Vincent J. Curtis
12 Oct 2018
As Esprit
de Corps’ resident Colonel Blimp, an “old Cold War warhorse,” an archaic
‘death or glory type’, I’d like to put a good word for Canada’s old armaments
makers. Specifically, John Inglis and Company.
You would be correct to associate John
Inglis with Bren guns, of which it made some 186,000 examples during the Second
World War. But it is also famous for the
Inglis Hi-Power pistol, which the Canadian army adopted as its standard sidearm
in 1944. These self-same handguns are
now completing their 75th year of continuous service in the Canadian
armament inventory.
The Inglis Hi-Power eclipses in duration of
service the Colt M1911, which was the standard issue U.S. sidearm from 1911 to
1985, a total of 74 years. The M1911,
another John Browning design, was manufactured in several batches: for World
War I, in the 1920s and 1930s, and then in another massive wave during World
War II. None of the guns made in 1911
served all the way through to 1985. The handguns
made by John Inglis and in service to this day were made between February 1944
and October 1945.
The Hi-Power was John Browning’s last
design, and he did not live to complete it.
Working with Fabrique Nationale, Browning sought to develop a pistol
that would meet the requirements issued by the French military in the 1920s for
a new pistol: a high capacity, semi-automatic in nine millimetre calibre and
with a magazine disconnect safety device.
Browning’s collaborator at FN was Dieudonné Saive who developed the
double-stacked, single feed magazine that is now standard today in practically
all modern high capacity pistols. Browning
looked to improve upon his M1911 design, and he had to get around the patents
he had sold to Colt. The trigger
mechanism in particular had to be changed, in part to incorporate the magazine
disconnect mechanism.
Ultimately, the French didn’t buy, and it
was the Belgian military that adopted the model in 1935. Hence, it is also sometimes referred to as the
P-35. When the Germans overran Belgium
in 1940, Saive escaped and fled to Britain, taking with him several examples.
The Nationalist Chinese government came to
Canada shopping for Bren guns, and in passing asked if Inglis could also make them
the Browning Hi-Power which the Chinese liked and had bought directly from FN
before 1940. Canada’s lend-lease agency,
the Mutual Aid Board, agreed to fund the purchase of 180,000, and Britain
wanted an additional 50,000. With orders
of this scale, Inglis set about to manufacture the Browning Hi-Power in
Toronto. With the help of Saive, Inglis
developed its own version built upon English measurements instead of metric.
Mass production began in February, 1944. The first allotment was sent to India for transshipment
over “the Hump” but the logistical absurdity then became apparent. Besides this, at that point of the war, the
Nationalist Chinese were more interested in fighting the Communists than the
Japanese, and so the bulk of that Chinese order was cancelled. Canada had thousands of these handguns just
sitting around and, with all this production capacity, the Canadian army
decided to appropriate them for its own use
The Inglis Hi-Power replaced the venerable Webley revolver in Canadian
service in late 1944.
Eventually the Canadian army received
nearly 60,000 Inglis Hi-Powers in the Chinese and No. 2 Mk 1* patterns.
After the war, the Hi-Power became a
de-facto military standard, and was adopted as a side-arm in about fifty
countries. Most of these were made by FN
in Belgium after the war. Today, the original
Inglis Hi-Power remains in service in Canada and Taiwan. The Inglis tooling and dies were shipped to
India’s Ishapore factory and were used to make side-arms for India.
After 75 years of continuous use in the
Canadian military and with roughly 14,000 left in inventory, the Inglis
Hi-Power is coming to the end of its useful life. FN ceased production in 2017. Fashions are changing. Given the newer materials of construction, it
is unlikely that any of the possible replacements – the plastic wonder 9s - will
serve as long as the all-steel Inglis Hi-Power.
Will the government surplus these old
warhorses to the Canadian market place?
-30-
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