A soldier’s first glance at a Chauchat indicated that there was something wrong or, at the very least, not right. The exposed metal parts appear rough, as does the slab wood buttstock, and the entire gun looks as if it is an unorganized conglomeration of sheet metal stampings and scrap parts. The Gladiator factory in Paris (where almost all of the manufacturing was conducted) appears to have had no affinity for quality workmanship, and reports of substandard materials and improper heat treatment haunted the CSRG throughout the war. From the moment of its introduction to American troops, the Chauchat’s awkward appearance did not inspire confidence in men used to handling well-finished arms.
Introduced into combat during the height of static trench warfare, the Chauchat suffered from the prevailing outmoded tactics of the time, as well as the harsh physical environment of the Western Front. One of the Chauchat’s greatest flaws was its flimsy magazine, which had a maximum capacity of 20 rounds of 8 mm Lebel ammunition. Unfortunately, the magazine springs were not strong enough; so most Chauchat gunners “short-loaded” their magazines for increased reliability. Even worse, the magazine was almost completely open on its right side (to provide gunners with a quick view of available ammunition), and this exposed the gun and its ammunition to all the mud, slime and grime that the trenches could provide. Too, the magazine feed lips were easily bent, and the entire magazine itself could be easily crushed or deformed.
With all of those problems considered, the Chauchat was not just prone to jamming, it was almost guaranteed to jam. Canvas covers were eventually provided for the magazines, and while this helped a little, the horrible magazine design was not corrected by the end of the war. While it may seem like an easy remedy to a completely predictable problem, it was not addressed in time to make the Chauchat a more dirt-proof design, and many French and American gunners paid for that fact with their lives.
Easily portable automatic arms were in short supply on both sides of the line on the Western Front. German troops were used to lugging around the MG08/15, in those days considered a “light machine gun” at only 40 pounds. Small wonder that the Kaiser’s men were keen to use any 28-pound British Lewis gun they captured. Not so, however, with the 20-pound Chauchat. Despite the large numbers of captured Chauchat machine rifles available to them, the Germans apparently made no attempt to use them. I have many photos in my collection of Germans using captured Lewis guns, but I have never seen an image of a German using a Chauchat in World War I.
Each time a Doughboy attempted to fire the Chauchat from the prone position he was painfully reminded that it was not a shooter-friendly design. To avoid a punch in the eye or cheekbone (the French called this “la gifle”), the shooter must position his cheek well forward of the plug end of the long-recoil mechanism. At the same time, the shooter must also hold the short buttstock tight to his shoulder to provide enough resistance for full cycling of the recoil system. As if the rifle were not already fraught with problems, the shooter must subordinate his natural instincts and fire it with awkward positioning of his eye, cheek and shoulder. Coupled with a spindly, unstable bipod and poorly aligned sights, accurate combat shooting beyond 100 meters with a Chauchat was quite an achievement. Hits at more than 400 meters were next to impossible.
Jamming the Chauchat was not limited simply to dirt entering through the open magazine. Overheating of the long-recoil action was unavoidable, but the burning question in the minds of Chauchat gunners was how many rounds would it take to jam it? Considering that a clean, well-oiled Chauchat (where would you find one of those in 1918?) would seize up after only 300 rounds of rapid fire, a dirty rifle could be maddeningly locked up after only 100 rounds. It would often take more than 10 minutes for the barrel and sleeve to cool off enough to allow the recoiling barrel to slide forward and lock in the firing position. No amount of kicking, hammering or cursing (in English or French) would release the jammed mechanism.
It is difficult for us to imagine today but the battle-readiness of American armed forces in 1917 was woeful. Colonel Isaac Newton Lewis (inventor of the Lewis light machinegun), provided this testimony before the Senate Military Affairs Committee on December 22, 1917: “The equipment of our troops in France, the pitiful handful of men, hardly equal to the casualty lists of the British that we get week by week—the equipment of those men is an outrage and a disgrace to this country. They have neither machine guns nor a suitable supply of rifles; they have no field artillery except what we are begging and borrowing from France, which is stripped to the skin. We are not going to get armament to them in ten months from today, nor one year from today. We will not have one million armed men in the field, because America will be absolutely unable to supply the arms and ammunition required. Somebody is responsible for that; something is responsible; some system is responsible for it.”
