Mitrailleuse
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The mitrailleuse was a manually-fired volley gun originally developed in Belgium in the 1850s. A number of improved designs were used in battle by the French Army during the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871). The French Reffye mitrailleuse was the first rapid-firing weapon to be deployed as standard equipment by any army in a major conflict. Although innovative, it failed as a tactical weapon because its operational usage and design were flawed. The word mitrailleuse nonetheless became the generic term for a machine gun in the French language, although the mitrailleuse itself was entirely manually-operated.
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[edit] Technical characteristics
[edit] Design
Several variants of the mitrailleuse concept were developed, with common elements to all of their designs. They were characterised by a number of rifled barrels clustered together and mounted on a conventional artillery chassis or (in the case of one model) a tripod. The ammunition was secured in a single pre-loaded plate or block and placed into the breech, behind the open ends of the barrels. All of the barrels were loaded simultaneously by a manual closing lever or large horizontal screw. A second lever could be worked rapidly (or in some models, a crank could be turned) to fire each barrel in succession. This earned the weapon its French nickname of moulin à café (coffee grinder). (A very similar name was earned by the "coffee mill gun" in America during the American Civil War).
The ammunition plate had to be removed by hand before another loaded plate could be inserted. Unlike in later rapid-firing automatic weapons, the entire loading and firing process was manual. The mitrailleuse's major innovation was simply that it speeded up these processes over the regular infantry rifles. [1]
The different variants of the mitrailleuse concept were distinguished by their number of barrels and their different calibers, as the following table summarises:
| Variant name | Barrels | Barrel arrangement | Calibre | Date developed | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bollée | 30 | Two circular rings (18 in the outer ring, 12 in the inner) | 13 mm | ? | Used by the French Army of the Loire during the Franco-Prussian War [2] |
| Chevalier et Grenier | 16 | Two horizontal rows (2 x 8) | 11 mm | ? | |
| Gabert | 4 | 11 mm | ? | Tripod-mounted, unlike the other carriage-mounted variants | |
| Christophe-Montigny | 37 | 11 mm | 1851 | Developed and used by the Belgian Army | |
| Reffye | 25 | In five rows (5 x 5) | 13 mm | 1865 | Widely used by the French Army during the Franco-Prussian War |
Most variants of the mitrailleuse were mounted on an artillery-style carriage. This made it heavy and cumbersome to handle on the battlefield, with gun and carriage weighing up to 900 kg (2000 lb). Approximately one third of the Reffye mitrailleuses were fitted with a protective steel armour plate to shield the operator from hostile gunfire. This appeared rather late (1871), presumably in response to conditions on the battlefield in the Franco-Prussian War.
[edit] Ammunition and firing rates
The mitrailleuse's dependence on manual loading meant that its firing rate depended greatly on the skill of its operators. A skilfully-manned Reffye mitrailleuse could sustain 3 volleys (75 rounds) per minute in ordinary operation and reach 5 volleys (125 rounds) per minute during emergencies. The rate of fire of each discharge was controlled by the gunner's action on a small manual crank on the right side of the breech. Each regular battery of Reffye mitrailleuses lined up 6 guns firing together, more or less side by side.
The Reffye mitrailleuse used a 13 mm cartridge,designed by Gaupillat, which represented the state of the art in ammunition design at the time (Huon,1986). It was rather like an elongated modern shotgun shell; it was center fire with a rimmed brass head and a dark blue hardened cardboard body. [3] The 770 grains, 13 mm (0.512 inch) bullet was propelled by a compressed black powder charge at a muzzle velocity of 1560 ft/s, three and a half times more powerful than Chassepot or Dreyse rifle ammunition. This was, by far, the most potent rifle caliber ammunition in existence at the time.
The cartridges were pre-loaded in interchangeable steel breech blocks. When firing the mitrailleuse, three breech blocks were kept in continuous use: one being fired, one being pressed down on the extractor and one being loaded from a single pre-packaged 25 rounds box.
The weapon's barrel could be moved sideways, back and forth, with a rotating handle for sweeping fire. The angle was narrow, however, and the barrel could not swing far enough from side to side to produce effective sweeping fire at short distances. The weapon's field of fire was so narrow that Prussian soldiers were often hit by several bullets at once. [4] French artillery attempted to rectify this problem by developing special ammunition capable of firing three bullets from the same cartridge for short-range point defence.
