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Show YANKS WEAPONS EXCEL, TEST PROVES INFERIORITY OF FOE'S . ABERDiifcN, 1ID. comparison oi captured Axis armaments with j American material in actual firing j tests at Aberdeen proving ground is demonstrating that the American weapon is certainly the equal and in most cases superior to any foreign weapon, according to Lieut. Col. G. B. Jarrett, chief of the foreign material ma-terial branch at Aberdeen. "Exhaustive tests of captured Axis ordnance material flown from the African and Southwest Pacific , battlefronts show that German equipment is the best, Italian a poor second and Japanese a tail-end third," he said. Declaring that inauguration of the foreign-material branch "to keep us abreast of all enemy developments" has made the United States better equipped than it was during the first World war from the point of view of keeping "up to the minute on the limit of effectiveness of the enemy weapons," the colonel said: "German armaments, as usual, show a clever design and careful workmanship. Lack Mass-Output Idea. "Some late specimens show a tendency ten-dency to substitute stampings, spot welding and rougher but adequate materia and workmanship for the finely machined mechanical parts formerly used. "However, the German mind, while giving close attention to details, de-tails, has not yet grasped the fundamental funda-mental idea of mass production of ordnance so well shown by the American mind." He said a lack of mass-production facilities in the Reich was evidenced evi-denced by captured materials containing con-taining parts that could not be interchanged inter-changed with those of other weapons of the same type, as parts of American Ameri-can weapons can be interchanged, due to their mass-production manufacture. manu-facture. "Italian material, to an even greater degree than German equipment," equip-ment," he said, "shows a total lack of comprehension of lnterchangeabil-ity lnterchangeabil-ity of parts so common to the everyday every-day American in his automobile parts and other everyday things." Japs Poor at Copying. Japane.se material, he said, was light and easily carried, but "poorly designed copies of older American and European weapons." "Workmanship is of low order," he declared, "and even in the all-important all-important ammunition for their weapons it is so poor as to be almost al-most unusable in many instances." "All in all," he said, "the American Ameri-can boys facing Axis armies throughout the world can rest assured as-sured that they are well armed and have in practically all instances a far superior weapon to use against the enemy. "Specific examples are our M-4 'General Sherman' tanks, which are far superior to anything the Axis has to offer. "And the enemy has nothing like our .30-caliber carbine, which is designed de-signed to replace the automatic pistol pis-tol for ground troops. They have nothing to compare with our Garand rifle, and nothing to compare with our Browning .50-caliber machine gun." He said our 105-mm. howitzer, mounted on the M-7 tank destroyer, called "the Priest" because of its pulpit-like turret, was one of the most dangerous weapons that has hit the enemy. |