Chapter 241 Leningrad Express
The towering steel body of a giant stands proudly on the double-track railway outside Leningrad. The cannon barrel that rises up at an angle to the sky is like a heavy sword piercing the clouds.
"Slender Bertha" is the nickname given to her by German artillerymen, and "Anzio Express" is the shadow that the Allied soldiers of later generations cannot get rid of.
Compared with the 800mm Gustav cannon, it is not weak and can be bullied. When the muzzle of the 283mm cannon roars, all the surface creatures within its firepower range will tremble deeply.
This is the railway train gun with the highest output and the most balanced and reliable performance in the history of human warfare - K5 (E) leopold 283mm railway gun.
In order to seize Leningrad, the red holy city of the Bolsheviks, before the Battle of Moscow, Marshal Loeb, commander of the German Northern Army Group, spared no effort in the deployment of equipment. A German special railway artillery regiment equipped with two K5 railway guns followed the order and went to the outskirts of Leningrad to participate in the battle.
Compared with the 800mm Gustav railway gun, which was powerful but required 500 people to serve, the K5 railway gun, which was relatively small and called "Slim Bertha" by the German artillery, only needed ordinary double-track railways to maneuver and go to the battlefield. A German artillery regiment was more than enough to serve these two K5 railway guns.
Although the 283mm caliber of the K5 railway gun pales in comparison to the unprecedented Gustav 800mm cannon, the destructive firepower of the K5 railway gun still has an unmatched overwhelming advantage on land.
The 6-meter-long 76-caliber 283mm gun barrel gives the K5 railway gun an outrageously powerful firepower performance.
After being accelerated by this 6-meter-long super-long gun barrel, the GR35 high-explosive grenade weighing 255 kg can reach an amazing muzzle velocity of 1,120 meters per second, and can be projected as far as 60 kilometers above the head of the target.
Although the K5 railway gun placed on an extended special rail car has a combat weight of 218 tons, its loading process is not as clumsy as its weight sounds.
The small loading car equipped on this K5 exclusive special extended rail car is a semi-automatic loading system, which consists of rails laid on the rail car itself and the small loading car itself. It can easily lift the 255-kilogram K5 railway gun's 283-mm giant projectile and the matching propellant cartridge. Only two loaders can manually push this small loading vehicle on the slide rail to move freely and effortlessly.
The 283-mm shells transported to the K5 railway gun's breech block by the semi-automatic loading system only need to be operated by a simple manual push rod in the last step of pushing into the chamber, which can be said to be very easy compared to its huge 283-mm caliber.
The easy and convenient semi-automatic loading system gives the K5 railway gun unprecedented combat effectiveness.
After the K5 railway gun is deployed, once its majestic barrel is raised and begins to roar, it can still fire at an ultra-high combat rate of 15 rounds per hour while calculating the trajectory of the shells and receiving the landing point of the shells from the front-line observation and aiming to correct and calibrate the trajectory.
If the calibration calculation of the shell aiming point and the correction trajectory is ignored and only a fixed target is covered with firepower, the actual combat firing efficiency of the K5 railway gun can be further improved on this basis and reach a higher speed. During the Battle of Anzio, the Allies, who were tortured by the German "Anzio Express" for a full four months, tasted the terrifying power of the K5's super-high firing rate.
The Soviet heavy tank units that appeared in an organized manner on the front line of the Leningrad theater caught the Germans, who originally thought that their opponents, the Soviets, had no large-scale organized tank units in this besieged city, off guard.
The Germans, who were deeply surprised, would not have thought that the independent first heavy tank breakthrough battalion led by Malashenko secretly entered the Leningrad theater surrounded on three sides through the Ladoga Lake waterway, which was known as the "Road of Life".
After thinking about it, the only conclusion of the problem can be placed on the former site of the Kirov Tank Factory in Leningrad, which has been almost emptied.
The German army naturally believed that the Kirov tank factory, which had been swept by the German Air Force, was still producing heavy tanks for the Soviet Red Army on the front line.
When the main force of the air wing under the Northern Army Group was unable to withdraw from the battle in the direction of supporting the town of Uritsk.
The German special railway artillery regiment, which had just arrived at the Leningrad front, rushed to the combat position, intending to completely destroy the Soviet tank factory that was still producing tanks through the combat radius of 60 kilometers of two K5 railway guns and the destructive 283 heavy artillery.
Malashenko, who came to receive the new equipment, unfortunately caught up with this "German Express". The roaring 283mm heavy artillery shells fell one after another with the unstoppable power of destroying the world like the end of the world. Before that, the former site of the Kirov tank factory, which had been bombed by the German Air Force, was instantly bathed in a terrible purgatory.
Lavrinenko, who was hiding in a relatively safe tank maintenance trench and feeling the strong tremor under his feet like an 8.0 magnitude earthquake, was the first to shout. He had never experienced such a terrible bombardment.
"What on earth are these fascists using to bombard us? Did they send their battleships to the Baltic Sea!?"
As a native of this era, Lavrinenko did not know the terrible "apocalyptic weapons" that the Germans invested in World War II, but Malashenko, as a later time traveler, knew all about it.
Malashenko, who was bathed in the strong shock of the shelling, could not remember for a moment what kind of super cannon the German army deployed on the Leningrad front in 1941.
But neither Gustav nor Karl's reputation for evil can be resisted by the fragile flesh and blood. If they leave the bunker at this time, they will undoubtedly die and there is no other possibility.
"Don't ask so many questions, Lavry! Now we can only stay here and wait for the shelling to pass. Without the bunker, we won't even be able to get rid of the dust kicked up by the shell shock wave!"
The devastating bombardment lasted for nearly half an hour. The two K5 train guns, which raised their muzzles and fired wildly at the former site of the Kirov tank factory, poured out more than twenty rounds of shells before they stopped. Shrouded in a cloud of flames and smoke, the former site of the Kirov Tank Factory is as messy as a ruined city standing next to a moon crater.