The Model 35 9mm Browning pistol, commonly known as the *high power or grand puissance from its marketing name, is and has been a single-action semiautomatic design since its introduction in 1935 and adoption as a military service pistol in its native Belgium, Finland, Lithuania and nearly a hundred other nations at various times since then.
While its internal mechanism and linkless locked breech were indeed developed by John M. Browning happy to improve on the earlier success of his 1911 design without the required addition of the grip safety demanded by Army Ordnance, primarily as a safety requirement for mounted horsemen, the pistol also owes its worldwide success to at least two other additions: the refinement by FN engineer and designer Dieudonne Saive, who would go on to develop the SAFN semiautomatic rifle, the FN-MAG light machinegun, and the superb FN FAL rifle, another FN product to achieve global acceptance in most on the world's non-Soviet Bloc nations.
Neither was the fortuitous addition of the large-capacity magazine derived from the M1920 Estonian Tallin machinepistol any small feature, giving the weapon a magazine capacity of 13-17 rounds, depending on the manufacturer, twice that of competing weapons of the same caliber from the same period.
The ability to be fitted with a shoulder stock for use with a tangent adjustable sight was an additional benefit, of interest and use in a day when bolt action rifles were standard and pistol caliber submachineguns/ machinepistols were rare.
The Browning GP in that form sufficed well enough for the following four decades, until the widespread distribution of Walther's trigger-cocking P.38 service pistol was introduced to the world by the Nazi regime and its obedient German Army...which also used captured P.35 Brownings, if in lesser quantity. And though both gunsmith conversions and the later BDA factory version would eventually offer both the largish magazine capacity of the P.35 with a double action trigger, it wasn't until the introduction of the S&W Model 59 selfloader in the early 1970s that any great commercial demand for both features in a single design was accomodated.
The M1911, the P-35/GP, and the P.38 are all pretty nifty little handguns, with much to reccomend them to the individual or wholesale user. But trying to combine all the salient features into a single unit is a tricky process involving delicate balances, particularly if differing cartridge chamberings are considered. And much of the utility of the preceeding designs can be lost in the process.
I have much respect for the minds that gave us all three designs, and for most of the examples of their brainchildren that have passed through my hands over the last four and a half decades, and on which my life has depended a couple of times. And I don't feel terribly inconvenienced at all by carrying more than one at a time, should I need the superior sights of the P.38, or all those rounds in the magazine...and a spare!...of the P-35, or the reliability, power, and long-term maintainability of the M1911 and its variants, individually or in serial combination.
But I'm not a fan of *double-action* Brownings. Had that feature really been needed, Mr. Browning would have made them that way.
Thank you for your gifts to us Mr. Browning. And M'sieur Saive.
