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The Der Schwarzlose Maschinengewer M.7 Und M.17/12: Historical Review

The Der Schwarzlose Maschinengewer M.7 Und M.17/12: Historical Review
1943. Hungarian soldiers manning a Schwarzlose Géppuska M07/12.

The turn of the 20th century saw dramatic innovations in military small arms, one of which was the development of fully automatic weapons — a.k.a. Machine Guns. Designers such as Maxim, Browning, and Hotchkiss devoted efforts towards which saw the perfection of the machine gun which quickly replaced manually operated guns such as the Gatling, Gardner and Nordenfelt. One of the lesser known of these designers was a German, Andreas Wilhelm Schwarzlose. Herr Schwarzlose’s gun was simpler and less expensive to produce than the competition. He did this by using a delayed blowback action using a heavy bolt and a lever-delaying system which avoided the necessity of a gas or recoil system and its attendant extra components. Schwarzlose’s gun utilized a toggle lock similar to the Maxim and Luger except it did not lock the bolt. Instead, the toggle was broken by the cartridge recoiling and forcing the bolt rearward, thus delaying it long enough to allow chamber pressure to drop to a safe level. The recoil spring (the only one in the design) then pushed the bolt forward, removing the next cartridge from the belt and chambering it as it went into battery.

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Note the relatively short barrel, large flash hider, water barrel jacket and tangent rear sight. (Rock Island Auction Co.)

As the Austrian-Hungarian service cartridge, the 8mm M.1893 scharfe Patrone, had a short (53mm), rimmed case and its 244 gr. FMJ bullet had a velocity of only 2035 feet per second the gun handled it easily. This required ammunition with a specific pressure curve, as overpressure ammunition will cause the bolt to open early and rupture cases while underpowered ammunition will simply fail to fully cycle the action. It also required an oil pump to lubricate cartridges to prevent extraction problems. To make the gun more portable, it was designed with a relatively short barrel which resulted in severe muzzle flash, requiring a large flash suppressor. It was water cooled and fed by a 250 round cloth belt of ammunition. The gun loaded from below and right of the receiver and ejected empty cases out the lower right of the receiver. Loading the gun when empty requires inserting a belt and manually cycling the action three times while holding pressure on the loose end of the belt to bring the first cartridge into firing position. The feed mechanism consisted of a gear-like wheel that held the cartridges and rotates them up to the chamber and then down to the ejection port. Firing is done by depressing the central dual triggers between the gun’s handles. There is a safety located between the triggers, which must be held to the left by one thumb while firing.

der-schwarxlose-maschinengewer-m7-und-m17_12-03
WWII Hungarian troops on the Eastern Front using the Schwarzlose Géppuska M07/12 (top left). 1917. Italian officers examining a captured M.7/12 (top right). WWI Austrian soldiers manning a Schwarzlose Maschinengewehr M.7/12 (bottom left). WWII German soldiers manning a M.7/12 (bottom right).

After a series of trials, the Austro-Hungarian army adopted the gun in 1907 as the Maschinengewehr M.7 (in Hungarian service the Schwarzlose Géppuska M07) and production began at Österreichische Waffenfabrik-Gessellschaft of Steyr. In 1912, the design was modified with a heavier bolt, recoil spring and modified lever angle in the toggle, increasing the time before opening, reducing chamber pressure and doing away with the necessity of oiling cartridges. The designation was changed to Maschinengewehr M.7/12. The initial M.7/12 had a cyclic rate of about 400 rpm that was increased to 580 rpm during WWI by using a stronger mainspring. The Schwarzlose was a robust, reliable, and popular infantry weapon.

der-schwarxlose-maschinengewer-m7-und-m17_12-04
The Schwarzlose was used by a number of armies from 1907 through 1948 including Russia’s.

In 1907, the British firm Kynoch, ltd. produced a licensed copy of the Schwarzlose as the Kynoch Machine Gun in .303 caliber. Sales were very poor, and production ceased before the outbreak of WWI.1 It was the primary machine gun of WWI Austro-Hungarian forces and served with German, Bulgarian and Turkish armies. The Italians captured large numbers of them and issued them to front troops, colonial units, and the navy. There was also a lightened version that used a simple, folding bipod mounted on the barrel jacket which was issued to Austrian Stosstruppen (Storm Troopers). The Austrian Luftfahrtruppe (air force) originally mounted standard M.17/12 on their fighters but eventually used two modified guns. The first was simply a M.7/12 with holes in the water jacket for cooling and the the Maschinengewehr M.16 which did away completely with the water jacket while the M.16A’s had a rate of fire of 880 rounds per minute. M.7/12 guns were adopted, captured, or received as war reparations, by a number of countries including Holland, Sweden, Albania, Greece, Peru, Columbia, Finland, Servia, Turkey, Romania, Spain, Czechoslovakia, Tsarist Russia (and USSR), Brazil, Yugoslavia, Poland and China.2

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Palestine, 1947. British soldiers with a M.7/12 captured from Jewish fighters (top left). The M.17/12 was one of the primary MGs used by the Bulgarians in both WWI and WWII (bottom left). Diagram of the Schwarzlose M.7 action.

In the 1930s, Austria and Hungary converted most of their machine guns to fire the 8x56R cartridge (Austria 8mm scharfe S-Patrone M.30 Hungary 8mm 31M. éles töltény) which used a 56mm rimmed case whose 208- grain Spitzer bullet had a velocity of 2,395 fps. The Italians converted some to fire the 6.5x52 Carcano cartridge while Czechoslovakia, Romania and Poland converted many guns to the 7.9x57 cartridge while Sweden produced guns in 6.5x55, Dutch guns were chambered for the 6.5x53R and Greek guns for the 6.5x54. After WWII Romania converted some guns to fire the 7.62x54 cartridge.

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The Romanian army used M.7/12 guns throughout WWII.

NOTE: “The notion that the Schwarzlose must have a short barrel to function correctly and use ammo with lower pressures than standard military cartridges are false. The fact that the first cartridge used with this gun was the relatively slow 8X50R Mann round was merely circumstantial. The Czech VZ24 Schwarzlose used a 24" barrel in 7.92 and functioned perfectly with standard 7.92 FMJ military ammo.” — Bob Naess, Black River Militaria (BlackRiverMilitaria.com)

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The Maschinengewhr M.7 can be identified by the gap between the receiver and barrel jacket.

During the interwar years, M.7/12s saw service in the Russian Revolution, Russian Civil War, Russo-Polish War, Peru-Columbia War, Greco-Turkish War, Gran Chaco War and Spanish Civil War. During WWII, Nazi Germany used numbers of captured guns to arm second line troops, Waffen SS units and various “allies” while the Italians issued large numbers of them to colonial, naval and anti-aircraft units.3 Others showed up in the hands of anti-German partisans and Jewish fighters during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.

  1. https://www.historicalfirearms.info/post/141743600921/
    the-kynoch-schwarzlose-machine-gun-in-1907-the
  2. Sweden produced the gun at the state armory, Carl Gustafs Stads Gevärsfaktori.
  3. The Italians converted some to fire the 6.5x52 Carcano cartridge.
  4. Schritt is the German term for “pace” and equals 0.75 meters.



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