Yeah, I’m a sucker for nice French rifles. So when Old Western Scrounger brought in another batch of them, I offered to do a video. These are rifles taken out of French long-term storage, having been rebuilt at French arsenals to like-new condition, and are in beautiful condition.
Full video on the MAS 49/56:
Full video on the MAS 36/51:
Jeez, I only realized when uploading this that I have not actually done a full video on the MAS 36/51. What an oversight! I will take care of that shortly…
Lot 252 in the September 2020 Premier RIA auction. Nicolaus-Noël Boutet is one of the most significant gunsmith artists in the world. He was the “directeur-artiste” of the Manufacture d’Armes de Versailles, set up in […]
In the early 1930s, France adopted a new standard pistol and a new cartridge to go with it – the MAS 1935 and the 7.65x20mm, closely patterned on the us M1918 Pedersen Device cartridge. They […]
Since we are in the middle of a series on French rifles, I figured it would be an appropriate time to take a look at what printed reference books are out there in English on […]
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Ian has a serious addiction problem. Why do people keep facilitating it?
if that’s wrong, I don’t want to be right.
What makes you think that there are not other people- definitely, most assuredly, not me- who suffer the same affliction?
Recovery starts with admitting that you have a problem.
Had the MAS49/56 showed up on American shores in 7.62 NATO, I guarantee you all that it would have a considerable following and partisanship.
As the French stuck to their iconoclasm, not caring for convenient standardization? Here we are; it’s a niche weapon few know about.
I am not to suggest that one ought to look forward to sales prospects once your weapons leave depot storage, but… It might not be a bad idea. If the French were able to sell their wares to an enthusiastic market here in the US, they’d be able to finance a few more premium products from HK.
You’ll look long and hard for any ordnance oiks possessing the wit and wisdom to consider such things, however. Here in the US, for example? Consider the advantages if they’d simply opted for a removable trigger pack that could slot into the M16, offering either semi- or fully-automatic options, one for military use, one for selling off when the weapon was no longer front-line issue. I wager you good money that were you to have an Ordnance department with an eye towards saving the taxpayers a few dollars, they’d offer up sales to retiring servicemen at a premium, and have “commemorative” rifles that’d actually seen service somewhere documented. People’d buy that crap, I assure you. I’d love to have the rifle I carried in Germany, back during the Cold War, and I’d have paid Uncle Sam a good deal of cash to have kept it. Same with the ones I had in Iraq…
You’d be amazed at how far someone will go to find the rifle they carried. An acquaintance of mine stumbled onto the very rifle his great-uncle had carried during D-Day and the Normandy campaign through sheer chance; he spent at least three times the actual market value of it to get that rifle and present it to his grandfather; it was the only thing that the family had of the great-uncle, him dying somewhere in Northern France. I’d love to know the full story on that rifle, but all there is to go on is the series of proof stamps on it from post-war service before it somehow wound up in the CMP program and later got sold.
For those curious, the family knew the serial number from the papers in the effects sent back after the great-uncle’s death. He’d written it down for some reason, maybe due to memory problems from a head injury on D-Day.
Weapons are things of intimacy; people will do a lot to retain them, just for the memories imbued.
France adopted the 7.5x54mm Model 1929 cartridge in, well, 1929. If I’d been dictator of French Ordnance, it wouldn’t have happened, but there it is.
Nato adopted 7.62x51mm by the 1950s… 1954-ish, but like 1957 for the USA, the FAL, and so on. By that time, France had built up large reserve stocks of 7.5mm ammunition and had made the decision to relegate all .30-06 cal. weapons to Europe/ Nato duty, and use all the M1 carbines in the misbegotten attempt to hang onto her colonies in Asia and what was considered an “outremer” overseas department in the colony of Algeria… Those were bad ideas, but the decision to “not care about standardization” makes sense if one recalls that they’d been first, and they’d already made up a bunch of the stuff and the rifles and machine guns to shoot the ammo in…
The U.S. might have urged Nato to adopt the French 7.5mm cartridge instead of reverse-engineering the “almost a .30-06, but more compact” 7.62x51mm, no?
