America Built the Perfect Service Pistol — Then One Committee Threw It Away

In the summer of 1955, the US Army shelved the pistol it had spent eight years asking American industry to build, and 30 years later bought the same idea back from an Italian factory. On one side, a Swedish-born toolmaker running a nearly broke revolver company, betting six years and [music] 30 prototypes on a contract nobody had signed.

On the other, a logistics office that never questioned how the gun shot, only whether pistols were worth the paperwork. Picture a typed requirement sheet. Under 7 in, under 25 oz, 9 mm, double action. Behind it, an aisle of parkerized .45s. If the pistol was good enough for the [music] Navy’s most specialized men, and for an entire state police force, what exactly was it not good enough for? >> [music] >> Everyone in this story eventually got what they asked for.

Two didn’t live to see it. One never got his name on it. It started with a piece of paper in 1947. The Air Force was barely a separate service that year, and it wanted something lighter than the pistol every American officer had been handed since the last war. >> [music] >> Army Ordnance wrote the requirement. Under 7 in overall, under 25 oz unloaded, 9 mm, double action so the first shot didn’t wait on a man’s thumb, a magazine holding at least nine rounds, a blowback action, and a trigger guard that folded forward for winter gloves.

In 1948, Colt and High Standard signed on to build to it, and the Ordnance Corps labeled the designs the T4 and the T3. Somewhere in a drafting room, an engineer read blowback and folding trigger guard on the same page and reached for a pencil. Eight years later, that sheet would be sitting in a closed file. Springfield, Massachusetts.

Smith & Wesson had made revolvers and almost nothing else for the better part of a century, and its books were thin enough that the founding family did something it had never done before. In September of 1946, it handed the company to Carl R. Hellstrom, a Swedish engineer originally brought in to straighten out a line of flush valves.

Nobody had asked Smith & Wesson to bid on that Air Force pistol. Hellstrom built to it anyway. In 1949, the company moved into a new plant on Roosevelt Avenue, and he walked a floor that still smelled of fresh concrete, tooling for an order that did not exist. >> [music] >> He handed the job to one man.

Joe Norman was the chief designer, and on October 28th, 1948, he had a prototype finished and stamped X46, the first American-made double-action 9 mm. It took the receiver logic of the German Walther P38 and mated it to the tilting barrel John Browning had left behind on an aluminum frame light enough to satisfy men who had never seen it.

A bench lamp in October. A hammer falling on an empty chamber while somebody counted. America had written the question. Now it had an answer. The question was what the country would do with it. The 9 mm part wasn’t sentiment, and it wasn’t surrender. It was what American ordnance officers had been carrying home in duffel bags since 1945.

They had handled the P38, a service pistol you could load, decock with a lever, and drop into a holster with a hammer down, then fire with one long pull of the trigger if it came to that. Nobody had to explain to a man who’d been in Europe what that meant at 3:00 in the morning. There’s an image worth sitting with, a captured P38 on a desk at Aberdeen, and an officer working that decocking lever over and over, listening to it the way a man tests a lock he’s thinking about buying.

Then in April of 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization came into existence, and the pressure to standardize came with it. Allies who might someday share a supply line would want to share a cartridge. And there was one more piece of reasoning written down in the Army’s own justification for the program, which sounds harmless until you know how the story ends.

The handgun is seldom used, so a lighter pistol holding more rounds would be easier to train men on and easier to carry in the field than a heavy single-action 45. Read that again. The Army argued for a modern pistol on the grounds that pistols didn’t much matter. What happens to a program when the institution running it likes the design more than it needs the thing? High standards entry, the T3 was the first to come in, and it spent 5 years being reasonable.

Aluminum frame, blowback action as the sheet demanded, a pivoting trigger guard patented so a man in gloves could still get a finger inside it. Batch after batch, the safety moved. The magazine release moved, heel first, then up onto the frame where Americans expected it. Each round of testing came back with notes, and each set of notes went back to Connecticut, and the drafting room did the same sheet a third time and a fourth.

Colt’s T4 was a 1911 put on a diet with its own folding winter trigger guard, and it came in at about 28 oz, three over the limit. In 1950, the Ordnance Corps quietly relaxed its own specification. 29 oz now, 7 and 1/2 in, which is what an institution does when it discovers the thing it demanded may not be buildable.

In 1952, it relaxed the rules again, and that second loosening is what let Smith & Wesson’s design into the room at all under the factory designation X100. In March of 1953, the T3 was tested one more time, found unsatisfactory again, and canceled. Two of the surviving Colt T4s still exist in the Springfield Armory collection, serials 1 and 3.

