Reprinted from Petersen Publishing Company - Guns & Ammo - December, 1988
50 Years of Walther Wondernines
A Half-century of great German handguns, 9mms for defense and sport.
By Wiley Clapp
In 1938, the German government adopted a revolutionary pistol. It was the famous Walther P38, a handgun that marks a turning point in automatic pistol design. The P38 combined a host of excellent design features in a pistol way ahead of most of its contemporaries. It was the first widely-used, full-sized battle pistol for a serious defensive cartridge which used a double-action trigger. A full five decades later, after countless battles and skirmishes, there is a new Walther 9mm service handgun. It's called the P88. The experience of the intervening years told the German designers what was required for success in a fighting pistol and the P88 is the result. Not surprisingly, the pistol has an improved version of the same double-action trigger. Lots of WWII P38's came back from the war in GI duffel bags and they started a trend in automatic pistol thinking. In the P38's fiftieth anniversary year, it's appropriate to examine what Walther has contributed to handgunning. We'll do that by looking back at the history of the P38 in all its variations, then looking ahead to the new P88 and its probable impact on combat handgunning - fifty years of Walther 9mms.
"Wondernine" is a term that has cropped up in the gun magazines in the past few years. Overused to the point of being a near-cliche, wondernine was doubtless coined by some desperate gunwriter in search of another word to describe the latest in a seemingly unending stream of 9mm service pistols. We have seen a lot of them recently, each touted to have features which obsolete its predecessors.
Most of them have something to commend them and a few are really superior handguns,
fully competitive in a vigorous handgun market. The shooter benefits, of course,
when he goes looking for a 9mm service or defense pistol. but, after a lengthy
evaluation of yet another wondernine, I am prepared to shorten the handgunner's
search for the best of the breed. I believe the new Walther P88 is the best
9mm service pistol currently available.
The pistol is much like all of the others, but most features of the P88 are carried out just a little better than those of the competition. In one area, there is no other contemporary service automatic pistol that comes close. That's accuracy, where the P88 turns in eye-popping performance. It is easily the most accurate of the modern service pistols on the market.
Looking closely at the P88, we see a 9mm handgun with a double-column fifteen-shot magazine. It has a form of double-action trigger like the one Walther pioneered on 9mm pistols fifty years ago. The frame of the P88 is weight-saving aluminum alloy, while the top half-barrel and slide-is machined tool steel. With a 4-inch barrel, the pistol measures just under 7 1/2 inches overall length. It weighs 31 1/2 ounces, which is right in the range of competing pistols.
The dimensions and general characteristics of the P88 place it in the middle of the field of modern service automatics. It is about the same size, has the same general characteristics and is clearly intended to play the same role as all of the others. How much difference can there logically be in a design that is so much like all others in the class?
There's plenty of difference, most of it centered around the clever way the German designers laid out the controls and other features of the gun. Simply stated, the P88 is better because it does ordinary things in extraordinary ways. Consider something as simple as removing the magazine in order to charge the piece for firing.
There
is a magazine catch located at the juncture of the triggerguard and the butt
of the gun, on the left side of the frame. It is a button that pushes in with
the right thumb, clearing an internal lug that allows the magazine to drop free.
That's pretty ho-hum, since nearly all contemporaries have the same feature.
Lots of shooters would prefer to use the tip of the trigger finger to dump the magazine and in the P88, they can do just that. The new Walther has another button on the right side of the pistol and a right-handed shooter can use the first finger. That's right, the magazine catch is completely ambidextrous, allowing either right or left-handed shooters the choice of using either thumb or trigger finger for fast magazine changes.
This either-way, either-side business doesn't stop with the magazine catch of the P88. Other controls are likewise ambidextrous. Most competing 9mm service pistols have combination safety and de-cocking features, with levers on both sides of the pistol. The Walther has no manual safety, just a de-cocker. Further, nearly all competitive service pistols have a frame-mounted lever on the left side which serves to release the slide and let it run forward into battery.
The Walther has both of these lever, but with a difference. On the P88, the decocking lever and the slide stop lever are one in the same. The operating manual for the pistol characterizes it as the operating lever. No part was ever so well named, because this small chunk of sheet steel controls most of the operation of the pistol.
Assume that the shooter is holding an empty P88 with the slide locked back. After he inserts a loaded magazine into the magazine well, he has but to trip the operating lever with his thumb and the slide release, run forward and chamber a round of ammunition. This leaves the hammer cocked, so a second downwards press on the operating lever will drop the hammer and set the trigger to the forward position for a double-action pull. After firing one or more shots, the hammer will be in the cocked mode and it may be de-cocked by a simple flip of the same lever.
The clever part of the design is a second operating lever on the right side of the pistol. A shooter working with the pistol in his left hand therefore has a complete set of tactical controls, magazine catch and operating lever, available. He does not have to resort to tricky manipulations of the pistol to stay in the fight. The Walther P88 has complete tactical ambidexterity.
