Posted on 05/08/2017 5:31:49 AM PDT by w1n1
Although the Ruby pistol became a procurement nightmare, it nevertheless armed French troops and scores of others throughout World War I and beyond.
The "Ruby" pistol is the result of France's desperate need for arms in the early days of the Great War. By 1915, much of the French industrial heartland was under German control, and what remained under allied control was producing critically needed material such as rifles, machine guns, and artillery. As the conflict grew beyond even the most pessimistic expectations, the sheer volume of troops sent into battle literally exhausted the meager stores of small arms. To meet this rising demand for pistols for the trenches, the French contracted with the Spanish firm of Gabilondo y Urresti-Eibar for their Ruby semiauto pistol.
The Ruby made use of a prewar design largely copied (without license) from the Browning Model 1903. Among the changes are the deletion of the grip safety and a relocation of the manual safety closer to the trigger guard. The resulting Ruby is a direct blowback pistol chambered in 7.65 (.32 ACP). The pistol features an internal hammer and a frame-mounted safety that goes down for FIRE. The original magazine capacity was nine rounds.
The original contract called for the firm to produce 10,000 pistols a month, but the insatiable French demand for handguns saw the production numbers increased in stages until the incredible target of 50,000 pistols a month was set. Read the rest of the Ruby pistol story here.
In WWI it wasn’t that French men couldn’t fight.
For the allies, it seems that their officers (English, French) were incredibly terrible at strategy and their solutions to everything were to just throw bodies at whatever and subsequently get those guys massacred. They stacked up like cordwood.
I mean when the officers and politicians fear that the fighting will stop because the troops on both sides at Christmas come together and start singing, and don’t want to go back to fighting, your officer leadership has problems in the head.
Back in 1981 I attended the Armor Officer Advanced Course at Fort Knox, KY. We received briefings from liaison officers from our NATO allies.
During the German officer’s briefing one of the other students made a wisecrack about the French army. The German officer took umbrage at the remark and said that the French enlisted men were superb. He blamed the French officer corps (corpse for zero) for their poor performance.
I think theres no gainsaying the fact that WWI represented mismanagement at its worst.People always try to develop technology to defeat the tactics of the last war - and equally, there is always a tendency for the leaders to be people who prospered by employing those same tactics in the last war. So the contest between if it aint broke, dont fix it and nothing could be worse than repeating the same mistakes and expecting a better result in the future goes on.
WWI was a classic case of dramatic tech changes in armaments transcending the advantages of previously successful tactics. The conservatism of the military command, especially in the French Army, simply went into sorcerers apprentice mode. And the same thing happened in WWII, when tech changes had transformed the advantage from the defensive (trench warfare, with a no mans land dominated by machine guns and repeating rifles) to the offensive (blitzkrieg, dominated by mechanized mobility).
It occurs to me that the singular mobility technology opportunity of WWI which could have made a difference would have been the use of trucks for maneuver. In WWII, the US sent the USSR thousands of Studebaker-built trucks which the Russians used to move their troops much faster than they could march. Some have rated that truck one of the most significant weapons of the war on der Ostfront.
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