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HONOUR BOUND: The Chauchat Machine Rifle. By Gerard Demaison and Yves Buffetaut. Collector Grade Publications, Cobourg, Ontario, 1995, 209 pp. Out of print.
Every once in a while, a book comes along that has the ability to change the conventional wisdom about a particular subject. Honour Bound: The Chauchat Machine Rifle is just such a book.
Since it was introduced by the French in World War I, the Chauchat has been unable to shake the mantle of being one of the worst, if not the worst, automatic rifle ever made. To explore the evolution of the Chauchat's reputation, I began with some modern sources and worked back in time.
In his recent book, Misfire, William Hallahan writes that the Chauchats issued to the U.S. Army, "turned out to be so poorly made American troops threw them away as quickly as they were issued." The source of that comment appears to be John Ellis' 1975 work, The Social History of the Machine Gun. In that book, Ellis notes that the U.S. Government bought twice the number of Chauchats it actually needed because, "a good half of the guns were thrown away by the troops because they were completely useless." Ellis gives no source for his information, but, in other places, does refer to LtCol George Chinn's classic multivolume work, The Machine Gun: History, Evolution, and Development of Manual Automatic, and Airborne Repeating Weapons.
In a chapter devoted to...