British soldiers said, “If you happened to be near the receiving end, you first heard the thing burst, then the whizz of its approach and lastly the boom of the gun that fired it.
Soldiers under fire could identify artillery by specific noises they made: One combatant noted that the French 75mm gun had a “sharp decisive note … which speaks quickly and in anger.” Soldiers also spoke of the “peculiar crack, crack they make.” The German 105mm howitzer was called a whizzbang. A shell hole left by a 15 cm ‘Jack Johnson’ (a German howitzer named after the famous boxer Jack Johnson because of its ‘punch’) had a diameter of 28 feet across and roughly 6 feet deep in the center. 5'/62 caliber Mark 45 gun United States: Modern 127 mm (5.0 in) 12.7 cm/50 Type 3 naval gun. (French artillery was always pointed toward Germany - even in practice.) The Big Bertha was a German 420mm howitzer, named for a family member of the Krupp Arms manufacturer. The largest bore of an artillery piece in WWI (‘bore’ meaning the diameter of the barrel or tube) was on the French 520mm. Artillery was more destructive than ever before.
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