Spetsnaz Trench Shovel

Origins

The spade is older than any of the units famous for it. In 1869 a Danish officer, Mads Johan Buch Linnemann, patented a short spade for the individual infantryman, reasoning that a soldier who could dig himself in under fire would survive where one waiting for the engineers would not. Denmark adopted it, and in 1870 Imperial Russia ordered sixty thousand from Linnemann's Austrian factory, going on to make it in vast numbers at home. The Russian designation, malaya pekhotnaya lopata — small infantry spade — gave the modern name MPL-50, the number being its length in centimeters. Soldiers have always called it the sapyorka.

Design & Construction

The tool is almost brutally simple: a flat steel blade roughly 15 by 18 centimeters, its tip squared rather than pointed, riveted to a straight wooden handle with no T-grip or D-handle, the whole about fifty centimeters long and weighing under a kilogram. Regulations required the blade to be kept sharp along both sides and the tip — a sharp spade cuts roots and frozen earth — and a soldier was expected to dig a prone firing scrape in a few minutes and a full standing trench in an hour or two. It was worn in a canvas or leather carrier on the belt behind the hip. The design has scarcely changed since the 1870s; Soviet production ran through the Great Patriotic War and continues in Russia today.

Combat Use

Trench fighting in the World War I taught every army that a sharpened spade was a better close-quarters weapon than a rifle and bayonet in a confined ditch, and the Russians and Germans both used theirs freely. It was the Soviet Russian Spetsnaz of the Cold War, however, that made the spade a signature. Viktor Suvorov's memoir describes recruits drilled to fight with it as a short axe — chopping strikes to the neck and limbs, the flat used to block — and to throw it, spinning, to bury the edge in a target at several meters. Much of what Western readers believe about Spetsnaz spade fighting comes from those pages and from later demonstrations, and the truth is that the drills exist and are practiced, and that the spade's real value in Afghanistan and Chechnya was still digging.

Legacy

The MPL-50 has become a piece of cultural shorthand for Russian toughness, appearing in films, video games and the survival-gear market, where sharpened "Spetsnaz shovels" of varying quality are sold worldwide. Original Soviet-era spades, dated and stamped on the blade, are cheap and common on the surplus market and are collected as much for their history as for their use. The tool itself remains in Russian service, one of the very few items of nineteenth-century infantry equipment still issued essentially unaltered.