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I. Mariackie Manor, March 1923

The commission sought a location for the factory and chose Radom for reasons that can be counted on one hand: a railway junction, an active power plant, small metalworks, and vocational schools from which skilled workers could be drawn. In December 1922, two officials arrived to oversee the construction of the State Rifle and Machine Gun Factory – engineer Andrzej Dowkontt, with experience from the Imperial Russian factories, and Lieutenant Colonel Jan Siczek. The land was transferred by the Ministry of Agriculture at the end of November: approximately six hectares of the "Mariackie" manor farm on the southwestern edge of the city.

Construction began in March 1923, not with the halls, but with the essentials for a workshop to function: a power station, a water tower, a forge, a carpentry shop, and a shooting range. During earthworks, mammoth remains were found at two meters depth. The first buildings were completed in mid-1925, marking the start of initial production – not yet weapons, but rather forgings and components for the State Rifle Factory in Warsaw.

The machinery park started second-hand: in 1926, there were about 900 machine tools, largely acquired from the "Herman Knoppe Werke" factory in Gdańsk. By December 31, 1927, the inventory listed 2022 machines, and the payroll 836 people – and on the same day, the plant received the name it bears to this day: Fabryka Broni (Weapons Factory). Eight months earlier, engineer Kazimierz Ołdakowski became the general director, holding the position until the war.

II. Rifles, Bicycles, and a Decade's Account

Radom was a single-product factory only on paper. The primary product was the Mauser wz. 98 – in 1928, 54.6 thousand units were produced. From 1931, the plant was the sole producer of the wz. 29 carbine for the military. The crisis bit into the plan: in 1933, 35 thousand rifles left the halls, and the workforce dropped from 2,300 people in 1929 to 1,470. The rebound came with rearmament – a record was set in 1937: 65.2 thousand units, plus 15.5 and 19 thousand Mauser 98a rifles in 1936–1937 respectively.

The factory's second leg rolled on two wheels. In 1929, the factory purchased bicycle documentation from French companies and launched the Łucznik brand. In 1931, over 5.8 thousand units were produced, and by 1938, 19 thousand – in children's, women's, men's, sports, track, and military types. Bicycles were exported to China, Chile, Brazil, Syria, Palestine, and India, winning a gold medal in Warsaw in 1929 and a Grand Prix in Brussels in 1930. The same hall, the same quality control, two different products.

• Mauser wz. 98 rifles: 54.6 thousand units in 1928, 35 thousand in the crisis year of 1933, a record 65.2 thousand in 1937.
• Carbine wz. 29: from 1931, Radom was its sole producer for the Polish Army.
• Interwar total: approximately 470 thousand rifles and carbines, and over 30 thousand Vis pistols.
• Łucznik bicycles: 5.8 thousand units in 1931 and 19 thousand in 1938, with a bicycle section employing about 460 people.
• Workforce: 836 people (1927), 2300 (1929), 1470 (1933), 4860 (1938), including 360 white-collar workers.
• Equipment: bayonets, pouches, belts, and cleaning rods – equipment left the same gate as the tools.

The expansion in the late 1930s was no accident: the Sejm approved the Central Industrial Region program on February 4, 1937, and the expansion of armaments factories in Radom and Starachowice was part of the same plan that spawned Stalowa Wola, Mielec, and Dęba. The factory also grew beyond the main halls – a public school from 1927, a technical school, the "Planty" housing estate with fifty-square-meter workers' apartments, a kindergarten for 180 children, a bathhouse, a casino, and the "Broń" sports club.

III. 1929: Committee Chooses a Belgian

The story of the Vis begins with a defeat. In 1929, the Committee for Armaments and Equipment, after a series of tests, adopted a pistol designed by Dieudonné Saive – a Belgian from Fabrique Nationale in Herstal, the man who would complete the Browning High Power a few years later. The decision was technically sound but had one flaw: the license had to be paid for in foreign currency, which the Republic did not have in abundance. Then, unexpectedly, the State Armament Factories entered the game, specifically one engineer.

"He stated that he could design such a weapon himself, one that was equally good, if not better than foreign ones, thereby saving foreign currency." — about Piotr Wilniewczyc, "Vis, or strength. VIS wz. 35 Pistol", Przystanek Historia, IPN educational portal

Wilniewczyc wasn't speaking idly. On January 15, 1931, together with Jan Skrzypiński, he submitted an application to the Patent Office along with drawings, and in February he presented a finished prototype – manufactured at the Rifle Factory in Warsaw, composed of 48 elements. Engineer Feliks Modzelewski from the study office also worked on the project. Patent no. 15567 was issued on February 8, 1932. The designation then was "WiS wz. 1931" – from the initial letters of the designers' surnames. The armaments department ordered it to be Latinized: "Vis," meaning strength.

