Besides being my all-time personal sentimental favorite pistol, the Beretta 92FS, aka M9, is a truly iconic combat handgun. Believe it or not, the Beretta 92/M9 pistol series is celebrating its 50th birthday this year, which by happy happenstance (alliterative wordplay intended) falls the year before the 500th anniversary of its manufacturer, which just so happens to be the world’s oldest industrial firm of any kind.
I’m pleased to note that I’m currently drafting a book on the 50th anniversary of the Beretta 92 series. Accordingly, as part of my historical research, my book will also cover the Model 92’s processor, the 9mm M1951, aka M951 Brigadier. I wasn’t able to get ahold of a genuine Beretta M1951, but was able to obtain the Egyptian license-built version, the Helwan Brigadier.
Helwan Brigadier Basic History and Vital Stats
As you ever-savvy readers have probably already guessed from the alphanumeric designation, the M1951 debuted in the year 1951. In one of those many ironic twists in the history of warfare, the M1951 was adopted by the armies of both Israel and Egypt, who wound up using the pistol to kill each other’s soldiers in the various Arab-Israeli wars of the 1950s through the 1970s, including the 1967 Six-Day War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War. (Somewhat akin to Ukrainian and Russian troops blowing each other away with Makarov pistols in the present day.)
The pistol quickly gained a reputation with both sides for excellent reliability and accuracy in the harsh conditions of desert combat. Indeed, the Egyptians liked the M1951 so much that began producing the gun under license in the early 1960s. Maadi, a local firearms concern, was tabbed with the manufacturing task. This Egyptian homegrown edition was dubbed the Helwan Brigadier.
Whether Italian or Egyptian-made (or Iraqi-made, as in the Tariq, for that matter), Brigadiers have the following tech specs:
- Caliber: 9x19mm Parabellum aka 9mm Luger
- Empty Weight: 31 ounces
- Barrel Length: 4.5 inches
- Overall Length: 8.0 inches
- Magazine Capacity: 8 + 1 rounds
“Coming to America”: the Helwan Brigadier Makes Its Way Stateside (and to my Personal Arsenal)
(Sorry, couldn’t resist the homage to the classic 1988 comedy starring Eddie Murphy there.)
Over the past several decades, a goodly number of Helwans been imported into the United States by companies such as Interarms and Navy Arms. They can ofttimes can be purchased in the $250-300 USD range for working models with at least one magazine.
Fast-forward to the beginning of this month, and Yours Truly purchased a Helwan from Joshua Gonzalez of Free State Arms in San Antonio, Texas after seeing it advertised on the Guns International website. Total cost including shipping and layaway free was $354.14 USD. (Well, okay, plus an additional $50.00 for the FFL transfer fees, which included three bucks for the Commonwealth of Virginia.) Many thanks to Joshua, and additional thanks to Trojan Arms & Tactical Inc. of Manassas, Virginia for acting as my FFL dealer to make the transaction happen.
This one turned out to be one of the Interarms importees. Someday I’m gonna try to do a serial number lookup to determine what year it was built.
Initial Examination
Upon taking the Brigadier out of the box, and field-stripping in from there, it’s fascinating to see both the similarities and differences with the Model 92 descendant. You can definitely see the carryovers of the open-top slide and the internal falling locking block system. (Both of these features were also used in Germany’s famous Walther P38 of WWII.)
However, there are some distinct differences in the Brigadier as well. For starters, there’s the single-stack 8-round magazine (which has an interesting hook-like finger extension), as opposed to the double-stack 15-rounder of the M92/M9. Also, whilst the Model 92/M9 is a double-action semiauto pistol, the Brigadier is a single-action. Even more significant (in this writer’s professional opinion) are the differences in the manual safety and the magazine release.
Early version of the Model 92 had a frame-mounted, slide-locking safety that enabled cocked-and-locked carry a la single-action auto pistols such as the M1911 and Browning Hi-Power, as well as certain double-action autos such as the CZ-75. However, in order to win the U.S. Armed Forces contract in the mid-1980s, Beretta changed over the an ambidextrous, slide-mounted de-cocker safety, redesignated it as the Beretta Model 92SB-F, which later became the Beretta 92F/92FS/M9 we know and love today. (Well, most of us love, anyway. Lord knows there’s a lot of Beretta haters out there).
The Brigadier instead uses a crossbolt safety, not unlike those you see on pump-action shotguns, except with shotguns, you push the crossbolt safety from right-to-left in order to put it in “Fire” mode (“Smooth on the right, ready to fight,” as my firearms instructors at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center [FLETC] were fond of saying). With the Brigadier, you go left-to-right to get ‘er ready to fire, thus accommodating the right-handed majority of shooters. It’s located on the left side of the grip frame just ahead of the grip tang and under the read end of the slide cocking grooves.
