[NationalInterest] During the Second World War, the major combatant nations all largely still employed bolt action rifles that were little changed from those used a generation earlier during the First World War. Only the United States military widely employed a semi-automatic infantry rifle—the M1 Garand. While both Germany and the Soviet Union developed semi-automatic rifles, with the G43 and SVT-40 respectively, neither of those rifles was utilized in significant numbers.However, France stood apart in many respects as its military actually developed a new, and more compact, bolt action rifle, the MAS-36. Additionally, even before the outbreak of the war in 1939, French military designers began to develop a semi-automatic version of the MAS-36. The weapon had reached a prototype stage by November 1939—during the so-called “Phony War” stage of the conflict.
In December 1939, the French military even issued an order for 100,000 of the new “self-loading” rifles. However, Manufacture d’armes de Saint-Étienne—the primary French facility for small arms production—was already geared up to produce the bolt action MAS-36, it couldn’t switch tooling without impacting its production efforts. It was planned for the first of the semi-automatic rifles to arrive en mass by early 1941.
Following the German blitzkrieg, which resulted in the defeat of the French Army and the signing of an Armistice with Germany, the staff of the Saint-Étienne arsenal actually managed to conceal that it was ready to produce the new rifle. The staff hid this fact not only from the Germans but also the new French Vichy government, which knew it was being developed and had sought to put it into production. The fear was that the rifle, even if produced for the Vichy military, would fall into the hands of the Germans.
As a result, the staff hid the prototypes as well as any drawings and documents related to the rifle.
It was only in 1944 that production actually resumed on the semi-automatic rifle, and some 6,000 MAS-44 rifles were eventually manufactured and subsequently issued to the Marine Command units that were sent to the French Navy to “liberate” Indochina following the end of the Second World War.
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