Hi guys, thanks for tuning into another video on Forgotten Weapons.com!
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we're going to be taking a look at some French World War 1 and World War 2 ammunition.
Specifically, the development of the 8mm Lebel [8x50mmR],
the changes that occurred to it over the course of World War I, and the interwar period,
and then the development of the 7.5 French cartridge [7.5x54mm Mle. 1929] that would take over from it.
So, the story begins, really, with 11mm Gras [11x59mmR],
which was, basically an obsolete cartridge, but it was kind of standard
during the 1880s, before people started adopting modern, rimless, spitzer [tapered, jacketed bullets] cartridges.
And the French developed-- were the first to develop smokeless powder
with a burn rate that was effectively usable in rifles.
And so they wanted to exploit this new technological advantage,
and so they rushed production of what would become the Lebel 1886 rifle,
basically adapting it from the tube-fed Kropatschek rifle,
and in order to minimize the amount of technical change to the rifle,
they took the existing 11mm Gras cartridge,
that they were using in their navy Kropatscheks,
and they just adapted it to the small bore 8mm bullet.
So they just necked it [the Gras case] down, basically.
This is what gave the 8mm Lebel cartridge its very significant taper,
it's also why it has a very significant rim to it,
because it was based on this much older, heavily rimmed cartridge.
And the French would go into World War 1, still using this cartridge.
In fact, they'd really go into World War 2, largely using this cartridge.
But, once the rifle was developed,
the first batch-- the first style of ammunition that was adopted was the Model of 1886 cartridge,
and in this guise it was actually a very long, cylindrical, round-nose bullet
with a little flat surface right at the tip of the bullet,
which was there to prevent any problems from having a pointed primer-- a pointed bullet hitting on the primer of the cartridge behind it.
That would turn out not to be an issue, but we'll get to that later.
The 1886 cartridge was this round-nosed bullet, basically.
It was a heavy and relatively slow bullet,
as is kind of typical for the early smokeless powder cartridges:
pretty much everyone, at first, adopted a round-nosed bullet
before then, later, converting to spitzer bullets, and the French would be no different in this case.
So the first one, the 1886, was a 15 gram bullet, traveled at 638 meters per second,
that translates into... my ammunition falling over...
That translates into a 230 grain bullet, traveling at just a hair under 2100 feet per second.
They modified this in 1891, they realized that the case was a little bit weak,
so they strengthened the case, they added a crimping groove,
some things just to make it a more durable cartridge.
And that became the 1886 Balle M.
And that's the vast majority of what was produced
up until... basically right up until 1900.
So in 1894, seeing what was going on around the world,
the French decided they maybe could improve this cartridge.
They wanted to get some better ballistic performance out of the round,
and the way to do that was to go to a spitzer, or pointed, bullet.
Which is, again, what everybody was doing. The Germans did it, the Americans did it,
the Japanese did it, the British did it, everyone did it.
So, they actually started some testing and some trials in 1894,
this was run by a guy named General Désaleux,
...General? I think he was a general, at that point. He certainly was later.
And they ended up developing five major types of new projectile design,
and they labeled these things A, B, C, D, and E.
Eventually, in 1898, after a bunch of testing, they decided that the "D" model was the best one,
and so that was formally adopted in 1898, and put into production.
And it had a number of interesting changes to it.
So, obviously it was a spitzer, a pointed bullet,
it was a lighter-weight bullet that traveled faster, which gave it a better point-blank range,
meaning the distance at which you could hit a target without having to adjust your sights,
because of the severity of the bullet's arc, that distance was longer;
higher velocity was better for ballistic potential,
it was a great bullet, all around, compared to the early round-nosed ones.
And it was adopted as Balle D.
Now there are some people out there who say that D stands for Désaleux, who was the designer,
seems more likely to me that it was because it was the "D" style from the experiments,
but you'll see both theories referenced out there.
Anyway, the other interesting thing about Balle D, is that it was no longer a lead-cored jacketed bullet,
which is is what the original ones had been.
