Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we're going to take a look
at the Belgian Army High Power pistol, the GP-35
or Grande Puissance Trente Cinq, which is High Power in French.
This was the last pistol design from John Browning,
and in fact, he only really got it started
and it was actually a design that was completed by
basically his protégé at FN, a man named Dieudonné Saive.
And this pistol went through a fairly lengthy
development process through the 1920s and into the 1930s.
And it was finally in 1933 that the Belgian Army decided
they kind of liked what they were seeing, and they ordered 1,000 of the pistols for field trials.
It took a little while to get them actually into production at FN, but over the winter of 1934-35
they were put into production and the guns were delivered to the Belgians in 1935.
Hence their official designation as the GP-35.
Now the original guns that were introduced had just a couple of little
minor differences from the final production version that would be mass-produced.
And so the the Belgians took these first 1,000, ran them through trials,
liked them, and then as best I can tell they actually took those 1,000 trials guns and
just sent them straight off to the army. So they were officially adopted
although they don't bear all the same acceptance marks as the later production guns.
They then started ordering guns and the Belgian military, or the Belgian government,
placed orders and received orders for High Power pistols from 1935 through 1939.
Obviously they stopped in 1939 when World War Two broke out.
The Germans would show up and occupy Herstal and Liège, and what was interesting is,
as the Germans did in some cases, they decided that these High Power pistols,
being chambered for 9mm Parabellum, would make a nice addition to German military stockpiles.
So not only did they confiscate what pistols they were able to capture,
they also took over the FN production facilities, and continued the production of the existing pistols.
So the first batch of German production High Powers was actually
manufactured using existing stocks of Belgian army parts.
The Germans would then go on and simplify production over the course of their occupation,
get rid of some of the kind of extraneous features of the guns. But...
At any rate, that's diverging from the original Belgian army contract guns, which is what we're here to take a look at.
So let's take a closer look.
This is one of those first 1,000 pistols that was delivered to the Belgian Army for trials.
And there's one particularly distinctive feature about it, and that is the ejection port.
It is a very distinctly oval-shaped ejection port, and that was in fact changed after the trials,
they wanted to alter the ejection pattern of the guns.
And so FN decided to kind of open up the corners, the bottom corners, of the ejection port.
And the resulting pattern, which looked like this pistol in the back,
is what would be used on all subsequent High Power production.
When the Belgians adopted these they were still interested in having a ... shoulder stock option on their handguns,
and so these pistols were supplied with tangent rear sights that go out to 500 metres.
You'll notice that the markings on this ... rear sight, only go about half way up.
The reason for that is that commercially FN was also offering this pistol with 1,000 metre rear sights,
and the only difference here is they left the top markings off of these short sights.
So in order to maintain the same machine profile for the sight base,
they compressed the 500 metre marks just down at the bottom and left that alone.
That would change later, we'll take a look at that in a moment.
Unlike many of the other stocks out there for automatic pistols which would usually serve as holsters as well,
the High Power was supplied with a very narrow wood flat board stock that had a leather holster attached to it.
Or at least this was the typical FN commercial/military option.
If you wanted to buy these pistols from FN, this is what they would mostly be happy to sell you.
Well, the trials guns used this style of rig, that's what they were supplied with,
but the actual general purchased Belgian High Powers used...
They had just the wood stock without a holster attached. The Belgians in fact had this kind of
interesting scabbard sort of sheath system where you actually had a,
kind of like this holster but on a larger scale, where you opened it up and you had one pocket for the pistol
and then a separate pocket behind it to hold your flat board wooden stock.
So unfortunately I don't have one of those here to show you, but
the board stock itself is basically identical, just without having this holster attached.
In order to fit those stocks all of the Belgian army High Powers have a slot milled in the back.
Couple things to note here, because people do occasionally try to fake these,
the stock slot gets just slightly wider at the top where
apparently what they were doing is they were taking an end mill up here, and then they opened it up in
a little bit of a circle at the top. And it's also cut a little bit deeper at the top as well.
So just a couple of details to look at if you happen to be inspecting one.
The magazines for these original early guns also have a few distinctive features to them.
All of the Belgian army pre-war magazines will have a blued base plate with this split tail.
That's there just as a retention spring to keep the floor plate from coming off.
