[ M1918 American Chauchat ] <i>Bonjour mes amis, je m'appelle Ian McCollum
et bienvenue à Armes Oubliées</i>. I'm Ian McCollum, thanks for tuning in to
another video on ForgottenWeapons.com. And today of course we have the classic original French automatic rifle, except that this isn't really a French one, it's made in France, but this is the American Model of 1918 Chauchat in .30-06 calibre. And this is I think a long-forgotten weapon of the US First World War, the
American Expeditionary Force. Because when the US entered
World War One in April of 1917, we had a grand total of 1,453
machine guns as a national military. And that was split between
four different types of guns. We did not have enough machine guns
to equip anybody to go anywhere, except basically into Mexico against Pancho Villa,
which is what we were in the process of doing. And so the US figures, "Well, we are
going to send troops over to France, we need something for them
to have to actually shoot." Now there were 4,000 Vickers guns on order
from Colt, but none of them had arrived. And in fact they wouldn't arrive
until late that year, late 1917. So the US starts looking
around at other options. And in June of 1917 Springfield
Armoury tests the French Chauchat. Now ... very sadly the actual testing
report from this experiment has been lost. But it appears that the result was at least
favourable enough to encourage further interest. Because the US the next month,
in July, inquires about the possibility of redesigning the Chauchat to run
.30-06 instead of the French 8mm Lebel. And that's actually done
and it's done fairly quickly. In August of 1917 Springfield runs another
test where they are actually comparing the first .30-06 Chauchat against
a prototype (at that point) of the BAR. Now you may be wondering about the
BAR here, let me just interject for a moment. The BAR at this point was
still a project in development, and it wouldn't be ready for
operational use until the middle of 1918. And it wasn't available in sufficient numbers
to actually be fielded until like October of 1918. So the BAR only sees service at
the very end of the First World War. And that really leaves the American troops kind of
hanging out to dry in terms of automatic weapons. They've got their bolt-action rifles,
we got Springfields, we got Enfield 1917s, but
what about the machine guns? So Springfield has tested the .30-06 Chauchat
against the BAR, alas, this report is also lost. But ... we know the result,
which was the BAR is a better gun. But the BAR is also not available,
and this is good enough that it will do. So the US goes ahead and arranges to
purchase Hotchkiss 1914 heavy machine guns and French calibre Chauchats
for the first two divisions that are being sent over from
the American Expeditionary Force. And they're figuring that after that they'll
be equipping troops with Vickers guns and .30-06 Chauchats until the BAR is ready. And then the BAR will
substitute for the Chauchat. Now there's an interesting other story
in here, that apparently General Pershing turned down an opportunity
for 20,000 Lewis guns, which would have been a fantastic solution,
but that's a subject for a separate video. The US ends up placing an order
for 25,000 .30-06 calibre Chauchats, which are to be delivered by December
of 1917, so a pretty quick turnaround. They are going to be manufactured by
Gladiator, which was the bicycle factory where the French Chauchats
were being manufactured. This gun ... officially (you'll see it on the
side here in a moment) it's the CSRG. And those initials stand for three of the
designers, Chauchat, Sutter and Ribeyrolles, and the "G" is for Gladiator, the
factory where they were manufactured. Anyway, deliveries actually
begin in January of 1918, and these guns go into the field
with American troops in France. So let's take a closer look at this and I'll show
you how it differs from the French Chauchat. These are not conversions, they are
built from the ground up in .30-06. And we'll also talk about
what went wrong with them. Alright, I can't even quite get
both of these things in frame here, but let's start with a quick
overview comparison between the American Chauchat here
and the French Chauchat. ... The first obvious thing that jumps
out at you is the difference in magazines. The French Chauchat has this
very distinctive half-moon magazine. Because it has to, because the 8mm
Lebel cartridge has so much taper to it that when you stack 18 of them
together this is what you get. .30-06 however does
not have that sort of taper, and so the American magazine is a single stack, much simpler, box magazine. And you might think this would be a much
better design, but it's kind of not really. So it's made out of very thin steel. It holds 16 rounds. Personally, myself, I don't ever
load these to more than 12. Because when I start to get this thing full,
I can see on mine the ... feed lips at the top start to bulge apart, this is
not a very strong magazine. So 12, like officially 16 rounds. Not as good of a mag
