Small Arms of WWI Primer 095: French Hotchkiss 1914

when the French entered the Great War they carried the salt at en 1907 machine gun as standard but very soon a model they had previously passed up would become the bell of their battlefield hi I'm Matthias and this grunt is the French MIT to you Modell 19:14 otherwise known as the big boy Hotchkiss so while I get this down and still keeping one two three four five of my fingers let's get it over the light box at 50 inches in length it doesn't sound too bad but when we see the weight tops 52 pounds this starts to stretch the limit of what we would term a small arm our example today chambers the French 8 by 50 millimeter rims labelled cartridge and it carries 24 rounds per strip other countries did adopt the gun they usually had 30 rounds in their strips now one day if we are lucky we'll get to try out one of those Santa Tien 1907 s they are very odd clockwork style machine gun if ever there was one they're also very rare in functioning condition in the US but for now we have not had that luck instead we are going to have to go a little bit out of order on this episode and I say a little bit because the Hotchkiss is actually a very early design it was just a late comer to the war and to talk about the gun we'll first have to mention its namesake Benjamin Berkeley Hotchkiss born in Waterton Connecticut in 1826 Ben's father was a Sahel Hotchkiss a Tanner turned factory owner who had gone into the business of tool-making Benjamin inherited his father's engineering bent and spent some time working for Colt firearms and Jowett manufacturing before striking out with his older brother Andrew Hotchkiss who had been born three years prior with a birth defect that actually left him unable to walk instead he used a cart of his own design to get around his sharp line was put to work on various arms inventions but settled most heavily on ordnance where they drew at the lead the brothers developed a massive selection of cartridges Shell's particularly timed fuse projectiles - ammo guys Andrew Hotchkiss is a name that's kind of up there with John Browning except he was sort of short-lived which is really he could have pushed a lot of new innovations if he had just survived a bit longer that's not our story today Andrew and Benjamin collaborated on a rifled cannon model of 1855 and a matching shell these would go on to see use in the American Civil War and actually drew French attention when one was seized by the French Expeditionary Force in Mexico this may have prompted Benjamin's first contacts in France now the Civil War sold eight a lot a Hotchkiss products but sadly these wartime profits would come only after Andrews death in 1858 like I said this is a man who was a very big innovator with very short life hard to say what might have been with both Hotchkiss is instead of just the one still we have Benjamin who persevered all on his own with his patents and products in use during the Civil War Hotchkiss Benjamin Hodgkiss had earned a fair bit of coin but that would dry up following the conflict as the u.s. retracted into its then more common penny pitching this is not the United States of today being an intelligent man Benjamin Hotchkiss didn't put a whole lot of effort into flirting his ship on what would ultimately be sand and instead that looked to Europe a region where the world was still very much likely to start open fire on one another for any number of reasons so while he filed patents in France for protection Hotchkiss actually focused his first efforts in Austria we partnered with Waffen fabric page I own company this is the same firm we mentioned as having the rolling block rights in the Austrian trials back in our vernal episode this experience would prove valuable soon after as the Prussians were added again this time it was the franco-prussian war a conflict that we've covered a few times over and actually in fairness France was the one that actually declared war and then was wholly unprepared for how good the Prussians had gotten at it with Napoleon the third captured a government of national defense was formed and that government would hear that there was an America munitions expert hanging out in Austria and so they offered him a facility and pay to get up to the vir and start making ammunition for their emergency purchased rolling block rifles and see the connection here the plate was initially found to be underpowered for the modern work so the French drove a locomotive in and paired it to the factory to provide more along with the train came an engineer and his young son and assistant that boy will come up later in our episode just keep that in your mind now obviously the franco-prussian war did not go well for the Franco's and the Hotchkiss contract would be cancelled but thankfully they did so with a lump indemnity that allowed Benjamin Hotchkiss to set up a prototype workshop in Paris and here he would finish the work he'd started during the prior war which he had seen the ineffective French light artillery and long for a rapid-fire cannon and so set to designing one now this would prove a huge success as by 1875 he had worked out the major kinks to what would become the Hotchkiss revolving cannon and in truth I've heard people mention both Alfred Carter's name and Louis wells broad well as being contributors but I haven't had the time to track down how much involvement either had in the actual engineering of the design again maybe on those times where Hotchkiss is an owner of an idea and not the executor what does matter is the Hotchkiss revolver went on to earn a lot of money for the inventor his company added a factory in Saint Denis and began expanding further as orders poured in from around the world by 1900 11,500 would be produced with 3.4 million artillery shells sold it's a tongue twister the gun was so good it can still be seen on the battlefields of World War one and was even toted up into the air on occasion during that conflict as a wild longevity following his cannon or rather just as it was starting to sell Hotchkiss introduced what would become an evolving rifle design this is again something that we've briefly mentioned and really the gun never went far enough for me to make a whole episode on it until we get well out of World War one but it's something for to be aware of for another time that there is a Hotchkiss bolt-action rifle now despite all of that workup Benjamin Hotchkiss is only the namesake of this gun today he was not the inventor and had no hand in the development of it whatsoever I'm sorry all this so far was just to establish the size in history of the company the focus on repeating arms and that there was a train one time and said we're going to focus on Lawrence Vincent Benet son of American General and inventor Stephen Vincent Benet Lawrence was born in January of 1863 in West Point he studied science and engineering at Yale graduating in 1884 his father urged him to visit an old friend in France and so in 1885 he began working for Benjamin Hodgkiss who promptly died with his passing the company would take a few years to restructure becoming a publicly traded concern naming itself these French words thanks to his father's reputation his own excellent education and with some hard work and an inventive mind Lawrence Binet would quickly rise to chief engineer and then beyond to general manager of Hodgkiss effectively becoming the leading man in the direction of the post Benjamin Hotchkiss Hotchkiss company was such a rapid transition Binet would need a more established local guide and he found one in Albert Andrey merci this is a man who I could find almost no vehicle data for and I tried for days but we already know him at least from earlier in the story he was the son of the locomotive engineer he had been so helpful during the war that Hotchkiss had kept an eye on him and kept him on staff afterwards where his natural engineering skill and his inventiveness shown or right through but they also appreciated mercy and made him his chief assistant all right now seeing our major players for the episode neither of them invented this gun that honor goes to bohemian weapons technician captain Baron Alfred odd collect von Luger's de he was from Vienna serving in the Austrian army he had been hard at work on an autoloading firearm most