French Rifles of World War 1 featuring Othais from C&RSENAL I THE GREAT WAR - Special

hi i'm indy neidell and as most of you know I'm the host of the YouTube channel the Great War and with me here in Berlin for this hangout is our social media guy Florian hello now tonight this hangout is the first of many hangouts where we're going to explore the weapons of the first world war as many of you have asked us about that on our channel what kind of stuff did people actually use and the best way to do that is to have an incredible weapons expert and that's what we have with us tonight live from Charleston South Carolina we have o'the eius say hi hey how's it going guys now we're going to go through the weapons the rifles and the pistols / - yes particularly country by country and today we're just doing one country today we're talking about France yes yes and we're also going to subdivide down to just the sort of mainline rifles and pistols today um so I was thinking um since the war started at the end of July 1914 maybe we could jump in as a starting point and and talk about what the French were actually going off to war with the standard equipment that a Frenchman would have in the first say month of the war if you want to take us out there France is going to be a really good indicator of this but when we look at all these small arms there's a quote that goes around that you're always prepared for the last war and this is sort of the case in a lot of Europe going to the First World War there's a lot in research technology about repeating rifles and machine guns and things like that but most the armies are still just carrying around bolt-action rifles and revolvers are very very basic pistols France is a really really good size how about this they're really good example this because despite being such an influential country they don't really have the most advanced weapons we're going to see designs mostly from the 1890s being called in in the first few months of 1914 in that case what I'm going to show you today are mostly going to be bolt-action rifles and simple pistols so as soon as you guys are ready I get started on that okay I am ready I was just thinking now France hadn't been well there hadn't been a mainland main all European war our main main European war since the franco-prussian war and that was a whole generation before so France had of course still been developing new stuff but you say that it was mostly twenty years old the stuff that they were bringing in at the beginning of the war it would be great to just jump right in and get a look at some of it the pervy the perfect example that is going to be what is their primary rifle at a time this is the 1886 m93 labelled bolt-action rifle now as you can tell if I can get my camera space it's a fairly long now we're going to see this over and over again with France by World War 1 we have semi mechanized mechanized warfare we've got trains moving people around you know we're in our trenches and things like that this sort of length is unnecessary and a lot of people ask why I was kept and you'll see a lot of historians telling you that it was kept because they thought that the longer barrel gave them accuracy but we kind of knew by that point that we didn't need that much accuracy anyway the biggest issue especially out of France is that the military still wanted soldiers to be able to fire in two lines they wanted to be able to line up and then have a gap and have somebody firing between that gap and so the length here is just so you don't shoot the next guy in the back and realistically we don't see that kind of fighting in World War one but that was still standard for what the Army was requesting not only on this gun but on some of the semi automatics that come out towards the end of the war so there really is sort of like a thought process that drags far beyond what's actually happening on the battlefield but for the Lebel itself this gun came out in 1886 it was the first smokeless powder dry 'full so everything before that's black powder it still had brass you know cartridges and things like that but it was slower moving a shorter range this gun doubled the length of the battlefield overnight and it sent everybody scrambling to keep up but because it was the first smokeless they got a lot of things wrong I mean this gun was designed in all of six months I mean it was a rush so they really didn't think out things like the shape of the ammo or the feed system with a balance or any of that stuff so we have an old-style tubular loading magazine and you'll see in the video that we have here that you have to open this thing up and load eight rounds one by one as slow as you can or quickly as you can hopefully but still it's not a fast process you're going to stack them up you're going to get one in the carrier and then for the French they didn't put a safety on their guns so you would actually pull it was nothing in the chamber and you'd March off to war and when you were ready to fight you would then load your first round and be good to go now that is fine now that you have nine rounds to work with that's actually fairly good for World War one battlefield but when it came time to reload this thing you better have good cover because you have to take the time to do it and you also have to carry nine and a half pounds of this across the battlefield wherever you go all day every March you know every attack this thing has to come with you so the French came up with a different system known as the Bertier and you'll see this as much handier this is a little bit later of a model but effectively the same design on this particular gun they then later in 1892 gave it over to artillery and other special support troops Communications basically anybody that doesn't need to be frontline infantry could have got one of these now during the war they would do some upgrades to it and this is like the first of the upgrades this is a this is still marked as a model 16 but it doesn't have any of the other features so this sort of sits in between the 1892 and 16 the one I'm holding here but these were originally three shot rifles so if we zoom in what they did is they found that they can load three rounds as fast as they could load one by using an end block clip so again these are dummy rounds they have no powder no primer but what we can do is as soon as just as fast as loading one round on the previous gun we can go ahead and stick three in there so now we're ready to shoot three rounds of this gun so what would happen is we shoot this thing clear and then when it when we had the final round the chamber it would just fall out this hole in the bottom that hole became a problem though because of in World War one mud and other debris on the battlefield would get into the action jam everything up these little carbines were great but they have a limited shot