Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm out here at the range today courtesy of the Morphy Auction House.
We're gonna do some shooting with a Model of 1914 Hotchkiss heavy machine gun.
This was, of course, the standard heavy machine gun for the French Army during World War One.
They continued to use it in service all the way through the end of World War Two,
and it was also the standard heavy machine gun for the American Expeditionary Force in World War One.
We didn't have Browning 1917 heavy guns until right at the very end of the war,
and so we got about 5,250 of these guys. And this is what American doughboys were using in France during the Great War.
So it is strip fed, I have a 24 round strip of 8mm Lebel ammunition.
This is sitting on a Standard Products mount, that's actually an American made mount.
It's a pretty scarce mount. I don't think very many, if any, of them actually got over to Europe to use during the war,
but it's rather scarcer than the standard French mount these days.
So, this is full-auto only, there is no safety.
I have a D handle back here to direct the gun and a trigger to fire it.
These things just run.
So the Hotchkiss doesn't get a lot of street cred.
Everyone looks at the Maxim guns and the Vickers guns and thinks, "Wow, they're water cooled, they can just fire forever."
Well, the Hotchkiss was no slouch.
The Hotchkiss really was as good a gun in combat as any of the other heavy machine guns in World War One.
It's air-cooled, so there is theoretically a restriction on its rate of fire.
But as a practical matter there is so much mass in that barrel, and
the official French doctrine was after you shoot so many rounds (and I don't remember the exact count),
you sponge it down with water. You know, you take the water that you're using in a water jacket,
throw some of that over the barrel when it gets really hot. These guns will just run all day long.
And one of the other advantages that it actually had over some of the other
belt-fed machine guns is just an incredible durability.
If you watched the video yesterday that I did taking this apart, you saw how few parts there are in it,
how monolithic all of the parts are.
This gun just runs and runs and runs and runs and runs.
In fact, you know, we had about 100 rounds to do our filming today and it's going really fast.
I wanted to make a point about the durability, because otherwise I'm just gonna throw strip after strip in there
and have fun dumping them downrange because this thing just runs.
So on that note, it is actually pretty cool that the ammunition is available today.
A lot of people look at PPU 8mm Lebel ammunition and cringe at how expensive it is. And it is expensive ammo,
but you know what? It's so much better than it used to be. Before this was available
all you had was surplus that was generally loaded with dud primers from poor storage.
So having access to ammunition to actually shoot these guys today I think makes them
fantastically undervalued compared to the Maxim guns and Vickers guns that everyone's much more familiar with.
So I'm gonna go ahead and dump the rest of this, see if I can hit something on the backstop.
Yup. Undervalued, underappreciated, the iconic Hotchkiss 1914.
Hope you guys enjoyed the video. Make sure to check the link in the description text below,
that'll take you to ForgottenWeapons.com, and from there
you can click over to the Morphy Auction House catalogue page on this gun.
And see their pictures, their price ... estimate, their description, all that sort of stuff because it's coming up for sale.
It's a C&R, fully transferable, NFA registered machine gun, available to anyone who wants it.
Thanks for watching.