[ Belgian Army GP-35 ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we are taking a look at
the most common pre-war Browning High Power.
And that is the Belgian army contract for them,
complete with all of its associated ephemera.
So what we have here is the pistol, the shoulder stock, the magazine pouch
and ... sort of the all-encompassing scabbard there.
Now a little bit of background here.
Belgium was the first country to actually adopt the Browning High Power,
which ... makes sense given that this was developed and produced by FN in Belgium.
... Well, to really go back, development of the pistol starts in 1921/1922
with a response to a French army request for trials pistols.
John Browning puts together the initial gun that FN sent to trials.
His apprentice, who becomes his replacement head designer at FN after Browning's death,
a gentleman by the name of Dieudonné Saive,
he does most of the actual work developing this pistol.
And it will develop through until about 1930,
when the French development trials and the Browning High Power sort of split ways.
FN has been working for basically 10 years at this point to develop a pistol for the French army.
They keep changing their mind about what they want and changing requirements,
but the pistol that FN has now is well enough developed
that they think it's suitable to get contracts from other countries.
So they kind of set it aside to market it as what's called at that point the
or the "high efficiency" military pistol.
They continue to develop more French trials pistols,
that'll go into the mid-1930s, and ultimately FN will get nothing out of it.
The Belgian government takes an interest in the
and in 1933 they order a batch of 1,000 of them for field trials, those trials run into 1934.
There are just a couple of pretty minor changes that they want in that pistol.
And by the way, I have a whole video on the
so if you're interested in this, check out that video.
Skipping forward a bit, the Belgian army formally adopts the gun as the GP-35 in 1935,
and that is the
Their first deliveries come in May of 1935.
And the Belgian army, their priority is to send these guns out to a lot of special troops and NCOs.
So they're issued to motorcycle messengers, tank crews,
machine gunners and assistant machine gunners,
all the guys who really don't need to be equipped with a full-length rifle
but they need some sort of compact handy weapon.
The concept here is not just that it is a sidearm,
but that when equipped with a shoulder stock it becomes sort of an intermediate
carbine style of weapon, it has a little more extended range and that sort of thing.
Now, time will tell if this is actually a practical useful concept,
but that's how the Belgians approach it.
By 1938 they've got enough of the guns
from FN to pretty much fully equip all of those special troops and NCOs.
And in 1939 and 1940 they switched to starting to equip their officer corps
with Browning High Powers instead of old FN Model of 1900s, mostly.
By the time Germany invades Belgium they have taken into service
something like 30,000, maybe 35,000 of these pistols.
There are a number of other contracts that FN gets in this like 5 years of pre-war time period.
They sell them to Estonia, to Lithuania, to Paraguay,
they sell some to China, they sell them to Finland.
But ... the Belgian orders account for something like
twice as much as all the other orders put together.
So if you're looking for a pre-war High Power, this is the one that you're most likely to find.
So let's take a look at exactly what you should expect to see
on a ... pre-war Belgian High Power.
So, here we have a really nice example of a Belgian pre-war High Power.
Let's see, a couple of things to look into, let's start with markings.
We have two serial numbers here on the side.
FN had kind of a weird practice with serial numbers
where they would assign batches, but make the guns out of order.
You ... can't make any assumptions about
date of production based on pre-war serial numbers, unfortunately.
It's a complicated and weird system, and ...
it's not of much practical benefit to historians or collectors today.
Up on the barrel here we've got a series of Belgian proof marks.
There's a serial number on the barrel but ... it's like right here,
but on the opposite side inside the gun, so kind of hidden.
And then of course your calibre marking, these are in 9mm Parabellum
as are all of the pre-war High Powers.
On the left side we have FN's markings, so
Fabrique Nationale D'Armes de Guerre, Herstal, Belgique
Browning's patent, patented over there.
Then we have a combination of Belgian proof marks, which are the last three here,
and military inspection marks.
That H in a circle is a military inspection mark: you'll find it on the slide, on the frame,
out here on the slide again,
on the back of the magazine down there. It's kind of all over the place.
And then we also have two of these PH marks,
those are the military final ... acceptance marks.
So the Hs are all done during the manufacturing process, prior to the bluing.
These two are done after bluing, so they look a little bit different,
and they'll be a little bit raised up as a result.
The sights on these guns go out to 500 metres in 50 metre increments.
But there are actually two different versions, they're both 500 metres.
This is one of the patterns, and it has a pretty sharply sloped ramp here underneath the sight.
