During WWI, the French army’s light machine gun, the Chauchat, became infamous as one of the worst firearms to have ever gone into mass production and got inflicted upon an army as a standard-issue weapon.
Introduced in 1915, the weapon immediately began presenting problems stemming from both a defective design and poor workmanship. The defects were further exacerbated by reliance on poor and low-quality metals to produce the Chauchat.
A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.
I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.
A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.
