How readily could someone with no semi-auto pistol experience work out how to reload?

I’m currently working on a Victorian-era Adventure Story- very much in the vein (excuse the pun) of King Solomon’s Mines, as it happens- and I’ve got a minor plot point that I’m trying to iron out.

The story is set in 1897, and the main character is an former officer in the Queen’s African Rifles, currently on an adventure/expedition to find a Lost City (yes, I know, it’s not exactly original- the plot twists later on). He has stopped for the night at a British military encampment, and the next morning the encampment is attacked by a large number of native tribesmen, most of whom are armed with spears, clubs and swords. A couple of them, however, have firearms, and the main character has just shot one of them with his revolver and then taken the tribesman’s gun, which turns out to be a Mauser C96 “Broomhandle” semi-automatic pistol.

Now, the battle is still raging on around the main character, who has taken cover behind some mealie bags, and overturned cart, and a number of wooden barrels, is trying to reload the Mauser with spare cartridges from a box found on the dead tribesman. The problem is, he’s never fired or used a semi-automatic pistol before- the Mauser C96 was the first widespread semi-auto handgun, and the story is set at a point in history where they are unlikely to be common outside Europe- production started in 1896 and travel was slow in those days, especially to remote parts of Africa. (How the gun ended up in the hands of a Masai tribesman is part of a mystery which forms a major sub-plot and is tied into other events further down the road, incidentally).

Anyway, what I’m trying to work out is: What sort of difficulties would someone with basic firearms training- but only familiar with British service revolvers and rifles- have trying to reload a completely unfamiliar firearm (in this case, a semi-automatic pistol) in combat? The reason the character is trying to reload this gun, incidentally, is that his revolver (yes, it’s a .455 Webley :D) is out of ammunition and his spare cartridges are in his knapsack, which is inconveniently located on the other side of the melee currently taking place in the encampment.

As most of the shooters here on the SDMB know, if you can operate one semi-automatic handgun, you can work most of them (If you own a Colt M1911A1 and wanted to borrow someone’s Sig P226, you’d have no trouble at all loading it, working the action, and firing it). Revolvers are a bit more problematic- if you’ve only ever owned and used Colt Peacemakers, and then borrow a friend’s Smith & Wesson Model 10, you might have a lot of trouble working out where the cylinder release catch is and what you needed to do to actually get the spent cartridges out of the gun once you’d managed to open the cylinder.

So, would someone in the main character’s position be able to apply some sort of prior knowledge (“To reload a Maxim gun, I need to pull the breechblock back, insert a new belt, and then release the charging lever; this gun seems to work in much the same way so I will try pulling this slide back and feeding bullets in”), or would they be struggling to get more than one round at a time in? (The C96 loads from stripper clips, but the character doesn’t have any- just a box of 7.63x25 Mauser cartridges and an empty gun).

The character is an intelligent guy, but he’s in the middle of a skirmish trying to work an unfamiliar gun (the markings on which are in German, a language he cannot read). How do you think someone in his position might go about reloading the pistol?

I am not a pistol expert… I’ve never actually shot a pistol, or held a loaded one (Just unloaded, CF issed Hi-Powers) But I’ve seen quite a few semi-auto rifles, and the principle’s similar. All my C96 knowledge is from some quick reading and a couple YouTube videos.

If the gun were shot to empty, the bolt locks open. That means there’s a nice big gap where the casings were coming out. I’m sure if the character were familiar with a revolver, they’d have some idea that “hey, this is where the bullets go”.

To reload, the ammunition should be in a stripper clip, but I’m really not sure if the ammunition would have been pre-loaded in to clips (perhaps the tribesman did specifically load it in to the stripper clips and put it back in the ammo box)

So now he sees the big empty hole were the casings were coming out of before, and a bunch of bullets attached to a metal thing. I personally, would try pushing the whole assembly, including the clip in to that hole. but when that wouldn’t work, I’d push down on the bullets to go in. If that didn’t work, I’d flip it over and see if I had it upside down (do stripper clips allow you to put them in upside-down?) It’d probably take a few tries, and he’d probably knock a few bullets off the clip (there’s some people with experience with the pistol reloading it on YouTube, and there are a couple where some of the bullets are forced off the clip when attempting to reload) but I’m sure they’d get the hang of it.

