Submachine gun: yesterday, today, tomorrow. Part of 2. Unusual first generation PCB
Well, what was the most interesting submachine gun of the first generation in design? If we all decompose them in one row, then ... the choice will be made easily. In the aggregate of all indicators, this will turn out to be ... yes, don't be surprised - not German, not Swiss (although he is also German in essence) and not a Czechoslovak model, but ... Finnish Suomi submachine gun m / 31 designed by Aimo Lahti.
Submachine gun "Suomi" with accessories and shops.
His full name was Aimo Johannes Lahti, and he began developing his own submachine gun from 1921, as soon as the German MP-18 fell into his hands. However, maybe it was the MP-19, produced under the provisions of the Versailles Peace Treaty for the needs of the police of the Weimar Republic. And he certainly liked him, otherwise he wouldn’t do it. But having liked it, this submachine gun made Lahti think about how to make the original sample even better and more perfect in all respects. His first model, embodied in the metal, had a caliber of 7,65-mm and was called KP / -26 (konepistooli Suomi m / 26), and he immediately went into production in the same year. True, it was produced in quantities not too large. Well, the word Suomi meant the name of his country, that is, Finland.
The first sample is often very strange. So “Suomi” m / 26 also looked like a perfect “something” ...
However, he did not stop improving this model, which eventually led to the appearance of another model in the 1931 year, called Suomi-KP Model 1931. The release of this sample lasted for quite a long time - until the 1953 of the year, and about 80 thousands were made in total.
Surprisingly, the “Suomi” was considered by the military rather as an ersatz of a light machine gun than weapon assault units. It turned out that there were not enough such machine guns, but just “Suomi” arrived in time and ... the military demanded to put a replaceable trunk of a great length on it, as well as give it a large-capacity store, as well as bipods. So not only the Czechs saw in the submachine guns a version of the lightweight machine gun. And, by the way, this was the case when the same designer, still in 1926, offered the army his own machine gun for the Lahti Soloranta rifle cartridge L / S-26. Well, make it, saturate the troops, and then buy a machine gun from the Czechs, from the Germans, if Czech seemed not very suitable because of the small capacity of the store. But no - they decided to compensate for the lack of a machine gun by the presence of submachine guns. So much so that some samples of "Suomi" were produced in a version for bunkers, that is, with a pistol grip and no stock at all!
Around 500 copies of "Suomi" were intended to equip bunkers and bunkers.
But the effectiveness of this submachine gun as a light machine gun was low due to the low striking ability of the pistol bullets. Therefore, the Finns had already directly during the hostilities of the outbreak of the Winter War to revise their military doctrine and hastily increase the production of Lahti-Solorant L / S-26. Then, fortunately, the captured DP-27 turned up for them, which turned out to be much better than its Finnish counterpart. But on the other hand, they increased the number of infantry from 1 unit to 2-3 per unit, which immediately affected the increase in the firepower of the Finnish infantry. Be that as it may, it should be noted that the Suomi, as a first-generation submachine gun, went very far from the MP-18 and became a successful model, although it also had its own, with very specific flaws. On the other hand, some of them were more likely attributed to him. For example, one can read in our literature that the drawback was the lack of a fore-end under the barrel behind the magazine, which is why when shooting we had to hold it by the magazine. But the PPSh had exactly the same design. But ... for some reason, this lack of our sample is not seen. However, “Suomi” really required a good training of personnel, since the vacuum shutter retarder that stood on it was very sensitive to the slightest pollution, dust and even simple fogging. By the way, the submachine gun Aimo Lahti liked not only in his homeland. The license for its production was bought by Denmark, where it was produced under the designation m / 41, Sweden (m / 37), Switzerland (and there they understood a lot about good products!). Here he went into production under the designation MP.43 / 44, and in total there were 22 of them released. 500 copies of Suomi were purchased in Bulgaria in 1940-1942. Sweden purchased 5505 units, and produced M / 420 37 thousand units. About 35 units were purchased by Croatia and Estonia, and Germany received 500 Finnish-made Suomi submachine guns, which went into service with the Waffen-SS units in Karelia and Lapland. They also armed the 3rd Finnish battalion of the Nordland regiment, owned by the 042th tank SS division "Viking". From Denmark, the Germans received a certain number of Madsen-Suomi, which they gave the designation MP.746 (d). Somehow, an unspecified amount of Suomi fell into Spain's civil war. The captured “Suomi” fought in the Red Army both during the “Winter War” and during the Great Patriotic War.
