Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today, courtesy of Ozark Machine Gun
down in Missouri, we have ... what appears to be a totally
standard commercial Colt Model of 1911 pistol to take a look at.
Now, this is externally indistinguishable
from any other commercial Colt,
however, I happen to know, and I'll show you why in a moment,
that this is one of 5,000 1911 pistols that were purchased by the French government
for military use during World War One. This one in fact shipped at the very end of 1915.
Now I find it interesting that France was in this position during World War One of being both
a supplier of rifles and machine guns to a whole bunch of Entente powers, including by the way the United States,
but also an importer, like a significant importer, of handguns.
They had factory production lines set up, and very efficiently set up, to make long guns,
and machine guns, and the Chauchat. 250,000 Chauchats, the most produced automatic weapon of the war.
However, they didn't have that same production capability set up for handguns.
And I think it comes because they recognised that
tooling up for war production would mean a lot of rifles and a lot of machine guns,
but they didn't realise how much handguns were going to play a role in World War One.
Because what we actually see in World War One is the significant expansion of
service groups that use handguns that really kind of didn't exist before the war.
So we see pilots get handguns often, tank crewmen were issued handguns
(in particular these, we'll touch on that in a moment), trench raiders got handguns.
The handgun became a much more widely used weapon, and the French weren't,
I don't think, expecting that, and they weren't set up to produce it.
So they found themselves significantly short of handguns, and they bought up stuff from all over the place.
That's why we see both French production revolvers but also
purchasing semi-auto pistols from Spain, purchasing revolvers from Spain.
Multiple different companies and different versions of semi-autos from Spain,
the Star ... of 1914s as well as Rubies, as well as copies of Rubies.
They purchased pistols from the United States, 1911s like this, as well as actually revolvers as well.
So they were bringing in pistols, they were shipping out rifles, it's an interesting setup.
Anyway, let's take a closer look at the pistol, because that's actually what we are here to take a look at today.
The French purchased 5,000 of these pistols, and they were not a special order sort of thing.
This was out of existing stock, off the shelf, "You have guns, we want to buy guns, ship 'em over."
Remember the United States was a neutral power, it was not in World War One when these purchases were made.
The first shipments were in April of 1915, with the majority then coming between November 29th
and January 24th of 1916. So basically right over the winter of 1915 to 1916.
The French were getting these in batches of between 450 and 1,200 at a time.
We don't know exactly how they were issued out, there's not a lot of information surviving about these.
We suspect that they were ... issued to tankers, because there are pictures of tank crewmen with
holsters that are kind of the standard Ruby pattern of holster, but much larger than you'd have for a Ruby.
Now there's some speculation that these may actually be flare gun holsters, because tanks communicated largely by flare.
But when you see a picture like this of a two man crew of a light tank, both with holsters like that,
well, you know what? They were also carrying little fighting knives.
There's a decent chance that those were in fact 1911s in those holsters, we just don't know it 100% for sure.
One interesting fact here though, these were identified by the French military as 11.25mm pistols.
If you an actual metric conversion on .45 calibre, it will actually come out to 11.43mm.
It appears that the French designation was actually based on the land diameter of the barrel
instead of the diameter of the bullet. Which is just kind of an interesting little side note there.
These are going to have all the standard Colt commercial markings, so it's marked Colt Automatic, Calibre .45.
It is a Government Model, they didn't call it the Model of 1911, it was the Government Model at that time.
And this is serial number C, as in Charlie, 23795.
What we know for a fact is that the French contract pistols were all C prefix, and they were 17,800 to 28,000.
That of course is about twice as many as what they actually ordered.
Colt didn't send them consecutive serial numbers, they just took guns off the shelf as they were able and shipped them out.
So we know all the French guns fall within that range, but not all the numbers within that range are French contract guns.
On the opposite side we have sort of the standard patent markings for the gun.
The light here makes this one look in a little poorer condition than it really is. But that's what we've got there.
There are of course standard 1911s, they are not 1911A1s, so we don't have the scalloped recesses on the trigger guard.
We have the early style of sights, the early hammer, the early grip safety.
We have a lanyard loop on the bottom of the magazine, as well as a lanyard loop on the pistol.
And the flat mainspring housing.
Now the only way to determine whether a pistol within this serial number range, 17,800 to 28,000 C prefix,
is actually one of the Colt contract guns is to write to Colt.
And the Colt official historian has all of their shipping records and can sent you back a letter like this one
giving you some details of the pistol. And they'll do this for any Colt Pistol.
So in this case we can see we have our serial number here, 23795,
it was .45 calibre, 5 inch barrel, blued, that's not surprising.
This sort of thing is more useful for, say, single action revolvers
where they were made in many different calibres and barrel lengths.
They don't list the type of grips, not surprising, it's just standard grips.
However, shipped to government of France.
This one was shipped out on the very last day of 1915 in a batch of 450 pistols.
So that is what gives us the actual provenance for this pistol.
In some ways it's a little disappointing, like I wish the French could have
inspected them and stamped them with something distinguishing,
but they didn't. They didn't really have to, they trusted Colt.
The guns didn't have to interchange with anything else that France was making domestically,
and so they just put them directly into service.
Like I said, we don't know the exact use, it's interesting that they started ordering these
in April of 1915 before the French Tank Corps was actually in service.
So, were they ordering them in anticipation of ... the "Special Artillery" that were not yet fully operational.
Or was it just a convenient group of guns to provide to tankers once
they ... realised that they wanted to issue handguns to tank crewmen.
Hopefully some of that history will come out of some of the French archives someday,
but for the time being we just don't know it.
These pistols are in an interesting position where 5,000 of them were purchased,
but because they have no distinguishing characteristics it's very hard to locate them today.
Because ... nobody knows what they are.
Even if you can see the serial number, we don't know exactly what serial numbers were shipped to the French,
without individually back checking every particular firearm.
So after the war it appears that these were probably surplused out through some Belgian dealers.
Because, while 5,000 is a substantial number of guns, they use .45 Auto
which the French weren't planning to standardise on for any other firearms,
and it just wasn't worth their time to try and deal with this non-standard weapon.
So these, and a bunch of other non-standard weapons, were surplused out after the war.
So they ended up on the commercial and collector markets and they do turn up from time to time.
The problem is, because they aren't marked, people just don't know about them.
So, finding one like this that does have all of the proper documentation and history to it is extremely cool.
I'd like to give a big thanks to Ozark Machine Gun for loaning me this pistol to take a look at.
We'll see if I actually send it back to them, or if I try and figure out some way to keep it myself.
If you find yourself down in Missouri definitely check them out, he has a very cool machine gun rental range
stocked with a huge assortment of historical, interesting and fun machine guns that you can try out there.
Anyway, thanks for watching.
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