Ruins of the Giant Cannon Position

Giant Cannon Position Ruins

The ruins we see before us, resembling an ancient dilapidated city wall, tell the story of a chapter from 60 years ago — this is the site of the then Asia’s No. 1 cannon, the 41-centimeter howitzer. The Giant Cannon Position Ruins are located at the northwest foot of Menghu Mountain, the main position of the fortress. It is the only position that was not built using Chinese laborers, but was secretly constructed by Japanese military engineers. At the time, electric tracks connected this site to the ammunition depot on Menghu Mountain for the transport of shells and the giant cannon.

The Giant Cannon Position was a semi-underground, fully enclosed, permanent fortification, with a diameter of 30 meters and a height of 15 meters. It was built to house the then largest cannon in Asia — the 41-centimeter howitzer. So why did the Japanese invaders deploy Asia’s largest cannon at the Hushou Fortress? Geographically, Hushou lies midway between Ussuriysk and Vladivostok in the Soviet Far East, like a spear thrust into the heart of Russia’s Far East, or a dagger at its throat — a location of immense strategic importance. At the same time, the Japanese invaders also stationed a railway gun imported from France on nearby Huoshi Mountain. The road we came along was once a Japanese military railway, which is why the Hushou Fortress was hailed as the core of the so-called “Eastern Maginot Line.”

In 1939, after the completion of the Hushou Fortress, the Japanese army accelerated its preparations for war against the Soviet Union. In order to promptly sever the main and secondary bridges of the Trans-Siberian Railway within Iman City in the early stages of combat, in 1941 the Japanese transported the then largest land-based coastal defense cannon in Asia — the 41-centimeter howitzer — from Tokyo Bay to Hushou. Installation was completed in June 1945, and it participated in combat against the Soviet Union on August 9, before being captured and taken back to the Soviet Union. The cannon had a caliber of 41 centimeters, a barrel length of over 20 meters, and a total weight of more than 300 tons. Its maximum range was 20 kilometers, and its shells were 2 meters long with a charge of up to 1 ton. Its intended targets were the water tower and iron bridge at Lazo in Iman, with the aim of disrupting Soviet transportation and water supply to pave the way for further advances into the Soviet Union. The Japanese imperialists had long occupied China’s northeast and harbored ambitions of attacking the Soviet Union and dominating Northeast Asia, as became increasingly clear. The cannon was operated by a single Japanese company, but was eventually destroyed from the inside by a close-range direct hit from a Soviet self-propelled gun, which triggered a massive explosion of its shells, leaving behind these ruins to this day.

The Japanese imperialists never expected that the massive military installation they painstakingly constructed would ultimately become their own tomb.