Introduction - The beginning of the development of Japanese pistols
In 1853, with the outbreak of the black ship founding incident in the East India Fleet forcibly landing in Edo Bay, the Japanese signed a humiliating and unequal treaty, but also unexpectedly entered the process of peaceful modernization because of their small value of occupation and high trade value, and the economic, institutional and weapons aspects have all made rapid progress in this stage, and the history of the development of Japanese pistols that we will describe in this article was also opened from this node.
At that time, the commander of the East India Fleet, Perry, in addition to preaching force and forcing the Japanese ruling class to submit, was also tasked with opening up sales channels for some of its own superior commodities and obtaining dumping rights.
In this case, many modern American products were given to the last shogunate in the hope of reaping commercial rewards, including a revolver called the Colt Type 1848, which was the first pistol actually owned in the history of Nichishima.
Through the leadership of this American revolver, as well as the follow-up domestic arms race and the establishment of the new government military and police pistol configuration system and other historical events.
Day Island communicates with the Perry fleet in Dutch
Starting from the import of small arms from the United States, Japan designed the southern series of semi-automatic pistols and entered the period of comprehensive military production control through the localization of revolvers and localization, a large number of private companies designed many categories of pistols to enrich the military, and after the war due to political choices, they gave up self-research and turned to the comprehensive import of NATO's advanced small arms, forming the history of the development of Japanese pistols in our current cognition.
Below, we will take a closer look at the content of this part!
Japan's early import rotation stage
To put it simply, the earliest Japanese pistol system can be mainly summarized as a "buy" word.
This period includes the decades from the founding of Japan to the beginning of the 1990s, according to the research of Kim Baowu and Goddard on this stage, the pistol weapons imported by Japan during this period mainly covered Smith. Wiesen's three revolver models and a variety of American-made Colt and other mixed revolvers.
Smith & Co
This is different from the rifle system formed by the British and French mutual support in the rifle system, in the field of small arms, the United States, which has many well-known pistol manufacturers, has always been the leader in the field of pistols, and this advantage was particularly prominent in the early days, so the American pistol was the only best choice for most countries in the international military trade at that time, and Japan was the same.
Colt
They bought small batches of Smith during the period of confrontation. Wiesen Rotary Type I and a large number of Smith. The Wiesen II, as well as a small number of Colt and other American-made pistols.
smith. Wiesen Type II
After the establishment of the new government, because of the existence of a large number of Smith II revolvers, considering logistical problems, the first standard military and police pistol in the country was finalized as Smith. The newly designed MODEL III of Wiesen was an early process in the development of Japanese pistols, and the period of full introduction of American-made pistols.
The most representative and large number of pistol weapons used in this phase is Smith. The third version of Wiesen, here is a brief analysis of this model.
smith. Wiesen Type 3
smith. The Wiesen III, full name Smith & Wesson Model 3, known in Japan as the Ichiban Type, was Smith's last single-action revolver, which was purchased primarily by the Japanese Army as a version made primarily from Russia and primarily from the United States by the Navy.
The Army version used in Japan
They were introduced around the beginning of the 1970s, and successively entered Japan after the 1980s, with a total production of nearly 100,000 or so in Japan, of which tens of thousands were purchased and held by the Japanese military police, and then because of the military reform that occurred in Japan shortly after, after learning the British proposal to only limit the category of secondary weapons, the guns themselves were procured by officers themselves, becoming the only small arms pistol model in the history of the Japanese army that was standardized.
Japanese Navy version
In terms of design, the main frame composed of the pick-and-hold structure, the wooden grille grip piece, the six-round nest capacity, the full-gun roasting blue process and the external hammer design are not special, and are more conventional designs, which have the advantages of simple maintenance and reliability.
Japanese Navy version smith. Wiesen III
You only need to press the button above the receiver to open the nest, and then from the telescopic extractor (shell ejection) and the gap between the nest, fill the ammunition back to the positive, and then pull the hammer to complete the standby state, you can pull the trigger to shoot.
Shell thrower
Such a weapon design, theoretically excellent, is also very suitable for the use of shooters, but it is obviously not suitable for japanese equipment.