The folding trigger guards are long gone off both of them. A rack of numbered prototypes and not one contract number among them. Smith & Wesson [music] kept going. The X100 series went through roughly 30 prototype [music] changes across 6 years, which is not a company dabbling, that’s a payroll. They built double action versions [music] and single action versions because nobody knew yet which one an army would ask for.

And at some point in the early 50s, [music] Hellstrom made a decision that tells you exactly how confident he was. He had about a thousand frames forged in steel, not aluminum, steel. In case the army came back and said it wanted something heavier, he wanted the forgings already sitting on the floor. A foreman counting a thousand frames into a bin out loud, losing his place somewhere in the 400s and starting the row over.

Ask yourself how many of those frames you think ever became guns. If you’ve stayed with me this far, hit subscribe because the part of this story that turns everything around isn’t the day the army said no. It’s what a different branch of the same military quietly did 11 years later with the pistol it had already turned down.

Here is the thing about the summer of 1955 that nobody who tells this story quickly ever gets it right. There was no dramatic meeting, no board of grim officers around a table, no vote, no verdict handed down on the pistol itself. What actually happened was that the deputy chief of staff for logistics looked at [music] the inventory and found that sufficient M1911A1 pistols remained on hand and the funding for further trials was argued down on the grounds that sidearms were seldom used. That was [music] it. The

lightweight pistol program was shelved. Colt and High Standard stopped work. You will hear a number attached to this, millions of surplus 45s stacked in government depots. That figure gets repeated far more confidently than the record supports. The part that is documented is plainer and worse. The count was enough.

The same sentence that justified building a new pistol was used [music] to cancel it. Seldom used means give the men something lighter. Seldom used also means don’t spend the money. One premise, >> [music] >> two conclusions, eight years apart, and nobody had to reconcile them because nobody was required to. Hellstrom took that news at a desk with a prototype on it.

Understand what was and wasn’t decided. The pistol wasn’t judged bad. It was judged unimportant. That is the sentence this whole story turns on. So, Smith & Wesson did the only thing left and [music] put it on the civilian market, calling it simply the 9-mm automatic. Uncertain whether Americans would even accept a double action first shot, the factory built 10 of each.

10 double action production guns, 10 single action, and waited [music] to see which way the counters would go. Nobody wanted the single action at all, and almost nobody wanted the other one either. Through the end of 1956, the total came to 797 pistols. In 1957, the factory built 426, and that same year it finally assigned the gun a model number, 39.

The single action version got the designation 44 and sat in the catalog until August of 1959 without drawing a single order. No [music] pistol was ever stamped with that number because there was no reason to bother. Picture the counter it had to compete on. A glass case in 1956 [music] with a the 39 in it, and 3 ft away, a war surplus P38 that already [music] did the double action trick for a third of the price.

And behind the clerk on the wall, the 45 that had won the war, and that every [music] man in the store already knew how to argue about. A clerk explaining to a customer why the hammer being down is a feature and not a defect. The customer nodding [music] and buying the 45. The skeptics weren’t fools. The most advanced American service pistol of its generation couldn’t find 800 buyers, and that is not the market being blind.

That’s the market saying, “Not yet.” [music] Dust settling on the glass over an unsold gun. Carl Hellstrom’s own words survive, which matters [music] because most of the men in this story left nothing. In 1953, [music] he stood up in front of the Newcomen Society and gave an address on the company’s first 100 years, published afterward under the title 100 Years of Gun Making.

A company president putting his own account of the [music] place into print while the pistol he’d bet on was still going nowhere. He was not a man who guessed at what customers wanted. In 1954, [music] he went to the National Matches at Camp Perry and sought out Bill Jordan, a border patrolman with a reputation earned in places where the answer mattered, and asked him what a lawman actually needed [music] in a duty gun.

Sit with that image for a second. The president of an American arms company standing at a firing line asking [music] questions instead of answering them. That conversation eventually produced one of the most successful revolvers the company ever made. It did [music] not save the pistol.

The Model 39 stayed in the catalog through the late ’50s and into the ’60s, selling in the hundreds, a solution [music] still looking for the problem it had been built for. On April 6th, 1963, Hellstrom died. It was sudden, and nobody was expecting it, [music] which leaves the question of who was left to make the argument, and whether the argument was even still being had.

Then 1966 happened, and it happened twice. That year, at the request of SEAL teams already deployed, the Naval Ordnance Laboratory took the Model 39 and developed a suppressed version of it, designated the Mark 22 Mod 0, a pistol built for men who worked at night and could not afford noise. It went into kits, and it went overseas.

