And he said to himself:
“Let no matter what happens, we will answer everything
We have a Maxim machine gun, they don't have a machine gun."
Hillary Bellock, 1898
People and weapons. And it so happened that quite recently on "VO" there was a conversation about mitraleses and questions arose about how the famous Reffi mitralese worked. It is known that by 1870 the Montignier and Reffi mitrailleuses were in service with the French army, but the latter was considered more perfect. Well, if so, then today we will tell about her, especially since the author had a chance to see her with his own eyes in the Army Museum in Paris. But first, a little about the biography of its creator, which is also very interesting in its own way.
Jean-Baptiste Auguste Philippe Dieudonné Verscher de Reffy was born in Strasbourg on July 30, 1821, and died in Versailles after falling from a horse on December 6, 1880, with the rank of general of artillery. And besides the fact that he was an officer, he was also the director of the Medon workshops and the Tardes weapons and cannons factory. He graduated from the Polytechnic School in November 1841, and then at the artillery school. He served in various artillery regiments, 15th, then 5th, 14th and 2nd, and then in 1848 got into the General Staff. In 1872 he was awarded the Order of the Legion of Honor.
His "bullet cannon", as Reffi called his development, he designed in 1866, using the principle of Montigny mitraillese. However, this was only part of his job. It was he who played a key role in the introduction in France of the Laffite cannons, which were put into service in 1858, which already had rifled barrels, although they were still loaded from the muzzle.
In 1870, he perfected a breech-loaded 85mm bronze cannon, and then converted the Meudon Experimental Workshop into an Artillery Workshop, which was relocated to Tarbes, which at that time became a major industrial city. There, in 1873, he developed another 75-mm cannon, but his guns were soon supplanted by the more modern 95-mm D'Lachitol cannon and especially the 90-mm Bungee cannon, who developed a very good piston bolt.
Why such a big introduction? And in order to show that the man was Reffi very educated and understood both technical issues and tactics, and it was precisely the questions of tactics, or rather their study, that led Reffi to the idea of mitrailleza.
The fact is that even during the Eastern War (for us it is the Crimean War) one very important circumstance emerged: field artillery and rifled rifles were equal in firing range! In the course of hostilities, it happened more than once that French chasseurs armed with Thouvenin's rod fittings, taking a convenient position, shot the servants of Russian guns and thus silenced them. And all because our guns fired at 1000 meters, while the French fittings at 1100! These 100 meters turned out to be critical, first of all, because the guns fired faster than the cannons and our gunners could not compete with the French riflemen on equal terms, moreover, our field guns at that time were loaded from the muzzle. The English Enfield fitting of the 1853 model had a range of up to 1000 yards, that is, about 913 m, which was also very good if the arrows also skillfully used it.
The knowledge of all these circumstances led General Reffi to the idea of creating a weapon - a destroyer of gun servants. Such a "bullet cannon", in his opinion, had to use modern powerful ammunition, and the firing range was greater than that of contemporary artillery pieces. Therefore, in his mitrailleuse, he used a powerful 13 mm (.512 inch) center fight cartridge, which had a brass flange, a cardboard body, and a lead bullet in a paper wrapper weighing 50 grams. A charge of black powder (and they did not know another at that time!) Of 12 grams of compressed black powder provided the bullet with an initial velocity of 480 m / s. According to this indicator, these cartridges were three and a half times superior to the bullets of the Chaspo or Draiz rifles. This, in turn, had a positive effect on flatness and firing range.
