[ Finnish C96 Ukko-Mauser ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at Bear Arms
in Scottsdale, Arizona, taking a look at some of the cool guns
in their reference collection like this Ukko-Mauser.
This is a Finnish Army marked C96.
And it's a gun that's definitely got some cool service history,
because it came into Finland almost certainly during World War One, or just after World War One.
And it remained in Finnish service through the Winter War,
through the Continuation War and ultimately into the late 1950s.
So Finland standardised on the Mosin pretty quickly, pretty effectively.
Like that was ... cost-effective and available, and the rifle they knew, and that worked fine.
For pistols there was a lot less standardisation in the Finnish military.
And the C96 was one of the very first guns that came into Finland.
So this story originates with the Finnish Jäger Battalion.
This was a group of ... nationalistic Finnish youth
who during the middle part of World War One snuck out of Finland into Germany,
enlisted in the German Army, specifically the Prussian Army,
and were put basically into their own battalion and sent to fight on the Eastern Front.
And the purpose of this was for them to obtain military training.
Now this is a period when Finland is ... significantly chafing under Russian occupation and rule.
At this point, we're talking 1916/1917, Finland has never been a sovereign nation.
It's always been either an eastern province of Sweden or a western province of Russia,
it's gone back and forth a couple of times.
And ... by World War One the Swedes are out of the picture, it's just Russia.
And the Finns are getting kind of tired of being a Russian province.
And there is an underground movement of Finnish nationalism that's starting to emerge.
And there were some assassinations, there was unrest before World War One.
But during World War One there is definitely the sense that,
... "This could be our opportunity to declare independence.
If the war goes badly for Russia and they are unable to
maintain their own military, and they fall apart as a country,
that's our chance to break away and form a sovereign nation of Finland."
And ... to that end a couple of thousand young Finnish men
sneak out to Germany, which they're not supposed to be doing because remember
Finland is officially part of Russia, they sneak out to Germany to get military training.
And as Russia starts to collapse,
... that Finnish Jäger Battalion is released from service
and they are allowed to go back to Finland and they take most of their guns with them.
And this is one of the early sources of armaments
for what would become known as the Finnish White Army.
Because once they declare independence, Finland breaks apart into a Civil War.
And you have the Whites, the nationalistic, the more Western Europe-oriented White Army
and you have the Red Army, obviously the communist, more Russian-influenced forces.
Now the Whites would end up winning the Civil War.
In large part because of this group of ex-German Army Jägers,
Finns serving in the German Army, who come back and essentially
form the officer core nucleus of the White Army.
And they have a level of military training that the Red Army, the Red Finns in Finland, don't have.
So this has all been a long roundabout way of pointing out why do they have C96s?
Well, they brought C96s back from World War One, along with other guns.
Probably about about 1,900-2,000 C96s come into Finland during the Independence War.
And not all of them came from Germany, most did, some also came in from Russia.
They were used on both sides, ... this was sort of a fairly standard common pistol in the world at that time.
It was certainly one people were familiar with, hundreds of thousands of C96s had been made.
Now in the aftermath of the Civil War,
The Finnish Army ... first they try to buy Ahlberg pistols,
... (I have a video on the Ahlberg) that doesn't go well.
They end up buying a bunch of surplus Rubies from France and they adopt that as the Model 1919 pistol.
And then just a couple of years later they standardise ... instead on the Luger as the m/23.
And so with their adoption of those two (and primarily the Luger)
the C96 is one of those guns that falls into a category of
they are fine, but they use a different calibre of ammunition
... some of them are in 9 Parabellum, the majority of them are in 7.63 Mauser.
So ... most of them are not standard ammo with the Lugers.
There aren't that many of them, like we just don't want to deal with the logistics
and the maintenance and the upkeep, and so ... all of the Mausers
that are in government hands are transferred to the Civil Guard.
And they remain in Civil Guard hands until 1939 when they are recalled,
because, well, the Winter War is going to break out at the end of 1939
and it becomes very clear that the Finnish Army is going to need all the guns that it can get.
And so a lot of Civil Guard arms are brought into official army inventory,
and these C96s are among them.
So it's at that point that it gets an "SA" stamp,
actually, that would be 1942 it gets an SA stamp as officially army property
and would stay in the army for another couple of decades.
So we'll talk about what ended up happening to them in a minute.
For now, let's check out what identifies a Finnish C96 as Finnish.
Now the Finns had C96s in both calibres, but they all share the same basic configuration.
And that we would call the wartime standard commercial pattern.
So we've got the full length barrel, this one is in 7.63 Mauser.
We have the new safety, which is marked there on the back of the hammer "NS".
We've got a short extractor here, we've got the
"Waffenfabrik Mauser, Oberndorf, am Neckar" on the top of the chamber.
The same basic markings here on the side, manufacturer marks.
We have an SA in a box and that is the Finnish army property stamp.
So that was added starting in 1942. It's usually found over here,
but occasionally it'll be like outside of this box or sometimes stamped on this side.
There was no official real standard for exactly where it had to go.
That's just a property mark indicating Finnish ... government ownership.
And then we will have a serial number on the barrel.
