Landships II

Now here's an oddity, a Swedish 12" coast defence howitzer:

http://www.tfd.chalmers.se/~m95perm/vapen/kanon/div/30cm_haub_m16.html

It caught my eye as the carriage is so unusual for such a large weapon:

If anything, it looks rather like a bloated anti-aircraft gun!

Anyway, it was built by Bofors and was the largest such weapon the Swedes built. It scrapes into Landships by virtue of the gun having been ordered in 1915 and the prototype tested in 1917, even though the 8 ordered in total weren't all complete until 1924.

Curious about the gun, I emailed the website owner, Mats Persson, the other evening, and he replied yesterday! Among the fascinating information he provides is this nugget, about the origin, and circumstance, of the photo above:

This particular photo was taken at a large exposition in Gothenburg 1923 "Jubileumsutställningen i Göteborg 1923"). The fair was to celebrate that the city had been founded 300 years earlier (by Gustavus Adolphus no less).

As far as he knows, all the guns were scrapped long ago...

He also very kindly passed on this link, upon which page several more photos of the gun at the 1923 exposition can be seen:

http://62.88.132.23/pls/carlotta/ListaSok?pin_termID=1227445&pin_objtxt=kanon

Note the massive counterweight at the front:

I rather like the story Mats tells of the Danes:

The Norwegian Coast Artillery ordered four howitzers of the same model. Though the ordnance was delivered in the late 1920s, for one reason or another, the Norwegians didn't start installing their 12 inch guns until 1938. So when the Germans attacked in April 1940, only two of the four howitzers were ready (somewhere in the Oslo fjord). And even if the two guns had a sufficient supply of shells there was a disastrous shortage of cartridge cases. As far as I understand the Norwegians newer fired their Bofors 12 inch guns in anger. The Germans eventually moved all four guns to Narvik.

Oh dear...