| Article by Steve Jackson (v.1) |
| Development History |
Since the 1840s with the development of the the Minié ball, rifles had been considered the most important weapon on the battlefield. Infantry made up the bulk of the militaries of the world, and nearly every strategy employed by those armies and technology devised for fighting since the rifle was introduced was intended to either help or to prevent the infantry from completing their objectives. Artillery and cavalry, the two other largest branches of service, were considered support arms.
The importance of modern rifles was demonstrated during Franco-Prussian war of 1870. In that war German (1) tactics, strategy, artillery, logistics, and morale all proved superior to their French adversaries, but the French had developed a new rifle, the Fusil Mle 1866 Chassepot , that was superior to the Prussian Dreyse needle gun. The irony was that the needle gun had been one of the most important factors leading to the Prussian victory over Austria. Austrians, using muzzle loading rifles, had suffered huge casualties from Dreyse firing Prussians whose rifle allowed them to remain prone when reloading.
In just a few years the Dreyse had gone from an important part of the Prussian war machine to a liability. French units equipped with the Chassepot were able to fire faster than their Prussian counterparts at a longer range and with more accuracy, and in many cases were able to cause huge casualties in a war that would otherwise have been a one-sided affair.(2) Although victorious the Germans immediately began to search for a replacement rifle. The French, while in possession of the best shoulder weapon of the war, were aware that this weapon was soon to be obsolete, and began to search for a better weapon themselves. The result was a general European small arms race that would last through the 1950s(3).
Oddly enough many of the lessons that Europe would draw from to create a new infantry rifle were already present and tested. The United States had been the center of small arms development since 1814 when it had adopted the Hall rifle, an early breechloader. The Hall had developed basic mass production techniques that allowed for interchangeable parts. By the time the United States Model 1840 musket was released, interchangeable parts were no longer an option, but a standard part of gun manufacture. American developers had also produced the first practical repeating rifles in the form of the Volcanic, had employed the first repeating rifle in mass combat (the Spencer), and had developed the first centerfire primer (http://www.google.com/patents/US53388). They had also been the first military to adopt a breech loading centerfire rifle in the form of the M1866 in .50-70 Government.
With the end of the Franco-Prussian war France had serious problems to solve. Paris was under control of a communist uprising, the German Army was occupying the countryside and demanding repatriations, and a new democratic government was being elected to replace the monarchy of Napoleon III. The distractions meant that the French needed to get a weapon into place fast and leave the perfect rifle for the future. Their choice was a cartridge-firing update to the Chassepot called the Mle 1874 Gras. The Gras would prove to be one of the strongest single shot rifles ever made, and would serve with the Greek Army through 1945, but it was not a significant leap forward for infantry weapons.
The search for a new infantry weapon gained urgency for the French after the Franco-Turkish war of 1878. It was during that war that Russian soldiers often found themselves facing repeaters with their single-shot Berdans. With the German Empire rapidly seeking new weapons and other nations such as the Austro-Hungarians testing first-generation repeaters such as the Kropatschek there was a clear urgency for France to seek a repeater.
The French started off to a slow start, but they were looking to leapfrog their European adversaries. Manufacture of the Gras rifle was curtailed, and new repeating rifles were ordered when needed in smaller batches, the first being the Fusil de Marine Mle 1878 Kropatschek, a weapon designed by Austrian General Alfred von Kropatschek and built originally by Steyr of Austria. It was chambered for the French 11mm black powder cartridge. At the same time French chemists began to work on a new powder that it was hoped would revolutionize firearm design.
Gunpowder, whose first use had happened so long ago that there are no clear records of it, was a relatively dirty propellent. That meant when it combusted there was a lot of soot left behind. Rifles with tight tolerances had always suffered from soot buildup, the French issued with muzzle loading weapons a tight fitting zinc round to be fired every 30-40 shots that would scour a rifle's barrel clean. Repeaters often had to be cleaned every hundred rounds or so or cease to function. The strength of the Gras/Chasspot bolt pull was designed to allow the weapon to be ripped or even hammered open if it became hopelessly clogged in battle. The problem of traditional gunpowder came to a head as automatic weapons were develop, Maxim machine guns were introduced in 1884 firing black powder and tended to jam after a hundred rounds or so, requiring cleaning. (4)
The solution that was present since the 1840s was to develop an ammunition that used a glyceryl trinitrate in some form of powder. Glyceryl trinitrate was extremely powerful, could be made cheaply by industrial processes, but it was explosive rather than simply being fast burning. This made it dangerous to handle. By the 1880s most attempts to use it for a gunpowder substitute had been abandoned, although it had been made into a more or less stable industrial explosive by mixing it with diatomaceous earth for form dynamite.