And you'll see that serial number on all of the other places you would expect it on a C96,
like the frame, the internal lock assembly, the top of the bolt and so on.
Now that serial number raises some interesting questions.
Just based on the standard serial number table, you would expect
gun number 8,800 and change to have been made in 1897.
But this does not have any of the characteristics of an 1897 production gun.
That would be very early, it'd be cone hammer, it's clearly not this.
There is no official paperwork that anyone has yet discovered
to explain exactly where these guns came from.
But there's a pretty good theory and ... this makes sense to me.
This, as far as I can tell, is pretty much the most widely accepted theory,
and that is that these guns actually came out of the Prussian "Red 9" contract.
So the Prussian government ordered 150,000 C96s in 9mm Parabellum in 1916.
And ... the contract was not completed by the end of the war.
But ... the Finnish guns fall into two categories.
Some of them will have either 4 digit or low 5 digit serial numbers like this one,
but never above about 21,000.
Maybe 23-25,000 depending on what source you look at, but they are all fairly low serial numbers.
And ... by the way, those serial numbers tend to show up
in Scandinavian countries, including a bunch of them Finnish marked.
And it appears that what probably happened is while that Red 9 contract was in place
they would occasionally pull out batches of guns, make them,
use ... the same serial number range, but manufacture them in 7.63mm.
Essentially for delivery to specific clients or units for Germany.
And a good example of this would be guns that were delivered to Finnish troops.
... They were going to get 7.63 calibre guns
for whatever reason that was deemed the more logistically appropriate calibre.
Again, this is all basically speculation,
but it lines up with all the coincidental evidence that we have.
So these are numbers that come out of the Red 9 contract.
... Essentially that's why you have a new serial number range
starting at a time when the regular commercial production serial numbers for C96s
were in the range of like 280-420,000 during the war.
Now there are some Finnish C96s that you'll find
that are in ... the high 200,000 to low 400,000 serial number range.
And those would be guns that came from a different source.
Instead of being directly supplied by the German government, as these low number ones probably were,
those are guns that were acquired privately, acquired commercially,
potentially acquired by the Civil Guard after World War One.
But this is often referred to as the "Scandinavian contract" series.
Guns like this one, 7.63 calibre, no Red 9 grips, but the same configuration as a Red 9 otherwise.
That's a ... name that was created by one of the authors in the collector community.
It's not anything official and ... no one's ever found actual contract paperwork for it.
But if you're interested in these, if you want to find out about them online,
looking for the "Scandinavian contract" as a search term is probably your best way to go about it.
While we are here, this is kind of cool,
this is the holster that this gun has lived in for a very long time.
And it's got some markings in it, I think that's just a name of an owner.
But not exactly sure, looks like "Vomberg" and then something that I can't quite make out.
But a pretty typical sort of holster for a C96.
These would take the standard shoulder stocks and a lot of the Finnish guns
do have the shoulder stocks with them. This one does not, it just has a standard belt holster.
Got a cleaning rod there, and you've got little pouches
for two 10 round stripper clips of ammunition to go along with the gun.
In the aftermath of World War Two, all the guns obviously go back into storage.
And the Finnish Army ends up with an inventory of a lot of weird miscellaneous stuff.
Because basically everything that had been available in the country
and that they'd been able to get as military aid from outside,
everything was dragged into service. And then after the war it's like,
"OK, we've got 200 of that and 500 of this," and it all just goes into inventory.
Finland being a relatively poor nation still, they weren't willing to get rid of anything right away.
Like, "You never know, the Russians might invade us again so let's hold onto it."
Well, by the late 1950s they're starting to surplus out some of the stuff
that's particularly unusable or inefficient for them, and C96 Mausers will be in that list.
So in 1959 Finland makes an export deal with InterArms,
Sam Cummings, a huge international arms dealer working out of the US.
It's a cool deal, like ... he did a deal with Finland trading Sten guns for Carcanos.
That ... was the way that we got ... virtually all of our 7.35 Carcanos into the US.
Anyway, I have a separate video on that story if you are interested.
In 1959 the Finns split apart the C96 Mausers that are in 7.63 from those that are in 9mm.
And they are using 9mm so they keep the 9mm ones,
but they decide that the 7.63 guns like this one, thoroughly obsolete,
we don't need them anymore, and they sell them to InterArms.
They have 359 in inventory, it's like ... really what good are 359
half-century old pistols in a weird proprietary calibre? ... They get rid of those.
They have 637 of the 9mm C96s, those they will keep in inventory until 1965
when they start offering them for sale to Finnish service members.
Which is something that the Finnish Army did for more than just Mausers.
Some of the obsolete stuff like "Yeah, ... we have a price list
and if you're in the service and you want to buy one of these, you're welcome to."
So it would take about 6 years, by the early 1970s those are all sold off to Finnish service members,
and that's basically the end of the C96 in Finnish service.
Very cool to see this one come into the US.
They are not unheard of here of course, because we got all of the 7.63 ones from Sam Cummings.
And some of them have come over in other ways as well.
But fairly rare guns, and I'm a sucker for cool Finnish history pistols.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video. A big thanks to Bear Arms
for letting me have a chance to check out this one.
Thanks for watching.