as you'd think it ought to be. On the other hand, at least it
doesn't have the giant mud holes. Because that hole is ... almost completely
covered by the magazine well when it's in the gun. Alright, next difference
is the vertical front grip. Now the vertical front grip is on the French
Chauchat here basically out of necessity. Because putting it way out here is just too far to
be useful, and you got a magazine in the middle, and so this is kind of the only place
you can put it, and it's awkward to use. The American one, actually that vertical front
grip is in just the right place, like it's great. And you can do that because
it's a straight box magazine. And our third difference
is in the buttstocks. The American gun has a buttstock
that is shorter by like an inch and a half. The mechanical elements of
the gun are the exact same length, but you can clearly see the
difference in buttstock length. And that is universal, like that's
how all the American guns are. If we take a quick look at the markings,
here on the American one we have CSRG. Like I said, the three designers and Gladiator. The American guns all have an
"A" prefix on the serial number. So this is actually fairly late in production, 14,000 out of what would
eventually be 18,000 delivered. Just for comparison sake,
there's the French markings. Exact same thing, but it doesn't
have a ... prefix on the serial number. This American one by
the way is all matching, right down to the barrel
and barrel shroud inside. We only have a couple of serial numbers on the
outside, the one here is on the back end of the tube. You can see again the "A" and 14446. Now there's also a difference in the
sights, but it's a little trickier to describe. So this is our French gun here, but that
rear sight plate ... was added by the Finns. Because a lot of French Chauchats that we
have in the US, including this French one, went to Finland prior to the Winter War as
military aid. So the Finns changed up the sights. Originally on the French gun you would
have this rear notch as your rear sight. Now the American guns have
a much, much deeper rear notch. And I can only assume that that was done
to match the trajectory of the cartridge. If I lift that rear sight up here,
you can see that even better. There's a metal plate that's been screwed onto the
back here, that allows you to adjust your windage. And this really deep V notch in there. This is actually extremely
difficult to get a sight picture on if you have, as far as I can tell, anything
resembling a normal shaped face. Alright, a couple of other quick features here. The ... selector markings on the American guns
are exactly the same as on the French ones. So they are actually marked in
French essentially, "S" is safe, "M" is <i>mécanique</i>, that's full-auto, and "C" is <i>
coup par coup</i>, or shot by shot, or semi-auto. So these are guns that are capable
of ... selective fire, you are semi or full. Again, my experience in the field is that you are
much better off using this in semi-auto than in full. You do get a bipod on the Chauchat, it is too
tall, floppy and really irritating to try to use. But it is there, so ... you've got a bipod,
that's all you can really say for it. Alright, in order to disassemble
this we are going to start by making sure the bolt is forward
so the spring is uncompressed. Then we are going to come to the rear
end cap of the gun, there's a little catch here. I hold that down, and it allows me to
unscrew this rear cap on the receiver tube. Then the springs come out. There's our guide rod, and we have an
internal spring and an external spring. This is so that we have one
spring ... pushing on the bolt, and one spring pushing on the barrel,
because this is a long-recoil gun. Which means the bolt and
barrel are locked together through the entire length
of recoil until they lock back. Then the bolt stays in place backward,
the barrel reciprocates forward. Once the barrel is all the way
forward, then the bolt is released to go forward to pick up
another cartridge. Now fundamentally the design
of the Chauchat is a combination of a very simple sheet-steel lower
assembly with a tubular upper assembly. And they are held together by two things: one is a
pin in the back and the other is this clamp in the front. So I'm going to take this lever
and rotate it 90 degrees down. That will release the front. Then I'm going to come
to the back of the gun. This pin you are supposed
to be able to pull through and then push this tab down
to sort of lock it in place. But this tab doesn't want to
go down, so I'm just going to pull it out the side like that.
This is a retained pin. Once it's lifted out, now I have to
pull the charging handle back, because I need this bar to come out. This piece is attached to the upper. That is
there in the lower, this is camming the feed ramp. And ... there we go. So there's the lower assembly,
we've got our trigger right there. We've got our magazine catch right there. And then we have a feed ramp here.
