INDEX:

On Ordnance Continuation Page 1:
  MORE ORDNANCE APOCRYPHA
    (Moved from Ordnance Page 2 on 12 Feb 2002).
  More on the 280mm Atomic Cannon - moved to this page 26 Aug 03.

On Ordnance Continuation Page 2:
  RAILROAD GUNS.
  ATOMIC CANNON - moved to this page 26 Aug 03.
  SMALL ARMS.

On Ordnance Continuation Page 3:
  CALIBER (Calibre).
  Anzio Annie.
  SMALL ARMS (moved from Page 2 on 13 Apr 00)
  BIBLIOGRAPHY
  Russian Armor.
  HELP!

On this Atomic Cannon Page:
  ATOMIC CANNON
  Atomic Cannon CQ (Seek You = HELP!)

On the Atomic Cannon Continuation Page 1:
  (30 Oct 08)
  Atomic Cannon in Asia!   (30 Oct 08)

On the Atomic Cannon Pictures Page:
  Battery B, 265th Field Artillery Battalion, Baumholder, Germany, 1955 and 1956.
  Atomic Cannon Training Manual.

Comet Metal Products Authenticast Models Page.

As noted on Page 1, army ordnance buffs should visit the Ordnance Museum at Aberdeen Proving Ground off Routes 40 and I95 just south of Havre de Grâce and the Susquehanna River Toll Bridge - very much worth the time (and allow plenty of that, in proportion to your interest!).  There are acres of tanks and armored vehicles, domestic and foreign, of all eras, Anzio Annie, a 280mm Atomic Cannon, a 16" coastal defence gun, a V1 buzz bomb and a V2 rocket, and a great indoor museum with a fine small arms collection!  This fabulous museum is an absolute must for the ordnance devotée!  More about the Museum and its history is on Page 1.

Here is Anzio Annie (the 280mm German "Leopold" K5 railroad gun before she came to APG:

(Ordnance Museum Foundation Photo)

Annie was the design basis for our 280mm Atomic Cannon.

[More on Anzio Annie on Page 3.]

---

Atomic Cannon

Actually, our own M65 280mm Atomic Cannon was also a Schnabel^@ vehicle; the T-131 cannon was mounted on a bridgework carried between two huge rubber-tired 6x6 truck tractors with load arms (the T-10 Heavy Artillery Transporter); the front truck has load arms pointed to the rear while the rear truck had the load arms pointed toward the front.  When they were deployed in Germany after the war (WWII), as the production M65, they tipped over with appalling regularity while traversing tight turns in tiny towns {a tongue-tripper}.

A new (24 Feb 01) Web friend in Germany sent me these four photos (by his friend) of an M65 set turning a corner, ca. 1955-56, in Geislingen an der Steige, a little town in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, located by the railway line from Stuttgart to Ulm (that small girl and the bicyclist are absolutely frozen in their tracks!):

(Photos by Frieder Welle, Neckarstrasse 59, 73329 Kuchen/Fils
(a little village near Geislingen) - all rights reserved.)
(Thumbnail images; click on photos for larger images.)

[09 Dec 04 - This is what I love about the Net; these images were lost and my source,
after three years, responded instantly and replaced them!]

The gentleman who sent these photos wrote that the "noise of the engines in the narrow street" was "tremendous!"  I had forgotten how loud they were; my tests at APG were all out in the open but a vague memory of the units running between the facilities buildings stirs in the innermost recesses of my mind.  I am so very grateful for these photos; they, or similar ones, were published here in the U.S. at that time but I never thought I'd see such on my site!  I have a ca.-1945 near-HO model (actually 1:108, 1" = 9'):

(Ca. 1945 model and box and 1999 photos by - and © 1999 - S. Berliner, III)

(Ordnance Museum Foundation Photo)