Even more bewildering was the French adoption of the 5.56mm FAMAS rifle on the eve of Nato formally adopting one or another 5.56mm cartridge as the new small-caliber, hyper-velocity Nato rifle standard… The cartridge settled on was Belgium’s SS109 62-gr. which became the M855. By then, France had selected 55gr. ammunition about like the M193, so the M855 boat was missed. Fortunately for French troops, they didn’t have to drive rifle bullets through M-1 steel pot helmets at hundreds of yards, for which the SS109/M855 was developed. Then the USA decided to lop six or so inches off the end of the rifle’s barrel and create the M4 carbine, but stick with the same M855 cartridge… And now the French are following suit, and even having ze Germans lop the HK barrel lengths down to 11-1/2 inches…
In 1951 a conference of the Defence Ministers of UK, France, Canada und USA took place in Washington. The French delegation declared that France had the intention to adopt the US caliber .30 as standard round!
If Colonel Studler really had been convinced that the power of the later 7.62 NATO was necessary, the aready existing(!) French 7.5 mm (same bullet diameter!) would have been the obvious choice. Alas, the French announced preferral of the .30-06, obviously -like all others at the conference- having been kept in the dark about the long running U.S. .30/7.62 Light Rifle plans.
Not unlike todays NGSW.
Thanks for the details! I’ll have to research that… Are we sure they didn’t mean the .30 M1 carbine cartridge? Certainly there were several French prototypes in the caliber, and the carbine itself was widely used. I have it that certain French reconnaissance outfits in Germany were using them into the late 1980s if not even longer…
The .30-06 was used by French units in Germany, certainly. They had the AA-52 GPMG in the works, the FM 1924/29, the MAS Mle. 36 and 36/51, the marsouins packing the MAS Mle. 44, and some MAS Mle. 49s… So small wonder they put a grenade launching apparatus on the end of the FSA 49, called it the FSA 49/56 and called it good… erm, uh, well “bon.”
Jules Moch, French Minister of Defence, said:
“Immediately after the liberation our entire small arms program was restudied on the basis of the same caliber – 7.5 mm.
In 1948, anxious to achieve a standardization of calibers and ammunition, France decided to adopt the U.S. rifle[!] caliber .30 (7.62-mm), now called .30 caliber long type cartridge; this decision was made notwithstanding the good qualities of the weapon[s] and ammunition it forces us to discard … [Mle 24/29 LMG and Mle 44 rifle] … All French studies (wepons and ammunition) have been shifted to this new caliber (.30 cal) and manufacture of .30 cal. cartridges (long type) has been organized.”
Source:
The Defence Academy of the United Kingdom has a copy of the U.S. Army document titled: Conference of Defense Ministers on Small Arms Standardization. It was held on 2-3 August 1951 in Washington.
It seems that the conference was called at the request of the. Canadian Defence
Minister, following UK’s announcement of the adoption of the .280 as standard infantry round.
Don’t know if the French really expressed a preference for the .30-06, or simply refused to accept the .280, preferring rounds in the .30 class (as the one they already had).
“Rifle development, standardization, and procurement in the United States military 1950-1967”, by Robert Dale Hinrichs, says the US already presented the T65 round as a better alternative, and the French ultimately sided with them.
Thanks for the details guys!
France pretty much went it’s own way in Nato… Didn’t even participate in the command structure and all that. Kept to its own 7.5x54mm suite of small arms. Basically the same role of spoiler within the Warsaw Pact was played by Romania. No Soviet troops could be based there, not even transit rights to get to Bulgaria or wherever. Didn’t participate in the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. No participation in the Warsaw Pact but formal membership after 1969. Not obliged to the territorial defense of the USSR.