Large size gun body
This is mainly because of its overall empty weight of up to 1.3kg factor, which is combined with the gun length parameter of up to 305mm in total length, as well as the undiminished ammunition sold by the United States, in terms of portability and usability, it will cause a huge burden on the Japanese soldiers with low upper limit of physical genes, even if the grip is hump-free design and small and easy to hold, but in the actual shooting of Japanese shooters, it will still cause accuracy problems due to lack of control.
Triggers that are easy to hook and hook
In addition, the problem that the single-action revolver's slow rate of fire is not suitable for military use, and the problem of hooking and hanging fire that is easy to produce by protruding special-shaped exposed hammers, has not been recognized by users in the more than ten years of equipping the Japanese military and police forces.
Therefore, on the eve of the initial stages of Japan's war of aggression against foreign countries, this weapon was replaced by a localized firearm, and the last two main corrections were the several maladaptive defects revealed by the gun.
Japan's localization revolving stage
The gun that replaced it was the "Twenty-Six Type Revolver and Kuwabara Revolver", which was developed by the Japanese mainland for the Sino-Japanese War, and the gun was used by the officers and gendarmes, which mainly corrected the problem that American guns did not adapt to the Japanese physique.
Twenty-six
Among them, some of the earlier to be introduced were the "Twenty-Six Revolver", which was fully known as the "Meiji Twenty-Six-Year Boxer", a firearm designed in 1893, designed and manufactured by the Koishikawa Arsenal in Tokyo, with a total of about 59,300 guns, which was discontinued after the Great Kanto Earthquake, but its components were still assembled until after 1935.
In terms of design, the gun adjusted the weight to 880g, shortening the size of the gun to a specification of 231x130mm, which reduced the weight of the whole gun by 1/2 based on the S&W of the previous type, and the size of the volume was also reduced by 1/3 compared to the previous type, which obviously solved the most important overweight and difficult holding problem of the previous American revolver based on Japanese shooters.
Small twenty-six-type rotor
Supplemented by the change to a double-action firing mode and a circular exposed hammer design, it has also adapted to the original military target on the issue of the rate of fire that has been criticized, and has banned the problem of easy hooking and hanging when carrying.
Rounded hammer
In addition, for the injection of additional design functions of the gun, the designer also added the idea of trigger ring rapid disassembly, etc., which allows the gun to have the ability to pull open the side plate and remove the grip plate after unlocking the trigger ring by pulling down, and quickly achieve the operation of opening the internal space of the whole gun, which is very beneficial to the maintenance ability of the gun and the daily maintenance ability.
Trigger ring removal method
However, it also has quite a few flaws, mainly due to lack of design experience and its own local environment.
For example, in the selection of materials, it is selected to be manufactured with a relatively sufficient local mild steel, which has no impact on the shaping of the gun body, but the lack of carbon content will still have a great reduction in the strength of the gun.
You can see the weirdness of the material
At the same time, because smokeless gunpowder has not yet been successfully applied in the local area during the development stage of the ammunition, it has also led to the use of softer warheads and the design of old ammunition, which mainly affects the lethality caused by the warhead when firing, and the initial velocity of the firearm will be very low.
Type 26 revolver
However, its most fatal flaw is not the above two points, but in the internal shell throwing mechanism, which is also the most mentioned defect of this weapon. It is mainly because of the cancellation of S&W's telescopic extractor (shell ejection) inside the nest, the use of the nest release that is, the complete ejection of the shell ejection action caused, although this design has no direct impact on the shell, but also lost the advantages of the previous U.S.-made revolver shell throwing mechanism fixed magazine, the problem caused by the main problem is the flywheel, simply put, fire and air shooting.
Shell-throwing form
Moreover, the design of this point is obviously a dislike for the shooter for the Japanese military system that emphasized the secondary use of shell casing in the early days, and it is obvious that the type 26 shell throwing mechanism that is littered as soon as it is opened is a disgusting existence for the shooter.
Belgian Nagant 1873
In the above design, in addition to the ideas added by the gun itself, most of them still come from drawing on foreign advanced technology, for example, its main conception mainly comes from the s&w III type and the Nagan 1873 type, drawing on the broken mechanism of the former and the main frame design of the latter, in fact, at the beginning they chose the French MAS 1873 type, but because the problem of smokeless gunpowder has not been solved at this time, only the shape design of Fagnos is adopted.
