The Nenana daily news., 1919-06-09
Report of Director of
 Munitions Tells of Great
 Weapons Prepared By s.


 : road to victory through the Ger man defenses last fall, the United
 States was forging, before the ' armistice was signed, weapons gi- '' gantic and powerful, counted upon
 to make ultimate victory certain. In the American artillery program alone, the full fruiton of which . could not have been reached before . 1920, there was in creation an u agency belived by army men here u to be of itself able to bring victory. An official and detailed account of that program is contained in the Il chapters just made public of 'Amer- " ica's Munitions,' the historical re- port prepared under the direction i' of Assistant Secretary Crowell, who '' was director of munitions during tha war.
 The whole story of guns, from the 37mm infantry cannon" with its inch-and- bore, designed
 for use in the front lines of com
 bat, to the 16-inch mortor on a rail
 way mount, which was to work
 havoc on the enemy from points miles behind the fighting front the story of the extraordinary efforts 1 of American industry to equip an army with artillery on scale never before attempted is graphically pie tured. Through it all runs the same spirit of parnership in the war en- terprise between industry ard the government that made possible such ! an undertaking. The chapters devoted to the guns are so extensive as to make up a considerable volume in themselves. They contain the names and the statistical records of achivement of all the firms that worked on guns I mentary will have place in he records of those firms in the yeari to come.
 Among the many interesting things in the report is the account now officially given of the reasons that impelled the war department to cast aside, except for training l purposes, all of the 3-inch field . artillery with which the American army was equipped when the United States entered the war, and to sub
 sttute for these weapons three i types of guns fitted to taka ammu- nition of the 75mm employed by the French light pieces.
 There has been much controversy because of the alleged failure to adopt at the outset of the waI the French 75, famous for its perform ances in the war, as the standard l 7 report shows that the gun was adopted for combat purposes, but that its production in quantity m the Unitd States proved to be even more of a problem than the gov ernment's experts had anticipated. For that reason the American 3-lnch gun, redesiged for D ammunition, and the British 3.3-inch field gun, ] similarly rechambered were both
 put into production in order toi make use of every facility for manu fracture. The Ameriaan and British |l type were intended primarily for N training work and wee 50 employed. \ But the wisdom of putting these \ guns in 0 production on q quantity < scale $ emphasized in the following paragraph: z "In the year and one half of our ' war experience the manufacturing production problems were ali i .ac tically atd comp!et ly solved with < one exception-that of building French Eydropneumati,, recuperators for the ;jmm guns This. perhaps < the harl,.s ranufacturlng job Tn < the whole range of war industrial (l enterprises and naturally the last \ one to come through, had not been N solved when the armistice was signed q However, it is only fair to state that the solution of this recuperator problem was imminent on November