Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten weapons.com. I'm Ian McCallum and today
I am up in Canada, visiting Marstar,
and taking a look at some of the guns in their inventory and reference collection, including today this
PPSh-41. This is one of the most distinctive submachine gun of World War II used in extremely large numbers by the Soviet Red
Army. Now, the Soviets had first adopted a submachine gun
basically when the Winter war with Finland broke out. The Finns had an
excellent submachine gun in the KP/-31 Suomi and the Russians had...
actually at that point kind of just recently decided that submachine guns were stupid and they didn't want any and they got rid of them.
And when they got to fight in the Finns and realized that, well,
maybe they'd been mistaken about that. So they developed the PPD-40, designed by Degtyaryov.
And I have a previous video on that gun, so if you're interested in the backstory more on that, check out that other video.
However,
by the time that... honestly, probably before that PPD-40 was even in full mass production,
it was pretty evident that it was going to be too expensive of a gun to really mass-produce in the way that the Soviet military
wanted.
So the problem was to figure out a new submachine gun that would keep all of the... the valuable,
desirable bits of the PPD-40 but make it a more
cost-effective and less time-consuming gun to manufacture.
So there were a couple different designers, who took on this challenge
one of them was a guy named Shpitalnyi, one of them was Georgyi Shpagin and
Shpagin ended up winning the competition and in December of 1940 this gun was adopted as the
PPSh-41. So Shpagin kept all the best elements of the PPD-40 most, notably, its rate of fire,
which is quite high like 900 rounds a minute, and it's 71-round drum magazine.
Kept those, but the design, he came up with, was
basically very heavy-gauge metal stampings and welded construction.
And this was much simpler than the lathe work required to build Degtyaryov's submachine guns. So
this ended up being adopted as I said in right like a week before 1941 began.
However,
it did take a little while to actually get these guns into mass production.
Because while they were definitely simpler and faster to make, once you were up and running this still required some...
Somewhat specialized heavy-duty tooling to produce. While these are stampings. They're pretty heavy-gauge stampings. You're not really gonna be
cranking these things out on a little 20-ton Harbor Freight style of press. So it was actually
mid-1942 before these things were really being manufactured in large numbers.
Throughout this process as the gun is adopted, put into production and issued,
there are a number of problems that were
discovered or flaws or things that were found that could be improved and a couple of the visible ones including
included the rear sight. So the original early guns had a tangent sight,
graduated in 50 meter increments out to 500 meters. That was replaced by a two-position
notch sight flip between 100 and 200 meters that is totally sufficient for a gun like this.
And in 1942 and February of 1942 it was officially determined that this drum may be not the best solution.
These drums had worked very well in testing. In fact the original the prototypes of the PPSh-41 went through successfully a
30,000 round endurance test half semi-auto and half full-auto.
They were really very reliable guns.
However, once you got into large-scale manufacturing these drums were time-consuming and difficult to produce.
They were actually a bottleneck of
manufacture of the guns.
There... there were periods where they couldn't deliver guns because they just didn't have enough drums coming off the production line to
equip with of them. Without the magazine this isn't really all that useful of a weapon.
So in 1942 they decided to introduce a box magazine. This is going to be simpler to manufacture.
It's going to be a lot simpler to carry, these drum magazines are cool in the gun,
but carrying a bunch of drums is awkward and clumsy. And
in addition to that the...
the top of production tolerances, the production quality dropped off when the production volume went up.
This isn't terribly surprising.
But it meant that these drums were not strictly interchangeable between guns if you had one of the guns you had to find
a couple of drums that you knew work reliably in your gun and keep them with that gun.
Now the Finns didn't really have this problem,
because, well, they were making a much smaller volume of guns for one thing, but they had a higher quality control on the drum production.
The box magazine was an attempt by the Russians to get around that problem, and it actually worked pretty well.
These are still kind of finicky, not necessarily strictly interchangeable with the guns.
I think there were some issues of
quality control and tolerancing on the magazine wells of the guns as well when they went into really high volume production.
But the box mags are certainly easier to carry, you can stick a couple of these in a pouch much more easily than you can
carry around like a sack of drum magazines. So this one into production in 1942
and you'll see both of these being used from that time period on.