MAS 1873 form factor
Its practical application was mainly involved in the Sino-Japanese War, and after 1924 received orders for naval standardization, but because of these new problems, so in its application, the gun did not receive much praise, after the design was developed through the southern development to the semi-automatic pistol system, it was no longer the mainstream choice of the Japanese domestic officer corps, but because of its simple structure and low damage rate, it was still equipped with the Japanese army for decades.
At the same time, there was also a revolver called Kuwahara.
This weapon was urgently designed to supplement the former's vacant tactical units in the following year, so in terms of the structure of the main body, it was basically inherited from the former's Type 26 revolver, but its cost would be lower (15 yen) to cover the lower-level officer corps that could not afford the Type 26 pistol.
The gun is designed and produced by Kuwabara Company, on the basis of the twenty-six type revolver, a telescopic shell extractor is added, and a single/double-action shooting mechanism is adopted, so the gun is solved compared to the prototype, the problem of the flywheel is solved, and it also maintains the accuracy and rate of fire of the two in the shooting mechanism, and the overall performance is greatly improved.
In addition, because the lateral quick-release design and the use of ammunition were adjusted to the .32ACP size factor, the kinetic energy of the gun was reduced to about 200J, accompanied by an increase in the control of the whole gun, and the portable maintenance advantage of the front type was maintained.
At present, the only drawbacks of this weapon are the reflection exposure of the nickel-plated version when in use, and the easy hook misfire problem of the hammer being restored after it was redesigned again in a curved and raised form, and overall, it is the better side than the Type 26 pistol.
However, due to the fact that it began to enter the semi-automatic pistol era soon after and its own production capacity was small, the retention of this weapon was worse than that of the inferiorly designed Type 26, and it was basically silent after the 20th century, which was also the last self-designed revolver gun in Japan.
The only surviving photograph
The semi-automatic era derived from the south
After the first afternoon, although Japan lost some of its interests in the intervention of the three countries, it still gained a great opportunity for development because of huge indemnities, based on the plans of several Meiji era military officials, the weapons development project mentioned in the "Rifle Chapter", the development of the pistol field in this period also provided a boost.
Southern series pistols
Among them, after learning the German self-developed and iterative Southern series pistols and importing American Colt, the two routes of importing and reproducing American and Japanese southern designs were mainly based on the subsequent war years. The former mainly includes the Southern A type, the Southern B type, the southern small, the southern B1 type, the southern 14 type, the southern 94 type and the southern 19 type, and the latter mainly includes the Colt 1903 type, the Hino Komuro type, the Imiura type, the Hamada type and the Inaheng type.
Among them, the first semi-automatic pistol that was first born was the Southern A, which was also known as the Southern A and was called the Grandfather Southern Pistol in the United States.
The firearm, because of the name of the southern series of follow-up works, has a certain popularity. In essence, however, the gun was a failed version, and apart from the production of 2,400 pieces produced by the Tokyo Artillery Arsenal and the Nagoya Military Industrial Base, as well as exports from Siam and the domestic warlord era, the rest did not gain any favor at home and abroad.
Siamese identity
From a design point of view, this is actually very easy to understand, although the southern A type has the advantages of multi-bullet capacity and small size, but it also gives it a weak weapon lethality, which is obviously contrary to the concept of high-power military pistols led by the United States after the drug samurai incident in the Philippines, and because the Japanese police (gendarmes) usually use the weapon configuration of the katana combination pistol, so in this aspect of near-point self-defense, the value of such firearms in Japan is not as critical as the pistols of other countries' police. The whole is in a more awkward position.
Telescopic stock
Perhaps realizing this later, this Southern A-type also has a storage function similar to the Mauser C96 pistol submachine stock, which can be inserted into the back of the gun grip to form a charging form, improving accuracy, and also because of the design of the stock expansion mode and storage mode, and has the characteristics of portability, can occupy a very low space, to obtain the ability to carry a magazine and a southern pistol.
Lower wall, upper magazine
However, even with the efforts and innovations made by Nanbu Linjiro in these aspects, judging by the actual use of the final Nanbu A type, the design of this firearm still does not bear the more moderate evaluation of good, but is poor in many people.
