the German naval system of ammunition where the base charge was held in a metallic cartridge case and supplemented by another charge in a silk bag which was rammed first. The existence of a shell with range must be regarded as unconfirmed, the longest engagement recorded for any of these guns was during the bombardment of Dunkerque by Batterie Pommern in Flanders in 1917–1918.| Shell name | Weight | Filling weight | Muzzle velocity | Range |
| Base-fused high-explosive shell | ||||
| Base-fused HE shell with ballistic cap | ||||
| Shrapnel shell ' | — | |||
| Light base- and nose-fused HE shell with ballistic cap ' | ||||
| HE shell with ballistic cap | — | — | — |