Tores Tuesday again. The Beholla pistol.
I have previously written about brilliant but inherently flawed pistol designs, the Jägerpistole and the Dreyse model 1907. Both with good qualities that were, sadly, eclipsed by their flaws.
The thing that makes pistols of that age so interesting is that it was the infancy of semiautomatic pistols. Nowadays things are pretty standardized, we know what works and what doesn’t, and the failed designs are scattered on the roadside of pistol invention. Back in WWI and before that was not the case. Myriads of weapon designers were frantically trying to make the next pistol to outcompete the others, and a huge number of more or less flawed ideas were put into production. Some became legends for their style and beauty, like the Mauser C96 and some had long service lives such as the P08 Luger or several of John Moses Brownings designs. Others disappeared, such as the aforementioned ones, or the Sauer model 1913 that really was not bad, but became a victim of its own perfection as it was too costly to produce. The Frommer Stop (later blog) as well simply was too expensive, but also flawed in other ways. The list is long, too long for today’s blog. Suffice it to say that the sheer diversity is enormous, and in a world war where everyone were desperate for arms, anything that could go boom was picked up and used, creating the perfect climate for production of all sorts of quaint guns.
The Beholla pistol was made by Becker & Holländer Waffenbau from 1915 to 1918. They produced about 45000 pistols that were purchased by the German army, mainly for use by NCOs.
It is actually a sturdy little pistol in caliber 7,65 (.32 ACP) and worked quite well in the harsh realities of muddy trenches, so why do I mention it together with flawed designs?
The thing is, once you try to dismantle it for cleaning you will know why. Disassembly and reassembly is a true horror. It is complicated and difficult. Of course, for pedagogic purposes I ought to dismantle it to show an exploded view of the pistol, maybe even make a video of how to take it apart and assemble it, but I will not. I did it once, and that was enough. If I was to show it it would take ages and on the way I would use language that my mother would strongly disapprove of, words that would make seasoned veterans blush! So, nope.
In other words, as with several other pistols of that day and age, there is a reason they stopped making them in 1918.
However, apart from being a sturdy gun it had one major factor that worked in its favor: It was cheap! So, the army bought them.