Battle of Mojkovac & The Biggest Artillery Gun in WWI

Hi, I'm Indy Neidell and this is another exciting episode of Out of the Trenches, where I sit here in a chair of wisdom and answer your questions about the Great War. Aleksandar Ivanović writes, True. I apologize for that. That is totally my fault. This was an important battle and it does deserve mention. It was on the 6th and 7th of January 1916. Austria-Hungary had invaded Montenegro and the Montenegrin army was not only hugely outnumbered, as you say, but was also seriously lacking in supplies. Now, this was actually Orthodox Christmas time, hence the name Bloody Christmas, and the Austrian forces attacked 30,000 strong against about a fifth that many Montenegrins under Count Vukotits or Vukotits. I'm not certain how to pronounce his name. Somebody will write in and correct me, I guarantee. They bombarded the city itself with artillery and attacked the Montenegrins who had dug in. Austrian attacks were repulsed again and again on the 6th and several thousand Austrian soldiers were killed. The following day, they resumed the attack and were once again beaten back with both sides suffering heavy casualties. Much of the fighting both days was hand-to-hand, bayonets, knives, and clubs. By the end of the second day, the Austrian forces had retreated and Mojkovac remained in Montenegrin hands. The courage and the heroism of the vastly outnumbered defenders became the stuff of legend, and rightly so, and Austro-Hungarian Colonel Reiner had this to say, The courage of the Montenegrin soldier has no equal in the history of wars. Attacking the bayonets of the enemy with his bare hands on the terrain of Mojkovac for days stopped the much more numerous Austro-Hungarian army equipped with modern arms. That's pretty serious praise. Dragoman51 writes, Hello, I've heard a lot about artillery now, but I'm wondering what is the biggest piece of artillery that was used in the First World War, and was there something like rail guns? Greetings from Belgium! That's with an exclamation point. Okay, greetings from Berlin! The Paris guns were the biggest of all. The Germans built and used them for a few months in 1918 to shell Paris from well over a hundred kilometers away. They were actually only good, only any good, against city-sized targets, and they were designed to instill fear more than make actual physical damage. The shells took several minutes to reach the target, and they were the first man-made objects to ever reach the stratosphere. I mentioned that once before, but that's a really cool piece of trivia. The first man-made objects ever to reach the stratosphere were the shells from the Paris guns. They'd go like 40 kilometers high, and nobody beat that actually until the V2 tests in the early 1940s. The guns were 34 meters long, that's 111 feet. The shells were 106 kilos, so more than 230 pounds, and you can imagine how fast they were going when being shot that far. Funny thing, these guns were the first guns ever that the artillery masters had to take into account the rotation of the earth when they were targeting. That's a big gun, and another nice piece of trivia. They fired a few hundred shells, did a lot of property damage in Paris, and wounded or killed like a thousand people. But they were removed to Germany when the Allies began to get the upper hand in 1918. Interestingly, under the Treaty of Versailles, the Germans were supposed to turn over a Paris gun, an entire Paris gun, to the Allies, but they never did. Max Camori Hertz writes, What advice would you have to students in middle and high school like myself who would be interested in going into a field of history? And many thanks to you and the background crew. Hey, Max thanks you guys, okay? Say thank you, Max. Thank you, Max. Thank you, Max. Okay, well, let me see. Advice. Never treat history as history if you want to make it real. I mean, think of the players and the things they're doing as things that you could actually watch happen, like it was happening now. I remember that, you know, when I was younger, you know, at first it's all just names and dates, and that doesn't really give you anything. But to see it as being really real, to really make yourself see it as being really real, then it makes sense. Like historical novels, like really good historical novels, do a great job of bringing things alive and making you realize that you're no different, and I'm no different, from the people who lived 500 years ago. I mean, you just have like a better toilet and more things to occupy whatever free time you have, but you're the same. You want to make history fun? You want to make it something you want to do? Something you really want to continue with? Read something like like Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, right? Like a great historical novel like that. But if I had one piece of advice for a budding historian, never ever, under no circumstances, believe that what the winner said about a battle or a political controversy is a totally accurate story of what actually happened. And there's, you should go to War History Online as well, if you want to learn all kinds of cool stuff about war and history when you're online. And if you'd like to know more about how I actually work on this show, how I write things, and a little bit more about what my fantastic life is like, you can click here for a summer interview we did with me in Stockholm last summer. Don't forget to subscribe. See you next time.