In the words of Mahatma Gandhi, "War makes people act like dicks." We don't want to glorify war or otherwise portray it as something other than terrible. Yet, war makes people think big, and sometimes you have to sit back and be amazed by what humans can accomplish when they really, really want to kill each other.

6 The Big Gun: The Schwerer Gustav

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The Gustav is the biggest gun ever fired in combat, period.

"Heavy Gustav," as the Germans called it, was 150 feet-long and weighed 2.7 million pounds (or, as much as 750 full-sized sedans). If you're having trouble grasping the scale of this monster, let's look at the shells it fired:

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That's not a toy tank sitting in this thing's shadow. The shells were 11 feet-long, and nearly three feet wide. They weighed 14,000 pounds. The Gustav could hurl them 23 miles. It took a half hour just to load it.

If you're wondering why the war didn't end the moment they rolled this terror onto the battlefield, you have to realize how laughably impractical the thing was. It took 250 men to get it assembled and ready to fire, then another 2,500 to lay twin rails for the damn thing just so they could move it towards Russia, the only country on Earth large enough for Heavy Gustav to hit.



It was basically a weaponized suspension bridge.

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The Germans actually tried to fit Gustav's 800 millimeter gun onto a tank, the aptly-named Landkreuzer P. 1500 Monster (yes, Monster). Fortunately, it never left the drawing board of a man who we suspect had a very small penis.