Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we're going to take a
look at a French Model of 1878 Marine Kropatschek.
This is one of those rifles that is an intermediary between
the mass production single-shot Gras, and the mass production
repeating Lebel rifle. Well, there was actually a whole series
in between that kind of served as stepping stones
for the French military before they got to the Lebel.
And this is the first of them. So
I should point out that we are filming this in conjunction with the launch of the Kickstarter
pre-sale for my book, "Chassepot to FAMAS: French Military Rifles 1866 to 2016". So
if you're interested in more details on this, or if you just want to see some of what goes into producing
a full-on published book, definitely head over to the Kickstarter and check it out.
There's a link in the description text below.
Now without further ado,
what's interesting, what sets up this story, is that the French Navy never adopted the Gras rifle.
So in the 1870s the French Navy was still using the Chassepot. It's a paper cartridge rifle,
and that honestly seems kind of weird for a naval force, like, you're literally on the water
and you're using paper cartridges that are like gonna get wet and not work.
But they worked well enough that the Navy didn't decide to make the change to the metallic cartridge,
or at least not at first.
However at the same time there are a number of implications or considerations for an army rifle
that don't necessarily apply to a navy rifle. So when the army was thinking about potentially adopting
a repeating rifle and decided to stick with a single-shot gun instead, they had some justifications.
Like we have to worry about ammo consumption, you know, what if we send this company of
Foreign Legionnaires with repeating rifles off into, you know, the deep jungles of Indochina and
they get into a firefight and they all blow through all their ammo right away,
and now they're completely unarmed. You know, if we have single-shot rifles, the officers can control volleys
and do a much better job of managing ammunition consumption. This was a universal concern.
And it led, by the way, to things like magazine cut offs.
For the Navy that's not quite the same issue, because naval troops are, first off, pretty limited in number,
you're talking about basically expeditionary little marine landing forces.
All of their ammo can get carried on the ship, so you don't have to worry about how many
donkeys worth of ammo can we take with us over whatever terrain we're going. No, you've got a
big naval vessel there and you can fill up part of the hold with ammunition, no big deal.
It'll be a tiny thing in comparison to all the rest of the stuff on that ship.
Similarly, you're generally talking about small forces that are often going to be outnumbered.
And forces that are a little more elite, you're not talking about conscripts ... you know, the force is
gonna turn over every couple years, you're talking about much more like the professional soldiers
who are going to be in the service for the long haul.
And they can be trained to properly take advantage of the firepower of a repeating rifle.
And so for a number of these reasons the French Navy decides to adopt a repeating rifle.
And in 1877 they hold a series of trials. They test the Krag-Petersson, ... they test the
Winchester-Hotchkiss and they test the Austrian Kropatschek. And the Kropatschek is the winner.
So let's take a look at what it is that they actually adopted.
The heart of this system is a tube magazine underneath the barrel of the gun,
and an elevator or a lifter mechanism that really fixed one of the shortcomings of
Winchester's elevator system. So of course Winchester rifles,
many of them ... had been available for a couple decades at this point,
and they had a tube magazine down here, but the way that their elevator worked
was that a cartridge would be pushed from the magazine tube back into the elevator,
and then lifted directly upwards, and then pushed forward into the chamber.
And this system was pretty sensitive to overall cartridge length, because it relied on the cartridge
... in the elevator to stop the next cartridge from coming in from the magazine tube.
And so if a cartridge was too short, it would come a little too far back,
and the next cartridge could come back in and jam partially onto the elevator.
If a cartridge was too long, it wouldn't fit all the way onto the elevator and thus couldn't be lifted.
What Kropatschek did (this is by the way is an Austrian gentleman by the name of Alfred von Kropatschek),
he came up with basically a pivoting lifter.
And you'll obviously recognise this from the Lebel rifle if you're familiar with the Lebel.
But basically instead of a vertical transition here, this is a pivoting piece, like so.
And so it's a lot less sensitive to cartridge length. It also has a stop catch in the magazine tube
that will catch on the rim of a cartridge and stop one cartridge after letting one onto this lifter.
So it doesn't depend on cartridge length to stop the magazine from feeding,
and ... you've got a lot more potential for varied overall length. In short.
Anyway, this system would be adopted not just by the French, but by a number of other countries as well.
The Japanese would adopt it in 1889 as the Type 22 Murata, they built that themselves,
but they used Kropatschek's system.
The ... Portuguese and the Germans were the biggest users,
the Portuguese adopted a Kropatschek in 1886, just in time for black powder to become obsolete.