Then there’s the magazine release button. It’s located in the lower left of the grip frame instead of directly behind the trigger guard (which is the more optimal placement seen on virtually all auto pistols designed for the U.S. market). *In theory* it should still allow for faster reloads than the so-called “European style” butthole, er, butt-heel release you see on the Walther P38/P1, Makarov, and HK P7 PSP. More on this in a bit.
According to Gene Gangarosa Jr. in his top-notch 1994 book “Modern Beretta Firearms,” the original Maadi Helwan Brigadiers had a fancy polished blue finish, later superseded by a functional but less attractive matte blue finish. However, it looks like one of the previous owner of my particular specimen had it refinished in a matte black in an effort to emulate Beretta’s patented Bruniton finish on the M9. The finish shows some signs of wear & fading but still looks pretty attractive overall.
Helwan Brigadier Trigger Time
Okay, all that aside, how does she shoot? Well, first, I took her to the fine folks at Sterling Arsenal Works and Tactical Supply, in Sterling, Virginia, for a safety examination. (Sterling Arsenal has been my go-to for gunsmithing services since I moved to Northern Virginia back in 2019). Sterling’s smiths gave the gun a clean bill of health as far as being safe to fire. So it was merrily off to the range from there…
Range Session #1
First “blooding” (so to speak) of my Brigadier was at the excellent XCAL indoor shooting facility in Ashburn, Virginia. I purchased 50 rounds of PMC Bronze 124-grain full metal jacket (FMJ) “hardball” ammo. As in my SOP for handgun live-fire evals, I even divvied the ammo allotment between head shots at the 7-yard line and center-torso shots for the 25-yard line, delivered from the Classic Weaver Stance. (Yeah, about my preference for Weaver, go ahead, call me a “dinosaur,” call me old-fashioned, call me what you will.)
The 1911-style sliding trigger is a pretty cool feature. However, as might be expected from an old-school mil-spec pistol, it’s a bit on the stiff side. And as also might be expected from an old-school mil-spec pistol, the sights are a bit on the small side; easy enough for front sight acquisition & focus at the 7-yard line, but definitely challenging as the 25-yard line (though still better than, say, my WWI Colt M1911).
The two factors led me to pull high-right with the gun. The first head shot at 7 yards went into the left eye socket whilst I was holding on the bridge of the nose, and the first 25-yard shot went into the C-zone—barely clipping the paper bad guy’s rib—whilst I was holding on the heart. Mind you, my typical tendency as a right-handed cross-eye dominant shooter is to pull high-left. (I said “cross-eye dominant, NOT “cross-dresser;” we Scotsmen wear KILTS, not skirts!!)
That said, the gun still gave me more than acceptable accuracy. At the 7-yard line, all 25 of my shots stayed within the rectangular “kill box” (for lack of a kinder, gentler term) of the target’s noggin.
At the 25-yard mark (taking 8 o’clock Kentucky windage), I ended up with 14 A-zone hits (including 4 heart shots), 10 C-zones…and one whiff that traversed the airspace just under the target’s armpit, argh!
Remember what I said before about the mag release being theoretically more dynamic than the European style butt-heel release? Well, *in practice*, at first the empty mag didn’t want to drop free from the mag well when at slidelock, so I had to physically and forcefully tug the mag out of the mag well—definitely *not* amenable to speed reloads (or as they call ‘em at FLETC, Emergency Reloads) in the middle of a real-life firefight or a competitive match—at which point the slide would slam back forward into battery. (Eh, at least that hook-shaped finger rest on the mag floorplate facilitated the tugging.)
Which was weird because it dropped free just fine when fully charged and the slide was forward! But maybe the parts needed to be worn in or broken-in a bit, I thought to myself at the time, as the empty mag was finally dropped free from slidelock at the end of my range session. My Facebook Friend and fellow gun writer Duane Thomas, whose name some of you may recognize from either his articles for G&A Handguns back in the early 1990s and/or his excellent 1996 book “The Truth About Handguns: Exploding the Myths, Hype and Misinformation,” gave me this useful pointer:
“It makes sense that, if there’s a bit of drag on the mag body-to-mag well interface, the magazine might fall free when fully-loaded, but not when the gun is empty and at slidelock. When the magazine is full, not only is it considerably heavier but its spring is almost completely compressed, so there’ s a lot of pressure levering the top cartridge in the magazine up into the underside of the slide. When the magazine is empty, it’s considerably lighter AND the mag spring is extended so it’s placing less pressure on the follower at the top of the magazine than it did on the cartridge at the top of the magazine AND instead of the cartridge touching the underside of the slide, instead the follower is touching the slide stop, which takes place considerably higher-up inside the gun, also doing its bit to less the amount of energy pressing down on the magazine.”
