NEW 25-POUNDER GUNS

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 60, Issue 250, 30 July 1940, Page 6

NEW 25-POUNDER GUNS

MANUFACTURE IN AUSTRALIA.

FULL PRODUCTION NEXT YEAR. SYDNEY, July 17. Plans for the complete assembly at centres in Melbourne and Sydney of 25-pounder guns were announced this week by Mr L. J. Hartnett (Director of Ordnance Production in the Ministry of Munitions). Mr Hartnett said that the 25pounder was a new piece of ordnance never before made in Australia. As soon as arrangements had been- made with major contractors, all facilities of industries suitable for making components would be pressed into action. The 25-pounder is now standard artillery equipment in the British Army, having largely superseded the 18pounder gun. It is a comparatively light field-piece, has a longer range than the 18-pounder, and is mounted on rubber tyres, which help to give it a speed, when drawn by tractor, of about 30 miles an hour. To a large extent it also combines the general purposes of the 4.5 in howitzer. “The 25-pounder,” Captain Liddell Hart, the British military writer, said recently, “is to the 18-pounder what the Bren gun is to the old Lewis gun.” Component parts of the new gun will be made by a large variety of manufacturing firms in different parts of the Commonwealth. Among them will be Thompson’s Engineering and Pipe Company, Limited, Castlemaine, Victoria. The parts will be assembled in a new building which is now in course of erection at the Commonwealth Ordnance Factory, Maribyrnong, Melbourne.

It was stated in Sydney that the new gun is expected to be in full production next year.