Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the Morphy Auction Company taking a look at some of the guns they're going to be selling in their upcoming April of 2019 Premier Auction. And what we have today here is the French World War One heavy machine gun. This is the Hotchkiss Model of 1914. It wasn't the only heavy French machine gun during World War One. They also use substantial numbers of the 1907
Saint-Étienne machine gun, which by the way I have a previous video on. Which you should definitely
check out after this one because it's interesting to put two guns side-by-side for comparison.
But this was the most heavily produced, and really the mainstay of the
French Army during World War One. So what we have here is an
air-cooled, strip-fed, heavy machine gun. So it did feed from [24] round metallic feed strips. We'll talk about
the pros and cons of those compared to cloth belts in a moment. Ironically, this is actually an invention that originated with an Austrian
guy, an Austrian army officer by the name of Adolf von Odkolek, who in the 1890s came up with a
patent for this gas piston operated gun. And he didn't have the capacity to manufacture
it himself, and so he went to Paris in the 1890s and approached the Hotchkiss company, which had
an excellent reputation at that point for making guns. ... The Hotchkiss Revolving Cannon was
probably their most successful product. And anyway, he brought the gun to them and what he
wanted to do was licence them to manufacture his gun. Well, ... two guys at Hotchkiss took a
look at it. These were Laurence Benét, who was an American living in France
as chief engineer for the company (Hotchkiss had been founded by an American, Benjamin Hotchkiss,
although he had passed away by the time this was happening), and then also Benét's assistant, a guy named Lawrence Mercié,
who was a Frenchman also working for the company. And they took a look at this patent
of Odkoleks and they ... decided, "You know what? His gun's kind of crap. We don't
want to make this, it's not gonna work well. However, the mechanical system at the heart of this
gun, which he had patented, is very interesting. This is a system that allows us to bypass ... Like we can build this, based on his patent,
without infringing on Colt or Maxim patents." And those are the other two companies heavily involved
in manufacturing heavy machine guns at this point. And Hotchkiss wanted to get in
on this new growing business. So they bought out ... Odkolek's patent and
then modified the gun to be their own design. They took his mechanical system, turned it into
their own gun, which came out initially in 1897. And even in 1897 it looked very much like this. Really the most notable difference is these
rings, which they put on there to absorb heat. The idea was it's an air-cooled gun, it's going
to get hot. What can we do to mitigate that? Well, we can increase surface area and
increase mass. And what this does is simply increase the amount of thermal energy that the barrel can absorb
before it actually increases in temperature enough to be a problem. In fact it's interesting the official manual for using
this gun talks about how you fire ... so many rounds ... within a certain time period. Then you you give
the gun a rest while you sponge this down with water to suck the heat out of those barrel rings. Well anyway, the early guns, the 1897s, these
barrel rings were actually made out of brass. In 1900 they decided, "Nyah, that's a little excessive.
We can just use steel and it will work just as well." ... As I was getting to, they improved the guns
a bit in 1900. They changed this over to steel. There were some problems with the gas piston. It had been
a bit fragile in the early guns and they strengthened that. And then they proceeded to actually sell these
things relatively widely on the international market. They sold them to a bunch of countries in South America.
