When Germany occupied Belgium in the summer of 1940, the took over the FN factory complex and ordered production of the High Power pistol to continue. It was put into German service as the Pistole 640(b), and nearly 325,000 of them were made between 1940 and 1944. The first ones were simply assembled from finished Belgian contact parts, and included all the features like shoulder stock slots and 500m tangent rear sights. As the war continued, however, production was simplified. The stock slots disappeared first, then the tangent sights, then the wooden grips (replaced by bakelite) and eventually even the magazine safety was omitted. Resistance among Belgian factory workers increased as well, with deliberate sabotage in the form of incorrect heat treating, errors in fine tolerance parts, and sometimes even spending lots of time to give a very fine surface finish instead of making more pistols.
These are a particularly popular subject of collecting, and there are a lot of nuances of the production and inspection marks that are worth understanding if you want to take them seriously. I highly recommend Anthony Vanderlinden’s 2-volume book “FN Browning Pistols” for very good detail on these, as well as other FN handguns:
https://amzn.to/42Bc541
Full video on pre-war Belgian Army GP35 High Power:
https://youtu.be/GPb-6SDXh1Q
Why is there a scalloped area on the right front of the slide on both of them? I have a Belgian made, 1972 production HP that does not have that.
I think it is to help you align the slide for disassembly, and to get your finger in place to push out the slide stop.
They dropped it by the time mine was made. And the big ear on the slide stop is still on mine, but it’s always been unnecessary.
FEG in Hungary deleted that “ear” on their PJK-9HP version about the same time that they replaced the small and easy-to-miss safety with a larger one with a more 1911-style “shelf”.
You find both on FEG-made HPs from the 1990s.
clear ether
eon
slightly OT:
Did FEG have a licence and the data pack for the GP35?
or were their production reverse engineered?
I’m reasonably sure that they did not have the TDP from FN, and it was reverse-engineered. I can’t remember where the cite might be on that, but that’s what I remember on the issue.
If they did have the TDP, they did a pretty good job of covering it up for some reason.
Friend of a friend was a Hi-Power fanatic, and he bemoaned the fact that while there was cosmetic interchange, the actual parts did not.
One advantage of the FEG was that when FN lengthened the butt to accommodate a 14-shot magazine, FEG didn’t. So FEG HPs can use any 13-shot HP magazine, but the newer FN version can’t.
It’s actually sort of academic, as any HP can use Beretta M92 and/or Taurus PT92/99 magazines by simply cutting a new notch in the magazine tube for the HP magazine catch. Since this is in a different location from the Beretta/Taurus catch, it does not interfere with using the magazine in its original intended pistol.
And Beretta or Taurus magazines are easier to find, and cheaper, than FN or etc. HP magazines.
cheers
eon
So why didn’t the Belgiums, when it was obvious that the Germans would easily conquer their country, destroy things that would be useful to the Germans, like the assembly lines at the FN factory?
Destroying your own factories to deny an invader any advantage might provoke him into slaughtering your people as revenge.
I would add that Belgium fell remarkably quickly; between the failure of their fortifications to withstand high-tech German attacks and the collapse of the French, there might not have been time to institute a scorched earth policy. I might also speculate about pan-European fascism — every European country had their Nazi sympathizers, and their opportunist profiteers. Perhaps some insufficient patriot at FN was looking at a position in the Occupation government, and the value of his DWM stock?
I don’t know that I’d characterize the German attacks as particularly “high tech”. The real issue wasn’t technology, it was technique… Meaning: Competency.
The Belgians had just as much access to the tools the Germans used; they simply did not bother to see the implications of those tools, nor did they appreciate where it was all going, in terms of military utility and potential. The Belgian Army was prepared to re-fight WWI; unfortunately, they were faced with WWII, and had not kept up with the times. Rather like the US Navy of today, I fear.
