The Long Max site

It was at this spot that one of the biggest cannons in the German Army once stood: the Long Max. The gun was actually manufactured for use on a battleship. It measured 17 metres long and weighed 75 tons. Each shell weighed 750 kilograms. It was the German admiral Max Rogge who first suggested using the gun on land - and so it was named after him.

From June 1917 it was employed to bombard the French port of Dunkirk. The shells took over one-and-a-half minutes to reach their target. Each shot was observed from the Belgian trenches, so that a warning could be telephoned through to those in danger on the ground. Even so, the gun still killed 114 people, most of them in Dunkirk, but also in Koksijde, Nieuwpoort and Bergues.

In 1941 the cannon was dismantled by the occupying German forces, because they needed the metal for the Second World War. A modern museum tells the story of Long Max and of the German Marine Corps in Flanders.

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