Judsonia weekly advance., 1918-10-09
MAKING GUNS FOR
 UNCLE SAM'S MEN
Day and Night Forces at Work on Weapons for Fighters.
PRODUCTION IN YEARS TIME
Plants for Manufacture of Ordnance Have Increased More Than 90 Per Cent Since Beginning of
 the War.

(From the Committee on Public Informal
 ton, Washington, D. CD
 The foundries of Is steel plants in the United States are today doing capacity business. Throughout the night the work will go on with slight interruption. The whistles that blow to announce closing time to one army of workers will be a summons to an other shift to take it's turn. The blast of chimneys will continue to roar, and the glittering white-hot streams of molten metal will flow into the molds. A year ago only two of these sixteen foundries where cannon forgings are now being made were in existence. The foundries at Bethlehem and Mid vale represented almost our entire re- sources for the making of cannon fOrgings. Today those two plants con- stitute less than 10 per cent of our total facilities for making such prod uctS.
 In one year new industry has been created in this country. It is new not only in the sense that the IA foundries have been built, but that the processes of manufacture are new. Making gun forgings is different from making steel forgings for any other purpose. The heated steel must be pressed and not hammered. The methods of heat treating the steel, of cooling 1t, and of annealing the molten metal are all diff ferent. Yet, within one year, this new industry has been built up in this country, and today it provides the wherewithal for the carrying out of an artillery program the like of which has not been projected in any other country.
 Nor is that all. In more than a score of other factories gun carriages, recOil mechanisms and other parts of artil- lery are being made. For the making of those parts, new industries have likewise been created. AS an instance a new industry was established to manufacture glass of quality avail able for use in telescopic sights on can- non. Such glass had never been made In the United States before.
 Handicapped at Start.
 WHICH, Vt cAlcTtu llc WHr we WeT6 handicapped by a lack of technical knowledge. We had been a peaceful people; we had not trained our scien- lists and engineers in the art of mu- nitions making. Therefore, we had but one ordnance expert for every 200 in Germany. We went into this war with an ordnance bureau consisting of 97 officers and 820 enlisted men. Not all of those 97 officers were ordnance experts. Some of them were only on detail to the oiuiiance department. In fact, not more than eight of them were charged with the designing work in the manufacture of artillery. Be- fore year had elapsed, the ordnance department had grown into an organi. zation of 5000 officers, 30,OOO enlisted men and 10000 civilian employees. It has undergone a thorough reshap- ing to adapt itself to the extraordinary new conditions. The ordnance bu- reau in the first part of the war did a total business of $4,700,000,000. In peace times it's average annual ex. penditures were $14,000000.
 Large as these figures seem, astound- ing as this rate of expansion must ap- pear, they give only scant idea of the difficulties faced by the ordnance department in its year of preparatory work. Ordnance is a highly technical ~o.oo~~