Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on FogottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, I am here today at the Rock Island Auction House,
and I'm taking a look at a pistol here today
that I've got a lot of requests to do a video on.
and that is the Polish Vis 35, commonly called the "Radom".
Radom is kind of a misnomer, Radom is the name of the town
where ... the factory was located where these were manufactured.
It's actually not the name of the pistol at all, but because
it's written on the side of the slide, that's kind of become
the standard nomenclature for the gun here in the United States.
At any rate, these pistols were the ... new
and becoming standard Polish Army pistol in World War Two.
And what's interesting about them is after Poland was occupied
the Germans actually put this pistol into significant production.
To the point that by 1945 this was actually the third most common pistol
in German military usage, behind the P08 Luger and the P38.
So a whole ton of these were manufactured.
In total about 46,000 were made pre-war by the Poles,
and then an additional 305,000, a third of a million basically,
were manufactured by the Germans during the occupation of Poland.
So, if we look at this externally, ...
kind of the simplest way to describe this would be sort of a 9mm 1911.
But that's not really quite accurate.
It has some elements much more similar to the Browning High Power.
And it has some items to it that are kind of novel for the time.
So, taking a look here this is our late gun, this is our earlier gun,
and I'll go over the differences in a moment.
What we see is a single action gun that actually has a de-cocking lever,
right there, which is a kind of unusual feature at the time, the 1930s.
And then we have ... an automated grip safety, but no manual thumb safety.
So those are the distinguishing features of the Vis 35.
Now the history of this pistol goes back to the mid to late 1920s.
In 1927 the Polish military held its first major pistol trial
to figure out what was the best automatic pistol out there to adopt for the army.
And they tested a bunch of different guns. They tested the FN ... Browning 1903,
the FN 1910/22, the CZ 24 from Czechoslovakia, they tested the P08 Luger.
They tested a couple of other guns.
And their characteristics ... basically they wanted kind of a small pistol,
most of what they tested were guns in .380 calibre.
And it just kind of happened that when FN brought its 1903 and 1922 models to the testing,
they also brought the 1926 version of what would become the Browning High Power.
And it didn't meet the requirements of the Polish military, primarily because it was far too heavy.
But they brought it along anyway.
And it turns out that they did all the testing on the legitimate candidates for the pistol,
and then ... most of these testing officers took a look at this proto-High Power and really liked it.
Despite the fact that it didn't really meet the Polish service requirements.
So this testing came up with the CZ 24 being probably the best gun according to the tests.
The FN 1922 was also acceptable and was the least expensive of the guns.
And ... there was a follow-up trial in 1929,
and once again FN brought along its most current version of the High Power.
So by the end of this 1929 follow-up trial the Polish military kind of changed its mind,
and realised that the High Power from FN was definitely a better gun than a CZ 24,
and better than everything else that they'd been testing.
So they actually made the decision to adopt the High Power,
and at that point things kind of went awry.
The Polish government was also purchasing BAR rifles from FN under the moniker wz.28,
and that whole contract process did not go well.
There were issues with quality, issues with timetables, scheduling,
and it really soured relations between the Polish government and FN.
So the planned adoption of the High Power kind of fell through at this point
because of the problems with the BAR contract.
So by 1932 what the Polish had kind of decided to do was
... they still wanted the same pistol but they figured,
"We've got this local domestic arms industry that we've been
putting a lot of money into developing, let's just build this ourselves."
So there was a Polish designer who filed a patent in 1932 that covers a lot of the elements of the Vis 35.
A telescoping recoil spring guide rod, a couple of other elements in there.
But it was kind of a cleverly done patent to sidestep some of FN's patents on the High Power,
and legitimise the Polish manufacture of this gun,
which is in many ways kind of a copy of the High Power.
... The history in Poland doesn't talk about this being
derived from the High Power, but it absolutely was.
They had been testing those guns, they had seen those guns,
they knew how they worked, and they liked them.
And that's the design that they used as a starting point for this.
So, the interesting debacle:
by like 1934 they were ready to start producing these guns,
but the Polish cavalry department objected.
Now in the original design the way the guns were de-cocked
was to actually use the disassembly lever right here.
And what you would do is lock the pistol open
using the disassembly lever.
And then you could pull the trigger and it would allow the hammer to drop.
The gun being completely out of battery, the mechanical safety prevented it from firing.
But that was how you could de-cock the gun was lock it open, pull the trigger, done.
