Railway Guns

Our First Post will feature

Railway Guns

As always credit where credit is due, to Nick Catford for his work on mounted railway guns in Southern England, Vince Lewis for his work on Dora and Gustav, JR Potts for his work on the K9 series of guns and various wikipedia pages.

The origination of the idea behind this falls into two camps, English and Russian. Both Anderson and Lebedew published the same idea around 1860 with Lebedew reportedly producing the first mortar mounted on a railway car shortly after. The American Confederate Army seems to have been the first to use this new weapon in action when they bolted a 32 pound Brook naval rifle to a flat car in action leading up the the battle of fair Oaks.

"An American Civil  War railway gun"

The Union army was soon to follow suit and in 1864 used similar weapons in the siege of Petersburg, the most famous being Dictator, a thirteen inch mortar firing 218 pound shells over 2 and a half miles/4 kilometres.

Few advances were made immediately after this with minor experimentation which started to gather pace after the turn of the century particularly in France and to a lesser degree in England. In France guns originally designated for warships were mounted in railway carriages and those deployed covered a wider range of calibres from 320mm, 200mm and down to 155mm. Early in the 1900's the German companies Krupp and Skoda started experimenting developing these weapons and by the beginning of the war  were building mammoth siege guns, two of the more famous being namely Big (420mm) and Skinny (305mm) Bertha.

Other contemporaries of that time were the famous Paris gun which could launch a shell seventy six, yes 76, miles against the nine mile range of Big Bertha. Though great on range the Paris gun was considerably lower calibre, being just 220mm and an accuracy that was as poor as its range was great. If it got a shell to land within half a mile of the aiming point it was thought a good shot.

 

The Paris Gun

Both sides used these weapons widely during WWI. The Germans notably at at the February 1916 offensive, the French at Verdun and to support the retaking of Fort Douaumont. At the third Ypres battle the British used fourteen inch railway guns named Boche-Buster and Scene-Shifter. The Americans joined in the act after their entry into the war deploying 14 inch naval guns, the Plunkett guns with a range of 24 miles which were used to attack supply and logistic bases and harass German troop movements.

 

After WWI development in Britain of railway guns stopped, with many gun carriages and barrels  being moth balled, as it would turn out luckily. By the late 1920's and early 1930 Krupp started developing the K5 series of guns. These had an effective range of 40 miles, were extremely accurate due to the rifle barrels, fired a 255kg shell from a 288mm gun. These guns were used extensively in WWII, from July 1940 taking part in coastal bombardments of the English Channel coast line, at the Battle of Anzio in 1944 when they were named Anzio Annie and Anzio Express by the allied soldiers due the express train sound the shells made in passing and extensively on the eastern front.

Russian use of railway guns seems limited. Three 12 inch (305mm) railway guns were built, using guns from the sunken battleship Imperatritsa Mariya, which had been lost to a magazine explosion in Sevastopol harbour in October 1916. They were used in the Soviet-Finnish war in 1939-1940. In 1941 they took part in the defence of the Soviet naval base on Finland's Hanko peninsula. They were disabled when the base was evacuated, and were later restored by Finnish specialists using guns from the withdrawn Russian battleship Imperator Aleksandr III. After the war these were handed over to the Soviet Union, and they were maintained in operational condition until 1991, and withdrawn in 1999. When withdrawn from service, they were the last battleship - calibre Obukhov pieces still operational in the world.

At the start of WWII Britain was short of large calibre guns and quickly found those pieces that had been put into storage after WWI. Boche-Buster was found in a transport shed at Ruddington covered in cobwebs when the doors were opened for the first time since the 1920s. The Elham Valley Railway was quickly made ready for the arrival of HMG Boche-Buster. The meandering line allowed it to sweep virtually the complete south-eastern corner of Kent, thus effectively enabling it to bombard any invasion force. Capable of hurling a 6 ft shell weighing 1 tons some 12 miles,  Boche-Buster was a high-angle Howitzer with an elevation of 40° but with a traverse of only 2°. Although never fired in anger several test firings caused considerable damage to local housing including bringing down ceilings in houses several miles away in Kingston and Barham.

"HMG Boche-Buster waits outside the south portal of Bourne Park tunnel."

The two largest railway guns ever completed were Gustav and Dora. Each of 800mm (31 ½ inch)  calibre firing a seven ton shell from a barrel over 30 meters long. The design criteria for these guns was set out to that the shell had to penetrate seven meters of steel reinforced concrete or at least one meter of hardened armour plate, over a range of twenty-five miles.

The scope and size of these guns was enormous. Each one standing fifty feet high, twenty feet wide, one hundred and forty feet long and weighing 1323 tons.

Gustav/Dora

The actual range achieved by Dora was 51,000 yards - twenty-nine miles.  She had a crew of two hundred and fifty for the actual firing and a crew of two thousand for full operation, including loaders, train drivers, assembly workers, canteen workers, armed guards, mechanics, electricians and track maintenance.  The complete equipment package for Dora was five trains totalling 106 carriages.

The size and weight of the shells including the one ton powder charge was seven tonnes and seventeen feet this restricting the rate of fire to two rounds per hour maximum. The effectiveness was colossal, penetrating thirty feet into the earth and making a crater over 90 feet across. The life span of the barrel was not colossal, limited to between 50 – 150 rounds.

The guns were used in action in 1942 at the siege of Sevastopol where conflicting reports on the usefulness of these guns range from no effect at all to one of detailed destruction where Fort Molotov was destroyed with seven shots on June 6^th, nine rounds were fired at The White Cliffs Of Severnaya Bay and a lucky shot hit an underground ammunition store and the whole Fort was completely destroyed. One of the shots missed the target and sunk a large ship in the harbour, the shell burst must have been absolutely devastating. Some days later when Fort Siberia was hit with five shots and destroyed as was Fort Maxim Gorki.  As many other large mortar and siege guns were in use at the time these accounts may be more propaganda than accurate we will never surely know but total effect of all of this firepower was overwhelming. .

After this action both guns were shipped back to Germany to have the barrels replaced and neither saw any real action afterwards. Both guns were destroyed towards the end of the war by the retreating Germans.

 

The rise in air power put an end to these engineering marvels, a few still exist, with Anzio Annie and Anzio Express captured and transported to USA after the war and Britain retaining a 200 tonne L1 example which recently visited the Netherlands to mark the Treaty of Utrecht.