Among the first heavy guns to have an impact during the American Civil War, the 13-inch mortar, Dictator, was mounted on eight rail wheels, but the flatcar collapsed from its recoil. Library of Congress

By the end of World War I, railroads were regarded as the preeminent method for fielding super-heavy artillery.

From the days of catapults and trebuchets, military men have dreamed of the ultimate weapon that could smash an enemy’s wall, castle, or defensive stronghold. For a span of eighty-five years, that weapon was the railroad gun, large enough to do substantial damage but also movable to wherever railroad tracks could go.

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Railroad guns had a shorter life span than other practical military technologies spawned during the American Civil War, such as submarines, repeating rifles, and machine guns. Yet from 1862 to 1945, they earned a reputation as a bunker buster without equal, and terrorized civilians by firing on cities from afar, without warning.

That the railroad gun’s reputation did not always comport with reality was not universally recognized at the time. Germany in particular spent considerable time and expense well into the twentieth century developing varied railroad guns that, while record-setting in size, range, and ordnance, consumed resources in the service of missions that could have been more efficiently and effectively accomplished by other means. The Germans were not alone in this pursuit, but in the end, the railroad gun’s usefulness did not live up to its reputation.

The “railroad battery” was first used in Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan’s Peninsula campaign in 1862. Confederates bolted a 32-pounder Brooke naval rifle to a flatcar protected by an iron casemate, the finished car looking much like a land version of the ironclad CSS Virginia. It engaged in artillery duels before the Battle of Fair Oaks.

The Union used similar railroad mountings during the 1864 siege of Petersburg. The most famous of these was Dictator, a thirteen-inch seacoast mortar on an eight-wheeled flatcar. Lobbing 218-pound shells as far as forty-two hundred yards, this behemoth bombarded Southern batteries and bombproofs with telling effect.

Apart from experiments conducted by the French during the siege of Paris in 1870 and by the British Royal Navy’s Capt. John Fisher (of Dreadnought fame) in 1881 and 1882, there were few advancements in railroad guns until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when French firms experimented with mounting large artillery pieces—originally designed as the main armament of warships—on large railroad carriages. The French so emplaced not only 320mm guns and 200mm howitzers but even pieces as small as 155mm howitzers. During the war to come, naval or coast artillery crews would man many such railroad guns.

The German and Austro-Hungarian militaries were also experimenting, in greatest secrecy, on mammoth siege guns—Krupp’s 420mm Dicke Bertha (Big Bertha) and Skoda’s 305mm Schlanke Emma (Skinny Emma) howitzers—which were later deployed with admirable accuracy and power against Belgian and French fortifications. The limitations of Europe’s road networks, coupled with the French experiments in railroad guns, may have encouraged Germany to combine the technical strengths of Krupp’s artillery bureau with those of the Eisenbahnpioniere, perhaps the most impressive and professional military rail service in Europe at the time.

By 1915, Krupp’s Professor Fritz Rausen­berger had successfully mated several modified naval gun designs with railroad mountings to develop the first in a series of long-range railroad guns. Two of these 380mm Max E guns were deployed as part of the enormous artillery forces (over 1,220 guns) arrayed against Verdun. These pieces heralded the German offensive on February 21, 1916. One opened fire on the city of Verdun from twenty miles away; its first shell hit part of the Bishop’s Palace. Its sister’s first salvos were far more effective. According to author William G. Dooly Jr., “after a few shots, the rails of the marshalling yard were standing in the air like twisted fragments of wire.”

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