Radom's Vis 35: Poland's Excellent Automatic Pistol

hi guys thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten weapons comm 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 gotten a lot of requests to do a video on and that is the Polish vis 35 commonly called the radon radon is kind of a misnomer radon is the name of the town where these were where the factory was located with you are 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 standard 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 po8 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 three hundred and five thousand the third of a million basically were manufactured by the Germans during the occupation of Poland so if we look at this externally it kind of the simplest way to describe this would be sort of a nine millimeter 1911 but that's not really quite accurate it has some elements much more similar to the browning hi-power and it has some items to it that are kind of novel for the time so taking a look here see this is our late gun this is our earlier gunman well I'll go over the differences in a moment what we see is a single action gun that actually has a decocking lever right there which is a kind of unusual feature at the time 1930s and then we have a automatic automated rip 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 what was the best automatic pistol out there to adopt for the army and they tested a bunch of different guns they tested the the FN 1903 Browning 1903 the FN nineteen 10/22 the cz 24 from Czechoslovakia they tested the POA Luger they tested a couple of other guns and they their characteristics basically they wanted kind of a small pistol most of what they tested were guns in 380 caliber and it just kind of happened that when FN brought its 1903 in 1922 models to the testing they also brought the the 1926 version of what would become the browning hi-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 the legitimate candidates for pistol and then they also 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 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 so there was a follow up trial in 1929 and once again FN brought along its most current version of the hot power so by the end of this 1929 follow up trial the Polish military kind of changed its mind and realized that the the high power from FN was definitely a better gun than a cz 24 and better than everything else that they've 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 var rifles from FN under the moniker W z28 and that whole contract process did not go well there are issues with quality issues with timetables and scheduling and it really soured relations between the Polish government and FM so the planned adoption of the high-power kind of fell through at this point because of problems the BA our contract so by 1932 what the Polish had kind of decided to do was they won that 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 other elements in there but it was kind of a cleverly done patent to sidestep some of FM's patents on high power and and legitimize the Polish manufacturer of this gun which is in many ways kind of a copy of the high power they had certainly they don't that 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 the interesting debacle by 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 D cocked was to actually use the disassembly lever right here and what you would do is lock the pistol open using 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 decock 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 really didn't realize 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 he had two extra patent claim that was an extra item he was getting paid for so this D 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 decocking 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 decocking 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 decocker works it's it's pretty slick there is really some question as to is a decocker really necessary for gun like this you know 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 decock cavalry pistols but that's politics for you that's bureaucracy and that's how the development ultimately went at any rate by the fourth quarter of well 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 one day as they were doing the decocker they actually also changed the name to vis 35 which is the the Latin term for power and in Polish is pronounced exactly the same the W is pronounced like a V so changing it from W is to V is 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 eco related for the designers anyway by the fourth quarter of 1936 they actually had had production beginning on the guns and ramped up until by 1939 they're 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 a trade arm pretty much completely attacked 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 9-millimeter issue cartridge they decided to continue production they put the raid on factory under the control of steyr in Austria and what steyr did was first off they took about 2,500 guns and produced them so these are 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 German the fully German produced guns start at the serial number range of about 49,000 and continue up to in serial number blocks up to a total of about three hundred and five thousand so final assembly was done in Austria but all the parts fabrication was done a trade on that barrel fitting and final assembly in Austria was to prevent theft and sabotage and that sort of thing however there was actually for a couple years there was an ongoing scheme by some of the 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 that kind of a clever solution to this what they did was actually duplicate serial numbers on guns so the the German inspectors were checking to make sure that every gun matched thinking that this would prevent any you know anyone from stealing apart because then you'd have a dispatched gun there inspection regime didn't accommodate for the possibility of a gun being a of a serial number being duplicated so what would happen was the the factory pretty were curse 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 both pass inspection and look fine and 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 the scheme was discovered about a hundred workers at radon were rounded up by the Germans a bunch of them were sent to concentration camps 50 of them were hanged in public a trade on not a good day for the poles and unfortunately that was the end of that scheme but and after that by the way they added a third Wafaa not 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 actually developed a revised version that did not have the disassembly lever it was cheaper to produce the main guns were known as the the P 35 P P Stoll 1935 and then the final P was for polish indicating country of origin this was in in German service these later versions without the disassembly lever were known as the P 35 P 2 to indicate the second variation some other simplifications here they actually replace the cross pins with rivets so they are not easily disassembled 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 raid on it really was one of the the highest quality pistols of World War two and a slick design all right now there are several different variations recognized 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 a 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 and we will do most of our looking at this particular one so this is a decocker 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 guttin 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 a 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 remove release the disassembly lever 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 six foot drop you 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 a gun would prevent it from firing so that telescoping guide rod was there primarily as a drop safety mechanism now I can pull the barrel out this has a linked list 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 decocker now - so in order to explain the decocker 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 decocker does two things you can see that 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 decocker 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 D cocking mechanism now on the later version that doesn't have a decocking 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 decocking 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's that was the advantage of the slide stop the the disassembly lever is it held the sliding 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 recognize what they really are it is a single stack magazine so holds total of eight cartridges nine millimetre 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 P 35 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 liked either one of them take a look at the description text below you'll find links to the the Rock Island catalog pages on both where you can check out the other guns that they are batched with and the high-res pictures if you're interested you could place a pin on one or both right on the website thanks for watching you

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 870,870

Rating: 4.9382987 out of 5

Keywords: poland, pole, polish, radom, wis, vis, 35, 1935, high power, hi power, german, germany, steyr, waa, nazi, occupy, occupation, fb, broni, waffenamt, waffenamp, pistol, 9mm, 9x19, parabellum, best, quality, handgun, sidearm, p35(p), three lever, two lever, p35

Id: mSH9VvQAvog

Length: 18min 47sec (1127 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 09 2016