>>3694608The Chauchat gets a unfair reputation, perhaps not exactly unfair, but lacking view in terms of greater picture.
If someone is handing you one and saying go fight, I would be less than thrilled. Fragile magazines with holes in them, long recoil, aluminum cooling parts that expanded with sustained fire to jam it until it cooled, sharp parts, poor quality control, an absolutely horrific cartridge for use in anything that wasn't a single shot or tube fed rifle.
It's shitty from the user perspective, yes.
But they were cheap and easy to produce, which is why they were the most widely produced light machine gun of the war. If it's works somewhat most of the time AND you can produce a lot of them both quickly/cheaply it makes more sense than something good that you can only get half as many of. Massive amounts of equipment was simply lost in combat due to attrition, quantity is arguably more important than quality.
Look at some of the production numbers, they made like 260000 during the war, where the lewis was only about 50000, 08/15 was 130000, BAR had 52000 deliver by the end of the war, but never were used in large scale since the plan was to use them suddenly in large scale than piecemeal and risk them being captured and reverse engineered.
