What if the French adopted a 7mm SLR before WW1?

[sillygoose]

Ultimately I think it would fail. A lot of the early semi-auto designs were just not good or reliable enough.

The French had a semi-auto rifle in WW1 that was not killed by ammo logistics - the Model 1917. Troops didn't like it because it was heavy, unreliable, and required too frequent cleaning. Production was stopped in 1918.

A 1914 semi-auto rifle is unlikely to be a Garand. It's far more likely to be a Gewehr 41.

Meunier rifle - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

The long recoil operated semi-automatic Meunier rifle was adopted in 1910 to replace the Lebel rifle. It gave excellent performance during the final trials: "The 7mm Meunier Rifle fired 3,000 shots without serious incidents".

The M1917 was a very different design and a stopgap solution, which is why it was dropped for further developments after the war (not to mention they changed their standard ammo again).



As to the rest of this about the mad minute it is a major digression from the point of the thread and a rather moot one because everyone, including the British decided that semi-autos were superior to bolt action rifles; if it didn't ultimately matter all militaries would still use bolt actions for general service.

The historical record for "mad minute" firing is 38 shots fired, all hitting the military standard 24-inch target at 300 yards.WWhile that was obviously exceptional, the service standard was that every soldier was expected to score fifteen hits in the minute using this rapid fire technique.

I've seen it even larger than that:

The Mad Minute Challenge: A TFB Contest -

To fully immerse yourself in history, sometimes you have to go out and make some yourself. With this in mind, we at TFB are announcing our Mad Minute Contest. Rules will for the contest will be laid out below, but first what is a Mad Minute? For that, we turn to Matt of Historical Firearms: …...

www.thefirearmblog.com

It is the top comment of the article:

I have a different understanding of the "Mad Minute" a colloquial term for the " 300yd rapid application of the classification practice (table B part 3 of the 1914 regs) Shot with 5 rds loaded one in the chamber (for a total of 15) with 2 loadings with "charger clips"

The target was not 12" it was a "Second class target with a No. 5 figure (man behind cover, which was an odd shaped hourglass looking figure ) " so 48"x48" with a 24" inner ring and a 36" outer ring . Any hits on the target counted.

Also 'every soldier' of the professional, long service army in 1914. They were wiped out largely by 1915 and then it was the territorials and new volunteers who did not have that experience, training, or skill.

The extreme speed versions of the "Mad Minute" drill actually involve a specific technique where the middle finger is used to pull the trigger so that the shooter does not have to repeatedly grab and ungrab the bolt. Note that even though the shooter in this video does fumble several times, the rate of fire achieved is vastly higher than in the other video.

Also fired while prone, not standing since that makes it easier to work the bolt in that position and more importantly a position you'd avoid in combat because you'd be a ripe target yourself. The mad minute though, as stated before, was about volume of fire, not accuracy, in order to break a charge at close range or provide final suppressive fire before an assault.

 

[bintananth]

The historical record for "mad minute" firing is 38 shots fired, all hitting the military standard 24-inch target at 300 yards.WWhile that was obviously exceptional, the service standard was that every soldier was expected to score fifteen hits in the minute using this rapid fire technique.

"service standard" != "average". It's the bare minimum that's considered acceptable.

 

[Atarlost]

Another consideration is that there won't be enough of the new guns. Unless they're as simple to produce as a Berthier they're going to get displaced by bolt actions due to attrition. Like the professional Royal Army they'll be mostly gone after the clash of Elan and Machineguns. Unlike veteran soldiers more can be produced, but nowhere near enough. And they won't take the same ammo as their reserve rifles and carbines.

OTL they could send 8mm Lebel to the front line troops and the Lebel, Berthier, and Chauchat could all run it. With a new 7mm rimless cartridge their new front line rifle and their light machinegun will use the new 7mm rimless, but the Berthiers and Lebels will still be needed to make up the numbers and they use 8mm Lebel and the Lebel magazine relies on that inconveniently conical shape to avoid tip to primer contact so it can't be converted. To get back to a single cartridge in front line service they'd have to relegate the Lebels to line of communication troops who OTL they got desperate to give Gras to and rechamber all the Berthiers while producing a more complicated primary rifle. Going into WWI with a primary rifle that uses different ammo from their backup rifle might even lose the Entente the war in spite of it being a better rifle by a wide margin. And it might not be better. Such an early SLR would likely have issues.

Indeed, the Chauchat would be highly interesting with a 7mm Mauser-like cartridge. In fact it might have been available in 1914 without having to design around the 8mm Lebel, since development started in 1903 and took until 1914 to get into first production. Having box magazines, like the .30-06 version, would have fixed a lot of the unreliability issues, as the French claimed 2/3rds of stoppages were caused by the half moon, open magazines and troops greasing the magazines to get the 8mm Lebel cartridges to feed properly.
Rimmed cartridges can be designed around (Bren gun obviously), but they are a nightmare to engineer a design to get to work properly.

Would it? The .30-06s with the box magazines are where the bad reputation in the Anglophone world came from. I recall Ian (the guy from the video in the OP) finding that the ones chambered in 8mm Lebel to be more reliable. They might have been better off with a completely different mechanism, but they also might have wound up with something worse. The LMG was not a solved problem yet and there's no knowing what they would have wound up with if a different designer got across the finish line first.

