[ Berthier Modele 1916 Upgrades ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we are continuing
our look at the Berthier rifle and carbine.
And today we're going to look specifically
at the Model of 1916.
This was not so much a new rifle as an upgrade package
that was applied across the board to both
rifle and carbine versions of the Berthier
that were currently in the French system.
So as the name suggests, this was adopted in 1916 - although fairly late in 1916.
And it would actually take several months to get
all of the production tooled up to actually produce these things.
So it would be ... in the spring of 1917 before any of these guns were actually put into production.
Now the focus was kind of made on carbines,
not a lot of these guns were actually issued
during World War One, despite the dates involved.
It took time to get things produced, and then once these guns were actually manufactured
they weren't issued individually as soon as they were ready.
What the French did was actually store these up until they had enough to outfit an entire unit,
and then they would outfit that unit, and then move to the next batch.
So things took a little longer to actually
get into the front-line soldier's hands than you might expect.
As a result, like I said, not a lot of these actually saw front-line service in World War One.
Now, what are the upgrades? Well, there are two, and the one is particularly important.
And that is an upgrade from the original 3 round clip to a 5 round clip.
And this is something that had been kind of in the works for a little while.
The new clip design was courtesy of a French Lieutenant Vibert who came up with it.
And it has a number of good design features.
So first of all, it maintains the same cartridge spacing as the original 3 round clip.
Which means the rims of the cartridges don't interact with each other,
and you don't need any sort of interrupter mechanism in the gun to prevent rim lock.
And then also the 5 round clip uses the exact same clip locking geometry as the 3 rounder.
Which meant if you had one of the new 5 round carbines,
you could still use the old 3 round clips as well as the new 5 round ones.
And that's an important element, because with the logistics of ammunition supply
on the front lines of something as huge as World War One,
you can't guarantee that ... all the new ammo will actually get to the new guns.
So having that interchangeability was very important.
A mud cover was added to the bottom of the system.
Of course on the Berthier there's a hole in the bottom of the action,
and when you chamber the last round in the clip the empty clip then falls out the bottom.
Having that hole was of course a place for mud to potentially get into the gun,
so a cover was added on the M.16 models.
And then an upper handguard was also added, this was another important element.
When these were originally developed as cavalry carbines
the upper handguard wasn't all that necessary.
However if you're using these things in continuous fighting,
yeah, that barrel gets hot actually pretty darn quickly.
And so having a handguard to protect the shooter's hand is a really good idea.
And that was another part of the M.16 package that was introduced.
Now interestingly the M.16 was also supposed to include a dust cover over the top of the action.
It was designed, they were actually produced.
And for some reason, and I'm not entirely sure why, they were actually dropped ...
from the overall upgrade package. So they were approved and then dropped.
If you're interested in that dust cover I have a separate video specifically on that,
as well as a contemporary German Mauser dust cover.
So you can take a look at that to see more details on them.
So that's the official M.16 package,
although there were a couple of other elements that were developed about the same time.
One of those is an upgraded, I think it's an upgrade,
a new system of iron sights which we'll take a look at in just a moment.
The Châtellerault Arsenal also ... finished developing
and started producing night sights for these rifles.
They actually had a luminous radium paint,
and they started drilling cavities in the rear of the sights to apply that paint in.
That started in 1917, about the same time as the M.16s
were actually starting to come off the production line.
And in addition to just the standard carbines and long guns,
they also even went back and in the 1920s they made an M.16 version of the 1902 Indochina rifle.
So this has all of the same upgrades: it has the upper handguard, it has the 5 round magazine.
They made 25,000 of these in the 1920s,
they stayed in Indochina so you don't see them very often.
But this M.16 thing was a complete and universal upgrade to the Berthier action.
When the M.16 package actually went into production this differentiation
between the two main arsenals of Châtellerault and Saint-Étienne kind of increased.
Châtellerault basically stopped producing rifles.
I think the official documentation is they made something like 370 M.16 rifles.
However, they made 290,000 M.16 carbines by the end of the war.
And then carbine production would actually continue on and off
all the way up until 1939, believe it or not.
The M.16 carbine would remain really the most
common standard rifle for ... the French military really.
The Saint-Étienne Arsenal really focused on making long rifles,
and in total they would make 400,000 - 600,000 of the M.16 rifles.
But that's when they stopped producing them after the end of the war.
The exact number that they manufactured during the war is cloudy.
A lot of these records have been destroyed.
A lot of the records that haven't been destroyed are still actually considered
military state secrets in France and are not accessible to historians or collectors.
So there's kind of a lot of guesswork going on.
But Saint-Étienne did rifles, Châtellerault did carbines.
And that's how the production wound up on these.
The most important aspect of the M.16 is the magazine, so we'll start there.
This is one of the 5 around clips. This is a Parkerised one, this is very much a post-war clip.
There are a couple of different designs, and that gets to a level of detail we won't be addressing here.
But what's interesting to note is you have two stamped protrusions, here and here.
And these are the little tabs that actually lock the clip into the rifle magazine.
On the original 3 rounder there was just one.
And what Lieutenant Vibert came up with was a system where, as you can see here,
if you index from the top these ... little protrusions are in exactly the same place.
So not only can you use this either direction,
there is no top or bottom, it's completely symmetrical,
you can also use it interchangeably with 3 round clips in the new 5 round magazine.
