This particular machine gun is universally condemned as the worst machine gun ever designedm let alone built. In fact, it may have the distinction of being the worst firearm ever developed. If it isn't, then it is darned close second.
The French Modele 1915 Chauchat, also known as the CSRG (after the 4 person commission that designed it).It was a bad design made of even worse materials. It was an early usage of stamped parts production when the machinery and the metals were not as good as they should have been to produce a machine gun that needed close tolerances. It was the "jam-o-matic" of jam-o-matics. It was designed for use with the French8x50R "Lebel" cartridge, which has a large rim. As such, the magazine was a half-moon looking device. Since it was a long recoil design, there was a lot of movement during cycling. So, IF you can get a sustained rate of fire, then the point of aim was always changing as the whole barrel and bolt moved together.
The long recoil system had been around for about 15 years. In fact John Browning patented the concept in 1900. Browning used the concept in his designs for the Browning Auto-5 and the Remington Model 11. The long recoil concept worked, well, until the French got to it. The French Army wanted a light machine gun that soldiers could walk and fire with. The Chauchat was about 20 pounds, which was, for the time, pretty light.
The French were involved in World War 1 at the time and took any weapon they could get and this pig was one of those weapons. To show you how bad it was, with a desperate need for machine guns, they stopped using this one even with no other options. Fortunately, the Americans came across the pond following "Blackjack" Pershing and the French saw an easy out. They dumped this hunk of junk on the Yanks in the thousands. The were converted to 30-06 and were given a straight magazine. This thing was not built for 30-06 pressures to start with, and this caused even more issues with an already worthless gun. According to Ian Hogg, one of the foremost arms experts, the 30-06 just shook the gun into pieces. The main issue was failure to eject spent rounds.
In theory, the gun had a cyclic rate of 250 rounds per minute. Obviously, this is very slow for a machine gun but the rate of fire was slowed by the long recoil system. Not that this mattered as it is said that you could never finish a 20 shot magazine without a stoppage, let alone try for 250 rounds straight through. At the end of World War 1, only 63,000 Chauchats were left in the French arsenal, of the 260,000 made. About 30,000 were dumped on the Americans.
Per Mr. Hogg, "It's service career was an unending tale of malfunctions and jams."