This is mainly due to several aspects, one is the safety of firearms, the second is the maintenance of firearms, the third is the design of the firing pin set, and the fourth is the ergonomics of man and machine.
Among them, the aspect of firearm safety mainly refers to the safety locking design defect of the southern A-type configuration, and the firearm as a whole has only one grip press type of insurance, which will lead to the accidental locking of the insurance to affect the shooting, and the problem of lockless misfire that is easy to occur in the state of uncooked carrying.
Grip insurance
As for the maintenance of firearms, it mainly refers to the disassembly defect of the southern type A gun body.
The southern type 14 relies on the three-action unlocking method of the gun locking method of pressing the barrel, cooperating with the unlocking button to unlock the middle of the gun, and then pulling down the trigger circle action to unlock the sleeve and the barrel lock, which is inherited all the way from this A type, this design will be extremely difficult in the disassembly of the gun, so it has long been praised by most people as one of the anti-human designs.
Press the barrel against the back seat of the table, press the pull-out button, and pull down the trigger ring
In this way, the gun maintenance ability related to the quick-release ability has naturally become a major defect of the southern pistol.
As for the last two, they refer to the two problems of the small diameter firing pin of the southern A type and the small trigger ring, which have caused the southern pistol firing pin to break and shoot difficulty many times in actual combat, and are more well-known southern pistol defects.
Ultra-small trigger ring
Synthesizing the above, the design of the southern A type can basically be summarized as an image of "multi-ammunition capacity, small size, low power, excellent carrying, poor safety, poor maintenance ability, poor reliability and poor man-machine efficacy", in general, it is a relatively inferior design, according to a Japanese gun history researcher, this gun is the most disliked design in World War II, and is considered to be a gun made in a country without pistol background, which I also agree with.
The final style of the Southern A type
In this way, under many disadvantages, this gun is not unexpectedly favored by the Locust Army, which is different from the impression that most people perceive the Southern Series pistol from the beginning of the 20th century to dominate the share of Japanese military and police pistols, and for most of the 1930s, the pistol that really served the Japanese military and police circles was the Colt M1903 pocket-sized semi-automatic pistol in the United States.
colt 1903
The Colt 1903 pistol, fully known as the Colt Model 1903, is a two-mouth pistol weapon designed with a single-action mechanism of internal hammer, with a total production of about 570,000 pieces, of which more than 50% of the production flowed into Nichishima, which was the largest number of firearms imported by Japan during the military period.
It can be a foreign relative, and it has long been in the position of semi-automatic pistol handle on the island, mainly relying on the shape of the gun.
Although the Colt 1903, like the Southern A, is a small-sized special population adaptive weapon, there are major differences in body shape, with the former being a common off-square grip and full-length sleeve construction, and the latter being an oval grip similar to the Luger pistol and a sleeveless gun with an exposed barrel.
Southern grip
Regarding the design of this part, I think that friends who have experience in holding targets should have a more reasonable understanding, because in the feel of holding the grip, in addition to the need to be small enough to fit the grip, it also needs to have a suitable fit and fullness to shoot better, like the latter southern this cylindrical grip, in the grip of the sense of obviously not better than Colt.
And as we said above, the Japanese military and police community for the application of pistols is actually not the key, then a conventional portable, suitable feel of the pistol, naturally is the best choice for the Japanese military police, and the Colt 1903 model is a perfect fit for this, using a gun type that has been applied to today's still obsolete.
You can see the group at the bottom of the grip but
In addition, in addition to the advantages of the gun type, the Colt 1903 also has the characteristics of "hammer concealment, single-action mechanism, grip and toggle double safety, magazine blocking and simple structure can be removed without tools". Therefore, this Colt 1903 also has the advantages of "overall smooth anti-hook hanging fire, low trigger pull force, easy firing, triple insurance and convenient maintenance and repair" and so on.
Overall smooth gun body
Based on the advantages of these performance characteristics, the Colt 1903 type entered Japan from the Kawaguchiya Firearms Company, and immediately won the favor of the Nichishima Officer Corps and the Gendarmerie Corps, with a total of more than 200,000 pieces of cumulative imports being absorbed by these groups.
