Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at DriveTanks.com down in Texas,
where we are taking a look at a Model of 1937 Puteaux 25mm anti-tank gun.
This is one of two light anti-tank guns that France had at the beginning of World War Two.
Now these guns replaced the Model of 1916, which was a 37mm, low velocity, infantry cannon,
that was what would have been an anti-tank gun if Germany had had any tanks of substance in World War One.
They didn't, the gun was really used as sort of a bunker and machine gun nest weapon, to take out those targets.
And what the French found in World War One is that it was important to have this sort of weapon be light
and portable and easily advanced with the front waves of infantry.
So that when infantry ran into a strong point they had something that they could use on it.
Maybe not the very first wave, but you didn't want guns that required a lot of
infrastructure to be able to bring up to the front and put into use.
I say this because this tactical reality heavily influenced their development of anti-tank guns
during the 1920s and '30s, which led to this, and also the Model of 1934 Hotchkiss gun.
So the French government wanted a 25mm anti-tank gun and they put this out to industry to build.
And the Hotchkiss company built one and the Puteaux Arsenal,
a government-run arsenal, also built a model. Both of them ended up going into service.
So we have here the Puteaux, it has a slightly longer barrel, but other than that the guns look really quite similar.
Now ... right now I've got this thing with the shield folded up,
I've got the trail folded together, and this is in the travelling configuration.
And before I unpack it, I should point out a couple things. There were a couple real deficiencies of this gun.
And one of them was it really wasn't well set up for motorised transport.
There is no suspension on ... the carriage of this. It does have pneumatic tires, but no suspension on it.
So this was limited to something like 15 km/h off-road travel and 30 km/h on road.
That would be a problem for the French, and also for the British who used some of these guns early in World War Two before Dunkirk.
The other problem of course is its calibre. ...
The best way to put it I think is this was a great anti-tank gun in the early 1930s,
and in the mid-1930s when it was developed.
Going into World War Two this was really capable of doing some pretty darn good effect on
basically everything except the heaviest tanks that were available at the time.
You've got to remember during the 1930s most of what's being developed are light tanks, tankettes, medium tanks perhaps.
It was only after a couple years of war that some of the really heavy tanks started coming into service.
So as I mentioned before, the design philosophy, the tactics, that this was designed for emphasised
movement, concealment, mobility, flexibility.
And so you can't do that with a very heavy gun, this whole thing only weighs about 620 pounds.
It can be easily moved around by a relatively small crew, towed by a horse, or almost any sort of motor vehicle.
So, let's go ahead and unpack this and we'll take a look at how it works,
then we'll talk about how many there were, and what ended up happening to them.
So this armour shield is currently folded up for transport.
So the first thing I'm gonna do is unfold this. There's a spring catch here
that we will fold down and, well, I'll latch that in a moment when you can see it.
We're then gonna lift this guy up, that allows these to fold out.
Each of these drops into position and locks in place once I open it up.
Go ahead and drop that into place, we can then
drop the middle section in. That locks this whole shield together.
Note that the top of the shield is cut in a wavy pattern so that there are fewer
straight horizontal lines to make this look like a man-made object. These guns were very easy to hide.
We'll talk about that a little bit more in a minute.
I have two additional little pieces of armour
that fold down behind the axles.
You can only put these down after the plates are around behind the wheels.
I can then take this spring keeper, lock it down into place there.
Next up we have to open up the split trail. So normally there's a keeper pin here,
this one's actually being repaired right now. So I lift this latch up,
there we go, that disconnects these two. I can then pop them apart.
Alright, then we're gonna spread these all the way apart.
Now there are little spades under here, you lift this up, fold the spade out.
I'm not gonna do that because we're on concrete not dirt.
And now this actually sits on a little single pedestal mount when it fires, so I have to drop this.
There's a little trigger right here, pull that,
there we go, drops down.
It takes some of the weight off the wheels, but it's still resting on the wheels, as well as this centre plate, as well as the rear spades.
