My newest hard to find French Bayonet

[Aragorn243]

The Germans armed a lot of their French occupation troops with Lebels. They had a lot of conscript troops in France. Russians, Ukrainians, etc they didn't trust a whole lot but they used them to keep the peace and armed them with local weapons. They didn't want the 20 inch weak Lebel bayonets so they cut them down to a manageable length. The French were in the process of converting long rifles into R35 carbines when the war started. They had a contract to convert 70,000 rifles which were to go to support troops but only 40,000 were completed in time. The goal to free up the new 7.5mm MAS-36 rifles for combat troops. They never resumed conversion after being liberated. No idea if the number of converted bayonets equaled the number of converted rifles as it's a lot easier to cut down a bayonet than convert a rifle but even at 70,000 examples, not a lot as far as bayonets go.