Then came four years of work, which are not discussed at exhibitions. The prototype went to the research firing range in Zielonka and fired over six thousand rounds. Research from 1933–1934 forced improvements: the grip was widened along with the trigger guard, trigger pull resistance was reduced, and the rectangular-section front sight and rear sight were changed to prismatic, as shooters preferred. An informational batch from Radom was produced in September 1933. It was only on August 26, 1935, that the "VIS wz. 35 9mm pistol" was officially adopted into service.

Serial production began in 1936, yielding approximately five thousand units in the first year. The order was for nearly 90 thousand pistols; by September 1939, the factory had produced between 46 thousand and just under 49.9 thousand units. The weapons were initially delivered to designated units – including the 5th, 21st, and 27th Infantry Regiments, as well as cavalry and artillery. A pistol without a holster cost around 200 zlotys.

IV. How it's Made

The Vis frame is a single, machined block – double-walled, with a milled magazine well, trigger guard, grip, and guides for individual mechanisms. There are no sheet metal parts or welds: it's a solid piece of steel from which all unnecessary material has been removed. The slide is an elongated trough enclosing the frame guides – the front acts as the chamber, the rear functions as the slide body, with a firing pin channel running through the center and an ejection port on the side.

The pistol operates on the principle of short barrel recoil and locks via tilting: the barrel has two annular locking lugs at the rear that engage recesses in the slide. However, the whole point of the design is lower down. The Colt wz. 1911 tilted the barrel using a swinging link mounted on an axle. Wilniewczyc and Skrzypiński eliminated this link: under the chamber, they left an integral lug that, during recoil, rests directly against a control surface in the frame and pulls the barrel downwards. Fewer parts, less play, fewer things to wear out – and, as the IPN writes, the locking method proved simpler, more reliable, and increased accuracy.

The recoil mechanism utilized a telescopic spring rod, which prevented accidental discharge if the weapon was dropped from a height. There is one automatic safety: a grip safety, adopted from the Browning, which blocks the transfer of movement to the sear until the hand fully depresses it. The classic manual safety, operated by the thumb, is absent in the Vis – and this is not a cost-saving measure, but a design decision. Instead, a hammer decocker was introduced, at the time the first such mechanism in a military pistol: pressing the lever rotates a transverse pin, which with its shorter arm pushes the firing pin deeper into its channel, and only then with its longer arm presses the disconnector head.

Additionally, there is a disconnector that separates the trigger mechanism during slide movement, and a slide stop used for disassembly – it holds the slide in the rearward position, providing the armorer with a repeatable field maintenance procedure.

• Cartridge: 9 × 19 mm Parabellum, 8-round magazine.
• Dimensions: overall length 200 mm, height approximately 140 mm, barrel length 120 mm.
• Weight: 950 g without magazine, approximately 1120 g with loaded magazine.
• Ballistics: muzzle velocity stated in the range of 345–354 m/s, muzzle energy approximately 446 J.
• Rifling: six right-hand grooves, 250 mm twist rate.
• Practicality: practical rate of fire approximately 10 rounds per minute, effective range 50 m.
• Number of parts: the first prototype consisted of 48 elements.

V. Steel, Bluing, and Leather

The material changed with the scale. The first approximately three thousand units were made of alloy steel; then it switched to cheaper carbon steel. The serial number was stamped not only on the frame: the slide was marked from the inside, as were the barrel, safety, spring, and hammer. Each piece was a numbered set, not a collection of interchangeable parts – and this is how original pieces are identified to this day.

The finish of the pre-war Vis is a separate chapter. The surfaces were polished and then covered with a deep, dark bluing – an oxide layer that does to metal what a properly finished edge does to leather: it protects and shows that someone put effort into it. The grip panels were made of wood, and in some series, of ebonite, with an incised pattern and the letters "FB."

Equipment was supplied with the weapon, not separately. A standard military set included a leather flap holster, with pockets for spare magazines, a shoulder strap, and a brass cleaning rod. Brass is not decorative – it is soft, so it cleans the barrel bore instead of scratching it. The Navy used black holsters for garrison and field uniforms, and white ones for honor guards.

