The Birmingham age-herald., 1919-05-18
Big Gun Production Offers One of Most Stirring
 Records of War
By Associated Press

1 By Associated Press
 Washington, May 17.-Behind the armies
 n France which smashed road to vic
 tory through the German defenses last
 fall the United States was forging, be-
 fore the armistice was Signed. weapons
 gigantic and powerful, counted upon to
 make ultimate victory certain. In the
 American artillery programme 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
 programme is contained in the chapters l made public today of Americas Muni- | tionS,' the historical report prepared un-
 der the direction of Assistant Secretary l Crowen, who was director of munitions | during the war.
 l The whole story of guns, from the 37 | nm infantry cannon with it's inch and
 one-half bore, designed for use in the
 front lines of combat, to the 16-inch nor
 tar on a 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 l on a scale never before attempted is graphically pictured Through it all runs | the same spirit of partnership in the
 war enterprise between industry and the government that made possible such an | undertaking.
 | The chapters devoted to guns are so
 extensive as to make up a considerable volume in themselves. They contain the names and the statistical records of achievement of all the firms that worked on guns or ammunition and this official l commentary will have place in the | ~lo ~f ty, lao H come.
 1 Among the many Interesting things in
 the report is the account now officially given of the reasons that impelled the I War Department to cast aside except for l training purposes all of the 3-inch held
 artillery with which the American army
 was equipped when the United States en-
 tered the war, and to substitute forthese weapons three types of guns fitted to | take ammunition of the 75-mm type employed by the French light pieces. | There has been much controversy be- cause of the alleged failure to adopt at l the outset of the war the French 75, fa- nous for its performances in the war, as the standard American piece of this type. The report shows that the gun was adopted for combat purposes, but | that its production in quantity in tho Limited States proved to be even more | of a problem than the governments ex- perts had anticipated. For that reason the American 3-inch fun, redesigned for
 75 ammunition, and the British S.3-inch field gun, similarly rechambered. were | both put into production in order to i make use of every facility for manufac- l ture. The American and British type were intended primarily for training , work and were so employed. But the
 wisdom of putting these guns into pro-
 duction on a quantity scale is empha-
 sized in the following paragraph:
 1 ''In the year and one-half of our war experience the manufacturing production problems were all practically and c '- pletely solved with one exception-tnaS of building French hydropneumatic re- | cuperators for the 75mm guns. This, perhaps the hardest manufacturing job in the whole range of war industrial enterprises and naturally the last one to come through, had not been solved when the armistice was signed. How e<er, 1t is only fair to state that the sou- tor of this recuperator problem was im- minent on November Il, 1918.
 The recuperator is the Iecoil device which makes these FrenA guns what they are Their construction was a
 French secret and to build them there IS required degree of precision compara-
 bic only, the report states, to that neces- sary in building as delicate an instru-
 ment as a sextant. It was with difficulty | that any American manufacturer was persuaded to undertake it, yet on April 9, 1919, 67 of these recuperators had been completed and 53 of these passed by French experts and accepted by the gov ernment They were the first of these devices built out of France or by other than the skilled French workmen.
 The report points out that the gun pro- l gramme in reality depended upon the ability to produce the recoil mechanisms. I This picture of what such mechanisn1s are called upon to do Is drawn:
 Not long ago touring car. weighing ! two tons, travelled at a rate of 120 miles an hour along a Florida beach. Con ceive of such a car going 3S miles an hour, which Is much faster than any man ever travelled; then conceive of a mechanism which would stop this car, 1 going nearly six miles a minute, stop it 1 in $ inches of space and half second of time. without the slightest injury to
 the automobile That is precisely the equivalent of the feat performed by a recuperator by a 240rnm howitzer after a shot,"
 Summarizing the production of guns by the United States as compared with France and Great Britain the report says
 that between April. 1917 and November, 1918 the United States produced zO8 complete artillery units as against 11,056
 by France and sos5 by Great Britain and during those 19 months turned out 4275 gun bodies as against 1892 by Francs and 11,s52 by Great Britain.
 l And our artillery capacity 1t adds. twas then. in the autumn of 1918, only