[edit] Development
The mitrailleuse is best known for its service with the French Army but it was in fact first designed and deployed in Belgium in the 1850s. It was designed by a Captain T.H.J. Fafschamps in 1851 and manufactured by Joseph Montigny of Fontaine-l'Evêque near Brussels. The weapon was used apparently only on a limited basis as a defensive weapon to protect Belgian fortresses. [1]
The French military became interested in the mitrailleuse at the start of the 1860s and the French Army's Artillery Committee undertook an investigation into the possible adoption of the weapon. In May 1864, General Edmond Leboeuf submitted a preliminary report entitled Note sur le Canon á Balles to the Emperor Napoleon III. Full-scale manufacture began in September 1865, in great secrecy, under the leadership of lieutenant-colonel Verchere de Reffye (1821-1880). Assembly and some manufacturing took place at the workshops in Meudon but many parts came from the private industrial sector. Production was slow due to limited funding (the army had already spent much of its five-year budget on the Mle 1866 Chassepot rifle ), forcing Napoleon III to pay for development and manufacture out of secret funds. [5]
The weapon was thoroughly tested in 1868 at the Satory "Polygon" facility near Versailles in conditions of great secrecy. Due to a fear of spies, test guns were concealed in tents while being fired at distant targets. The mitrailleuse performed mechanically with remarkable efficiency and much was expected of it in a combat situation.
A total of 215 mitrailleuses and five million rounds of ammunition had been manufactured by July 1870, but only 190 were operational and available for field service when war with Prussia broke out.
[edit] Operational doctrine
The French Army saw the mitrailleuse as a form of artillery weapon, rather than an infantry support weapon – a role later to be filled by the machine gun. As a matter of fact,the official name of the Reffye mitrailleuse in the French Army was " Canon a Balles", a designation that translates litterally as : "an artillery piece that fires bullets". Having been developed by the artillery they were, naturally, manned by artillerymen and attached to artillery groups equipped with regular four-pounder field guns.[6] Each mitrailleuse battery comprised six guns, each with a crew of six. One man on the front right fired the gun while another man on the front left swiveled the gun sideways for sweeping fire. The four other men attended to aiming, loading and unloading.
The battlefield use of the mitrailleuse as artillery was a fatally flawed concept. In order to avoid being hit by Dreyse rifle fire ,the mitrailleuse batteries were systematically deployed beyond about 1,400 m ( 1,500 yards) from the enemy lines. Although the maximum range of the mitrailleuses was 3,400 m (3,700 yards), the distances at which they were typically engaged in action rarely exceeded 2,000 m ( 2100 yards). This was much less than that of conventional French field artillery with which the mitrailleuses were deployed. However it was still too far given the facts that range-finding and target acquisition,with the two open sights on the mitrailleuse, was extremely difficult at such long distances. For instance its bullet impacts on the ground were impossible to observe at long distances unless enemy ranks were disrupted by hits. It may be noted that modern machine guns are typically used at ranges far shorter than their maximum range – the M60 machine gun, for instance, is normally used at an effective range of 1,100 m (1,200 yards), compared to its maximum range of 3,725 m (4,074 yards). The mitrailleuse, by contrast, was often used at the outer edges of its range. These deficiencies in its operational usage proved disastrous in the Franco-Prussian War.
[edit] The mitrailleuse at war
[edit] Franco-Prussian War (1870-71)
The outbreak of war with Prussia on 15 July 1870 led to a somewhat chaotic mobilization of the French Army. The mitrailleuse batteries faced particularly acute problems. Although they had been organised, on paper, into proper batteries, on the outbreak of war the guns were still in storage at Meudon and in the forts of Montrouge, Issy and Mont-Valerien around Paris. The crews had been designated but had not yet been assembled. Many had little or no training in the use of the weapons and so were unaware of its sighting and ranging characteristics. Detailed instruction manuals had been printed in January 1870, but had only been distributed at the very beginning of the hostilities. Such was the secrecy surrounding the weapon that not only did few artillery commanders know how to deploy it effectively, many did not even know that it existed. Marshal MacMahon, commander of the Army of Châlons, claimed that he had never even seen a mitrailleuse until one was wheeled past him at the Battle of Sedan on 2 September 1870, nearly two months after war had been declared.[citation needed]
Mitrailleuses were used in many of the major engagements of the war, but their small numbers – only 190 of the Reffye variant in the entire French army – greatly restricted their effectiveness in the field. Their flawed operational usage was a serious problem on the battlefield, as they were often inaccurate and unable to acquire targets quickly enough. To make matters worse, the complex firing mechanism was vulnerable to damage at the hands of inexperienced crews. Fouling of the mechanism by black powder combustion residues could also become a problem after prolonged firings.