notably this used a gas piston operation something suitably reliable at its heart although dubious in the details as represented by odd collect he approached the Hotchkiss company about producing his gun under licence and while Binet and Marcy found it very interesting mm they did not find the design as a whole something that they could really sell something that would function and work in a hard environment it needed a lot of extra development and so they offered him a lump sum payment for the patent rights in this way they could be protected from competitors while they undertook an overhaul of the entire concept ode collect agreed although I'm unsure of what some he was paid he did however leave his idea in the hands of the French company and went on home Binet and merci would get right to work and by 1895 they had something ready for testing which on the whole went a lot better than they expected and because of this it actually did reveal one particular problem which is that the barrel was very clearly overheating as we know Hiram Maxim had solved this issue with the water jacket but the name RC had another idea entirely first and foremost they thickened up that barrel and added thermal mass means slowing that time to heat up but of course it can also mean that the barrel then holds that heat much longer just thermal mass works both ways takes longer to get where it's at takes longer to become something else and so they added brass doughnuts these were pressed over the barrel and created a much larger radiating surface I've seen it claimed that ode collect already had these sorts of ridges in his design but I haven't seen any at the you know patent papers and currently turned up why this was claimed so grain of salt it might have been oak collect it might have been been am receipt now unlike the maxim this new gun ran from the open bolt making it run cooler as anytime you stopped firing the barrel is open front and rear long to air to flow releasing any heat stored in that chamber and overall just sort of allowing everything to flow away more heat and filing our shed thanks to an open-ended gas piston sleeve down at the bottom when the bolt is rearward that has a noticeable gap in it it's pretty easy to spot the gun fed thanks to 30 round strips of ammunition which appeared to have been eight millimeter labelled from the outset these would later be reduced to 24 though because while they were issuing ammunition packs of eight so if that made it divisible despite being complex to mill the finished gun used very few parts and was easily disassembled without tools all of that combines to give us wellthis which was named in honor of the late Benjamin Hotchkiss and also likely because they wanted to sell the thing on the back of that revolving cannon everybody already knew they wanted to buy Hotchkiss military guns more than they wanted to buy a bene or mercy that's gonna prove really true later demonstrations of the gun began that same year the US Navy showed the most initial interest and they did some trial work on the gun they found a number of minor issues and one major one in the form of parts breakages due to improper heat treatment inventor Edward G Parkhurst who had been present for much of this had already advised on the Gardiner gun actually interestingly enough he gave us the same clip system that we saw for the Krag Jorgensen episode actually but that ultimately went nowhere either because they had already decided to give up on the Krag by that point well anyway he gave Ben a mercy his full impression with some advice which apparently stuck as both men worked hard to improve the design resulting in the model 1897 now normally I'm all for these incremental changes but my sources featuring such nuance are pretty short and this episode is pretty long already so I'll just say from 1897 to 1900 there were a number of very small changes like the steel cooling fins instead of brass ones refacing of hard corners and other damage prone areas within the system an even heavier barrel with more nickel content along the way these guns were trialed and accepted in Norway though Japan France ich and eventually Belgium and a few other small orders here and there lumped in as well but again not a huge seller just yet outside of the big Japanese adoption in every case they were pitted against the world-famous maximum gun one that we've covered in two previous episodes now now there's fight being a smaller contract the Norwegian trial is very important because the notes are very helpful in figuring out just why you would go with well this gun instead of the maxim gun they found that the Hotchkiss was actually easier to crew with simpler operations disassembly and parts replacement was really fast and really intuitive on the Hotchkiss the gun was technically lighter do recall that this was against the earliest pattern of the maxim and when using the gun it was in their opinion easier to stay alone behind cover the feed strips feed directly to the chamber and resist swelling in wet weather or stiffening in the cold like the fabric belts would the Hotchkiss was on the whole cheaper to buy and easier to maintain and very importantly it ran without the use of water French adoption would come in 1899 likely thanks to this exact advantage although they only wanted 10 at first that was just to equip fortress troops and get a feel for the gun it wouldn't be until 1906 that a significant order was placed these were meant for cavalry alpine and desert troops but that last one was really key as they almost all ended up in colonial use you see the Hotchkiss was particularly resistant to find sand and of course didn't use water like we said making it a desert favorite even with those advantages as well later see the only reason for the limited purchases was because of delays in the production of the then adopted boot oh now I know what you're thinking the maxim had a lot of other advantages it was more developed as a system at that time and would see further radical improvement so let's talk about another comparison between the maximum in the Hotchkiss let's talk about a country that tried both guns that would actually be Japan they had licensed production of the Maximus far back as 1891 and by the time of the sino-japanese war they were rolling off the line deployed only and for most of the guns repeatedly jammed this may have been in part due to the eleven millimeter Marauder black powder cartridge regardless the Japanese military officials were not too happy and when they had the chance to see the Hotchkiss at work well they went ahead and went with that especially because it was already running in a smokeless six point five millimeter cartridge had this been chambered in Morada probably wouldn't do so well at all since it relies on that gas piston anyway they snapped these things up with an order starting in 1898 in 1902 they made their own version these can be spotted by the seven cooling fins they were called the type ha for well Hotchkiss in 1905 they switched to the type 38 named for the 38th year of Meiji rule these had a cartridge lubricating device and an improved trigger group in 1914 Japan would further improve the Hotchkiss to get the type 3 heavy but that's a story for another day as they did some fairly big changes to get that gun we'll see in our next episode how Japanese use of the Hotchkiss would bring about even more changes but for now let's talk about that last major adopter the belgians sometime around 1906 they too would choose the Hotchkiss it's not a bad choice really at first they still rolled this about on the old carriages a lot like artillery just big ol boxy things with ammunition carry it by a horse or dog cart it looks like perhaps 65 were in the country when war were declared now that we're in the war how many did France really have at this point well about six hundred as a matter of fact penne and Murcia had rolled out an improved model nineteen twelve just two years before the war is the last attempt to entice the French officials they had balanced it specifically to the ball D cartridge now this was a Spitzer version of the eight millimeter labelled cartridge adopted in 1898 it saw an improved primer in 1912 it's a heavy hitter but uses a terrible sloping case shape that made it hard to adapt to Auto loading