French chemist Paul Vieille was aware of work on various nitrate explosives when he started working for the French government to overcome the issues with these chemicals, enabling a new class of gunpowder to be produced. Vielle turned out to be successful, creating Poudre B, the first smokeless powder.
The French now had their advance in technology, but many military thinkers of the 1880s in France were enamored with a way of thinking that in later years could be called the firepower doctrine. The role of the military, according to the firepower doctrine, is to accurately deliver as much force as can be brought to bare on a given target so that target quickly becomes ineffective in a military sense. For infantry this meant that, when called, they should be able to rapidly and accurately fire on their targets until those targets are no longer able to respond.
Military thinkers saw the infantry doing this using four basic tactics:(5)
(1) Unit-to unit volley fire, the standard move for Infantry since the Martinet reforms of the 1650s.
(2) Long-range individual fire.
(3) Rapid fire at moderate ranges.
(4) Close combat using bayonets.
Any new infantry weapon had to perform all four of these techniques, and the French intended that their standard weapon be superior in all four areas. The arrival of Poudre B enabled the first three techniques to be done better than ever before. Smokeless powder generated much higher velocities and flatter trajectories, making long-range fire possible to 800-1000 meters. Volley fire was likewise extended to nearly 2000 meters. The lack of powder fouling meant that rapid fire could be sustained over a long period of time and since smoke did not accumulate firing lines were not obscured. Not related to the powder French medical research had lead to improvements in bayonet technology for close combat. (6)
French planners, aware of the new Maxim machine gun (which had been making the rounds of Europe in a marketing blitz since 1884) knew that their Poudre B would open up the possibility of an infantry weapon that allowed for automatic mechanical operation. Indeed dozens of weapon designers began to work on the issues involved in the 1880s. French designers though felt that it was imperative that they work toward an "ultimate rifle" for use by soldiers, even if it took twenty years. The rifle would be self-loading and use the new smokeless powder. All weapons adopted until that weapon would be interim at best. Plans for the introduction of an interim rifle first, followed by an ultimate design, was approved by defense minister Jean-Baptiste Campenon, the only defense minister to stay in office long enough during the early 1880s to matter to French military thinking.
The idea of seeking a perfect weapon over a lengthy development phase ran into difficulties spurred by the practicality of world events. In 1885 it was apparent to French intelligence that the Germans were widely adopting a version of its Mauser 1871, the 71/84, with a tubular magazine for rapid fire. Aware of the Russian problems facing Turkish Winchester repeated, the French civilian military leadership became concerned that the obsolete French Gras rifle was opening them up to potential attack by an increasingly bellicose Germany. This was magnified by the election of a civilian government who strongly supported a revanchist agenda and radicalized in terms of military agenda.
In the first weeks of 1886 the revanchist minister of war for France, Georges Ernest Boulanger, informed the military that due to international political realities they needed to have a repeating smokeless powder rifle in place by years end. The result was one of the most ingenious small arms development programs ever undertaken. Few nations had ever completely switched the direction of their small arms development for their entire army in only a year, but France was dedicated to not only doing this, but of having production of these new weapons accelerated to an unheard of scale of 1400 weapons per month. To complete this task the French military establishment created a special commission, the Commission des Armes à Répétition, lead by Baptiste Tramond, with orders to cut through obstacles and have a working rifle in place in less than two years.(7)
The ammunition for the new rifle was developed by a group including Nicolas Lebel, a graduate of École Spéciale Militaire de Saint-Cyr, the French war college, who engineering skills had seen him rise to the head director of the École Normale de Tir, the French Army shooting school. When first tested smokeless powder had a significant problem, and that was it created velocities too high for lead bullets to handle. Lead would literally melt in the barrel, quickly fouling the bore of a rifle in a way that required a mercury soaking to correct. This was hardly a cheap of feasible field solution. Lebel solved this by adopting the copper jacketed bullets of Eduard Rubin, the director of the Swiss National Ammunition factory at Thun in the cantonment of Bern. After several rounds of testing an 8mm bullet was chosen as optimal.
