Q&A 21: French Edition

I'm a semi beyond the news obli air thanks for tuning in I'm Ian McCallum and today we have another Q&A session and today it is specifically Q&A about French firearms now why French well do we need a reason we do have a reason the reason is of course I am getting close to the end of the process of writing a book on French military rifles from the Shah spo2 the FAMAS and so I thought it'd be cool to use a Q&A video to kind of promote that in fact at the moment we actually have a contest going on to come up with cover art for the book so if you're interested in checking that out maybe submit a proposed piece of cover art yourself win a cool awesome premiere copy of the book as a prize or just take a look at what other people are submitting themselves vote on which one you think should get the audience choice award anything like that head over to French rifle book.com figured that's a pretty uncomplicated URL to use for the project so while you're there you can also sign up for notifications when the book is ready to be ordered and anything else that's going on with the book that you might want to know about so with that said QA questions as always come from our patreon supporters anyone from my pocket month it up is able to submit questions when I ask for questions basically once a month and well let's get right into it our first question is from Logan what is your favorite French pistol rifle and machine gun let's see favorite French pistol would be two options either the 1873 revolver just because it is cool and old-fashioned and I just really like the looks of it by the way if you're curious what the 1873 looks like if you have ever seen The Mummy with Brendan Fraser the original one he actually carries a brace of them in that movie one of the few places like outside of specifically like French historical documentaries where you'll actually see one or the 1935 a pistol which is a very elegant nice handling and packed a little gun in the 765 French long cartridge that was designed by Charles Petter who was going to design the Sig 210 which is of course one of the iconic excellent service pistols ever made and the French 1935 a is kind of basically a scaled-down version of the same things so they're hard to shoot because the ammunition so hard to get but they're really nice guns favorite French rifle I think would be the Indochina Bertier I think it's again just a very elegant good-looking rifle and then favorite French machine gun is a bit more difficult because let's be honest the show shows not a great gun I may enjoy it but it's not a particularly good God it probably would have to come down to the shot LRO 24:29 which is perfectly serviceable but it doesn't really excite me all that much so next question is Joe how did you become a Francophile I figured we should cover that in in this Q&A it seems appropriate although I have mentioned I've discussed this a couple times before basically I was looking for a particular specialty to focus on in my firearms collecting and I had I had a couple of French guns already and when I looked at them I realized that they embodied a lot of what I find generally interesting which is to say unique and different and unusual so the French arms program was largely run by a number of state Arsenal manufacturers they didn't try to bring in they didn't buy designs from other countries the way so many people in the world at you know say the turn of the century were buying mousers or a couple decades before that we're buying Winchester's or Remington's the French wanted to design things domestically and they kept all of their designs as state secrets they treated this as a very protected sort of important military technology sort of area and as a result they ended up with designs that weren't really copied by anybody else because they weren't available to anybody else and they were also designs that generally weren't copies of anything else so the French were early adopters or earliest Meryem enters with a lot of different semi-auto mechanisms and systems I find all of that very interesting and also French rifles here in the US are relatively underappreciated they cost less than a lot of other nationalities and that makes them easier and well easier to collect 10 acquire so all of that together in some ways it would have been nice if I had ended up picking a country that say spoke English or spoke a language that was actually pronounced the same way it's spelled unlike French but that's a separate issue we'll move on to the next question which is from Ian a different Ian how effective was the LaBelle's recessed primer pocket at preventing chain detonations in the magazine why has no one else used this system that is a very good pair of questions the system the LaBella was actually very good at preventing chain detonation in two ways first off there is I think what you're referring to here is there's actually a groove in in the cartridge case head around the primer and so it's kind of like this gully that a bullet a pointed bullet will tend to rest in and once the bullets in there because the whole magazine tube is under spring pressure there's no that the bullet isn't able to easily slip up out of that groove and make contact with the primer of the cartridge in front of it so that's a good thing by itself and then what really makes this system work well is the extreme taper and the large rim of the Lebel cartridge the eight labelled cartridge when you lay one of those things on the table it really does just like point at a nice downward angle and if you lay out a series of eight Laval cartridges you'll find that they've never are going to try to actually line up bullet tip to primer because of the taper they're gonna lie on their sides at an angle facing downwards and the more pressure you put on them with a magazine spring the more they're going to try to push outwards around the rim of each cartridge instead of inwards towards the center so these two things together worked very well to prevent detonations in the magazine in fact I am not aware of any labelled magazine detonation it's possible something took place at some point but I've never heard of one I've never seen evidence of what now of course the reason why nobody else did this is because the taper and the rim of the cartridge were huge problems elsewhere what most other countries were doing at this point when the tube magazine was a thing people were using round nosed cartridges that a lot of them actually were also relatively tapered and had relatively large rims but then they either were small bore cartridges with round bullets or they were flat nosed bullets cartridges like the 11 millimeter Mauser where you know the flat nosed that the cartridge is large enough that it's not going to detonate a primer anyway even if they are knows to tip by the