In the latter half of World War One the Austro-Hungarian military experimented with a number of select-fire pistol type weapons. One of these was the Steyr Repetierpistole M1912/16, an automatic adaptation of the regular M1912 pistol. It was given a 16-round fixed magazine (loaded via two 8-round stripper clips) and a selector switch. A total of 200 were produced, each supplied with a shoulder stock to help make the blistering 1200 rpm rate of fire somewhat usable. The design was not made from scratch, but rather adapted form the existing 1912 fire control system, which makes for a rather unorthodox system.
In addition to 200 of these pistols, the Austro-Hungarian military also acquired 50 twin-gun systems , which two of these pistols were attached to a frame with a single shoulder stock between them (no surviving examples of those are known today).
Frommer Pistolen-MG Model 1917 video:
Many thanks to the VHU – the Czech Military History Institute – for giving me access to these two fantastic prototypes to film for you. The Army Museum Žižkov is a part of the Institute, and they have a 3-story museum full of cool exhibits open to the public in Prague. If you have a chance to visit, it’s definitely worth the time! You can find all of their details (including their aviation and armor museums) here:
https://www.vhu.cz/en/english-summary/
Good video about an interesting gun!
The stocks on these guns are indeed rare and, at least from my own observation, are not actually interchangeable with the stocks paired with commercial Steyr 1912 pistols. A while back I tried slotting the stock from a Romanian contract model onto one of the machine pistols. Didn’t fit. Maybe I was doing something wrong, or maybe they’re hand-fitted to each individual gun.
The only quibble I have is that I believe ‘Repetierpistole M.12’ was actually the designation for the standard semi-auto M.12 pistol. The machine pistol was called the ‘Anschlagpistole M.12’ (which I believe either means ‘Attack Pistol’ or ‘Stocked Pistol’). The term ‘Repetierpistole’ does not imply fully-automatic function; the M.7 Roth-Steyr was also designated a ‘Repetierpistole’.
This thing had already been cancelled by July 1917 in favour of the Sturmpistole (Škoda-Werke’s reverse-engineered copy of the Villar Perosa) which actually was pressed into service and got its first taste of combat during the Battle of Caporetto in October 1917. In early 1918, the Sturmpistole project was paused while Austria-Hungary considered the possibility of licensing production of the Maschinenpistole Schwarzlose from Germany, but this came to nothing and 40,000 Sturmpistoles were ordered in March 1918. Only a small number were manufactured and issued before the war ended, however.
Ian shows lots of these “unicorns”. They are a cool. But my gripe is that he can’t actually fire them. So we don’t know if the concept was truly stupid or if the powers-that-be were stupid and did not recognize a great new technology.
As mentioned in video, this specimen is missing stock. Therefore it can not be tested firing in manner envisaged when it was created.
The story goes that these were originally intended for aviation use, before fixed machine guns with interrupter gear became standard on single-seat “scouts”. The twin-gun system, like the Frommer version, would certainly have “fit” as the observer’s gun in a two-seater.
But the “1912/16” designation makes this all questionable, as the advent of the machine guns on aircraft happened in 1915 or so.
This may have been intended as a weapon for trench raiding, a forerunner of the Bergmann “Muskete”.
cheers
eon
The ‘/16’ suffix isn’t a contemporary thing, it was invented in the 1980s, and so has no bearing on the intended use. Active development of this machine pistol didn’t really begin until early 1917.
There is no record that these guns were ever intended for aviation use. The Austro-Hungarian machine pistol projects were all developed in response to the use of the Villar Perosa by the Italian infantry and were intended to be deployed as such. The idea of tethering two guns together was not conceived with aviation mounting in mind, but for the deployment of these guns as crew-served weapons (mimicking the Italian ‘sezione pistole mitragliatrici’ platoons who crewed the Villar Perosa).
A lot of this may not seem logical by today’s standards, but in 1916 – 1917 you have to keep in mind that the Villar Perosa was the accepted benchmark for machine pistol/SMG design and the concept of the SMG as an individual, off-hand arm was not yet fully realised.
Ca. 08:30 the mystery of the lower half-window on semi M.12 is that it serves to push out the magazine bottom/lanyard eyelet / spring holder thingy while disassembling the pistol. On full-auto you don’t need to poke it out with anything, because you have the mag extension to hold onto. Note that the half-window ends at the level of the spring-holder to allow poke the screwdriver into and pry the magazine bottom out, instead of using the lanyard ring and possibly damaging it.