capacity and they're fairly light so the recoils much worse but they're easier to manufacture to the French find that out just as a coincidence so little three shots get turned into rifles at first it was done in order to arm troops in Indochina because the shorter natives were not handling the Lebel too well there's a big heavy rifle they kind of made a rifle in between this length than the one I just showed you that's the 1902 they liked it so much they started sending it to Africa that was done 1907 in 1915 like I said desperate to manufacture more rifles they took that little carbine and the African rifle and merged some features simplified everything to share as many parts as possible with the Lebel to take the Lebel bayonet instead of a special bayonet and they came out with this the O 715 so as you can see we're back to a full length rifle it shares the same length barrel as the little Ballack shares the sights but we are still still in 1915 we're making a three shot rifle to carry into World War one so whenever you think of those French advances it's important to remember that most of them were going to be done with either a heavy labelled infantry rifle or these guys or if you're lucky if you're lucky you were given one of the various three shot carbines and that's what you had to take against the German machine yet it boggles the mind every time you think you've heard it all and then then he explains something and something some new way for people that get themselves killed maybe you have to manually and then you get one and then you reckon annually and you get two you do that three times and then you guys start all over again what a Jaffray ourfox think of their their rifles compared to say those of the British or the Germans that were they satisfied with the three shot or were they satisfied with the labeller I mean do you know anything that they specifically said about what they wished for or were they happy with where how things were going as far as I understand it really until you see something like the Americans get involved most higher echelon leaders just think of them as rifles they just I don't know that they think that much detail a lot of these guys come in at at such a higher level and don't go through the same sort of training they might not even shot these rifles it kind of depends I'm not that strong of a military historian but it's depending on what rank they rose from to them generally especially when you have an arms revolution that goes on you know the 1890s where everything's changing so rapidly this thing was probably miles better than what they had if they were serving when they were younger so to them it was already advanced they might not even know that they're being beaten now there's there's not that much of an eye on the gun itself because it shoots straight and shoots as far as the other guy's gun you guys just need to be a little braver it's really the attitude that comes out of it but obviously at some point it does start having you know effect on their attrition rate so it does come to light I mean he eventually does because we're going to see some minor changes so the next thing let me get some of these out the next big thing is they take that three shot carbine and they make it five shot Wow go wow there we go there we go our target so now we're up to here so let me get close up again so I'll make trim let me zoom on in again and adjustments up now we got five that's looking a little better this is matching just matching what the Germans are doing we're not we're not going any higher but look at all the extra space it takes up on this particular design part of that is because this is rimmed ammo and that's going to really drive the French crazy rimmed ammo when these things slide together they want a lock on each other so you have to design the magazines very carefully in the clips very carefully so the ammunition snag on the next round down and so that's why you see steep angles for feed and everything on these kind of guns you'll see it on the Russian stuff - they're rimmed as well but we're up to five the other thing that we've finally done and you guys don't you you haven't been over here to shoot with me yet but they heat up real fast and we finally put a handguard here that way we can shoot and then this is crazy move because previously you would shoot from your nice position with your right bolt get a couple rounds out it would get hot and then you'd have to carry that thing back across the battlefield and it'd be scalding your hand because there just wasn't really a provision on the previous gun to keep that hot barrel off of off your sensitive skin the Germans thought about this a lot better we're going to see that we're going to see hand guards rinse the other features from their equipment and really until you see the German episode that we're going to do is you're getting half the picture but really the French at this point with this gun they're just trying to match the Germans they're just playing catch-up that was part one of our weapons special without ice where he talked about the French rifles used on their evolution there will be a second part because we also talked about French pistols during our live event you should check out oh ties detailed videos about all the weapons we briefly discussed today and subscribe to his channel if you're interested in historic firearms follow us on Facebook or Twitter so you don't miss the announcement for our next live event when we'll talk about German rifles

Channel: The Great War

Views: 432,077

Keywords: History, History channel, Documentary, Footage, Great War, First World War, World War I (Military Conflict), WWI, 20th Century, 1914 to 1918, British Pathé, Indiana Neidell, Wilhelm II, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Winston Churchill, Mediakraft, Original, France, Firearms, Guns, Rifles, Berthier carbine, Lebel Model 1886 rifle, Cartridge, Historic Firearms, Military History, Othais, C&RSENAL, Caliber, Reloading, Shooting Range, Ammunition, Poilu, Cavalry

Id: 0_v_ZdFXk_M

Length: 12min 51sec (771 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 24 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/Otter_Bob]

This was great. Please keep working together. My selfish request is for Othais and Mae to rank the current weapon being tested against the previous weapons and keep them in a list.

[u/citoloco]

Great series, great production team guys. Many thanks.

[u/Akira_Yamamoto]

You guys are always coming out with cool stuff :D

[u/Crap_Sally]

I enjoyed that video a lot. The ineptness of the commanders wasn't just limited to battle tactics, but the guns! I didn't really realize that.

[u/SloppyChops]

Genuinely disappointed when the episode finished, I was so engrossed. Great episode, great series, great channel!

[u/[deleted]]

Can't wait for more with Othais!