time spitzer projectiles were really coming into vogue the tube magazine thing was on its way out the rimmed cartridges were largely on their way out and people were adopting staggered box magazines instead because well they just work a lot better in general next question is from Spencer says was there ever a plan to produce more of the RSC rifles after World War one perhaps an updated rifle of the same type the answer is not really so once the war was actually over the the French military really jumped at the opportunity to get rid of the eight labelled cartridge and replace it with a basically a straight wall door a bottle necked it's generally straight rimless cartridge which would be the seven five and the RFC was just not a rifle really compatible with adapting to 75 so there were as far as I know there were never any plans or experiments with converting the RSC to 75 you know you've got that whole bottom feeding clip system the receivers are all pretty intricate intricately machined specifically to take these clips the whole magazine cover assemblies specifically for these clips and there were some concerns about the rest of the rifle they didn't they didn't want to stick with the RFC even if they couldn't modify it up to 75 because they thought they could design a better rifle and this was right after the war when these plans were all being put into place it wasn't it wouldn't be until like the 20s have really kind of dragged all the way out without much progress here that maybe someone would have decided they'd be better off sticking with the are SCS but by then it was too late now during the war there were absolutely plans to increase the production in fact I've seen some documents that suggest that ultimately the French plan the intention was to provide every soldier as a standard issue rifle with an RFC 1918 carbines and that would have been a tremendous step forward in infantry armament during World War one that that could have given the Germans really a run for their money in the small arms department but the war ended at the end of 1918 and that plan never came to fruition in fact they didn't really get any 1918 carbines into the field before the war ended at all so kind of like the u.s. pettersen device in that way or the British far qua he'll big plans cut short by the end of the war kevin says why was French weapons development almost exclusively government-run rather than based around private companies submitting their designs to trials like almost everyone else well I think some of it is just the bureaucratic nature of the French government and the French military part of it is that the French government really didn't want to pay royalties on private designs you see think you see that with things like the Hotchkiss machine gun where it was available in like 1897 and the Japanese adopted at that early but the French government decided to stick with its own arsenal produced saw at en 1907 instead despite it being really obviously not as good of a gun and they wouldn't grudgingly accept the Hotchkiss until 1914 when the outbreak of war really kind of gave them no other choice so because they didn't want to pay royalties and presumably because they wanted to keep a lot of this technology secret in a way that you couldn't really do with private companies the French government paid for it ran of three or four major Arsenal complexes and I think if you're a private company in that sort of environment you don't have a whole lot of incentive to be trying to submit designs to the French government often is not what would happen is they would accept guns for trial or they'd set up you know request submissions and look at them all figure out the best elements of each and then go build them in the state arsenal and not pay anyone royalties for them so it doesn't take very many instances seeing that happen as a private entrepreneur to decide that maybe the French government isn't really who you want as a client so ultimately I think it was it was in effect from both sides the government wanted to control all of its own production and intellectual property and private individuals who maybe could have competed looking at this from the outside decided that they were kind of incentivized not to Tanner says what is current French arms manufacturing capability in France if any at the large level none similar to England in that way honestly well the issue was that the because this French arms developments had always been done by government-run Arsenal's when those were shut down it didn't leave a whole lot of arms production capability out there industrial capacity so when you're talking about a main infantry rifle you're gonna want a couple hundred thousand of them as a country the size of France and no but there is no factory capable of doing that in France right now now they do have small arms production capability but it's on a much smaller scale things like the PGM rifles precision rifles some hunting rifles custom stuff small scale guns are absolutely still made in France but at the level of a major industrial concern the likes of you know in America the likes of Colt Winchester Remington those guys there aren't any England has had the same thing happen the British Royal Small Arms Factory at Enfield is no more interestingly in in Germany the same thing as sort of happened in that the government-run Arsenal's have also disappeared but they're left with a couple well one in particular heckler coach Koch have one large private company that happens to be located in Germany next question is from John says how does the FAMAS fit into the general European timeline of Bullpups l85 hog f2000 etc what's the progenitor of the whole concept it's right in the there was basically one major wave of military large-scale bullpup rifle adaptation or adoption and that would be basically the late 70s early 80s so the British had the l85 right in that period sa80 early 1980s the FAMAS was adopted in 1979 opened into production in 79 its development started in like 1970 the Steyr AUG was adopted in 1977 so it's really right here at the end of the 70s and early 80s that that european militaries get this bolt up idea and kind of run with it now they're not the first the British did technically adopt a bullpup in the 9th early 1950s with the em2 but it was very quickly unadopted in favour of various nato considerations and I think what really drove this you wouldn't have the bullpup until you had major use of submachine guns by militaries because one of the driving factors for adopting a bullpup was consolidating the roles of the submachine gun on the rifle so in the early days if you're still especially when you go very early when you're talking about still conceptually thinking about fighting in ranks Bullpups would never be adopted because one of the reasons for a long rifle when