Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1918 edition. Excerpt: ...in order to avoid any delay to output, afforded by the Germans. The outbreak of war found Germany, as I have already mentioned, with an obsolescent field gun, but as I personally discovered in the battle of the Somme, she directed all her energies, not to remedying its defects, but to developing production. I happened by accident to examine there two captured guns which were standing side by side. One, No. 40, had been made twenty years before and converted from breech loading to quick firing; the other, No. 6173, had only been made the previous year, but there was not a rivet's difference between them; only, in the new gun, time had been saved by omitting engraving the Imperial cipher on the breech! Ammunition. As with the guns, so with the ammunition, but perhaps to a still greater extent, production has been the great problem, for from early in the first autumn of the war our stocks of ammunition were practically exhausted, and we gunners had over and over to turn a deaf ear to the calls for help from our almost exhausted infantry. Everything possible was done to expedite output. National shell factories were set up all over the country, for the smallest shop could at least make 18-pounder shrapnel bodies, and delicate women toiled long hours at the lathes. We adopted designs which were not the best but which were the easiest to make, and then faced the danger of prematures. Prematures. This bursting of guns by the premature explosion of the shells is almost inevitable when one has to depend on hurried and unskilled production: it is one of the risks which must be run when shells have to be rushed out to the front. But the loss of guns and men maybe serious, and it is always a trying ordeal to the artillery. The. French with their large...