Landkreuzer P 1500 "Monster" (German Super Heavy Self Propelled-Gun) by The-Robur on Newgrounds

The Landkreuzer P 1500 Monster ('monster') was a German self-propelled artillery pre-prototype designed during World War II, representing the pinnacle of extreme German tank and combat vehicle designs.

On June 23, 1942, the German Ministry of Armaments proposed a 1,000-ton tank, the Landkreuzer P. 1000 Ratte. Adolf Hitler himself expressed interest in the project, for which he immediately received the go-ahead. In December of the same year, Krupp designed an even larger 1,500-ton tank, the P 1500 Monster, but in early 1943 Albert Speer, the Minister of Armaments, canceled the project.

Possible design problems that led to its cancellation (along with the cancellation of the Ratte) were massive size (which would make it very easy to detect by Allied aircraft in the air and impossible to transport by rail), difficult to transport (because of its heavy would devastate highways and byways), the amount of material needed to manufacture it (Germany could not afford to use so many amounts of material or gasoline due to the war situation) and the preparation time to put the vehicle in attack position.

The P 1500 could have dwarfed any of the heavy tanks of the time, such as the Panzer VIII Maus, the largest built during the war. The Maus weighed 188 tons against the 1,500 tons proposed for the P 1500. For comparison, the German Tiger I heavy tank weighed 57 tons.

As a curiosity, the Dora cannon that it mounts needed 1400 men to assemble it, of which about 500 were in charge of handling and maintenance. The Dora gun was transported by a 25-car rail convoy. According to some German sources, the Dora gun had a recoil problem. When firing, the reaction force to the firing force caused the rail gun itself to recoil about three kilometers for each howitzer fired. The Monster likely still had the same recoil problem.