The PPSh-41: Soviet Submachine Gun from WWII

I want to apologize in advance for the formatting, the geniuses at Google still don't know how many eggs are in a dozen, thus they don't understand the concept of copy and paste from Word, the World's most popular word processing program. 

The PPSh-41: Soviet Submachine Gun from WWII - Randy Chanberlain

The PPSh‑41 (Pistolet-Pulemyot Shpagina model) was one of the most common infantry weapons of World War II. Designed by Soviet engineer Georgy S. Shpagin, it became famous for its solid construction, rapid rate of fire, and the distinctive drum magazine often seen in photographs from WWII.  By the end of the war, millions had been produced, making it one of the most widely manufactured submachine guns in history and an important weapon of the Soviet Red Army.

 

In the late 1930s, the Soviet Union realized the importance of automatic weapons for close-quarters combat. Earlier submachine guns, such as the PPD‑40, were effective but expensive and slow to manufacture because they required significant machining.  When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, the Soviet Army needed a weapon that could be produced rapidly in massive quantities. Georgy Shpagin redesigned the concept around the stamped metal components, drastically reducing manufacturing time and cost.  The result was the PPSh-41, officially adopted in 1941.

The PPSh-41 operates on a blowback mechanism and fires from an open bolt.  It has a 10-inch chrome-lined barrel inside a wooden stock.  This design uses the rearward force of the cartridge firing to cycle the bolt, ejecting the spent casing and loading the next round.  The design included a switch in front of the trigger to toggle between semi-auto and auto firing, which was considered a valuable option.  The advantages gained by this design included mechanical simplicity, fewer precision parts and a reliable weapon in harsh conditions.  This made the PPSh-41 the perfect weapons for the Soviets to mass produce for the war.

This weapon uses the 7.62×25mm Tokarev cartridge, originally from the 7.63×25mm Mauser cartridge used in Mauser pistols, which is comparable to .38 Super. This round offered high velocity (around 480 m/s or ~1,575 ft/s) and made good penetration for a pistol-class cartridge. It also fired at a relatively flat trajectory at short ranges.  One of the PPSh-41’s most important characteristics was how fast it could fire off rounds.  A typical rate of fire was 900 rounds per minute.  This allowed Soviet soldiers to deliver intense bursts of fire in urban fighting, which was important in places like Battle of Stalingrad.

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Two magazine styles were used with the PPSh-41.  The 71-round drum magazine, with its recognizable circular design and high ammunition capacity, although it was heavy and sometimes difficult to reload.  It also used a 35-round box magazine, that was introduced later in the war with more reliability and a lighter weight.  The early drums often had to be individually fitted to specific guns, which created logistical challenges.  The gun weighed 12 pounds when it was loaded with the 71-round drum and 9.5 pounds with the 35-round box magazine.  When the weapon was fired slowly, the accuracy was more controllable but at a higher speed of fire, the gun bounced and was less accurate and relied more on the volume of bullets and sweeping, than intentionally targeting.
 
The PPSh-41 was designed specifically for mass wartime production.  The key to its high production was stamped steel parts, minimal machining, simplified assembly and its wooden stock.  Because of its simple design, Soviet factories were able to produce over 6 million units during the war.
 

The PPSh-41 became a standard weapon for many Soviet troops, particularly: assault troops, tank crews, recon units and urban combat forces.  Its combination of high capacity and rapid fire made it especially effective in close-quarters combat, such as fighting inside buildings, trenches, and forests.

German soldiers sometimes captured and reused PPSh-41s because of their firepower. Some were even converted to fire 9×19mm Parabellum ammunition for use by German soldiers.

 

In 1944, there was an attempt made by Chief A.V Nadashkevich and engineer S. Saveliev to add a series of PPSh-41’s to the bottom of a Tu-2 bomber plane for mass fire power.  The Tu-2 bomber had a large bomb bay door in which they designed a skid with 11 rows of 8 PPSh-41 submachine guns to attach.  The guns were pointed downward for fire, and the cockpit was set up with a special sight so the Pilot could aim the weapons at a target.  When the pilot fired the weapon, all 88 guns would fire simultaneously. Each gun on the skid could fire 900 rounds per minute, however they only had a 71-round drum each, which only allowed a little over 4 seconds of fire power.  That was still 1,320 rounds per second for those 4 seconds, while flying 250 miles per hour.  The target range was around 1800 feet long and about 4 feet wide. The plane earned the nickname of the Fire Hedgehog. 

There was only one experimental plane that carried Saveliev’s skid.    The concept was great, but the execution proved to be a failure.  It took around 100 man hours to load all of the magazines, which wasn’t practical for fast missions and when the rapid fire would eject the casing, they would potentially get into the plane’s engine or create jams in other guns mounted on the Tu-2.  The problems were enough to prevent the Fire Hedgehog from ever making it to combat.

After the war, the PPSh-41 continued to appear in numerous conflicts around the World. Many countries produced their own copies or variants of the weapon. In North Korea, they were known as the type 59 and the Type 50 in Communist China. Vietnam modified the Chinese versions and named them the K-50M.

The PPSh-41 was eventually replaced in Soviet service by more compact designs like the PPS-43. The PPS-43 used even simpler stamped construction and a folding metal stock, which made it more portable and cheaper to manufacture. 

The story is very similar to the M1928A1 (Tommy Gun) being replaced by the M3 (Grease Gun) in the U.S. Military during the second World War. 

 

The legacy of the PPSh-41 became a long-lasting symbol of Soviet infantry during World War II. Its drum magazine, perforated barrel shroud, and wooden stock made it visually distinctive and widely recognizable.  Today it remains an important artifact of military history and industrial wartime engineering.  It demonstrates how weapon design can be shaped by the demands of mass production, reliability, and battlefield practicality. These factors helped make it one of the most influential submachine guns of the 20th century.
 

References:

·         www.WarHistoryOnline.com, Yes The Tu-2 ‘Hedgehog’ Could Fire 79,200 Rounds Per Minute – Like Carpet Bombing But With Lead, by Jack Beckeet, 3/20/2018

·         www.YouTube.com, The Iconic “Burp Gun” shooting the PPSh-41, @Forgotten Weapons, 12/16/2017

·         www.wikipedia,com, PPSh-41 Soviet-made World War II Era Submachine Gun

·         www.YouTube.com, Shpain’s Simplified Subgun: The PPSh-41, @Forgotten Weapons, 12/15/2017

·         WW2db.com, PPSh-41 Submachine Gun, by C. Pete Chen, 12/2007

·         www.thevintagenews.com, The Tu-2 ‘hedgehog’ could fire 79,200 rounds per minute, by Ian Harvey, 5/16/2016

 

About the author:
Randy has been a decades long member of the NRA, the Civilian Marksmanship Program and Washington Arms Collectors; he began collecting weapons in the 70's and has owned more than 500 weapons including the subject gun above. He will continue to contribute his vast knowledge of surplus and collector weapons.