Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum, and today we are
taking a look at a Hotchkiss Universal. I did a video on one of these many years
ago, but, well, I can take this one apart now, and I know some more information
about them. So it's time for a redo. Now the Hotchkiss Universal was of course
produced by the Hotchkiss Company. This is a company that was originally founded by an
American, Benjamin Hotchkiss, back in like the 1870s. He was working in small arms in the
United States, and in the post-Civil War, well, arms sale depression because there
were tons of leftover arms from the Civil War, he figured he wasn't going to sell anything in the US,
so he might as well take his business over to Europe. And he settled in Paris, founded the Hotchkiss
Company there, and proceeded to do quite well. Now by the time this was developed,
Benjamin Hotchkiss had long since died. But the company remained in France, it was responsible, of
course, for the Hotchkiss Model of 1914 heavy machine gun that was a mainstay of the French Army during
World War One, and during World War Two as well. And anyway, to move forward a bit. During World War Two the French military
had the MAS 38 submachine gun in 7.65 long. Which was fine. It was a very compact submachine
gun, it was mechanically a fine submachine gun, but it really became obvious that
they wanted to standardise on 9mm. So after World War Two the French military
held some trials to adopt a new submachine gun. And in addition to being chambered in 9mm,
they wanted something that was compact. Something that would be suitable for
guys who didn't have a lot of space. In particular paratroopers and
mechanised infantry. These are some of the various specialities that came out of World War Two
looking like they're the thing that's going to really be relevant. Having guys in armoured personnel carriers, having
guys in helicopters, having guys jumping out of aircraft. And so if you look at the prototypes that were submitted
to these trials, they all are compact in some way. And the gun that ended up winning, the ... MAT 49,
has a folding magazine well, kind of like this. However, Hotchkiss took the folding thing
to a whole another level, and every bit of this gun folds up,
which makes it incredibly cool. So, let me go ahead and show
you how all that actually works. Alright, we'll start by folding this up.
And this begins with the magazine well. There is a latch right here, which allows
me to push the magazine forward. I can then press the magazine release button,
right here, and pull the magazine through ... back in the magazine well. There's a little stop right
here on the receiver, so the magazine comes to here. By the way you can do all this
with the magazine fully loaded, which means you can actually
have this gun folded up and in ... a totally safe stowed position with a
loaded magazine already in the gun. Next up, we're going to retract the barrel, because
this actually reciprocates into the receiver. So to do that I'm going to take this lever, pull it
down, and then I can grab the muzzle end out here (and by the way, that's why
there are these two finger rests), and pull this back into the gun. This button right here locks the barrel in place.
(Put the charging handle there.) And then lastly I'm going to fold the stock underneath. So we'll pull this back, right there. There's a little spring plunger in the end, right here,
that locks into a plug in the end cap of the receiver. Once you've unlocked it, this folds around,
locks into the bottom of the magazine well. The grip folds up because it's hollow
and folds over the trigger guard. And voilà, you now have a very compact package.
This comes in at a little less than 18 inches long. ... You really can't get a smaller submachine
gun than that for the equivalent barrel length. We would normally then close the dust cover. On this particular
one, the parts kits that came in for these are all pretty beat-up. My dust cover doesn't want to stay closed. But that is the folded configuration. To unfold it,
which you can actually do pretty darn quickly, you start by opening the stock. Then pull this button right here down, that extends the barrel.
