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N0KFQ > TODAY 23.03.13 17:23l 43 Lines 1822 Bytes #999 (0) @ WW
BID : 37641_KB0WSA
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Subj: Today in History - Mar 23
Path: IZ3LSV<IW0QNL<OK0NBR<OK2PEN<OK0NMG<N0KFQ<KB0WSA
Sent: 130323/1456Z 37641@KB0WSA.MO.USA.NA BPQK1.4.54
...
Mar 23, 1918:
Paris hit by shells from new German gun
At 7:20 in the morning on March 23, 1918, an explosion in the
Place de la Republique in Paris announces the first attack of a
new German gun.
The Pariskanone, or Paris gun, as it came to be known, was
manufactured by Krupps; it was 210mm, with a 118-foot-long
barrel, which could fire a shell the impressive distance of some
130,000 feet, or 25 miles, into the air. Three of them fired on
Paris that day from a gun site at CrÉpy-en-Laonnaise, 74 miles
away.
The gun sent Paris, a city that had withstood all earlier
attempts at its destruction, including scattered bombings,
reeling. At first, the Paris Defense Service assumed the city was
being bombed, but soon they determined that it was actually being
hit by artillery fire, a heretofore unimagined situation. By the
end of the day, the shelling had killed 16 people and wounded 29
more. It would continue throughout the German offensive of that
year in four separate phases between March 23 and August 9, 1918,
inflicting a total of somewhere under 260 Parisian casualties.
This low total was due to the fact that the residents of Paris
learned to avoid gathering in large groups during shellings,
limiting the number of those killed and wounded by the shells and
diminishing the initially terrifying impact of the weapon.
Almost all information about the Pariskanone, one of the most
sophisticated weapons to emerge out of World War I, disappeared
after the war ended. Later, the Nazis tried without success to
reproduce the gun from the few pictures and diagrams that
remained. Copies were deployed in 1940 against Britain across the
English Channel, but failed to cause any significant damage.
73, K.O. n0kfq
N0KFQ @ KB0WSA.MO.USA.NA
E-mail: kohiggs@hotmail.com
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