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Concept
Walther P38
Summary
The Walther P38 (originally written Walther P.38) is a 9 mm semi-automatic pistol that was developed by Carl Walther GmbH as the service pistol of the Wehrmacht at the beginning of World War II. It was intended to replace the comparatively complex and expensive to produce Luger P08. Moving the production lines to the easier mass producible P38 once World War II started took longer than expected, leading to the P08 remaining in production until September 1942, and pre-existing copies remained in service until the end of the war.
As the Luger P08 was expensive to produce, Germany started to look for a replacement as early as 1927, settling on the Walther P38 in 1938, which offered similar performance to the Luger P08, but took almost half the time to produce.
The first design was submitted to the German Army and featured a locked breech and a hidden hammer, but the Army requested that it should be redesigned with an external hammer.
The P38 concept was accepted by the German military in 1938 but production of prototype ("Test") pistols did not begin until late 1939. Walther began manufacture at their plant in Zella-Mehlis and produced three series of "Test" pistols, designated by a "0" prefix to the serial number. The third series pistols satisfactorily solved the previous problems for the German Army and mass production began in mid-1940, using Walther's military production identification code "480".
Several experimental versions were later created in .45 ACP, and .38 Super, but these were never mass-produced. In addition to the 9×19mm Parabellum version, some 7.65×21mm Parabellum and some .22 Long Rifle versions were also manufactured and sold.
The P.38 was a cutting edge semi-automatic pistol design, which introduced technical features used today in current commercial and military semi-automatic pistols, including the Beretta 92FS and its M9 sub-variant.
The P38 was the first locked-breech pistol to use a double-action/single-action (DA/SA) trigger (the earlier double-action PPK was an unlocked blowback design, but the more powerful 9×19mm Parabellum round used in the P38 mandated a locked breech design).
Official source
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