you're fighting in ranks is to make sure that the rear most rank their muzzles are in front of the front most rank so you don't have the rear rank accidentally shooting the front rank in the back that would be a major problems and the idea of minimizing overall length of the rifle is counterproductive in that era then you get to the bolt-action period and there are bolt-action Bullpups but they're all really quite awkward it's not until you have self-loading rifles that Bullpups become possible so and none of them were really it really came out before World War two so the 50s were the earliest when it could happen and it didn't really take off until the 70s I think today we're in a position where some of the downsides of the bullpup have really become better known and people are less concerned with having a particularly long barrel in a combat rifle you look at what militaries are adopting today and they're generally not 20-inch barrels or anything longer than that they're generally 11 and a half 14 and a half maybe 16-inch barrels and at that point your conventional rifle is getting pretty close to the same overall size as a 1970s bullpup so why bother next question is from Lane who says once the 75 French was adopted do you think the French would have been better served in world war ii by producing the RFC 1918 chambered for the new cartridge rather than adopt in mas 36 and its accompanying semi-auto or was that simply too antiquated by them to be significant I should have noticed this kind of already touched on this no I think the the RSC was a good rifle for the time but given 20 years of development period there was definitely the opportunity to develop something a lot better the MAS 40 the French the semi-auto that they were developing allegedly from like 1924 that mas 40 was really a quite good rifle and it is very similar in mechanical layout to the MAS 44 that was ultimately produced right after World War 2 they should have developed it faster but it was much simpler than the RSC easier to clean than the RSC a more compact gun more durable guns it was in every way a generational step forward and what they should have done was develop it faster not try to hold over the RSC and 7/5 Tim wants to know do I speak French if so do you think it makes it easier to research French guns when you can actually speak the language that the technical information is written if the answer is I don't speak French but I'm working on it I'm at the point where I can like order a meal in a restaurant but like if I ask for directions I have a difficult time comprehending the answer when spoken in normal rapid-fire native French so I'm working on it it's easier to read than it is to understand verbally and as for your other questions yeah it absolutely makes things easier for researching in particular well this probably applies universally but because there unless you're studying guns from a country where the native language is English most of the best literature is probably going to be in some other language and that's definitely the case with France there are probably a dozen good books on French rifles French firearms written in French on those have been instrumental for me in researching my own book which will be written in English and translating them is a huge pain it is far easier to be able to just understand them as you're reading beyond that I have plans for some other research I would like to do on a couple of more specific French subjects in particular the RSC rifles doing that will require doing firsthand research in the French archives and that will absolutely require reading French in fact not only will it require understanding the language it will also require being able to read the cursive script handwriting that French is typically written in that's something you also see as an issue with German resources and archives is that fracture very very stereotypical Germanic script what a lot of their official records are written in and that can be a tricky set of characters to properly you know under read and understand if you're not used to it so French and their script is kind of the same way so I'm working on it hopefully within a couple years I'll be fluent enough got it it seems hopeless to even think that will ever achieve fluency but hopefully at some point I will and that will really be a big health for me Brandon in your opinion which was a better combat firearm the Lebel or the belt ei I will say if you give me the option of choosing the five round bear TA I would go with the five round bear TA carbine I would call that or maybe even the you the five round indochina that ta the Lebel is kind of a clunky gun to operate the the eighth round capacity of the tube magazine is cool but the tube magazine itself is less cool once you empty that tube magazine it's it's very slow to reload it compared to the Mon liquor type packet loading clips of the bear ta where you can reload it quite quickly so give me a five round bear ta and I will be the most happy short of a semi-auto rifle Mike R says why did it take France so long to fully adopt an infantry arm to replace the MAS 49:56 I'm aware of interim weapons used in place of them but why did France not tool up to make a more conventional battle rifle in this era before the FAMAS honestly I'm not entirely sure about the premise the 49:56 is every bit the the generation of battle rifle of the FAL and the g3 the only place where it's not quite up to par is the magazine capacity the choice to go with 10 instead of 20 rounds but that really has nothing to do with the mechanics of the gun itself mechanically the 49:56 is is every bit as modern as it's has the other Cold War battle rifles which is actually rather impressive if you consider that the design was a pre-world War two design it was really the MAS 40 developed through the late 1930s that was that directly translated into the MAS 44 that went into production immediately after World War 2 it's tilting bolt it's got a very simple direct gas impingement action and there is no reason that they would have had to update it until they wanted to go to an intermediate cartridge instead of the full power cartridge the thing even has an integrated scope rail on rifle it's it mounts optics more easily than a foul a stock Fowler g3 it's simpler to operate it's as reliable as the g3 and more reliable than the FAL it's got good iron sights to it aperture sights I don't think they had any reason to update it until they wanted five five six Jeremy says and we actually we have a couple questions on this so let me combine a couple Jeremy wants to know if a modern FAMAS that uses pmags would be feasible actually I can answer that one straight up yes because they've actually made one the French Navy adopted the FAMAS g2 so the standard original rifle was the f1 pattern the there was