COBI 60 cm Karl-Gerät 040 ZIU Set 2560

COBI's 60 cm Karl-Gerät 040 "Ziu" is built from 1,574 blocks, with working tracks, rotating wheels, a movable barrel and a functioning loading system. Four figures and a dog are included — an officer, a crewman, a mechanic and a field gendarme with his dog — with new legs in tall officer's boots and new equipment parts. A brick printed with the name ZIU mounts on the model, and a nameplate completes the set. No stickers.

A shell you cannot lift

The Karl-Gerät fired a 60 cm projectile weighing over two tonnes. Not two hundred kilograms — two thousand.

Everything about the vehicle follows from that number. There is no way for a crew to load it by hand, so the mortar carries a hoist and a rammer, and each gun was accompanied by its own ammunition carrier built on a Panzer IV chassis with a crane on top. Moving the whole thing between positions required disassembly and a special railway wagon. A firing position took hours to prepare.

In exchange, a single round could collapse a fortress. The concrete-piercing shell was designed to punch through several metres of reinforced concrete before detonating.

Ziu fired on Warsaw

Karl-Gerät number 6 was named Ziu, and in August and September 1944 it was brought to Warsaw and used against the insurgents during the uprising — firing two-tonne fortress-busting shells into a city held by people with rifles and improvised armoured cars.

Six of these weapons were built in total. They were used at Sevastopol, at Brest-Litovsk and in Warsaw, and that is essentially the whole history of the type.

In the COBI range

Set 2530 is the earlier COBI Karl-Gerät 040. Set 2057 is the Warsaw Uprising figure set, and sets 2670 and 2655 the vehicles the insurgents captured — the other side of what Ziu was firing at.

Specifications

Pieces: 1,574 · Figures: 4 and a dog · Working tracks and loading system · No stickers