11 & 14 Jan 2002 - I heard from the son of a sergeant "on a 280mm crew who was in Frankfurt from 1960-62/3 with the 82nd Artillery and was one of the drivers.  He has a lot of stories about the cannon and quite a few of them revolve around transporting it.  Seems they stuck it into the sides of more than one building.  He also still has a crease in his skull from the barrel dropping down on him.  It seems some nitwit pulled the locking pin without checking to see if anyone was in the way.  The barrel dropped a few inches and nailed him in the head.  He said if it wasn't for the mud on the ground, it probably would have killed or maimed him."  Unfortunately, this gentleman's photo album was filched from his footlocker, so no pix.  Well, it turns out that "it was someone else that had the barrel hit him in the head and was lucky he was standing in the mud.  He didn't see it, but had heard about it.  What happened to my dad was a separate incident.  While doing maintenance, some guy pulled the lock pin without announcing it.  My dad was standing on the ground next to the crank wheel that elevates the muzzle and when the muzzle fell, the wheel spun around and the handle nailed him in the head.  Knocked him out cold and left a small crease in his skull.  Kind of funny when you think about it....but lucky it didn't kill him."  "Said he had some pictures of the 280mm, carriage and transports, upside-down in a ditch.  Also had some pics of when the mechanism that retracts the muzzle for transport failed and shot the works out the back of the carriage."  Oh, would I love to get and post those purloined pix!

"Son of a Sergeant" - e-mail me; a man who was in C Battery, 265 FA BN, Baumholder, in January 1957, wants to get in touch.

On 12 May 02, I heard from Gary R. Del Carlo (USA, Ret'd), who was with B Battery, 3rd Gun Battalion, 80th Artillery, stationed in Bamberg, Germany in 1960; A Battery was located in Schweinfurt, Germany.  In his own words {ever-so-slightly-edited, and annotated as italicized}:

"While with the 80th Artillery, I never saw or heard of a gun tipping over on it's side, while turning {they did, in fact}.  There were walls knocked out by the B Unit (rear) while turning, though.  We went to Grafenwohr, Germany to fire the gun twice a year.  I believe they only fired twice, because the tube life wasn't very long, I understand.  The gun was set down on it's base.  There were anchors that were driven into the ground, and attached to the gun.  Still, when the gun was fired, it seemed that the entire gun lifted off of the ground.  You could actually see the round coming out of the tube {I can attest to that}, and it smelled like rotten eggs {normal smell of burned propellant}.  The person that fired the gun used a long lanyard. It was either 50 foot or 50 yards, I don't remember.  Probably 50 feet.  We were further away than that and we laid down with our hands over our earplugged ears.  They had to park the vehicles at a certain angle because if they weren't, the concussion would break the glass."

"Unlike other artillery pieces, the breech opened down, instead of to your right.  It took two crewmen to open the breech.  If I remember correctly, it called for a 21-man crew.  We never had that many, but you really didn't need that many to set up and fire the gun."

"The A Unit had two forks coming out the back.  The B Unit had two forks coming out the front.  On each end of the forks was a large link, like a chain link {a loop}. They attached under a down curved piece on either side of the ends of the gun.  Then they raised the gun up off the ground for traveling.  When the gun was lifted to a certain point, two square holes lined up with the gun and the Unit.  Then a very large wedge fitted in the holes, with a very large cotter pin through the wedges."

"We deactivated December 1960/January 1961."

More on the 280mm Atomic Cannon (moved from Ordnance page 1 on 26 Aug 03):

Hal Hildebrecht (haltrvlr@aol.com) from Cleveland, Ohio, wrote 27 Sep 02 that he was with the 868 FA BN at Fort Bragg and Baumholder, Germany, from 1953 to 1956 with the 280mm Atomic Cannon, serving as driver, cannoneer, artillery mechanic, and finally Section Chief.  He used to fire the piece with a 3' rope and then ride the carriage back into battery (nuts, just like me!) and is still surprised he can hear anything today.  He wrote again on 03 Oct 02 that may he have started the "Atomic Annie" nickname by painting names and pictures on all the battalian guns, Atomic Annie (with a witch riding a shell), L'il Ajax, Ye Olde Ironsides, etc.  His gun appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in October, 1953, and the name may have stuck from that.

Hal sent pictures but I couldn't download them; stay tuned.