then a g1 pattern which was a modification which didn't get adopted by anybody it was kind of the economy version of the rifle and then the g2 pattern was a further modernized version that was adopted by the French Navy and the two main things that it changed were well visually it went from a single finger trigger guard to that whole hand trigger guard kind of like styrol that's the easiest way to recognize them you know in pictures and whatnot mechanically g2 went from a 1 in 12 twist barrel to I believe a 1 in 7 allowing the use of ss109 m855 modern nato ammunition as well as other heavier than 55 grain bullets and it changed the receiver profile to use ar-15 stanag magazines so if you have a famas tree - I believe P mags will fit right in it if they don't it's only because of a weird detail or you know like the exact magazine stop height on the PMAG a famas using ar-15 mags will work and has worked because that's what the French Navy adopted unfortunately those are very rare the Navy didn't buy a whole lot and I want to say it's something like 10 or 20,000 of them maybe a little bit more but compared to something close to 400,000 of the standard f1 pattern being made Tom why did the French not adopt the maxim gun in World War one it seems like all sides used the maxim Russians Germans and British but not the French was it simply a matter of national pride and they wanted to use a French designed machine gun or did the French simply believe that their guns were superior to the maxim we kind of got a little bit of each I'm sure there was an element of we'd rather use a domestic thing there was an element of cost if we use our own guns theoretically they'll be cheaper because we're not paying the profit motive or the royalties for a private company like the maxim company however there was also a seriously rational reason why the French didn't want not specifically the maxim but they didn't want a water-cooled gun and that is because the French had a particularly large colonial empire in North Africa in the desert where there wasn't a whole lot of water and if you try to run a maxim gun without water all of its magnificent sustained fire capabilities go away pretty darn quickly because the maxim depends on water as a coolant it uses a very thin profile barrel for a machine gun it's kind of like a rifle profile barrel and that sucker will overheat really quickly without a jacket full of water so from the French perspective if we're gonna be using these guns in a lot of places where there isn't just much water lying around we're better off using an air-cooled machine gun that relies on surface area and barrel mass to stay cool and that's why the santi and gun Hotchkis gun are both air-cooled ultimately ultimately of course they ended up using their machine guns far more in France itself during World War one than they ever did in the colonies so in hindsight yeah they would have been a lot better off with a maxim gun but you can't say that you they didn't know that nobody knew that prior to 1914 next question is from Carl since you have acquired a famas do you have plans to get a hold of optics for it also where their optics initially issued at the adoption of the rifle for use in DMR roles or did the French army issue a different rifle so two questions there first off I have actually acquired an optics rail for my FAMAS sort of there are a couple different ways that this was done by the French the simplest version is basically modifying the existing carry handle assembly to have a Picatinny rail inside it there are a couple different ways that that has been done the one I have is it's not quite the military standard but it works it's okay what I found using it is that it gives a really high or offset you get a pretty poor cheek weld and the optics like way above the barrel and the FAMAS has really pretty good iron sights so I have kind of set aside the optics thing on the FAMAS and decided if I'm gonna shoot it I should shoot it as it was originally intended that's really how it is better setup now today the the French did work on modernizing the FAMAS with what's called the faylene program which is kind of the French equivalent of the u.s. future warrior or objective warrior systems integrating a lot of electro-optical and communications technologies so faylene mounts this gigantic scope assembly onto the rifle which honestly it looks really goofy in pictures you'll have to judge judge for yourself how about that but that thing has a built-in laser rangefinder it's got a built in camera it's got a night vision scope built into it as well as a standard magnified optic it's got controls in the front grip you can it comes with a like a little touchscreen computer system on your web gear you can coordinate with other members of the squad you can take pictures send pictures it's it's really a cool system if it didn't involve this gigantic thing on top of the rifle and in order to make that even remotely practical they had to come up with something better than mounting it on top of what was already a really tall carry handle so they came up with what was called the I mean oz butcher this annunciation on this but I'm these sure boss a or valois a model of the FAMAS which means either improved or lowered and what they did basically was take the charging handle the trigger hooks sort of charging handle in the charity assembly tilted over onto its side and then drop the carry handle down replace it with just a piece of rail and they dropped its Frye 8 inch inch and a half lower and then they mounted this gigantic faylene scope on top of that so that's the much better optical system what you do is you take the Faline scope especially as an individual collector and you go and get rid of it and you put a modern red dot or magnified optic but I would go with red dot on that lowered Picatinny rail and that's actually what a lot of French soldiers do today they have these galleries a pattern rifles FAMAS rifles and they don't always take that faylene system into the field if it's not practical for whatever the mission is bill instead put something like an e attack or an aim point on that rail now what I like to get one of those for my FAMAS I would love to it would be fantastic unfortunately in order to the process of doing that also involved changing up the iron sights which are mounted fixed to the barrel of the rifle and if you take out a carry handle or lower it you've got these iron sights that are sticking weirdly awkwardly pop and when they did the Valerii say they chain they got rid of those things and I don't want to like permanently get rid of the iron sights on my rifle which is not to say that I actually have access to a modernized lowered carry assembly which I don't but if I was gonna do that I'd probably have to come up with a second from us to convert like that