General Reffi: man and his "machine gun"
Mitraleza Reffi. It looks like new. Preserved at the Morges Castle War Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland
And he said to himself,
“No matter what happens, we’ll give an answer to everything
We have a Maxim machine gun, they don’t have a machine gun. ”
Hilary Bellock, 1898
“No matter what happens, we’ll give an answer to everything
We have a Maxim machine gun, they don’t have a machine gun. ”
Hilary Bellock, 1898
People and weapon. And it so happened that more recently, a conversation about mitraliasis started at VO and questions arose about how the famous Mittral Reffi worked. It is known that by 1870 the Mithralies Montignier and Reffy were in service with the French army, but the latter was considered more perfect. Well, if so, today we’ll tell you about her, especially since the author happened to see her with his own eyes at the Army Museum in Paris. But first, a little about the biography of its creator, which in its own way is also very interesting.
Jean-Baptiste Auguste Philippe Dieudonne Verscher de Reffy was born in Strasbourg on July 30, 1821, and died in Versailles after falling from his horse on December 6, 1880, with the rank of general from artillery. And besides the fact that he was an officer, he was also the director of the workshops of Medon and the factory of armaments and guns of Tardes. He graduated from the Polytechnic School in November 1841, and then at the artillery school. He served in various artillery regiments, the 15th, then the 5th, 14th and 2nd, and then in 1848 he entered the General Staff. In 1872 he was awarded the Order of the Legion of Honor.
Jean-Baptiste Auguste Philippe Dieudonne Verscher de Reffi.
His “bullet cannon”, as Reffi called his development, he constructed in 1866, using the principle of Mitraleza Montigny. However, this was only part of his work. It was he who played a key role in the introduction in France of the guns of the Laffitte system, adopted in 1858, which already had rifled barrels, although they were still charged from the barrel.
Mitraleza Reffi. Fig. A. Sheps
In 1870, he improved the bronze 85-mm cannon, which was loaded from the breech, and then turned the Medon Experimental Workshop into the Artillery Workshop, which was redeployed by Tarbes, which at that time became a large industrial city. There, in 1873, he developed another 75-mm cannon, but his guns were soon replaced by a more modern 95-mm D'Lahitol gun and especially the 90-mm Bunge gun, which developed a very good piston shutter.
Reffie's 85mm Cannon
Why such a big introduction? And in order to show that the man was very educated by Reffy and was well versed in technical issues and tactics, and these are precisely the issues of tactics, or rather, their study, that led Reffy to the idea of mitralose.
So, with a bunch of buckets, Reffy's mitrallise looked like a campaign. (War Museum in the castle of Walrus, Lausanne)
The fact is that even during the Eastern War (for us it is Crimean) 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 the French Chassers, armed with Tuvenin rod fittings, in a convenient position shot the servants of the Russian guns and thus silenced them. And all because our guns fired at 1000 meters, while the French choke at 1100! These 100 meters turned out to be critical primarily because guns fired faster than guns and our gunners could not compete with the French arrows on an equal footing, and besides, our field guns were loaded from the muzzle at that time. The English Enfield fitting of the sample of 1853 had a range of up to 1000 yards, that is, about 913 m, which was also very good if the shooters also used it skillfully.
Mitraleza Reffi. A device for extracting empty cartridges from a magazine is clearly visible. (War Museum in the castle of Walrus, Lausanne)
The knowledge of all these circumstances just led General Reffy to the idea of creating a gun - a fighter gun servants. Such a “bullet gun”, in his opinion, was supposed to use modern powerful ammunition, and the firing range was greater than that of modern artillery guns. Therefore, in his mitraliasis, he used a powerful 13-mm cartridge (.512 inches) of the central battle, which had a brass flange, a cardboard case, and a lead bullet in a paper wrapper weighing 50 grams. A charge of smoke powder (and they didn’t know another at that time!) In 12 grams of compressed black powder provided the bullet with an initial speed of 480 m / s. According to this indicator, these cartridges were three and a half times superior to the bullets of Shaspo or Draise rifles. In turn, this in turn had a positive effect on persistence and firing range.