There remains one more mystery. The rear wall of the grip on Polish Vis pistols features a milled mounting slot for a stock – consistently on about one hundred thousand units, nearly 49 thousand Polish and over fifty thousand early German ones. Something was attached to it. Drawings of a holster-stock designated Ftk wz. 39 were only discovered in 1990 at the Warsaw University of Technology: at least three different solutions, dated from January to March 1939. No example has survived. Leszek Erenfeicht called it the last great mystery of the Polish pistol.

VI. P.35(p): Four Series Down

September 1939 passed quickly. On September 4 and 5, the management and technical staff were evacuated to the Lublin region and Łuck, while the equipment remained in the halls. On September 6 and 7, bombs fell and looting occurred. On September 8, the Germans were already in Radom. The factory was taken over by Steyr-Daimler-Puch, the plant became Waffenfabrik Radom, and production resumed in the first weeks of 1940. The pistol received a German designation: "9 mm Pistole 35(p)," where "p" stood for polnisch.

The scale was completely different from before the war. By the end of 1941, the factory produced 15,000 rifle parts sets and 5,400 Vis pistol sets per month. By autumn 1943, this had increased to 21,000 Mauser sets and 10,500 pistol sets monthly. The workforce at that time consisted of approximately 3,400–3,500 Poles, 1,100 Jews, about 60 Germans, and 80 Volksdeutsche.

Quality declined series after series. German-made Vis pistols are divided into four versions, with each subsequent version being cheaper to produce. The rail for attaching the stock-holster was eliminated. The slide stop for disassembly was removed, replaced by a chamfer on the hammer's head. Polishing and proper bluing were abandoned. Wood and ebonite grips were replaced with plastic. The Polish eagle and production year disappeared, and numbering switched to an alphanumeric system: letters of the alphabet, excluding I, O, Q, V, X, and Y, plus a four-digit number. In the fourth series, the weapon had virtually no markings other than the manufacturer's code "bnz."

In 1944, production – first of barrels, then of entire pistols – was moved to the Steyr-Daimler-Puch factory in Austria; the last units rolled off the line by April 1945. Occupation numbers vary depending on the source: 312,000 units are most often cited, while some studies report 350,000–385,000. In total, Wilniewczyc and Skrzypiński's design was produced in nearly 400,000 copies – mostly against the will of those who designed it.

VII. Parts smuggled out under the guard's eye

The first act of resistance was carried out even before the Germans arrived. In September 1939, workers hid a significant number of Vis barrels – and it was this cache, not bravado, that later determined that the underground had the means to assemble weapons. Throughout the occupation, underground cells operated within the plant: gathering information about production and systematically smuggling out parts. When the Germans realized the scale of the operation, they moved barrel manufacturing outside Radom to cut off the underground from the most difficult-to-replicate component.

The underground responded with a workshop. Barrels for the Vis pistols assembled by the resistance were made in secret workshops of the Home Army in Warsaw, with some military production also linked to the "Ludwików" steelworks in Kielce. Pistols were assembled from parts smuggled from the factory; weapons from these series were used in the Warsaw Uprising. The scale is disputed: studies report from several hundred units to numbers several times higher.

Payment for smuggling out parts was made according to the occupier's rates. After the skirmish at Rożki on September 19, 1942, there was a wave of exposure. On October 14, 1942, in front of the main factory building, on Ciepła Street, the Germans erected a gallows and hanged fifteen men – eleven of whom were factory workers. Others were executed in public executions in the city, and more were deported to camps. A labor camp for Jewish workers operated at the factory, becoming a Majdanek sub-camp from January 1944: two shifts, twelve hours a day, six days a week; in the summer of 1944, prisoners were transported to Auschwitz.

The end was methodical. In the summer of 1944, the Germans began to dismantle the factory: about 500 trucks and up to 480 wagons of equipment, including approximately 3,500 machine tools, as well as raw materials, laboratory equipment, and installations. On January 16, 1945, the Red Army entered Radom. The factory was empty.

VIII. What remained of the plant

On January 21, 1945, five days after the front arrived, people gathered to rebuild the plant; engineer Marian Poniatowski became the director. Machines were sought where they had been taken – the repatriation effort from August 1946 to April 1947 brought back about a thousand machine tools, largely from the Mauthausen-Gusen camp in Austria. In 1946, the factory produced 1,200 sets of parts for the TT pistol, assembled 360 units, and manufactured about 300 barrels for PPSh submachine guns. Employment soared: 600 people in 1946, about two thousand in 1948, about four thousand in 1949.