Hal is the guy who has a copy of that picture of an inverted 280 with all the wheels in the air, after turning turtle in Germany; can't wait to see it again after all these years!

He also still has his 1958 Renwal model and sent a slew of pix; unfortunately, the lighting was poor, so I'll only show a representative few, cropped and at much lower resolution:

(Cropped and altered from photos by H. Hildebrecht - all rights reserved)

(Cropped and altered from photos by H. Hildebrecht - all rights reserved)

[eBay Item #2160347750 - photos by, and with permission of, A. W. (seller), NL - all rights reserved.]

The 265th was renumbered the 868th sometime in 1957.

Incidentally, the 280 (11") is an odd caliber; the U. S. Army has (or had) a standard series of gun carriages and gun motor carriages in which the long gun and corresponding short howitzer shared all components except barrel, ammo, recoil, and equilibration.  They are noted on Ordnance Continuation Page 1.

While rummaging around in old photos, I ran across this sequence I took from the reviewing stand at Aberdeen Proving Ground at the Armed Forces Day Demonstration on 19 May 1956; they are labelled "Approach, Set Down, Remove Trucks, Fire, Pick Up, and Depart.  Unfortunately, that last is both out of focus and light-struck, so I excerpted a detail of the set moving away and another of a tall, ramrod-straight, distinguished white-haired civilian in the stand who I believe was my dearly belovèd professor (and department head) of Army ROTC at MIT in 1951-52, Col. (ret'd) Samuel Hall (my notes say he was in the stands that day):

(19May56 photos by and © 1956, 2003 S. Berliner, III - all rights reserved)

Dig the officer in a Sam Brown belt at the top left rear in the stand!

I was there as a guest, this time, as a member of the American (formerly Army) Ordnance (and later Defense Preparedness) Association.

Something turned up from that review, that I had completely forgotten I (still) had, a gift from a Chrysler rep., this lapel pin:

[Photo by and © 2005 - S. Berliner, III - all rights reserved]

On 07 Dec 2004, I heard from "the 280 mm Instructor at the Ordnance School, Aberdeen Proving Ground, in 1954 -1956 era", who advised that "the cannon barrel was produced at the Watertown Arsenal, Watertown, MA, now a Home Depot."; he was present at the Armed Forces Day May 1956 pictured above.

Not at all incidentally (it wasn't called the Atomic Cannon or Atomic Annie for nothing you know), this is what it was all about:

(Photo courtesy of Les Canons de l'Apocalypse - all rights reserved)

Speaking of gun #9, "Atomic Annie" survives at the Artllery Museum at Fort Sill in Oklahoma; here she is in the background of a class picture taken for the 27 Oct 05 BNCOC (Basic Non Commissioned Officers Course) for SSG E-6:

[Photo courtesy of J. Jamison - all rights reserved]

Oddly, on Richard Seaman's fantastic Aviation Museum page [see also his great Air Shows page (this Kiwi gets around!)], I ran across another gun; this one, misidentified as "Atomic Annie" (maybe they're ALL called that, now), is sitting at the sadly-neglected Norfolk Air Power Park in Virginia:

[Photo by, and courtesy of, R. Seaman, by permission - artificially lightened - all rights reserved]

In Jun 2006, I heard from one J. Shaffer who knew an infantryman stationed in West Germany in '56 who was on bivouac one night when the crew of an M65 popped a round which "happened to land on the tent of the guys next to him.  Big hole and lots of paperwork and such.  Obviously a non-nuke".  Obviously!

280mm Cannoneers - see this site:

    42nd FA Bn, USAREUR.

Much more on the Atomic Cannon follows on the Atomic Cannon Pictures Page.

I found three fantastic sites with coverage of the 280 and of AFVs and also one with coverage of superguns; I started a new, separate page on the latter.  The sites are:

    Les Canons de l'Apocalypse (The Cannons of the Apocalypse), in French, as noted above,

    AFV Database, and

    JED Military Enthusiasts Directory

and

    Encyclopedia Astronautica - Gun-Launched.

Atomic Cannon CQ (Seek You = HELP!)