The Seward gateway daily edition, and the Alaska weekly post., 1919-06-02
AMERICAN ARTILLERY WAS SMASHING ON
 10 VICTORY

WASHINGTON. June Q BehinC the armies in France which smashed a road to victory through the German dcfcnScs last Fall. the United StateS was forging before the armiSticc wa> signed, weapons gigantic and power, ful, counted upon to make ultimaty victory certain. In the American ar tillery program alone, the full fruit ion of which could not have been reached before 1920, there was ia creation an agency believed by army men here to be of itself able to bring the victory.
 An official and detailed account nt that program k contained in the chap terS raade public today of "America's Munitions" the historical report pre- pared under the direction of Assistant Secretary Crowell vr' was director of munitions during the war.
 The whole story oE guns. from the &7 nm infantry cannon" with itS inch and one-half bore designed fO use in the front lines of combat, to the Is inch mortar on a railway mount which was to work havoc on the en- emy from points miles behind the fighting front. the story of the extra ordinary efforts of American indust- ny to equip an army with artillery on a scale never before attempted is gra- phically pictured. Through it all runs the same spirit of partnership in the war enterprise between industry and the government that made possible such ar undertaking,
 The chapters devoted to guns are so extensive aS to make up a considerable volume in themselves. They contain the statistical records of achievement of all the firms that worked on guaS or ammunition and this official com mentary will have place in the re- ccrds of those firms in the years to come.
 fmong the may interesting things in the report is the account now offic- ially given ot the reasons that i'm pellcd the War Department to cast aside except for training purposes al! of the S-inch field artillery with which the American army was equipped when the United States entered tn" war. and to substitute for these wcap. ons three types of guns fitted to take ammunition of the 75mm type em- ployed by the French light pieces.
 There has been much controversy because of the alleged failure to adopt at the outset of the war the French 75. famous for it's performance m th' war, as the standard American piece of this type. The report shows that the gun was adopted for combat pur- poses but that it's production in quar- tity in the United States proved to b" even more of a problem than the gov ernment's experts had anticipated. For that reason the American 3-inch gun, redesigned for 75 ammunition, and the British 3.3 inch field gun, similarly rechambered were both put into pro- duction in order to make use of every facility for manufacture. The Ameri' can and British type were intended primarily for training work and were so employed. But the wisdom of pu; ting these guns into production on Z quantity scale is emphasized in tho following paragraph:
 "In the year and one-half of ou' experience the manufacturing produc tion problems were all practically ant completely solved with one exception that of building French hydropneu- matic recuperators for the 75mn guns. This, perhaps the hardest manu featuring job in the whole range O, war industrial enterprises and natur ally the last one to come through, haC not been solved when the armistic, was signed. However, it is only fai to state that the solution of this re cuperator problem was imminent o' November II, l9lS.'
 The recuperator is the recoil devic which makes these French guns wha they are. Their construction was
 French secret and to build them ther