French Rifles of WWI

Hi, I'm Indy Neidell, and as most of you know, I'm the host of the YouTube channel, The Great War. And with me here in Berlin for this hangout is our social media guy, Florian. Hello! Now, tonight, this hangout is the first of many hangouts where we're going to explore the weapons of the First World War, because many of you have asked us about that on our channel. What kind of stuff did people actually use? And the best way to do that is to have an incredible weapons expert, and that's what we have with us tonight. Live from Charleston, South Carolina, we have Othais. Say hi! Hey, how's it going, guys? Now, we're going to go through the weapons, the rifles and the pistols, particularly, country by country, and today we're just doing one country. Today we're talking about France, yes? Yes, and we're also going to subdivide down to just the sort of mainline rifles and pistols today. So, I was thinking, since the war started at the end of July 1914, maybe we could jump in as a starting point and talk about what the French were actually going off to war with, the standard equipment that a Frenchman would have in the first, say, month of the war, if you want to take us up there. France is going to be a really good indicator of this, but when we look at all these small arms, there's a quote that goes around that we're always prepared for the last war, and this is sort of the case in a lot of Europe. Going into the First World War, there's a lot in research technology about repeating rifles and machine guns and things like that, but most of the armies are still just carrying around bolt-action rifles, and revolvers are very, very basic pistols. France is a really, really good... How do I put this? They're a really good example of this, because despite being such an influential country, they don't really have the most advanced weapons. We're going to see designs mostly from the 1890s being hauled in in the first few months of 1914. In that case, what I'm going to show you today are mostly going to be bolt-action rifles and simple pistols. So, as soon as you guys are ready, I can get started on that. Okay, I am ready. I was just thinking, now France hadn't been a... Well, there hadn't been a main all-European war or main European war since the Franco-Prussian War, and that was a whole generation before. So France had, of course, still been developing new stuff, but you say that it was mostly 20 years old, the stuff that they were bringing in at the beginning of the war. It would be great to just jump right in and get a look at some of it. The perfect example of that is going to be what is their primary rifle at the time. This is the 1886 M93 Lebel bolt-action rifle. Now, as you can tell, if I can get my camera spaced, it's fairly long. Now, we're going to see this over and over again with France. By World War I, we have semi-mechanized mechanized warfare. We've got trains moving people around. You know, we're in and out of trenches and things like that. This sort of length is unnecessary. And a lot of people ask why it was kept, and you'll see a lot of historians telling you that it was kept because they thought that the longer barrel gave them accuracy. But we kind of knew by that point that we didn't need that much accuracy anyway. The biggest issue, especially out of France, is that the military still wanted soldiers to be able to fire in two lines. They wanted to be able to line up and then have a gap and have somebody firing between that gap. And so the length here is just so you don't shoot the next guy in the back. And realistically, we don't see that kind of fighting in World War I. But that was still standard for what the army was requesting, not only on this gun, but on some of the semi-automatics that come out towards the end of the war. So there really is sort of like a thought process that drags far beyond what's actually happening on the battlefield. But for the Lebel itself, this gun came out in 1886. It was the first smokeless powdered rifle. So everything before that's black powder. It still had brass, you know, cartridges and things like that. But it was slower moving, a shorter range. This gun doubled the length of the battlefield overnight. And it sent everybody scrambling to keep up. But because it was the first smokeless, they got a lot of things wrong. I mean, this gun was designed in all of six months. I mean, it was a rush. So they really didn't think out things like the shape of the ammo or the feed system or the balance or any of that stuff. So we have an old-style tubular loading magazine. And you'll see in the video that we have here that you have to open this thing up and load eight rounds, one by one, as slow as you can, or quickly as you can, hopefully. But it's not a fast process. You're going to stack them up. You're going to get one in the carrier. And then for the French, they didn't put a safety on their guns. So you would actually close it with nothing in the chamber. And you'd march off to war. And when you were ready to fight, you would then load your first round. And be good to go. Now, that is fine now that you have nine rounds to work with. That's actually fairly good for World War I battlefield. But when it came time to reload this thing, you better have good cover. Because you have to take the time to do it. And you also have to carry nine and a half pounds of this across the battlefield wherever you go. All day, every march, you know, every attack, this thing has to come with you. So the French came up with a different system known as the Berthier. And you'll see this is much handier. This is a little bit later of a model, but effectively the same design. On this particular gun, they then, later in 1892, gave it over to artillery and other special support troops, communications. Basically, anybody that doesn't need to be frontline infantry could have gotten one of these. Now, during the war, they would do some upgrades to it. And this is like the first of the upgrades. This is still marked as a Model 16. But it doesn't have any of the other features. So this sort of sits in between the 1892 and the 16, the one I'm holding here. But these were originally three-shot rifles. So if we zoom in, what they did is they found that they could load three rounds as fast as they