They sold them into Scandinavia. They sold them to Japan. Japan would actually become a big
proponent of the Hotchkiss system. And they would not only buy some of these but then
they would licence and further copy the design for both light and heavy machine guns,
the Type 11s, the Type 3s, the Type 92s. All of those guns are, you know, derived from the
original Hotchkiss. At any rate, sold them to Japan. And they actually sold a number of them to the French
government as well, in particular for colonial service. So the other guns that were out there
at the time, in particular the Maxim gun, which was the world standard for heavy
machine guns, are water-cooled guns. Well, many of the French colonial
interests at this time are in northern Africa. And there's not necessarily a lot of water in northern Africa,
and if you take something like a water-cooled Maxim gun and you try to shoot a significant volume of fire through it without
having water in that barrel jacket, it will overheat very quickly. Because it uses the water for cooling
it has a very light profile barrel inside. So without the water that's a problem,
and it would really suck to send off, you know, an expeditionary force into
the Sahara and have them discover that, "Oh, our machine guns don't work because
we don't have any spare water for them." So that's why the French were
interested in this for colonial use. Now when World War One breaks out ... Actually I should back up a step. They weren't
interested in this gun for general army use because, to be just blatant about it, they were
too cheap to pay for the royalties. They figured they could have a gun
built by the French state arsenals, which they owned the rights to everything that
was done in there, and then they could have a more efficient, more cost effective
system for building machine guns. Well, this resulted in the development of
the 1905 Puteaux and the 1907 Saint-Étienne. The Saint-Étienne in particular is
kinda like take a Hotchkiss gun, and then reverse how everything works so that it's doing
the same thing, but it doesn't infringe on the patents. That's kind of the Saint-Étienne. However, once we get to 1914, war breaks out, the Saint-
Étienne is in fact a particularly expensive gun to manufacture, and the French military realises,
"We're gonna need a lot more of these guns." And so at that point they decide to adopt the
Hotchkiss ... formally as the Model of 1914 Hotchkiss. So they made two significant changes between
the commercial 1900s and the military 1914s. Those would be: one, they got rid of the shoulder stock.
The original guns didn't have this D ring handle on the back, they had a pistol grip and a rather intricate
shoulder stock attached to the top cover here. They changed that out for the D ring because the shoulder
stocks weren't considered necessary, and they were big and bulky. And then they also simplified the
mechanism for ... taking the barrel off. They went from a split pin on the 1900s
to a rotary lever on the 1914s, so. With that background in mind, one of the particularly
impressive things about this gun is its disassembly. There are a minimum number of parts, despite how funky and
big and complicated it looks, it actually has very few parts in it. It requires no tools, besides possibly a hammer, to
disassemble. No screws, no pins. It's a pretty cool disassembly. So let me go ahead and show you that. We have the major markings on the side of the
receiver here. Mitrailleuse Automatique Hotchkiss, Hotchkiss automatic machine gun.
"Brevetee S.G.D.G." basically means it's patented. But, you know, the government guarantees the patent but doesn't
guarantee that it'll work. That's just a standard legalistic thing. And then calibre 8mm. These were made in a
wide variety of other calibres for other countries. On the other side of the receiver
we have the serial number and the date. Hotchkiss had one continuous serial number run of
these guns, 35,000 would put this at probably early 1918. This is by the way in contrast to the Saint-Étienne guns
where they started a new serial number range every year. In terms of operation it is a very
simple gun. There is no manual safety, there is no semi-automatic feature.
There is a trigger. You pull the trigger and it fires. There is a nice chunky charging handle here, lock the gun open, push the
charging handle back forward (that's really a pretty standard machine gun
order of operations), then you're ready to fire. This is truly a 19th century style of gun. You saw the brass
pistol grip, there's also this intricately cast brass feed block, and then of course we have 24 round
feed strips for actually shooting. Unlike the Hotchkiss Portative, these ... insert into
the gun with the bullets on the upward side of the strip, which is nice. On the Portative guns
with the strip hanging over this way you have the risk of rounds falling
out as the strip gets jostled around. This goes in much more
nicely. So slide this guy in. There were a couple reasons
to use metallic feed strips. They weren't prone to deterioration,
especially in wet weather. These are easier to store than belts that flop around.
