Chauchat

Origins

Before 1914 Colonel Louis Chauchat and the armorer Charles Sutter had been working at the Puteaux arsenal on a light automatic weapon, and a small number of their guns had been tried, partly for use in aircraft. In 1915 the French army found that it needed automatic fire that could move forward with the attacking infantry. Heavy machine guns such as the Hotchkiss M1914 were too heavy to keep up. General Joffre ordered the Chauchat-Sutter design into mass production. Paul Ribeyrolles, manager of the Gladiator cycle and motor works near Paris, adapted it for manufacture in his factory. The initials of Chauchat, Sutter, Ribeyrolles and Gladiator gave the gun its official name, CSRG. A second firm, SIDARME, joined production later. The gun reached front-line units in 1916.

Design & Construction

The Chauchat worked on the long-recoil system. On firing, the barrel and bolt slid back together for the full length of the cartridge, then the barrel returned forward while the bolt was held back, and the bolt followed to chamber the next round. This gave a slow rate of fire of about 250 rounds a minute, which made the gun controllable but shook the firer, whose cheek rested against the receiver tube. It had a pistol grip, a forward hand grip, a bipod and a selector for single shots or automatic fire.

The gun was designed to be made quickly by factories that had never built firearms. Many parts were steel tubing, stampings and simple turned pieces, and standards of fit varied. It fired the standard 8 mm cartridge of the Lebel Model 1886 rifle. The tapered, rimmed shape of that round forced the use of a half-circle magazine holding 20 rounds. The magazine was made of thin metal and had large openings in its side so that the gunner could see the remaining rounds. Mud and dirt entered through these holes, and dented or dirty magazines caused most of the stoppages. The gun also tended to seize when it overheated in long bursts.

Combat Use

The French army issued the Chauchat widely from 1916, at Verdun and on the Somme, and by 1917 it was the basis of the infantry platoon's firepower. Gunners were trained to fire short bursts from the hip or shoulder while walking forward. With clean magazines and a careful crew it worked acceptably, and French infantry valued having automatic fire in the assault. Belgium adopted it in its own caliber, and it also went to Greece, Serbia, Romania, Russia and Poland.

The American Expeditionary Forces arrived in France with few automatic weapons and took what France could supply. They bought roughly 16,000 Chauchats in 8 mm, and American soldiers called the gun the "Sho-Sho". A version in .30-06, the M1918, was made for the Americans, but its chambers were wrongly cut and it jammed after a few shots. Most were rejected or kept for training. The 8 mm gun was the automatic rifle of most American divisions in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, where the mud and poor training in its care made its faults worse. The M1918 BAR began to replace it in the last weeks of the war.

Legacy

About 262,000 Chauchats were made, more than any other automatic weapon of the war. It has often been called the worst machine gun ever issued, a judgment that owes much to the failed American .30-06 version. Later studies have been kinder to the 8 mm gun and stress how early and how cheaply it gave ordinary infantry sections their own automatic weapon. France replaced it in the 1920s with the far better FM 24/29. The idea it proved, a light automatic that moves with the riflemen, shaped infantry tactics for the rest of the century. It is described with other French Arms & Weapons of the World War I period.