PPSh-41 (Pistolet-Pulemyot Shpagina 41)

History

The Soviet Army began experimenting with submachine gun-class weapons in the second half of the 1920s. By WWII they had a small number of these weapons and of course the quality of these weapons was expensive - all designed, developed and manufactured in peacetime. As a result, Red Army soldiers lacked intermediate weapons that could well fill the void left by the standard bolt-action rifles and machine guns of the day.

This became a dire focal point during the Winter War against Finland, when the Finns used submachine guns to good effect and subsequently caused an embarrassing defeat for the Red Army before a provisional peace was reached. To capture the scale of the battle, Finland's death and missing count totaled 26,000, compared to 127,000 in the Soviet Union.

However, everything changed on June 22, 1941, when Hitler and his vast Axis army of German, Romanian, Italian, Hungarian and Slovakian soldiers launched a campaign against the western Soviet Union through Operation Barbarossa overwhelming battle. As the Soviet Union capitulated, once allies were now mortal enemies. When the Axis powers reached the outskirts of the capital Moscow, the Soviet response was chaotic and lost a lot of territory in the battle. However, the brutal Soviet winter had come and the Germans had begun digging, giving the Red Army a much-needed rest.

In previous battles, the Soviets had killed and captured many people, as well as thousands of tanks, military vehicles and artillery. To make matters worse, many small arms depots and manufacturing facilities are now located in German-controlled areas - taking away much of the Soviet wartime manufacturing infrastructure.

As the fighting came to a standstill, new factories were opened in the eastern Soviet Union, followed by the design and development of new weapons.

The expediency of this weapon led to the production of the "PPSh-41" in 1941, a crude but effective high-capacity submachine gun chambered for a 7.62x25mm Tokarev pistol. The weapon became an iconic symbol of the Soviet-German struggle during the dark days of World War II, and in the process it became the standard Soviet submachine gun throughout the war. The design of the weapon is credited to Georgi Shpagin, and production officially began in 1941 to help fill the Red Army's stocks. The core of the weapon consists of a rifle-style wooden stock and a one-piece lower receiver.

The stock was ergonomically shaped to form a pistol grip, similar to bolt-action rifle stocks of the time, simplifying production. The upper receiver is metal, embedded in the lower wooden part. The metalwork has been extended forward to accommodate the magazine well and key inner working parts.

The barrel protrudes forward and is covered with a perforated tubular cover. The rear-view mirror is located above the receiver, and the front-view mirror is located behind the muzzle. The trigger system is suspended below the wooden part of the receiver. Magazine types include the standard 71-round drum or 35-round detachable magazine, although the former is very popular in combat.

Regardless, the gun was designed to deliver a lot of firepower to a single target area, so the gun didn't disappoint the operator. The firing action is recoiled with an open bolt assembly.

To service the weapon in the field, the operator simply manages the articulated receiver, which provides access for cleaning and servicing of bolts and springs.

Given its desperate wartime production nature, exterior build quality is minimal. The barrel is of course chromed for the rigors of combat. A selector switch allows for ammo-controlled semi-automatic and fully-automatic fire modes, although late-war models have full-auto fire only for convenience. The rate of fire is about 900 rounds per minute and the muzzle velocity is 1,600 feet per second.

In fully automatic fire, the muzzle rise is quite noticeable, but is somewhat offset by the addition of a simple muzzle compensator. The range is up to 820 feet depending on the environment and conditions, but the submachine gun is inherently short to medium range.

The amount of ammunition available was also invaluable compared to their Western contemporaries, ensuring that Red Army soldiers were adequately armed in battle.

With the arrival of the PPSh-41, the Red Army is now better prepared to fight Germany. Soviet military planners modified small-unit tactics to take full advantage of the new submachine gun, and the PPSh-41 became the star of the Red Army during the war. With limited tactical rifles and few machine guns, it's not uncommon for an entire platoon to be allotted only these submachine guns along with ammunition and grenades.

In any case, the PPSh-41 performed well, especially when soldiers tried to charge into enemy bunkers or trenches. In addition, the weapon was widely used in the bloody house-to-house and floor-to-floor battles that symbolized the Soviet-German war. By 1945, the last year of the war, nearly 5 million PPSh-41s had been produced.

Its ready availability and ease of manufacture only ensured its long-term health in the ensuing Cold War.

Although the Red Army officially stopped using the PPSh-41 after the introduction of the Kalashnikov AK-47 series of assault rifles in the 1950s, the PPSh-41 was in service with the Soviet Union and satellite states, and its basic qualities may be subject to budget-conscious purchases A real appreciation for the home. Armed forces of Albania, China, Cuba, Guinea, Hungary, Iran, Laos, North Korea, Poland, North Vietnam/Vietnam and Yugoslavia continue to use this weapon. Finnish soldiers used captured stocks in the Continuing War (June 1941-September 1944), as did the German army.

The German army managed to capture so many samples during WWII that the weapon was issued to the German army in two different versions - the MP41(r) is a PPSh-41 designed to fire the German 9mm Parabellum submachine gun cartridge , while the MP717( r ) is an unmodified base Soviet PPSh-41 that fires the German 7.63x25mm Mauser cartridge of poor performance and similar dimensions. Hungary also recovered captured PPSh-41 samples.

The PPSH-41 was produced under license in a few countries after the war. Iran made a different version by using tangential sights, and several derivatives later appeared. Vietnam manages a PPSh-41 called "K-50M". The Yugoslav "M49" was identical to the Soviet design on the outside, receiving its magazine, but internally it was different. North Korea produced the PPSh-41 under license under the designation "Type 49".

While Hungary used this captured gun during World War II, it also manufactured it under license in the years that followed, and Poland also produced Soviet guns locally. China's military industry began to illegally imitate the "50 type".

The legacy of the PPSh-41 did not end with WW2, with the fighting in the Korean War and the subsequent Vietnam War - either in the original Soviet PPSh-41 form or the Korean Type 49 and Chinese Type 50. The weapon Used in the Chinese Civil War, the Bay of Pigs Invasion, and the Cambodian Civil War.

Total production of the PPSh-41 eventually reached 6 million units, and a limited number of models can still be found today (2012). This is illustrated by the fact that specimens as far away as Iraq have been confiscated in the past decade after the 2003 U.S. invasion.

For much of the world, the PPSh-41 eventually gave way to the glut of Kalashnikov automatic weapons that emerged in the 1950s and beyond.

The name PPSh-41 comes from the word Pistolet-Pulemyot Shpagina, which when translated into Russian becomes Shpagin Machine Pistol - named after Georgi Shpagin. "41" indicates the year of introduction - in this case "1941".

Specification

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