The United States military, which had shelved this design in 1955 on the reasoning that sidearms were seldom used, had just gone looking for it on behalf of the small number of men in uniform who used a sidearm more than anyone else alive. And in the same year, back in Springfield, the factory pulled the leftover steel frames out of storage.

927 of them were still sitting there, forged for an army order that never came, untouched since the early ’50s. The company machined them, built them into pistols, and sold them commercially. A machinist blowing dust off a forging older than his own apprenticeship. The 1955 finding was never tested. It was assumed.

And the first people to actually put the question to the ground disagreed with it immediately. That [music] still wasn’t the moment the argument turned. The man who turned it was a sergeant in Illinois who did something the United States Army had never bothered to do. He counted. Illinois State Police troopers were required to be armed off duty.

In uniform, they carried service revolvers with 4-6 inch barrels, [music] and on their own time, going to the store, sitting in their own kitchens, they carried little 2-inch .38s because that’s what a man can hide under a jacket. Lewis Simon ran the Ordnance Section, which meant qualification scores came across his desk, and the scores told him something nobody in the department wanted written down.

His troopers shot the snub-nosed guns badly, not slightly worse, dismally worse than the same men shooting the same course with a service revolver in their hands. So, half the time his people were carrying the gun they [music] couldn’t shoot. A stack of scorecards on a range table and a sergeant adding the columns twice because the first total looked wrong.

The department spent roughly 2 years evaluating alternatives and [music] the pistol that came out the far end of it was the one the army had passed over. Light enough to conceal, flat enough to wear under a coat, double action so a man could carry it the way he’d carried a revolver, and the same gun on duty as off so a trooper would only ever have to learn one.

What do you do with numbers that say your own men are worse armed on their own time than on the state’s? In 1967, Illinois adopted it. The first order was 500 model 39s. The follow-on was 600 of the improved 39-2. Every frame got stamped on the left side ILLSP with a property number under it. Issue was finished the following year across roughly 1,700 sworn officers and the average qualification score across the department went UP.

Say the honest version of what happened next because the legend is bigger than the fact. Illinois was not the only agency carrying these pistols. Rhode Island State Police put them on detectives and at least one California department bought them, too. What Illinois did was issue one to everybody. The writer Massad Ayoob, who has told this story more than anyone, calls it the ripple that turned into a wave and that’s exactly right.

Something else needs saying here. Hellstrom left an address and a book. The Ordnance Corps left its typed requirement and its own logistics finding and one of the men who worked inside that system, Roy Rail, later set the reasoning down in a memoir under his own name. Louis Simond left nothing. There is no letter of his, no article, no line of his own that has surfaced.

Everything we know about why he did it come second hand through one writer’s reporting and through old troopers remembering. The man who proved the army wrong is the one who never gets to speak. His troopers wore it cross draw in a flap holster on the left side where a man sitting in a squad car could reach it.

And for the first stretch, that holster didn’t even come with a magazine pouch. The gun repaid them by breaking. Not catastrophically and not all at once, but in the way new designs actually fail. In the small parts nobody argues about at the counter. The first 500 pistols in the 600 that followed had come with two different types of extractor, the piece that pulls a fired case out of the chamber.

Illinois objected to running two versions of the same gun. So the original 500 went back to Massachusetts and came home retrofitted with an interim spring-loaded extractor. Some of them with the serial number stamped underneath the rear sight because that’s what you do when the same pistol [music] has been through the shop twice.

In 1971, the factory formalized the fixes as the model 39-2, a reshaped [music] feed ramp, a heavier barrel bushing, the better extractor as standard. There was also no drop safety on these [music] guns. Understand what that meant to the men issued them, not as a specification, but as a fact you live with.

[music] This was a pistol from an era before the industry had solved a problem it hadn’t fully admitted was a problem. An armorer in Springfield, Illinois prying open a crate he’d shipped out eight months earlier and the gun still wasn’t the biggest problem, [music] the cartridge was.

From 1967 into the early 70s, the department issued round nose ball ammunition, which is what military’s used and what the 9 mm had been designed around. Years later, the Illinois Ordnance Section told Ayub what their own records showed across that period. With ball, they could not point to a single instance of an armed felon stopped by one hit unless that hit had gone through the central nervous system.

That is a department discovering at its own expense that it had won half an argument. Soman had proven a man shoots better with the pistol he can actually carry. Nobody had yet proven what the pistol should be loaded with. The search that followed occupied Illinois for years and eventually produced a hollow-point load so associated with the department that it ended up carrying the state’s name.