In a few instances where the Reffye mitrailleuses were put to good use, they showed that they could have a significant impact. Captain Barbe's mitrailleuse battery at the Battle of Gravelotte devastated massed Prussian infantry when they had quickly found the range on their targets, contributing to the exceptionally high Prussian death toll in that battle. For the most part, however, mitrailleuses proved ineffective. It was concluded after the war that Chassepot rifle fire had caused a far greater number of Prussian casualties than the Reffye mitrailleuses. However, about 100,000 Chassepot rifles were engaged in the conflict, in contrast with the less than 200 Reffye mitrailleuses used at any given time.
The Prussians and foreign observers were not impressed by the performance of the mitrailleuse. In the case of the Prussians, their views were undoubtedly coloured by propaganda. They had very few machine guns or volley guns of their own and, not least for reasons of maintaining morale in the face of a new weapon technology, they scorned the effectiveness of the mitrailleuse. They nonetheless saw the weapon as a threat and Prussian artillery always made it a priority to engage and destroy the mitrailleuse batteries. The weapon's characteristic "snarling rasp" does appear to have made some impression – the Prussian troops called the mitrailleuse the "Höllemaschine" ("Hell Machine") [7]
Its failure to have much effect in the field led to a belief that rapid-fire weapons were useless. [8] United States Army General William Babcock Hazen, who observed the war, commented that "The French mitrailleuse had failed to live up to expectations. The Germans hold it in great contempt, and it will hardly become a permanent military arm." [9] Strictly speaking, manually-operated volley guns such as the Reffye mitrailleuse were a technological dead-end – they would be soon be replaced by fully automatic machine guns.
After Napoleon III's abdication following the disastrous French defeat in the Battle of Sedan, French war powers fell into the hand of a republican government led by Leon Gambetta. He vigorously organized national defense and the continued manufacture of war equipment. Most of the conventional weapon manufacturing was located in provincial France, but some mitrailleuse repair and even construction continued inside Paris during the city's four-month siege.
The manufacture of the mitrailleuse and its ammunition was resumed under the direction of De Reffye in the coastal city of Nantes in western France. An additional 122 mitrailleuses were manufactured in Nantes to replace the nearly 200 mitrailleuses that had already been destroyed and/or captured .
[edit] After the war
After the armistice with Prussia in May 1871, one of the last recorded uses of Reffye mitrailleuses was by troops under the command of Adolphe Thiers when a battery executed captured Communards in the Bois de Boulogne following the suppression of the Paris Commune. Similar incidents involving the Reffye mitrailleuse are reported to have taken place at the Caserne Lobau, a barracks in the center of Paris.
Only a few Reffye mitrailleuses remained in service at the end of the war. They were retired into static point-defence duties, for providing flanking fire in the moats of French fortresses. The last Reffye mitrailleuses were finally removed from forts in eastern France as late as 1908. The Reffye mitailleuses were never sold as surplus by the French government, after the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), nor were they ever used outside of France. They are often confused with other types of manually operated volley guns such as the Belgian- made Montigny mitrailleuse or even with the Gatling gun.
[edit] Impact of the mitrailleuse on military development
The long-term effects of the mitrailleuse's poor performance have been the subject of some dispute among historians. In Machine guns: An Illustrated History, J. Willbanks argues that the weapon's ineffectiveness in the Franco-Prussian War resulted in long-standing opposition among European armies to adopting machine gun weapons, particularly in Continental Europe. It is true that the French army did not adopt an automatic machine-gun until 1897, when they chose the Hotchkiss machine gun , later to be followed by the Hotchkiss M1914 machine gun. The French armed forces also adopted another automatic machine gun, the St. Etienne Mle 1907. It has been suggested that the relative slowness displayed by the French services to adopt machine guns was the result of weariness occasioned by the failure of the mitrailleuse. There is some justification to that, for the Maxim gun had repeatedly been tested by the French armed services ever since its inception.[10]
In the immediate aftermath of the war, the French put a much greater emphasis on improving their conventional artillery. The failure of French artillery during the 1870-71 campaign served as a strong motivation to develop the De Bange field artillery piece (1877) and eventually the well-known Canon de 75 modèle 1897 field gun. At a normal 15 shells per minute rate of fire, one single 75 mm gun could deliver 4,350 lethal shrapnel balls within one minute, up to 6 km away, versus the 75 bullets per minute that were delivered at up to 2 km distance by one Reffye mitrailleuse.
