Radom Vis 35 Combat Pistol
The Polish Radom Vis 35 is quite possibly one of the world’s finest combat pistols… that you’ve never heard of. Radom is a city in central Poland, a country all too familiar with war, and home to the factory that produced the pistol over many years. In the wake of the First World War, Twentieth-century Polish policymakers resolved to outfit their soldiers with a domestically produced sidearm. As was the case with a majority of Poland’s arsenal, troops traditionally used a variety of second-hand pistols purchased from other nations, such as the Austro-Hungarian Roth-Steyr M1907 and the Rast & Gasser M1898 Army Revolver.
The Radom is a hybrid of the P35 and 1911, respectively referring to the Browning Hi-Power and Colt M1911, two preeminent combat pistols of the twentieth century. Designed by Piotr Wilniewczvy and Jan Skrzpinski, the Vis (Latin for “power”) is a magazine-fed auto-loader and widely considered one of the best pre-WWII pistols ever made.
Even the Germans, who already had a variety of advanced weapons, forced the Radom factory to supply a variant, the P35 (p), to the Nazi war effort. Reliable and accurate, recovered Radoms are highly collectible and still capable of holding sub-3-inch shot groups at distances up to 25 yards.
Germans coveted the Vis 35, relocating Radom production to Austria during the early 1940s. Concerned with the potential of Polish factory workers providing weapons to insurgency efforts, such as the Warsaw Uprising, Nazi officials closely monitored all aspects of Vis 35 production over the remainder of the war. Nevertheless, covert agents did manage to smuggle several hundred Austrian-produced pistols to the Home Army back in Poland. Many of these later Vis 35s were rushed into production and made with inferior materials, degrading the overall quality of the weapon, consequently explaining why they fell out of favor near the end of the war.