Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without...

The Dreyse 1907 is a .32 ACP blowback pistol that, while obviously influenced by FN's Browning 1900, dodges its patents by using a slide that does not completely enclose the barrel. Instead, the breechblock, which is inside the frame, has a long forward extension running above the barrel. This is the part that has the cocking serrations visible in the photos.

First and Second Variant are pictured above. The guns were produced from 1908 until shortly after the Great War. The top pistol, with a serial number of 66742, is of antebellum vintage, while the second, number 234589, is a much later production gun. Both guns were claimed to be WWII GI bringbacks.

Note the lanyard rings: The 1907 was a popular police pistol and was purchased by the nascent Czech army immediately following the First World War.

The later gun shows an interesting repair where the frame had cracked through at the corner and was repaired by drilling laterally completely through the frame and riveting. I'm not sure I'd trust it to shoot, but I don't have Allied tanks overrunning my neighborhood, either.

Or perhaps it was one of the few pistols a member of the anti-Nazi resistance could get their hands on, and they needed to keep it working? Or perhaps it was just one of the ones exported to the Czech army, which were removed from service for unspecified safety reasons after only a few years.

Either way, the gun was worth the $20 asking price. How could I refuse?

For the most detailed online Dreyse resource, check the Unblinking Eye.
 
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Continental .32 Pocket Pistols, 1900-1914, Part II

A quick vignette of three more European .32 autos:

The top one, in the white, is an Austrian Steyr-Pieper M1908/34. Not content with the bizarre designs churned out by their native sons, Steyr licensed a design from Belgian gun maker Nicholas Pieper. Featuring a tip-up barrel (released by the lever above the trigger guard,) the mechanism was unusual in that the recoil spring was located above the barrel and pivoted with it, being fitted with a hook on the back to engage the slide. The example shown was made in 1920 and was issued to the postwar Austrian State Security Police.

The second one down is a Mauser M1914. A nicely-fitted pistol, the 1914 was a scaled up version of the company's M1910 .25 auto. An odd feature by modern standards was the removable sideplate in the frame, allowing access to the lockwork. The M1914 was a common substitute standard issue pistol in the imperial German army during the First World War, and the example shown sports military acceptance marks and came to America as a war trophy.

On the bottom is the one that started it all: The FN M1900, John Browning's first commercially successful self-loading pistol and the original home for the 7.65 Browning Automatic cartridge, now better known as the .32ACP. The pistol has several unusual features for a Browning design: The recoil assembly is above the barrel, rather than being concentric or located beneath it; also, the pistol requires tools, or at least a screwdriver, to disassemble for cleaning. The successors to this ur-Browning, the Colt M1903 and FN M1910, were vastly less baroque in their construction and seem quite modern by comparison.

Continental .32 Pocket Pistols, 1907-1912, Part I

Above are three representatives of the great diversity of early 20th Century European pocket pistols chambered in 7.65 Browning (or .32 ACP, as we Yanks term it.)

From top to bottom, they are a Dreyse M1907, a Frommer Stop, and an FN 1910.

Two are blowback operated, while the third is a locked-breech, long recoil design. One is striker-fired, one has an external hammer, and the third, an internal hammer. All three are single-action pistols. The Dreyse has a thumb safety, the FN has both thumb and grip safeties, and the Frommer has a grip safety as well as an external hammer which can be manually lowered to decock the weapon. All three saw service in various capacities with militaries and gendarmeries.

We'll be taking a closer look at these pistols over the next weeks.

Radom ViS wz.35: The last horse pistol.

While it's common to imagine that cavalry went the way of the Eohippus some time in the muddy Spring of 1915, it just isn't true. Most all of the major military powers retained cavalry formations into the WWII years. Russia and Japan both made extensive use of mounted troops, and the last United States Army cavalry charge was made in January 1942 in the Phillipines by three platoons of the 26th Cavalry.

Since the days of the Sixteenth Century caracole, the pistol has been the traditional sidearm of the mounted soldier, and pistols designed as such are frequently easy to tell from their "badge-of-rank" kin. As far back as the days of the percussion revolver, the Colt Navy had a .36" bore, while the Colt Army, a cavalryman's weapon and expected to be able to kill a horse, was a .44. Cavalry pistols tended to be large, accurate, and often slotted to accept a shoulder stock, so as to allow them to double as a pseudo-carbine.

ABOVE: ViS wz.35 Radom, photo by Oleg Volk

Poland's cavalry had long been emulated in Europe, and as the newly-reconstituted nation built up an army after WWI, they searched for a domestically produced sidearm to equip their cavalry troopers. In 1935 a design by Wilniewczyc and Skrzypinski was settled on and, dubbed the ViS wz.35, was adopted by the Army that year. It was made at the Radom plant with the assistance of Fabrique Nationale engineers working under contract, and offered an interesting blend of familiar Colt/Browning features with some new touches.

LEFT: Radom disassembled, showing its Browning heritage.
Photo by Oleg Volk

The trigger was a sliding affair, similar to that used on many Browning designs, and the grip safety would be familiar to any user of Colt pistols. The barrel, while operating on the familiar Browning tilting-barrel short recoil system, used a cammed lug under the breech end to effect unlocking, rather than the more usual swinging link; this feature was shared with the FN GP35 "High Power" pistol that was making its debut the same year, and seems to point to a certain amount of Fabrique Nationale influence. The gun was chambered in the by-now-ubiquitous 9x19mm Parabellum, and was fed from an eight-round single column magazine. It had a butt slotted to accept a shoulder stock, and was provided with a decocker so that the trooper could more safely return it to his holster with one hand than if he was trying to control the fall of the hammer with his thumb while astride a possibly skittish mount.


RIGHT: "S"-rune on barrel lug, indicating contract manufacture for Waffen SS, most likely by inmates at Mauthausen.
Photo by Oleg Volk.





After Poland was overrun by the German and Soviet invasion of 1939, the Radom plant fell in the German -occupied half of the country and the Poles were soon forced to churn out arms for their conquerors, who called it the Pistole 645(p). The wz.35 was a common issue weapon to the Waffen SS, and as that force grew, the pistol was simplified in manufacture so as to keep up with demand. Polished bluing was replaced by a brushed finish that got rougher as the war went on; the slot for the shoulder stock disappeared; finally the frame-mounted takedown catch was deleted. Late-war guns produced by Steyr using slave labor are wretched indeed, with extremely coarse finishes and crude wooden slabs for grips.

In 1945 the Radom plant was destroyed by the invading Russians; it was a sad ending for the last horse pistol. As a footnote, though, a limited run of replica (reissue?) Radoms were produced by a revived Radom in 1997; excellent examples can command price tags of almost four figures; good originals seem to be bringing anywhere from $450 for a sad-looking wartime piece to over $2,000 for a nice pre-war "Polish Eagle" (well over $2k if that Polish Eagle has German Waffenamt proofs.) The pistols are a joy to shoot and spare parts, while difficult to find, are not impossibly so. They make a worthy addition to any collection.