Now, this was covered in the patent on this pistol,
and it seems that the cavalry department didn't ... realise,
didn't understand this the same way that everyone else did.
The real reason for this thing to have been patented was that
the designer was getting paid by the Polish government for rights to his patent claims.
And if he added an extra patent claim, that was an extra item he was getting paid for.
So this de-cocking method was really in there as a way
for the designer to get more money out of the Polish government.
The cavalry department actually took it seriously, unlike apparently everyone else,
and insisted that it wasn't a good enough mechanism
for de-cocking and they wanted a better one.
And they threatened to derail the entire adoption process if they didn't get it.
So the engineers went back to the drawing board and spent another year or two
figuring out how to squeeze a de-cocking mechanism
into this little teeny bit of a slide back here.
And they actually did a quite impressive job.
When we take this apart we'll take a closer look at exactly how the de-cocker works.
It's pretty slick.
There is really some question as to is a de-cocker really necessary for a gun like this?
They've been around for quite some time, it wasn't like there was a rash of
problems and fatalities from people accidentally shot while attempting to de-cock cavalry pistols.
But that's politics for you, that's bureaucracy, and that's how the development ultimately went.
At any rate, ... 1935 the gun is finished, formally adopted as the Vis 35.
This was initially WiS 35, with the W and the S being the initials of two of the men behind the project.
That was changed actually ... as they were doing the de-cocker,
they actually also changed the name to Vis 35, which is the Latin term for power.
And in Polish it's pronounced exactly the same, the W is pronounced like a V,
so changing it from WiS to Vis didn't change the pronunciation
but eliminated the potential of confusion with things like Webley & Scott.
And I suppose they may have wanted it to be a little bit less ego related for the designers.
Anyway, by the fourth quarter of 1936 they actually had production beginning on the guns,
and ramped up until by 1939 they were actually at full-scale production.
And as I mentioned earlier, they managed to get 46,000 of these guns manufactured
and completed by the time the Germans invaded.
Now those guns are very nicely finished, they've got Polish eagles on the side of them.
When the Germans invaded they captured the factory at Radom pretty much completely intact,
and with a whole mess of pistol parts in various stages of fabrication.
So the Germans decided that this was a good pistol, it was in their 9mm issue cartridge,
they decided to continue production.
They put the Radom factory under the control of Steyr in Austria.
And what Steyr did was, first off, they took about 2,500 guns and produced them.
... They had about 2,500 guns worth of parts
that were already finished and just not assembled.
So Steyr used those guns as basically practice for assembling and getting the factory running.
And then they started in on production of new guns.
So the ... fully German-produced guns start at a serial number range of about 49,000.
And continue ... in serial number blocks up to a total of about 305,000.
So final assembly was done in Austria, but all the parts fabrication was done at Radom.
That barrel fitting and final assembly in Austria was to prevent theft and sabotage, and that sort of thing.
However ... for a couple years there was an ongoing scheme by some of the Polish workers,
many of the Polish workers actually,
to smuggle guns out of the factory to provide to the Polish Home Army.
And they came up [with] kind of a clever solution to this,
what they did was actually duplicate serial numbers on guns.
So the German inspectors were checking to make sure that every gun matched,
thinking that this would prevent anyone from stealing a part, because then you'd have a mismatched gun.
Their inspection regime didn't accommodate for the possibility of a ... serial number being duplicated.
So what would happen was the factory workers would make two guns...
Typically they were making about 200 guns a day, and they would duplicate a single serial number each day.
So you'd have two guns with the same serial number,
they would both pass inspection and look fine.
And then one of them could be smuggled out of the factory,
but that serial number was still accounted for in the final production.
And so no one was the wiser, until September of 1942 when the scheme was discovered.
About a hundred workers at Radom were rounded up by the Germans.
A bunch of them were sent to concentration camps, 50 of them were hanged in public at Radom.
Not a good day for the Poles.
And unfortunately that was the end of that scheme. ...
And after that, by the way, they added a third Waffenamt proof mark to the guns.
It was a slightly different version of the stamp, it was held in very tight security.
They change procedures to make sure that this sort of duplication and theft couldn't continue.
Now, as the war progressed quality on these guns decreased, the finish quality primarily.
And late in production they actually developed a revised version
that did not have the disassembly lever. It was cheaper to produce.
The main guns were known as the P35(p), Pistole 1935.
And then the final (p) was for Polish, indicating country of origin, this was in German service.
These later versions without the disassembly lever were known as the P35(p2),
to indicate the second variation.
