Last shelling of Paris

On 9 August 1918 Paris came under fire for the last time from the German long-range gun that Parisians called “Bertha”. According to Henry W. Miller, an American artillery officer and author of a substantial book on the bombardment, that day the gun fired twelve rounds at the city between 9.13 a.m. and 2 p.m. The German author Heinrich Eisgruber, who described the operation after the war, states that the last shell fired at Paris was launched on 9 August at two in the afternoon. The British chronology of the war records the last shelling of the French capital under 15 August. The French military historian Alain Huyon points out that eyewitness accounts of the end of the last series are contradictory and that according to some it went on until about the middle of August. Most sources, however, including the works of Miller and Huyon, take 9 August as the last day of the bombardment.

The wandering gun

The bombardment had begun on 23 March, two days after the start of the great German offensive on the Somme. The guns, built by Krupp and manned by sailors, fired from a range of over a hundred kilometres, from a wood at the foot of the hill of Mont de Joie near Crépy, outside Laon. The first series lasted until the beginning of May, the second from 27 May to 11 June, during the German offensive on the Aisne. When the Germans reached the Marne, one gun was moved to a new position in a wood near Bruyères-sur-Fère, not far from Fère-en-Tardenois, from where on 15 and 16 July, in the first days of the Second Battle of the Marne, it fired fourteen shells at Paris. The French counter-offensive of 18 July forced the Germans into a hurried evacuation. According to Eisgruber, the train carrying the gun passed through Soissons under fire from the French artillery, which cut the track near Venizel immediately afterwards. At the end of July a French intelligence officer found in the wood near Bruyères the pit of the emplacement and the remains of the cases of fourteen shells, with markings matching the fragments collected in Paris.

The gun went to a position that had been prepared for several weeks in a wood near the village of Beaumont-en-Beine in the Aisne department, west of La Fère, about 108 kilometres from Paris. French aircraft had spotted work in the area as early as June, but the Germans had built several dummy sidings and emplacements nearby. At 9.52 a.m. on 5 August the fourth and last series began. According to Miller, the gun fired 17 rounds on 5 August, 18 on 6 August and 12 on 7 August. The office of the French war minister noted on 6 August that “since yesterday the gun firing on Paris has resumed fire”.

The end of the bombardment

On 8 August the British and French attacked at Amiens and broke through the German front. That day the gun fired five more rounds, and on 9 August, as the Allies were still advancing, twelve. In the evening the command decided that the position at Beaumont, although still beyond the reach of the French infantry, had come within range of the enemy’s heavy artillery, who knew perfectly well where it was. The gun, its carriage and steel base were hastily dismantled and removed by 12 August. According to Miller, the remaining barrels, already rebored to a larger calibre, had a shorter range, and the Germans had no positions closer to Paris. The bombardment was over.

According to the Paris prefecture of police, cited by Huyon, 367 shells fell on Paris and its suburbs over the 46 days of the bombardment. They killed 256 people and wounded 620. Eisgruber gave a lower number of rounds, about 320. The single deadliest shot came on 29 March, Good Friday, when a shell pierced the vault of the church of Saint-Gervais-et-Saint-Protais during a service. According to the plaque in the church, 91 people were killed and 68 wounded. The bombardment did not, however, break the Parisians or change the course of the war. Even before the armistice the Germans destroyed the withdrawn guns and their documentation, so that none fell into Allied hands.