The next thing I would normally do is install the muzzle brake.
So this is quickly removable, or relatively quickly removable,
in order to shorten the overall length of the gun by about a foot for transportation.
And it locks into this plate here, with a little keeper spring right there that locks around that.
However, this particular gun has had its original French muzzle device replaced
with this aftermarket one. And this one is really tightly carboned on there.
So, it'll come off eventually but it'll take some oil and some time, so we're leaving it on today.
One more little task here before we're all ready to fire is to take our traverse wheel and actually install it.
So this again has a spring-loaded keeper, pull that out to release this,
and this is going to slot into there.
The wheel out,
bring it back from its stowage position.
There we go.
That pops in there and then I can lock it in place. Now I can traverse the gun.
We've got some nice clear markings here on the top of the breech block.
We've got the model designation, which is 1937, and we have the serial number and the manufacturing date and arsenal.
This is Ateliers de Puteaux, or Puteaux workshops. This is a 1940 production gun.
These were only in production for a couple years. In fact, they only managed to make 1,285 of them
before the Armistice, before production shut down in mid-1940.
After the Armistice the Germans of course ended up with a lot of these. They renamed them the PaK 113(f).
For what it's worth, the Hotchkiss version was the 112(f).
The Germans would use a few of them themselves, and they also use them as military aid to other countries.
So this one, as you can see by this tag, went to Finland.
Finland got some, Spain I believe also got some of these.
So the way this works mechanically is that it has a vertically travelling breech block, slides up and down to lock.
It is what's known as a semi-automatic action.
Which is to say that it will automatically eject the empty case out the back of the gun when you fire,
then leave the breech block open ready to be manually loaded with the next round.
So in operating this the first thing that we have to keep in mind is to always cock the action,
make sure that it's cocked before opening the breech. So this lever is a manual re-cocking lever.
... One of the design flaws here is if you have dry fired this and the firing pin's sticking forward,
and then you open the breech block without re-cocking it,
the firing pin is still sticking forward into the action and it will shear the tip of the firing pin off.
So cock it, and then punch down on this lever with a bit of force.
There is basically an artillery snap cap in there, right there, that will come out when I do.
So we got this little guy, which is just in there so that the gun can be safely dry fired,
but gives you a really cool view of how that action actually works.
Inside, what we have going on (I'm gonna use a poker here because I don't want to get my fingers in this),
you have two ejectors or extractors right there. You can see I'm pushing one up.
That one is linked to the lock that holds the breech block open.
So in order to load this I'm going to take my "new" shell here, we're gonna set it in there. [Note this dummy ... is cut down. ...]
And with a live shell in actual combat what you would do is push this in with a little bit of velocity,
the rim will catch on the extractor and as it goes in it will lock the breech,
... the breech will snap closed. I'm going to use a push rod.
Once I get there I'm engaging with the extractor.
Boomp, up it comes, and now it's locked, and I still have all my fingers intact.
Now in order to aim this guy we have of course a traverse wheel
here on the bottom at the back. And we have an elevation wheel.
You can see the compound screw there that this elevates with.
So I use that to bring the gun onto target.
There are actually two aiming devices that you can use. There's a 4x power optical sight here.
And there's also a set of iron sights. So I'll show you here, there's an aperture there,
and then you can see the post front sight right there.
So there's your sight picture through the iron sights. You can see the rear aperture, and I can bring that front post in.
Focus is not really going to work for us here, but there's your iron sight.
And then there is the view through the optical sight. You can see we have a crosshair at the top, and then we have
windage and elevation stadia, so that you can adjust aim for different ranges and different conditions.
The windage stadia are there not so much for wind but for moving targets, so you know how far in advance to aim.
Alright, so once you have your target in sight and you're ready to fire, your firing lever is right here on the elevation wheel.
There's also a manual safety to it, which is this little guy.
