Unless you are a “gun person”, it is very likely that the reader has never heard of the MAS 49, much less its final iteration, the “49/56”…which is not surprising. However, this little-known weapon had a huge impact on world, not least because it remains in action on the world’s battlegrounds, into the current day.
The MAS (Manufacture d’Armes de Saint-Étienne, formerly one of the weapons makers for the government of France) series of rifles were the result of the French military and government trying to learn from their (many) mistakes made during World War One.
During that war, France – like most nations, being fair – had found itself woefully unprepared for the conflict. One of the main lessons learned by all of the combatant nations was the sheer scale of wastage of all categories of weapons and equipment, especially small arms. As casualties began to quickly mount, national military establishments found it nearly impossible to keep ahead of the need for weapons to both arm new troops, and to rearm troops whose weapons had been lost, destroyed or worn out.
This proved a windfall for arms manufacturers in the rest of the world, who were uninvolved in the fighting. Indeed, Great Britain found itself in such dire need of small arms that its Royal Navy had to turn in its standard-issue SMLE’s, and rearm themselves with everything from Winchester level-action rifles to Japanese Arisaka’s. Even Imperial Russia bought extensively from anyone they could, including Winchester.
In the aftermath of the war, France found itself with literal piles of small arms of all descriptions, from countries and manufacturers from around the world, all using different ammunition and parts, most of which wasn’t made in France, and which could not be easily (nor cheaply) licensed for manufacture. As well, the standard French rifle and machinegun cartridge, the venerable 8mm Lebel, was not a very good cartridge, and needed to be replaced. As the 1920’s dawned, France seemed to have placed itself on the path to rearmament, with a realistic and well-thought out program to develop a broad spectrum of small arms and light infantry weapons for its armed forces.
The execution of that program, however, was an entirely different matter.
While the Chatellerault M1924/29 light machinegun and the MAS 36 rifle were both excellent weapons that worked very well, and were mostly on time in their development, France failed to get the weapons into production in enough numbers to completely rearm its forces. It would not be until World War 2 was almost upon Europe that France saw the danger, and began to ramp up production in earnest. Of course, it would be too little, too late.
The reasons for this are not difficult to understand. France, like most of the “winners” of the ‘war to end all wars’, was in financial ruin after the end of the war. With the advent of the Great Depression on the world, money for military-anything was in short supply, and for France, especially, having lost the better part of an entire generation of young men during 1914-1918, was spending much of what little money it had for defense on an alternative plan.
After France was overrun in 1940, the Various French arsenals were in German hands. While the Nazi forces kept some of the factories working to produce ammunition for captured weapons (“beutewaffe”), as German industrial capacity was simply incapable of meeting Hitler’s war needs, very little new work was done on the incomplete French designs, until the country was liberated in 1944.
Almost as soon as the Germans had been driven out of the various French state arsenals, their workers flooded back in, retrieved blueprints and designs that had been hidden for four years, and immediately got back to work, completing production on the MAS 36, quickly finalizing the first MAS 44 semiautomatic rifles and getting those first guns into production just as the war was ending.
The MAS 44, like most prototype designs, had a lot of issues. Although the design had been in its final stage of development when France was overrun, it had not been perfected, and was rushed into production primarily to show the resilience of French industry. One critical flaw in the design – a flaw never corrected – was the rifle’s detachable magazine.
In the rush to complete the design, the decision was made to use tooling for the rifle receivers that was originally made for the bolt-action MAS 36. All that was modified for the MAS 44 was to remove the floorplate of the MAS 36’s fixed, five-shot magazine. The “magazine catch”, which locks a detachable magazine in place, was simply a ledge-shaped shelf milled into the outer-right side of the receiver. The rifle’s ten-round magazines were all fitted with a thumb latch on the magazine’s exterior, making it very awkward to try to fit two magazines into a pouch. For reasons unknown – but likely related to the magazine’s inability to safely hold the weight of additional ammunition – the magazines would remain at their ten-round limit throughout the rifle’s service life. However, the semiautomatic rifles would still retain their ability to be loaded via five-round strip-clips.
By 1949, enough lessons had been learned from the -44 that a new model began to make it out to the troops. The MAS 49 corrected several internal reliability issues (but not the magazine, nor the silly “spike” bayonet that the French arms industry was fascinated with), streamlined some aspects of the rifle to make it cheaper and faster to produce, and added a method to add a rifle grenade launcher, something the French infantry establishment had a long-standing love affair with.
It was this rifle that France would sell to many of its colonies (resulting in the so-called “Syrian Contract” rifles) and take into battle in Indochina, Algeria, and the Suez Crisis, all of which – in time-honored tradition – revealed where yet more improvements to the rifle could be made.
The result, developed in 1956 and deployed in 1957, was the rifle’s final form, as the “MAS 49/56”.
While retaining the overall look, feel and handling (and the magazine, still) as its predecessors, the stock was significantly changed, as was the rifle grenade system. As France had joined NATO, it was attempting bring its weapons in line with early NATO standards. The rifle grenade system was altered to use the NATO-standard 22mm grenades, which required the installation of a gas cut-off, to prevent damage to the rifle. This also resulted in a better sighting system for firing the grenades, as the grenade sight had to be raised, in order to disengage the gas system. Most importantly, this system was installed on all MAS 49/56 rifles. Another significant improvement was the incorporation of a scope mount milled into the left side of the rifle’s receiver, a feature also incorporated into every 49/56. And, because of the redesign, the rifle lost the spike bayonet, and received a proper knife-type pig-sticker.
Despite some lingering problems, the matured design continued in service as France’s standard infantry rifle until 1979, when it was replaced by the FAMAS rifle), and remained in combat action until its complete replacement. The MAS semiautomatic rifles were mostly sent as aid to many armies in the newly-free states resulting from France’s abandonment of empire. Many of those rifles remain in combat as of this writing.
In an interesting twist to the end of this story, a good number of MAS 49 and 49/56 rifles are on the surplus market in the United States. Many rifles were sold into the American surplus market, beginning in the late 1980s. Some versions were modified to take 7.62x51mm, instead of the 7.5x54mm French round. As a word of warning, if those conversions were done in France, they most likely work well, but the ones converted in the US are known for gas-cycling issues.
Look into older firearms – they tend to have very long lives.