 

[sillygoose]

Another consideration is that there won't be enough of the new guns. Unless they're as simple to produce as a Berthier they're going to get displaced by bolt actions due to attrition. Like the professional Royal Army they'll be mostly gone after the clash of Elan and Machineguns. Unlike veteran soldiers more can be produced, but nowhere near enough. And they won't take the same ammo as their reserve rifles and carbines.

IOTL as of 1914 they had the capacity to produce 5000 per month since they waited for a few years until they settled on ammo spec before tooling up. Since I'm assuming they decide on the ammo spec at the same time as the rifle design is adopted in 1910 for the sake of reasonableness let's assume they are tooled up as of May 1912 for production, so that would be about 40,000 units in 1912, 60,000 in 1913, and another 35,000 by August 1st 1914. So 115,000 units in service by the time the war starts. That's assuming they don't increase production at all. I think they would, especially if there is a war scare. As it was there already was an arms race going on.

I could see them starting with equipping the cavalry to give them the most firepower possible before moving on to the general infantry. That would likely ensure they remain in service and get their use expanded, probably reserved for assault units for a while.

Reserve rifles and carbines can be saved for the vast majority of troops that really only have them as PDWs. Front line troops can be equipped with them. Much like how the M1 Carbine had greater production and issuance than the Garand in WW2 and how the French planned on issuing the MAS 36 and 40.

OTL they could send 8mm Lebel to the front line troops and the Lebel, Berthier, and Chauchat could all run it. With a new 7mm rimless cartridge their new front line rifle and their light machinegun will use the new 7mm rimless, but the Berthiers and Lebels will still be needed to make up the numbers and they use 8mm Lebel and the Lebel magazine relies on that inconveniently conical shape to avoid tip to primer contact so it can't be converted. To get back to a single cartridge in front line service they'd have to relegate the Lebels to line of communication troops who OTL they got desperate to give Gras to and rechamber all the Berthiers while producing a more complicated primary rifle. Going into WWI with a primary rifle that uses different ammo from their backup rifle might even lose the Entente the war in spite of it being a better rifle by a wide margin. And it might not be better. Such an early SLR would likely have issues.

IOTL they fielded a wide variety of calibers on the ground and in the air, so having multiple calibers in concurrent service isn't the issue you think it is.

How could it cost them the war to have different rifles and ammo?

As an SLR it apparently ran very well in testing and only had issues with mud, but that was relative to bolt action rifles. It used the same tech as the Chauchaut for the operating system, long recoil, a very well developed technology by that point in multiple countries. Given that the US produced long recoil rifles and shotguns for the commercial market they could probably tool up to make French spec rifles.

Would it? The .30-06s with the box magazines are where the bad reputation in the Anglophone world came from. I recall Ian (the guy from the video in the OP) finding that the ones chambered in 8mm Lebel to be more reliable. They might have been better off with a completely different mechanism, but they also might have wound up with something worse. The LMG was not a solved problem yet and there's no knowing what they would have wound up with if a different designer got across the finish line first.

The .30-06 conversion was hasty and there was the probably of imperial to metric conversion, which caused all sorts of feeding problems. It wasn't that a rimless cartridge had feeding issues in the magazines it was the guns were poorly adapted and manufactured. Exactly the same issue the US .30-06 MG42 conversion had.

The Chauchat was already developed by the start of WW1, so it got the nod. There was an alternative option, the direct gas impingement of ENT that ultimately resulted in the MAS 40/44/49/52. They had already developed a 6mm automatic rifle version in 1906. I suppose if desired they could have done that, but given that they seemed to have preferred the long recoil system instead likely they'd just stick with the Chauchat.

Plus given that they'd have the ammo worked out in 1910 they'd have roughly 3+ years in peacetime to convert the design (which started in 1906 IIRC). Shouldn't be an issue then. The .30-06 conversion was done in less than 6 months IIRC for comparison, that at a time when the build quality of the 8mm version was less than desirable.

 

[Buba]

The .30-06s with the box magazines are where the bad reputation in the Anglophone world came from. I recall Ian (the guy from the video in the OP) finding that the ones chambered in 8mm Lebel to be more reliable. They might have been better off with a completely different mechanism, but they also might have wound up with something worse.

Looking at the HMG competition held by the Polish army in 1924 (or was it '25?) I suspect that there might had been another cause of the Chauchat working poorly with the American 7,62x63mm.
One of the contestants in that competition was Hotchkiss with its - let us kindly call it modified - 1914 HMG. However, the lazy fucks did the absolute minimum to make their entry capable of using the requested 7,92x57mm sS Mauser ammo. FWIW the sS is the heavy (and hot loaded?) version for machineguns and more or less just as powerful as the 7,62x63mm. The Hotchkiss people did not change the rifling, did not adjust the gas port to the piston etc., hence the Hotchkiss 1914, which worked beautifully with the 8mm Lebel round (and made the French love it so much that they were still happy users in 1940, with nary a replacement in sight), gave a very sub-par performance.