could load one by using an end block clip. So again, these are dummy rounds. They have no powder, no primer. But what we can do is, as soon as, just as fast as loading one round on the previous gun, we can go ahead and stick three in there. And so now we're ready to shoot three rounds out of this gun. So what would happen is we'd shoot this thing clear. And then when we had the final round in the chamber, it would just fall out this hole in the bottom. That hole became a problem, though, because of, in World War I, mud and other debris on the battlefield would get into the action and jam everything up. These little carbines were great. But they have a limited shot capacity. And they're fairly light, so the recoil is much worse. But they're easier to manufacture, too. The French find that out just as a coincidence. So the little three shots get turned into rifles. At first, it was done in order to arm troops in Indochina, because the shorter natives were not handling the Lebel too well. It was a big, heavy rifle. They kind of made a rifle in between this length and the one I just showed you. That was the 1902. They liked it so much they started sending it to Africa. That was the 1907. In 1915, like I said, desperate to manufacture more rifles, they took that little carbine and the African rifle and merged some features, simplified everything to share as many parts as possible with the Lebel to take the Lebel bayonet instead of a special bayonet. And they came out with this, the 07-15. So as you can see, we're back to a full-length rifle. It shares the same length barrel as the Lebel. It shares the sights. But we are still, still in 1915, we're making a three-shot rifle to carry into World War I. So whenever you think of those French advances, it's important to remember that most of them were going to be done with either the heavy Lebel infantry rifle or these guys, or if you're lucky, if you're lucky, you were given one of the various three-shot carbines. And that's what you had to take against a German machine gun. It just, it boggles the mind. Every time, you think you heard it all, and then he explains something and it's like, wow. Some new way for people to get themselves killed. You have to manually, and then you get one, and then you have to manually, and you get two. You do that three times, and then you got to start all over again. What did Joffre or Foch think of their rifles compared to, say, those of the British or the Germans? Were they satisfied with the three-shot, or were they satisfied with the Lebel? I mean, do you know anything that they specifically said about what they wished for, or were they happy with how things were going? As far as I understand it, really until you see something like the Americans get involved, most higher echelon leaders, just think of them as rifles. I don't know that they think that much detail. A lot of these guys come in at such a higher level and don't go through the same sort of training. They might not have even shot these rifles. It kind of depends. I'm not that strong of a military historian, but depending on what rank they rose from, to them, generally, especially when you have an arms revolution that goes on in the 1890s, where everything's changing so rapidly, this thing was probably miles better than what they had if they were serving when they were younger. So to them, it was already advanced. They might not even know that they're being beaten out. There's not that much of an eye on the gun itself because it shoots straight and it shoots as far as the other guy's gun. You guys just need to be a little braver. It's really the attitude that comes out of it. But obviously, at some point, it does start having an effect on their attrition rate. So it does come to light. I mean, it really eventually does because we're going to see some minor changes. So the next thing, let me get some of these out of the way. The next big thing is they take that three-shot carbine and they make it five-shot. Okay, cool. Wow, there we go. There we go. Now we're talking. So now we're up to here. So let me get close up again. Sorry, I'll make some room. Let me zoom on in again. And now we got five. That's looking a little better. This is matching, just matching what the Germans are doing. We're not going any higher. But look at all the extra space it takes up on this particular design. Part of that's because this is rimmed ammo, and that's going to really drive the French crazy. Rimmed ammo, when these things slide together, they want to lock on each other. So you have to design the magazines very carefully and the clips very carefully so the ammunition doesn't snag on the next round down. And so that's why you see these steep angles for feed and everything on these kind of guns. You'll see it on the Russian stuff too. They're rimmed as well. But we're up to five. The other thing that we've finally done, and you guys don't, you know, haven't been over here to shoot with me yet, but they heat up real fast. And we finally put a handguard here. That way we can shoot, and then this is crazy, move. Because previously you would shoot from your nice position with your rifle, get a couple rounds out, it would get hot, and then you'd have to carry that thing back across the battlefield and it'd be scalding your hand. Because there just wasn't really a provision on the previous gun to keep that hot barrel off of your sensitive skin. The Germans thought about this a lot better, and we're going to see that. We're going to see handguards, we're going to see other features from their equipment. And really, until you see the German episode that we're going to do, you're getting half the picture. But really the French at this point with this gun, they're just trying to match the Germans. They're just playing catch-up. That was part one of our weapons special with Otayis where he talked about the French rifles used and their evolution. There will be a second part because we also talked about French pistols during our live event. You should check out Otayis' detailed videos about all the weapons we briefly discussed today and subscribe to his channel if you're interested in historic firearms. Follow us on Facebook or Twitter so you don't miss the announcement for our next live event when we'll talk about German rifles.