That’s just the way I’d handle it. I’m sure someone with more experience will be along to correct me.

Your hero is screwed. For one thing, IIRC the C96 Mauser doesn’t have a bolt lock; the stripper clip is what actually holds the bolt open while you push the rounds down into the magazine. Without the clip he’s going to have to contrive some way of holding the bolt open. He could take off the removable floorplate from the bottom of the magazine, remove the spring and follower, and feed the rounds from the bottom, but this will take the better part of a minute. Someone experienced might be able to do it under fire, but I doubt someone with no previous exposure to the weapon and under fire would know where to start. I don’t know how to resolve your protagonist’s problem unless you make him at least vaguely knowledgable about firearms and sufficiently mechanically inclined to improvise a solution to hold the bolt open.

If he had a more modern autoloader, not such a problem. Virtually all autoloading pistols load from a detachable magazine installed in the grip or (for mini-submachine guns) forward of the grip. To load, you merely feed rounds into the magazine–which can be tough with the last few rounds in a double stack magazine–insert the magazine into the grip, and either actuate the slide release (if the chamber is open) or pull back and release the slide (if closed). The pistol would already be cocked (in the case of a single action or double action/single action gun) so there’s no issue about whether the hammer is forward or back, although some modern decocker safety pistols will let you do this with the safety on, so you still might need to release the safety.

A person experienced with only the 1911 might have a problem with the Sig P226 insofar as there’s no manual safety on the latter, and he’ll probably try to lower the hammer manually rather than use the decocker. From a shooting standpoint, the DA/SA trigger on the Sig will probably through him for a loop, too. Loading and unloading is essentially the same, though.

I can’t imagine anyone having significant problems between the operation of different revolvers. With a few obscure exceptions, the slide release is loaded on the left the frame, rear of the cylinder, and the cylinder swings out to the left. Anyone with any degree of manual competence will quickly figure out whether it’s a push style (S&W), pull (Colt), or toggle (Ruger). The break-open frame guns are similarly mechanically intuitive. Extraction is either automatic (in the case of most break-open guns) or done by pushing the extactor rod on the front of the cylinder to push the cartridges out while the gun is tilted barrel upward.

Stranger

Oh, and here is a site on the C96 Mauser. The link points to loading and unloading instructions, but the site has a lot of information on the pistol.

Stranger

Yep…he’s screwed. I had the same first thought Stranger did (only not in anywhere near a detail!). Without stripper clips, he’ll get nowhere.

Maybe you can have the hero see the tribesman load it once, and then have to work out how to feed rounds into the stripper clip and load the weapon from there.

Or maybe he can’t use the damn thing at all and beats somebody over the head with the infernal thing and takes their gun. Then he figures out how it works later on in a quieter location.

Thanks for the replies everyone!

I should mention I’m familiar with the operation of the Mauser C96 (I have a technical guide for on my desk nearby, as it happens!), but given the situation the main character is in, I’m inclined to agree he’ll need to have stripper clips in order to reload the gun. I figure it will take him a few hair-raising moments of fumbling around before he manages to get a clip into the magazine, push it home, and get the safety off, and get back into the fray…

Even less if he’s recently read a review of it in the ‘Modern Innovations for the Discerning Gentleman’ section of the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News.

I toyed with an idea like this- it’s a very good idea, and I like it a lot- but I don’t want the character to be one of those Hero Types who’s an expert at everything. Part of the point of the adventure is that despite the fact he’s resourceful and intelligent, he’s basically in a strange land and doesn’t actually have nearly as much of an idea about what’s going on as he thinks he does…

Martini Enfield, you’ve just made my day.

Remember a while ago when you started that Ask the Firearms Historian thread? (Was it really last December? Good lord, doesn’t time fly etc). I had a question I wanted to ask, but I put it off due to pressure of work and so on – the thread got buried, and I forgot about it until it was too late to resurrect it. Several times since then, I’ve regretted not taking the chance to ask my question, which would have been this:

“Suppose you were writing the adventures of a pre-WWI adventurer (of the Alan Quartermain type). What weapons would you equip him with, and why? Bonus style points are available for including a ‘Broomhandle’ Mauser.”
:smiley:
So aside from the Webley and the Mauser, do you plan to feature any other weapons of the period?

