Canon de 32 Modèle 1870/84 à Glissement: Seeing Action in Two World Wars

(From a stereoscope card. Author's collection)

     Somewhere near the French city of Reims, a battery of French Canon de 32 Modèle 1870/84 à Glissement railway guns fire on German positions, likely during the Second Battle of the Marne which raged from July 15, 1918 to August 6, 1918. In 1915, thirty of these railway guns were constructed by the Schneider-Creusot company using former Canon de 32C Modèle 1870/84 coastal defense guns. The 320mm (32cm) gun was capable of firing a 855lb. high-explosive shell to a maximum range of 13 miles and a skilled crew could maintain a rate of fire of one round every four minutes. The carriage was designed by Schneider-Creusot to house the guns and consisted of a rectangular steel base on two, five-axle bogies. The gun used a sliding recoil system (Glissement) in which the gun cradle slid backward to absorb some of the recoil forces before having to be pushed back into battery. For firing, the gun could be elevated from 3 degrees to a maximum of 40 degrees. However, given the gun itself had no means of traverse, special curved track had to be constructed at the firing site in order to move the entire carriage along the track to obtain traverse. The curved track provided from 2 degrees of traverse up to 15 degrees. Any further angling risked instability when firing. To stabilize the carriage, once the firing position was selected, heavy wooden beams were used to reinforce the rail bed and then steel beams underneath the carriage were lowered onto the tracks and the carriage lifted onto jacks. The steel beams utilized friction between them and the track to further reduce the recoil effects. The apparatus on the back of the carriage was the shell hoist and the ammunition was in two parts, the projectile and the powder bag. The guns entered service in 1916 and served throughout the remainder of World War One and after the conflict ended, some were put into reserve.

     When World War Two began, eight Canon de 32 Modèle 1870/84 à Glissement railway guns were taken out of reserve and assigned to the 373e Regiment Artillerie Lourde sur Voie Ferrée (ALVF; Heavy Artillery on Railroad) with four guns placed with the 7e Bataillon ALVF and four with the 8e Bataillon AVLF. Both battalions were held in reserve at Seppois-le-Haut but in short order, the 7e Bataillon AVLF deployed to Hirtzbach while the 8e Bataillon AVLF was sent to Steinsoultz. Both of these locations were in the Alsace region of north-eastern France, near the German border. Following the German invasion, these guns plus one additional example were captured and put into German service under the designation 32 cm K(E) 657(f).