PPSh-41

Origins

The Winter War against Finland taught the Red Army a hard lesson about submachine guns — Finnish Suomi gunners cut apart Soviet columns in the forests — and the German invasion of 1941 destroyed both the bulk of Soviet small arms stocks and much of the specialized industry that made the earlier, expensively machined PPD. Georgy Shpagin's answer, adopted in December 1940 and mass-produced from 1941, was designed around the emergency: a submachine gun whose receiver and jacket were stamped from sheet steel, whose only heavy machining was the bolt and barrel — barrels were made by cutting Mosin rifle barrels in half — and which could be assembled by unskilled labor in workshops that had never made a weapon.

Design & Construction

The PPSh-41 is a simple blowback design firing from an open bolt, in the high-velocity 7.62x25 Tokarev pistol cartridge, at a ferocious cyclic rate around 900 rounds per minute. The sloted barrel jacket ends in an integral muzzle brake/compensator that fights climb; the barrel is chrome-lined against neglect and corrosive primers; a hinged receiver opens the weapon for cleaning in seconds without tools. It fed from the 71-round drum copied from the Finnish Suomi — heavy, slow to load, and beloved anyway — or the later 35-round curved box that logistics preferred, and it selected between full and semi-automatic fire. With its solid wooden stock the weapon weighed about 5.4 kilograms loaded with a drum: heavy for a submachine gun, steady for it too.

Combat Use

The Red Army issued the PPSh at a scale no other combatant matched: not as a specialist's tool but as the primary weapon of entire submachine-gun companies and battalions, whose doctrine — ride the tanks to the objective, dismount, and drench the position in automatic fire — made the tank-rider with a drum-fed papasha the signature of Soviet assault infantry from Stalingrad onward. In the city fighting that decided the Eastern war, its 71 rounds and point-blank rate of fire outmatched the MP40's 32-round box so decisively that German troops prized captured PPShs, and the Wehrmacht formally issued them — some converted to 9mm — as the MP717(r). The gun fought a second famous war in Korea, where Chinese and North Korean night attacks announced themselves with the 'burp gun's' distinctive tearing report against American troops carrying the M3 Grease Gun and Thompson Submachine Gun.

Legacy

Some six million PPSh-41s were built by 1945 — the most-produced submachine gun of the war — and the type equipped socialist-bloc and client armies for decades, in Soviet form and in licensed versions like the Chinese Type 50. In the Soviet Union it became an icon on the scale of the T-34: the weapon in the hands of the war-memorial soldier from Berlin's Treptower Park to villages across Russia. Its replacement was total — the AK-47 made the whole submachine-gun category obsolete in Soviet service — but no weapon says 'Great Patriotic War' more immediately, and demilled and semi-automatic reproductions keep the drum-and-jacket silhouette in the collector world where the originals, as transferable automatics, are rare prizes.