Two members of the Free Belgian Brigade Piron armed with an Inglis No. Note: some pistols assembled when the factory was under German control do not have the magazine disconnect safety. When the Second World War broke out, Belgium was quickly overrun by the Wehrmacht, which took possession of the FN facilities (referred to as Werk Lüttich) and continued production of Browning Hi-Powers for the German armed forces under the designation 9mm Pistole 640(b). In 1939 Finland purchased 2,400 Hi-Powers from FN (Sotilaspistooli FN M/35 "GP") for use in the Russo-Finnish Winter War against the USSR. The Browning Hi-Power proved an instant success, being purchased over the next few years by the armies of Belgium, China, Estonia, Latvia and Peru. Some shoulder stocks had leather holsters riveted to them, while the Belgian army issued them with a large leather holster with two pockets - one for the pistol and another to hold the stock. It was offered in two versions, one with fixed sights and another with a tangent rear sight adjustable from 50 to 500 meters (1000-meter sights were available as an option for the overly optimistic) and a detachable wooden shoulder stock. Note the M95 Winchester in the snow - was it used by the Finn or the Russian? Saive - who would become FN's chief engineer - combined the best features of the Colt 1911, Browning's prototypes and a number of his own ideas into an entirely new 9mm handgun.Ī Finnish soldier armed with an FN Hi-Power pistol takes a Red Army prisoner. In 1928, the period of patent protection that Colt and FN had agreed upon expired and the Belgian firm appointed Dieudonne Saive as the engineer in charge of the pistol program. He remained at FN - where the workers referred to him as le Maître (the Master) - until his untimely death in 1926. Secondly, despite his reported opposition to the concept, he designed a double-column, 15-round magazine for it.Īfter the French trials, which they did not win, Browning returned to work on his new over-under shotgun. First, instead of the barrel unlocking by the articulation of a link, an integral cam on the bottom of the barrel pulled it down to unlock it from the slide during recoil. Both were single-action striker-fired pistols, but the first was a blowback design, while the second utilized a variation of the locking system Browning had developed for the Model 1911.īut with the second pistol, Browning included two radical improvements over the 1911. Within short order, he presented them with a pair of functioning toolroom models. In 1921, FN asked Browning to design a high capacity, 9mm Parabellum pistol for upcoming French army trials. The wily Belgians saw the commercial possibilities of the new pistol and signed a contract with Browning. FN had been founded to manufacture Mauser rifles for the Belgian army, but with the contract fulfilled, was casting about for other products so as to keep the assembly lines humming. Berg, the American representative of Fabrique Nationale d'Armes de Guerre (FN), of Herstal, Belgium. While the Hartford, Conn., maker was not too keen on diverging from revolvers, the semiauto pistol's rising popularity was obvious and Colt eventually purchased U.S. patents for a semiauto pistol were granted in April of 1897. In the 1890s, Browning's mechanical genius turned to the design of automatic firearms and his first U.S. 22 pistols to 37mm cannon, he is perhaps best remembered for his semiautomatic pistols. While Browning designed everything from single-shot. The commercial successes of Colt, Fabrique Nationale, Remington and Winchester were all based to one degree or another upon Browning-designed firearms. To say his designs were commercially successful would be a gross understatement when you consider the influence this one man had upon the world's arms industries.
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