And this is cammed up and down by the passage of this rod under this plate. So that's a little complicated to show you. But essentially when the bolt is
going forward chambering a round, it lifts this up so that the round will feed and
then ... it drops down when no longer needed. In the upper assembly, I'm going
to pull this back to this point where this slot on the bottom here
widens out and I can lift off this piece. This lug is running in that hole in the bolt. You can see the cam track here, that's
what ... raises and lowers the feed ramp. This is the cartridge pusher,
that is what is actually pushing a round out of the magazine,
up the feed ramp, into the chamber. And that of course is the charging handle. Now we can pull some
more bits out of the gun. I think it ... shows this best if
I pull the whole internal tube out. So you can actually see the
cooling jacket on the barrel here. We are going to pull this all
... out of the back of the gun. Alright, so here's the barrel jacket, the flash
hider up there, the front sight, the receiver tube. This is the barrel up here,
it's actually a relatively short barrel. We have our barrel extension here. And then we actually have the
bolt assembly running inside. And then this is the bolt and bolt carrier. And fundamentally this is
a two-lug rotating bolt to fire. So on the French version basically it's all the
same, except the bolt face is a little bit wider to accommodate the large rim
of the 8mm Lebel cartridge case. I mentioned this aluminium
barrel jacket before. Note that it is actually serialised
to the gun, which is really cool. This is separate, it's
attached to the barrel, but it's not fixed to the barrel, and it's not part
of the barrel, and it's made out of aluminium. And it is intended just to
sink heat off the barrel, and then it's got these ribs so that it can
(in theory) disperse the heat as quickly as possible. Get it out of the gun, keep the gun cool. It sort of worked, it works for a couple
of hundred rounds and then the tubes start expanding at different rates and the gun will
seize up eventually if you shoot too much out of it. So there you go, there is the American Model
of 1918 .30-06 calibre Chauchat field stripped. There is really not that much to it. The parts are all really big,
it is full of sharp edges, and it will very happily cut you
and slam thumbs and such. It is an advanced-level gun to use, but it's really not as bad in some ways as its
reputation makes out, but it is as bad in other ways. So let's talk about what
ended up happening with these. So American troops were issued with their
French small arms when they got to France, and problems fairly quickly
showed up with the 1918 Chauchats. The problems were
largely with extraction. So when the guns got hot,
cases just wouldn't extract. And that's a big problem,
like you need them to. Now these guns were
being tested at the factory, but the factory test was 24 rounds
per gun to make sure they worked. And that's not enough to get
them hot to any substantial degree. Now problems were
being found at the factory, there was allegedly a 40% reject
rate on these guns at Gladiator. I mean they were cranking these things
out fast, and just to put it in perspective, 40% is really bad, but it's not like
that much worse than a lot of other wartime production projects that you see
in World War One and World War Two. The Germans had like a 30% reject
rate of Sturmgewehr 44 receivers. The Russians had huge reject rates on
a bunch of their World War Two productions. So it's not usually surprising that there would
be a lot of guns rejected for quality control. It's actually kind of a good thing
that they were caught. But of course, instead of trying
to find the core problem and fix it, the focus was on finishing the production as quickly
as possible because guns are needed in the field. And so underlying problems
that were able to pass that 24 round check would
then emerge later in the field. And what ... we know today
from researchers investigating this, is that the chambers were cut wrong. And we don't know why, whether it was
a mistake on the blueprints, or bad tooling, or hypothetically even some sort
of German sabotage for all we know. But the chambers were
cut a little too short, the cutout in the barrel for the
extractor was a little too small. And again, when the guns got hot
they just wouldn't extract well. So a lot of the surviving examples have actually
had the chambers just touched up with a reamer and run well, I actually have one myself
that runs really surprisingly well. And I have not fired this one but I am
told that it also runs quite well now. Because there wasn't anything fundamental
about these guns that made them not work. These guns have a poor reputation because
they are very difficult guns to shoot well. There is an experience of shooting a Chauchat that
is really unlike any other machine gun out there. And it's something you have to experience, and
it takes a lot of practice to get good with them. And today nobody does, like nobody has
actually been really good at shooting a Chauchat since probably about 1927, which is
when the Belgians finally got rid of theirs. And I think they were the last country
effectively actually fielding the Chauchat. So in the field, for the US in World War
One, these problems were too severe for guys to apparently be very confident
taking the .30-06 guns into combat. And it appears, although there's
very little documentation about this, that units would train
with the .30-06 guns. But when they actually rotated
up to the front they got issued 8mm Lebel Chauchats,
French calibre Chauchats. In total the US would
acquire 18,004 of these guys, and just under 16,000 (15,998 apparently)
of the French calibre guns. These are found as battlefield relics, ... you'll find magazines, you'll find the guns dug
up on battlefields, so they did see combat service. But it seems that whenever possible
they were kept in the rear for training, and the French calibre ones which were more
reliable, they didn't have these chamber issues, those were the ones that were
actually sent forward for fighting. As for the guns in combat,
they have a mixed reputation. I have a whole video on the French calibre
Chauchat, it would be a bit long probably to get into the reputational issues
versus the reality here in today's video. Suffice to say, there were a lot
of Doughboys who came home very happy to have had their Chauchats,
because they offered a level of firepower far beyond what was possible
to have in a bolt action rifle. There are also plenty of Doughboys who
came home really annoyed at their Chauchats for having given them problems in the field, and
probably a decent number who didn't come home because the Chauchats didn't
work when they needed to. So it is a mixed bag, there's a reputation there, some
of it's based on reality, some of it is exaggeration. The only way to really
find out for yourself how these are to shoot is to
get one and shoot it yourself. And we're at Morphy's, so this is
going somewhere with somebody. Hopefully it goes to someone
who appreciates it. I think these are criminally under-appreciated
as an element of true American military history. Like, the American Expeditionary
Force went over the pond to France, and these are the guns that they took into combat
with them, these and the French calibre ones. So I think they have a place
in any proper US martial collection. Anyway, now I'm totally rambling because it's
a French gun and it's also an American military gun, and I really like them
and I'm clearly biased. So, a big thanks to Morphy's for giving me access
to this one to ramble on and wax poetic about. Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.
