The first design was submitted to the German Army and featured a locked breech and a hidden hammer but the Army requested that it should be redesigned with an external hammer. Development Īs the Luger P08 was expensive to produce, Germany started to look for a replacement as early as 1927, settling on the Walther P38 in 1938, which offered similar performance to the Luger P08 but took almost half the time to produce.
Moving the production lines to the more easily mass producible P38 once World War II started took longer than expected, leading to the P08 remaining in production until September 1942 and copies remained in service until the end of the war. It was intended to replace the comparatively complex and expensive to produce Luger P08. The Walther P38 (originally written Walther P.38) is a 9 mm semi-automatic pistol that was developed by Carl Walther GmbH as the service pistol of the Wehrmacht at the beginning of World War II. Short recoil, hinged locking piece assisted breechblockġ,050 ft/s (320 m/s) Carl Walther Waffenfabrik, Mauser Werke, Spreewerk