If you are at all familiar with World War II, you'll probably recognize that 1943 was a rather strenuous and difficult time for Russia.
So this is kind of about all we have for markings on this gun
manufactured in 1943 got the serial number clearly at this point they didn't have no time for doing fancy press or nothing like that so
we have this
and we have a serial number and a couple of inspection stamps down here on the tang and that's it for markings.
As far as controls go there's a little more to this than you might expect for an economy measure
submachine gun. We have a safety that is mounted on the bolt. It's this tab that goes in and out.
So I can engage the safety with the bolt forward or
with the bolt back and in either case locks the bolt in position, which prevents you from firing.
It's important to be able to lock the bolt forward so that...
Basically so that the gun is dropped safe. So, if it impacts in the back,
you don't want the bolt
to come back far enough to catch a cartridge and then go forward and slam fire without catching on the sear and locking open. So
that's the safety.
And then there is also a fire selector lever here.
And that's this
rather crude looking lever. The forward position is full-auto and the rearward position is
semi-auto. So, you might not expect a
mass-production emergency sort of submachine gun to have a semi-auto setting,
but that was considered important and valuable to have on the PPSh and so there it is.
I mentioned that the original sights were a tangent leaf.
That was fairly quickly changed to this two-position flip sight, it's a little U-notch
100 and 200 meter increments.
And the front sight is a nice easy round post there with a welded-on round shield around it.
The magazine catches a little bit unusual or
unorthodox it is this folding lever, so to use it you have to fold it down and then it allows you to...
pull the magazine catch back like that.
The magazines both the drums and the sticks have a notch right there in this rib
and that's what locks the magazine into place...
put that in...
like that and then in order to make sure that you don't bump it and accidentally drop the mag,
you can fold the lever back like that.
And these drums are all a little bit finicky.
Here we go.
The stick mags have the exact same rib on the back and they work...
the same way.
One of the other need elements to the Shpagin is that in his effort to make this gun simple to
manufacture, he managed to actually come up with a way to build it without any threaded bits. So, usually with a submachine gun,
you'd have a tubular receiver and usually the end cap is screwed on. Well, to avoid having that sort of lathe operation
Shpagin has a spring-loaded clamp.
So we push this in and then the receiver pitch is open like this.
Once you have that open you take the bolt and just pull it
straight out
along with the recoil spring, guide rod and this fiber buffer.
And that's it, that's field-stripped all you do pull the bolt out,
clean it, I guess, wipe it down, put it back in, close the gun up and you're ready to keep shooting.
Looking inside the reciver, we have only a couple of parts.
We have a fixed ejector welded in place and then we have our firing sear back here.
Now this is currently in semi-auto mode, which means when I fire the gun the bolt will immediately travel over this
disconnector. When that goes down,
it will disconnects and it pops the sear back up, so I have to release the trigger in order to fire a second time.
When I put this into full-auto mode,
that disconnector drops down and is no longer
affecting how the gun shoots so in full auto
as long as I hold this sear down the bolt cycles back and forth and the gun fires.
If we take a closer look at the receiver,
you can see that the entire upper assembly from muzzle all the way back
here is one big piece of stamped or bent sheet metal.
On the bottom here, they didn't even bother to weld it together on these three intersections.
It is welded up here at the front.
And there's a disc, basically a washer, welded in the front to make it solid. This front section acts as a compensator.
The barrel ends right there, and then you have three gigantic vent ports,
which make actually a pretty cool and distinctive flash hider, or a muzzle flash sort of picture.
But this did actually this was a part of allowing the PPSh
to be in trial something like 70% more accurate than the PPD-40, because
with its high rate of fire, this did actually help keep the muzzle down and under control.
Much of the lower assembly is also stamped metal. You can see, we have two layers of it right here joining together.
If we look at the front of the magazine well, we can see that's also
several layers of stamped metal welded together in various ways.
Now it's not quite all stamped because we do have a solid milled
trunnion up here at the front to hold on to the barrel, that's pretty important.
And there's this block up here which is locking the barrel into the trunnion.
As for the bolt, it's a pretty typical submachine gun bolt except that it's square on the bottom instead of being round since it's in a
square bottom receiver.