Countries (or their Ordnance Departments) fight like devils to avoid changing the calibers when adopting new cartridges. They all had research departments that told them a smaller cartridge with a skinnier bullet was the way to go, but Germany, Russia and the US stuck with their old bore diameters. I guess those bullet-making machines were expensive compared to their budgets, because that stubborness was erased by the microbullet revolution later in the Cold War.
Bureaucratic inertia, more than anything else.
You base your arguments on “installed base of production equipment”, and what you miss is that every single war we’ve ever gotten our species into has resulted in the discovery that the old production equipment was entirely inadequate, requiring replacement. Usually including facilities, as well.
I would advocate for listening to the procurement types on these issues, and then ignoring them if the arguments aren’t actually valid. MacArthur did for the .276 Pedersen, but the fact was that all the .30-06 stock that he based that on was mostly unfit for purpose in the new Garand, and ammo for that had to be manufactured from new.
I can’t remember where I saw it, but there was something in a back issue of American Rifleman or one of the other gun magazines I used to read obsessively that discussed how a lot of the WWI stock of ammo that MacArthur was referencing wasn’t ever actually used, anyway; they had to break it down for parts, as there were huge quality control issues with it.
I also recall reading in various post-WWI memoirs about how the guys who were serving as Regulars were really pissed-off because there used to be a huge chunk of their pay that was proficiency-based and they were having trouble getting good qualification scores with a bunch of the ammo. One passage I remember particularly spoke of having to do deals to get “the good stuff”, and all the machinations that they went through.
The economies are entirely illusory, I suspect.
Yes. The entire “light rifle” project, elicitation of prototypes, testing programs for the prototypes, and eventual adoption of the Winchester entrant into the “U.S. carbine, cal. .30 M-1″ was based around a single cartridge: The .30 carbine cartridge with its round-nosed 110gr. bullet pushing 2,000 feet per second (more like 1970+). That cartridge had to be a .30 cal. because U.S. ammunition factories were set up to produce .30 cal. bullets. So from the get-go, the .32 Winchester SL cartridge, an 8.2x31mm cartridge with a 165gr. bullet at 1390 fps. was the model for a 7.62x33mm cartidge with a 110gr. bullet at 1980fps.
In retrospect, something of a conservative choice. I mean, it’s not like they looked at the .30-06 7.62x63mm or the .30-30 WCF 7.62x52mmR and cooked up something like, say, the DANRIF 7x44mm or the German Geco 7.75x39mm or the post-WWII French 7.65x35mm. None of those cartridges went literally anywhere, neither did the .276 Pedersen, and neither did the .280 7x49mm…
As for Ordnance departments, the Russians had all sorts of 6.5mm cartridge experimentation, but went back to 7.62x54mmR rimmed Russian 1908. The UK stuck with .303”. The USA had the notorious “pig board” tests that demonstrated the potential of 6.5mm bullets, but opted for 7mm. As far as I can tell, it was a rather arbitrary “goldilocks” “too small vs. too large so this one must be *just right*” proposition. Fëderov in Russia only tested 6.5mm cartridges, and ignored the 6mm .236 USN Lee cartridge, as far as I can tell because it was an “outlier.” The Japanese decided 6.5x50mmSR wouldn’t do in machine guns, and so they developed what? three iterations of 7.7x58mm aka. .303 British rimless, with one of those for service rifles and some machine guns. Sweden developed the monster 8x63mm MGs–.338 Lapua mag. MGs avant la lettre? Maybe? Italy had the 8mm Breda MGs after the 7.35 fiasco and retention of the 6.5x52mm.
One of the stranger fads of the 1970s was the plethora of Microcalibers… German 4.6x36mm with “spoon-tip” bullets, 4.7x33mm caseless Kraut spacemagik, Swedish .22 mag with spitzer 4.5mm bullets perhaps now seeing fruition in the .21 Sharp cartridge no one asked for, the original British IW 4.85x45mm cartridge shelved for the 5.56x45mm SS109/M855 L85/SA80 and so on and so forth.
