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WW1 German 17 cm Shell Casing


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One of my areas of interest is WW1 Ordnance, which is really hard to find here in the US, but not impossible. I found the shell casing below about a year ago in a antique show along the coast, I was amazed when I saw it, just the sheer size was impressive. I believe this to be for the 17 cm SK L/40 i.R.L. auf Eisenbahnwagen "Samuel" (SK - Schnellladekanone (quick-loading cannon), L/40 - Länge (40 caliber barrel), i.R.L. - in Räder-Lafette (on wheeled carriage) auf Eisenbahnwagen (on railroad car) as it meets the dimension and shell requirements. 

The  17 cm SK L/40 gun, made by Krupp, was originally designed for naval use on the Braunschweig-class and the Deutschland-class as a secondary armament. After 1916, the Navy transferred these canons to the army for use in the field. However it was found, not unsurprisingly they were extremely heavy. Even when broken down into 3 separate components it was still too heavy for horses to move. So the Germans decided instead to mount these guns on railway cars, in which they could be somewhat mobile. The railway car had a platform in which the gun sat that could be rotated and provided for recoil. The maximum firing elevation was only 45 degrees, which limited operations. Since this was a naval gun, it used the naval system for loading which used a brass casing that held the base charge, augmented by another bag of powder propellent. 

So this shell was used in gun that was 172.6 mm or 6.8 inches and weighed 62.8-64 Kg dependent on the shell type. The shell casing itself stand at 3 and half feet tall. The nose-fused high explosive shell (Sprenggranate) L/3 Kz had a range of 16,900 meters. The nose-fused high explosive shell with ballistic cap  (Sprenggranate) L/4.7 Kz. (mit Haube) had a range of 24,020 meters. The gun itself weighed 61.5 tons. 

30 of these massive guns were used on the Western Front starting in 1917, 8 were used in the 1918 spring offensive. 8 were captured by the allies in October 1918, and 14 were located after the war was over. In 1922, 14 of these guns were destroyed per the Inter-allied Commission of Control. 

 

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