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Railway Artillery — 1921

A Report on the Characteristics, Scope of Utility, etc., of Railway Artillery — Ordnance Department Document No. 2034

These files are made available through the kind cooperation of Bolling Smith of the Coast Defense Study Group. They have been processed with OCR and the pages renumbered, so you can use the search function of the reader to locate a word or phrase, or use the table of contents to go directly to the subject you want.

The treatise was originally submitted as part of the final report of the Railway Artillery Unit, Artillery Section, Engineering Division, Office of the Chief Ordnance Officer, American Expeditionary Forces in France. Made up at the close of the World War of 1914–1918, it was a revision of a similar report prepared in April 1918. The second report was finished and submitted in August 1919 and covered, as fully as available information would permit, all railway artillery completely or partially designed by ourselves, our allies, and our enemies in that war. The work was prepared for publication by Lieutenant Colonel H. W. Miller of the Ordnance Department.

Volume I contains the matter of general character: the historical introduction, the classification of types of railway artillery, the scope of utility, and the characteristics of existing types — including the detailed descriptions of the American railway mounts (the 4.7-inch howitzer through the 14-inch guns). Volume II is devoted to the detailed mechanical descriptions of the individual mounts and is here represented by the section on French railway artillery — some forty mounts from the 120-millimeter gun up through the 400-millimeter howitzer.

Use the Table of Contents button at the bottom-right of the page to jump to any section or mount, and the Volume I / Volume II buttons to switch between the two volumes in the viewer below.

Using the viewer: Use the Full Table of Contents button (bottom-right) to jump to any section or mount. Use the double caret (») symbol at top right of the viewer to adjust scrolling. Toggle between Volume I and Volume II with the colored buttons at bottom-right.

⇓ Download Volume I — 23.9 MB ⇓ Download Volume II — 21.7 MB