In the year 1898 Winston Churchill, future Prime Minister of England, was a young lieutenant in the British Army. With funds provided by his mother, he had just purchased a strange-looking new pistol from the firm of Westley Richards & Co. in Birmingham, England. Attached to the 21st Lancers in Sudan, Churchill effectively used that pistol to save his life. In the battle of Omdurman, which was one of the very last British cavalry charges, on September 2, 1898 Churchill killed or wounded at least three of his fierce spear-toting dervish opponents. The pistol he used was a Mauser C96 “Broomhandle.” Writing his mother, Churchill called the pistol “…the best thing in the world.” He later carried the same handgun as a war correspondent in the second Boer War. Today, the Mauser has one of the most recognizable profiles of any firearm ever made. It is a hot and very classic collector item.
The pistol’s development began in 1893 or 1894, when three brothers working for Waffenfabrik Mauser in Oberndorf on the Neckar River in Germany undertook a new project. Fidel Feederle was the Superintendent of the Mauser experimental workshop. Together with his brothers Friedrich and Joseph, he crafted the first successful prototype on March 15, 1895. Peter Paul von Mauser, the head of the firm, didn’t even know about the new handgun, but when it was demonstrated to him, he quickly recognized its potential. A German patent was issued for it on December 11, 1895. During the following year, about 110 pre-production pistols were built, and full production started in April of 1897. The cartridge chosen was dubbed the 7.63x25mm Mauser, a near-twin of the bottlenecked 7.65mm round used in the 1893 Borchardt pistol, forerunner to the Luger. It differed mainly in its 300 feet per second higher velocity, launching an 86-grain bullet at a sizzling 1400 fps. This cartridge, which spawned the almost-identical 7.62x25mm Tokarev round in 1930, was the highest-velocity commercially manufactured handgun cartridge until the S&W .357 Magnum came along in 1935. The pistol itself was first known as the P-7.63 or Feederle Pistole. Paul Mauser chose to rename it the Mauser Military Pistol. Most know it today as the C96, which stands for "Construktion 96," the short-form year of its first manufacture. Germans seeing it for the first time nicknamed it the "kuhfusspistole" because they thought it was as ugly as a cow’s foot. The Chinese, who used it widely, called it the “box cannon” for its box-like forward magazine and the fact that it was usually housed in a wooden holster that doubled as a shoulder stock. The English-speaking world, taking notice of its distinctive rounded grip, universally called it the “Broomhandle.” By whatever name, it was the first commercially successful semiautomatic pistol. While it was never adopted as a first-line firearm in Germany, it saw wide usage in both World War I and II as a substitute standard.
The C96 is recoil operated, and utilizes a breech locked by a tilting block which joins the upper receiver to the bolt for the first moments of travel. The block is then cammed down. The unlocked bolt then continues rearward to eject the spent shell, cock the large hammer, and return under spring pressure to chamber a new round. The upper receiver and barrel are machined as one piece, making barrel replacement a real challenge today. The safety is on the left side of the hammer and locks the hammer on engagement. It uses a fixed integral magazine in front of the trigger which is loaded either with single rounds or more quickly with a stripper clip. Early versions contained 6, 10 or 20 rounds, but since about 1905, mostly 10-round versions were made. The only way to unload the magazine is to operate the bolt back and forth on the remaining rounds. The magazine follower has a projection which retains the bolt in the rear position when empty. A tangent rear sight optimistically graduated from 50 to 1000 meters is provided. The pistol was slotted for and was often combined with a detachable hollowed-out wooden shoulder stock. This stock also served as a protective holster and was retained on the body by a shoulder strap. The pistol itself has no screws other than the one used to retain the wooden grips. Inside, it’s like a jigsaw puzzle with many interlocking parts. The lock assembly detaches from the upper frame as a complete unit. It can be disassembled with only the point of a cartridge or a cleaning rod. Because so much precision hand labor was involved in its manufacture, it would be virtually impossible to duplicate it today for less than thousands of dollars.
There are many sub variations of the basic pistol, involving subtle changes to the shape of the hammer, the operation of the safety, and the milling, or lack of it, on the lower frame. The basic configuration used until about 1915 was called the pre-war commercial type. The pistol illustrated is one of these, which I estimate was manufactured in 1914. Due to the senseless deliberate destruction of the Mauser plant’s records by American forces following WWII, more exact dating is now virtually impossible. In 1915, the German Army contracted with Mauser for 150,000 Broomhandles chambered for the standard 9x19mm Luger or Parabellum round. Roughly 137,000 were delivered. These were distinguished from the 7.63mm pistols by a large “9” routed out in the grips, with the number painted most often in red, but sometimes in black. The P.08 Luger was standard, but the Mausers were also extensively used. A cartridge called the 9x25mm Export Mauser was chambered in a small number of pistols, but these are quite rare. They were intended for export to China and South America. Some pistols were made as carbines with long barrels, fore ends and integral pistol-grip shoulder stocks. These are also very scarce today.
The C96 was distributed worldwide and found popularity on the civilian market. Many officers in armies around the world purchased them with their own funds. Winston Churchill was but one of these. People as diverse as Lawrence of Arabia and Chiang Kai-shek of China used them. Shorter-barreled versions with stubby and less-rounded grips were distributed in Russia prolifically, finding favor with the Bolsheviks. These became known as “Bolo” pistols because of this connection. A C96 was used in the July 16, 1918 execution of Tsar Nicholas II and his family in Ekaterinburg during the Russian revolution. It carries serial number 167177 and is now displayed in the city museum.
Unlicensed copies of the C96 were made in Spain and in China. These were either direct copies or had different internals. A Chinese variation was made in .45 ACP caliber. Some of these imitations were of surprisingly good quality, and some were really crude. The Spaniards made some full-automatic versions in the late 1920s, and Mauser quickly made a selective-fire model of its own, called the Schnellfeuer Pistole (rapid-fire pistol). It was designed in 1930, with production starting in 1932 and ending in 1936. Some went to China and to both sides in the Spanish Civil War. The “Model 1932” full-autos were also provided to the German Wehrmacht, where the pistol was designated officially as the M712. Large numbers of the standard C96 were used by Hitler’s elite Waffen SS forces in World War II.
Although the pistol was powerful, reliable and accurate, it did suffer from being relatively bulky, slow to reload, and expensive to manufacture. Production of Broomhandle Mausers ended in 1937, giving them a production run of about 40 years. In that interval, the pistol became iconic and has remained one of the most visually striking pistols ever made. It’s estimated that about one million were manufactured by the Mauser factory. Today, collectors eagerly seek out good or better condition specimens. It’s estimated that only about 200 legal Schnellfeuer selective-fire guns exist in the U.S. due to governmental restrictions here. The standard semiautomatic pistols are becoming increasingly scarce and expensive, with even rusted junkers commanding prices unheard of even 10 years ago. Look up the word “classic,” and you just might find a picture of a C96 Mauser Broomhandle!
(c) 2012 JLM
John
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