North Vietnam retired the PaK-40 in 1972, so none were in use during the 1975 final conquest of South Vietnam. North Vietnam did, however, employ PaK-40 guns in defensive units in the Red River corridor, including coastal defense batteries along the coast of the Gulf of Tonkin. The USSR reverse-engineered this ammunition during WWII and based on the stampings on the ammunition’s baseplates, these are Soviet-made rounds, at least the two facing backwards.) Additionally, the near-complete air superiority of American warplanes made moving and emplacing towed field guns like this very hazardous. The North Vietnamese did not often employ their PaK-40s in the intended anti-tank role, as they sought to avoid set-piece confrontations with American or South Vietnamese tanks. (North Vietnamese PaK-40 guns on parade in Hanoi during the late 1950s or early 1960s.) They were refurbished before the transfer. They had been captured during WWII and kept is storage for ten years afterwards. In 1955, the USSR transferred a small number of PaK-40 guns to North Vietnam. (Breechblock assembly of a Vietnamese PaK-40, today preserved at the Vietnam Artillery Museum.) During WWII, this was an extremely effective anti-tank gun capable of taking on even the T-34 and M4 Sherman. It weighed 3,142 lbs and fired 75x714mm AP or HE rounds out to a range of about 1,820 yards in the anti-tank role or 4 miles when used as a light howitzer. The 75mm PaK-40 was a standard anti-tank gun of the Wehrmacht during WWII. (Taken from a 1966 US Army “Jungle And Guerrilla Warfare” booklet, this collection of Viet Cong firearms includes a StG-44, a 98k, and a MG-34.) This was probably staged inport, as the North Vietnamese did not typically assign combat photographers to smuggling junk runs.) (Crewmen on a North Vietnamese sail junk take aim with an ex-Wehrmacht MG-34 in the 1960s. The most surprising weapons were WWII German designs, which, through a strange combination of politics and necessity, ended up in combat halfway around the world in Vietnam two decades after their last use in Europe. There were even a few WWII Japanese guns floating around, left over from the Japanese occupation. Some old WWII-era Soviet and American weapons were used by the two sides respectively, and to a lesser extent, WWII-era French weapons left over from the Indochina War. During the Vietnam War, the communists in the north were armed mainly with post-WWII design Soviet weapons, while their opponents in the south used almost exclusively post-WWII American weapons.
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