When confronted by the heavy Soviet tanks in the summer 1941, the German army rapidly realized that the contemporary production of anti-tank guns was insufficient and that was the reason to use numbers of captured guns. One of such types was French 75mm gun model of 1897, vast numbers of which had been taken from French in 1940. The barrels of these were removed from their original field mountings and fitted into modified 5cm Pak.38 carriages. A cage-type muzzle brake was fitted to reduce the recoil stresses arising from the 'up-gunning' of the carriage.