designs the piston of the 1912 was reinforced further the manual safety removed an improve extractor was fitted firing pin was fluted the ejector was reinforced the breech cover was improved to lock more firmly and easily the barrel was fitted with an interrupted screw design for easier takedown and various other small changes were put in to improve the manufacture and performance of the Hotchkiss military machine gun the French officials however were still not interested you see the official gun was still the santa tian 1907 which is a wild bit of Clockwork if I've ever seen one but also excessively difficult for the government Arsenal to produce this would proved to be sort of its greatest failure because as we know in hindsight machine guns during the Great War were important and while France had a fair few here and there certainly not as bad as some other unprepared countries Marantz had a fair mix of models in somewhat disjointed training program and they were up against Germany the Germans with their MgO eights were proving to be troublesome and so the French would have to gear up to match in doing so well of course they'd have to turn their attention back to that model 1912 that they had abandoned and that is finally how we get to this gun right here since the government arsenals could produce everything Full Tilt and machine guns like the 1907 were especially difficult to manufacture they contracted the Hotchkiss company for about as many of these as they could possibly roll out and so Hotchkiss took that model 1912 popped on a spade grip and sort of ditched the stock and voila okay so there were some more time changes and some of those are in this gun but we'll get a look at those later for now let's just get a closer look at this monstrosity alright so I'm just gonna you know look at this may prove more difficult than I realized in one second I just flip this over and I just need to pop a little lever here and if I now twist up what huh don't make a liar out of me yet let's see you there's my doodad there's my ding-a-ling I just got to probably helps not to have the gun resting on itself I'm alarmed from there the weight is right here in this barrel shook you closer in just a second oh but with that other way I can actually do this hey we're getting down into the about is heaviest to rifle segments so with that in mind let's get a closer look taking the tour is something this big closeup is gonna be pretty fun but what we have here is Oh a mounted machine gun so there's our Spade grip at the rear there's our actual pistol grip and trigger I'm not going to pull that right now back here this is our ejection side of the feed system and if I flip her over for you there's not much more safe way of turning this thing around and not having the barrel or chamber attached other sides same thing this is reduce assembly as we'll see in a moment this is our cocking handle and as we walk back this is our feed block for feeding our strips in and then as we walk forward we're going to see hanging out front right here that's actually our gas piste and you can tell we've been using a little bit but ignore any of this white stuff that's just grease so a gas piston is actually external this system you can see it when the guns assembled as we covered earlier that helps keep it from building up too much fouling and keeps it from really filling up with any dirt or grime yeah mud can get in but yeah mud can get back out now how I took this apart who is actually hold on it's on the other side they go oh there we go there's actually this lever right here this guy can be flipped down I now have it flipped up and when it flipped up I'm able to turn just like a takedown shotgun oh the interrupted screw on the barrel one two three right yeah one two three interrupted screw patterns then just like a little artillery piece this goes in turns and locks so it's just that simple take down the barrel the gas system is up here where we have our cone and we have our adapter here this guy can be turned in and out although I have our set where I want I'm not going to mess weather today this thing can be turned in and out to get the pressure just how you want it and the way that works is it's got a gas bleed off in here and this acts like an expansion chamber so the further you turn this out easier she rides the further you turn it in the more that gas gets shoved right back down on that piston and runs are a lot hotter this system can actually foul up very easily in the battlefield and it's the one sort of vulnerability in this gun although still doesn't seem to be that big of a deal when it's on this scale so make of this oh I'm sorry cooling fins haha one two three four five yep it's French it's pretty wild right now these guys were pressed on and it's just there to allow the hottest part of the barrel to have even more heat radiating surface there's some argument about how effective this really is certainly not as effective as just water but there is a lot of Steel to this gun if I bring her around actually well I've still got the barrel we make some room bring her around yeah that's a thick bore a little bit dirty but a thick thick or and you can start to see how much mass is really on this gun now this is thread at the end that way it can take a let's say flash suppressor or there's even some muzzle gas redirect devices and things like that to get ahead of these guns later on so this away gun now the way this gun works is it fires from the open bolt so right now the bolt is back and the system is locked as a matter of fact if I turn this guy around I can see something pretty cool make sure I mean camera okay the bolt cannot drop unless this little guy in here there's like a lever on that side it gets tipped and it would be tipped by well they stripper clips no this is partially loaded 24 rounds of eight millimeter labelled in total obviously I'm not gonna stick these live rounds in the system I do have an empty strip these things are pretty quick to ID even though they're crazy-looking they're punched out of one piece of sheet steel all at once very easy manufacture and they can be confusing at first but if you just look for these ridges down by my finger that's the rear that's where the rim of the cartridge sits so if you know that and you know that the gun is currently facing me that means the ridges go this way or the ammo load it's even more obvious the point again goes towards the enemy and they just sort of slide in here and once they slide in you'll see you know what let me get this partially fed it might be the easiest way to do this let's see I've got a partially disassembled the gun there we go now they're designed to feed only one way they won't come back out of the action the other way and I'm just getting this in enough doing it delicately to not slice my hands on how sharp this strip is but if I can get it partially in there there we go flipped over so you can see there we go so this may be a little fine in there but with my patented and plastic I can hopefully point out that there's a center wheel here spindle that is acting on this notch that's cutting the strip that's sucking this thing through so every time we fire that gets rotated over once so this index is in one more position when it goes in one more position it falls into the path of the bolt now I don't want to dry fire this but now that the strips inserted it strip this lever here and so if you want to mainly drop the bolt manually you drop the bolt you could trip this little lever right here and you'd be allowed to let the bolt down so I can do that now by actually pulling the cocking handle back and giving it some rearward pressure I'm gonna do this on the main camera and then just let her index for it so if you look our bolt is now in our path it's picked up around I flip her over it'll be easier to see oh there's a lot of metal bouncing there we go there's our bolt see her in there and then so she's forward she would have fired I mean I can feel the fine pin right here she would have fired at this point yep there's our firing pin down and you know what I'm gonna be able to get my camera ball forward strip there and then when she actually goes bang the gas piston here which now is way far forward and already building up some of that good old sugar rust telling you