The issue of sympathizers in the Belgian government and management cadres is a difficult one to answer; a lot of Belgians were Nazi-sympathetic or at least, Nazi-adjacent in their thinking. That changed rapidly during the war, to the point where the people running FN after the war flatly refused to license the FAL to the Germans for production inside Germany. Where those guys were, during the early part of the war? No idea, but they weren’t the sort who would have turned the factory over intact, if they’d had a choice.
It’s easy to say, sitting in a comfortable chair behind a computer display, that they should have done something other than what happened historically. However, the Belgians had resolved not to be taken over again so easily, spent massive money on defenses during the interwar years, and the idea that they’d lose so quickly as to need to demolish key industrial infrastructure was effectively unthinkable. Too much invested in the defense network on the borders that failed within literal hours of the beginning of the invasion.
It came down to a complete failure of imagination. They never factored in glider-borne infantry coming in on top of Eben Emael, even though anyone who’d paid attention to things going on during German exercises should have recognized what was likely to happen. I’ve even run across references to a Belgian military attache who accidentally witnessed some of the assault engineers running through their drills for the assault, and he did not recognize what he was looking at. I don’t know how accurate that account was, but it seems to have worried the Germans.
Destroying a factory or a production line isn’t as simple as it might seem. How many German factories shrugged off Allied bombing strikes and were back into production, minus their rooves?
You want to go scorched earth on an industrial scale, you really have to have planned to do just that from the beginning, doing things like prechambering the buildings and key pieces of machinery. Few have the testosterone to do that sort of thing, and keep on hoping hopefully that it will never come to that.
One also has to remember that the Belgians were sorta on-brand in WWII, in that during WWI, they had the necessary feedstocks for Germany’s explosive industry sitting there on the docks, just in time to bridge the gap between prewar planning fantasies and the Haber-Bosch process coming fully on line. Without those stocks of nitrates, WWI might have evaporated in fairly short order, and never have become the charnel house it did. It was that narrowly run; German pre-war planning was that bad. They’d no idea how much they’d need in terms of explosives feedstocks, and had not stockpiled anywhere near what they needed. The Haber-Bosch process hadn’t come fully on line, and there was an itty-bitty window there where the Belgians nutting up and blowing their stocks of nitrates sky-high would have put a serious crimp in German war-making potential. Enough to win the war for the Allies early? Maybe… Certainly, enough to really screw things up for Germany.
There aren’t too many nations with the balls to do the planning for real war, and scorched-earth plans. Switzerland? Yeah, they did it… The whole countryside was a fortress. The Germans, during the Cold War? Pussies, really… There was a UK/US plan to do some serious landscape work on the Inner German Border, things like moving some towns, doing some flooding, changing forest lines… All stuff meant to make defense of Germany far more practicable. The Germans wouldn’t hear of it. Flat refusal to so much as trim a woodline or two, in service of better lines of sight for the tanks we were going to be dying in, in order to defend Germany. If the town was there or the building was there before, not a thing could be moved, no matter how many NATO lives were going to be lost trying to defend the indefensible, and perish the thought that we might try to do something about it before a war started. Hell, even after the war got going… You would not believe how butt-hurt the Germans got when they would see the likely outcome of what we’d have to do, just on exercises. “Oh, no… That’s a cultural monument, you can’t defend from it…”
There are reasons I’m extremely cynical when someone says anything about “NATO” to me, and most of those stem from German intransigence on these matters. I’ve seen the staff planning documents on that defense plan… They were quite sensible, and not totally insane the way that the Germans characterized them. Germany before the Wall came down basically insisted on making believe that war would never come, and that there was no need at all to do anything in terms of real prevention. They may have been right, but the whole thing still rankles… “Here, go ahead… Die for a 13th Century church, because we don’t want you to do anything that might damage it…”
Meanwhile, the odds are that the Soviets would have leveled the surrounding town and several grid squares around it…
Kirk, what are the odds that NVA would go renegade en masse and start fighting the soviet brothers ? (I think I maybe asked similar question some time before)
Or were they so brainwashed into dying for communist paradise by attacking westward.
What the NVA would have done in the actual case of war is one of those imponderables we’ll never know the answer to. Thankfully.