In any event, the gun was wholly reliable with the 50 rounds fired, with zero stoppages or misfires. So far so good, right?
Range Session #2
Er, yeah, about that…
This time it was off to another top-notch indoor range facility in Ashburn, VA, that being Silver Eagle Group (SEG), where I had worked as a part-time Range Safety Officer (RSO) back in 2019. The purpose of this particular range session was twofold:
1. To test the Brigadier’s reliability with jacketed hollowpoints (JHPs)
2. To test the gun’s head shot accuracy at 25 yards and torso accuracy at 50 yards
Why those lofty and ambitious distances for an old surplus gun, you ask? For one thing, the 25-yard head shot accuracy standard is used by elite antiterrorist and counterterrorist units like France’s GIGN and America’s SEAL Team 6. As for the 50-yard test, it’s the ultimate litmus test of combat handgun practical accuracy as prescribed by experts such as the late great Chuck Taylor and Chuck Karwan.
This time I bought 50 rounds of Federal Tactical HST 124-grain JHPs and an ICE-QT paper target. Ugh, this time there was much trouble in proverbial pistol paradise.
After two shots at 50 yards (one didn’t even hit the paper, the other just landed just outside the left shoulder, in spite of my anticipatory 8 o’clock Kentucky windage), the disassembly lever came loose, preventing the slide from going fully into battery.
After I remedied that situation, the magazine wouldn’t seat in the magazine well anymore (the polar opposite of the issue from the first range session, when the empty mag wouldn’t drop cleanly).
Ugh. So much for Egyptian arms industry quality control. 
To quote the late great Sir Roger Moore as James Bond in “The Spy Who Loved Me,” “Egyptian builders…”
But then again, in fairness to the “Egyptian builders,” perhaps it’s just the sheer age and previous wear & tear on the gun, i.e. maybe the pistol is simply at the end of its service life. Such are the chances one takes when buying a surplus firearm. After all, nothing manmade lasts forever. (Rest assured, my day still sure as hell wasn’t wasted! I ended up spending the rest of that range session with my beloved Beretta 92FS and Bulgarian Makarov instead. )
So, I promptly took the Helwan back to the gun hospital (so to speak), i.e. back to Sterling Arsenal, whereupon shop owner Luis Rose did some exploratory surgery on the gun for me. it turns out that the grip panel was holding the mag release button and had come loose during shooting…and basically every time I shooting the damn thing, I’ll have to retighten the screw on the the grip panel…but can’t tighten it all the way, ‘cuz then that’ll create the opposite effect problem, i.e. trapping the mag.
Good ol’ Duane Thomas added this: “Shorten the screw. Do the same with the other screws, if needed. Install them all with blue Loctite so they won’t vibrate loose. Problems solved.”
Range Session #3
So, with all those painful lessons learned, I gave the Helwan Brigadier one more go-around on the firing line. (Third time’s the charm, right?) I went back to SEG and stuck with the 25-yard and 50-yard evals as well as the ICE-QT target and the Federal HST JHP. However, I limited myself to one 8-round magazineful each at both distances.
In spite of my pistol’s previously described foibles, thanks to some extra judicious Kentucky windage I managed to get seven intentional torso hits (including one 5x-ring strike) plus one unintentional head hit at the 50-yard mark, and seven intentional head hits plus one unintentional center torso hit at the 25 yard mark. (How’s that for marksmanship symmetry, eh?)
As far as the reliability arena: Mag still dropped loose twice, and on the second string, the first round in the magazine wouldn’t chamber (cartridge nosed downward), so I manually inserted directly into the chamber like Sgt. Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) did with his Beretta 92 in his near-suicide scene in the original “Lethal Weapon.” The rest of the rounds fed, fired, extracted, and ejected just fine.
Concluding Thoughts
Definitely not a home defense or CCW/EDC piece. From here on out, the Helwan will pretty much be a “safe queen” and personal “museum piece” (so to speak) like my recently “retired” WWI Colt M1911. (That darling old Colt used to be a shooter, but the age and metal fatigue eventually got the best of her. After a couple of thousand rounds or so, she kept blowing out its front sight, even after silver soldering).
But still, it’s cool to have that Brigadier in my collection for historicity and book research purposes. “Ilham dulilah,” as the Egyptians themselves might say.
NOTE: This article was first published on the author’s Patreon page, “The D’Orr-senal of Democracy.” What’s more, the information contained herein will soon reappear (in expanded form) in the author’s upcoming first book, “Five Decades of a Fabulous Firearm: Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Beretta 92 Pistol Series.” Stay tuned, dear readers!