Pull the magazine forward, lock it in, and then you need only rack
the gun and it's ready to use. Just to give you a little bit of a close-up on some of
those, here is the latch that unlocks the magazine well. And the magazine well is a two-part thing
where we've got the inner magazine well that actually holds the magazine, and the outer
component which has the two hooks to lock into the stock, and has the hinge mechanism
and everything to keep this in place. On the other side here we have this
button, which releases the magazine. This is a 32 round magazine. And I have seen it claimed that this is in fact
interchangeable with an MP40 magazine. Unfortunately, I don't have an
MP40 magazine handy to try this out. So I'm not completely sure,
but it does look very similar. And it is, by the way, a
double-stack, single-feed magazine. There's an interesting element in the
markings that's worth taking a look at. The guns are marked CMH, which
means Carabine Mitrailleuse Hotchkiss, or carbine machine gun Hotchkiss,
like automatic carbine Hotchkiss. It looks like the early ones, the first batch that were produced,
were marked like this and then serialised here on the receiver. The second batch, or a later batch, were marked "CMH2". They do not have a serial number on the receiver, and they do instead have a serial number
on a tag attached here to the buttstock. Now, I'm not entirely sure
of the significance of this, I don't know exactly how many were
made with each different marking. However, there are a couple of features
that you'll find variations of on the gun. So one of them is right here, the little
finger notches to retract the barrel. There is one version where they are offset, and
they have a nice little scalloped cut to them. I believe this is the early version. And then you also have a version here where they
are simplified, they're squared off, there's no scallop. I believe that's the CMH2, the later version. I suspect what was going on here is that
they were trying to simplify the design where they could easily, and
reduce the cost at least a little bit to try and make these guns
more appealing to the military. So you can see here ... on this they
actually turned down the barrel so that this is flush with the
barrel diameter all the way down. Where here they didn't bother, ... they put
an oversized front block on with a pin. This, I believe, is the early style of sight. They're all a two-position aperture sight
with 50 metre and 150 metre settings. However, this one is nice and rounded,
the other version that you will see (and unfortunately I don't have
an example to show you here), the other version are just simple square blocks. So I believe this is the original, and
the squared ones are the CMH2 type. There is a peg here on the side of the grip that
has a hole in it for attaching the rear part of the sling. This is really annoying if you're left handed, but it's
not that much of a problem if you're right handed. The front sling was actually
attached around the barrel. ... That's done so that when the
whole thing is folded up you have sling swivels that are basically at the front
and rear of the package that you're left with. The assumption would be if the
gun is unfolded and ready to fire, you're not necessarily carrying it on the
sling, you're carrying it in a ready position. If it's folded up, that's when you would
want the sling to be most useful. Now on this particular gun, the fire control
group has been modified to semi-auto. However from a parts kit I have an extra lower
here that I can show you that has not been modified. On this one we have "R" for répétition, or repetition,
semi-auto, that you can push through on that side. You have automatique, "A", automatic there. And
there is actually a safe position that is in the middle. So it's a little tricky to get to, it's very easy to
run the button all the way to one side or the other. But in the centre position the trigger is blocked. Over here you've got semi-auto, and over there you've got full-auto. Disassembly is pretty easy.
We're going to start by opening the rear cap. We just fold that all the way in,
and then there's a little button here. When I depress that, I can then
rotate the end cap 90 degrees. It's going to come out, and I have a recoil spring. Now, making sure that this isn't hooked,
we can actually pull the whole lower assembly there we go, back out of the gun. So there's our lower with our fire control group,
this is the same part that you saw my other [one]. This one's been modified to semi-auto of course. With a little bit of wiggling the bolt comes out the back. This whole thing is the bolt assembly. And one of the ... unusual things about the Hotchkiss
Universal is that it was, from the ground up, a closed bolt gun. Meaning that the bolt chambers
a round, and the bolt closes, and then it waits until you pull the trigger to fire. The alternative of course being an open bolt gun
where the bolt starts in the rearward position, and pulling the trigger causes it to go forward,
chamber a round, and then immediately fire it. For a practical matter in my case here, that means that this
was a pretty easy gun to convert to ... legal semi-auto in the US. It also means that this has a relatively complicated
firing system, because it can't just have a fixed firing pin. Instead it's got a series of interlocks and levers. ... So this is the out of battery safety
right here. When the bolt's in battery this gets pushed up out of the way. And then
pulling the trigger actually pushes this up, which releases an internal hammer. And you can see
the firing pin has now come through the breech face. And then when the bolt cycles
backward, this re-cocks it like that. So the whole ... firing pin, firing pin spring
and sear system are built into the bolt, which is kind of a cool system. Our one last bit of disassembly
is that we can take the barrel off. So this cap slides on the barrel and
comes off, and then we can take ... this out. And just like they built a bunch of stuff into the bolt,
they ... built a bunch of stuff into the barrel as well. So we have our feed ramp here,
this is actually the ejector, the barrel trunnion and all, obviously all of
this is built right into the barrel assembly. On the original guns as machine guns,
the magazine housing assembly right here is actually a separate part that can come off as well. The conversion process of making a
semi-automatic receiver for this gun involved making the tube one contiguous part.
