page_title: 25 mm Hotchkiss anti-tank gun
section_title: Foreign use
hierarchical_section_title: 25 mm Hotchkiss anti-tank gun / Foreign use
caption_attribution_description: English: The British Army in France 1939 Men of the 2nd Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers training on a French 25mm SA 34 anti-tank gun, 4 November 1939.
context_page_description: The 25 mm Hotchkiss anti-tank gun was a French anti-tank gun that saw service in the first years of the Second World War.
context_section_description: In 1935 the Hotchkiss 25 mm anti-tank gun was purchased for evaluation by the US Army. Turkey bought 400 examples of the gun during the interwar period.
  When the British Expeditionary Force landed in France in 1939 it had insufficient numbers of anti-tank weapons such as the Ordnance QF 2 pounder. They were issued 300 canons de 25 which became known as Anti-Tank Gun, 25 mm. Hotchkiss, Mark I on 25 mm. Carriage, Mark I in British service. The BEF was fully mechanised and attempted to tow the weapon behind their vehicles, but quickly found that it was not robust enough, because English troops had been issued with the hippomobile version of the cannon (designed to be towed by horses). The solution was to use the gun as a portee, that is, carried in the back of a truck. It was the first artillery piece to be used in this way.
  Examples captured by the German forces were operationally used under the designations 2,5 cm Pak 112(f) for mle 1934 guns and 2,5 cm Pak 113(f) for mle 1937 guns. Some captured guns also made it into Italian service in North Africa as alternatives to the Solothurn S-18/1000, under the designation cannone da 25/72.
  Finland purchased 50 French 25 mm M/37 antitank guns during the Winter War, but only 40 of them were delivered in February 1940 through Norway. The remaining ten guns were captured by the Germans when they invaded Norway in the spring of 1940. About half of the guns, which had arrived during the Winter War, saw front line service during it and three of them were lost in battle. During the Interim Peace the Germans sold 200 captured guns to Finland. 133 of them were model M/34s and 67 were model M/37s, and they were designated 25 PstK/34 and 25 PstK/37, respectively. They were withdrawn from front line use by 1943.
  Some were used by the Việt Minh at the beginning of the First Indochina War.
caption: Men of the British Expeditionary Force train with a Hotchkiss 25mm anti-tank gun, November 1939
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