You can have a case full of 24 round feed strips. In theory, you can actually link these together end-to-
end while feeding to get kind of a continuous feed, I'm not sure how practical
that was in actual service. However, it's also important to remember
that these are crew-served guns, and so you don't have one guy who has to
alternate between shooting 24 rounds and then, you know, finding another
strip and loading it into the gun. No, you have a loader whose job is to,
as soon as one strip goes in the gun, he fishes out the next one and he's there waiting
and ready to feed the next strip into the gun. So this was absolutely capable of maintaining
every bit as heavy a rate of fire as a Maxim gun. Now the tripod that this is mounted on currently
is actually an American production tripod. This was made by a company called Standard Products and they
only made like 2,500 of them. Most of them have been scrapped. I don't think they actually saw combat service. The French had a substantially different,
what they called an Omnibus tripod that was fitted out for both the
Saint-Étienne and the Hotchkiss guns. So this is an interesting one, it's a bit of a rarer model of tripod. And
at the same time though, it's maybe not as historically relevant. It does offer a full 360 degree rotation. You have your
elevation wheel here to elevate and depress the gun. And you can also take the gun out of
its mounting trunnions, flip it around, elevate the whole tripod and
use it in an anti-aircraft role. The rear sight is actually marked
"Hausse Pour Cartouche Modèle 1886 D". That was the ... standard model of 8mm Lebel cartridge
in use by the French military during World War One. These guns did stay in service and would ... have their
chambers reamed out for the Balle 1932 N later on, although this particular gun has not had that done to it. The sight is graduated out to 2,000 metres. And what's
pretty cool here is you can see these two little holes. Those were actually for a
luminous glow in the dark paint. The French introduced night sights,
in fact the French and the Germans both used luminous night sights during World War One,
which I think a lot of people maybe don't realise. And so they, as a standard practice about halfway through the
war, they started adding those sights to all of the machine guns. The matching front sight there, also with
it's a little more intact luminous front sight. The Saint-Étienne machine gun had introduced this big
cowcatcher looking flash hider, which was really quite elaborate. Those were used on these guns as well, but they also had this
kind of much more typical low profile, simple cone flash hider. This is a gas piston operated gun, so this
is your massive gas block here on the gun. And then it does actually have an adjustable ... gas port. So you can adjust more or less gas depending on the
condition of the gun and the condition of your ammunition. I think it's kind of funny to note that,
you know, on a lot of the French rifles the parts that the individual trooper was not supposed to
disassemble were manufactured with these split screws so that ... a normal screwdriver
couldn't be used to take them out. Here we have the same sort of philosophy. ... Where the
... adjustable gas system actually goes into the gas block is only for armourers to mess with. And they
have actually stamped or engraved on here "Demontage Interdit", do not disassemble. Alright, now we can start disassembly,
which is pretty slick on this thing. So the first step is to remove the feed block,
and there is a little split pin, right here, that is going to allow us to do that.
However, I need to persuade it just a little bit. There we go. So this is a wedge, you can see that right there. That's a
wedge that locks the feed block in place. And once it's removed I can then open the bolt, and just pull the whole feed block assembly out. Next up I need to remove the top cover and rear
handle, which means I have to pull this plug out. If I push in this little button, right there, I can then
pull the plug out. The top cover comes right off. This is our main spring guide, top cover, D handle. I can then pull out the recoil spring. Next up I'm going to go ahead
and take off the [pistol grip]. This just slides backward in a dovetail
like that. So it goes up, slides in. Another really cool solid cast piece of brass there. And then the trigger just comes out
as well, along with its return spring. And now I can use the charging
handle to pull the internals out. There we go. This is our bolt gas piston and op rod. In theory we could also pull the barrel off at this point.
What you would do is simply pivot this up 90 degrees. That unlocks the barrel, and
then you can rotate it this direction. You can see that stop would actually
rotate down on to the receiver here, and then the barrel comes off. Just
has an interrupted thread in there. However this one's quite tight on there, and
without a big wrench I'm not going to do that for today's video, but that's
how it would have been done. And this is one of those two, in fact
probably more significant of the two, improvements that were made for
the 1914 pattern military Hotchkiss. Oh, and last but not least, I can
now take the charging handle off. So really, I mean this is an
incredibly intricate receiver here, the amount of work that went
into this thing is remarkable. However, what they ended up with as a result
was a gun that is extremely easy to disassemble. it is made of all quite robust
parts, and not very many of them. And it is a gun that had a very well deserved
reputation for being pretty much unbreakable. This is it, this is all of the internal parts.