This 8mm bullet was intended to be fired from a centerfire, brass cased cartridge. Here commission member Basile Gras, the chief inspector of arms for Paris who had learned engineering at École Polytechnique, added his knowledge. Gras was most famous at the time for his advocacy of what would be know as firepower, his genius at saving money in the French armory system, and for his conversion of the Chassepot needle rifle to fire a metallic cartridge, which he had developed himself in 1873. Gras noted that the immediate need for weapons meant that any attempt to design a completely new cartridge for what was accepted to be an interim firearm was a waste of money. He also felt that the millions of Mle 1874 rifles then in service need not be discarded if the new ammunition adopted was close enough in size to the old 11x59Rmm black powder round. Finally, he demonstrated that cartridge manufacturing plants currently making the 11x59Rmm could be cheaply converted to making a new round if their dimensions were similar, possibly producing the two rounds side-by-side. Since his role as chief inspector of arms for the Paris district put him in charge of the nation's three largest weapon manufacturing facilities (St Etienne, Châtellerault and Tulle) he was able to quickly develop a cartridge design that could be rapidly put into mass production without great expense.
The new Gras designed cartridge was essentially an 11x59Rmm cut down in length, then necked down in two steps to 8mm. The gradual neck (as opposed to a more angular neck as would be adopted by Mauser in the 8x57 and by Rubin in the 7.5x55) was a move to provide added strength to the case at a time when no one had any experience with case ruptures using smokeless powder. Combined with Lebel's 15 gram jacketed bullet it formed the new Balle M ammunition. The ammunition's statistics were impressive. At the muzzle the round generated a velocity of nearly 650 meters per second compared to 420 meters per second normal for the 11x59Rmm round. This added velocity made the round amazingly accurate compared to black powder weapons, black powder shooters had to fire at steep angles past 200 meters, causing unpredictable wind currents to move their bullet from target, while the Balle M had a relatively flat trajectory until past 600 meters.
The choice of the ammunition allowed plans for a new rifle to move forward, and it was fortunate the committee had made the ammunition compromises that it did. Tooling up any new weapon manufacturing program was a long and expensive ordeal. The commission had the mandate to do it, but lacked the funds to simply throw people at the issue. Instead they took advantage of the 8x50Rmm design to aid them in getting a new rifle into service.
Many of the test firings of the new 8x50Rmm round were done with modified Gras rifles, and indeed there was no repeating rifle chambered for the round by its completion in the middle of 1886. In 1884 though the French state arsenals had started small scale production of a modified version of the marine Kropatschek, now called the Mle 1884, in 11x59Rmm. Followed up by the improved Mle 1885, the weapon had seen service overseas, machinery existed in the French system to produce it in quantity, troops were slowly training on it, especially non-commissioned officers who were given the rifle first when it arrived to units in the field, and the design was safe, none of its components were likely to suffer teething problems. Putting a new barrel on the Mle 1885 and other small changes were enough to get it into service, with the weapon reaching a production rate of nearly 1500 units a month by the start of 1887.
| Operation: |
The Kropatschek/Lebel (8) design is basically a spring-loaded tubular magazine similar to that used by the 1866 Winchester, that carried 8-rounds of ammunition under the rifle's barrel. A turn-bolt operation level similar to the Gras locked into the receiver with two lugs, and also was secured by the bolt handle's raised base. When the bolt was opened it cocked the bolt and allowed ammunition to be pressed into the ammunition tube. A final (9th) round could be placed in the loading tray, and the loading tray could be secured by means of a magazine cutoff. No safety was provided as French soldiers from 1866 to 1940 were trained to never keep a loaded chamber, preventing accidental discharge even from weapons with engaged (but faulty) safeties.
With the magazine cutoff in place the Mle 1886 operated like any other single-shot rifle, accepting individual rounds. On command to load and fire an infantry soldier would take a single round from their ammunition pouch and load it, then aim and pull the trigger. When they opened the bolt it would grab the spent casing and eject it allowing a new one to be manually placed in the weapon.
The Lebel design had two significant advantages over other repeaters such as the Winchester lever action. The first was that the action was substantially free from ports or gates that can allow access of dirt. When the bolt is closed only the barrel represents a route for ingress of dirt. The second was that although the action more complicated that other designs, its bolt was simple to clean and maintain. Soldiers in the field have found weapon bolts the most challenging task for cleaning since the dawn of the age of repeating rifles, and more than one U.S. soldier can describe seeing their mainspring escape their weapon and fly across their bunk room. This same problem happened in the Lebel, but the spring and most of the parts were smaller and less numerous that bolt action weapon.
| Bayonet |
The Mle 1886 was equipped with a new bayonet, a narrow epee with a metal handle, 500 millimeters long with a hooked quillion for breaking enemy bayonets. The epee was the result of studies during the American Civil war and the Franco-Prussian war that showed slashing weapons, except in the hands of experts, were rarely effective in close combat: most bayonet wounds that would incapacitate an enemy were caused by the point of the weapon. The narrow point of an epee takes advantage of this by allowing all of the force of a bayonet thrust to be concentrated at a small, stiff point.