Your hero should already be familiar with stripper clips and how they are used.
The Lee-Enfield series of rifles, first adopted in 1895, used a box magazine loaded from stripper clips. Other nations had adopted stripper clip-loading rifles as early as 1893. Stripper clips, IOW, pre-date the broomie. They were used in it, but not invented for it.

Crap. My mistake. The Lee-Enfield didn’t become “charger loaded” until 1904. However, stripper clip fed weapons weren’t exactly rare or experimental at this point. As an army officer, he should be acquainted with the concept, if not the specific manual of arms for the C-96.
Don’t overthink this.

Can the bloke firing a Steyr-Mannlicher from behind a pile of buiscuit boxes next to him shout instructions, complete with amusingly inventive imprecations when he drops all the clips in a sweaty-fingered panic, and tries to shoot someone while the safety is still on? “No, you turnip-eared buffoon, push the catch UP!”

And I’ll buy you a pint if you can work in a Gasser Montenegrin. No idea why, but I’ve always found them cool.

Just call him an ex- victorian adventuer !!! :stuck_out_tongue:

Strictly from a literary standpoint, you might think about having your hero actually having had some sort of exposure, but didn’t pick up on it at the time, then has one of those “Damn, I wish I’d been paying attention!” moments under fire. Readers would identify with that. There was quite a dynamic tension between old ways and new ways in Victorian England, and a lot of literature deals with that. If your man is a true Victorian, he’s going to have definite ideas about advances in technology.

Lots of them. :smiley: I like historic guns, so I’m being reasonably specific when it comes to makes, models and types.

Besides the Webley and the Mauser, the main character will also acquire a Winchester Model 1887 lever-action shotgun later on, and a Magazine Lee-Enfield Mk I sometime before that. Normally, I’d think 4 guns was a bit too many, but he is travelling by camel and no adventurer worth their membership of the Colonial Club would be wandering around Africa without a rifle.

A Russian character appearing later has a Nagant M1895, and the French Foreign Legionnaires that are also in the story have Lebel M1886 rifles and Lebel M1889 pistols.

The British military characters are armed with the various service arms from the period: Martini-Henry and Martini-Enfield rifles, Magazine Lee-Enfields (full-length and carbines), Beaumont-Adams revolvers, Enfield Mk II revolvers, and some old Colt Navy cap & ball revolvers.

Most of the major late 19th Century firearms will show up somewhere, although there won’t be that many US arms (the story is set at the height of the British Empire, after all), but a few might show up later on, depending how things go…

Perhaps you have him playing with one on the ship on his way to Africa? Another passenger or the Captain had one, so they fired it off the ship’s stern (along with other firearms?) to while away the time. Maybe he only loaded it once so he’s not too familiar with the operation. Say the ladies on board complained about the noise , so they packed it in?

I’d go with this one too , German colonies in Africa so it would fit in nicely for him to be chatting it up with some prussian colonel or something comparing pistols.

Declan

I think he’d give up in less than 12 seconds once he sees it’s some strange weapon he is clueless about. He’d secure it in a back or pocket to check out later, but in the meantime, he’d go aquire something he knows–like a knife or a stick.
Everyone knows how to use a club. And I’d much rather have a club in my hand than a gun I can’t load or shoot.
…especially under fire in combat!! A person’s fine motor skills and dexterity will be greatly depreciated under that kind of stress. He would not be able to figure it out, nor would he try, IMO. I’ll be honest, I have much experience with fireamrs and semiautos–I even hold armorer credentials with several manufacturers. However, I am not familiar with the weapon in your story, and I’m doubting that even I could figure it out while being raided by violent tribesmen. I’d have to have an extremely safe hiding place to even attempt figuring it out.

Unless he’s Jason Bourne! Jason Bourne could figure out anything and not even break a sweat!

I owned a broomie for a while. Loading and shooting one isn’t difficult, especially to anybody who has some prior knowledge of charger loading. There just isn’t that much to figure out. Stripping and reassembling it is another matter entirely, though.