Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today, courtesy of Ozark Machine Gun,
we have a very cool Ballester-Molina pistol to take a look at.
Now, the Ballester was an Argentine pistol developed in the 1930s.
It looks very much like a 1911, it uses 1911 mags and barrels, but beyond that it's not mechanically interchangeable,
it has much more in common with the Star pistols.
And these were developed for Argentine military use,
and in fact I have a whole separate video on the standard Ballester-Molina.
So if you're not familiar with it, you should take a look at that.
What we have here today is one of the British contract pistols
that were purchased, as far as anyone can tell, for Special Operations Executive.
So the deal with the British Ballester contract was that, as best as anyone can tell,
because there's ... like no original documentation on this
(SOE was a highly secretive organisation),
the deal is that approximately at the time of the Dunkirk evacuation, the British government
approached HAFDASA, the company that manufactured these pistols,
with a request to purchase something like 10,000, between 8,000 and 10,000 of these pistols.
Now, Argentina was a neutral country at that time,
and wasn't really particularly hot to engage in international arms trade with a warring party,
and it would take about two years to obtain the necessary government permissions
for HAFDASA to actually fulfil this order.
Now, ... Argentina in general had a critical shortage of raw materials,
in fact HAFDASA had been an automobile manufacturing company before the war,
and during the war they had to actually shut down automobile production
because they just didn't have the steel to do it.
So, what England did in order to get this contract, in order to facilitate this, to actually make it happen,
was they actually provided the steel that was needed to make the pistols.
It almost certainly was actually delivered by the United States as part of the Lend-Lease program,
and then apparently at least a part of the contract price was paid in steel as well.
This gave the Argentine government more of a reason to accept the deal.
The steel was something that they really needed for a lot of domestic production, and was very useful to them.
So, as a result the contract was originally arranged, again as best as anyone can tell, about 1940,
production did not start until 1942.
Now if you've seen my other video on the Ballester you'll know that these started out as the Ballester-Rigaud,
and then were renamed to Ballester-Molina. All of the British contract guns are Ballester-Molina.
They also are all marked calibre .45, that would later change to calibre 11.25mm after the end of this production run.
On the bottom of the magazine there is one additional mark, this is actually a stylised HA in a diamond
and ... that's for HAFDASA. And that indicates that this is in fact an original Ballester magazine.
These are interchangeable with standard 1911 magazines, so you'll often find them with non-original mags.
Now the Ballesters are serialised on the side of the back strap there.
One of the differences between them and the 1911 is that
that back strap is integral to the frame, not a separate component.
And the British pistols will fall in a range between about 10,000 and 21,000.
Now, it's interesting to note that ... the serial number range composes more guns than what the British actually received.
Now it's really easy to distinguish the British contract guns because
they were all marked with an additional serial number on the side of the frame.
A "B" and then a four digit serial number, or up to four digits.
And those would run from 1 up to approximately 8,000, so this is one of the very last ones.
These serial numbers are not all exactly sequential with
the standard serial numbers that are down on the back strap here.
If you compare, and some people have done this, if you actually compare the difference between
this serial number and this one, you'll find that approximately 25%
of the serial number range did not go to the British. And those pistols are scattered
basically at random throughout the production run.
It's not entirely clear whether those are guns that were rejected by the British for some sort of quality issue,
or if HAFDASA was manufacturing pistols for ... Argentine purchase at the same time as the British ones,
and perhaps they just ... were mixing them up, "We'll send a couple of hundred to the British
and then we'll send some to the Argentine military." That's really not clear.
Now, there are no other markings that the British put on these pistols at the time,
however, this one, and many of the ones that you will find, are proofed.
So this has a pair of British proof marks back here on the slide and frame,
and then also a sort of standard British proofing mark on the barrel.
And what that actually says it's an NP, that's a proof mark itself,
and then the cartridge description here is .45 inch by .900 inch, that's the cartridge case length,
which is .90 which is 23mm, if I remember correctly.
And then 7 tons per square inch is the pressure.
Now this style of proofing was introduced in England in 1955.
What happened was when these pistols were originally purchased by the British they were not given any special markings.
They were issued to SOE. There is some rumour that they were also issued to the 8th Army in North Africa,
but that seems to be probably not the case.
A lot of these pistols survived in beautiful original condition like this one,
and even with their original boxes.
And a lot of those pistols were purchased up by Interarms in the 1950s
and brought into the US to be sold on the surplus market.
Well, when they were sold commercially, these were pistols that came out of British inventory having never been issued,
when they were sold commercially to Interarms they had to be proofed according to British proof law.
So if you find one with these proof marks on it, it means that the pistol was sold commercially by Interarms.
There are some out there that are more likely to be World War Two souvenir pistols that were actually issued,
they are typically in much lesser condition and they don't have any of those proof marks.
So, that's the state ... that the gun would have been in during World war Two.
The proofing only happened in the 1950s.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video. These British contract Ballesters are floating around out there,
but they are relatively scarce to find, and they are definitely one of the cool sub-variants of the Ballester-Molina.
So a big thanks to Ozark Machine Gun for providing this one on loan so that you guys can take a look at it.
If you find yourself in Missouri, definitely make a point to check out his rental range,
they have a whole cool supply of interesting and historical machine guns you can try out there.
Thanks for watching.
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