France, and Rifles
In World War 2, the French got a raw deal. They actually had a bigger army than the Germans, and when Germany invaded in 1940, the French had good defensive positions and good armor. In some ways, French armor was better than the German armor in 1940. Not later, perhaps, but in 1940, the French had a pretty good tank in the Char B1.
What the French didn’t have was knowledge of what the Germans were going to do. The French were spread out, all along the frontier, apparently forgetting that old maxim about it being smarter to be strong in the right place than to be weak everywhere. The Germans, having pretty much perfected mobile warfare, rolled in and did it to the French before the French could do it to them, and in so doing established the Wehrmacht as the masters of mobile warfare until a guy named George Patton happened along to show that they weren’t the best, after all.
One thing the French did have going for them was a pretty decent service rifle. The MAS 36 was a solid infantry weapon. Like most service rifles of the time, it was a bolt gun. But it had a few innovations that set it apart.
The Design
The MAS 36 was adopted in 1936 (obviously) and was in use for quite a while. Designed to replace the Berthier and Lebel rifles of the Great War era, the MAS 36 was an interesting piece.
The design of the MAS 36 was intended to meet two primary goals:
- To come up with a carbine-length, easy-to-build, cheap yet reliable rifle that would lend itself to later development of a semi-auto.
- To be simple enough to maintain, to make it usable by colonial troops with minimal training and experience.
In these, the MAS-36 succeeded. The rifle is a short rifle, as the term was used at the time, with a two-piece stock and a slab-sided receiver. It had its own cartridge, the rimless 5.4x54mm French, based on the shortened 7x57mm MAS Model 1924 round that was used in the issue light machine gun of the time. The bolt was locked into the breech by two rear-mounted locking lugs on the bolt body, broadly similar to the British Short Magazine Lee-Enfield (SMLE) rifles. The bolt handle was oddly bent and angled forward, supposedly for ergonomic reasons.
The gun had five parts that could be removed by the user for cleaning and maintenance: The bayonet, which nested under the barrel; the bolt body; the bolt rear cap; the firing pin; and the firing pin spring. It’s a rifle that was built to be easy to clean, to maintain, and perhaps most of all, to make it easy to replace that firing pin spring, which even in 1936 was prone to breaking. That turns a service rifle into an odd-looking club and can ruin an infantryman’s whole day.
A few manufacturing shortcuts were made during the war, and yes, the MAS-36 was still built during the war, equipping the Vichy French forces and seeing some use in the Wehrmacht as the Gewehr 242(f). After the war, one more interesting change was made, modifying the bolt so it would not close on an empty chamber. Presumably, this was to warn the user that there was no round in the chamber; personally, I generally carry my bolt guns with an empty chamber and a loaded magazine unless I’m in very thick cover, but then, I’m hunting, not warring. There's a key difference in that normally, in war, the enemy isn't trying to eat you - but he can put a round in you from a distance, whereas a grizzly has to get within chewing range.
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One thing that most bolt guns in these times didn’t have was an easy way to unload the rifle without jacking live rounds through the action or taking them one by one out of the magazine through the receiver. The MAS-36, with its metal receiver, solved this by adding a pushbutton release on the side that dropped the magazine’s floorplate, allowing one to unload by dropping the rounds from the bottom. One just had to be careful not to press the button while in action, which, as you can imagine, would result in unfortunate outcomes. Of all the marks of Mauser made, the only military product of Mauser-Werke that I'm aware of that had a hinged floorplate is the 1909 Argentine contract rifle.
The Guns
The MAS-36 rifle was built at the Manufacture d'armes de Saint-Étienne, or Saint-Étienne Weapons Factory in English. The factory, located in Saint-Étienne, Loire, was the French state-owned arms plant, just as was the American Springfield Armory in Springfield, Massachusetts, for many years. This was a factory that had been making weapons since 1764, so they had a pretty good notion as to what they were doing.
The MAS factory made the MAS-36 rifle from 1937 to 1952. In all, about 1,100,000 rifles were built. The 7.5x55mm cartridge launched a 139-grain pill at about 2,700 feet per second (the French no doubt presented its specs in commie metric, but I’m an American, all right?) That’s not a bad bullet-chuck for the day, comparable to their German foes’ 7.92x57mm round plunking out a 198-grain bullet at 2,600 feet per second. It was, in other words, in the mainstream of service rifle rounds in the World War 2 era.Some interesting variations on the MAS-36 theme included the CR 39, a paratroop rifle with a folding aluminum stock, the LG48, equipped with a rifle grenade launcher, the MAS-36/51, with a 22mm NATO grenade launcher, and the Fusil modèle FR-G2, a modified version mounting a telescopic sight, intended for use by designated marksmen.
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The MAS-36 was in use by the French Army until 1967 and is still in use by former French colony nations today. That’s not a bad record for a pre-World War 2 service rifle. It was replaced by the MAS-40/49 semi-auto, but the good old MAS-36 remained in use around the world in the hands of users, both military and civilian.
Where Are They Now?
You can still pick up a MAS 36, if you want one, on most online auction sites. Ammo may be another story. There is some ammo available, mostly from European manufacturers, but it isn’t the cheapest stuff around, at about a buck and a half a pop.
Still, you can, if you want, have a piece of World War 2 history here that has been sort of forgotten. The sad fact of their swift defeat in a war they weren’t prepared to fight gave them a raw deal in history, and kind of overshadows the fact that they had come up with a pretty solid, reliable, and affordable infantry rifle. That’s not a bad thing.
