Guns Afloat and Ashore: Naval, Coastal and Anti-Aircraft Ordnance from the 36-Pounder to the 90 mm Gun

The 36-pounder long gun was the largest piece of artillery mounted on French warships of the age of sail. It also served in coastal defense and fortifications, and its shot weighed 36 French livres, about 17.6 kilograms, heavier than anything the French Army fielded, where the heaviest guns were 24-pounders.

French general Henri-Joseph Paixhans designed this gun in 1822 and 1823 as the first naval gun built to fire explosive shells. The French Navy adopted the first examples in 1841, and Britain, Russia and the United States used them in the 1840s, a step that pointed toward the end of wooden warships and the rise of the ironclad.

Thomas Jackson Rodman, a Union artillery officer, designed this family of large smoothbore cast iron guns for United States coastal defense. His hollow casting method cooled the barrel from the inside out, giving stronger guns, and bores ran from 8 inch up to a rare 20 inch. More than 140 survive at coastal forts.

These British breech-loading 9.2-inch guns, 46.7 calibres long, were made by Elswick Ordnance, Vickers and William Beardmore. They served both as naval guns and as coast defence guns from 1899 into the 1950s, one of the longest and most varied service records of any British heavy ordnance of their time.

The name gives the size: an 8 inch bore and a barrel 55 calibers, or 440 inches, long. It was the main armament of United States Navy heavy cruisers and two early aircraft carriers, Lexington and Saratoga, firing a 335 pound armor-piercing shell to a maximum range of 30,050 yards, and it armed more than 40 vessels.

This gun was the standard heavy anti-aircraft gun of the United States Washington Treaty cruisers, light enough to be trained quickly by hand. It was also carried by older battleships and carriers until the 5-inch/38 gun, derived from it, took over, and some guns were later converted for use on submarines.

The Mark IX and Mark XII 4.7 inch guns armed most Royal Navy and Commonwealth destroyers in the Second World War. Britain built 742 Mark IX and 372 Mark XII guns, each firing a 50 pound shell about 15 times a minute, and they later passed to the navies of Canada, Australia, Greece, Turkey, Argentina, Brazil and others with the ships.

The Royal Navy used this as its standard medium-range gun against ships, aircraft and shore targets from 1938. Despite the name its true bore is 4.45 inches, or 113 mm, and this 45-calibre family stayed in service into the 1970s before the unrelated 55-calibre Mark 8 replaced it.

The Oerlikon 20 mm cannon descends from the German Becker Type M2, a design that first appeared early in the First World War. It was built by Oerlikon Contraves and by licensees, used by both Allied and Axis forces in the Second World War, and later versions remained in service into the twenty-first century.

Swedish company Bofors developed this family of 40 mm automatic anti-aircraft guns, starting with the L/43 model, which reached the market in 1934. The L/60 followed in 1936 and the L/70 in 1948, and the guns saw heavy combat use in the Second World War and remained a significant anti-aircraft weapon through the Cold War.

The United States Army contracted development of this heavy anti-aircraft and anti-tank gun in June 1938, and the M1 was standardized in March 1940. About 30 contractors built more than 140,000 units, and it was the Army main heavy anti-aircraft weapon until surface-to-air missiles replaced it in 1960.