By Jim Dickson | Contributing Editor
As the 19th Century drew to a close inventors worked feverishly on self-loading pistol designs.
People used to single shot pistols and the revolvers that had taken over the market in the preceding 50 years were disconcerted by slides violently recoiling towards their eyes in the new automatic pistol designs. The obvious solution was to have the moving parts go safely forwards instead.
There is plenty of power to make this happen if you just know how to harness it.
A bullet swaging down to fit the rifling exerts enormous drag forwards. That’s why barrels must always be securely fixed in place lest the whole shebang go flying off in the general direction of the target. There is tremendous power here as long as the bullet is in the barrel compared to a blowback weapon whose power is generated only as long as the bullet is in the case.
To accomplish a blow forward action instead of a blow back action you need a fixed standing breech and a barrel that can move forward against a spring for sufficient distance before stopping and returning. It must eject an empty case when it is going forward and feed a loaded round into the chamber as it is returning to battery. A simple and effective concept.
The first pistol to employ this method of operation was the Mannlicher M1894. This was the first Mannlicher pistol and it was made for a rimmed 6.5MM and a rimmed 7.6MM cartridge. The Swiss tested it with a 7.5MM cartridge but rejected it. It was a noble first effort but like many first tries it was not successful.
In 1908 The Japanese weighed in as the Komuro M1908 blow forward pistol was introduced. Made in .25 ACP, .32ACP, and 8MM Nambu about 1200 made during a production run that spanned 1908-1912.
The real success story was the M1908 Schwarzlose blow forward pistol. It’s inventor, Andreas Wilhelm Schwarzlose of Germany was one of the great geniuses of modern times along with Nicola Tesla and Hiram Maxim. I remember an ordnance officer commenting that everything he built worked strangely but it worked. He was one of the most original thinkers ordnance has ever seen. He was born in Wust, Altmark in Northern Germany on July 31, 1867 on his family’s farm and upon growing up he enlisted in the military and went to the ordnance training school in Suhl which was one of the best in the world.
Upon leaving the service he embarked on his career as a gun designer and by 1912 he had 58 firearms patents in Germany. That’s quite a feat.
He developed an automatic pistol that fired standard revolver ammunition held in a non-detachable magazine under the barrel with the cartridge noses pointing toward the ground. It was weird but it worked.
Moving right along he moved the cartridges into the grip in his second design. This would eventually become The Schwarzlose military pistol AKA the Standard Self Cocking Pistol. During the final development stage, he moved from Suhl to Charlottenburg outside of Berlin where he made his M1898 Military Pistol. This was an attractive, modern, ergonomic pistol in 7.63 Mauser but few were made with some going to the Dutch Boers and some to Russia. I just wish one had gone to me. I always liked that pistol.
In 1902 he patented his machinegun. The Schwarzlose remains one of the simplest and most reliable belt fed machineguns ever made. It has a blow-back action with the blow back made at a mechanical disadvantage to slow down the operation. In its final form, the M1907/12 it does what is still largely considered impossible being a blow-back weapon for a full power rifle cartridge that will work with both lubricated and non-lubricated ammo.
The Schwarzlose is second only to the Maxim machinegun in reliability and it is simpler, cheaper, easier to manufacture, more reliable, and longer lived than the Browning machineguns. It is a masterpiece of simplicity with the belt feed having only two moving parts and it has one spring that functions as buffer, bolt return, and firing pin spring. Disassembly is done in mere seconds.
This is the gun that established him as a great gun designer and made his fortune. This water-cooled gun is capable of far longer sustained fire than any air cooled machinegun. A little known fact is that no matter how often you change a quick change barrel eventually enough heat soaks into the receiver to expand the metal sufficiently to jam the gun shut until it cools off and the metal shrinks back to proper functioning size.
He followed up on this success with his .32 ACP blow forward pistol in 1908. It was marketed in the U.S. By the Warner Arms Company. Retailing for about $15 it was sold around the world from 1908 until 1913. Some are marked with the names of the various countries importers. The example photographed for this article was sold in Norway where it was confiscated by the Germans when they invaded Norway in WWII. It was brought to the U.S. by an American army officer after the war.
The M1908 was made both with a grip safety and without one. Those with a grip safety can lock the grip safety down by holding it in and then pushing up the grip safety button on the side of the receiver.
It was remarkably flat and thin being only 7/8 inches wide at its widest point, the grips, making it quite comfortable to carry in the pocket. At 1 pound 3 ounces unloaded it certainly didn’t weigh down the pocket much and it fit nicely there being just 4.5 inches high and 5.5 inches long. This pistol feels right in the hand and points well. It was relatively easy to take apart for cleaning and had nice sights for its day. Well made from milled forgings the quality was all you could ask for. The firing pin is a massive affair that is part of the hammer and appears to be quite unbreakable. It is certainly the strongest one I ever saw. Accuracy is on a par with the Colt, Savage, and other .32 automatics of the era. Quite sufficient for its intended purpose.
The pistol was not without its drawbacks though. With no blow back mechanism to absorb some of the recoil the shooter got the same recoil as from a single shot pistol plus the feel of the barrel assembly slamming back to battery after firing. Thus it is a difficult .32 ACP to shoot rapid-fire due to the recoil in the lightweight gun.
One of the reasons for the .32 ACP’s popularity is that it’s recoil is not much more than a .22LR. Nobody ever said that about it when it was fired in the Schwarzlose though. Even so, there is a fascination in shooting a gun that works the opposite of every other pistol. This really is a fun gun to shoot and a unique experience. While a bit thinner and smaller than the M1903 Colt and the Savage .32’s the blow forward mechanism was not as reliable with extraction, ejection, and feeding jams sometimes occurring. While these problems were not as bad as some might make them out to be they did cause the Schwarzlose to lose out to the simple blowback .32 automatics in the marketplace.
This was not the end of the blow forward gun designs though. During the Viet Nam War Colonel George Chinn, America’s greatest expert on machinegun mechanisms, had just completed the design of the Mark 19 high velocity 40MM grenade launcher. A fully automatic machinegun shooting high velocity 40MM grenades. The Navy then ordered a design chambered for the 40MM low velocity grenade and Colonel Chinn used a blow forward design with horizontally opposed barrel and bolt springs. He succeeded in overcoming all the reliability problems that blow forward designs had in the past and the gun was a success.