the south loves to put this on everything as fast as we clean anything so this piston comes forward this would be now up inside that shroud underneath the barrel and then the gas system would push back on this as you can see my bolts starting to move so let me get her further Ford the piston would be pushed back the bolt gets retracted this stripped index is forward one more position and the system's locked back into operation unless I was holding trigger at which case the whole thing would start over and over and over again so there's a lot to cover in that regard but I'm not doing it manually like this that's nuts we'll have an animation in a moment but at least you get the idea in person so at this point this guns almost fed this entire strip now because there's no ammo it I can just keep yanking it out but let's say this was a partially fed strip there's live ammo want to get back out well in that case we've got to get this guy over to the other side okay and then there's our lover here so this guy see where you guys that guy okay little guy and I'm pushing it that way that guy allows us to release the strip back out the way it came in so that's to unload the gun prematurely which is a nice little example and all it really does is it disengages the spindle you can see it's free to spin now and then if I let her go she's locked in so that's all that little guys doing but still really handy feature to have on something like this and a lot more complicated not nearly as easy to do on the lighter gun that comes after this says we're gonna see at some point all right since I'm already dirty let's talk about disassembling this monstrosity so to do that I'm first going to have to let the bolt down and since we already sort of talked about that I can just go ahead and do it for you here I'll pull that cocking handle to the rear oh yeah hold it and let her forward okay now normally you would do this on the mount by the way that makes things a thousand percent easier but with that down I can push on a rearward button kind of keep this where you guys can see it I can push on oh man it's a big gun I can push on this button here you guys see that one right there and once I push on that I can then release this cross pin with the big old head on it so this guy's gonna come out but he can't until I hit the button so I don't want to lose the entire gun but push button and push pin that's really it this is a big piece to try to lose but look what happens there's our big cover and here's our spring and if we pull our trigger and fiddle a bit the scale comes back and out I'm sorry I mean you guys is away I'm also trying to balance the gun there's our trigger group if we wiggle this out oh this is where this thing always goes awry give me one second it's much easier to do on the tripod and I probably should have just gone outside and done that but somehow some of you guys seem to enjoy watching me struggle I mean spring is out of the way now she's just hung up in there my trigger must be rotated the trigger needs to get rotated back enough to pop out that's the trick there and then Oh from there I can just push my piston rearward and at this point I'm just hung up on this assembly the entire sort of feeding a loading assembly now this is done with a cross key here that you just need to whack with a mallet or in this case all iso pre loosen this and I sewed in it so the tool is included here in the sense that since this is brass or phosphor bronze actually is what I believe it's really made out of it's softer than the steel a couple quick taps couple extra quick taps and really I'm doing more than a Frenchman in wood because I'm trying not to scratch it this cross key comes out this is really the one thing that bothers me is this seems like the most vulnerable piece because there is a flat spring on it right right there that little guy that worries me everything else seems very very brutalist very doable so with that out of the way the entire feed block can be removed in one second oh riveting I know so all I did was I pulled that guy out of there it's just a big laborious job so there's our feed block it's one contain unit it can be stripped further by removal of a clip here but it's not really our job today okay so we're no longer tied up on that feed system so we should be able to just pull ourselves to the rear baby pull this guy off the side let me get you the magic floor bolt and lock out and the huge gas piston now with all this out of the way do not accidentally lose this little guy where is he going because he won't like to hide on you there we go oh that little guy if he gets out 90 degrees pop and we're free so uh just be careful that I believe that's our yeah that's our ejector show so let's get that over this is now just a very complicated skeleton if I actually get it into close-up that is some wild milling I mean imagine the machine tool design hours into this as much as it's a complicated shape if you really look at it there's a lot of shortcuts that were done drilling all the way through in order to get a hole on the other side and things like that so it's not entirely complicated to manufacture but it is a big block of metal and still much simpler than they saw at the end 1907 so this guy over here and we'll look at our piston and walk so this is our gas piston slash carrier in this case and then this is how the gun walks up so this is our bolt big guy right as he let's see as the gun cycles back they separate as they come forward see this little tab here watch watch that guy clear carefully as they as the system comes forward he can down I'm not representing very well he cans down into this space right here well what's in that space are two sections of the receiver that sit right in there they're solid that is the locking surface right there so that's how we get lockup on our gun okay IVA but it just comes off not very surprising anybody I'm sure and there's a firing pin floated in there now I have done a fairly good job of covering myself in what grease was left in the system and I've explained the parts vaguely you can certainly see how if this were on a tripod it would come apart a lot quicker this is not a ton of parts to maintain all the very big they're chunky I mean you're in the main camera you're not in the close-up and it's like keep an eye on this guy keep an eye on this guy but everything else is like this is like these are the next smallest pieces so this is a pretty good field serviceable gun if you're part of a team if it's mounted up on tripod this is going to go by a lot faster there's almost sort of a calming element of watching me struggle with this little parts like the extractor here very easy to get out very simple you just sort of pry up on that side flip it over and pull it out so very very simple field serviceable gun in terms of getting to a firing pin or extractor you can skip a lot of this and pop the cover get her all the way back just Jenk the fleed block pull her all the way back pop out the rear end pull the firing pin put in a new one if that broke if it's the extractor that broke you just pull her far enough back to yank the whole bolt out swap that and there's ways to get into the system faster if you know what part broke so don't think it's as insane as I just showed you but if you're wondering how it really really works I imagine this was not super helpful so with that said we're gonna go look at some x-ray animation courtesy of our friend over at VBB SM YT make sure the action is open and simply press in your loaded strip pulling the trigger releases the massive carrier / piston assembly which Springs forward driving the bolt into pressing a round off the strip and into the chamber where it fires excess gas presses on the piston which drives rearward resetting the action the bolt locks into the receiver with a set of swinging arms these are raised and lowered out of battery by a central link which is shaped to be directed up or down by the carrier the firing pin in red is driven by the carrier into the next rounds primer after a walk the piston body is shaped to drive the feed strip as it rotates a rear spindle which in turn drives a star-shaped front spindle the projections of that forward spindle draw in the strip this pulls the cartridges onto a simple fixed metal lifter which is