From The Archive: Renault FT - Hotchkiss M1914 Ammunition Stowage - Part 1 - Inside Track | Renault TSF Tank Kent

We have been asked to republish this and other articles by some of our new members. All of you who attended our Members Open Day have seen the end product fitted within the Renault FT. This will take you back to those heady days when we were working out what the next step would be. . Our hunt for semi flexible belts for the Hotchkiss M1914 for our Renault FT has come up with a few surprises. A previous article describing our misfortune in finding a complete and very good condition box containing 4 empty belts for 50 rounds of ammunition for the Hotchkiss. The problem was it was not for the Hotchkiss M1914 but rather the Hotchkiss in British service in the First World War. We were convinced, quite mistakenly, that we were looking for a 251 round belt for the Hotchkiss 8x50 round Lebel cartridge. . This error was continued for some time while we were attempting to work out the stowage of the belt ammunition in our Renault FT. The stowage area for the later Riebel machine gun pods is well known given the surviving example in Muse’e des Blinde’s at Saumur. The WW1 configuration for the Hotchkiss M1914 is very different. We were trying to interpret how the belts would have been stowed within easy access of the commander / machine gunner. We had a very good idea of where the ammunition was stowed given the information and blueprints provided by Muse’e des Blinde’es on the Renault FT. Would the ammunition have been laid out in belts within the stowage area or would it have been left in their original waxed bags and stowed in the same area. The problem was that the bags were too wide to comfortably fit within the space provided. The most obvious way in which ammunition would be stowed would be belt upon belt. The width of a belt loaded with cartridges would fit comfortably within the stowage area. The loaded belt would be just over 75mm wide and the allocated space is 88mm wide. Our investigation stalled at the point of trying to understand how the belts would fit length ways on and folded at the edges. How many 251 round belts would fit in this way? A friend of ours pointed out that the answer lay within one of the manuals in our collection, Reglement de manoeuvres des unites de chars legers (see attached photo). We were looking for 50 96 round semi flexible belts, totalling 4800 rounds.

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