So as long as that's in, like it is now, it locks the firing lever. To fire we're gonna pull that out and then
snap and kaboom, there goes a shell.
When that happens this whole assembly comes recoiling backwards.
It will hit a cam, drop the breech block, throw the empty case out the back.
It'll then reciprocate forward, the breech block stays locked open ready for you to load the next round.
There is a big ol' spring on the barrel,
right here, that is going to actually do the work of pulling the action forward after firing.
And we have a cylinder here to provide the resistance against the gun recoiling backwards.
So the shell used by both these and the 25mm Hotchkiss guns was the 25x193mm rimmed casing.
So I don't have a full shell here, but I do have this empty casing that I can show you.
Now most of the time an infantry gun like this, a light anti-tank gun, would actually be able to be used
in multiple different roles because they would have a variety of different ammunition types.
For a 37mm, for example, there's enough capacity inside a 37mm projectile to put in a useable
high explosive charge. And so you'd have a variety of explosive and also armour-piercing shells.
For the 25mm French cartridge, 25mm is just not really big enough to have a substantial payload.
So with these they only had two types of ammunition: they had armour-piercing, and they had armour-piercing tracer.
So that armour-piercing projectile, according to the French, at 400 metres it would penetrate 40mm of armour at a 25 degree slope.
The Soviets did some trials on these guns, what they found was 36mm of armour at a 30 degree slope at 100 metres,
dropping to 32mm of armour at 300.
... These are numbers that are not particularly impressive by mid to late World War Two standards,
but were really perfectly adequate at the beginning of World War Two.
There is at least one incident where one of these guns really wreaked havoc on a column German Panzer I and Panzer II tanks.
Because of the long barrel and the relatively small projectile,
these actually had very little flash signature. That huge flash hider helps.
They were very difficult to detect, they're very physically small guns, they're easily moved, they're easily hidden.
And in that way these fit their tactical role really quite well.
So, like I said, there were actually two guns very much like this. We have the Puteaux, this one,
and then there was also the 25mm Hotchkiss gun.
In French service, ... they made about three times as many of the Hotchkiss guns, the 1934.
And those were a little bit heavier, a little bit more durable,
and those were issued out to ... specifically anti-armour units.
The Puteaux guns were issued to infantry support companies.
In total I guess 1,285 of these manufactured, a little over 4,400 of the Hotchkiss guns in the same calibre,
and then the French did also have a 47mm anti-tank gun that was developed right about the same time period,
between '37 and '39. That was the last one to come into production, it was only made in relatively small numbers,
but it was actually a very effective gun and really quite feared by German armour during the Battle of France.
But there weren't enough of them, and they weren't used in the right places to make any ultimate difference in the battle.
So if I were to give this an overall sort of conclusion, I would say the 25mm Puteaux was a gun
that ... had a bunch of pros. It was flexible, it was mobile, it was small and discreet and easy to hide.
It was a very accurate gun, and it fired a cartridge that was high velocity, about 3,150 feet per second.
And it was perfectly capable of filling the role of a light to general anti-tank gun in 1939.
Now the problem was of course when the war broke out development of heavier and heavier armour happened really quite quickly,
and within just a year or two 25mm guns like this were pretty thoroughly obsolete.
So the downsides of course would be the fact that it ... had relatively low power and became obsolete quickly.
Not really well designed for motorised transportation.
This is a trade-off, you can have durability or you can have weight.
Or you can have durability or light weight. You can't really have both at the same time.
And so this gun skewed to the side of being light weight,
and thus lost out on some of the the durability, and the suspension systems, and that sort of thing.
So I'd like to give a really big thanks to DriveTanks.com down here in Uvalde, Texas,
for giving me the opportunity to take a look at this thing and show it to you.
... If you check out their website at DriveTanks.com they have a whole bunch of machine guns, artillery pieces,
and full-on, fully functional, historic, fascinating tanks that you can drive and shoot. So check them out.
Thanks for watching.