We remember it as World War I. Many Britons still refer to it as The Great War. To a generation of military historians, it was the machine-gun war. Specialists in heavy ordnance recognize it as the war that brought mobility to land weapons of unprecedented size and power.
From the very beginning, enormous guns and howitzers were moved across the face of Europe. Included among the “guns of August” were the German 42-cm. (16.5 inches) “Big Berthas,” which quickly demolished key Belgian forts thought to be impregnable. Hug mobile guns appeared in every nation’s Army, the enlarges of them a French 52-cm. (20.5 inches) howitzer mounted on a railway carriage.
World War I, unlike many more recent conflicts, seemed unambiguous, and it inspired patriotic zeal and national enthusiasms that workers, at least in this country, translated into extraordinary production efforts. One such effort involved a remarkable feat of design and manufacture—a crash program to produce special railway carriages to allow the use of five 14-inch naval guns on battlefields in France. It was an industrial undertaking that would normally have demanded three to five years from initial planning to delivery, yet it was carried out in roughly seven months.
With America’s entry into the war in April 1917, the Navy was eager to make some active contribution to a conflict that promised to be confined to Europe, so far as the United States was concerned. When the plans for a forthcoming class of battle cruisers were altered late in 1917, arming the vessels with newly designed 16-inch guns, senior Navy officers saw the opportunity for making constructive use, on land, of the existing 14-inch weapons originally projected, a suddenly available surplus of guns of enormous power and range.
In November 1917, preliminary design studies were begun for a massive but relatively simple railway carriage that could be produced in a minimum time, and late that month the manufacture of five such units was approved. Each gun and its mount would constitute a separate firing battery that would also include a locomotive, two ammunition cars, and service train with cars for headquarters, machine shop, kitchen, personnel berths, et cetera.
Final construction drawings were prepared during January 1918 for submission to interested manufacturers. All of the materiel was to conform to the dimensions and capacities of the French railways. In mid-February, the principal contract was awarded to the Baldwin Locomotive Works for the major job— the gun carriages—and during the next ten weeks, an industrial miracle occurred: the first mount was completed on 25 April.
All five guns got to Europe and formed a unit commanded by Rear Admiral Charles P. Plunkett. The first gun went into action on 6 September. Testing, disassembly, transatlantic shipment, and reassembly in France were far from trouble free, requiring more time than had the production itself. The five guns fired a total of 782 rounds at ranges of up to more than 22 miles. The last firing took place at 10:59 A.M. on 11 November so that the final shell would arrive on target a few seconds before the moment of armistice.
These guns did not have the greatest c range of any artillery during the war (some German guns exceeded 70 miles), nor were they the largest or most powerful artillery pieces of that conflict, despite what Americans have been writing about them for the last 70 years. Certainly their contribution was Either decisive nor even very significant.
Nevertheless, the production of these Navy-designed weapons remains to this day an unparalleled technological and industrial achievement. The one surviving unit, recently restored and displayed at the Washington Navy Yard— not far from the offices where the project was initiated—is a most fitting monument both to the dedication and ingenuity of World War I’s bluejacket and to the patriotic contribution of that era’s American worker.