Chauchat

Chauchat Mle 1915 - 8x50mmR Lebel

Chauchat Mle 1918 - .30-06

The Chauchat, officially the Fusil Mitrailleur Modele 1915 CSRG ("Machine Rifle Model 1915 Chauchat, Sutter, Ribeyrolles and Gladiator", the four names referring to designers Louis Chauchat and Charles Sutter, and Paul Ribeyrolles, the general manager of the Gladiator company which produced the weapon) was a French light machine gun that went into service in 1915 with the French Army, and was used primarily during the First World War. The weapon was designed according to the same concept as the Browning Automatic Rifle, a "walking fire" gun that could be fired from the hip by an advancing soldier to suppress an enemy trench line. It was an extremely unusual design in that it used gas-assisted long recoil operation in a fully-automatic firearm, creating a very low rate of fire of 240rpm, and had a bizarre U-shaped 20-round magazine to accommodate the sharply tapered 8x50mmR Lebel round.

The Chauchat became infamous as one of the most ineffective machine guns ever produced. The original Mle 1915 was regarded by some as terrible and others as merely extremely finicky, but there is no such disagreement about the Mle 1918, the practically unusable .30-06 version manufactured for the American Expeditionary Forces. The latter is often ranked alongside the Ross Rifle as one of the worst weapons of WW1.

Due to what appears to have been a personal feud between the US Army Chief of Ordnance, General William Crozier, and Colonel Isaac Newton Lewis, inventor of the Lewis Gun, the US Army not only never adopted the Lewis Gun but actually confiscated Lewis Guns from Marines who had them. Further, General Pershing was extremely loath to deploy the new Browning Automatic Rifle until victory was certain, for fear that the Germans would copy it. Instead, the American Expeditionary Force were issued with Chauchats, initially 16,000 in 8mm Lebel but later 19,000 hastily manufactured chambered for .30-06, often with incomplete reaming and dimensional errors from rushed production: American inspectors at the Gladiator plant producing .30-06 Chauchats reported they had rejected over 40% of weapons produced. These loose manufacturing tolerances did not in any way agree with the mechanism, which typically failed to extract the instant the action started to heat up after a few shots: this also happened with the standard 8mm Lebel variant, which would lock up with the bolt jammed in the rearward position after about 120 rounds of sustained fire due to thermal expansion of the aluminum radiator jacket immobilising the barrel (which had no forward assist), and not unlock until the weapon cooled down.

Far worse, though, were the dimensional errors in the .30-06 models. Due to incorrect Imperial-to-metric conversion, many of the guns that actually made it out of Gladiator's factory had still been produced with chambers that were too short. As a result, the case neck would end up jammed into the chamber and on cycling the extractor would either strip the rim or cause a complete case head separation, rendering the weapon useless. Even the Mle 1915 had manufacturing issues often requiring hand-finishing, to the point that parts from one Mle 1915 would not necessarily fit in another. These faults seem to have been unique to Gladiator: while there was another manufacturer, SIDARME which started assisting in manufacture in 1918, they are not associated with the more heinous aspects of the Chauchat. It probably helped that SIDARME was a steelworks while Gladiator was a bicycle factory.

Additional problems included the poorly designed 8mm Lebel magazines, made of thin metal that deformed easily and with an opening on the right-hand side (intended to allow the loader to monitor the remaining ammunition) which allowed mud and debris to enter freely, only exacerbated by the tendency to heavily oil the magazines to ensure proper feeding: magazine-related failures were responsible for some 75% of stoppages in the 8mm Lebel version. The .30-06 model had a closed-sided but still flimsy box magazine. All Gladiator-produced guns had sights incorrectly set low and to the right, the jarring recoil from the long recoil action, poor ergonomics and a loose bipod made the weapon inaccurate outside short bursts, using a normal cheek weld rather than lying at 45 degrees to the gun and resting on top of the action would result in a ridge tearing the shooter's cheek, and there was a tendency for the 8mm Lebel version to fail to feed on the first round if the magazine was fully loaded. To top all this off, it is unclear if US forces received any instructions in operating the Chauchat: no American service manual for the .30-06 version has ever been found. Almost all .30-06 Chauchats that reached the front line appear to have been thrown away by their operators, and very few ever made it that far, being traded for 8mm Lebel versions: images of the Mle 1918 being used in combat are practically non-existent.