There’s a lot of utter irrationality in all the caliber/cartridge decisions.
The US had a perfectly good intermediate cartridge they could have gone back to, after the 7.62 NATO failed the test of combat. They couldn’t admit to having been wrong, soooo… SCHV, here we come.
Gotta thank God it worked as well as it did, or we’d have gone through yet another nutroll before they gave up on it and then tried moving on to that SPIW nonsense, which they never quite got working.
I’m of a mind that 5.56 ain’t quite enough. I cannot, however, prove that fact. As it has worked well in the role we put it into, I would strongly suggest sticking with it until there’s no other choice in the matter. The 7.62 NATO has the same flaws as the current NGSW BS, in that it’s an MG cartridge biased towards (barely…) being able to also work in an individual weapon role.
Dual-caliber is the only way a rational person could go, but we ain’t at all rational. The “desire path” of small arms has always been for a medium intermediate caliber in the individual weapon, and something big enough to actually blow through cover and do damage to material in the support role… And, they are both necessities down in the squad, regardless of what your fantasies might be about being light enough to dance through the hail of fire.
Personally, however? Ya can’t objectively and conclusively prove that either 5.56 or 7.62 are not working in the roles they’re in; the majority of that whole “overmatch” thing was imaginary, and due to the fact that the current lot of idiots don’t know how to get the most out of what they’ve got. I am morally certain that I could fix “overmatch” issues with better training and support equipment for the existing weapons suite.
Italy didn’t had “the 8mm Breda MGs after the 7.35 fiasco and retention of the 6.5x52mm”. The 8mm Breda was adopted specifically for MMG use in 1935, and the 7.35X51 Carcano in 1938 for LMGs and rifles.
Any 6.5mm cartridge user, in the ’20s-’30s, adopted a bigger cartridge for MMGs Italy he 8mm Breda, Netherlands the 8mm Mauser, Sweden the 8X63, Norway the 7.92X61, Japan the 7.7X58 (then deciding it was better to use it for rifles too).
If weight was not a concern, as in the case of MMGs and vehicular MGs, the better penetration of bigger rounds was preferred.
Thanks @Dogwalker for the correction on the chronology of the Italian 8x59mmRb MG.
During the 1920s there was the Terni 7.35x32mm intermediate cartridge for the experimental Terni M1921. My understanding is that project was cancelled in 1928. I don’t read Italian, but I wouldn’t be surprised if using 6.552mm cartridges as a basis for the intermediate stimulated the 7.35x51mm that came later, and was slated for mass issuance as the two-caliber solution to small arms: a machine gun cartridge capable of dealing with aircraft, vehicles, cover, etc. and a rifle cartridge for typical infantry combat ranges <400m and more like <250m.
@ Dave
Yeah. Early post WWI Italian studies concluded that rifles had been of little use, carbines (“moschetto TS”) were favored over long rifles, rifle exchanges generally happened at short distance, and submachineguns had been much better than rifles.
The recommendation had been to adopt “moschetti automatici” (“automatic carbines”) for general use in place of rifles.
In 1921 various prototypes were tested, but the Terni 1921, a short recoil action, thus still not viable, had been deemed the only one worth to keep on evolving.
In 1922 was introduced a deep modernization of the Army structure, the “Battaglione nuovo tipo” (“new type battalion”), that took the new automatic muskets for granted, so much that the ordinary soldiers were no more called “fucilieri” (riflemen), but “moschettieri” (musketeers).
For the Terni 1921 various rounds were tested, of slightly different calibers and ball weight, all based on shortened Carcano cases, of about 32mm lenght, and bullet diameters from 7.33 to 7.65mm. Power-wise, they were between the .30 Carbine and the 7.62X39. A tad milder than the 8mm Kurz.
