No doubt we're all well aware of the use of sub-contractors' parts, but I can't believe that the Spreewerke factory, nor Mauser and Walther for that matter, told their sub-contractors first, "I need x number of magazines [or any other parts] and they need to be sequentially numbered as follows...." and second that they'd have workers searching through the sub-contractors' parts deliveries to mate them up with completed guns. If anything, it'd make more sense to have workers unpackage sub-contractors' parts, stamp them with the requisite serial numbers to match the guns on their work bench and then assemble the whole package. That being the case, then again, why the different fonts? Surely a gun factory would have the ability to make their own stamps and have some semblance of standardization. Speculation on my part of course...
But what about the second part of the question, to whit, the possibility a pre-1943 magazine in a 1944 gun? I'm not saying that's the case here, but if we presume Buxton is the authority and has done more research on the subject than the rest of us, this could not possibly be a case of a magazine "force" matched to a gun? Likewise, if these were matched post-1942, why aren't we collectors seeing more of these examples? Certainly there are plenty of pre-1942 P.08s with matching magazines, even with the nearly-hundred-year-old Imperial P.09s and the Wiemar P.08s.
I think that if we truly want to hear some insight into interesting case, you should post photos of over at Orv Reichert's P38 forum Welcome to the P38 Web Site....
Nonetheless, it's certainly a pretty pistol and you should be quite proud to have it in your collection. (I have an equally minty byf 43 in mine; I'll have to post some photos of it sometime.)
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