Type 76 twin 37 mm naval gun

The Type 76 twin 37mm naval gun is a small caliber naval artillery piece developed by China for anti-aircraft and anti-surface purposes.

The lineage of the Type 76 originates with the Type 61, which was the Chinese army's modification of the Soviet V-11 model of the 37 mm automatic air defense gun M1939 (61-K). In the late 1950s, the People's Liberation Army Navy updated the Soviet V-11 naval gun by incorporating a semi-automatic operation to reduce manpower needed to operate the gun. The result was the Type 61, named after the year in which the development was competed. Type 61 incorporated the semi-automatic operational mode, but as a precautionary measure, the manual operational mode of the original Soviet V-11 gun is also retained as a backup.

Despite satisfactory results, the Type 61 did not enter mass production because China was still recovering from the political turmoil caused by the Great Leap Forward, during which time many military programs were scaled back or canceled altogether. As a result, the Type 61 only entered Chinese service in very limited numbers and never saw action in any battles.

Although limited, the service experience of the Type 61 proved that the semi-automatic operational mode design was reliable and the manual operational mode was not needed. In 1965, the Type 65 model was released without a manual operational mode, and series production was scheduled to begin in the following year. Like its predecessor, though, the planned series production of Type 65 also suffered from political turmoil, this time in the form of the Cultural Revolution. As with Type 61, Type 65 only entered Chinese service in very limited numbers. It did see action in real battles, but not against foreign enemies: during the fractional fighting among Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution, Guards in Sichuan seized the Type 65 guns from the production factory and used the guns in battles against each other.

The Type 76 is a further development of the Type 65. The Chinese military wanted to further improve the Type 65 by incorporating a fully automatic operational mode, but political turmoil from the Cultural Revolution delayed development of the Type 65's successor until its eventual release in 1976.

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