The other pattern is pretty much flat, and it goes out to 500 metres,
but the markings are spaced out all the way up to the front end of the tangent.
So that was just a change that FN made during production.
And you'll find ... those differences kind of just scattered throughout the contract.
The guns are of course cut for shoulder stocks.
If you're getting deep into the nitty-gritty details here
and you want to make sure that you don't have a faked gun,
a couple of things to point out are the divot
(the deepened hole here for the little locking peg on the stock),
and then up at the top of the slot the machining changes a little bit
as they come up the side here and then cut that top profile.
So you can see what that looks like there, ... there's a little bit of a ledge,
and it gets a little bit wider at the top of the stock slot, and that's how it should look.
And just a quick bit on the magazine. These will have phosphated bodies.
It's an aluminium follower, kind of interesting.
And this sort of split tail floor plate on the magazine, which
you can kind of see why they replaced that,
because it's not the world's most secure style of floor plate.
Here is one of the original Belgian stocks.
Early production ones will actually have the full serial number of the gun stamped here.
This one, the later ones, do not.
However, they do have ...
basically that same military approval stamp that you'll see on the gun.
That'll be located back here by the carry bar.
One of the interesting details about the Belgian military stocks is they were just a flat board.
The standard commercial stock that FN made for most of these pistols
was a board stock that actually had a leather holster riveted to it.
And these three holes were used to rivet the holsters on.
Well the Belgian army wanted something different.
They actually wanted a scabbard where you could put in the gun and the [stock] separately,
so you didn't always have the holster flopping around on the outside of all of your equipment.
But ... FN still drilled these holes in the stock.
And I suspect the reason for that is an industrial one.
I suspect, with no proof whatsoever,
that when they were manufacturing the stocks you got a blank piece of wood,
drilled these three holes first, and then you use them
to set the stock on a jig (with pegs through these holes) to cut the outer profile.
Then after the stock was all shaped, they would go in and countersink these holes for rivets.
So for the Belgian army guns
they had to drill the holes so that they could actually manufacture the thing.
But they didn't bother to countersink it because they weren't attaching a holster to it.
So here is the scabbard that they used, or holster I guess you could call it.
Attachment there. Once you open this up
this has pockets for both the gun here on top, and the [stock] on the inside.
So you can draw the pistol while leaving the [stock] in place.
You can draw both and attach the ... stock onto the back of the pistol.
A couple of belt loops on the back, D-rings if you want to attach a shoulder strap to it.
But that's what they used instead of actually riveting the holster onto the board itself.
And then there was one more piece of web gear that the Belgian army issued with these pistols,
and that is a double magazine pouch.
There are your two spare magazines.
The gun came with three mags total, one in the gun, two in the pouch.
Now along with the early stocks being serialised,
originally the leather parts were also serialised.
They stopped bothering to do that in 1938, and they switched to just date stamping them.
This is "AC", which stands for
and then a two-digit date code, so it's a 1939 magazine pouch.
The stamp on the ... scabbard is a little bit fainter, but it's also a 1939 scabbard.
Shipment of High Powers to the Belgian army of course ended
when Germany invaded and occupied Belgium in May of 1940.
And the Germans saw the benefit in this pistol.
... In many ways this is the most advanced pistol in military service
in 1940, at the beginning of World War Two.
It's got a high capacity magazine ... for the time, 13 rounds.
It's an ergonomic pistol.
It's frankly one of the best pistols of World War Two, and the Germans recognised this.
So when they occupied FN, they simply continued Browning High Power production
and put them into German service.
There's a whole variety of different variations of German guns
which we'll go into in a different video.
But what the Germans pretty quickly decided is that this whole
500 metre tangent-sight shoulder-stock stuff is pretty much impractical nonsense.
And really it didn't do the Belgians much good during the invasion.
And the trend of having a stocked pistol with the long-range sights
really would come to a halt with the end of World War Two.
So, FN would go on to sell a lot of High Powers after World War Two,
but they're more commonly now no longer being ordered with stocks,
and ... attached holsters and all that sort of stuff.
So not only are the Belgian guns the most common pre-war ones,
but they're also the most common ones to find (maybe short of the Inglis Chinese guns),
but they're some of the most common ones to find with the actual shoulder stocks.
Anyway, I have rambled on at some length here, hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Definitely if you like this, check out the previous video I did on the
And if you like that, I also have a video on the Grand Browning,
which is FN's version of the 1911 more or less.
That's also a really interesting piece of forgotten FN/John Browning history.
Anyway, thanks for watching.