The value of an ambidextrous pistol is not primarily its appeal to the small percentage of southpaws in the population. More than that, the ambidextrous handgun is more versatile in the hands of right-handed shooters who are forced by tactical circumstances to shoot left handed. This might be as a result of a wounded arm or a situation where the shooter has to shoot around the left side of an object. The sum and substance of the matter is simply that the P88 is a more usable handgun by virtue of its ambidextrous nature.
When Walther engineers determined that a pistol shooting the powerful 9mm cartridge needed a locked-breech system, they developed the clever locking block which floats in the slide of the P38 pistol and its successors. It is a workable concept, good enough to find its way into the current U.S. M9 service pistol. Nevertheless, the floating block system may not be as conducive to gilt-edged accuracy as some of the others and the new P88 uses another type.
The barrel of the P88 locks into positive engagement with the slide by means of a Browning tilting-barrel arrangement. This is a tried-and-true method and one that is used on the majority of today's centerfire autoloaders of 9mm or larger. In the case of the P88, it is a fairly radical departure from earlier designs, but one that undeniably works.
The P88 barrel looks a good bit like the Browning, but differs in the way it is fitted to the slide. There are three points of firm contact in the P88 slide-barrel relationship. The first is the lower barrel lug's fit to the frame. Second is the contact made by the upper surface of the barrel against the top inner surface of the slide. Finally, the muzzle end of the barrel indexes firmly against the lower edge of the opening on the front face of the slide. When the P88 slide goes forward into battery, the rear of the barrel is forced upwards and the squared breech section fits into the ejection port. The barrel contacts the area just forward of the port. With the barrel forcefully elevated at the rear, its front end wants to turn down. The hole on the front face of the slide is somewhat elliptical in shape and there is no cylindrical barrel bushing. In other words, the front end of the barrel is free to pivot downwards a few degrees.
Forced up at the rear, the muzzle end of the barrel comes to rest in the same spot every time. If the amount of pressure on the barrel was excessive, it would doubtless bind and interfere with the cycling of the pistol. The amount of resistance is carefully worked out in order to ensure the barrel positions itself in the same place everytime, but is free to move a short distance with the recoiling slide. The result is a fully workable locking system, where the barrel is in the same position relative to the slide each time the pistol fires.
It is much like the system used in the famous Sig 210, the most accurate 9mm pistol of them all. Part of the reason for the pistol's excellent accuracy (which is covered separately in this story) is the lockup, but part of it is also due to the high-quality Walther barrel. Whatever the source, accuracy is flatly outstanding in the P88.
The pistol pictured in this story is one that I have had for the better part of a year. In that time, I have fired close to a thousand rounds through it. Happily enough, one of my earliest criticisms of the gun seems to be resolving itself as a result of the continued use. Out of the box, the Walther trigger pull is less than ideal. It is long and draggy in double action and a bit mushy in single. Without gunsmithing, the trigger pull has become perceptibly smoother, apparently just from being cycled a number of times.
The less-than-ideal trigger pull is a consequence of a most unusual saftey system. Since the P88 has no manual safety, it relies on a passive trigger safety. There is just no way the P88 can fire unless the trigger is deliberately pulled. The last fraction of an inch of trigger movement, in either cocked or double-action mode, elevates the firing pin into alignment with a flat surface on the hammer nose. If the hammer should somehow fall in the process, it cannot hit the firing pin, which is linked to the trigger. There's even a concave section on the hammer nose which ensures that a falliing hammer will not strike the firing pin. The firing pin is held down by a stubby coil spring and overcoming the resistance of that spring is what makes the trigger pull less than ideal. As noted earlier, it cleans up somewhat with use.
Most users of the pistol see it as being a bit too thick. That is a criticism that applies to about eighty percent of the current crop of wondernines. It is pretty hard to get a double-column magazine of 9mm cartridges into a pistol and have a butt that is slim and graceful. The Walther designers are fully aware of this and did a respectable job of coming up with an acceptable grip configuration. Nevertheless, I would love to have a thinner pair of pebbled or checkered grips made of Delrin.
For the shooter who demands the best, the P88 is the gun to have. It is a fine handgun and one that I genuinely believe is the best of the wondernine breed. I'll concede that my evaluation is based on just one example and that I did no rough-service evaluating with mud and sand baths, etc. Service under the rough conditions for which the pistol is unquestionably intended might show up a flaw or two-but I doubt it.
There's so much good news associated with the P88 that the small bit of bad news might be trifle easier to swallow. The pistol costs a lot of money. the suggested retail price of the gun is $1,215 and yes, you're right in concluding that other pistols are far less costly. Nevertheless, I hold firm in my contention that none of the other excellent 9mm service pistols are quite as good as the Walther P88. It's the reigning monarch of wondernines.