Instead, the French actually went to a solid bronze bullet.
A 90/10 bronze mixture, and they basically just turned bullets on a lathe.
And they found that this required substantially fewer machining elements,
or manufacturing steps, than stretching a bullet jacket,
and then compressing a core into it, and then fitting the tip of the jacket over,
so they actually ended up fighting pretty much all of World War 1 with solid brass bullets, which is quite interesting.
Now, I should say, that was the standard ball round; there were also a variety of other specialty types of ammunition made,
throughout this whole period. Armor piercing, incendiaries, blanks, tracers, all that sort of stuff.
But the standard bullet, was actually a solid brass construction.
I said it was a smaller bullet, it was a 12.8 gram bullet, traveling at 701 meters per second,
and that comes out to basically exactly 2300 feet per second, and a 198 grain bullet.
So, it's a couple hundred feet per second slower than 8mm Mauser,
it's pretty much equivalent to the .303 British cartridge.
Some people will occasionally say that the 8 Lebel was an underpowered cartridge,
it really wasn't. It was a little bit slower than Mauser, but one could easily argue that the 8mm Mauser is an overpowered cartridge.
Anyway, that's what the French used primarily through World War 2.
And that was called Balle D.
Now, after World War 2, they would start experimenting,
and they wanted to-- they developed this new cartridge, which we'll touch on in a moment,
but at the same time they were doing that, they realized that a lot of their machine guns
were going to stick around in the existing 8 Lebel cartridge for a while,
and so, since they were trying to move to the new 7.5 for rifles,
but they were going to stick with 8mm for some of the heavy machine guns for a while,
they wanted to develop yet another new version of the 8 Lebel cartridge
that would be ideal for machine guns.
And that was, eventually became, the 1932 "N," or Nouveau, cartridge.
It's commonly called Balle N, although that wasn't its formal designation.
And what they did there was they kind of over-pressured it, they bumped up the powder charge a little bit,
they went back to a heavier bullet, which gave more mass-- more kinetic energy at long ranges,
which was a reasonable requirement for a machine gun.
They went back up to a 232 grain bullet, 15.05 grams,
and they boosted the velocity up to 680 meters per second,
or, like 2265 feet per second, so they added about 15% to the bullet weight,
and they only lost 5% of the velocity. Just a little drop in velocity.
So, this was a more powerful cartridge, and in order to help prevent it from having pressure issues,
they actually strentghtened the mouth of the cartridge. The neck, right up here.
The bullet diameter did not change. But because the thickness of the neck did increase,
these new 1932 N cartridges would no longer fire safely out of the original Lebel and Berthier rifles,
or the machine guns, for that matter. The problem was, if you chambered one of these,
you were putting a lot more pressure on the neck of the cartridge, because it was bigger than the original spec,
and that meant when you fired the cartridge, the pressure would build up to a much higher level
before the bullet actually got moving, because it was being held more tightly.
The bullet diameter did not actually change.
So the barrels did not have to be modified to suit this,
but what the French did instead, was they actually reamed out, just the neck of the chamber,
on all the rifles and machine guns that were in inventory that were going to use this new cartridge.
When they made that change, they stamped a big "N" on both the barrel and the receiver of the guns,
and around 1932, 1933, there was a very large-scale program
to retrofit all of the rifles in inventory with this new chamber so that they could use the new 1932 patten of ammunition.
That is when you will find the "N" on your Lebel or Berthier rifle.
It's important to realize that the majority of the surplus-- basically all of the surplus ammo out there in 8 Lebel
is Balle N, or 1932 N, and you do not want chamber and fire that,
or try to, in rifles that have not been converted for it.
Because you, you might be able to do it, you'll probably have to whack the bold into the locked position,
but you'll be stressing the rifle substantially, and in a lot of cases these are rifles that are well over a hundred years old.
