"Auto-mitrailleuse" Topic

"I hope everyone had a great New Year's celebration and are well recovered from your hangovers (gueule de bois). This post began when I noticed several recent pictures on Gallica depicting a certain Captain Genty tooling around Morocco in what is likely the very first "technical" to appear on an African battlefield.

The very early automobiles, as they progressed from slow moving, cumbersome shaking piles of junk to light, quick moving reliable challengers to horses, were immediately put to use by the French military. As early as the late 1890's they could be seen in military maneuvers and exercises as a courier vehicle and to a limited degree a command vehicle shuttling staff between various vantage points and command posts. It was only a matter of time before some real man of genius thought of arming the vehicles with a machine gun. By 1902, the Charron Girardot Voigt (later Charron) Company began to study self-propelled machine guns. The model first presented at an early Salon de l'Automobile (auto show) is the first known French armored vehicle and involved the innovation of placing an armored tub in place of the rear seats of an ordinary car and mounting a Hotchkiss 8mm machine gun. A field test was completed in 1903…"

Main page
link

Armand

Very interesting. I recall reading about these MG cars in Porch's "Coquets of Morocco." Furthermore, one problem encountered by these early SP MG cars was that prior to the 1914 model, the Hotchkiss was only available on a static tripod that could not traverse from side-to-side, thus the crew had to maneuver the entire vehicle to bring the gun to bear on targets outside of its front arc. Luckily these cars were fast. Sort of a precursor of the Belgian Minerva armored car used in 1914.