At 200 tons it weighs in at more than some of the biggest locomotives ever. In full operation it can pack a velocity of nearly 2,000 feet a second. It needs 50 people to operate it, and has had an astonishing working life spanning nearly 40 years. Could this be the most unusual railway vehicle ever built in Britain?
This week [Tuesday 26 March] the mighty “Boche Buster”, a breach-loading 18-inch Howitzer mounted on a railway “sleigh”, dating from 1920 and Britain’s largest surviving piece of artillery, was back on the move, emerging from semi-retirement at the Royal Artillery’s garrison at Larkhill on Salisbury Plain for a journey of nearly 450 miles to the Dutch National Railway Museum in Utrecht. Here it is to be the centrepiece of an exhibition to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the Treaty of Utrecht, marking the end of the Spanish War of Succession in 1713.
The move, which took nearly seven hours using a 500-ton crane simply to load the howitzer onto specially equipped vehicles for the historic journey to Harwich and across the North Sea to Holland, is a triumph for Lieut-Col John Le Feuvre, the deputy garrison commander, who personally ensured the survival of this cherished piece of railway and wartime history, which could so easily have been scrapped. For years, it had languished mostly unloved with its heritage unrecognised at the Royal Artillery’s former home in Woolwich, and subsequently at Larkhill, where it had been quietly rusting away until Le Feuvre took it under his wing.
The Boche Buster – numbered L1 – was one of five made by the Elswick Ordnance Company of Newcastle Upon Tyne during World War One. The 52-foot barrels were of a traditional design, mostly used on ships of the Royal Navy, yet larger and more powerful than anything seen hitherto. But they were delivered too late to see service. They were all put into storage, except L1, which was placed on a railway truck mounting in 1921 and tested on the Army’s firing range at Shoeburyness in Essex.
So successful were the tests that the Boche Busters – primitive weapons though they might have seemed 20 years on – found new life at the dawn of World War Two. In 1940, Winston Churchill, always alert to the tactical power of the railways, called in Major Montague Cleeve, then the only serving officer with railway gun experience, who was given the order to get the “Busters” into service immediately to protect the vulnerable Kent coast from the threat of a German invasion.
Boche Buster No. L4 had a distinguished career during this time hidden in the Bishop Park tunnel near Folkestone, equipped with ammunition shelters, acting as a deterrent to German plans to cross the Channel. It was manned by 50 men from the Royal Artillery’s 11th Super Heavy Battery detachment, backed up by a further 30 reinforcements. Firing tests were done on the Elham Valley line near Canterbury, which had been taken over by the military during the war. It was deemed so important that it was visited by both Churchill and Roosevelt. (I have a Ministry of Information photograph of the Boche Buster there firing into the sky, in my new book Steaming to Victory: How Britain’s railways won the war. However, close inspection reveals that the gunsmoke may have been airbrushed into the picture.)
Meanwhile, Britain’s railways were developing other rail-based weapons to defend the nation against enemy attack. In 1940, when there was general panic about German invasion, Colonel Alan Mount, the chief inspecting officer of railways, came up with the idea of building armoured trains with more modest guns to patrol the coast. The idea wasn’t entirely new, since such trains had been used successfully in the Boer War and on the Eastern Front in World War One. Seeking the best advice possible, he turned to two of the most eminent locomotive designers, Sir William Stanier of the LMS and Sir Nigel Gresley of the LNER.
After experimenting with various designs, a prototype was built, consisting of a tank locomotive at the centre of the train, with armour covering its cab and water tanks. A standard goods wagon was attached before and after the locomotive, and an armoured gun truck was positioned at each end of the train. Beneath the armour, it was a standard 20-ton coal truck, carrying an infantry detachment with anti-tank rifles and light machine guns along with a six-pounder gun and crew.
A dozen such complete armoured trains were built in the LMS works at Derby and the LNER works at Stratford and they patrolled the coast around the south and east – from Penzance up to the Moray Firth. The fighting crews were laid on first by the Royal Armoured Corps and later by contingents from the Polish Army, although the trains themselves were always operated by regular railwaymen. By 1943, the need for the armoured trains was reduced and several were withdrawn, although the last ones remained popular in Scotland, operated almost to the end by the Home Guard. One still exists in the Bovington Tank Museum. When the locomotives were restored to normal traffic they were endowed with a nice touch – engraved plates commemorating their valiant role in the war.
Even more valiant was the role of the staff of the little Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway in Kent, who converted one of their 15-inch gauge miniature railway trains into an armoured train, bristling with weapons. The locomotive Hercules was covered in armour plate, and the heavily reinforced vehicles it pulled were equipped with Boys anti-tank rifles and Lewis guns, manned by the men of the Somerset Light Infantry. The train was invaluable in patrolling the strategic and lonely Romney marches on the Kent coast facing France.
But all this was small beer compared with the powerful rail-borne weapons being developed by the Nazis. In 1939, Hitler instructed his military leaders to find a way to penetrate the Maginot Line a fortified wall of artillery, tank barriers and machine gun emplacements that guarded the borders with France and Italy. They turned to the German engineering firm of Friedrich Krupp of Essen, and by 1941, they had created “Gustav”– the largest gun in the world. Mounted on a rail wagon and named after the patriarch of the Krupp family, Gustav Krupp von Bohlen, “Gustav” weighed 1,344 tons, was 140 feet long and 20 feet wide. It was as tall as a four-storey house. Its 500-man crew needed 54 hours to set it up – and every time it had to be moved it had to be removed from its rail truck and disassembled into a kit of parts to avoid destroying the track with its weight. One of its concrete-piercing shells alone weighed as much as a bus.
With a bore diameter of nearly three feet, it dwarfed Britain’s Boche Buster both in size and range, and was capable of hitting a target up to 23 miles away – and unlike its British counterpart could technically have fired across the Channel. Lucky it didn’t, since the result would have been widespread destruction, with each shell leaving a 30-foot deep crater. As it turned out, Gustav saw very little action. It fired 300 shells on Sebastopol and 30 more during the Warsaw uprising in 1944. Ultimately it was captured by Allied forces and dismembered. Its sister weapon, Dora, which was destroyed at the end of the war by the Germans themselves to prevent it falling into the hands the Russians.
Britain’s Boche Busters had no more of a glorious ending. For all the power they packed, with a muzzle velocity of 1,880 feet a second and a range of 13 miles, they were something of a flop. They could not achieve the key requirement of firing across the Channel and they were quietly withdrawn from service before the end of the war. Not a single Boche Buster was ever fired in anger. All were scrapped in the 1960s, but No. L1 continued to live a charmed life, sent to Shoeburyness once again to test the efficacy of 1,000lb “Bunker Buster” bombs. During its time at the Proof and Experimental Establishment there, the veteran LI fired some 430 rounds before being placed in retirement with the Royal Artillery Historical Trust
I spoke to Lieut-Col Le Feuvre as he was waving his “baby” through the garrison gates at Larkhill, the lorry and support vehicles snaking slowly onto the A303. “It’s been a triumphant day. I’m tired but feeling pretty euphoric. Actually, you know, I’m not a railway enthusiast, but I couldn’t be happier that this marvellous piece of our history is now going to be admired by thousands.” The next step now, he hopes is that after a five-month stay in Holland, funded by the Dutch, this important piece of railway technology will find a permanent home on exhibition to the British public.
Michael Williams’s latest book ‘Steaming to Victory: How Britain’s railways won the war’ will be published in May by Preface (price £25)
