[ Ukrainian Shoulder-Fired DShK ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and a lot of you have expressed an interest in
the weapons that are currently being used in Ukraine.
We took a look last week at some PKTs being adapted for infantry use,
and I've got another interesting one like that for you today.
This is specifically the DShK, the "Dushka",
repurposed as a bipod-mounted shoulder-fired infantry support weapon, which is pretty cool.
Well, that's pretty cool stuff, right, ... it's impressive looking.
This video comes from the US Department of Defence.
US and Ukrainian soldiers have been training together for actually quite a few years
since the initial Russian invasion in 2014.
There were in particular training exercises in 2017 and 2018
that DOD filmed and released some footage from.
And these two sets of video are from that training.
So if we take a look at this thing.
The first element that the Ukrainians developed of this setup was the muzzle brake,
this gigantic bolt-on muzzle brake, that came into use even in 2014.
I suspect at that point they were still using these guns off of tripods,
or other sorts of pintle mounts.
And there's a lot of climb on those things, they're difficult to shoot.
They are difficult to hold on target.
even if you have a pretty solid mount if it's a swinging pivoting mount.
Now the DShK was originally developed as an anti-aircraft machine gun in the late 1930s.
And it did that role very effectively for the Soviet Union.
And going into the early stages of the Cold War
... they'd mount these guns on tanks and other armoured vehicles.
I suspect Ukraine has a pretty significant supply of them
that were on essentially leftover Soviet vehicles
that they inherited when the Soviet Union broke up.
There's not a whole lot of good to be done with a DShK fitted on a T-55 or a T-62 or something.
So pull them off, and maybe you can repurpose them for something else, like this.
At any rate, the muzzle brake really does a pretty good job
of helping to control recoil and climb, as you can see from these video clips.
The next thing that was developed was the bipod and the shoulder stock.
Which allows them to come off of their pintle mounts,
and be used much closer to the ground, and make them really much more portable guns.
And the reason that they came into use like this was
after an initial flurry of activity in the eastern part of Ukraine in 2014 and early 2015,
the war kind of stagnated down in a lot of areas into trench warfare.
And in many places this was trench warfare at ranges of 500 metres or more.
And Ukrainian forces found that their .30 calibre machine guns, their PKMs,
just weren't all that effective.
It really took some lucky shooting, essentially, or a particularly unlucky opponent
for those guns to do much.
But a .50 calibre like a Dushka was a lot more effective.
So you add bipods, you add shoulder stocks.
You can see that ... on [some of] the early ones ... this was sort of a standardised modification,
that's sort of a shop built one.
It depends on the exact time period when a particular one was made.
Early on they added a shoulder stock, but continued to use the dual spade grip firing triggers.
Later on, as you can see in the 2017 to 2018 DOD footage,
they've included a standard style ... pistol grip and a normal trigger to the things.
Which definitely does make them easier to shoot effectively.
But in either configuration you can put that thing down in a firing loophole in a trench
much more easily than you could a Dushka on some sort of tripod pintle mount.
And then, especially if you put a scope on it or if you have an observer with optics,
that ... was a quite effective weapon out to 500 metres or more
on things like vehicles and hardened emplacements, strong points.
And that's what they got used for in eastern Ukraine in 2015,
and I'm sure that they are still being used over there now.
Because they had them in 2018, why would they have got rid of them?
It's interesting that this ... actually looks like a pretty reasonably effective weapon.
Heavy to be sure, not something that's going to be super dynamic.
But if you're in a trench style of emplacement,
this is definitely something that can be put to good use.
There are some historical precedents to this of course, the US actually experimented
with a version of the M2 Browning heavy machine gun that was pretty similar in layout.
I've got a couple of pictures I'll show you here.
This was tested by the US Cavalry, didn't end up going into production, but you get the idea.
It's basically a very heavy calibre anti-materiel rifle.
Now the US experimentation focused on semi-auto versions of this.
Where the Ukrainians are using it as essentially a support machine gun
in full-auto but fired in relatively short bursts, so.
At some point I expect one of these will show up in a twitter video
from the current fighting in Ukraine, ... I can't imagine that they're not still in use over there.
They had them in 2018, why would they have got rid of them?
And they are a ... potentially effective weapon.
So hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
A big thanks to the vet who gave me the pictures of one being used in 2015.
Thanks for watching.