and that would be an extremely expensive proposition than one that is unlikely to happen unfortunately next question is from Lila says why did the French adopt n block style clips when everyone else went the internal magazine route I think that is actually kind of a misconception there are a lot of other people who took the moniker style clips so the Italians with the Carcano in 1891 went with a moniker and block clip the Austrians with the 1895 Steyr straight-pull on with a moniker and block clip the Romanians the Dutch also used moniker type rifles with n block clips it's almost like a 50/50 split between stripper clips and and block clips so the reason the French went with it specifically is because they adopted that for the barre ta carbine the birthday was originally adopted as a cavalry carbine and they wanted it was that the reason they didn't use a tube fed rifle was in large part to have something that could be more easily loaded on horseback and a moniker packet and in block clip it's gonna be a lot easier to work with than a stripper clip when you're on horseback less chance of cartridges like twisting out and falling all over the place so that's why the French went with it Hans says what French military arms are currently available on the surplus market for a reasonable cost actually a lot of them the MAS 49:56 has gone up recently they're getting close to like a thousand bucks in the US right now they used to be more like 600 so the heyday for buying those things just kind of passed but you know they're still far cheaper than buying you know you want to find an original military surplus foul or g3 that isn't a parts kit built good luck you're gonna pay a crapload of money for one of those things compared to a 49 56 those were imported as complete rifles they may have a century import mark on them because century imported a lot of them but as long as you avoid getting one that was converted to 308 that is a totally stock military rifle in fact is one that was refurbished by the military before being put in storage before being sold as surplus so you know today you look at the price and someone will pay for an actual legit HK produced German receiver hk91 well that's your only option with a 49 56 there are no century receiver parts kit builds of those so in that way they're still an excellent value the MAS 36 is out there for pretty much across the board the French rifles are are less expensive than German or American guns of the same period so mas 36 is are out there the 3651 grenade launching rifles are out there both of those are often in extremely good condition because they were refurbished by the French military then this reserve storage you know for use in a possible war and then when they were deemed obsolete they were sold as surplus still basically in new conditions bertier's are available you can still get a Betty a carbine for 400 bucks depending on the type so I think a lot of that is because there's a lot of variation in bertier's that a lot of people aren't really familiar with and them I suspect those prices will go up when my book comes out because not to be overly unhung below but I think that would give people a lot more information so they'll understand what they're looking at and it'll become more interesting especially the the good proper versions of them and the rarer versions of them will go up in price at that point but today there's still some real bargains out there LaBelle's however have gone up in value quite a lot LaBelle's used to be like a 4 or $500 gone now they're regularly thousand-dollar rifles and I think a lot of that comes from the fact that first off a lot of them are antiques and thus exempt from most US law a lot of them I think may actually be being purchased by Europeans and shipped back to Europe where they're even more expensive than they are here and because of their antique status that's not that's easier to do than with some other guns and of course because of the anniversary of World War one the lapel is kind of the iconic French rifle of world war one and they're very popular because people are starting to get more interested in that conflict because of its centenary really the one French rifle that's not available is the FAMAS because only a very only a couple hundred of those came in in the late 80s as semi-autos next up is from Justin said are there themes in French small arms design that reflect a particularly French manual of arms have these peculiarities lessened over time as NATO was wrist was established it's kind of only one and that's the lack of a safety the early French rifles didn't have safeties because arguably they didn't really need them you know the shots Po and the Gras if you only have a single-shot rifle and your doctrine is based on you know group in infor mation firing volleys on command well you're not gonna load the rifle until you're being ordered to load it in preparation for firing it so do you really need a manual safety yeah and then that kind of transitioned over to the Lebel and the Battier and it was there that it became kind of a particularly French feature to have a repeating rifle without a safety and then what's particularly unusual is that even the MAS 36 has no manual safety to it this manual of arms of you don't load the rifle until you're ordered to and you just leave the chamber empty until you're ready to fire that is an unusually French thing now when they went to semi-auto rifles both the MAS 44 pattern and onward and the RFC rifles from World War one those all have safeties because on the semi-auto rifle you really have to be on that I wouldn't say that there's any particular French unique specific characteristic to the rifles there are some things that were unusual at the time but they don't tend to be the same in different you know we're talking different generations of rifles so you have a mas 36 from the 30s you have two semi-auto rifles which are basically from the 50s 20 years later you've got the FAMAS then which is from the 70s 20 years after that and the the things that are kind of unique and unusual about the guns would change in those 20 year time periods next up is Thaddeus who says if the French had managed to produce their autoloading rifle prior to the German invasion presumably the world war ii invasion would it have made any significant impact I think the answer is no the French military's problems in World War two in the Battle of France were far beyond the the possibility of simply small arms fixing I think that would have made absolutely no difference at all next up is Chris who has a cool question here what was the status of the French state-owned arsenals like Salah Tian during the occupation in world war ii were they still making french rifles for the Vichy government are they simply not in use are there any examples of them being