Great big cannons exert a certain fascination (see Heavyweights). And when they get big enough moving them around becomes problematic, leading to the railway gun. While the railway gun’s heyday was World War I, when the front remained stable enough to go to all the trouble of setting up emplacements (usually a turntable or a curving track to allow the gun some traverse) World War II fronts were fluid enough to minimize railway gun employment. Still, there were some cases where they were used to advantage; action across the English Channel, at Anzio, and around Sevastopol. Although the book covers French, Belgian, Italian, Soviet, Finnish, Japanese, British and American guns, the German guns take the center position.

The cross-Channel duels were not very effective for either side; it was extreme range for both and there wasn’t much of military importance to hit. Exhibiting their penchant for technical achievement at the expense of practicality, the Germans deployed an updated version of the WWI “Paris Gun” to coastal France – the 21cm K12. Like the “Paris Gun”, the weapon employed a truss on the barrel to prevent sag and used numbered and splined projectiles to cope with barrel erosion. While it succeeded in delivering shells as far as Rainham in Kent (88km away), a German artillery general dismissed it as a “toy”.

Also in the technical toy category were the 80cm K(E) guns, nicknamed “Gustav” and “Dora”. These were originally proposed by Krupp as a way to deal with the Maginot Line. While the Wehrmacht had no interest, they caught the fancy of Hitler’s obsession with giantism. “Dora” was deployed to Sevastopol, and fired 48 rounds. There are various legends about a near miss capsizing a Soviet destroyer in the harbor and a direct hit on a fortification penetrating 25+ feet of concrete; “Dora” is mythic enough to appear in Harry Turtledove’s WWII fantasy novel In the Balance, where it poses a problem alien lizard invaders can’t deal with. However, it the real world author Steven Zalonga argues that “Dora” was singularly ineffective. The gun required 1420 troops to operate (about the sized of an infantry battalion) with an additional 2500 to prepare the firing site (which require two parallel tracks, and a third track for cranes) and 60 specialists. Zalonga notes there’s no evidence that “Dora” ever hit any of its targets; the average shot missed by 200-300 meters. The lack of success apparently didn’t deter Hitler; it’s noted elsewhere (Germany’s Secret Masterplan in WWII) that he proposed a battleship armed with eight of these things, only deterred when his advisers pointed out there was no harbor in Germany big enough to construct such a vessel. There’s also no information on what was actually involved in firing ‘Dora”; for example, how was it aimed and how was recoil handled? I imagine it might have been pushed along its curved dual track by switch engines for aiming; the difficulty of doing that precisely might explain why it was so inaccurate.

The “New Vanguard” book is mostly intended for military modelers (I wonder if anybody has ever gone to the trouble of building a “Dora” in an HO layout?) with a lot colorful illustrations. Esoteric but interesting; for more on German WWII railway guns see K5(E) Railgun. ( )