However, it is unlikely that the captain (then the captain!) Reffi managed to "break through" his design, if not for the support of the Emperor Napoleon III himself. He, being a very educated man, also noted the fact that canister fire of artillery lost its former strength after the armies acquired rifled small arms. And although many military considered this weapon to be nothing more than a fantasy of the emperor, in fact, he was superior to most of his generals in terms of understanding the art of war. He received his military education at an artillery school in Thun, was well versed in artillery, and wanted to get a weapon that could fill the gap in the engagement zone between 500 meters - the maximum range of grape-shot fire and 1200 meters, the minimum range of the then artillery guns that fired explosive shells. He wrote a study "The Past and Future of Artillery in France", where he explained the need for a weapon capable of hitting the enemy precisely between these extreme distances. "Between the rifle and the cannon" - this is how the French military called this distance, which is why the mitrailleza Reffi, acting just between them, seemed to many, including the emperor himself, a good solution to this unexpected problem. As a result, the emperor personally financed the creation of new weapons, and in order to maintain secrecy, the parts of the mitrailleus were manufactured at different factories, and assembled under the personal supervision of Reffi. They were kept in a warehouse, the keys to which, again, only he had, and they were tested by shooting from tents, so God forbid, no one could see what it was shooting!
How did this "bullet cannon" work, by the way, similar to an artillery gun even in appearance?
Inside the bronze barrel, she had 25 barrels arranged in a square with a minimum distance from each other. In the breech there was a mechanism that consisted of a box, guidance mechanisms and a stop screw with a handle. The screw rested against a massive shutter, through which 25 channels passed, inside which 25 spring-loaded strikers were located.
The mitrailleus was fed using square-shaped magazines ("cartridges") with four guide rods and 25 through holes for cartridges. Between the caps of the cases and the strikers there was a rather thick metal "locking" plate with profiled holes: the strikers slid along its narrower holes, and "fell through" into the wider ones.
This mitralese was charged and actuated as follows: the stop screw turned by the handle and pulled the bolt back. The loader inserted a magazine filled with cartridges into the frame, after which, the locking screw fed the bolt with the magazine forward until it stopped, while the guide rods entered the holes in the breech of the barrel, while the strikers were cocked at the same time. Now, in order to start shooting, it was necessary to start turning the handle on the box to the right "of you". She, by means of a worm gear, set in motion the "locking" plate. It shifted from left to right, which is why the strikers began to alternately fall into the holes of a larger diameter and, at the same time, hit the capsules of the cartridges. Mitralese was starting to shoot, and she gave about 150 rounds per minute!
When unloading, the handle of the stop screw had to be unscrewed in the opposite direction in order to open the shutter and release the magazine and strikers. Then the plate drive handle had to be turned in the opposite direction to return the lock plate to its place. The magazine with empty sleeves was then removed, and it was necessary to put it on a special extractor with 25 rods on the "trunk" of the carriage. A magazine was put on them, then one press on the lever and all 25 cases were simultaneously removed from the magazine and dropped from these rods.
As you can see, everything is simple. At the same time, it was possible to fire the barrel along the horizon and even fire with dispersion in depth, but it is very bad that this, in general, a rather perfect and effective weapon was so secret that until the beginning of the war, practically in the French army, he did not know about it, and the calculations of mitrales were not properly trained in handling them and, accordingly, trained.
The consequences were dire. Combined into batteries of six guns in each, they were installed without taking into account the specifics of their characteristics, which did not allow, on the one hand, to reveal their potential, and on the other, led to large losses. One more circumstance was also found that reduced the effectiveness of mitraleses. So, the maximum range of their fire was about 3500 meters and that was good. But even closer to 1500 meters to the enemy, it was also dangerous to install them, since the crews could be hit by infantry small arms fire. However, in the interval from 1500 to 3000 m, the hits of the mitraillese bullets were virtually invisible, and the optical sights were absent on them, which is why it was simply impossible to adjust their fire. The small distance between the barrels led to the fact that some enemy infantrymen were hit by several bullets at once (for example, one German general was hit by four bullets at once during the Franco-Prussian war!), Which led to an overexpenditure of ammunition and their shortage at critical moments of the battle.
If the French army had mastered the mitrailleses in advance, would have identified all their strengths and weaknesses, worked out the tactics of their use, then the effect from them could have been much more significant. At the same time, the experience of the Franco-Prussian war showed that 90% of the losses suffered by the German army fell on the victims of infantry small arms and only 5% on artillery. Somewhere among them, and mitrailleus fire losses, although their exact percentage was never found out!
