Steyr M1912

The Steyr M1912 was Austria-Hungary’s principal military pistol of the First World War, and the thing everybody notices about it is what it does not have: a removable magazine. The eight rounds live in a box machined into the frame, and the only way to fill them is to pull the slide back, drop a charger clip into guides above the action, thumb the cartridges down and throw the strip away.

The lock is the other unusual part. It is short recoil with a rotating barrel: lugs riding in grooves turn the barrel through twenty degrees as the two parts move back together, until a lug meets a stop wedge, the barrel is held and the slide runs on alone to eject and recock. The layout that results is distinctive from across a room — the slide occupies only the rear third of a long one-piece frame, and the external hammer standing behind it is what gives the pistol its nickname, the Steyr-Hahn, and tells it apart from the hammerless Roth-Steyr M1907 that preceded it in Austro-Hungarian service.

It was designed by Karl Murgthaler, Helmut Bachner and Adolf Jungmayr at Österreichische Waffenfabriks-Gesellschaft between 1909 and 1910 and sold commercially as the Model 1911 before the army took it. Chile and Romania both ordered it; Germany ordered ten thousand; Austro-Hungarian handgun shortages during the war pushed production up, and perhaps three hundred thousand were made. A selective-fire version with a longer magazine and a fitted stock, the M1912/P16, was built in small numbers. Enough of the pistols survived the empire that the Wehrmacht reworked a proportion of them to 9x19mm Parabellum and issued them again in the Second World War.

Gaps on this page: nothing but the encyclopedia is available for the measurements, which it credits to Jane’s without a page or an edition, so every figure here rests on a single secondary source; no width, sight radius, rifling twist or trigger pull is published anywhere free. The production figure is given as “up to 300,000” — a ceiling, not a count — and is recorded as an estimate. Production is described only as running from 1912 into the 1920s, with no end year, so no production range is recorded. This entry is filed under Austria because the taxonomy has no Austria-Hungary term; the pistol was made at Steyr and adopted by the Austro-Hungarian Army.