This was combined with a bayonet attachment that fit directly into the fore stock of the rifle. Most previous bayonets in French service hung off the rifle that carried them at a right angle. Internationally, it was more common to have bayonets attach to a rifle below the barrel. In most cases the bayonet's only point of purchase was the lugging that held it in place. The French found that the weight of a bayonet on long rifle barrels actually reduced the accuracy of the weapon when it was attached, and that the stabbing force was not efficiently transmitted between the bayonet and the body of the rifle, which could lead to damage of the weapon.
The comparison of the French Lebel bayonet and the standard Mauser bayonet of the Great War (which itself was an improvement over older designs in terms of hafting) shows that the Mauser bayonet does not transfer the center of the force of a thrust from the blade to the rifle. By creating a haft point that securely hugged the entire bottom of the bayonet, by making the bayonet as light as possible, and by creating a narrow cruciform shape to the bayonet (which reduced the racking stress applied to bayonets being spun to remove them from targets), the French were able to solve many of the deficiencies notes in the weapon type, creating the "ultimate bayonet."
Despite the relative effectiveness of the new bayonet design it would never be very useful in combat (9). The soldiers felt that the Mle 1886 was absurdly long attached to its bayonet. At over 1.8 meters long soldiers took to calling their rifles fishing poles. Many officers of the post-firepower period of élan vital were enamored with the idea of decisive bayonet charges, and European writers even after two years of war would write turgid prose describing the deadly Lebel bayonet and the devastating fear it caused the Germans. In fact, the Germans did not like the wounds caused by the bayonet, but noted that French soldiers so rarely got close enough to inflict them that they were curiosities as opposed to a continual headache. For the soldiers bayonets were usually subjects of fun, or used to open tins, rather than serious fighting implements, and were called le cure-dents or la dîner fourchette. In the ultimate rejection of military blood thirstiness the most common knick name for the Lebel bayonet was "Rosalie."
Over time the bayonet were modified in two distinct ways. The first was by shortening the weapon, reducing its size from over 500mm to 400mm or even shorter. Soldiers in the trenches found that their rifles were too long to fight with in many circumstances. Half a meter of bayonet on a rifle more than 1.3 meters long made it practically impossible to employ in a trench fight. With the order to "fix bayonets" being a standard command given before charges, French soldiers found that when they needed to be nimble the most, they were instead carrying the equivalent of a flag pole. Many Generals such as Pétain argued for getting rid of the bayonet all together(9), but many generals who had advocated for bayonet charges before the war and during the first two years of that conflict feared that to remove the bayonet would open them up for criticism, after all a million men lay dead using the old tactics of bayonet charge. Instead the bayonet was shortened, and new tactics saw the bayonet stay in it scabbard anyways since soldiers were now issued with VB style grenade launchers that blocked the mounting of these weapons.
In addition to shortening the bayonet the soldiers gained one significant victory when they were allowed to grind away the quillon of their blade. Quillon's were designed to trap an enemy blade and snap it. They were ineffective against cruciform shaped blades such as were carried by the French, but the longer sword bayonets used by older Mausers could be snapped from their rifles. The problem with the quillon was that it could get caught on barbed wire even when left in its scabbard. As a further modification soldiers would remove even the rifle mounting to make a poignard de tranchée, or a hand weapon for close ranged combat. These "needle-knifes" Had a large following among soldiers, and were considered by medics on both sides of the conflict as the deadliest knives to face. German soldiers likened the French to criminals who used stilettos in the night, and there is some truth to this. French soldiers in no-man's-land would often refuse to carry their Lebels or even pistols, relying on the shortened spike bayonet and a set of wire cutters.
| Failed Carbine Design: |
After the basic rifle was developed efforts were started to modify it for service with support branches of the military. Many support branches, including the engineers, cavalry, gendarmerie (military / civilian police), and the cuirassier (armored lance carrying cavalry) needed a short carbine to use from horseback. The older Gras carbines were easy to load but they suffered from the same issues that all single-shot black powder weapons did.
