MY VOTE for the best single-action combat pistol goes to the Browning Hi-Power. In 1921, Fabrique Nationale (FN) of Belgium had John Moses Browning design a 9mm pistol for French army trials. He produced two functioning models: one was blowback operated while the second’s barrel unlocked by a cam on the bottom of the barrel that pulled it down to unlock it from the slide during recoil, and used double column mags designed by his chief assistant, Dieu-donne Saive. After Browning’s death in 1926, Saive combined the best features of Browning’s prototypes with the 1911’s and a number of his own ideas into an entirely new 9mm handgun introduced in 1935 as the Pistolet Browning Grande Puissance (Browning High Power Pistol). Before WWII, it was adopted by more than a dozen armies. During the war the Germans used pistols made at the occupied FN plant while the Allies used Hi-Powers made by the John Inglis Company.
Production at FN resumed after WWII and the Hi-Power became the most popular military pistol in the world outside of the Soviet
