Coast Defense Gun
These guns were modified with a larger chamber for coast defense duties to handle the increased amount of propellant used for the special long-range Siegfried shells. Gander and Chamberlain quote a weight of only 105.3 tonnes (103.6 long tons; 116.1 short tons) for these guns, presumably accounting for the extra volume of the enlarged chamber. An armored single mount, the Bettungsschiessgerüst (Firing platform) C/39 was used by these guns. It had a maximum elevation of 60° and could traverse up to 360°, depending on the emplacement. The C/39 mount had two compartments; the upper housed the guns and their loading equipment, while the lower contained the ammunition hoists, their motors, and the elevation and traverse motors. The mount was fully powered and had an underground magazine. Normally these were placed in open concrete barbettes, relying on their armor, but Hitler thought that not enough protection for the guns (Battery Todt) emplaced on Cap-Gris-Nez in the Pas de Calais near Wimereux and ordered a concrete casemate 3.5 metres (11 ft) thick built over and around the mounts. This had the unfortunate effect of limiting their traverse to 120°. Other C/39 mounts were installed at the Hanstholm fortress in Denmark, and the Vara fortress in Kristiansand, Norway.
Four Drh LC/34 turrets, three of which were originally intended to re-arm the Gneisenau and one completed to the Soviet order, modified for land service, were planned to be emplaced at Paimpol, Brittany and on the Cap de la Hague on the Cotentin Peninsula, but construction never actually began. Construction for two of those turrets was well underway at Oxby, Denmark when the war ended.
Read more about this topic: 38 Cm SK C/34 Naval Gun
Famous quotes containing the words coast, defense and/or gun:
“Frequently also some fair-weather finery ripped off a vessel by a storm near the coast was nailed up against an outhouse. I saw fastened to a shed near the lighthouse a long new sign with the words “ANGLO SAXON” on it in large gilt letters, as if it were a useless part which the ship could afford to lose, or which the sailors had discharged at the same time with the pilot. But it interested somewhat as if it had been a part of the Argo, clipped off in passing through the Symplegades.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“... most Southerners of my parents’ era were raised to feel that it wasn’t respectable to be rich. We felt that all patriotic Southerners had lost everything in defense of the South, and sufficient time hadn’t elapsed for respectable rebuilding of financial security in a war- impoverished region.”
—Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 1, ch. 1 (1962)
“Though I had not come a-hunting, and felt some compunctions about accompanying the hunters, I wished to see a moose near at hand, and was not sorry to learn how the Indian managed to kill one. I went as reporter or chaplain to the hunters,—and the chaplain has been known to carry a gun himself.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)