shaped to pull them up off the strip and into the path of the bolt when empty the system ejects the strip to the right with that clear a spring-loaded lever is freed to catch an additional projection on the piston rod locking the action back open and preventing dry fire this also allows you to more rapidly load the next strip you can see more of this animation over at V BBS my T's YouTube page but for now let's put this gun in May's hands excellent news guys we got to try this twice our first example was thanks to our friend William who had the model 1907 tripod our second key from Jeff to a long-standing hero of the show he had the later model 1916 tripod all right this thing is pretty dang cool almost worth the amount of weight that you have to lug around to shoot it now we rush the history a bit to get to the firing segment so let's review the French army had something like 5000 model 1907 machine guns my numbers vary by source but the short story is the Germans had roughly doubled the number of automatics that's bad and like we covered the sympathia 1907 was not going to be a fast gun to produce so hodgekiss was contracted for as many as they could spare but about that same time the factory at Saint Denis proved to be a little too close to the German lines to prevent the possible shelling crippling the war industry Hotchkiss was moved to Lyon 400 workmen production machinery and hundreds of tons of material were uprooted and replanted in just three days production began again in just 12 I ran out of things to count with amazing another facility was set up across the channel in Coventry but as we will soon see this was set to manufacture a different Hotchkiss gun now the st. Denis plant didn't just sit idle tooling was found to keep it hard at work manufacturing parts and accessories for the machine guns just not 100% vital things like receivers at the new headquarters in Lyon the French government kept pouring in money and resources and that factory would double in 1916 along with production increasing again in 1917 with a third factory building at the outbreak of the war Saint Denis could produce maybe 50 guns a month but by the time of the Armistice that number had risen to four thousand I've heard over 100,000 guns were made but I've also seen claims of just 46,000 so I'm not sure who to believe but in either case it's a lot more than the 1907 and not only did they get conch kiss out produce the 1907 and outperformed it so much so that the 1907 was dropped as the official gun and any production halted in 1917 how is that for vindication now it took a bit for this to be recognized in order to prevent supply and training come the first 1914 were actually issued to the territorial regiments in reserve only in 1916 when mass production was in full swing did they start being pushed out onto the front line in big numbers and once in combat alongside the Santa Thea in 1907 the Hotchkiss 1914 really shined through to Hotchkiss guns were part of the defense of Hill 304 in the spring of 1916 they held their isolated unreinforced line for ten days against a superior enemy the supporting infantry focused on reloading the strips with their own rifle ammunition in the end these two guns expended over 150 thousand rounds combined from their key positions behind the crest both were still functioning when relief came seems pretty impressive sure but we've heard of a lot of long lasting guns before and I'm sure the French just put the salt at the end through its paces so what made the Hotchkiss so much better well maybe it's that the thing was 100 percent mud proof a division report from the Somme in the autumn of 1916 owing to the mud the automatic weapon soon became useless neither the machine rifles nor the Santa Tien guns will operate fortunately the division has two Hotchkiss machine gun companies whose guns divided amongst the various units engaged have enabled us to hold our ground for they continue to function this combined with much easier operation simpler parts replacement and fewer parts replaced overall plus the unanimous favor from the troops in terms of operation put the 1914 well above that old 1907 and saw it firmly out the door now as I said there would be some more time improvements to this gun the breech cover would go from bronze to blued steel the barrel would be threaded for that flash suppressor the grip width would increase luminous sights would be added the case adjustment would be made captive no losing that the tangent rear sight would give way to an adjusted disc version as seen on the 19 seven as well the locking lugs would change shape just a bit to prevent cracking and the feed block would be modified to better support linked strips these simulated belts of ammunition up to 250 rounds and segmented strips they could be used in fixed positions or like here in a tank honestly it's a good thing they kept improving the design because they would soon be loaning these particular guns out to allies the American Expeditionary Force was in such a hurry to get into the action that they left their own guns at home not that they had all that good of a heavy machine gun in stock at this point anyway again like the French they found the Hotchkiss unstoppable an excellent friend to have in the trench although John Browning would interrupt that love affair eventually that's another episode for another time so that's it the 1914 was one of the best heavy machineguns of the great war mostly because it just kept running the Energizer Bunny of throwing a lead I won't go into the Hotchkiss company's post-war developments just yet but they were numerous for some time the 1914 itself though well that remained on hand until World War two as a matter of fact lacking a suitable replacement production even resumed limitedly in 1938 when Germany blitzed France in 1940 well they captured a lot of these guys calling the mg 2 v 7f and entered their inventory as a reserve weapon post-war they were back in French hands where they served in Algeria and you know that holding their China conflict they only really phased out of service when the 8-millimeter labelled cartridge was phased out of service the guns just kept running proving once more that they may be the most robust heavy machine gun ever fielded the original inventor owed collec well he turned towards experiments with parachutes and served as an instructor during the war he would also design a sort of mine warfare but this went unused in 1916 he was prota to major in the reserves they would pass away in January of 1917 presumably from natural causes Laurence Binet retained his US citizenship and even enlisted in the banished American war serving as an ensign in the Navy through the conflict he then returned the Hotchkiss remaining there until he would actually go back to the US for two more years of the Great War as an advisory member of the American Expeditionary Forces purchasing board again he returned to Hotchkiss after this and led the company until his retirement in 1936 at which point he returned to the US a last time to live until May of 1948 when he was taken by illness as for Henry mercy well I certainly have nothing definitive I struggled for biographical information and sadly failed the only thing I could actually find in all of this was a post-war newspaper advertisement which was placed in hopes of finding what I assumed was his son Daniel who had been a prisoner of the Germans last seen going to a hospital for treatment of an illness right at the end of the war I honestly have no clue if he was ever found or what became of his father if you know of a good source by all means pass it along I feel like this is a man who needs up there your role in history alright on that happy note let's turn our attentions back to this gun right here and we'll get her over to May and find out her opinion on while probably the heaviest dang thing we've pulled in alright once more we have May and we've actually left the gun out we've been doing some double filming today I know but that thing is a pain to haul around but I guess I should let you tell us that so we're gonna talk about the Hotchkiss 1914 and two mounts we had two mounts to choose from with this gun and we kind of got to talk about the ergonomics so let's break this up a little bit can you give us a rundown about what