As I said before, ... it's hard to overstate
actually how important that was, and they did well by making it work.
The M.16 is easily recognised by this metal addition on the bottom below the stock.
That's of course necessary to get two extra rounds into the system.
And as I mentioned, there is a dust cover on the bottom of it.
So you can open this manually if you want to.
Or if you fire a clip empty and then push another clip into the action,
the new loaded clip will shove the empty clip out.
And it will push this dust cover open by itself.
I should point out this is the early pattern of the dust cover.
It has a little serrated section right here on either side, there's the other side.
And that's what you're supposed to grip in order to open it.
That was fairly quickly replaced
with this style where they just had a couple of cut outs.
This was easier to manufacture and cheaper. So that's the much more common pattern to find.
The handguard was another important upgrade to the M.16.
And it just extends right about this far.
It's pretty much just the section you're actually going to be holding.
This is an 1892 carbine without the handguard, and this is the new handguard.
One of the other updates that was made later on
was to actually raise the line of sight just slightly, and they re-designated the sights as a result.
Just to make sure that the handguard didn't interfere with your line of sight.
Something they didn't do initially and then decided,
"Well, I guess we should have taken care of that a little better." So they did it later.
At this point in the development, the clearing rod was still included on the M.16s.
Typically when you find M.16s today they don't have those rods,
but that's because they were removed in the '20s.
We'll cover that in the next video on the post-war modifications made to these guns.
But the M.16 did originally have a rod - as long as it was a carbine,
rifle-length guns never had these clearing rods.
And the receiver markings were updated.
So this is a Châtellerault carbine, because Châtellerault did basically all of the carbines.
And it is now Model M.16, that "M." is "Modifié": modified, updated.
And you'll find that for the carbines ...
and you'll also find it on the long rifles, like this Saint-Étienne long gun.
There were a total of something like five different M.16 markings that were used
over the course of their manufacture between 1917 and 1939.
Here is an example of a very late one.
This is the most distinctive of them where it just says "M.16" in much bigger letters.
But there are a couple of other variations that you will occasionally run into.
Just to make things a little bit more confusing for collectors, there was a transition period
as all of these new parts were brought ... on-line.
So what I have here are two examples that I was actually really, really excited to be able to find.
These two carbines were both made at the Châtellerault Arsenal,
and they were made literally less than a month apart.
So this is one of the very last of the 3 round carbines that was made,
and this is one of the very first of the 5 round carbines that were made.
And there are stock roundels on both of them, this is October of 1917,
this is November of 1917.
However, this 3 round gun has an "M.16" marked receiver.
And the reason for that is the receivers were the first part
that ... were actually available to put into production.
They got the new receiver markings before they actually had
handguards or new magazines to put onto these guns.
So rather than try and deal with remarking things, they just used the new receivers
for that brief period until they had all the rest of the parts to put on as well.
That of course makes things a little bit yet trickier for people trying to track down
when did these guns go into service, was a gun refurbished or in original condition?
I mentioned that ... both of the sights change.
So what I have here is the later pattern, the M.16,
and then here we have an earlier 1892 carbine.
The original early carbines (and early rifles for that matter)
have a very narrow blade on the top of the front sight.
Where on the 1916 pattern they went to this really wide front sight.
The thing's almost a quarter of an inch wide, it's probably 4mm wide.
And it has this very narrow little slot cut right down the middle there.
And the reason for this change
was to make the guns a lot more capable of getting quick shots, especially in low light.
So you can see here the upgraded sight on the left,
it's a big notch and a big front post, and it's really easy to line up.
And in fact ... I think in this shot you really can't even see that slot on the top.
But when you're actually sighting down the rifle you can,
and that slot is there as a precision sight should you need it.
On the right is the early pattern of sight, it has that much narrower post.
It's the theoretically more precise,
but it takes a lot more time to actually get a proper sight picture and use.
And that's not, it turns out, what you want in something like World War One.
You want to be able to make a shot on a fleeting target.
A German pops up from a trench and moves a short distance, and then drops back to the ground.
You have a very limited time to engage that target.
And a large front sight is going to make it more likely that you'll actually make a hit.
One other element that makes the history and tracking on these guns a little more difficult
is by January of 1918 the French arsenal system was officially ordered
to upgrade repaired guns to the 1916 pattern.
So when they got a damaged carbine or rifle in for repair, it would get all of these upgrades.
It would get the handguard, it would get the 5 round magazine, that sort of thing.
And often a damaged gun they would retain the original serial number.
So it can be very difficult looking at a gun from World War One.
It may be original, it may be refurbished during the war, it might be refurbished after the war.
There was a whole series of changes in various elements of these guns
that were made in the 1920s and 1930s.
And that's going to be the focus of yet a different video,
because there's a lot of little detail stuff that we want to cover there.
So it makes it difficult.
The M.16 rifles and carbines are the most common of the Berthiers to encounter today,
and it can be really quite tricky to differentiate or to track down the exact history
of what happened to these guns and when.
It is entirely possible to have one that started service in the early 1890s,
as an 1890 or 1892 carbine,
went through all of these changes.
And then went through all of the changes in the '20s, and all of the changes in '30s,
and was still in service (many times refurbished) by the time World War ... Two broke out.
So we'll cover some more of that in the next video.
But hopefully this gave you a pretty good overview of what was actually done
during World War One to produce the M.16 rifles and carbines.
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