The Japanese military management set captured by the American army Guadalcanal
Later, in all the years of the war in which Japan participated, this weapon was basically one of the most common pistol configurations in the Japanese army.
In the decades that the Colt pocket dominated the Japanese market, the design of weapons on the Japanese mainland did not stagnate, and with the deepening of militarism, Japan's investment in weapons also increased.
Increase investment in weapons manufacturing
During this period, the blessing of the pistol field was mainly centered on the failed Southern series, which later led to several other versions of the Southern Series, the Southern B, the Southern 14 and the Southern 94 semi-automatic pistol.
Among these models, the Southern B type is the earliest one, and it is also a version that lays the main framework of the central and southern pistols that we currently recognize, and the Japanese southern pistol is basically derived from the B1 version of the southern B type.
Southern Type B
This Southern B series pistol, also known as the Southern B pistol and the Dad Type South, has a total of four variants, namely B1, Small, B and another unknown type, the first is a successful design version, the latter three are failures.
Cancel the stock slot
Among them, the changes in the southern B-type main version based on the failure of the A type are mainly "the elimination of the tail stock slot, the replacement of the wooden magazine bottom with an aluminum alloy material, the elimination of the middle button that the gun needs to press when disassembling the gun body, and the thickening of the firing pin diameter".
The bottom of the magazine has changed texture
At first glance, it seems that this model has a lot of places to adjust relative to the former, but in fact, through the final design results to compare, the changes are actually some insignificant small details, and there is not much improvement in the defects of the gun itself.
These adjustments are concretely understood as "the elimination of the submachine stock function, the unification of the structure of the magazine, which previously used secondary materials due to cost reduction, the reduction of the body disassembly design requiring three actions into two actions, and the thickening of the breakable firing pin to increase the strength."
There is almost no substantial difference between types A and B
After this modification, the Southern B type was completely unchanged in the final gun body structure, except for the removal of one tail slot. And because of the increase in expensive materials, the price is not even affordable to the original middle-level officer audience. Moreover, the parameter data in the follow-up actual battle also shows that the difficulty of disassembly of this type is still complicated, and the problem of weak needle firing is also a large number.
So in simple terms, because the design adjustment is too small, this southern B type is still the same span design as the southern A type.
Type B overall perspective
Therefore, although it was mainly a pistol produced for the Army in the early days, it did not get the final approval of the Army, but carried the logo of the Army on the side of the gun, and was applied to the Naval Red Deer with low gun demand, with a total production of only about 6,000, which was a failed work.
Army red deer logo
Here the Southern Small Pistol (Baby South), which was only reduced relative to the B type and eliminated because it inherited all the B-type design, was removed, and in fact, the Southern B series, only one Southern B1 pistol was successful.
And this weapon is not so much a B type, it is more reasonable to understand as the predecessor of the southern 14 type, we can also see this through the comparison of the A type, B1 type and 14 type below, the main body of the design of the type 14 is changed from this stage of the B1 type, that is to say, the adjustment of this type is the main joint that can be successful in the follow-up of the southern type 14.
A/B1/14 type comparison
From this type, the Southern Series pistols for the first time determined the high-capacity layout of 15 rounds of ammunition capacity, and replaced the original cylindrical squid grip with a square with a sense of full grip, and relied on multiple cuts in the receiver part, reducing the mass of the whole gun, which was not heavy, and adding the design of the internal double re-entry spring, as well as the receiver safety safety and large trigger design applied for the first time.
Cut to cut the weight
This improved southern pistol has greatly improved the rate of fire, fluency and fire sustainability of shooting, and has also solved the long-term shortcomings in grip, gun safety and ergonomics, and the self-defense ability and lethality of the military and police of the weapon have also been greatly improved, which is also the main reason why the subsequent 14 type can be adopted.
The bolt double re-entry spring is embedded left and right, and the firing pin is straight into the spring in the middle
However, from a modern and more systematic point of view, the gun still had many flaws, which were not noticed by Nanbu Linjiro at the time.
For example, in order to maintain the smooth surface of the gun body, it moves to the magazine pull button in the position of the front face of the grip, this design is obviously easy to cause the problem of mistakenly leaving the magazine, which will cause serious consequences for the southern pistol that relies on the magazine in 1/3 of the locking structure of the whole gun, and it is not just a simple matter of affecting the shooting.
