Geth Reviews A Terrible Gun: The Chauchat

 As many who read this blog or who know my tastes may be aware I adore reading about history. Wars are particularly interesting to read about, but honestly, they suck because wars kill people. And people die when they are killed.

And, now that I made a lame Fate/Stay Night meme reference, bear with me (and for the gun nuts among you, get the antacids) as we take a trip down the snark-laden road that was the history of the Chauchat, long considered to be one of the worst weapons to ever be given to soldiers to kill people with.

First off, the name, being French, is pronounced "show-sha". Also, that's merely the informal name. The actual official military designation is Fusil Mitrailleur Modele 1915 CSRG (French for "Machine Rifle Model 1915 CSRG"). The more informal name comes from its chief designer contributor, Colonel Louis Chauchat.

Before we continue, some argue this gun is unfairly maligned, and while it was a piece of garbage that had better use as a paperweight or should have been used to club to death the guys who scammed the troops into accepting them, some argue it was not all THAT bad. These people, frankly, I must disagree with, because this was a weapon issued for service in a war where bodies stacked daily, and weapons that helped you kill the other sides faster were obviously essentially.

One of the arguments given by those who tried to defend this weapon was its innovations, which would be standard on many later weapons. To be fair, I agree, a WWI light machine gun with a pistol grip, was easy to mass produce, and had an easy-to-change-out magazine (on par with a rifle or even a pistol for ease of swapping out) sounds like a dream weapon. At the same time, so does buying a car with TV and DVD player tossed in for free along with everything else that has a bum engine. I ultimately would be all "you just ONE job" to the car, which I would have purchased more to go from place to place via automotive movement. By the same token, just because the Chauchat had some fun bells and whistles still does not obviate the fact the most basic reason it was made was done very poorly on a good day.

To give an idea of how even in the planning stages this weapon was headed for trouble, it's worth noting it had FOUR designers, Specifically, Colonel Louis Chauchat, Charles Sutter, Paul Ribeyrolles and the factory Societe des Cycles Clement et Gladiator. With four different pairs of eyes on the development, these guys could backstop any flaws. Instead, they proved that old saw about too many cooks screwing up the soup.

Now, the design phase dates back to 1903, when the French sensibly realized a man-portable LMG was a great idea. In defense of this weapon, weighing barely above 20 pounds made it one of the lightest and most feasibly man-portable guns of its class. Of course, while guns like the Lewis Gun were far heavier, they also worked a lot better, so while it gave the guys holding a workout to the point they could do arm crunches with them for toning, they paid off by actually not being so useless one wanted to trade them out for some magic beans. Another problem that cropped up in the design phase that would dog this weapon in all incarnations of practice was reliance on the 8mm Lebel round. Even at the time that this was chalk on a blackboard the Lebel round was a long-in-the-tooth grandpa that was laughably underpowered and needed to be retired. Unfortunately, the French were unwilling to throw out what they got used to, so the Chauchat and a lot of their other weapons went into WWI already fitter for museums than maneuvers.

The construction phase was beyond inexcusable. Typically, when you mass produce anything, you want the average finished product to at least be (or have a good chance of being) reasonably sound out of the box. Unfortunately, the quality control for this was nonexistent, using second-hand Lebel rifle parts that were no longer fit for normal service, sheet steel that was of cheap alloys, and milled parts (milling refers to the process of cutting parts out to exact specifications and fitting them together) had no standards for baseline quality. As a result, the sights were useless, the parts had trouble fitting together, and good luck getting spare parts. Even if you somehow had them, it was a coin toss if they'd work since even those were cursed by the cheapest bidder-level effort.

In practice, many aspects of this gun were laughably bad in practice:

• The magazines were these bizarre, half-moon-shaped pieces of garbage that could deform easily and not even fit their magazine well. Even if they did work, some brainless idiot literally left the inside of the magazine exposed to the elements, meaning the ammo would be dead on arrival in a war where dirt, rain, mud, and all sorts of other disgusting things were omnipresent.
• The much-touted pistol grip was a squared-off block that was about as much fun to hold as a dog turd and felt just as pleasant to steady the weapon. The foregrip was placed just slightly ahead of the pistol grip and was a cockeyed knob-like attachment that did not feel normal in combination with the blocky pistol grip.
• LMG weapons were meant for long-range use and thus had a bipod. Unfortunately, some idiot gave it a super tall bipod that gave enemy troops a lovely profile of the user so anyone wanting to pop a skull would not have found it hard to do so.
• The firing mechanism of the receiver was a baffling one. It used a long-recoil model, meaning all the moving parts of the gun, after the discharge of a round, had to slide back as far as they would go before it could fire another round. This meant the firing rate was bad, the recoil was absurd, and given how poorly these weapons were constructed, this did not allow them to avoid excessive wear and tear.
• Just above the butt stock (which would be just below the eye of a sniper or cradled high against a shoulder) was the recoil tube. Combine really stiff recoil with a recoil tube that could dislocate your arm or bust your jaw if your face grazed the recoiling tube above the butt stock. I'll wait while you quit wincing from the imagined agony.
• The sights were not aligned well at all with the gun even under ideal conditions. Some genius thought a cheek weld was a practical idea for a gun with nasty recoil and a squared-off block of a receiver and thus the sights were offset to the left, meaning your aim required adjusting for this idea that was never fully developed.
• On top of the magazines jamming due to practically any matter getting in them, the gun itself was miserable at dissipating excess heat, meaning a few clips of ammo later it was a useless jammed fireball that had to cool off and often bashed against a solid object to free up any jammed gun parts due to heat distortion.

Now, all of the above bullet points apply to the original 1915 model of this weapon, which was, on a very good day, marginal at best. When the US joined the fight, the French convinced them to take these weapons in 1918, albeit with some requested modifications for a higher caliber, the .30.06 round.

The 1918 version had its own embarrassing design failures:

• When modifying the gun for higher caliber rounds, some idiots didn't bother to check the difference between Imperial measurements and the metric system. As a result, the barrels often were too small for feeding the rounds. Rounds that did feed could literally have chunks of the case tear off inside the barrel, making the gun an instant paperweight.
• The Americans were often forced to downgrade to the original 8mm version because the mass majority of the larger caliber versions would become useless after firing no more than a single round. As mentioned above, the 8mm Lebel round version was already an exercise in fail, and it really says something that it was a legit improvement over the 1918 revision.
• Repair and maintenance were already a nightmare for the 1915 model, it was impossible for the 1918 version, as they came with no spares or manuals, meaning once it broke, it was dead.

Now, this gun, despite being one of the biggest mass-produced flops in the history of firearms, COULD be made into something valuable. The Belgians heavily modified it and replaced many of the worst features, upping it from laughably bad to decently useful. Most everyone else did not have that luxury, so the French and later the Americans were cursed with a gun has, in my own humble opinion, earned being spit on the judgment of history.

In short, this was a dumpster fire in the history of firearms. Despite those who think it had a lot of great concepts and want to defend it on those grounds, I look at it from the "how practical was it for guys dealing with life and death situations" standpoint. From that standpoint, it was terrible.