Development
After World War I the French military expressed a need for an anti-aircraft autocannon. The Hotchkiss company submitted its 25 mm design, but it was rejected as being too slow-firing, so the weapon was proposed for export instead. In 1938, as the international situation was worsening, and the favoured Schneider 37 mm autocannon was still not ready for production, the French military decided to reconsider its refusal to Hotchkiss, who had just won a contract with Romania. The export guns were held in France and impressed into domestic service. The original tripod was found to be unstable, which led to the development of a revised variant with a triangular base with a two-wheel carriage. This new variant was chosen for mass production, but at the time of the German attack in May 1940, only a few hundred of these guns were in service. With them and only approximately two hundred Oerlikons, the lack of modern light AA guns greatly hampered the French army in the campaign.
Read more about this topic: 25 Mm Hotchkiss Anti-aircraft Gun
Famous quotes containing the word development:
“They [women] can use their abilities to support each other, even as they develop more effective and appropriate ways of dealing with power.... Women do not need to diminish other women ... [they] need the power to advance their own development, but they do not “need” the power to limit the development of others.”
—Jean Baker Miller (20th century)
“The Cairo conference ... is about a complicated web of education and employment, consumption and poverty, development and health care. It is also about whether governments will follow where women have so clearly led them, toward safe, simple and reliable choices in family planning. While Cairo crackles with conflict, in the homes of the world the orthodoxies have been duly heard, and roundly ignored.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“There are two things which cannot be attacked in front: ignorance and narrow-mindedness. They can only be shaken by the simple development of the contrary qualities. They will not bear discussion.”
—John Emerich Edward Dalberg, 1st Baron Acton (1834–1902)