it's like to move that gun around and those mounts that's the first ergonomics and then we'll talk about actually you know setting up getting ready to fire so understand this the gun is 52 pounds you know 52 pounds it really isn't a lot of weight when you think about it I mean anyone can carry it I can carry it fairly easily but it depends on how that weight is dispersed so on a lot of guns that we've experienced especially as machine guns a good bit of them are actually have more of their weight to the rear I guess or more where you would carry it with your own and you're at your own center of mass right unfortunately for the Hotchkiss it's kind of more towards the center where the fee block is located so and it's also pretty well distributed throughout the gun so you go to pick it up and you naturally need to move it so it's closer to your own center of mass which means that fee blocks not poking into your belly it's kind of awkward and then there is still a good bit of weight on both ends like even the barrel just separating on its own is pretty heavy yeah the the busiest part of the gun is the balance the point of the gun which is really awkward for you whenever you're trying to tote it around so if I'm just carrying it from point A to point B on its own it's it's definitely not the most mobile gun I would say now when we take it over we will look at the different mounts so we actually just have two different mounts as with eius was saying we have an earlier mount which we'll just call the saint-étienne mount and then we have an older mount or a newer mount which was basically for wartime until 1916 so the to clarify we covered this a little bit earlier but it was the Santa T in 1907 s essentially mount there's the standard French mount going into the war and then they had a more expedient more time 1916 mount the first one is very muchly levers gears locks in the second one is like one lever and you sort of get everything where it needs to go and you lock it at once it's a much more of a balancing act I guess to get it set up is the way I would describe that now interestingly enough setting both of them up as far as getting them walked into place I would say the scent at the end when was slightly better I would say it wasn't quite as awkward in that the wartime one when you look at it it's got these weird tabs that you're trying to like push both legs into place and unfortunately you just you kind of need help with it and honestly in order to get both of them set in the exact right place otherwise you can wind up with a teeter-totter type you know a tripod of some sort which is a bit awkward but and then the sentence knee on one was slightly heavier as a result making it not quite as easy to move around so unfortunately not as easy with the team but the wartime one definitely was much lighter and could kind of fold up and was just easier to transport so would you say that you would want to march with the later one and you would want to fight with the first one exactly now granted setting the gun in both of them I would say both both times when I set the gun in them they were pretty easy although I will say the wartime one was slightly more finicky and just that it didn't always feel like the gun wanted to set in the positive tabs up front as well so I did find the mounting system way easier than the maximum though which is just three points of contact is that the two sort of like locking logs up front the round 20 and looking guys you just pop it up and drop those in once they're set the lever back line up the doodad at the rear which is just that yoke for being able to adjust it up and down line it up drop it in pop a pin that's it I mean it's literally like open set click click and you're in it's really fast it can be really fast and you're a you at the team especially could get very fast with those I would agree but yet so I've got the gun I've got it in the mounts at this point I need to get the gun ready to actually fire now here's the thing I think it is a very simple gun and easy to set up but if honestly I didn't know anything about guns I would say the most not intuitive I say the least intuitive function that you need to do with getting the gun ready for fire is the charging handle know it's like the VAR you just need to pull it back to in order to pull the bolt back and they you need to make sure you push the charging handle all the way forward home that's the most difficult part otherwise popping in a strip you know which way the bullets go hopefully outside the gun and it's a very positive lock in you can hear it click you can feel that the strip is in there and positively set light it doesn't want to come out the only extra thing could have been is maybe adding an indicator on the outside so that it you could positively tell it was in there but you can see it like if you go to look at the feed tray you can hear it for the click and you can feel it for the strip like hedges how solid it is in there so that's possibly my only complaint and the only other thing is maybe there's no safety for me to take off because there is no safety so there's a little bit of danger there at that one open bull is ready to fire so careful with that one this is fantastic it's almost terrifying in a way not really because it's the way we handle guns we go with the four rules so they're always loaded but it is bizarre to have an open bolt gun with no manual safety and then the way you load it isn't to pop in a mag or push up button or do anything you're used to you just take this strip and you stick it in there and it happens so easy and so fast you you've got a go you you know first time you ever done you like that's a little weird click can you're like well crap that's a live machine gun now I mean it's all it took was rack and then click wife I mean you could take somebody who knows almost nothing about firearms they'd be done in three minutes flat now the only thing I wish we had been able to try which I'm sure some people throughout the episode have been like why didn't you add the second strip on to the end of the other one why well gentlemen we wanted to okay so I guess this is up to me to explain right well we have feed strips that go into the system and I need to cover this in this episode which is that as this is feeding you can just take another one stick it on top and they actually lock in it just gets pulled along and you can just keep firing so the belt size or the feed size for the system is theoretically infinite I mean eventually the gun will start melting down from heat somewhere but realistically you can just keep linking these little strips until the guns sick of it that's pretty cool I mean this is this is something belt feds don't do you don't just keep linking belts together so there's no need to ever recharge the system and even if you did run off a strip the system locks up and you just stick another strip and pull the trigger I mean the reset time is nothing on this gun now the reason we didn't get to do it is because there's a steel blade that pulls the cartridge out and into the path of the bolt and that had a notch in it and we didn't know when we went to the range the first time and so we've had the gun alone but we've also been competing with project lightning which was our light machine gun review of World War one and we needed a lot of eight millimeter lapel for that cartridge to or really labelled cartridges for that series so since we had to feed the Shoshone we had to feed the Hotchkiss and we had to you know we're and there's all these competing interests and we only have so much budget and time we took out the 1914 we had a fixed budget of rounds for it and then we ran into this problem and so on the range we were able to repair that notch enough that it would feed the first strip fine beautifully like butter the problem is when you lay the second strip in it's it's a little proud it likes to sort of bounce a bit and there's no guarantee that it wouldn't catch the damage not in that one particular gun and when it did that was really severely bad for the gun it was parts grindingly bad and we didn't want to damage a hundred and some-odd year piece like that's that's good custodianship is to not force an issue just to get a couple seconds of footage so if we could go back out right now