Why A.E.F. was armed with peace of shit Chauchat when a perfectly fine gun like Lewis - developed by an american! - was available?
Why A.E.F. was armed with peace of shit Chauchat when a perfectly fine gun like Lewis - developed by an american! - was available?
idk but that shit slapped in Verdun
The guy in charge of adopting weapons for the US Army had a personal grudge against lewis, iirc
the USMC had them. But the Army,
Wasn't Lewis black or something?
Next thing your going to tell me is that all major inventions around that time were done by black people.
For real, name 1 succesful black weapon designer of atleast a semi modern, functional, mass produced firearm. I'll wait.
Gaston Glock beez a homie, you can tell because he has a French sounding name and he's named after a gun.
>name 1 succesful black weapon designer of atleast a semi modern, functional, mass produced firearm.
That guy who invented super soakers. Bet you feel like a stupid moron now, don't you?
no Lewis Black is a israelite
>A Black person invented it
Lmao. Zoomer brain rot from modern curriculum is real. I've given you a hint, Black folk invented very little.
Lewis and McClean were both bog standard white dudes
The armory department head guy or something was really, really butthurt about Lewis. Like, hella mad.
If I remember the story right, Lewis served under Crozier in some coastal artillery unit at one point and Crozier held some kind of personal grudge against him even then. Maybe he fricked the guy's wife or something.
>American military higher ups making moronic decisions about small arms adoption
Many such cases!
ikr? .30-06, 7.62, and 5.56 could've all been .270
>developed by an american
Based on an Austrian design, using a British arms manufactory to make it mass produce possible. But the reason is that the US procurement head disliked Isaac Newton Lewis (apparently).
It was manufactured by Savage in USA. No excuses for not adopting a great gun over a foreign manufactured piece of shit gun.
In addition to the personal issues, I believe a major reason was the moronic fantasy of "walking firepower" where doctrine dictated that machine gunners would advance at a walking pace while hip-firing to suppress the enemy. The Chauchat was theoretically light enough to do this but the Lewis was not.
I may be moronic and have the cause and effect backwards on this though. As with most military procurement decisions, there's no guarantee that doctrine dictated armament rather than the other way around.
The US only got Chauchats after they arrived in France, well after the Lewis gun had been rejected, so I don't see how it could've been in their doctrine beforehand
The BAR.
yeah
> Why A.E.F. was armed
Why do you type in an indian accent
Forgotten Weapons said the Chauchat was actually a pretty good gun but it's main flaws were bad ammo in the hands of Americans and the stupid magazine which easily allowed dirt into the weapon. I don't know any better myself, is the above true?
The flaw of the American Chauchat was that the Americans wanted a version using American ammo. This meant the French having to redesign the weapon, put up a new factory with new factory workers in the middle of the war. The new factory struggled bad and eventually manufactured subpar weapons to the Americans which were neither optimally designed nor optimally manufacturing. This lead to an abysmal percentage of failure in the field. But at this point the gun, with its original design, had already been very successful in France and iirc 14 other countries it had been exported to.
The French tried folding Americans into French units as a stopgap iirc but it stopped after the US had enough forces in Europe to do their own offensives.
It sucked, constantly had issues compared to all the other LMGs we had in service at the time. Read Hatchers Notebook you illiterate moron
The Chauchat was the WWI equivalent of the STEN, cheap shit to arm the newly arrived enlisted. The Lewis was a proper machine gun, despite both of them doing the same thing in those days it meant that the Lewis was a specialty weapon.
Also closed-door political bullshittery, as mentioned by previous anons.