The Man Who Made The Supergun – Part 2

Written by Andy Rowlands on November 11, 2019. Posted in Current News

Here in part 2 we follow Gerald Bull’s exploits conducting more questionable arms deals, and how he came to design the Superguns for Iraq.

After serving four months of his six-month jail term, Bull was released and reunited with his family. It seemed a happy reunion, but Bull [pictured, above] and his wife separated not long afterwards, and his Space Research Corporation almost went bankrupt. He had considered helping white South Africa his patriotic duty, and it appears he had been encouraged in that belief. He felt betrayed and angry by his treatment from the US government, and vowed he would have no further dealings with America.

He moved to Brussels, where the arms trade was big business. Most of those involved in the arms trade know of each other, and one in particular; Sarkis Soghanalian; nicknamed the ‘Merchant of Death’, knew of Bull. Soghanalian was an Armenian-Lebanese international arms dealer who gained fame for being the Cold War’s largest arms merchant.

1981 was a good year to be in the arms trade. Iran & Iraq were still fighting their protracted war with each other. Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran ran into trouble when his elderly Soviet-made artillery ran up against more modern Iranian artillery. Soghanalian saw a business opportunity and contacted Gerald Bull, who seemed interested in supplying Iraq with his GC-45.

After four months, Soghanalian had nothing more from Bull. He soon discovered Bull had been talking with China about building the GC-45’s there, and then selling them direct to Iraq, bypassing Soghanalian. He immediately ended his business relationship with Bull.

Despite an on-going American ban of military technology to China, Gerald Bull was secretly making arms deals with them. He gave them everything they needed to start producing their own versions of his GC-45. To sell legally from Canada he still required a US export license, and his had been revoked after the South Africa affair. On 12^th March 1983, Dennis Lyster, an ‘associate’ of Bull, was stopped at a US Customs post. During a routine search, Lyster was found to be carrying a large quantity of SRC paperwork, computer disks, blueprints and contracts worth $25 million with China North Industries Corporation. Customs officials seized the paperwork and Lyster was arrested. The State Department agreed it was a strong case, but once again, the US government favoured arms sales over it’s own laws. Lyster was released, his paperwork returned, and the case was dropped.

By this time, Bull had set up another manufacturing deal with a company called Voest-Alpine in the German city of Linsz. Voest-Alpine had taken an interest in the GC-45, and wanted to build them under license. Bull agreed. It was a good deal for the SRC, but a bad one for Voest-Alpine, as Bull did not supply complete drawings for the gun, so they had to make educated guesses about certain parts and tolerances. After a time, a Voest-Alpine subsidiary called Noricum produced their own version of the GC-45, which they called the GHN-45, as seen below.

With his war with Iran in danger of being lost, Saddam ordered 200 GHN-45’s from Voest-Alpine. In Brussels, Gerald Bull’s business was on the up. He found himself as Iraq’s artillery designer. He designed a larger self-propelled version of the GC-45, subsequently designated the FGH-203. This could fire a 210mm (8 ½ ”) shell out to 36 miles, the longest range of any self-propelled gun in the world at that time. For reasons best known to themselves, the Iraqis didn’t take up the FGH-203 apart from two prototypes. Very few photographs exist of them, and this is about the best I could find.

Saddam also purchased 200 155mm howitzers from South Africa, 200 from an Austrian arms dealer and 120 from China, all of which were also based on the original GC-45. In the 1990 Gulf War, they were in the front line of his mechanised armour.

To Gerald Bull, all this was just a means to an end. He was really just raising money to further his ambition to build much bigger cannons. The prototype HARP gun slowly rusting on his Canadian range (seen below) had not been forgotten, and he nursed the idea of reviving it.

He was by then something of a heavy drinker, and with each re-telling of his successes with the Barbados Gun, he mused about massive cannons that seemed to grow ever larger. He maintained up to 1500 miles was possible, but eventually settled on about a thousand miles as the longest practical range.

