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…
This rifle design was developed by the Gevelot cartridge company to compete with the Modele 1866 Chassepot for French military use, although it was not successful in that attempt. The weapon has an uncommon […]
Did you know that the French Army issued more than 80,000 semiautomatic rifles during WWI? They had been experimenting with a great many semiauto designs before the war, and in 1916 finalized a design for […]
The PM9 was an interesting an unique submachine gun designed by Louis Debuit for the French firm Merlin and Gerin (hence the MGD name – Merlin, Gerin, Debuit) in the late 1940s and early 50s. […]
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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.”
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.