ANTI-TANK GUNS

Evening Post, Volume CXXX, Issue 150, 21 December 1940, Page 9

ANTI-TANK GUNS

AUSTRALIA AT WORK

INDUSTRIAL ACHIEVEMENT

MASS PRODUCTION

(By Trans-Tasman Air Mail, from "The Post's" Representative.)

SYDNEY, December 14. The next important development In Australia's rapidly-expanding munitions programme will be the mass production of anti-tank guns. Reports have been made of astonishing progress in the project for building these guns here. Manufacture of all-Australian antitank guns is part of a vast and ambitious programme of ordnance production for the Empire. Australia is already building 3.7 in and 3in antiaircraft guns, rifles, and machine-guns, and other guns, such as 25-pounders and Bren guns, will follow. So competent is Australian workmanship that some of the guns now pouring out of the 'Australian workshops are preferred by the British Army and Royal Air Force to guns of the same type made .in England. The anti-tank gun, for which about 60 firms in New South Wales, Victoria, and South Australia are now busy making parts, is an extremely powerful and deadly weapon of the latest British Army model. It fires a two-pound semi-armour-piercing shell, which is about to be produced in quantity in Australian munitions factories. .The gun is so new that it was possible to equip the British Army with only a small number of them before the Germans launched their offensive in Belgium last May. SIXTY FIRMS PARTICIPATE. Australia's decision to build antitank guns of the new pattern was first announced by the Ministry of Munitions last June. According to a statement subsequently released by the Department of Information the plan envisaged the selection of a factory for assembling the gun and the manufacture of the component parts in a large number of workshops spread over several States. In August the Prime Minister, Mr. Menzies, announced that progress had been so satisfactory that there was every reason to believe that production time for these guns would constitute an Australian industrial record. General Motors-Holdens Ltd. was appointed major co-ordinating contractor, with full responsibility for ensuring the manufacture of the gun parts by sub-contractors in Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide. Complete drawings of the gun reached the firm in October, by which time an assembly plant had already been installed in Adelaide. About sixty firms were quickly allotted tasks, and within a few weeks a great effort for the manufacture of parts was in full swing. The forging of the gun barrels got away to an even earlier start. Large numbers of them, turned out at an alloy steel works in New South Wales, made their appearance several months ago, and the rate of output is now considered to be highly encouraging. THE SCHEDULE. Thousands of Australian workmen will participate in the job when the gun is in full production. Some hundreds will..be engaged in -'machining and assembly at .the main assembly plant in Adelaide. Many have already been active on preparatory work for two months, during which period they have not had a single Sunday off duty. They take as much pride in beating the schedule as do the contractors and the planning experts of the Ministry of Munitions.- . : Not the least exacting task in the gigantic project is the preparation of tools, jigs, and fixtures to enable proauction to begin. All of them were made in Australian workshops, a striking contrast to conditions prevailing before the war, when it was customiry to import all such production Adjuncts from Britain.

The construction locally of anti-tank euns will add enormously to the efficiency of the A.I.F. The expected rate (if output is necessarily confidential, but it will be sufficiently high to msure not only the adequate equipnent of Australia's forces at home and ibroad, but also to permit export to tfher" Empire countries.