The Weapon Russia, China & North Korea All Love

By Sebastien Roblin,The National Interest

The PPsH-41 submachinegun undoubtedly reigns as an icon of the Soviet war machine in World War II, immortalized in combat photographs and in films such as Cross of Iron and The Tin Drum. Like the T-34 tank and the Il-2 Shturmovik attack plane [3], the “Pepsha” or “Papasha” (“Daddy”) was not only a rugged marvel of mass production, but performed well compared to more expensive contemporaries. Both the Red Army and later the Chinese and North Korean armies would employ the “burp gun” on an unprecedent scale.

Submachineguns began to appear near the end of World War I to help soldiers clear out trenches in brutal short-range assaults. These short barreled, highly portable automatic weapons usually employed the simple blowback principle in which the gasses expelled by a low-powered pistol cartridge both propelled the round out of the barrel and pushed back the weapon’s bolt, allowing a new round to pop up into the chamber to be fired once the bolt sprang back into place.

Recommended:Uzi: The Israeli Machine Gun That Conquered the World[4]

Recommended:The M4: The Gun U.S. Army Loves to Go to War With[5]

Recommended:Why Glock Dominates the Handgun Market (And Better than Sig Sauer and Beretta)[6]

Despite the fame of weapons like the Tommy gun in interwar years, submachineguns were relatively expensive and only effective at short combat ranges below 150 meters, so armies adopted them only in modest numbers to supplement slow-firing but more accurate bolt-action rifles in general use. Typically, a single submachinegun might be assigned to a squad leader, though certain elite special operations units employed them in larger numbers.

The Red Army’s first submachinegun, the PPD designed by Vasily Degtyaryov, was inspired by the German MP18 and employed 7.62×25 millimeter Tokarev pistol cartridges. However, the PPD was labor-intensive to produce due to its milled-steel parts and only ninety thousand were issued by the time production ended in 1942, with most factories having been overrun by the invading Nazis.