14-inch/50-caliber railway gun
guns
The 14"/50 caliber railway guns were spare US Navy Mk 4 14 inch/50 caliber guns mounted on railway cars and operated by US Navy crews in France in the closing months of World War I.
Background
In 1917 the Allies were losing an artillery duel against heavy German guns along the Flanders coast in Belgium, and the important French Channel port of Dunkirk was being shelled by 38 cm German guns sited in Belgium at a range of over 24 miles (39 km). There was also a need for the Allies to bombard strategic targets in the German rear areas to hinder German capability to stage attacks. The largest Allied guns in the area were British 12-inch Mk X guns which were outranged.
Mark I Navy railway mount
Upon its entry into the war, the US chose its largest and longest-ranged available naval gun to fill the gap—the 14"/50 caliber Mk 4 gun with a muzzle velocity of 2800 feet per second. The new 16-inch gun would have been preferable, but it was not yet available in numbers; spare 14-inch guns kept for the active fleet were used instead.
Baldwin Locomotive Works delivered five trains for the United States Navy during April and May 1918. Each train transported and supported a 14"/50 caliber Mk 4 gun mounted on a rail carriage with four 6-wheel bogies.
Arrival in France
There was some doubt as to whether the Flanders coast and French Channel ports were now safe Allied ports, following the German spring offensive successes in March and April 1918 which brought those areas within German artillery and attack range. The guns were therefore diverted from the British zone in the north to further south, to the port of St. Nazaire, to avoid the risk of having such valuable assets captured or destroyed.
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This entry incorporates text from “14-inch/50-caliber railway gun” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.