Chauchat
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The Chauchat (pronounced 'show-shah'), from a design by Hungarian Rudolph Frommer, was the primary French light machine gun of World War I, first introduced in 1907. It is generally regarded as one of the great engineering failures in the history of firearms. It fired 8mm Lebel rifle rounds at a relatively slow rate of 250rpm. However, it is estimated that over 250,000 were manufactured, making it the most widely manufactured automatic weapon during World War I.
The Chauchat was designed in such a way that mud and debris easily found their way into the inner workings of the gun. In the muck ridden environment of trench warfare this was an invitation to disaster. It regularly jammed in battlefield conditions. The most frequent malfunction was failure to extract spent shells, and thus the next round would get wedged into an occupied chamber, seizing up the mechanism. Additionally it used a 'long recoil' system that threw a tremendous force against the user's shoulder, resulting in a very unwieldy weapon, even when it worked correctly. It was of a rather shoddy stamped metal construction, of such poor quality that oftentimes its parts were not interchangeable between guns, so a new gun could not be assembled from the parts of two separate guns. It has sometimes been referred to as 'the worst machine gun ever issued to any army at any time in history' in English language firearms texts.
Notably, French sources consider the gun's performance poor but acceptable. Given the lack of other light automatic weapons available at the time this is not unreasonable as the nearest comparable weapon was the Lewis Gun which was considerably more expensive yet also suffered from serious jamming problems.
Because of a lack of equipment, the American Expeditionary Force was issued with Chauchats from their French allies. They received about 34,000 in 1917, about 26,000 of which had been modified to fire the more powerful US .30-06 caliber round. The performance of the M1917 .30-06 Chauchat was far worse than the original and it was unceremoniously dumped by the troops to which it was issued. No further .30-06 caliber weapons were produced and when supplies of the superior, but more expensive, Browning Automatic Rifle became available they were immediately acquired. Where required, the AEF used the French M1915 version of the Chauchat for the rest of the war.
Post-war information alleged that the design change to .30-06 had used incorrect measurements but the radical differences in size, shape, impulse and power of the 8mm Lebel and .30-06 US rounds almost certainly explain the disastrous performance of the .30-06 version.
Over 5,000 Chauchats were donated to Finland and were used, for lack of anything better, during the Winter War and Continuation War against Russia. Some remnants of the French design popped up in the 1960s during the Vietnam War.
External link
- Chauchat Gun (http://www.firstworldwar.com/atoz/mgun_chauchat.htm) on firstworldwar.com (http://www.firstworldwar.com/index.htm)pl:Karabin maszynowy Chauchat