You can see where it's welded on right there. So I can't show you that bit
of disassembly on this gun. So considering the relatively small
number of parts one normally sees on a modern post-World War Two submachine gun, which would be you know, a very
simple stock, a tube receiver, a basically ... one piece bolt and a fixed barrel. You can I think understand the issues
that Hotchkiss had with this gun, it was just way too complicated,
way too expensive. A couple other things to point out. While these are more colloquially known
as the "Universal", or "Universelle", ... in Hotchkiss's terms they were
referred to as the Model 010. And there were a bunch of other models
of this basic system that Hotchkiss made I think more intended for police sales than military. There were a bunch of versions with
long barrels, some with wooden stocks, some with folding stocks, most of them
without the telescoping barrel feature. But ... there was a Model 010, the Model 011,
017, the Model 304, there were bunch of these. If you're interested in them, Jean Huon
has a book on French submachine guns that has pictures of a bunch of the different
models. It is a book only in French though. In practice, I find this actually a
pretty uncomfortable gun to use. In order to have the pistol grip fold up
over the trigger, the grip is a C-shape, and it's hollow on the front, which makes ... for
weird handling. It's a little squishy here as well. You can see that these grips have already cracked. The trigger itself is really, really wide, which is kind
of odd. I don't understand why it would need to be. That seems to be a design decision that
Hotchkiss went with, and I don't know exactly why. The butt plate is also pretty darn small and kind of has a
weird shape to it, again as a result of the need to fold. So this is where the magazine is
actually sitting when the stock folds. I also find the sights to be quite remarkably low. This is the long range 150 sight, that's the
short range. And for me it's fairly awkward to get my cheek down low enough on this
tube stock to actually get a good sight picture. The aperture is really quite small. I have a lot ... of ergonomic
complaints with the gun. There's no particularly good front grip. This again
comes from the requirements of having it all fold up. Like where would you fold a grip into?
So this is your front grip. I guess you could hold it back
here, but you can't really. And you don't want to hold it out here because this
is the barrel itself, and that will get hot quite fast. So it's this that you're stuck with. If you're left handed, you've got this
thing right inside your grip, which is weird. So not the world's most comfortable gun.
But it is the world's most folding gun I think, and there's something certainly to be said for that. Not surprisingly, the Hotchkiss here did not
win military trials, of course the MAT 49 did. The Hotchkiss was rejected on account
of being too complex and too expensive. And you can certainly see ... where those
complaints come from, and they're totally justified. Hotchkiss was able to make about 7,000 of these guns. ... There were a couple of small contracts that
they got, they apparently sold some in Venezuela, they sold some to the Moroccan police,
they sold some to French police forces. Apparently they sold a hundred to the CRS,
which is like the presidential security, VIP security forces of the French government. And they did also actually see trials and limited
use in Indochina by the French Foreign Legion. In particular we know that the 1st BEP, or
the 1st Foreign Legion Paratroop Battalion did get issued some Hotchkiss
Universals basically for field trials. And their reaction to ... the gun was, "It seems fine. It's reliable. It's way too
complicated and weird to try and open and close." So these guys, who weren't actually jumping
out of aircraft when they were using these guns, they were already on the ground, they just carried
them in this, in the deployed configuration, rather than try to mess with
all the buttons and levers. Not nice to clean, as you might
suspect from having seen the inside, but. Ultimately, like this was a commercial failure.
Yeah, 7,000 is nice, but not all that many. They remain really quite scarce
today, and it's very cool that, well, I consider myself very lucky
to have managed to find this one. It has of course been registered
as a short-barrelled rifle. And I'll tell you what, we are going to go ahead
and do some shooting with it tomorrow. So if you're curious to see how this does on the
standardised pistol calibre carbine course of fire, stick around, check out the video tomorrow. Thanks for watching. [ sub by sk cn2 ]
What is it with the French wanting SMGs to fold?
This is the result of design philosophy focused on a firearm which will be packed/carried far more than actually shot/used.
In practice, the French military adopted and successfully used (for decades) the MAT 49, which incorporates a folding magazine well but not the rest of the “transformer“ features.
There are several other successful commercial and military designs which have incorporated some of these features, but this one really stands out. I would love to own one for the novelty alone.
This pop-out barrel is the coolest thing ever!
Unfortunately I'm fresh out :-(