repurposed to produce arms for other Axis powers there actually are so a hand I'm not sure what to de and shontella ro we're doing at the time but sign Tien I can explain it fairly well they did make submachine guns the mas 38 was manufactured for the Vichy forces for the police more likely the there was a 22 caliber trainer version of the MAS 36 that was manufactured again for the Vichy government and then the main thing was actually signed Tien became one of the main producers of German g43 receiver forgings so they didn't make complete guns but g43 receivers excuse me were produced at sign TN through the war and it was actually the when the the American forces liberated or when Free French forces liberated sign TN that shut down a major German source of parts for their g43 production so you'll see g43 production really take a dive right at that point in that belief was October of 44 as a result next question is from Nicholas will your book cover flavors of the Tabata air I know you aren't a fan of muzzleloaders but conversions should be more interesting so that the tubba TR is like the French equivalent to the Snyder or the trapdoor Springfield they are conversions of muzzleloading rifles to breech-loader cartridge firing breech loaders raining like open the breech of Messiah Bader most similar to the Snyder and my book is not going to cover those I am sticking to starting with the shots Po and then the Gras partly because I have no experience with the tubba the air I don't have any myself and as conversions they kind of aren't the same as the the purpose-built military firearms that the army specifically was using next up is Antigonus who says the French military was one of the few militaries to adopt an entirely new standard rifle cartridge between World War 1 and World War 2 given bolt-actions remains the standard in world war two in your view would they have been better off adopting an intermediate cartridge instead of full power seventy-five by fifty four well first off seventy-five is actually one of the lighter of the full power cartridges it is a bit lighter in power than the 716 NATO would they have been better off with an even lighter cartridge in a yes but in a bolt-action rifle I'm not sure it really would have made that much difference they would have been better off ideally if they produced the MAS 40 and also with large cat large capacity magazines Andy in an intermediate caliber cartridge and basically like if they develop the Stormare themselves they would have been better off regardless it wouldn't have made a difference as we talked about a couple questions ago but I think the intermediate cartridge was the clear winner here that's what we've seen today and so have they made more made longer strides towards that earlier overall they would have been better but it wouldn't have made a an actual quality quantity of difference in World War two Robby asks every collector and gun enthusiast seems to have a garbage route or two hanging around their collection so as a fan of French firearms with as we have seen quite a nice French collection do you have plans on acquiring a shuttle arrow made Mosin m91 to round out the collection yes yes I do but I haven't yet because they tend to be pretty expensive and I just haven't justified it yet so if you're not familiar with what we're talking about here when the Russians adopted the Mosin Nagant the model of 1891 most Nagant while they were tooling up to get production going in Russian factories actually started by purchasing a big bunch of the guns from the shuttle aero Arsenal in France so these are difficult for you know the typical gun show patron to spot because they don't actually say shot LRO on them they say shot LRO written in Cyrillic which just looks like Russian gobbledygook to those of us who can't read Russian however I would definitely be interested in getting one I just haven't been able to justify the cost because ultimately it's not a French rifle it's too it's a Russian rifle made on contract in France so not really the focal point of my collection if I ever find a really good deal on one yeah I'll definitely get the other issue here is these the shot LRO rifles are almost really the only source we have for them here in the United States is by way of Finland examples that were purchased or captured by the Finns when they declared independence those have all been rebuilt to finish specifications so they still have the receiver markings but the sights the sling swivels and some of the the the parts that are really unique to the very early the first couple of years of of m90 1891 most in the gun production things like having a little finger stop on the trigger guard having a sling swivel on the magazine well those things the Finns generally upgraded and modernized and got rid of so finding a shot lro most in the gun in its original configuration is is pretty difficult and I have little hopes of ever finding one of those at a price that I can justify next question is from Justin whoo here we go here's our second one on the FAMAS having shot a famas possibly more than any other American what in your opinion could be improved on on the rifle for a hypothetical version to which will never exist basically make it more optics compatible make it STANAG magazine compatible and and then you could there are some things that could be done to make it a little bit more ambidextrous so it's really cool that it can be switched without any extra parts from left to right handed the one thing that would be a little bit better than that is being able to actually basically hot-swap it you know you have it in its left hand configuration but be able to shoot it from the right shoulder if you're going around a corner and I think with the right sort of deflector either clipped on or sort of built into to the stock assembly you could get that so that while cartridges are mostly coming backwards you could get them deflected downward probably and make the the gun really truly ambidextrous the action requires no update at all it's a very simple action it's an accurate system you know change the iron sights set up to one like the eval how he say easily adapted optics and I think you have what is arguably a very modernized able rifle that could still do good service but of course this will never happen next question is from Joel who says if you had to pick an overall most practical French weapon of world war 1 what would it be and I'm going to once again for the same reasons that we talked about earlier I'm going to say the five round dartie a carbine it was short it was handy had the best capacity the fastest reloading of French rifles of World War one I'd rather have a five round packet loader than an eight round tube magazine and I'd definitely rather have a rifle that is shorter overall than the giant pike of the Lebel