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South American 1911-A1 pistols made under Colt License had only one serial number on the pistol, on top of the slide. Change slides, and no serial nuimber. The early Colt slides interchanged perfectly.
It seems that BATF neglected to notice this and allowed some of these pistols to be imported on the surplus market in the '60's.
(Later ones had to have the serial number stamped into the frame in the usual manner.)
My goodness, how strange tales abound to elevate the price of some rather common early Colt style pistols from Argentina!
When you are at a gun show, and some shyster lays this kind of crap on you, demand to see some provenance (written proof) of his fantastic tale.
When I was in the Ordnance Corps I saw a large number of pistols used in covert operations; all of them had serial numbers.
If you find one without serial numbers, usually an application of hydrochloric acid will bring up the original number that some unnamed person or agency has obfuscated.
The only unnumbered ones we saw were made by
machine shops in North Korea and some much later from North Vietnam. In every instance, they were very poorly made specemins.
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