The St. Paul Echo

ST. PAUL ECHO

Kaiser's Experts Let Big Opportunity Pass

Colonel Deport, inventor of the "75," the rapid-firing gun that saved France, died a few years after the war. Before he passed away the colonel wrote the story of the gun and revealed how France came within an ace of losing the plans and models long before the war. When the first models had been constructed, they were carefully sealed in a freight car and shipped to an isolated section of the country for a tryout. The car was by mistake hooked up to a goods train, destined for Germany and actually landed on German soil. The Germans opened the car and immediately officers of the artillery school came down to examine the guns minutely. But they let them go again, reporting that no officer would be able to manage a battery of guns that could each fire a hundred shots per minute. And so the gun came back, though the Germans managed to make an imperfect copy. The real secret of the hydropneumatique was never mastered in Germany, even in 1914, when the kaiser's armies captured plenty of models.—Pierre Van Paassen, in the Atlanta Constitution.