Mauser C96 - Service

Service

Within a year of its introduction, the C96 had been sold to governments and commercially for resale to civilians and individual military officers.

The Mauser C96 pistol was also extremely popular with British officers at the time and purchased privately by many of them; numbers were supplied to Westley Richards in the UK for this purpose, although its popularity with the British military had waned by the onset of World War I.

As a military sidearm, the pistols saw service in various colonial wars, as well as World War I, the Estonian War of Independence, the Spanish Civil War, the Chinese Civil War and World War II. The C96 also became a staple of Bolshevik Commissars and various warlords and gang leaders in the Russian Civil War.

Indian Revolutionary Ram Prasad Bismil and his partymen used these Mauser Pistols in the historical Kakori train robbery on 9 August 1925. His lieutenant Ashfaqullah Khan gave his Mauser to Manmath Nath Gupta and engaged himself to break open the cash chest. Incidentally, Manmath Nath Gupta tried to fire the newly seen weapon and a passenger was killed in the action.

Winston Churchill was fond of the Mauser C96 and used one at the Battle of Omdurman and during the Second Boer War; similarly, Lawrence of Arabia carried a Mauser C96 for a period during his time in the Middle East. Chinese Communist general Zhu De carried a Mauser C96 during his Nanchang Uprising and later conflicts; his gun (with his name printed on it) can be viewed in the Beijing war museum.

Imported and domestic copies of the C96 were used extensively by the Chinese in the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Chinese Civil War, as well as by the Spanish during the Spanish Civil War and the Germans in World War II.

Besides the standard 7.63×25mm chambering, C96 pistols were also commonly chambered for 9×19mm Parabellum with a small number also being produced in 9 mm Mauser Export. There was also a Chinese-manufactured model chambered for .45 ACP. Despite the pistol's worldwide popularity and fame, the only nation to use the C96 as the primary service pistol of its military and police was China. The Broomhandle Mauser has become a popular collector's gun.

The C96 frequently appears as a "foreign" or "exotic" pistol in a number of films and TV shows, owing to its distinctive and instantly recognisable shape, and for the same reasons and in the same tradition, a C96 was modified to form Han Solo's prop blaster pistol for the Star Wars films.