Pull the box button
The same is the design flaw of the disassembly gun body, although this version does not again use the previous anti-human design of the three hands at the same time to operate the disassembly gun design to unlock the gun, but it is locked through the tail knob, but also need to use tools to remove the bolt lateral fixing rod of the B1 disassembly design, is not much simpler than the former.
A tool is required to remove the transverse fixing rod
However, in general, the southern series of pistols to this type of stage, in the actual performance indicators and application needs, there is no defect, its problems are mainly reflected in the logistics maintenance and safety of the low probability of hidden dangers, which was not a core problem in the era of human life at that time.
It may be precisely because of this that this type of problem always appears in the upper echelons of Japanese pistols.
A few years later, in 1926, shortly after the southern B1 was introduced, the widely known southern type 14 pistol was also born at this point in time, which was the true owner of the name of the south in public perception.
Southern Type 14 pistol
The model is based on the B1 version of the previous type, the main difference is in the cost of the aspect, the predecessor has no major defects in the design, but the high price, and finally it did not get much order, so the improvement of the 14 type in the south is also mainly carried out around this line.
First of all, the change of the structural part, the original reliance on the breech bolt to complete the structure of the whole gun lock, was adjusted back to the previous three-point lock gun body structure, so that the design simplified a lot, at the same time this is also the previous customary structure, so in terms of labor costs and material costs, have saved a lot of cost, which is also the main reason why the southern 14 type can reduce the price.
Rear structural adjustment and receiver cutting reduce material costs
However, correspondingly, because the disassembly aspect has changed back to the disassembly form of the previous series of complex double actions performed at the same time in the southern series, the disassembly design difficulty of the original B1 type that was slightly adjusted back to the previous anti-human form has returned to the previous anti-human form, and the disassembly gun body has become extremely difficult.
In addition, the transformation of the 14 type in the south is mainly centered on the defects of the southern B1 type that I mentioned above.
For example, the design of returning the pull-out button to the side wall of the receiver and hiding the button inside the receiver can make the grip of the gun body not decrease, while solving the problem that the previous type is easy to cause the magazine to fall off.
Concealed pull-out button
The same change also includes the adjustment of the safety insurance from the dialing type to the one-week rotation form, which can reduce the mistake of dialing the safety insurance and cause the problem of misfire. However, the flaws of this design are also obvious, in the rapid use of firearms, the complex adjustment insurance form of the Southern 14 type will obviously lose the first-mover advantage.
Semi-circular rotary knobs can be seen
It can be seen that Nanbu Linjiro suddenly tried to improve the safety of firearms in this type, which may be because of the acceptance indicators, but this kind of adjustment, in terms of final results, is mostly of no actual combat value.
Moreover, in other design aspects, the gun still found new design flaws that were added with each previous adjustment in the south, and there were many designs that greatly affected the performance of the gun.
Type 14 magazine gradient
For example, this type of magazine opening suddenly increases the slope tilt, which will cause the instability of the firearm's ammunition supply, and with the high-speed bolt action, it is very easy to cause the problem of jamming when throwing the shell, which I have observed in many live shots.
Type 14 ejection position, the rear bolt is too fast to cause the shell to jam
The same is also the problem of the fragility of the firing pin that has never been solved, although this type has increased the diameter of the firing pin, but the final test results show that the strength of the firing pin is still insufficient, and the south has not improved this, but has added a backup firing pin to avoid this, so there are still defects in the design.
Southern 14 modeling
Based on the above, we can understand that the Southern 14 is still a gun type full of mistakes, it is actually not much better than the previous Southern Front, but because the cost is almost reduced to B1 Type 1/2, and due to the impact of external expansion, and the increase in demand for local weapons, so this Southern Type 14 has become the first large-scale application of the local semi-automatic pistol.
End of this article - series to be continued
Due to space limitations here, the Japanese pistol series has come to an end, and the follow-up update of the history of Ming and Qing firearms booked by another friend, The Southern 94, Hamada, Yipu, Daoheng, North China 19th, New Southern 60 and subsequent imported types are free to write.
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