So, just don't do that. Happily, today, PPU, or Prvi Partizan, makes 8mm Lebel ammunition,
on the new, commercial market. It can be a little hard to find sometimes,
but that's what I've got loaded in all of these things, and this is made to the original Balle D specification.
So it can be safely fired in rifles that are "N" rechambered, or rifles that are not. It's a universal thing.
And it also has the rim setup for Lebels. Which, I should actually talk about,
because that was introduced with Balle D, and I skipped right over it.
So, if you look at the base of an 8mm Lebel cartridge, pretty much any one you find today,
you'll find that it actually has this extra groove cut in the rim.
And that was there as a place for the point of the bullet behind it to sit.
So when you have two cartridges-- can you see those? Maybe bring them back here.
So when you have cartridges in a tube magazine, because of the taper of this cartridge,
the primer-- the nose of the bullet isn't actually pointing at the primer of the cartridge ahead of it.
It's actually pointing down at the rim. So in theory, in a tube magazine that should work just fine.
You're never going to have an unintentional detonation in the magazine.
However, just to be safe, the French added this extra groove as a way to basically capture the nose of the preceding bullet.
And Prvi Partizan added that to their cases in I believe 2014. So everything that you buy now, new,
is set up for proper feeding, or proper safe feeding, in a Lebel rifle.
That groove wasn't necessary for the Berthier, but the French put that groove in all of the cartridges just as a way to standardize.
When this ammunition was distributed, it was actually packaged in a whole bunch of different ways.
And distributed based on what rifle it was going to. So the earliest and the simplest was--
These were all paper packets, by the way, tied with string.
This is a packet of eight cartridges, which was made for the Lebel rifle, and if you had a Lebel this is what they would issue you.
You'd carry a couple of those in each of your ammunition pouches. Just eight loose rounds.
Now if you had a Berthier carbine, prior to the conversion to five rounds,
You would be issued ammunition in three round clips, like this one,
and these were packaged both as six round and twelve round packages.
So they made some that were two clips, in a paper packet, wrapped with string, and some that were four clips.
Later on, once they developed the M16 upgrade to the rifles, ammunition would be issued in five round clips,
and this was sent out in ten round packages, so you'd get two of these clips, side by side.
Wrapped in paper and tied with string.
And then of course for the 1917 self-loading rifles, they also had a five round clip, although it was a different clip.
Those were also issued in ten round packets. So you'd get two clips in there.
Now a lot of people ask, "why on earth did they use a different clip?" for the self-loading rifle and the standard Berthier.
And the answer as best I can tell, is that both of these developments were being researched and, well, developed,
simultaneously by two different groups. So you had one arsenal that was working on developing a self-loading rifle,
and figuring out how best to feed it, and obviously a three round clip is not really a good idea for a semi-auto rifle;
you had a second group of guys who were developing the upgrades to the Berthier.
And they independently came up with five round clips, but they had different designs for them.
And in all honesty, the self-loading rifle clip is much better designed.
It's not compatible with the three-rounders, but as a standalone clip, it's sturdier, it holds the cartridges better, it's better overall.
Now, they resolved this issue when they, a year later, introduced the Model of 1918 self-loading rifle, or self-loading carbine.
It was adapted back to use the standard Berthier clip, because that's what had been--
that's what was in massively larger service. So while this 1917 clip is technically better,
it was logistically inferior, so the later self-loading rifles used the common clip.
Unfortunately, they didn't get very many of those rifles made before the end of the war, so that didn't really make much difference.
The one other type of ammunition that you'd get would be cartridges on these metal feed strips,
for the Hotchkiss heavy machine guns. The taper and the rim of the 8mm Lebel case kind of made this sort of feed mechanism the only practical option.
With the British cartridges, the .303 had a taper, but not as much of a taper as 8 Lebel,
The .30-06 and 8mm Mauser cartridges were basically straight walled.
And those were all very easily adapted to cloth or metallic belts.
Because of the taper and the really big rim, the feed strip was really the best setup for the Hotchkiss heavy machine gun.
