Posted June 6, 2019 1:00 pm by Comments

By Chris Eger

Chambered in 7.63x25mm, or .30-caliber Mauser, this R-713 Schnellfeuer was brought back from Omaha Beach after D-Day. (Photos: U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command)
While combing through an abandoned German bunker in Normandy on D-Day 75 years ago, a Navy officer found a rare Mauser machine pistol worthy of a space smuggler. The officer was Lt. John Millard Weeks of the destroyer USS Ellyson, a warship that had spent the morning of June 6, 1944, pounding German positions ashore in support of U.S. Army Rangers tasked with seizing the key strategic cliffs of Pointe du Hoc, overlooking Omaha Beach. The gun he came across, now in the collection of the Naval History and Heritage Command, is a Mauser R-713.
The captured Mauser sports a 10-round detachable magazine, tiny when you consider they had a rate of fire of 900 rounds per minute.
The gun, which looks outwardly like the more common semi-auto Mauser C96 “Broomhandle” pistol, was the German company’s answer to unlicenced Spanish clones that were being made in the 1920s that had a select-fire capability. Dubbed the Schnellfeuer (rapid fire) the value-added Mauser had a detachable 20-round box magazine and a rip-roaring rate of fire that would empty it before you could

Source: Guns.com

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