35 cm naval cannon L / 45 M.15
The naval cannon 35 cm L / 45 M 15 was a naval gun of the Austro-Hungarian Navy that was used on land during the First World War . In the Navy, the gun was given the model designation 35 cm L / 45 K 14 . These were the guns of the replacement Monarch battleships ordered before the war , the construction of which could no longer be started. When the war broke out, eleven of the pipes for the first ship of this class were already in various stages of manufacture.
history
The development of the cannon was carried out at the Škoda works in Pilsen , which also took over the production. Since the Austrian naval cannon 35 cm M 15 fired the same ammunition as the German 35 cm SK C 14 L / 45 intended for the battlecruisers of the Mackensen class , agreements with the Krupp armaments company in Essen may have been made before construction work began . This was suggested by both the Austro-Hungarian and the German navy to simplify the procurement of ammunition during a war.
When the plans for the construction of the replacement Monarch battleships were put aside, two of the heavy artillery pipes required for this had already been completed. The first was delivered on May 28, 1915. The pipes were placed on adapted mounts and handed over to the fortress artillery with the task of using them as effectively as possible. The enormous effort that had to be operated to such a gun to make ready to fire (among others had at each position under the gun a several meters deep gun wells to be dug), all efforts put strict limits. One of the cannons, which was called "Georg", fired 122 of its 700 kg grenades over the plateau of the seven municipalities to Asiago in May 1916 on the occasion of the Austro-Hungarian offensive of Calceranica right next to Lake Caldonazzo . It then had to be brought back to the factory for overhaul. In May 1917, the cannon No. 1 was. Not in use, the no. 2 was delivered, no. 3 was ready and had to be shot are the no. 4 was in the final assembly, no. 5 were to 11 in various Production stages, but were no longer delivered until the end of the war.
In 1918 the cannons were used again to support the June offensive in Gorgo di Molina. After the tenth battle of the Isonzo, cannon No. 2 was brought from its firing position near Sistovo to San Croce north of Trieste , from where targets near Grado were fired on from October 18, 1917 .
The whereabouts of the cannons could not be definitively determined. Italy and France (the latter probably No. 4, which was delivered shortly before the end of the war) each captured one copy, which was soon sent for scrapping. The other two cannons fell into the hands of the Yugoslavs ; one of them is still proven in the interwar period, then its trace is lost.
After Austria was annexed to the German Empire , the former kuk Kontreadmiral Alfred Freiherr von Koudelka was commissioned by the Wehrmacht leadership to search for the two cannons . The search was unsuccessful and both have disappeared without a trace to this day.
literature
- Erwin Anton Grestenberger: Imperial and Royal fortifications in Tyrol and Carinthia 1860 - 1918. Verlag Österreich ua, Vienna 2000, ISBN 3-7046-1558-7 .
- M. Christian Ortner: The Austro-Hungarian Artillery from 1867 to 1918. Verlag Militaria, Vienna 2007.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Tony DiGiulian: German 35 cm / 45 (13.78 ") SK L / 45. Navweaps.com. Retrieved July 2, 2010.
- ↑ Erwin F. Sieche: The battleships of the KuK Navy. Marine-Arsenal Volume 14, Podzun-Pallas-Verlag, Woelfersheim-Berstadt 1991, ISBN 3790904112 .
- ^ Ortner The Austro-Hungarian Artillery. P. 545