Despite such improvements in longer-range artillery, there still remained a need to develop better short- and medium-range infantry support weapons. During the period from 1871 to the 1890s, a variety of new European- and American-designed manual machine guns were adopted by many European armies. Large numbers of Gatling guns were purchased from the United States and were used by Western European powers in colonial wars in Africa, India, and Asia. Twenty-five Gatling guns also saw active service in French hands during the Franco-Prussian war, in early 1871. They performed particularly well at an engagement at Le Mans in western France. Furthermore the French armed services purchased, for their Navy and eastern fortifications, a large number of manual, rapid fire 37 mm multi-barrel guns (so-called "cannon-revolvers") made in France after 1879 by the firm of American expatriate Benjamin Hotchkiss.
By the 1890s however, European armies begun to retire their Gatling guns and other manual machine-guns in favor of fully automatic machine guns, such as the Maxim gun,the Colt-Browning M1895 and the Hotchkiss machine gun. Such weapons became universal – and notorious – with the outbreak of the First World War in 1914.
[edit] Modern uses of the term mitrailleuse
Machine guns are still called mitrailleuses in French, following the pattern set by the adoption of the Mitrailleuse Hotchkiss in 1897. An FN 5.56 mm NATO machine gun, the Minimi, derives its name from the term Mini-Mitrailleuse, or literally "little machine gun".
The term is also used in Norwegian. Although spelled slightly differently as mitraljøse, the pronunciation is similar. In Norway the term nowadays is used to a machine gun (the MG3, labeled as mitr-3, to be specific) mounted on a tripod. This is similar to the German Schwere Maschinengewehr as a term for a regular machine gun mounted on a tripod.
A related word, metralhadora, is used in Portuguese. Although it is derived from the French mitrailleuse, its pronunciation is different. It describes any automatic firearm.
The word also survived in Romania, where the generic term for a machine gun is mitralieră, while in Slovenian and Serbian it's mitraljez.
[edit] Preserved mitrailleuses
An original Reffye mitrailleuse that could bear some mechanical rehabilitation can be seen in Paris at the Musée de l'Armée in the Hotel Des Invalides. It is located in the internal main courtyard, in one of the outside covered galleries. Another better preserved mitrailleuse can be found in the Musée royal de l’Armée et d'Histoire Militaire in Brussels.Finally ,a very well preserved Reffye mitrailleuse is also displayed in the collections of the Dreiecklandmuseum,79423,Heitersheim (near Freiburg im Breisgau),Germany.
[edit] References
- ^ a b Terry Gander, Machine Guns, p. 13 (Crowood Press, 2003)
- ^ S Shann, The French Army 1870-71 Franco-Prussian War, p. 39 (Osprey Publishing, 1991)
- ^ Huon, Jean. Military rifle and machine gun cartridges (Arms & Armor Press, 1988)
- ^ McCormick, Dr William, On the Surgical Practice of the War (Pall Mall Gazette, 1870)
- ^ S Shann, L Delperier, French Army of Franco-Prussian War: Imperial Troops, p. 35-36 (Osprey Publishing, 1991)
- ^ David Nicolle, Gravelotte-St. Privat 1870, p. 25 (Osprey Publishing, 1993)
- ^ Geoffrey Wawro, The Franco-Prussian War: The German Conquest of France in 1870-1871 (Cambridge University Press, 2003)
- ^ Julian S. Hatcher, Hatcher's Notebook, p. 74 (1962)
- ^ Stig Forster, On the Road to Total War: The American Civil War and the German Wars of Unification, 1861–1871, p. 602 (Cambridge University Press, 1997)
- ^ John Walter, Allied Small Arms of World War One, p.47 (Crowood Press, 2000)
- Richard Holmes, "The Road to Sedan", London, 1984. ISBN 0-391-03163-5. pp.206-208
- Thomas Adriance, "The Last Gaiter Button", New York, 1987. ISBN 0313254699
- Cmdt Frederic Reboul,'"Le Canon a Balles en 1870{The Reffye mitrailleuse in 1870}",163 pages,1910,Librairie Militaire Chapelot,Paris.
- Jean Huon,"Military Rifle and Machine Gun Cartridges"Ironside International Publications,1986,ISBN 0-935554-05.Contains a detailed description ,with photos, of the Reffye mitrailleuse ammunition.
[edit] See also
- Vandenburgh gun
