In the beginning was the 9x19 mm …
Well, not actually in the beginning, but it was there earlier than most American gun enthusiasts realize.
Georg Luger produced the 9 mm Parabellum by necking up the 7.65x21 mm Parabellum round in order to make the Imperial German Army happy way back in 1901, several years before John Moses Browning debuted his .45 ACP in the Colt M1905.
For the first three decades of its life, however, the typical home for those 9 mm cartridges was a single-action handgun with a single-stack magazine, usually holding eight rounds or so.
The 1930s brought about two significant elements in handgun design that would affect the trajectory of 9 mm service semi-autos, however.
Walther had been building small, blowback-operated pistols, the PP series, mostly intended for law enforcement, with a novel lockwork that incorporated a hammer-dropping safety that allowed the pistol to be safely de-cocked after chambering a round—without pulling the trigger. It could then be carried with a round in the chamber either with the safety on or, if one preferred, with the safety off, relying on the long, heavy, revolver-like pull of the first shot to serve as the safety.
When the rapidly expanding German armed forces needed a pistol that was cheaper and simpler to manufacture than the Luger, Walther took the DA/SA lockwork of the PP series and combined it with a locked breech, recoil-operated mechanism that used a toggle-type locking block under the barrel. The resulting P38 (aka “pistole 38,” for the year of adoption) became the primary handgun of the Wehrmacht and many captured examples found their way to the U.S. after the war.
In the late 1940s, with an eye toward perhaps winning some military contracts, Smith & Wesson then-president Carl Hellstrom tapped designer Joe Norman to design a pistol that combined the DA/SA lockwork and hammer-drop safety of the Walther with a more conventional slide enclosing the barrel and a Browning-type tilting barrel, short-recoil mechanism.
When the military didn’t bite, since World War II had left us hip-deep in more than enough M1911A1 pistols to supply the smaller, postwar armed forces, Smith & Wesson brought its pistol to the commercial market. It’s a mark of how novel the Parabellum cartridge still was in the U.S. that Smith could just call the pistol the “Nine Millimeter” before renaming it the Model 39 in 1957 when swapping romantic names for clinical model numbers.
While there was initial hesitancy about this weird pistol in a foreign chambering, in the late ’60s, the progressive Illinois State Police adopted the Model 39 as its issue handgun and set the table for increasing acceptance of the 9 mm cartridge and semi-automatic pistols in general as law enforcement sidearms—with the cachet that also brings to commercial sales to private citizens.
The other pistol development from the 1930s began with John Browning and was shepherded across the finish line by Dieudonné Saive. This, of course, was the GP-35 (“Grande Puissance,” or “High Power”) from Fabrique Nationale. Originally developed in hopes of winning a sizable French military contract, the Hi-Power went on to serve with the Belgian army before World War II—and eventually with, oh, half the armies on the planet.
The “Hi-Power” name derived from the pistol’s double-stack box magazine, which held 13 rounds. This was better than half again the capacity of nearly every other service pistol on the market at the time.
Fast-forward to the Vietnam War, and U.S. Navy SEALs are using Smith & Wesson Model 39s in 9 mm as the Mk 22 Mod 0. Someone got the idea to widen the frame and magazine well on the Smith auto to accommodate the 13-round Hi-Power-size magazine. This eventually became a regular production pistol when it was brought to market in 1971 as the Smith & Wesson Model 59.
Now the table was set and the pieces were in place for the seismic handgun shift of the last couple decades of the 20th century. Take one 9 mm handgun, fit it with a DA/SA action featuring a hammer-dropping safety and feed it from a double-stack magazine holding more than a dozen rounds, and you’ve created what the gun magazines of the time termed (only slightly tongue-in-cheek) the “Wondernine.”
All through the 1970s, the number of entrants in the field kept growing, and the trend was turbocharged at the end of the decade when the U.S. military’s Joint Service Small Arms Program kicked off the trials to select the XM9, the pistol that would replace the aforementioned hip-deep pile of M1911A1s in the Pentagon’s rather considerable inventories.
Those pistols had served long and well, but by 1980, the newest of them was 35 years old, chambered a round that wasn’t in common with our NATO allies, and—well, the exposed hammer, single-action design had one particular problem in a military where handgun training is extremely perfunctory for anyone apart from a small number of special operations-type dudes: safety in the hands of inexperienced and marginally trained young troops.
The XM9 trials specified a safety that would decock the hammer and a firing pin block to ensure that said decocking could be done safely and without any untoward loud noises.
As everyone knows, the XM9 trials were won by Beretta, albeit narrowly on price, over the SIG Sauer P226, and the ’80s and ’90s became the era of the Wondernine. The military toted the Beretta M9, the LAPD carried the Beretta 92. Navy SEALs carried the SIG Sauer P226 as the “Mk 25.”
You could not look at a Hollywood movie poster from an action thriller, a buddy cop flick or a war movie without having a Wondernine all up in your grille right next to the lead actor’s face.
Two things put an end to the Wondernine era: For starters, training shooters to manage the transition from the double-action first shot to the single-action second shot was notoriously difficult. Also, it involved the need to train officers to remember to decock after a shooting incident.
The other was that these handguns, the pinnacle of the all-metal, duty-pistol era, could not possibly compete on price with a new handgun out of Austria that also did not necessitate teaching how to deal with two different trigger pulls.
Still, I remain a fan of the genre, and not because some of my most heroic moments in classes and matches happened with a Langdon-tuned Beretta 92. If you put in the time, the Wondernine is still pretty wonderful.
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