yeah we could but we're on the two-week rotation again and we have got to get you guys some episodes so I'm sorry you get to see them links fed into the action but absolutely it will just sort of infinitely relink these guys which is kind of interesting that you could effectively have infinite amounts just until the gun does know oh it's a beautiful crew weapon so super easy to set up we can feed as many strips as we want in there I mean a kid could do it does this take us to our actual firing summit what happens when the gun goes bang just gonna start off with the sights because honestly I thought they were very very easy to read if I'm Lesley they were like rifle sights I'd I had no problem whining on my target those were beautiful the trigger I would say it's just middle of the ground it's not a heavy pull through necessarily it's it's not light it's kind of middle-of-the-road and the smooth so there's nothing really extra special about it there I'll give you points on the machine gun that's mounted a tripod it's not that's a the biggest deal it's melted you know you're not gonna flinch it or move the shot so I guess the trigger can be what it is which is fine I mean it worked for that and then actually the only awkward part was the bouncing that came from the recoil and I don't even know how much of it would have been the gun versus the tripod that it was in because we did notice that the center DeYoung tripod did seem to hold it more steady and we think probably just because it had more weight to it granted both of them could have done amazingly if we had sunk them deeper into the ground used some sandbags done some some decent lay where I work with them but we just we didn't we didn't have time so unfortunately we plunked them down gun goes in we went to be fair we could you know occasion we've had it when we say we don't have time I want to be careful because some days we do in some days we don't we want to make sure we evaluate these compared to each other so waiting if we sink one gun down with 30 pounds of sandbags we must always sink every gun with exactly 30 pounds of sandbags or you won't be able to compare them which you know honestly the only one we have done that with interesting enough was the tiga bear well the t bear was not weighted down it just was given a surface in which it could dig in so he's put on top of sandbags so that those little toes could actually dig in which is the mg o 815 which we used in lightning and we will have an episode on soon also uses that same mount it was put on the ground where those toes were allowed to dig in like they should we just didn't want to shoot the Teague of air from a prone position because that's a very uncomfortable proposition and we didn't even know what kind of recoil we're gonna get we shot that gun live we had five rounds you saw every round that may ever fire there's no test shot and so that gun we took a little extra precaution to make sure that you were protected but otherwise no we want to leave them a little naked so that they can be compared to each other so you can see what the system unassisted will do we're not shooting them for competition for actual fighting we're shooting them for comparison but even at that that's the most preparation we have done everything else has just been plunked down ready to go that's it and so unfortunately you can just tell from the shots like that it they just were more dispersed than what I thought they could have been and then also I wish that the first shoot we'd had a chance to play with the gas system I feel like that would have made a huge difference because we did get to it the second shoot and honestly you can tell there's just a drastic difference like when I doubt that pressure up my shots definitely spread a bit more but then again also we may have been running the the round the cartridge a little bit hot if I'm not mistaken sort of we're somewhere between Baldy and ballin in terms of our load data and a lot of people go a little lighter than that and you can go lighter than that with this system but realistically we should just dial the gas system almost all the way out until the gun stalled and then dialed it back up but this again becomes a function of the limitation of time and ammunition because that is a fifty to a hundred round proposition and we had 100 rounds to film this gun it takes a lot of time to set this stuff up on a two-week rotation so it's just where we are if somebody else has the gun I highly recommend going out and playing with it and putting up the footage I'd be happy to link it on one of our social medias or all of our social medias like we love sharing more of this information it's just we're kind of a drive by in terms of the shooting and we're a very heavy show in terms of the research so you kind of get what you can we can't put our resources ever right so you said recoil and you blame it on being able to wait on the tripods and also the fact that we probably could tune the gas system a little bit better and that's been fair of say even to Maxim but overall we get to see the amount of recoil that can be in that system did that shake your feelings on how accurate the gun could be would you say that the the Hotchkiss would never be an accurate machine gun oh I definitely think it could be accurate don't get me wrong I don't think it can be potentially as accurate as the maxim is but it's still got a high accuracy rating for me I definitely think it could be yeah it's a I mean fixed barrel heavy gun the piston and that carrier sort of assembly is so massive and that's the thing that worries me even if we dial the pressure way down I don't think you could soften all of that moving metal enough so it becomes this game of really weighing it down which makes it not very mobile so it's an in-place gun but it's still pretty good I mean I'd I was I was fascinated with how good it could be I really wish I did have more time and more expense to play with it but to do that I have to stop producing episodes I always want to play more with each of the things that we touch on I really hope that some of the thing that we're doing with the show setting up a legacy where people will go and do these extra bits of research and report back I would love to hear this stuff from others oh that would be fantastic and we'll definitely he said before well would definitely want to make sure we share that too with our own viewers yeah so I think we're down to the final question which is would you happily or unhappily would I take it into battle always an important question yeah honestly I can't see not taking this gun into battle there were too many pros with it it was it was a fairly accurate gun even considering not playing with a gas system that much and tinkering it too the right place to where it was perfect with the ammo and with the mountain blah blah blah everything else the trigger was decent sites were decent the cartridge is decent if I've got a buddy with me if I've got someone who's there and I'm able to feed you know strip after strip after strip yeah that would be amazingly awesome gonna take into battle with me it's just transporting around setting up would be a little bit difficult so I'd say yes taken in a battle I want someone with me what I still taken in a battle fire on my own yeah but it'd be a little bit difficult you would carry that thing by yourself into a battlefield I think you can manage by yourself I really do I think if you're in a tough situation and you're outgunned you if it's already set up you can man it but to move it you're talking about four-man team easy because it's one on the gun one on the tripod 102 on ammo it doesn't add a minimum you know what I mean and that's the way they ran up to they were nice these were two three-man teams these were four plus you know we they threw many of these things to keep them crewed because they were worth a whole line of infantry I mean these things were I mean these are powerful powerful weapons compared to even a hundred riflemen you know I mean it really cranked their rounds and so if you can take four six dudes and put them on something like this and then get rid of a line of guys I mean 30 40 guys it's way more efficient and so yeah it's it's wild but I'm sorry to review on that one but you were saying yes you would take it