or the oh seven 15 Bertier next question is from Louis who says did the French use a version of the Gatling gun during the franco-prussian war of 1870 no they did well they had a gun in that same category I was called the meat I you which has today become just the word for it machine gun what it was at the time was a multi barreled gun so they were 25 barrel volley firing guns so they kind of looked like cannons cuz I've got a big big breech assembly or barrel assembly like this that has 25 individual barrels in it and they feed from this big cartridge block it's a big metal plate yay sighs that holds 25 cartridges and you drop it into the gun close the breech and then you've got a lever that fires all 25 barrels in succession open the breech pull out this block with its 25 now empty cartridge casings replace it this was a major French secret weapon going up into the franco-prussian war the problem was it was so secret that they didn't really do any training with it they didn't do any familiarization with it and as a very early type of pseudo machine gun they didn't really understand the best way to use it and they set it up to be used like artillery they were trying to use this to combat like to use counterbattery fire on german artillery well the problem is proper artillery has a range that is definitely longer than say 11 millimeter LED rifle bullets and as a result they meet hi you was really almost ineffective in the way that they were trying to use it there were very few situations where they were brought up and used a close-range against infantry there were a lot more successful there but that didn't happen very often and certainly didn't affect the outcome of the war in fact what's interesting is if if the me try you had any long-lasting effect it was a lot of observers who looked at how it was used saw that it was completely ineffective and kind of scorned the whole machine gun volley fire concept for decades to come I've been ignoring my T there and it's all gotten cold because I just keep talking next up is Adam who says what are your thoughts on the French army moving away from the FAMAS and beginning the use of the hk416 given that there is no longer a military scale rifle factory in France it was inevitable that they would adopt a some other foreign rifle there's nothing particularly wrong with the well there are some obsolete aspects of the FAMAS design but it's not a bad gun it's just it was adopted in 79 it is now 2018 or when they started doing this it was 2016 more than a 35 year lifespan on a combat rifle it's time for something that's newer and better they need a rifle that can use optics they want a rifle that's more modular that can a better fit things like the Faline system or hopefully a more modernized equivalent of it as for the 416 it we talked about this on an in range Q&A recently there are not a whole lot of options if you are a large national military force looking to buy rifles you're not gonna go to desert tech and buy their bow pop because they're not gonna be able to make you 300,000 of them just ain't gonna happen you have to go to one of the major industrial you know arms making hubs of the world and there aren't a whole lot of those left so the French and the British ones are gone you've got HK you've got beretta could conceivably do it cz could probably pull it off but there aren't really any American companies that one would look to you know if you look at look at how we treat Colt look at Colt bankruptcy scandals of the last few years do you want to trust your national military to trying to get Colt to make you 300,000 rifles no you don't I certainly hope you don't FN could do it so really you've got h k FN cz and beretta that those are tiny your choices and of those the 416 it may be a little bit heavy but it is a durable rifle it's pretty well proven it's got other people adopting it especially early adopters in the Special Forces community have really kind of worked out all the kinks with those with the the details of those guns it may not be the rifle that I want personally but it makes a very compelling military choice and looking at the other options that France had I don't know that I would want the VHS bullpup FN I'm a little surprised that they didn't give Morken more consideration to the FS mm or the f2000 but I don't know all the details there I wouldn't want the beretta ARX system I think the hk416 is preferable to it and the cz Bren I haven't I really don't have any serious hands-on time with one of those so I can't really speak to the the Bren the cz Bren but given their options the HK is is hard to criticize next question is from Jake says what in your opinion was the best firearm for its time fielded by the French military I realize more modern firearms like the FAMAS are probably technically better than older stuff but if you could pick a time period and a firearm from that period what would it be the answer is easy that is absolutely the Lebel when we we don't maybe think about this so much today because everyone just is used to black-powder in fact we even used to black-powder substitutes in in black-powder guns so they all behave like smokeless powder sorry we're all used to smokeless powder today when the Lebel was adopted it was absolutely fundamentally better than every other military rifle out there because of that smokeless powder cartridge it was far flatter shooting it was far higher velocity didn't create clouds of smoke that would either obscure your own troops vision or reveal their position to the enemy it was without any doubt a revolutionary and fundamentally top of its class fire now the problem was because they rushed its development they ended up with a system that didn't have a lot of longevity to it and it would only be a few years before a lot of other people would have guns that were equivalent to or actually better than Lavelle but when it was adopted you know 1886 1887 1888 that that couple of years right there absolutely LaBelle's we have just a couple left here the next one is from Stefan or Stephen I'm not sure which says why does the French government keep so much information as state secret even though information from world war ii couldn't possibly be useful to any other country at this point it's not just world war ii it's even world war one but there's actually a rational explanation and that is the french archives don't have a system of automatically declassifying classified information so if they classified information on let's say design of the RSC rifle our production of it in World War one in 1918 then information is going to remain classified until someone actually tries to tries to access it discovers that is classified and then requests that it be declassified once someone makes that request then the archive and the government will go through and decide if it's