Edog: "leopold, what are you stating here??? That the RR guns were thought to be useful, and hence the production of them was justified?" "Can you not agree with anything I say??? "
Leopold: "So, were railroad guns a huge expenditure of men and materials? Sure. Were they a total waste of time? For the US? Sure, we never used them. For the Germans, probably so, they could have spent their effort on things like more aircraft, tanks, subs, etc." " "Railroad guns never were capable of being used in a strictly tactical sense since they were too large and their design was intended for strategic use. They had only a small role in deciding the outcome of any campaigns or battles" "after this campaign,(Sevastopol, May 1942) the need for these huge weapons had passed and no, I do not think that the continued manufacture of these could be justified." Dora's 48 shots at 7 targets is both a testament to how little she was used, certainly NOT justifing her cost of over 10 million Reichmarks, and to how effective her 7.1 to 10 ton shells were at decimating her targets. They didn't run out of shells after 48 rounds, they ran out of targets. If Dora HAD been completed in time for the Battle of France and provided with German air superiority, she would have made short work out of the Belgian forts and the Maginot Line and then gone on to Gibraltar and turned it into a lunar landscape as well. Then, and only then, she MIGHT have paid off her debit. Did I say, quoting you; "That the RR guns were thought to be useful" Yes, that is why WE built over 630 of them, let alone the total number built by the Germans, the French, the English, The Soviets and the Italians. And then: "and hence the production of them was justified?" Reread my above quotes. You seem to think that just because my moniker is "Leopold", that I must be a die-hard, pro-railroad gun fanactic. Sorry, "Probably so" means I'm agreeing with you, Yes, they were a total waste of time, since they were not used for their INTENDED ROLE. Despite the fact that Karl was ready for action by 1939, he was not used (according to my sources)in the Battle of France. Whether this was because of Karl's disappointingly short firing range (which surely would have made him succeptable to counter-battery fire from the French forts, and the reason all the 600mm mortars were rebored to 540mm and the shell weight cut in half in order to double the range in 1942), or due to the change of tactics used by the Panzerwaffe (most probable) I can not say. Regardless, these two weapons, the "Karl" series of mortars and Dora were specifically designed (before the war) with only one purpose, the reduction of heavily armored fortifications, particularly the Maginot Line. Since neither weapon was used for this purpose, their expenditures in manpower, materials and money, were a complete waste. Subsequent use of Karl at the Battle of Warsaw in the fall of 1944 was indeed a mere propaganda stunt, since the use of such a weapon against a unarmored, nonstrategic target like the city of Warsaw served little use other than it's propaganda value. The assertion that Krupp would accept such an enormous undertaking as building the world's largest artillery piece at over 10 million Reichmarks and years of development, simply for the purpose of providing Hitler with a gargantuan toy with which to scare his neighbors and sedate his inferiority complex, is laughable at best. Such folly would require substantial written proof to raise it beyond the level of mere spectulation.