We have a surface right here. That is going to hold on the sear, so that's what controls it to fire or not fire.
This hole going through the center. There is just for the recoil spring guide rod.
When the bolt goes back that will come out through the front.
There is however an ejector in the front, so this isn't actually acting as the ejector.
This rear buffer pad is also actually
relevant to the gun and interestingly, the Soviets tried to come up with some other options for fiber.
This was actually one of the limiting factors in production of the PPSh at times when... when the magazines weren't.
And they had trouble actually finding other materials
that would work as well as this hard... hard fiber material without coming apart. Things like rubber didn't work well in the cold,
composite materials tended to delaminate because they're... they're under a lot of
high-impact stress,
being the buffer for a PPSh. We should also take a quick look at the drum magazine that they used.
This is as I said a copy of the finnish Suomi drum. I believe actually the story behind that is that a
traitorous Finnish army officer actually delivered the plans for the Suomi entirely to the Soviets and
they didn't take advantage of the gun,
but they did take advantage of having the engineering plans for the drum to copy it. Anyway in order to open it,
we're going to push this button on the front which is going to push this thing back
and we can open this latch, and then pull the back off of the drum, and then you have this track of
cartridges in there, and a center winding spring, and a follower right up there at the top.
So what you do is crank this spring up. I'm just going to do one click.
You would crank this all the way around and then you stand 71 cartridges in this magazine. (This thing by the way is
nasty and full of cosmoline) So anyway you put all your cartridges in being very careful not to tip them over because
that quickly becomes a big pain. These are not quick magazines to reload and not good for loading with frozen fingers either much to the...
But which may be surprising considering that they were developed in Finland. Anyway once you've got all your cartridges in,
you then... you have two options what you're going to do is release the spring tension on the follower.
I think the official way is probably to put the back cover on the drum first and then, when you push this button in,
the spring is relieved, and if the drum is full nothing really happens except
it gets tensioned. If the drum is empty like this one,
you'll hear it click as the... the follower snaps into position there, but you push that up,
rotate the locking tab into place, and then you're ready to use it.
The stick magazines of course required no such special complex procedure. However,
being a double stack magazine that tapers to a single feed position, you do pretty much need the loading tool
to load this. So the loading tool for this actually has a couple of little clamps below a
grooves that slide into the mounting tabs here. These tabs are there to balance the magazine side-to-side
Which is equivalent basically to this plate on
the drum.
While the PPSh was certainly a far more
efficient gun to produce than the PPD-40, the Degtyaryov had been, it still didn't really turn out to be good enough.
And the Soviets would continue to look for new options. They wanted... they wanted a gun that was even simpler. In particular,
they wanted a gun that could be manufactured by small shops that didn't have firearms production experience.
And so ultimately they would go on to adopt, what was technically a replacement for the PPSh although
it was never... never actually
replaced these guns in the field during World War II. And that would be Alexey Sudayev's PPS-43.
I also have a previous video on the PPS-43, so if you're interested in,
what followed this gun afterwards take a look at that video.
But this would be continue to be quite popular
throughout the course of World War 2, they were used in very large numbers.
They were copied by a couple of other Soviet bloc countries. These saw use in the Korean War as well.
They are durable and effective guns as long as you have a magazine that works with them. So at this point
I think it's about time for me to go out and do some shooting with this guy.
I'm really curious to see how it handles, how it shoots, what it looks like, what it sounds like.
So that video will be coming tomorrow. Stick around, stay tuned for that one, because I think, that will be really cool.
In the meantime I would like to give a big
thank you to Marstar here in Canada for letting me do some
shooting and disassembly and bring this gun to you guys. If you're in the shooting sports up in Canada,
definitely check out Marstar's website for surplus cool stuff and
gun accessories and ammo and guns and you name it all the stuff
you need as a shooter, And if you're not in Canada or even if you are, I suppose,
consider checking out my Patreon page, if you enjoy seeing this sort of content on the web.
It's the awesome folks on Patreon whose dollar a month contributions or more if they like the perks that are. available there
Those contributions that make it possible for me to travel to places like this and bring you guns like this PPSh-41. Thanks for watching.