Due to the weapon's apparent total destruction by the Germans in the face of the final Entente offensives, its capabilities are not known with full certainty.

[Note 2] This was written by Dr. Fritz Rausenberger (in German), the Krupp engineer in charge of the gun's development, shortly before his death in 1926.

Since it was based on a naval weapon, the gun was manned by a crew of 80 Imperial Navy sailors under the command of Vice-Admiral Maximilian Rogge, chief of the Ordnance branch of the Admiralty.

[1]: 66  It was surrounded by several batteries of standard army artillery to create a "noise-screen" chorus around the big gun so that it could not be located by French and British spotters.

Writer and journalist Adam Hochschild put it this way: "It took about three minutes for each giant shell to cover the distance to the city, climbing to an altitude of 40 km (25 mi) at the top of its trajectory.

This was by far the highest point ever reached by a man-made object, so high that gunners, in calculating where the shells would land, had to take into account the rotation of the Earth.

Each shell was sequentially numbered according to its increasing diameter, and had to be fired in numeric order, lest the projectile lodge in the bore and the gun explode.

Also, when the shell was rammed into the gun, the chamber was precisely measured to determine the difference in its length: a few inches off would cause a great variance in the velocity, and with it, the range.

Then, with the variance determined, the additional quantity of propellant was calculated, and its measure taken from a special car and added to the regular charge.

After 65 rounds had been fired, each of progressively larger caliber to allow for wear, the barrel was sent back to Krupp and rebored with a new set of shells.

[9] The initial assumption was these were bombs dropped from an airplane or Zeppelin flying too high to be seen or heard,[Note 4] or perhaps an "aerial torpedo".

[10] Another possibility was that German forces had penetrated the front line, but authorities realized that such heavy artillery could not be moved and emplaced so quickly.

[11] Three emplacements for the gun were located within days[12] by the French reconnaissance pilot Didier Daurat,[13] the path of the shells which landed in Paris having revealed the direction from which they were being fired.

The closest emplacement was engaged by a 34 cm railway gun while the other two sites were bombed by aircraft, although this failed to interrupt the German bombardment.

One spare mounting was captured by American troops in Bruyères-sur-Fère, near Château-Thierry, but the gun was never found; the construction plans seem to have been destroyed as well.

[17] In the 1930s, the German Army became interested in rockets for long-range artillery as a replacement for the Paris Gun—which was specifically banned under the Versailles Treaty.

During World War II, they were deployed in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region of France; they were used to shell Kent in Southern England between late 1940 and early 1941.

[21] Firing at the Cathedral of Notre Dame, the "Tomanians" (the fictional country that represented Germany) succeed in blowing up a small outhouse.