Paris shelled by a long-range gun

On Saturday 23 March 1918, two days after the start of the great German offensive on the Somme, at about 7.20 a.m., an explosion went off on the pavement in front of No. 6 Quai de Seine, in the working-class 19th arrondissement of Paris. Splinters smashed windows, but no one was killed. No aircraft or gunfire could be heard over the city, and the sky was empty. During the day, roughly every quarter of an hour, further shells burst in various parts of the city and in the suburbs. Only in the afternoon did the authorities admit that the Germans were shelling Paris from a gun placed more than a hundred kilometres from the city. It was a weapon unknown until then. Parisians called it “Bertha”, and it went down in history as the Paris Gun.

Mysterious explosions

The first explosion was taken for an aerial bomb. Paris already knew air raids, but for a long time only at night. The city had lived through the last great raid by German bombers on the night of 30–31 January. Some residents took the bang for another explosion at the recently destroyed grenade factory at La Courneuve in the northern suburbs. At about 7.40 a.m. a second shell fell on the Boulevard de Strasbourg, a few dozen metres from the entrance to the metro station at the Gare de l’Est, at the busiest time of day. According to the American officer Henry W. Miller, author of the first substantial book on the bombardment, eight people were killed there and thirteen wounded.

Soon, summoned by the police, artillery and air force officers hurried to the scene. Fighters of the Paris defences took off but found no aircraft, and observers at the front insisted that no one had flown over the lines. Among the fragments collected were pieces of copper and steel with clear marks of rifling grooves, which an aerial bomb could not have had. At 9.15 a.m. the authorities ordered the sirens to be sounded. Parisians knew their wail from the night raids, and now they heard it in broad daylight. Traffic in the city came to a halt. People went down into shelters and metro stations, and shops and offices stopped work. According to Miller, by about 9.30 a.m. artillery officers had concluded that the city was being shelled by a new gun of about 21 centimetres calibre, probably placed near Laon, by the new railway sidings near the village of Crépy that reconnaissance aircraft had spotted earlier. Even so, the communiqué issued at about 10 a.m. still spoke of aircraft flying at a very great height.

Shells kept falling until the early afternoon. After 1 p.m. one burst in the Place de la République, killing two people. Others hit streets of the 4th arrondissement near the Lycée Charlemagne and the suburbs of Pantin, Vanves and Châtillon. The last fell at about 2.45 p.m. on the railway tracks at Pantin. The afternoon communiqué at last stated that the enemy had shelled Paris with a long-range gun, roughly every quarter of an hour, and that there were “about a dozen killed and fifteen wounded”. Figures for this first day differ between sources. According to Miller, 25 shells fell on Paris and its surroundings, killing 16 people and wounding 29. The French military historian Alain Huyon counted 22 shells, 18 in the city and 4 in the suburbs, and about ten killed and fifteen wounded.

The gun at Crépy

The gun was built by the Krupp works. Its barrels were made from worn-out 38-centimetre naval gun barrels, into which long 21-centimetre liners were inserted, projecting far beyond the muzzle. With an additional extension the barrel was more than 30 metres long and had to be held up by a special bracing so that it would not droop under its own weight. The shell weighed about a hundred kilograms but carried only a few kilograms of explosive, so its burst was not much more powerful than that of an ordinary field-gun shell. Fired at an enormous muzzle velocity, it rose to a height of about 40 kilometres, into the stratosphere, where the thin air offered almost no resistance, and after about three minutes in flight it came down on the city. At such a range the ballisticians even had to take the rotation of the Earth into account. Each shot wore away part of the rifling, so successive shells had ever larger diameters, were numbered and had to be fired in a strictly fixed order. After several dozen rounds the barrel had to be replaced.

The firing positions were prepared from the end of 1917 in a wood at the foot of the Mont de Joie hill near Crépy, not far from Laon, about 120 kilometres from the centre of Paris. Because the gun derived from naval artillery, it was manned by sailors of the Kaiserliche Marine under the command of Vice-Admiral Maximilian Rogge. To make it harder for the French to locate the position by sound, the surrounding heavy artillery batteries fired at the same time, and aircraft covered the sky above them. The Germans called the weapon the Paris Gun or the Kaiser Wilhelm Gun. The French spoke from the start of “Bertha” or “Big Bertha”, although the real Big Bertha was a 420 mm siege mortar which in 1914 demolished the forts of Liège.

A weapon against morale

The Paris Gun could not destroy the city or hit any particular target. Its purpose was to intimidate the people of Paris at a moment when a decisive offensive was being fought at the front. French sound-ranging sections soon distinguished its boom from the other batteries, and as early as 24 March French heavy artillery began shelling the positions near Crépy. Paris, however, did not panic. Some residents left the city, but the rest quickly grew used to the shelling.

The most tragic shot came a few days later, on Good Friday, 29 March, after 4 p.m. A shell struck the vault of the church of Saint-Gervais-Saint-Protais during a service and brought part of the roof down on the congregation. About ninety people were killed. The shelling continued, with breaks, until 9 August 1918. According to Huyon, a total of 367 shells fell on Paris and its surroundings, killing 256 people and wounding 620. When the Allies went over to the offensive, the Germans withdrew the guns, and the Allies never captured any of them.