Mas Mle 1935S History in Guns World

Charles Petter, a Swiss national invalided out of the French Foreign Legion after suffering severe wounds in North Africa, joined the Societè Alsacienne de Constructions Mechanique (SACM) at Cholet, Alsace in the early 1930s as an engineer. He eventually took charge of the firearms department. In 1934, he patented a pistol design: a locked-breech weapon in which the slide and barrel were locked together by lugs and unlocked after a short recoil stroke.

Petter had engineered the locking mechanism into a removable module similar to one the Russian Tokarev pistol but as the Tokarev was entirely unknown outside of the Soviet military at that time, it seems probable that Petter developed his design independently.

The prototype was submitted to the French Army, which put it through trials and adopted it as the Pistole automatique modèle 1935 (Automatic Pistol Model 1935; abbreviated mle 1935). The pistol became the official French service sidearm in 1936 but did not enter large-scale production until 1938.

Manufacture d’Armes de St. Etienne (MAS) assumed most of the responsibility for supplying the automatic pistol and produced it as the MAS 1935. St. Etienne engineers reworked the design in 1937 to simplify production, after which the original model was known as the MAS mle 1935A and the new simplified model became the MAS mle 1935S. The differences in the two versions are immediately apparent to anyone holding them. The mle 1935A is much smoother with a butt shaped to fit the hand and an excellent finish. The mle 1935S is a more angular and more poorly finished weapon that was, nevertheless, equally serviceable.

The mle 1935 chambered a 7.65-mm (0.301-in) longue (long) cartridge that was developed specifically for it. This ammunition was only marginally effective as a combat round and was used in only one other weapon, the French MAS 38 submachine gun.

In 1937, Switzerland’s Schweizer Industrial Gesellschaft Co. (SIG) purchased a licence from SACM to exploit and develop the Petter patents, from which it subsequently developed the SIG pistols. Captured pistols were taken into German service as 7.65 mm P625(f).

After World War II, the French design, reworked to chamber a 9-mm (0.354-in) cartridge, was re-issued as the MAS 1950 pistol.