Perhaps the most successful German railroad artillery was the 280mm K5(E) series of rail guns, of which some twenty-five units were built. Two of these 218-ton mammoths, Robert and Leopold (known to the Allies as “Anzio Express” and “Anzio Annie,” respectively), achieved infamy during the 1944 battles for Anzio. Firing 550-pound shells to a range of over thirty miles, these K5(E)s played havoc with beachhead operations but were only fired sporadically in the daylight, taking advantage of concealment in railway tunnels. Despite intelligence as to their positions, Allied air power never neutralized either gun and only occasionally interrupted ammunition supply trains.

Germany fielded the largest railroad guns—in fact, the largest land artillery pieces—of all time. Intended to defeat the Maginot Line, Krupp’s 800mm Schwere Gustav and Dora guns weighed 1,350 tons, fired 4-ton shells from a 90-foot barrel up to 29 miles, and required a crew of 1,420 commanded by a major general. Gustav was only used once in combat; Dora, never. Gustav’s first and apparently only action was when it fired fewer than fifty projectiles against Sevastopol’s fortifications in 1942. Its cumbersome size, paired with the complicated logistics required to bring it into action—the gun required two parallel rail tracks (four rails total) to be laid for it to be brought into position—drastically curtailed its role from the outset. As Germany lost air supremacy, Gustav was dismantled, and Dora was relegated to a Wehrmacht testing range, where American forces found it in spring 1945. Even in the war’s waning days, the Germans still used their remaining railroad guns: one pummeled units of the American 101st Airborne at Hagenau, France, in February 1945, while others fired rocket-propelled “arrow” projectiles toward Maastricht and Belgium.

Before the rise of bombers, missiles, and precision munitions, investments in railroad guns were perhaps justified. In World War I, the guns frequently proved to be fort-cracking artillery par excellence, and superb for long-range bombardment. By the 1930s, their days were numbered: armed forces turned to air power to shatter fortresses (and the guns themselves); to drop paratroops behind fortified lines; and to sever rail links, the guns’ umbilical cord. Ponderous size, camouflage difficulties, and logistical constraints all made the guns vulnerable to air attack. While a viable role remained for cannon artillery on many battlefields into the early twenty-first century, World War II’s end rang the death knell for super-heavy artillery, of which the railroad gun marked the apotheosis.

The surviving Plunkett gun can be found at the Washington Navy Yard, and several 305mm Soviet railway guns may be found in Russian museums. Leopold, one of the K5(E)s used at Anzio, is permanently displayed at Aberdeen Proving Ground, and another K5(E) can be found at Batterie Todt near the Pas de Calais. MHQ

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