This rare video, produced by the Springfield Arsenal LLC, shows how five 14″ Naval guns — similar to dreadnought turret guns — were made by the Navy, transported to France, and mounted on railway trucks to form the US Naval Railway Batteries in 1918.
In action at Verdun, these guns fired a 1,400-pound shell twenty-five miles behind German lines. Aviators conducted forward reconnaissance and signaled the battery with cloth panels on the ground when it was ready to fire.
The US Naval Railway Battery grew out of a simple fact: by 1918 the Navy had 14-inch guns and gun-building expertise that the Army’s field artillery could not match, and the Western Front had settled into a range war the shorter Army guns could not reach. The Bureau of Ordnance mounted five 14-inch/50 guns — the same type carried by the newest dreadnoughts — on purpose-built railway cars, each a self-contained rolling fortress with its own crew, ammunition, and locomotives. Manned by sailors under Rear Admiral Charles P. Plunkett, the batteries reached France in the late summer of 1918 and shelled German rail junctions, supply dumps, and troop concentrations far behind the lines until the Armistice in November. They proved that heavy naval ordnance could be moved and fought ashore, a lesson the Navy applied again with railway and coast-defense guns in the decades that followed.
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