Now, with the end of the war, let's step back a few years, with the end of the war the French realized
that now was their opportunity to get rid of this obnoxious cartridge design,
that require weird clips, and feed strips, and just wasn't really compatible with standard box magazines.
So, in the early 1920s, they put through a development program to come up with a new rimless cartridge.
They'd actually been developing this for a long time, they had developmental versions,
or developmental cartridges well before World War 1, just nothing that had been finalized to the point that could be actually issued.
The closest they came was the 7mm Meunier cartridge, which, they made 1000 Meunier rifles,
give or take, actually issued them in World War 1, but a thousand rifles is a literal drop in the bucket
and they had no substantial impact on the war effort.
And they weren't about to-- they couldn't convert that self-loading rifle to 8 Lebel.
So, anyway, at the end of the war, they finally came up with a good, rimless cartridge: this was the 7.5 French.
Now this is the modern version of it, which is 7.5x54mm; however, in 1924, when it was first adopted, it was 7.5x58mm.
It was substantially longer, 4 millimeters longer. And it worked great, it was a nice cartridge.
However, it had one unintentional problem. And that was that it was very similar, both in look and in size, to the German 8mm Mauser.
Which, actually, may not have been an accident. They may well have developed it based on the Mauser as a model.
However, the French military had a lot of, basically, war trophy German firearms, especially Maxim machine guns,
and they were being used by reserve-type elements of the French military. They took all of these guns from Germany,
after the armistice, and they put them into use. They're cheap, they're good guns, let's use them.
So there was 8mm Mauser ammunition being used as well, and what people discovered was,
you could actually take an 8mm Mauser round, and it would fit and lock in the chamber of a 7.5x58 French rifle or machine gun.
So, you could accidentally load it, and then when you fired the gun,
the action would have to try and squeeze an 8mm bullet down to 7 and a half millimeter, and this had, typically,
somewhere between bad and catastrophic effects on the firearm in question.
So guys got hurt, guns got blown up, by doing this. You'll see the same thing today, actually,
if you have .300 Blackout and 5.56 NATO, those .300 will chamber and will fire in a 5.56 chamber,
with catastrophic results to the firearm, so be very careful with those.
The French solution to this, knowing that this would be an ongoing problem, they decided to shorten their cartridge by 4 millimeters.
So it went from 58 millimeters long, to 54, and once it was shortened like that,
now the 54 millimeter long chamber could no longer accept an 8mm Mauser cartridge.
You could stuff one in there, but a bolt would not be able to close and lock on it.
And that effectively ended the problem. So in 1929, they formally adopted the 1929 C cartridge, which was a 7.5x54mm case,
it was a 139 grain bullet traveling at 2700 feet per second, which is just a little bit lighter than 7.62 NATO.
It was really a perfectly typical full-power rifle cartridge for the time.
I should add, that's 9 grams at 823 meters per second.
And this cartridge would be the standard for their first real-- their first modern light machine gun,
The Châtellerault 24/29, and then it would go on to be used in conversions of the Lebel and the Berthier,
and the MAS-36 and all of the subsequent French designs, and they would end up keeping this until the 1970s,
when they replaced their rifles with the FAMAS. So, that is I think a pretty decent overview of French cartridges from this time period.
If you would like to know more about 8mm Lebel in particular, I would recommend this book,
although only if you can read French, this is "Les Cartouches 8 mm Lebel," by Jean Huon and Alain Barrelier,
and it's an excellent reference guide, it goes through all of the weird custom types of bullet that they used,
the tracers, the armor-piercing, the blanks, it is the guide to the 8mm Lebel cartridge.
Unfortunately, it's only in French. It can be ordered from the publisher, Crépin-Leblond, in France.
That's how I got mine, it's typically no problem to get it shipped here to the US, if you're so inclined.
So, anyway, thank you guys for watching, and stay tuned for some more interesting forgotten weapons.