You know, ... we're used to seeing you know a couple of small pins or something. Well, you got that. Take a look at this guy, this is halfway between firing pin
and like a tent stake. There's no way that is going to break. We can go into a brief bit of detail here
about how this actually mechanically works. This is the bolt. Bolt face up there,
and a pivoting locking block. So the actual locking surfaces are these
two, right here. And this sits on our op rod. Somewhat similar to the Lewis gun,
although this came before the Lewis. (There we go.) And as this cycles the gas piston will
go backwards, which will lift that locking block up, cycle backwards. When it comes forward, it will
come forward until the ... bolt face hits its end of travel, the gas piston keeps going, and this giant cam
surface there forces the locking block down, where these two surfaces engage
against a pair of recesses in the receiver. At the same time we have a
firing pin here that's inside the bolt. It's being held by the operating rod right there. So as soon as the op rod starts moving backward
the firing pin is retracted into the bolt face and can't fire. And then likewise, when it's coming forward this
firing pin is held back out of the bolt face until the bolt is all the way rearward,
which means all the way locked. You probably noticed all these odd cam surfaces in the
op rod, those are there to actually operate the feed block. So our feed block here has these pawls
on it, which cause this sprocket to rotate, which causes it to pull the feed strip into the gun.
So the feed strip is going to start right here. ... This prevents it from going backwards,
and this actually pulls it forwards. So I have a lever on the bottom, right here,
I push that up I can drop the ... reverse stop. I can then put a strip in, like so. There is a control on here, right there. In this position it's ready to shoot, and ... the sprocket
is locked and can only be operated by the op rod. So if you want to remove a partially fired strip,
you pull this out, then the sprocket rotates freely and you can pull the strip out the back. In total the French would manufacture
45,850 of these during World War One. Production started off a bit slowly and
then ramped up towards the end of the war. And it kind of was balanced against
production of the 1907 Saint-Étienne, which was higher at the beginning
and then they kind of ramped down the 1907 as they were able to
scale up the production of these. Although they did make a lot of 1907s, there
was a total production of about 35,000 1907s. So they made quite a lot of these and these would actually
stay in French service all the way through World War Two. ... In the aftermath of World War One the French immediately understood that the 8mm Lebel
cartridge was obsolete and needed to be replaced. The heavy taper, the rim, these were major problems for
in particular light machine guns and self-loading rifles. And so by 1924 they had adopted a rimless
cartridge, and they almost immediately developed and adopted a light machine gun
to go with it. That being the Châtellerault 24/29. They then looked into developing infantry
rifles for the new rimless cartridge, and that would lead to the M34 conversion
of the Berthier and the MAS-36 rifle. However, they never really got around to
replacing the heavy machine guns with a 7.5. So these were never actually converted to 7.5, they
remained in 8mm Lebel through World War Two. And it was only in the aftermath of World
War Two with the development of the AA-52, really not a direct replacement for the
Hotchkiss, because by the late '40s everyone kind of understood that a ... rifle calibre
heavy machine gun like this was an obsolete concept. And so these were removed and the AA-52s as more
of a general purpose machine gun were brought in. So, a pretty iconic gun of World War One. I should
also point out the ... American Expeditionary Force used primarily Hotchkiss heavy
machine guns as their heavies. The US military received 5,255 of these guns, and then used
them to great effect in the late stages of World War One. So, pretty cool to get a chance to take a
look at this one. It's in pretty nice shape. If you're interested in having it yourself, of course it
is coming up for sale here. This is a fully transferable, ... NFA registered machine gun. So purchasing it
requires going through the NFA transfer process. If you're interested in doing that, take a look at
the description text below, you'll find a link there to Morphy's catalogue page for this gun. Where you
can take a look at their pictures, their description their price estimate, all that sort of stuff.
Place a bid for it right there on-line, or go ahead and browse through the catalogue and
take a look at all the other cool stuff they have as well. Thanks for watching.
If they created a butterfly trigger version of this I would appreciate it even more. For some reason I am not a fan of pistol grips on heavy machine guns, they just feel like they should require a two-hand grasp to dump lead downrange.