Sometime in the mid 1980s, he decided to revisit his long-range guns, and in the process un-earthed Major Robert Turp’s report on the German V3. He also became aware of the immense railway guns known as Dora and Schwerer Gustav, built at Hitler’s personal request. These were truly monstrous, the largest mobile cannons ever built. They were developed in the late 1930s by Krupp, who had previously built the Paris Gun, specifically for destroying the forts of the French Maginot Line, the strongest fortifications in existence at the time. These fully assembled guns weighed just over 1300 tons, required two parallel railway tracks to support their immense weight, and could fire shells weighing seven tons as far as 29 miles. It took several weeks and hundreds of men to prepare the ground, lay the tracks, transport the gun in sections, assemble and test them. The Wermacht’s blitzkrieg offensive through Belgium rapidly outflanked and isolated the Maginot Line’s defences, eventually forcing the French to surrender and making their destruction unnecessary. Gustav was later deployed in the Soviet Union during Operation Barbarosa against four heavily fortified and heavily reinforced forts at Sevastopol. After firing 23 shells, all four forts were very heavily damaged and put out of action. The gun was moved to Leningrad, and may have been intended to be used in the Warsaw Uprising like other German heavy siege pieces, but the rebellion was crushed before it could be prepared to fire.

Dora was the second gun produced. It was deployed briefly against Stalingrad, where it arrived at its emplacement nine miles to the west of the city sometime in mid-August 1942. It was ready to fire on 13^th September, but when it looked like the Soviets may encircle the German position, they withdrew and took Dora with them. It’s unclear which one of the two the photo below shows, but note the people on the right showing the scale.

On April 14^th 1945, one day before the arrival of US troops, Schwerer Gustav was dismantled and was to be taken away for hiding in Germany to prevent its capture. On April 22^nd 1945, parts of it were discovered on railway vehicles in a forest north of Auerbach (seen below) by Soviet troops who got there first. Over the summer, the remains of Schwerer Gustav were studied by Soviet specialists and in autumn of the same year were moved to Merseburg, where the Soviets were gathering German military material. What happened to it after that remains unknown.

In March 1945, Dora was moved to Grafenwohr and was blown up there on the 19^th. The debris was discovered by American troops sometime after the discovery of Schwerer Gustav. The remains of Dora are believed to have been scrapped in the 1950s.

In 1985, it seemed the Americans were at last interested in his ideas for really big cannons. Armed with volumes of data on the HARP project and the Barbados Gun, Bull went to Washington DC. While HARP was a civilian project, his latest proposals were purely military; an ‘intercontinental cannon’, describing how ranges of up to 6000 miles were theoretically possible if you had a barrel wide enough and long enough.

It was effectively his first Supergun design, which he described as ‘industrially feasible’, and which he costed at $10 million. Unfortunately for Bull, once again his hopes were dashed, the Pentagon passed on the project. He looked around for another potential customer, and found a willing buyer in Iraq.

The best estimates are that Bull went to Baghdad in 1998, and Saddam gave the go-ahead for the Supergun at that time. A relatively cheap, simple strategic weapon; it’s attractiveness to Saddam was obvious to Israeli intelligence. Long-time enemies of Iraq, they saw a large enough gun could fire on their country. Unlike the Scud missiles, shells from such a weapon could not be shot down by interceptors like the Patriot system the USA had stationed around Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, they travelled far too fast. They didn’t need terminal guidance either, they just needed to be able to hit a city.

Actually building the Supergun was a cloak-and-dagger affair. The project was given the name ‘Babylon’. To conceal the true uses of the equipment, contracts were places in different countries. Sometime during 1988, SRC placed an order with Walter Somers of Birmingham, for five 350mm diameter tubes. These would form the smaller ‘Baby Babylon’ test gun. Suspicious that these tubes might be for a weapons system, Water Somers asked local MP Sir Hal Miller to inform the MoD, the DTI and the British Intelligence services. Miller did so, but hearing of no objections, he informed Somers they could go ahead, and in February and March 1989, the tubes were flown to Iraq, described in export paperwork as ‘oil pipeline segments’ for the ‘PC-2 petrochemical refinery’.