Mitraleza Reffi. The mechanisms of vertical and horizontal aiming are clearly visible. In the box on the trunk of the carriage on the right was a store. Other stores were in drawers on the right and left. The total ammunition for the "gun" could reach 4000 rounds. (War Museum in the castle of Walrus, Lausanne)
However, it is unlikely that the captain (then still the captain!) Reffy 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 that circumstance that the artillery fire of cartridges had lost its former strength after the armies acquired rifled small arms. And although many military men considered this weapon nothing more than the emperor’s imagination, in fact he was superior to most of his generals with respect to understanding military art. He received a military education at an artillery school in Thun, was well versed in artillery, and wanted to get a weapon capable of filling the “gap” in the affected area between 500 meters — the maximum range of shotgun fire and 1200 meters, the minimum range of the then artillery guns firing explosive shells. He wrote the study, “The Past and Future of Artillery in France,” where he explained the need for weapons that could hit the enemy precisely between these extreme distances. “Between a rifle and a cannon” - this is what the French military called this distance, which is why many of Reffi’s mitraliasis, acting precisely 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 a new weapon, and for the sake of secrecy, the details of the mitraliasis were made at different plants, and assembled under the personal control of Reffi. They were stored 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!
In the campaign, the discharging device was closed with such a case. (Museum of the Army, Paris)
How did this “bullet gun”, by the way, look like an artillery gun even externally?
Inside the bronze barrel, she had 25 trunks located square with a minimum distance from each other. In the breech there was a mechanism consisting of a box, guidance mechanisms and a thrust screw with a handle. The screw rested against a massive bolt through which 25 channels passed inside of which 25 spring-loaded strikers were located.
The scheme of the device of Reffi's mitraliasis.
Mitrallesa was fed using square-shaped stores (“cartridges”) with four guide rods and 25 through holes for cartridges. Between the caps of the shells and the strikers there was a rather thick metal “locking” plate with profiled openings: the striker strikers glided along its narrower openings, and “fell through” into the wider openings.
Rephy mitraliasis scheme - continued. The "locking" plate with profiled holes for the strikers, the worm drive of the plate, the hammer and the 13-mm cartridge in the section are clearly visible
This mitraliasis was charged and actuated as follows: the stop screw turned by the handle and retracted the shutter. The recharger 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 percussion was cocked. Now, in order to start shooting, it was necessary to start twisting the handle on the box to the right of "on my own." She used a worm gear to move the “locking” plate. She moved from left to right, which is why the drummers began to fall through the holes of a larger diameter one by one and at the same time they hit the cartridge capsules. Mitraleza starting to shoot, and she gave about 150 rounds per minute!
This is what Reffy’s mitralias look like at the Army Museum in Paris today.
When discharging, the handle of the stop screw had to be untwisted in the opposite direction to open the bolt and free the magazine and drummers. Then, the plate drive handle should be twisted in the opposite direction to return the locking plate to its place. The store 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 gun carriage. A magazine was put on them, then one click on the lever and all 25 shells were simultaneously removed from the magazine and dropped from these rods.
Massive Screw Shutter Box
As you can see, everything is simple. At the same time, it was possible to fire a barrel along the horizon and even fire with scattering into the depths, it’s only very bad that this generally quite perfect and effective weapon was so classified that until the start of the war almost no one knew about it in the French army and the calculations of mitraliasis were not properly trained in their handling and trained accordingly.
Cutout on the barrel - that's all the sights. Of course, it was impossible to shoot like that at a great distance!
The consequences were sad. Collected 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 revealed that reduced the effectiveness of mitraliasis. So, the maximum range of their fire was about 3500 meters and it was good. But it was also dangerous to install them closer than 1500 meters to the enemy, since the calculations could be struck by the fire of infantry small arms. However, in the range from 1500 to 3000 m of bullets hit, the mitrales were practically not visible, and there were no optical sights 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 of the enemy infantry were hit by several bullets at once (for example, one German general during the Franco-Prussian war was hit by four bullets at once!), Which led to an excessive use of ammunition and their shortage at critical minutes of the battle.
Bust of Reffie
If the French army had mastered the mitrallises in advance, revealed all their strengths and weaknesses, worked out the tactics of application, then the effect of them could have been much more significant. At the same time, the experience of the Franco-Prussian war showed that 90% of the losses incurred by the German army accounted for the victims of small infantry weapons and only 5% for artillery. Somewhere among them is the loss of fire from mitraliasis, although their exact percentage has not been elucidated!
During the war, it turned out that the Shasspo rifle was better than the German Draize rifle (Military Museum of the Walrus Castle, Lausanne)
But the cartridges for her were simply terrible! (Military Museum of the Walrus Castle, Lausanne)
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