The 'Broomhandle' Mauser by Jonathan Ferguson

Author:Jonathan Ferguson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472816177
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2017-07-04T16:00:00+00:00

‘Stopping power’

Another important consideration was the nebulous concept of so-called ‘stopping power’. In an era when this power was believed to derive from the ‘shock’ effect of a big, heavy bullet striking the enemy’s body, many felt that the relatively small and lightweight Mauser bullet was insufficient for ‘savage warfare’. An article in Country Life magazine explains:

Nickel-plated bullets, such as are used in the magazine pistols, are not well suited, say their opponents, for stopping a rush by the enemy; the bullets go whistling through the bodies of those hit by them without doing them very much damage, certainly not enough to stop their on-rush effectually. At Omdurman, for instance, one officer of the Lancers is said to have dropped three Dervishes dead with three discharges of his Webley revolver, while his companion who was armed with a Mauser pistol fired ten shots into as many Dervishes, but did not succeed in dropping or even stopping a single one of them. If true, the story tells well in favour of the present Service revolver at close quarters. (Anon 1899a: 264)

The phrase ‘whistling through’ was used advisedly, as informal testing carried out by the Sporting Goods Review showed that the normal 7.63mm bullet would pass through a side of beef 1ft (30.5cm) thick, with penetration to spare; but they, too, commented on the ‘clean’ holes that it bored. One of the British officers responding to an official request for opinions on the type described the weapon’s ‘man-stopping power’ as ‘defective’ by comparison with the .455 Webley revolver. The science of the day, though underdeveloped in this area, appeared to support these claims. Experiments carried out in 1897 by the German surgeon Paul von Bruns showed impressive penetration. However, at ranges between 20m and 200m small, ‘clean’ wounds were observed in animal tissue. In one heated exchange of letters involving distributor Westley Richards, it was claimed that the weapon might not even incapacitate a rabbit! Nor was this an exclusively ‘Western’ belief. The Russians and Chinese may have set stock by the 7.63mm bullet, but British folklorist Mary Edith Durham reported in 1909 that some Albanian fighters believed the Mauser bullet to be outright harmless, to the extent of proposing a demonstration in which she would shoot one of them through the hand! Others did not feel as strongly, however, and a photograph from the Imperial War Museums archive shows another Albanian militiaman proudly displaying his Mauser.

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