I’ve heard the opinions of several people who were in a position to speak on the issue, however, and they were all pretty sure that it was way more likely that the NVA cadre would have cheerfully slaughtered the Soviet cadres for backsliding and not being sufficiently socialist. They’d have been enthusiastic volunteers for doing the necessary in Poland or Czechoslovakia, as well…
NVA rank-and-file? Probably not as enthusiastic, but likely to go along to get along with their cadre’s actions.
The NVA was rated by a lot of our analysts as being more reliable and enthused about the whole socialist thing than the Soviet’s own troops. Whether that was true, and how it all would have played out? Nobody knows, and I’m damned glad of it.
I suspect that in the actual case of it having happened, that a lot of people would have been disappointed by the various “expectation failures” as things worked their way out. Not least, the planners and so forth on the NATO side of things, most of whom seemed to have lived in a rose-colored world of fantasy, especially about their own OPSEC.
I had a friend who worked intelligence back in those days and by all accounts it was universally agreed that the NVA were *by far* the most devoted of the WarPac vassel state armies.
On the other hand, apparently in those days absolutely everyone in the west was WILDLY overestimating the loyalty of the Czechoslovaks, Poles and Hungarians to all of that nonsense, whereas according to accounts that have come out since they’d just as likely have been in a four-way race with the Romanians to see who could turn around and go for Moscow fastest
That’s pretty much been the opinion of every well-informed individual I’ve ever discussed the matter with. I’ve no idea what would have actually eventuated, and I’m glad we never ran that particular “experiment” in order to determine what would have happened.
I do think that there were a lot of things that were going to trip up both the Soviets and the NATO allies, things that they all thought were “no problem”. What would have happened in the event? We don’t know, and thanks be to God, we never will.
I will say that the majority of the East German cadre that I ran into and got to look over were very capable people with high motivation. How many of their subordinate conscripts would have been willing to do the necessary? That would be the question… Some of those guys were, at best, going to be maliciously compliant with their orders, and likely to do their best to gum up the works with malice aforethought. How much they might have gotten away with? No idea; I do know that even the East German border guards had issues with their conscripts lacking enthusiasm and certainty in their beliefs, especially towards the end.
One of the issues with any of these totalitarian regimes, whether it’s the Soviet Union or whatever, is that it’s difficult to maintain generation after generation of “true belief”, because it becomes really obvious after a bit how much the whole thing is based on pure self-interest; ain’t nobody in it for the pure-as-the-driven-snow altruistic bullshit, and eventually, it shows. And, that erodes it all… Until the inherent internal self-contradictions wind up breaking everyone’s faith in the deal, and there ya go…
I don’t see anyone creating “true Communism” until they can genetically engineer human beings to behave like ants. So long as we’re descendant from plains apes that once lived in an arboreal paradise, there’s going to be a certain difficulty in convincing a majority to give up their self-interest and let everyone else screw them over like good Stakhanovites live for…
All that is what has always made the German destruction of the IG Farben Buna (synthetic rubber) plant at Auschwitz so strange. They literally razed it to the bare foundations before the Russians got there in March 1945.
Exactly why has never been adequately explained. The idea that they were somehow concealing secrets of synthetic rubber production makes no sense, as during the German/Soviet “honeymoon” a decade earlier IG Farben had built a “Buna” plant in Russia that was pretty much the same thing they built at Auschwitz starting in 1940. So it’s not like the Russians didn’t know what a synthetic rubber plant looked like inside.
It makes you wonder if what was going on there wasn’t something in addition to, or other than, turning out tires for Kubelwagens and Opel Blitz trucks.
clear ether
eon
There are a whole bunch of things in the history of that period that just plain don’t make sense. I mean, c’mon… The V2 program? WTF? How was that supposed to win a damn war, on its own, absent something at least reasonably WMD-ish to stack on top of it?
Then again, the Nazis really were that stupid and crazy, so… Anything’s possible.