It was replaced in French service by the Chatellerault Light Machine Gun, a weapon based on the Browning Automatic Rifle action, but the Chauchat turned up during the Spanish Civil War (one member of the International Brigades declaring it to be "the most outstandingly useless weapon I have ever seen" and saying his unit threw all of theirs away on the first day of action) and saw limited use in World War 2. The Belgians seemed fairly happy with their 7.65x54mm Argentine version (a redesign which featured a fully enclosed box magazine and a number of mechanical improvements) and used it well into the 1930s.

Specifications

(1915-1945)

• Type: Light Machine Gun

• Caliber: 8x50mmR Lebel (French), .30-06 (US), 7.92x57mm Mauser (Polish), 7.65x53mm Argentine (Belgian)

• Weight: 20 lbs (9.1 kg)

• Length: 45 in (114.3 cm)

• Barrel length: 18.5 in (47 cm)

• Action: Long recoil with gas assist

• Rate of fire: ~240 rounds/min

• Muzzle velocity: 630 m/s

• Feed System: 20-round half-moon magazine (8mm Lebel, rarely loaded with more than 19 in combat), 20-round curved box magazine (.30-06)

• Fire Modes: Semi-Auto / Full-Auto

• Effective range: 200 m

• Maximum range: 2000 m

The Chauchat can be seen in the following:

Film

Title	Actor	Character	Note	Date
La Grande Illusion		A German Prison guard	without magazine	1937
Ski Battalion (Za Sovetskuyu Rodinu)		Red Army soldiers		1937
Fighting Film Collection No. 11 (Boyevoy kinosbornik No. 11)		Soviet partisans		1942
Young, Violent, Dangerous (Liberi armati pericolosi)			Seen in Lucio's collection	1976
Deal of the Century			Mle 1915 and Mle 1918; Seen in the Gundealer's Room	1983
Assassin of the Tsar			Seen in the guard's room	1991
Capitaine Conan		French soldiers		1996
The Lost Battalion	Daniel Caltagirone	Pvt. Phillip Cepeglia		2001
	George Calil	Pvt. Lowell R. Hollingshead
	Arthur Kremer	Pvt. Abraham Krotoshinsky
A Very Long Engagement		A French soldier		2004
Battle of Warsaw 1920		A Polish soldier		2011

Television

Show Title / Episode	Actor	Character	Note	Air Date
Lock 'n Load With R. Lee Ermey			Ep. 1 - "Machine Gun Educations"	2009

Video Games

Game Title	Appears as	Mods	Notations	Release Date
Fallout Tactics	Chauchat		Cannot be fired, appears as an easter egg	2001
Battlefield: 1918				2004
Cross Fire	"CSRG M1915"			2007
Battle of Empires: 1914-1918	Chauchat			2014
World of Guns: Gun Disassembly	Chauchat LMG		Anti-Aircraft sights	2014
Verdun	"Fusli Mitrailleur Mle 1915 CSRG Chauchat"			2015
	"US CRSRG .30-06 M1918 Chauchat"		"incorrectly" shown as a functional firearm
Battlefield 1	Chauchat		"They Shall Not Pass" DLC	2016
Post Scriptum			Introduced with Plan Jaune update	2018
Battlefield V	Chauchat			2018
Beyond The Wire	"Chauchat 1915 CSRG""		both French and American variants	2021
	"Chauchat M1918"

Anime

Film Title	Character	Note	Date
Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood	An Amestrian soldier		2009 - 2010
The Mystic Archives of Dantalian	A Suitor		2011