Once in Iraq, the tubes were taken to the test site, just outside the town of Mosul, where British engineer Chris Cowley oversaw it’s assembly and test firings. Early in 1990, plans were drawn up for two more guns; an elevating, traversing 350mm and a fixed 1000mmm. The Baby Babylon gun was moved to a secret inclined site and assembled, pointing in the general direction of Israel (seen below). Further orders were placed with Walter Somers and Sheffield Forgemasters for both 350mm and 1000mm tubes.

In April 1990, the British intelligence services, suddenly alarmed at the progress of Project Babylon when they had turned a blind-eye before, advised Customs officers that huge tubes at Teesport Docks were ‘parts of an Iraqi supergun’. On examination, they were found to be from both UK steelworks and were impounded. Across Europe, a frantic search ensued. The trunnions, or barrel supports, and parts of the ‘Tube Slide Assembly’ for the recoil system of the second 350mm gun, were found on a British lorry in Patras, Greece. The lorry had only been stopped because the driver’s papers were not in order. The lorry and it’s load was impounded and taken to a Greek military base.

In Britain, the then Secretary of the DTI; Nicholas Ridley, denied any knowledge of military uses for the equipment, and it remains unclear exactly what and when the DTI knew of the contracts. Pipes, pumps and 1000mm tubes found in Switzerland would have formed the recoil system for Big Babylon. 75 tons of forged steel castings discovered in Italy were parts of it’s breech mechanism (seen below). A company in Lincoln; Destec Engineering Ltd, produced the barrel seals, after the DTI said they could accept the contract. More sections of the 1000mm barrel were found in Britain and in Iraq. The ones in Britain were kept intact, the ones in Iraq had the flanges cut off.

The propellant charges were made by a company called PRB in Belgium. In mid-1989, the company went into liquidation, and was bought by a British firm; Astra Defence Systems. When Astra’s managing director John Pike examined the order books, he was startled by the physical size of the charges. He found a memo from long-time Bull associate Dennis Lyster, detailing test results of the 350mm charges. If the ‘System 350’ prototype charges were successful, then the 1000mm charges could be finally designed and produced. Trials were indeed successful, and in late 1989, Astra received orders for the larger charges.

The ‘Big Babylon’ gun would have a barrel 156 metres long with a 1000mm bore. The barrel was to be 30 cm thick at the breech, tapering to 6.5 cm at the muzzle. Like the V-3, the barrel would be sectioned. 26 six-metre-long sections would make up the barrel, weighing just over 1500 tons in total. Added to this would be four 220-ton recoil cylinders, and the 165-ton breech mechanism. The recoil force of the gun would be 27,000 metric tons – equivalent to a small nuclear explosion, and sufficient to register as a seismic event all around the world. Nine tons of propellant would fire a seven-ton projectile over a range of 1,000 kilometres.

The photograph below shows two sections of the 1000mm Supergun erected at the Royal Armouries museum in Fort Nelson, Portsmouth.

By this time, the Supergun project had been penetrated by the intelligence services, and Gerald Bull had himself become a possible target for Mossad; the Israeli intelligence service. Mossad realised as Bull carried most of his knowledge in his head rather than on paper, and did not cooperate with many people, if they eliminated him, the project would effectively also be killed off. Bull knew his life was in danger. He told friends about threats from Mossad that if he continued, they would be forced to take action against him. Bull seems to have disregarded these threats, and so his fate was sealed.

On March 22^nd 1990, while walking to his apartment on the Avenue Francois Folie in Belgium, he was shot five times in the head. 600 people would later attend his funeral. The managing directors of Sheffield Forgemasters and Walter Somers were questioned by Customs officials in May 1990, as was British engineer Chris Cowley. They were arrested and charged with violating export regulations. In the November however, the charges were dropped, after it became apparent they had documentary proof of government permission to fulfil the contracts, and Sir Hal Miller reminded Parliament of his warnings two years previously.

The threat of another Supergun may have receded with Bull’s death, but it is now known such weapons are possible. How close Project Babylon came to succeeding became apparent seven months after the Gulf War ended, when a team of UN weapons inspectors found the 350mm gun on it’s inclined site. It was cut into pieces, but not before British ballistics experts had examined it and determined it had been fired at least four times. By a curious irony, Gerald Bull; father of the biggest gun ever made, ended up as the target for someone else’s gun barrel.

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