A box of ball on a shelf and next to it a shooting report that ends the wrong way. Read once and then set down very carefully. So, ask the uncomfortable version of the question. If the round was the weak link the whole time, was the committee right for the wrong reason? For a while, a lot of people thought so. The Model 39 got a bigger brother in 1971, the 14-shot Model 59, and [music] Illinois itself ordered 500 of those in 1972.

Departments across the country watched Illinois and followed, and then some of them turned around and went back. In the July and August 1978 issue of American Handgunner, Ayub reported what several of those agencies had done, returned to revolvers, usually stainless .357 revolvers, citing malfunction rates with anything other than round-nose ball and doubts about what the 9 mm did when it arrived.

This is what a gun magazine was in 1978, [music] not a comment section, not a forum, but a monthly authority that landed in a mailbox and got folded open beside a cup of coffee and carried into a gun shop [music] where an argument would start with the words, “He wrote that.” A chief signing a purchase order to go backward. Stainless revolvers sliding into racks that had just been emptied of them.

For several years, the men who’d staked their names on the automatic looked early in the way that is indistinguishable from wrong. Meanwhile, the argument that had killed the whole thing in 1955 was quietly dying of its own logic. Sufficient M1911 pistols remained on hand, that had been the finding.

But, an inventory is not an argument. It’s a clock. By the late ’70s, the .45 caliber pistols had been through Korea and Vietnam and 30 years of attrition. And what was left in the racks was worn out. Picture a depot armorer running a gauge over a frame that’s been rebuilt twice already, setting it in the reject bin without really looking at it, and reaching for the next one.

The joint service small arms program started up in the late ’70s with NATO standardization on 9 mm now settled. In 1980, the Air Force ran trials and the Beretta 92S1 came out on top. The Army protested, among other things, that the 1911s used as the yardstick were issued guns, rather than new [music] ones, and took the program over.

The Army’s own round in 1981 and 1982 ended with every entry failed and very little data released to explain it. Congress ran out of patience and cut off funding for 1911 spare parts and .45 caliber ammunition until the service picked a 9 mm. Every line on that 1947 [music] sheet was about to be purchased, just not from anyone who had answered it.

On September 18th, 1984, the Army eliminated three of the five finalists. The Heckler and Koch P7M13 went out, the Walther P88 went out, and so did the Smith & Wesson 459M, the direct descendant of the pistol Joe Norman had finished in October of 1948, [music] the American answer to the American question disqualified from the American [music] competition.

What remained were the Beretta 92 SBF and [music] the SIG P226. On January 14th, 1985, the Beretta was adopted as the M9. Smith & Wesson joined the protest, and when a re-competition was run in 1988, the company’s candidate failed to meet [music] mandatory requirements. Roughly 459 of those trial pistols were built. One of them survives in a box with its documentation, and it comes up at auction now and then.

A trial gun going back into its foam. Carl Hellstrom had been dead 21 [music] years. Joe Norman’s name is on the drawings and on almost nothing the public ever sees. Louis Seaman exists mostly inside one writer’s retellings and Illinois Trooper’s memories and a property [music] number stamped on a frame. Both sides were right, and it cost both of them.

The logistics of this was correct that the army could get by. It got by for 30 years on guns that eventually had to condemn. Hellstrom was correct that America wanted a modern service pistol. [music] He was correct 12 years before anyone would buy one and 30 before the government would. Being right early is not a lesser version of being right.

[music] It’s a different thing entirely, and it pays differently. So, who gets remembered? The man who was first or the man who was on the invoice? The line from that pistol never stopped. The 39 became the 59, the 59 became the 439, and the 459 and the 469, and those became the third generation guns, the 5906, the 6906, that filled American duty holsters through the ’80s and ’90s while departments across the country converted off the revolver almost entirely.

Illinois itself moved to a 40 caliber in the late 90s. The M9 served from 1985 until 2017 when the army replaced it with a SIG. There are officers working today who have never seen a duty revolver outside a display case. Somewhere right now two people are having this argument without knowing whose argument it is.

One of them is looking at life cycle cost and existing inventory and asking whether the change is worth what it costs. The other is holding a stack of qualification data and saying, “Look at the scores. Look at what the men can actually do with what you gave them.” Neither of them has heard of Lewis Simon and the paper is still there.

Under 7 in under 25 oz 9 mm double action. It reads today like a description of a standard issue pistol filed one archive box away from a photograph of an American soldier holding an Italian gun that meets every line of it. And in a case somewhere in Illinois a frame stamped I L L S P with a property number under it.

A pistol that got issued because one sergeant counted holes in paper in a country whose army had already decided the count wasn’t worth taking. If you’ve got a side in that argument, leave it in the comments because I read them. And if you want more of these, subscribe.