The Best Automatic Pistols of World War II: History of the Firearms

A pistol is a firearm designed for firing with one hand. Usually the effective distance of the defeat of pistols does not exceed 50 meters. There are two subclasses of this weapon - a revolver and a self-loading (or automatic) pistol. By the beginning of the Second World War, revolvers were already considered obsolete as a class, but they were used by many countries.

The revolvers are powered in the form of a drum, which are a chamber and a magazine at the same time. At the time of the shot, the chamber becomes part of the barrel of the weapon. The advantages of this type of gun include reliability, durability and fault tolerance. But because of the long reloading and the small number of cartridges, the revolver is poorly suited to the needs of the military. It cannot provide an acceptable density of fire, and therefore was supplanted by a new type of weapon - self-loading pistols.

Self-loading and automatic pistols use the energy of recoil or powder gases to bring the weapon in readiness for the next shot. Cartridges in the chamber are served through a special store. In pistols, the store is removable for convenience. The advantages of pistols - high rate of fire and quick reload.

The first pistols appeared approximately in the middle of the 16th century, when spark gates (Romanian and flint) for manual fire-arms were invented. For the past two years, the pistol practically did not change in the structural relation and because of the duration of the discharge from the barrel, it was the practical weapon of uniform action. Although some craftsmen used to manufacture multiple pistols in order to increase their efficiency, they didn’t have widespread use.

In this book, the headboard will look at the most successful samples of pistols that were used in World War II.