Hence my hypothesis that the Chauchat - which seems to had been a rushed design to begin with - simply did not work reliably with a much more powerful round without modifications. Modifications which I suspect the French had not made because reasons.
This, combined with poorly trained US troops and possibly other factors, like lacklustre quality of make, all came together to give a weapon which was disliked and/or blamed for US troops mediocre performance.
Also - possibly the Chauchat came across as bad through comparison with the Lewis which did work - but this was a mature (plus maybe simply more robust?) design fine tuned for years before the war, conceived by users of the 7,62x63mm, and originally put into manufacture for the 7,7mm British, closer in power to the US cartridge.

As to manufacture and replacement of the Lebel rifle - I assume that if it was introduced in peacetime then it'd been manufactured at the rate of at least 150-200K a year to ensure a relatively speedy rearming of the infantry arm. Artillery, sappers, colonial garrisons, navy etc. all these would be behind the PBI in the cque* to get the SLR and - with no real use for a rifle - could safely be left as Lebel users for years - if not a decade.

* typo caught by Atarlost

 

[Atarlost]

France couldn't manufacture Lebels -- which they considered their preferred front line rifle -- fast enough to outfit their entire front line army. That's why there are rifle length versions of the Berthier carbine: we may consider them better rifles now and the interwar French agreed, but to the early WWI French they were a wartime expedient substitute.

What makes you think they'd do any better with an SLR? The French don't have your theoretical production numbers. They have the number they think they need because they don't want to spend money on more rifles than they think they need and even that might be a high estimate if they think they have longer before war to build up their stockpile. If they knew they were going to need a limitless supply of rifles in WWI they wouldn't have run out of Lebels OTL. They had a lot longer to stockpile those and a first generation SLR is probably more complicated to produce. OTL they happened to have an easier to produce gun tooled up that they just needed to put longer barrels and stocks and deeper magazines on because by chance they had already designed an easier to produce gun because cavalry carbines and tube magazines don't mix, but if they're switching ammo they're switching carbines too. The Berthier tooling is out and they're stuck with the probably even slower to produce than a Lebel first generation SLR. The Lebel tooling is also out. Every Berthier or Lebel made during the war is a rifle the French don't have ATL. Every rifle made by a civilian contractor may also be a gun they don't have because the tolerance on a first generation SLR are going to be tighter. It might not be as bad as English attempts to contract Americans to make SMLEs since they don't need to send representatives across an ocean, but it won't go smoothly.

cue

And learn your homonyms. Stage directions have nothing to do with rifle distribution.

 

[Buba]

@Atarlost - I have no beef in the fire, I'm just throwing around ideas
And I agree with most of your two last posts.

 

[stephen the barbarian]

I assume that if it was introduced in peacetime then it'd been manufactured at the rate of at least 150-200K a year to ensure a relatively speedy rearming of the infantry arm.

they need between 1.5- 2 million rifles going into the war and 5- 8 million rifles in total during the war

Hence my hypothesis that the Chauchat - which seems to had been a rushed design to begin with - simply did not work reliably with a much more powerful round without modifications. Modifications which I suspect the French had not made because reasons.

it doesn't help that the us guns were all made by Gladiator, and they did not have good qc

 

[sillygoose]

France couldn't manufacture Lebels -- which they considered their preferred front line rifle -- fast enough to outfit their entire front line army. That's why there are rifle length versions of the Berthier carbine: we may consider them better rifles now and the interwar French agreed, but to the early WWI French they were a wartime expedient substitute.

What makes you think they'd do any better with an SLR? The French don't have your theoretical production numbers. They have the number they think they need because they don't want to spend money on more rifles than they think they need and even that might be a high estimate if they think they have longer before war to build up their stockpile. If they knew they were going to need a limitless supply of rifles in WWI they wouldn't have run out of Lebels OTL. They had a lot longer to stockpile those and a first generation SLR is probably more complicated to produce. OTL they happened to have an easier to produce gun tooled up that they just needed to put longer barrels and stocks and deeper magazines on because by chance they had already designed an easier to produce gun because cavalry carbines and tube magazines don't mix, but if they're switching ammo they're switching carbines too. The Berthier tooling is out and they're stuck with the probably even slower to produce than a Lebel first generation SLR. The Lebel tooling is also out. Every Berthier or Lebel made during the war is a rifle the French don't have ATL. Every rifle made by a civilian contractor may also be a gun they don't have because the tolerance on a first generation SLR are going to be tighter. It might not be as bad as English attempts to contract Americans to make SMLEs since they don't need to send representatives across an ocean, but it won't go smoothly.

Perhaps they didn't have the capacity for bolt actions because they had introduced the SLR and were working that up and had to switch back during the start of the war since they had only manufactured a few thousand by the start of WW1. ITTL they'd have orders of magnitude more in service as well as increased production capacity the more they made thanks to experience in production creating efficiencies in manufacture as well as having more time pre-war to increase production capacity.

Other rifles of course would be in production and use, but they'd have plenty for 1914 and if the performance is there they'd go with what works best. Besides, in open combat an SLR will have a major advantage in the maneuver battles of 1914.