L'Ecole Normale de Tir (ENT), once finished with getting the Mle 1886 into service, began to test shortened versions of the Lebel rifle. The main design was to have a 3 or 4 shot magazine, considered sufficient for mounted troops, have a knife bayonet (a common request of mounted troops in the colonies), and sling hardware suitable for mounted use. The design progressed slowly and proved to be unreliable even after multiple versions of the weapon were tested.
By 1889 attempts to build an ENT designed carbine had failed, even when additional help was brought in from Manufacture d'armes de Châtellerault (MAC). As a result the French small arms establishment was forced to look outside of the normal channels of development and adopt the design of an outsider, the Mle 1890 Berthier
| 1893 Modification Program |
The Mle 1886 was already a mature design when it was adopted, having gone through nine-years of development before being adopted to fire the new smokeless powder round. Like most mature designs it did not require extensive modifications. One modification though that was found to be needed was a means of handling the gas released from a cartridge with a burst case. Modifications to the basic 1886 allowed gas to escape away from the shooter in case the weapon burst.
| Notes: |
(1) In 1871 Prussia integrated the Northern German Confederation with the remaining German speaking states (except Austria) to form the German Empire. In this article the term Prussia stands for the German speaking state of Prussia, part of the Northern German Confederation. Germany itself stands for the nation formed after 1871, or the collection of German speaking states as a whole prior to that date.
(2) The effectiveness and ease of use of the Chassepot also broadened the scope of rifle use among civilian populations, after its adoption thousands of French civilians acquired these rifles and learned to shoot at newly formed rifle clubs. During the war these civilian-soldiers formed units of francs-tireurs, or snipers, where small groups armed with Chassepot were able to tie down huge units of German soldiers and inflict significant casualties on German forces.
(3) Innovations in small arms still occur, but after the 1950s and the development of telescopic sights, night vision, and the lightweight assault weapons, these innovations were no longer a cause of significant increases in individual soldier effectiveness. The main tools of battlefield effectiveness became logistics, the use of precision artillery, communication, and rapid mobility. This did not end the role Infantry had in combat, but instead made infantry into a service for the precise use of force to achieve critical objectives. Planes and artillery can flatten a town or destroy a state's capacity for offensive action in days, but infantry are required to spot targets to avoid civilian casualties, to search for active combatants hiding among innocent civilians, to provide critical security.
(4) Later Maxim style machine guns firing modern ammunition have been recording firing thousands of rounds without a stoppage, and hundreds of thousands of round before needed parts replaced. The use of black powder in the Maxim was part of what caused soldiers to be reluctant to adopt it.
(5) These four basic tactics would not survive completely intact the Great War. Unit-to-unit volley fire demanded a long rifle so that soldiers in the rear ranks could fire over the heads of soldiers in the front ranks. In reality the shock value of volley fire was permanently lost to the machine gun, which did it better using fewer soldiers. The infantry retained long range fire, but needed optical and eventually electronic sights and special training to be effective. Rapid fire shooting, both semi-automatically and automatically, became a standard for all infantry weapons. Close combat would see the bayonet replaced by shortened rifles. A fifth duty was added in the second war and that was launching various explosive for suppression, assault, and anti-tank use.
(6) The epee design of bayonets would prove to be the "ultimate design" for bayonets. The problem was that by the time the bayonet was perfected it was barely useful in combat, and attempts to put it to use except in emergencies cause huge casualties.
(7) Although Boulanger may have appeared paranoid at the time, and indeed he was later to embarrass the leadership of the Third Republic on numerous occasions, his feelings that a smokeless powder rifle would be useful on the world stage turned out to be correct. Several incidents, including the 1887 Schnaebele incident, may have been solved without military conflict when the German emperor, apprehensive over the new rifles, insisted on negotiated climb downs during a crisis.
(8) Lebel's name was permanently attached to the Mle 1886 by happenstance. The biggest contributor to the design of the rifle was of course Kropatschek, but he was an Austrian officer and it was felt that giving his name to the new weapon would be a public relations blow. Vielle's work was mostly with smokeless powder, he had little contact with the weapon itself that fired it. Gras was the obvious choice to name the weapon after since he worked on both the bullet design and lead the industrial design team to convert Kropatschek production lines to the new rifle, but this would present confusion since the previous Gras rifle was still in service. Finally the commission leader Tramond might have been a good choice. In reality Lebel was chosen (over his own and other protests) by Boulanger simply because he tested the final weapon - reports for the last several months of testing repeatedly had his name on it and many politicians assumed that meant he was the leader of the design team rather than merely one of its members.
(9)See this article on bayonets.
(10)See the Development of French infantry tactics during the Great War.
| Bibliography: |
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