Mitrailleuse
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The Mitrailleuse was a manually-fired volley gun used by the French Army during the Franco-Prussian War. Although the weapon was a failure, due to flaws in its design and inefficient utilisation by the French, the word mitrailleuse became the generic term for a machine gun in French (it means literally "small piece-shooter", deriving from the Old French noun "mitraille", meaning "small coins"). The mitrailleuse was not in fact an automatic weapon at all, but was manually operated.
Technical characteristics
Several variants of the mitrailleuse were developed, with common elements to all of their designs. They were characterised by a number of rifled barrels clustered inside a cast bronze cylinder 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 and placed into the breech, behind the open ends of the barrels. All of the barrels were loaded simultaneously by a manual closing lever. 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 "the coffee grinder" (a similar nickname 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 weapons, the entire process was manual. The mitrailleuse's major innovation was simply that it speeded up the loading and firing process. [1]
The different variants of the mitrailleuse were distinguished by their number of barrels and their different calibres. The original Montigny mitrailleuse had 37 barrels. The most widely-deployed French version was the Reffye mitrailleuse, with 25 barrels of 13 mm calibre (arranged in five rows of five; see picture above right). The Chevalier et Grenier mitrailleuse had two horizontal rows of eight 11 mm calibre barrels. The Bollée mitrailleuse had thirty 13 mm calibre barrels arranged in two circular rings, the outer ring having 18 barrels and the inner ring having twelve. The Gabert mitrailleuse looked more like a modern machine gun, with four 11 mm calibre barrels and a tripod mount. [2] Due to its small number of barrels, it had the lowest firing rate of any of the variants. A skilfully-used Reffye mitrailleuse, by comparison, was claimed to be able to fire up to twelve bursts a minute (300 rounds per minute) at ranges of up to 2400 m.
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. [3]
The French 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, at the workshops in Meudon. Production was slow due to limited funding (the army had already spent most of its five-year research budget on the Chassepot rifle and had very little money left over), forcing Napoleon III to pay for development and manufacture out of his own pocket. [4]
The weapon was trialed at the "Polygon" facility at 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 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 15th July 1870, but only 190 were operational and available for field service when war with Prussia broke out. These were stored at Meudon and Paris, and transporting the delicate machines, along with their ammunition and trained crews, was severely hampered by the French army's chronically inefficient mobilisation process in July 1870. [citation needed]
Deployment
Mitrailleuses and their crews were not organised into proper batteries in peacetime, and units had to be hastily assembled after the declaration of war on July 15 1870. One such unit, raised from the Imperial Guard, was typically attached to each brigade. Crucially, however, they were considered artillery weapons, being deployed alongside two 4-pounder batteries rather than in the later machine gun's role of fire support for the infantry. [5] Commanders tended to leave their mitrailleuse batteries back with the artillery, where they were too far out of range to attack Prussian infantry, and vulnerable to exploding shells from Prussian artillery.
The hasty organisation of mitrailleuse units and the defective French mobilisation process meant that weapons and trained gunners rarely arrived in the same place at the same time. To compensate for the shortage of trained gunners, the weapons were issued to untrained soldiers who frequently broke the delicate firing mechanism. Instruction leaflets had been printed, but due to the chaotic transport system, the leaflets failed to reach mitrailleuse batteries in the field. [citation needed]
To make matters worse, the weapon had been developed in such secrecy that commanders and regular artillery crews had no real idea of its capabilities or even what it looked like, greatly hindering their ability to use it effectively in the field. Such was the paranoia over the threat from foreign spies that 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]
The design of the mitrailleuse also proved problematic. The gun and its carriage were heavy and cumbersome, weighing up to 900 kg (2000 lbs.), making the weapon difficult to push forward with the infantry. Crucially, the weapon's barrel was fixed in place on the carriage and could not be swivelled from side to side, restricting the weapon's range to a very narrow cone of fire. The only way to traverse the barrel was to pick up the heavy carriage tail and physically swing the entire weapon round, a very difficult task in combat conditions.
The result of these failings was that in most instances the deployed mitrailleuses were simply not very effective in the field. In some instances, such as Captain Barbe's mitrailleuse battery at Gravelotte St-Privat, they devastated massed Prussian infantry. However, most were quickly neutralized by German artillery fire or simply stopped working as wear and tear snapped the thin firing pins. It was later claimed that ordinary rifle fire had caused considerably more casualties than the much-vaunted mitrailleuses.
The Prussians and foreign observers were not very impressed by the performance of the mitrailleuse. In the case of the Prussians, their views were 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 apparently superior technology, they scorned the effectiveness of the mitrailleuse. Although the weapon's characteristic "snarling rasp" did appear to have had some impact on Prussian morale—the Prussian troops called the mitrailleuse the "Höllenmachine" ("Hell Machine") [6]—its failure to have much effect in the field led to a belief that rapid-fire weapons were useless. [7] 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." [8] Strictly speaking, the manual volley gun was a dead-end—it would be other types machine guns with many other new features that would be adopted.
After the war, the few mitrailleuses still in action were retired into fortification duties and research shifted to the development of new, lighter and better guns. The last recorded use of mitrailleuses was by troops under the command of Adolphe Thiers in May 1871, when a mitrailleuse battery was used to execute captured Communards in the Bois de Boulogne following the suppression of the Paris Commune. [citation needed]
Mitrailleuses and machine guns
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 a new model of machine-gun until 1897, when the French army adopted the Hotchkiss Mle 1897/1900 gun. It later adopted another automatic machine gun, the St. Etinne Mle 1907. It has been suggested that this relative slowness to adopt machine guns was the result of wariness occasioned by the failure of the mitrailleuse. [9]
However, 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. A small number of Gatling guns also saw service in the Franco-Prussian war but the French did not adopt them more widely after that conflict. By the 1890s, European armies were retiring their Gatling guns and other manual gun designs in favour of automatic machine guns, such as the Maxim gun and the Colt-Browning M1895. [citation needed]
mitrailleuse in Language
The word mitrailleuse is still the French word for "machine gun". The word is derived from mitraille, "small shot", from the Old French mistraille, "pieces of money".
Machine guns are still called mitrailleuses in French, following the pattern set by the adoption of the Mitrailleuse Hotchkiss in 1897. An FN 5.56mm 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. The spelling and sound are diferent from the french. It describes any automatic firearm.
References
- Richard Holmes, "The Road to Sedan", London, 1984. ISBN 0391031635. pp.206-208
- Thomas Adriance, "The Last Gaiter Button", New York, 1987. ISBN 0313254699
Notes
- ^ Terry Gander, Machine Guns, p. 13 (Crowood Press, 2003)
- ^ S Shann, The French Army 1870-71 Franco-Prussian War, p. 39 (Osprey Publishing, 1991)
- ^ Terry Gander, Machine Guns, p. 13 (Crowood Press, 2003)
- ^ 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)