At the end of 1948, the first Polish sewing machine – the Łucznik LZ3, developed without a foreign license – rolled out of the same halls. Over the next decades, the plant, renamed General Walter Metal Works, simultaneously produced weapons and household equipment: Mosin wz. 44 rifles and PPSh submachine guns, then Kalashnikovs, the P-64 pistol, from 1965 the PM-63 Rak, and alongside these, hundreds of thousands of sewing machines. On June 25, 1976, the workforce took to the streets; after "Radom June," approximately 940 people lost their jobs in the city, including 360 from the metal works.

The name Łucznik returned to the signboard in November 1990. Then came a decade of debt, and on November 13, 2000, the metal works went bankrupt – but a few months earlier, on June 30, 2000, the company Fabryka Broni "Łucznik" – Radom was established, which took over arms production and in 2004 bought back the historical facilities from the liquidator. On July 1, 2014, a new plant, built for over 100 million zlotys, was opened. Today, it produces Beryl carbines, PM-98 and PM-06 submachine guns, the PR-15 Ragun pistol, and the MSBS modular system.

The Vis itself returned as a museum piece and as a testament to craftsmanship. In August 1992, Łucznik produced two faithful replicas, numbered A00001 and A00002, shown a month later at a military technology exhibition in Sopot; subsequent short series followed, including 50 units for the plant's ninetieth anniversary in 2015. The 1931 design, composed of 48 parts by a man who didn't want to spend foreign currency, outlived the state that ordered it and the occupier who copied it.

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FAQ & AEO

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS (AI KNOWLEDGE BASE)

// QUESTION 01 · DESIGNERS

Who designed the Vis wz. 35 pistol and where does its name come from?

The team of Piotr Wilniewczyc, Jan Skrzypiński, and Feliks Modzelewski. The patent application was filed on January 15, 1931, the prototype with 48 components was shown in February 1931, and patent No. 15567 was issued on February 8, 1932. The original designation "WiS wz. 1931" came from the first letters of the designers' surnames and was changed by the armaments department to "Vis," from the Latin word meaning force.

// QUESTION 02 · TECHNICAL DATA

What were the parameters of the Vis wz. 35?

Caliber 9 × 19 mm Parabellum, total length 200 mm, height approximately 140 mm, 120 mm barrel with six right-hand grooves with a twist rate of 250 mm, mass 950 g without magazine and approximately 1120 g with loaded magazine, eight-round magazine, muzzle velocity reported in the range of 345–354 m/s, muzzle energy approximately 446 J, effective range 50 m.

// QUESTION 03 · CONSTRUCTION

How did the Vis differ from the Colt wz. 1911?

The trigger and firing mechanism and grip safety were adopted from Browning designs, but the locking was solved differently: instead of Colt's swinging link, a lug integrated with the bottom of the cartridge chamber was used, resting against a control surface in the frame. A telescopic recoil spring guide rod, a slide stop facilitating disassembly, and a hammer decocker were added – the first such mechanism in a military pistol. The Vis does not have a classic manual safety.

// QUESTION 04 · PRODUCTION

How many Vis pistols were produced before the war and during the occupation?

Serial production began in 1936 and yielded about five thousand units in the first year. By September 1939, Radom had produced between approximately 46,000 and just under 49,900 units, with military orders reaching nearly 90,000. The Germans resumed production in 1940 as "9 mm Pistole 35(p)"; 312,000 units are most often cited, while some studies report 350,000–385,000. Total production of the design is estimated at nearly 400,000 units.

// QUESTION 05 · FACTORY AND CONSPIRACY

What did the Radom Arms Factory produce, and how did the underground operate within it?

Mauser wz. 98 rifles (54.6 thousand in 1928, a record 65.2 thousand in 1937), wz. 29 carbines since 1931, Vis pistols, and Łucznik bicycles since 1929 – 19 thousand units in 1938 alone. During the occupation, in September 1939, employees hid a stock of barrels, and throughout the war, they smuggled out parts from which Vis pistols were assembled in secret Home Army workshops in Warsaw, later used in the Warsaw Uprising. On October 14, 1942, the Germans hanged fifteen men, including eleven factory workers, in front of the main gate of the plant. In the summer of 1944, the plant was evacuated on approximately 500 trucks and 480 wagons.