The Germans adopted it in the form of the Mauser 1871/84,
which pairs the Mauser bolt system with Kropatschek's magazine tube and lifter. So
a bunch of different people used this, but the French were really the first major power to adopt it in 1878.
So this holds 7 rounds in its tube magazine, plus you could carry one additional round on the lifter if you wanted to.
In theory you could also carry another additional round in the chamber,
but there is no manual safety on this rifle and that practice was discouraged.
At any rate, when you pull the bolt all the way back, at the end of travel it's going to
pull up the lifter, then when you push the bolt forward, it's going to chamber a cartridge.
When you close the bolt handle, it actually hits a lever and pushes
the lifter back down. ... When you close the bolt, a new cartridge then pops out of the
magazine onto the lifter. So that when you have fired, you open the bolt,
you're going to eject the empty case, pop the lifter up. When you push the bolt forward again
you're ready to cycle another cartridge in. By the way, this one is unfortunately missing its extractor,
so normally we'd have an extractor sitting up on top of the bolt there.
This does incorporate a magazine cut off in the form of this little lever right here.
In the rearward position the magazine is engaged and this will fire as a repeating rifle.
If you just push that forward, the bolt now no longer pushes down the lifter when you close it.
So in this configuration you single load cartridges, and you can leave the magazine tube full.
When you decide that you want access to that magazine tube all you have to do is pull that lever back,
and then you have 7 more rounds at your disposal.
That lever, by the way, is the reason that you have these two very distinctive holes or cutouts in the bolt handle.
Because when you close the bolt, those holes give a place for that lever to sit.
Like so.
As for locking, this uses kind of the time honoured single-shot, black powder rifle style of
the bolt handle is a lug that locks against the receiver.
These were black powder rifles, that's all they required.
In this case this is chambered for the 11mm Gras cartridge, which was the standard French cartridge.
The French bought a grand total of 25,000 of these starting in 1878. The last of the contract was delivered by [1881].
They were all serial numbered with an 'A' prefix, and this is actually a pretty late one.
The markings on the side, these follow the standard pattern of French arsenal markings, except
they weren't manufactured in France. These were manufactured by the Werndl factory in Steyr, Austria,
because Werndl owned the rights to the Kropatschek system.
So: Manufacturer Werndl, Steyr, Autriche - Austria, and then the model number is 1878 Marine.
Because these were specifically rifles for naval marine troops.
That's why this is all in the white, the Navy specifically requested these guns be delivered
polished in the white, which is not atypical of naval small arms.
We'll have serial numbers in all the standard places.
This one is dated 1881, which fits with the relatively high serial number.
It also has this .. kind of unusual marking,
2D class, and my understanding is that this is a marking that was applied by the Werndl factory
to rifles that were being sent out for export. And I think it was a relatively late addition,
I think they started doing this at the tail end of the French 1878 contract,
because most 1878s do not have this marking, but a lot of the other contract made,
Steyr produced Kropatscheks made for countries other than Austria, do have it.
... I'm a little bit up in the air on that marking, but it's an interesting one to see for sure.
These were outfitted to take a bayonet, and it's a bayonet that looks very much like a Gras bayonet
but it's not actually interchangeable. The fitting is just slightly different.
So all of the 1878 bayonets were also made and delivered by Steyr.
In terms of quantity produced, these are just a drop in the bucket.
However, their historical implications would be much greater than that,
because it is the 1878 Kropatschek that forms the basis for about a decade of French military
experimentation and development that would ultimately lead to the Lebel rifle.
So after this, the next iteration would be the Model 1884, and then we have the Model 1885,
and right after that comes 1886 and that's the smokeless powder Lebel.
So those rifles are both stories for another day, we'll get to those.
Today, however, we're just taking a look at the 1878 here.
So hopefully you guys enjoyed the video, if you are interested in French military rifles, or if you're
interested in small arms development history, or just the military history of France for the last 150 years,
what you should definitely do is check out my new book, Chassepot to FAMAS.
As I said at the beginning of the video, we currently have this available throughout this month
available for pre-order on the Kickstarter. We've got a special Kickstarter-only edition of the book,
just for those people who are willing to help us out by pre-ordering it.
We're using that pre-order to raise the funds to do the actual print run of the book.
So if you're watching this, you should definitely head over to the Kickstarter, there's a link in the description text.
And this video is over anyway, so there's not really anything else left to see here.
So really the question is, why are you still here? You should be over there.
Thanks for watching.