The Cordova daily times., 1919-06-10
OUR ARTILLERY PROGRAM SURE
 OF VICTORY


 fore the, armistice was signed weapons gigantic and powerful, count. ed upon to make ultimate victory cer. tain. In the American artillery pro. gram alone, the full fruition of which could not have been reached before 1920, there was in creation an agency believed by army men here to be of itself able to bring the victory.
 An official and detailed account of that program is contained in the chap. terms made public today of Americas s Munitions" the historial report pre-. pared under the direction of Assistant Secretary Crowell, who was director of munitions during the war.
 The whole story of guns, from the 37mm infantry cannon with it's inch and one-half bore, designed for use in the front lines of combat, to the 16- inch mortar on railway mount which was to work havoc on the enemy from points miles behind the fighting front, the story of the extraordinary efforts of American industry to equip an army with artillery on a scale never before attempted is graphically pictured. Through it all runs the same spirit of partnership in the war enterprise be- tween industry and the government that made possible such an undertak- ing.
 The chapters devoted to guns are so extensive as to make up a consider able volume in themselves They con- tain the names and the statistical rec ords of achievement of all the firms that worked on guns or ammunition and this official commentary will have place in the records of those firms in the years to come.
 Among the many interesting things in the report is the account now offic- ially given of the reasons that impeled the war department to cast aside ex- cept for training purposes all of the g. inch field artillery with which the American army was equipped when the United States entered the war, and to substitute for these weapons three types of guns fitted to take am intuition on the 75mm type enA,akgd by the French light pieces. f,
 There has been much controversy because of the alleegd failure to adopt at the outset of the war the French 75, famous for it's performances in the 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 quan- tity in the United States proved to be even more of 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 re- chambered, were both put into produc- tion in order to make use of every facility for manufacture. The Amer ican and British type were intended primarily for training work and were so employed. But the wisdom of put ting these guns into production on quantity scale is emphasized in the following paragraphs:
 "In the year and one-half of our war experience the manufacturing produc- tion problems were all practically and completely solved with one exception that of building French hydropneu- matic recuperators for the 75mm guns. This, perhaps the hardest manufactur- ing job in the whole range of war in- dustrial enterprises and naturally the last one to come through, had not been solved when the armistice was signed. However, it Is only fair to state that the solution of this recuperator prob- lem was imminent on November ii, 191S."
 The recuperator is~the recoil device which makes these French guns what they are. Their construction was a French secret and to build them there is required a degree of precision com parable only. the report states. to that necessary in building as delicate an instrument as sextant. It was with difficulty that any American manu. facturer was persuaded to undertake 1t, yet on April 25, 1919, 67 of these recuperators had been completed and 53 of these passed by French experts and accepted by the government. They were the first of these devices built out of France or by other than the skilled French workmen.
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