as long as you had some company as long as I had some help honestly I can't yes if it is already set up already in place sure I can handle it but the problem is is that one is down to just one person having to move things around not so much I would honestly probably say no if it was just me on my own but if I've at least got one person with me to help me get me set up and everything else goes I'd probably yeah I'd definitely take it into battle it did well I did well with it so there weren't really any downsides to it when I had a buddy yeah and then let's talk about compared to the maximum for a second because that's really gonna be the big thing for this shows we've seen the maximus you in place gun which one's easier to set up yeah honestly the Hotchkiss was the easier one to set up even in both mouths they were they were fairly straightforward so yeah the maximum requires this sort of like pull out this thing and put in this this pin and move it over and set it down and clip this and yeah make sure to slide it on just yeah there's an instruction manual for the maxim and so no this thing just drops it I didn't need any explanation whatsoever and then which one's easy to set up in charge the maxim you have to do that pull one pull two and know what you're doing which is rack of it and when there's a jam you know it's definitely definitely not an intuitive one honestly when it comes to yep setting up for feeding clearing jams nothing about it seems like completely obvious thing to do with it whereas with the Hotchkiss it just ran and then also there's a little nice little tab you can just depress in in order to pull out the rest of the strip which was kind of convenient - yeah but on the Maxima it's kind of funny there's a whole manual around in British and German around if the arms in this position it's probably this kind of Jam so you shoot there like for a different spot yeah it's like an if-then list where the Hotchkiss bolt forward or bolt back hit it and do it again you know they just it's so straightforward and you can see it operating I mean and then you think okay well that's gonna allow an ingress of all this mud and stuff it didn't matter just be there right back out sometimes opens the right way to go we saw this with the Luger where people said Lugar's don't run in mud and then you know our buddies already arranged it a test and just the mud goes right back out it's the if the outer surface is the camming surface it just throws it back out so it's a wild gun in terms of it's just sheer ruggedness the only disadvantage to it is just that some premium weight and the complexity of the milled shapes those are the two big killers for this system oh great but you as an infantryman you don't care about that you're not choosing whether or not it's manufactured that way now if I'm a country do I want to pay to make that thing it kind of depends in what one it's still actually one of the simpler designs but when we get into 20s and 30s no it's pretty complex so if it's weird it's it's just a big old piston gun it's definitely bizarre but hey but do you feel like you'd bet your life on one definitely I feel like I would it it didn't give us any problems really the only issue was that it had us small like bend in one of the tabs but the top that wasn't allowing us to feed multiple strips through it which that wasn't its fault it was slightly damaged other than that it's still RAM and the impact that did that must have been severe whatever it did it because it's a deformed steel part so it's impressive that knock it would have taken in order to get that much damage right and even then you can still fed the single strips you just have to be a little careful so no I just in my mind I don't know about you I actually have more confidence in the koshkas than I do in the maximum I would agree the maximum gave us it could the jams on that one to clear let alone put it up below the Hotchkiss in my book right it's not about which one ran better that's the only part of the scenario it's which one's easier to maintain and serve and just I can get you now that Hotchkiss when it's on an actual mount very very quickly same with the maxim but the actual parts that needs swapping are just these bulky groups that you just I mean you just grab when you know what it is I could do it blind I mean with a maxim I'd still be thinking a little bit about what I was doing with my hands in the dark what the Hotchkiss yeah I know it's fresh because I'm doing it right now it's just so obvious and so I think it's a really underrated gun I'm surprised more hasn't been written about it and I found it fantastic I know we don't normally gush but it's one of my favorite machine guns to date well if it's any of your same luck as usual as soon as this episode airs more information will come out about it so then we'll have to do another episode yeah or on apologize for things we missed but good news for those of you who like guns that don't run well this is not the last Hotchkiss that we're talking about we get to talk about another one in our next episode so stay around for that as soon as it's available and stay after the credits for any updates and thank you for tuning in bye everybody all right gang we are back to regular episodic production which I know some of you are very happy for because let's be fair habits are habits so next time around I'm gonna try very hard to go ahead and get some episodes in the bag before I do anything extraordinary part of the reason I couldn't do that before is actually because there's no time I could either do the show or something else because I was already working about an average of 70 to 100 hours a week just to keep up regular production this show now we set a goal to alleviate this because may actually does know and I know a lot of you guys are kind of judging on this one I want to assure you she's not just the Marx woman at this point May has over the course their show picked up every bit of editing knowledge that I have she understands how to film and frame how to take care of in the software all the macros for setting in the charts for the ammo and stuff that you see everything that I can do developmentally everything that I do except for the research phase she does and so may is the ideal person to have come on full-time to alleviate my problem by having me for 40 hours you can take 40 hours off of my schedule it's one to one she's that good and so we set a goal to go ahead and employ her by the show and we've been short of it by about 5% for a while but we just went ahead and Hale married it we're gonna live a little cheap there's gonna be some ramen around the house but that means that seeing Arsenal despite all this sort of growth and fundraising by taking on Mae has made my life easier and I'm no longer gonna have to go the doctor every other week but at some level we're also sort of falling back on our ability to sell fun so if you like the show please do be a patron it's a very critical growth phase for us but otherwise you should do this very few changes except for that we actually start to pull ahead on episode production and things start to smooth out and when they smooth out well then I'm gonna start to do more cool stuff like lightning on the side that is something I'm very excited for because that represents bringing in new viewers now specific to this episode Hotchkis I want to thank two people close friends of mine now Jeff - he's loaned us a number of things and this is one of them again this is his right ear and our good friend William who actually learned us the first Hosken the first hotchkiss 1914 now we managed to lay hands on and we filmed remotely William thank you very much we managed to get two looks at this gun and as a matter of fact William also loaned us another firearm a couple other firearms so we're gonna see some more things from him in the future all right you guys have a good one thanks for joining us as always the fans are absolutely the backbone of what we do so we thank you even just for watching and maybe telling a friend have a go

Channel: C&Rsenal

Views: 131,409

Rating: 4.9672685 out of 5

Keywords: firearms, guns, WWI, History, greatwar, bf1, battlefield1, worldwar1

Id: kG7P5P36Ug4

Length: 73min 38sec (4418 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 26 2019