Some other simplifications here, they actually replaced the cross pins with rivets.
So they are not easily disassembleable, that was simply a way to make them cheaper to produce.
And actually why don't we take this opportunity to take a closer look at disassembly of these,
and some of the clever design elements that went into the Radom.
It really was one of the highest quality pistols of World War Two, and a slick design.
Alight, now there are several different variations recognised by collectors.
The first ones are the actual Polish production guns, I do not have one of those.
The second version, basically the second main variation,
are the German production guns with the disassembly lever.
And then you have the third variation of German produced guns without the disassembly lever.
Those are the three main ones. We have these two here today to take a look at.
We will do most of our looking at this particular one.
So this is a de-cocker, drops the hammer.
This is a slide stop. This gun, like a 1911 or High Power, locks open when it's empty.
And then this lever is for disassembly.
So to disassemble it what I'm going to do is
pull this back and lock it open right there.
Now you'll notice on a 1911 there's an extra tube here on the outside of the gun
that has a spring and a couple of detents for the manual safety and the slide stop.
What the Poles did was actually, and this is quite clever,
the slide stop is held in place by a flat surface on the slide stop pin
that's pushed on by the main recoil spring.
So they don't need an extra spring and detent
here on the side of the frame to hold it in place.
Alright, so to disassemble this piece I'm going to take the magazine out first.
And then I need to lock the slide open
on the disassembly lever, right there. That just holds the slide in place.
Now, because this is held in place by spring tension from the mainspring,
all I have to do to release it is flip the gun over, pull this forward,
and it will simply fall out.
Just like that.
So no idiot mark scratches on the gun like you might get with a 1911.
Once that is out then ... release the disassembly lever,
the slide comes off the front of the frame.
Now I can take my recoil spring, pull it out, it is captive.
And I think I mentioned this before, it is actually a telescoping guide rod in there.
Now there's good reason for that.
During initial testing, when they did drop testing on this pistol, they found that
from like a 6 foot drop it would actually fire when it hit the ground, which is a problem.
The way they remediated that was by telescoping the guide rod spring,
which made it slightly easier for the slide to bounce out of battery from inertia.
And once it was out of battery the mechanical safety in the gun would prevent it from firing.
So that telescoping guide rod was there primarily as a drop safety mechanism.
Now pull the barrel out. This has a linkless barrel, similar to the High Power.
So this angled surface acts to pull the barrel down and push it back up.
This is a Browning locking style system.
And then lastly we have our de-cocker. ...
So in order to explain the de-cocker I want to start by pointing out
that we have this little piece sticking up right here on both sides of the ejector.
And when I fire the gun, that drops like so.
Now it works both ways. That goes down when I pull the trigger,
and if I push down on that it will drop the hammer.
So, the de-cocker does two things,
you can see that foot, right here, that comes down.
That impinges on that little piece on the side of the ejector,
and that's what trips the sear and drops the hammer.
At the same time when you run the de-cocker,
you are also camming the firing pin, right there, back into the slide.
So when I run this lever, by the time this foot comes down and fires the gun,
I have automatically pulled the firing pin in so that the hammer won't hit it.
So that's how you get a safe de-cocking mechanism.
Now, on the later version that doesn't have a [disassembly] lever
this is slightly more difficult, but still not too bad.
What you do there is simply pull the slide back
until
this cutout lines up with the slide stop pin.
And then I can do the same thing.
The trick here is without the [disassembly] lever
you have to manually hold the slide in the right position,
while releasing tension on the mainspring. And that's a little bit trickier.
So, I will leave that one alone. ... That was the advantage of the ... disassembly lever,
is it held the slide in the correct position for you when you were doing this.
So overall the Vis 35 was a well thought-out, well designed, and well-built pistol.
They were quite popular with German troops.
They are still popular today with people who recognise what they really are.
It is a single-stack magazine, so it holds a total of 8 cartridges of 9mm Parabellum.
They tend to shoot well, they tend to fit the hand well,
and really quite good guns that are underappreciated.
Thanks for watching guys, I hope you enjoyed the video.
Like I mentioned at the beginning, I've had a lot of people ask me
to do a video on the P35, or the Vis 35, and hopefully you enjoyed this one.
Now, both of these examples are coming up here for sale at Rock Island.
If you'd like either one of them, take a look at the description text below.
You'll find links to the Rock Island catalogue pages on both,
where you can check out the other guns that they are batched with in the high-res pictures.
And if you're interested, you could place a bid on one or both right on the website.
Thanks for watching.