They then have a matt finish, a Parkerised or phosphated magazine body, and an aluminium follower.
The magazines for the Belgian army pistols have a few distinctive features to them as well,
and this goes for all of the pre-war Belgian army magazines.
They'll have a blued base plate with this sort of split tail retention spring that prevents the base plate from coming off.
They then have a phosphated magazine body and an aluminium follower.
And then there will be a little inspector's mark on the base of the magazine on the back of the body.
After the trials were successfully concluded production really got going,
and as I said the ... Belgian Army would be buying these guns for about four years in various batches.
And this is pretty much the typical style, well, this is the typical style that they would purchase.
We have the expanded squared off ejection port here.
We have the internal extractor right there, that wouldn't change until after the war.
Now this one is serial number 30,000 and change.
These guns have three matching serial numbers on them, there will be one on the frame,
one on the slide, and one on the barrel. And on most of the Belgian ones
... the barrel serial number is actually on the inside, so you have to take the gun apart to see it.
There will also be a whole mess of proof marks on the barrel, as well as on the other side on the slide.
This is basically just the whole set of standard Belgian national proof marks.
On the other side we have manufacturer marks for Fabrique Nationale D'Armes de Guerre, Herstal, Belgique.
Browning's patent, which this is originally based on. Here are our Belgian national proof marks on the slide.
Belgian proof marks on the frame.
There is also a little... this is an "H" in a circle up here on the front end of the slide,
and that is an inspector's mark that was added in the factory by a Belgian military inspector.
But that was also done before the gun was finished.
Then we have these two marks right here, which are Belgian military acceptance marks.
You'll note if we look at these in the right light, you can see that they kind of look a little bit different,
and the metal just around the stamp is kind of bulged upwards. That's because these stamps were
put on after the gun was completely finished in the factory, so they're done over the bluing.
... When you make a stamp like this, you're going to press some of the metal up around the stamp.
Normally with marks like these,
that metal would then be polished down along with everything else before the gun was blued.
These are of course done after the bluing process, so that's why they look a bit different.
Now this gun, serial number about 30,000, still has the same style of rear sight as the trials guns.
This would change at about 40,000. Sometime between 1938 and '39
FN adopted a slightly different version of rear sight.
Namely this rear sight right here, where they recut the profile you can see of the sight base here,
and expanded the markings to use the full length of the the rear sight leaf.
This would be the standard pattern for the remainder of Belgian production,
and the Belgian guns got to a serial number right about 50,000,
I think actually it was just shy of 50,000, when the German occupation happened.
Guns after that will have Waffenamt markings.
There were three different Waffenamt codes used for FN over the course of the war, the first one was 613.
So a German occupation gun like this one will be marked with WaA 613 markings.
You'll notice it does not have any Belgian national proofs, nor does it have ... any Belgian army acceptance marks.
When the Germans took over this would have been a gun that was in the parts bins, having not been
completed or assembled yet. And so they did that under their own direction.
And they did also mark their magazines, you can see a little Waffenamt right there on the base of this magazine.
Now the Germans weren't interested in this shoulder stocked pistol nonsense,
so while the early production German guns have slots in them, they have those because they
were already manufactured that way by FN. The frames that had been completed to that point.
So as the war progressed and as the Germans used up the various stockpiles of parts at FN,
when they were making new parts they simplified a lot of these extraneous features.
So the Germans would stop putting in stock slots,
they would stop using tangent sights and switch to just a fixed rear notch sight.
And the Germans never used shoulder stocks on these guns.
They had their own style of holster which was this one, very similar to what they would use
in other German pistols. So it's just a flap holster with space for a spare magazine in it.
The High Power ended up being one of FN's really landmark successful pistols. They were
ultimately adopted by a very large number of countries,
some large, some small. The entire British ... military standardised on the High Power at one point.
Everything from that down to a bunch of very small countries.
So there's a lot of variability out there in High Powers, mostly in some of the small details.
So hopefully you enjoyed getting a chance to take a look at these,
the very first batch of High Powers adopted by a military force.
If you do enjoy this sort of thing do consider checking out my Patreon page,
it is support from folks there at a buck a month that makes it possible for me to
travel to collections, find guns like these, and bring them to you.
Thanks for watching.