still needs to be classified if it's not they be classified you can look at it all you like but that doesn't happen automatically so when you're trying to research something that other people haven't looked at before in the French system you will often run into classified information because you're just the first person to try and look at it so that's why interestingly there are a few exceptions and one of them was archival records on the French mutinies of 1917 some of that information was sealed for 50 years and some of it was sealed specifically for 100 years and I haven't had a chance to really dig into it and I don't know that I would find anything in English yet but in 2017 just last year a lot of records about the French mutinies would have become available to the public for the very first time and I suspect I hope we're gonna see some really interesting good scholarship about that period of events coming out in just you know in the next couple of years as proper historians are able to to take those newly available records and really amalgamate them into the the current existing understanding of that period in the war Christian asks were there many examples of the MAS 40 produced before the Germans invaded or is it similar to what would become the 49 where the plans were smuggled to Britain if there were any made before how come the Germans didn't have them produced in large numbers there's a really cool answer to that question first off there weren't many produced they were in early field trials right at the beginning of the war and when it became when Germany declared war they they kind of did everything they could to rush the production and their development and finalization of of that rightful and it just didn't work out a few of them probably actually saw service in the Battle of France but we're talking a couple hundred guns total probably now what's really cool about it is the beaver being developed or being produced pets on TN and they were also making a bunch of other guns like Maus thirty Six's part of the development plan for the Maus forty was to have it as compatible as possible with the tooling for the MAS thirty-six develop both guns simultaneously and economize between the two and in fact the mas 40 had a fixed internal five round magazine like the MAS 36 so there weren't these detachable magazines floating around to be used that was really the main change to the rifle after the war when it was finally put into production what they did at Sinai n was they smuggled the the blueprints and the technical package in the documentation out and hid it and then they disguised the MAS 40 production line as a mas 36 production line and the receivers and the barrels and most of the other parts at a glance look similar enough that as far as I can tell the Germans never caught on that there was a semi-auto rifle on the cusp of mass production outside yen and for that reason it never occurred to them that they might need to produce it because they didn't know it existed all right and our last question is from Demetrius who says hi Ian I love your work thank you the French gras and Lebel rifles and also Bertier carbines played a major role in the Greek Resistance and also in the Greek Civil War later on although Greeks have an almost romantic relationship with the gras and a lot of military history with it I find it weird how they were able to put it to work against the Nazis ammo shortages etc can you give me any information on specific formats for the guns of that era and if you know of any other commonly used firearm of that conflict I know some of them have the the crest of Saint George upon them well I don't have any specific information on Greek use of the Gras however I do actually have a Greek Bertier carbine and what the Greeks did was actually cut down a lot of bear to a full length rifles into carbines and they did it in kind of a unique manner the barrels will be larger in diameter than standard production carbines because they're cut-down rifle barrels the Greeks actually put their own replacement sights on the guns so the sights really stand out they're substantially different from French pattern Bertier sights the bayonets are different they don't fit a French band they fit a Greek bayonet and they're they're out there they're not super common but they're not incredibly rare either there will be pictures and description there will be a section in my book on that Greek conversion because it is a really neat specific unusual iteration of of the birth yay and by the way it does have that Greek crest of st. George stamped into the stock so there will also be a standalone video coming on that rifle but I haven't had a chance to do it yet whether that video comes out before the book does I'm not sure at this point it might or might not but it will definitely be in the book so thank you guys for submitting the questions it was kind of fun to do one specifically on my area of collecting focus the French stuff hopefully you guys are all also if you're certainly if you're still watching at this point hopefully you will be interested in acquiring a copy of my print book when that does come out I'm hoping that will be sometime in the spring so it is still a couple months away at this point when this is when this Q&A is being posted we're right around the time period when we're doing photography for the book I have a professional photographer who's doing that and it is gonna be awesome looking photography it will be a really great looking book I'm really excited about it in addition to everything else it's been a really fun project to work on everything you would need to know about that book you can find at French rifle book calm and of course I have linked to that in the description text so check that out for you know be on the email notification list for updates on the book and of course if you just want to get your own question in to the next Q&A when we're not just talking about print stuff check out patreon these questions are all submitted by those of you who are patrons who step up and actually directly support forgotten weapons it is you guys who make this happen so big thanks to all of you and thanks for watching

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 173,062

Keywords: france, french, rifle, pistol, forgotten weapons, q&a, question, answer, mccollum, gun jesus, lebel, berthier, gras, chassepot, mas36, mas40, mas44, 49/56, mas 49/56, 7.5mm, 7.5x54, 7.5 french, 8mm lebel, 8 lebel, archive, research, world war, ww1, ww2, great war, best rifle, best french rifle, maxim gun, tabatiere, st etienne, chatellerault, tulle, mutzig, small arms, military, hk 416, famas, felin, rsc, fsa17, fsa18, rsc 1917, tube magazine, french rifle book

Id: 2p4BssH7gCw

Length: 59min 6sec (3546 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 13 2018