At that point the more conservative positions in the Army took hold. In 1928 bot the Terni Rifle and the Battaglione Nuovo Tipo were ditched. The new Army structure, adopted that year, was much more rigid. For one, the LMGs were taken out of the infantry squad and formed a separate squad in the platoon.
The French copies no one and no one copies the French. Gaelic arrogance is forever strong.
Maybe this is why Ian loves French firearms. There is nothing else like them in the world.
Century Arms was converting 49/56s to .308 and they seemed to be at all the gun shows back in the 90s I believe. The head headspace issues I believe as well.
They had headspace issues.
“(…)French stuck to their iconoclasm(…)”
I never encountered this term in relation to history of French Republic, nonetheless having MAS 49/56 firing 7,62×51 NATO and MAS 49 firing 7,5×54 cartridge could lead to situation where someone would attempt to use wrong cartridge in their weapon (especially considering that these cartridge are visually similar). Keep in mind that 7,5×54 was initially longer and was intentionally shortened to prevent attempts of firing 7,9 mm Mauser cartridge (French forces used post-German weapons in interbellum) in weapons for 7,5 cartridge.
Recall that when French infantry carried a 7.5x54mm GPMG in the AA52, a 7.5x54mm FSA 1949/56, and a 9mm SMG MAT-49, that the République also purchased 7.6xx51mm G3s and had Manurhin producing 5.56x45mm SIG 540 rifles to arm French forces serving in various capacities. So the logistics did require French ammunition stocks for the most part, and Nato standards as well.
Clearly these rifles have been very well looked after in French reserve stocks. I imagine they are now being sold to raise some cash as they are considered surplus. Given how French society is going, this decision may well come to be regretted. A civil war of some sort cannot be ruled out. The same applies to the UK, but our government would not have bothered to store any surplus arms in the first place.
My 1946-mfr. MAS Mle. 1936 7.5x54mm service rifle was reparkerized and cleaned up and put into long-term storage in Clermont-Ferrand for possible Gendarmerie/ CRS use in 1976. It remained un-wrapped until I got it. Getting the sights dialed in entailed acquiring several different rear sight leaves, which was frustrating, but I think I’ve got worked out. Other than the inability to change the windage, it’s pretty much a near-ideal bolt-action rifle, IMO.
I seriously doubt that any people of the West have the guts to fight back anymore. Those what ain’t woke are all LARP’ers
Dave:
Ideal apart from the lack of a safety catch?
The French didn’t put any safety on any of their bolt action rifles. They did put them on the self-loaders. Not that big of a deal to me. Either keep it unloaded until you’re ready to shoot, or know that if the trigger is pulled it’ll fire, so keep it unloaded, and unload it when you ain’t gonna shoot it. There are safety devices that are really ponderous to use, like on the Russian Mosin-Nagant “three line” vintovka, for instance. Just a brute to use, especially with cold or wet hands…
The safety issue is a doctrinal and training thing, not a particular sign of virtue.
I imagine that the thinking was along the lines of that which went into the Glock; put the least distance between using the weapon to kill someone and it being “safe”. In both cases, they eliminated any form of safety switch. As I understand French bolt-action rifle doctrine and drill, the weapon was always “chamber unloaded” until presented with a target; then it was “work action; shoot”.
That’s the simplest, most consistent and “condition free” drill for riflery you could have on a bolt action. And, that’s what the French chose to go with.
Kirk:
I think the French went too far in the search for simplicity there. Whilst the Lebel could be carried with a loaded tube magazine and an empty chamber, the Berthier could not, nor could the MAS36. Mind you, you only have to look at the strange safety arrangements on the 1935 and 1950 pistols to make you wonder if the French had some sort of mental glitch about safety catches in general.
I can’t even work out a rationale for the pistols; the rifles kinda-sorta make sense if you squint really hard and just ignore your prior conditioning.