What I suspect is the actual reality of things is that the schizoid Nazi party structure and the people in it that thought all that split authority and wildly entrepreneurial approach to things made sense. I mean, these are people who actually articulated and promulgated Fuhrerprinzip as a legit idea, and didn’t see the inherent contradictions and manifest stupidities within it, sooooo… Yeah. They could have been secret geniuses with super-secret weapons programs, or they could just have been ‘effing crazy.
Ockham’s Razor says “simplest answer”, so I’m gonna go with “crazy”, with an open eye to maybe there being some “there” actually there. I could be convinced of Nazi superweapons, should some evidence actually turn up.
My SWAG about IG-Auschwitz has always been, not “that’s where they were making the mythical Nazi atom bomb”, but rather “that’s where they were trying to produce Tabun”- the early “G agent” or “nerve gas” they developed in the late 1930s.
IG Farbenindustrie was after all the “primary contractor” on that, and after VE Day nobody could find any plant that was making it. We only found out about it from the chemists who worked on the development in the Berlin and Munich labs, who came over to us after the fact (because we paid better than the Russians).
If the Auschwitz plant was where they were trying to manufacture it, it would make a good bit of sense from logistics and strategy.
-Outside of the operational radius of USAAF and RAF bombers flying out of England, so less chance of being bombed.
-Closer to the Eastern Front, where they would most likely be using it.
-And of course, all the human “test subjects” they could ask for, right next door.
So yes, razing that plant to the ground before the Russian army got there would make sense. The Germans wouldn’t care about the Russians learning about the latest tweaks in making synthetic rubber; they absolutely would not want them getting a peek at the means of making what was probably their only, actual “super-weapon”.
As I said, just a guess.
clear ether
eon
I wouldn’t discount the possibility that west Germans may have had their own plans, that they weren’t about to share.
as a certain demon that entered human form in the town of Fürth, over 100 years ago, is supposed to have said;
“to be America’s enemy is dangerous, to be its friend is fatal”
1q
What plans they had boiled down to trying to keep as many Germans alive as possible. I suspect that under certain circumstances, most of the allied NATO military members might have found themselves rounded up and handed over to Soviet forces, in lieu of most of Germany being turned into a radioactive wasteland. If they could have figured out a way to do that, I’m pretty sure a lot of Germans would have done it happily.
The one thing that I don’t think we ever really found out was just how much active collusion and actual assistance the Germans would have given the Soviets. I think it would have been a very large problem, one that would be dependent on a lot things like how the Soviet forces behaved. If they were treated well, and the Soviets didn’t pull multiple Bucha-type massacres during the opening phases, I could see a lot of Germans choosing to aid them instead of the allied NATO forces.
It’s one of those things we’re never going to know, thank God. I suspect it would have been yet another one of those things that didn’t conform to expectations, and that there would have been a bunch of surprised staff officers in the various NATO headquarters.
Belgium was over run in a matter of a few days.Besides there were Belgians that supported the Reich like the Rexist Party’s Leon DeGrelle
“Why Didnt The Belgiums” – the people are called Belgians.
Production of pistols is insignificant for overall ww2 effort. It mostly wastes resources.
Did these “belgiums”, errr. belgians had ammunition factories ? Now that would be more useful
“(…)was obvious that the Germans would easily conquer their country(…)”
It was not. Belgians prepared Fortifications see
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fortifications_belges_seconde_guerre_mondiale.svg
including https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortified_position_of_Li%C3%A8ge which were overtaken faster than anyone at Belgian side might expect.
Regarding Belgians with national socialist Sympathies
Belgium does have a German speaking minority.
I occasionally work alongside a young Flemish speaking Belgian. one of his grandfathers fought in the Belgian legion of the SS.
he had been captured by the Soviets during the retreat from Stalingrad and imprisoned until well after the war was over.
On eventually being handed over to post war Belgian authorities, he was imprisoned for something like a further ten years.
My young colleague says that present day Belgian authorities are still reluctant to share information about the guy, and what he may or may not have been involved in (eg SS revenge massacre of an entire French town).
Making a nicer product than you have to in order to waste resources is called “malicious compliance”.