← Back to the front page

Incompetence That Shaped History

Khalid Elhassan March 9, 2020 33 min

Nineteenth century Washington Metropolitan Police Force officers. Washington Metropolitan Police

13. Good in Theory, Terrible in Reality

The Chauchat in the trenches. Historic Firearms

In theory, the Chauchat should have been a winner. Conceptually, it was a revolutionary weapon, being the world’s first truly light (20 lbs) portable automatic firearm. Manufacturing it was relatively cheap. It did not require a team of machine gunners and a heavy mount or tripod, but could instead be operated by a single user, alone or with an assistant.

The Chauchat also featured a detachable magazine and a selective fire capability. It could easily be carried around the battlefield by a single soldier, and was light enough to be fired from the hip during assaults in suppressive marching or walking fire, to pin down enemy defenders while the attackers closed in. From that perspective, the Chauchat set the template for subsequent light machine guns, from the BAR to the SAW. However, the weapon’s negatives far outweighed its positives.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

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.