How was this rather original submachine gun set up, which set a kind of trend, in modern terms, to the designers of many countries of the world. In general, “Suomi” was a typical first-generation software that started its “pedigree” starting with MP-18. So, the shutter resembled German from MP-19, (ancestor of the Austro-Swiss “Steyr-Solothurn S1-100), but at the same time it had its original design highlights. However, about this a little later, but for now it is important to note that this sample was made according to very high quality standards, very soundly, but ... with the use of a large number of machine tools. The bolt carrier had to be milled from solid steel forgings, converting whole kilograms of metal into chips! The strength was high, but the weight (in the curb state more than 7 kg) was not small, and there’s nothing to say about the cost. By the way, this is one of the reasons why this software was released in relatively small quantities.
The submachine gun had the simplest automatics, operating at the expense of the recoil of the free shutter, and fired from the open shutter. That is, the hammer on the gate was fixed motionless, and the barrel itself was not locked when fired! Such a design to slow down the rate of fire or requires a large mass of the shutter, or some devices. And on “Suomi” such a “adaptation”, or rather “highlight” of its design, was the vacuum shutter brake, arranged in a very original way. The barrel box of a cylindrical shape and the bolt, also in the form of a cylinder, were so tightly fitted to each other that the air breakthrough between them during the movement of the bolt inside the receiver was completely excluded. There was a valve in the back cover of the receiver, which allowed the air that was there to go outside, but on the contrary did not let it through. When the bolt went back after a shot, he squeezed air from the back of the receiver to the outside through this valve. At the same time, there was an overpressure, and here it slowed down the shutter. When, under the action of a return spring, the valve began to move forward, the valve closed, and a vacuum appeared behind the valve, which also slowed its movement. Such a device made it possible to solve several important tasks at once: to achieve slowing down of the movement of the shutter when moving both ways at once, and hence, reducing the rate of fire, and also to improve its smoothness, which most favorably affected the accuracy of fire.
To prevent dust and dirt from entering through the slit for the bolt handle, and, of course, in order to increase the tightness of the receiver, the designer placed the L-shaped shutter handle separately from it, right under the back plate of the receiver, and firing she remained motionless.
Submachine gun "Suomi". Appearance and view with cuts. The L-shaped reloading handle, which is located behind the left, is clearly visible.
Another feature of “Suomi” was the design of the barrel casing and the barrel itself, which were easily removed together, which made it possible to replace overheated barrels and maintain a high rate of fire. Although the sector sight was calibrated over a distance of 500 m, the real range when firing bursts did not exceed 200 m.
Shops for "Suomi" were of several types. One of them is box-shaped for 20 cartridges, then a disc for 40 cartridges, the design of Lahti itself, and finally, another drum magazine for 70 cartridges developed by engineer Koskinen in 1936 and weighed as much as 40-charging. In Sweden, four-row box magazines with a capacity of 50 cartridges were designed. In 1950-e, a box-based store on 36 cartridges from the Swedish Karl Gustov M / 45 submachine gun began to be used. The soldiers of the Finnish army, as, incidentally, the soldiers of all other countries of the world, were strictly forbidden to keep a submachine gun when firing at the store, so as not to loosen its latches and the mouth of the receiver. But this prohibition in combat almost always violated.
Drum shop machine gun "Suomi".
Despite the fact that the production of Suomi was generally small, the Finns demonstrated their skillful use in battles during the Soviet-Finnish war of 1939-1940. Then these submachine guns made a strong impression on both the private and the commanders Red Army. In fact, this is what forced our military to speed up the production and mass production for the army of this new type of weapon. Moreover, plans for the deployment of PP production in the USSR were adopted even before the Finnish War, but their implementation in practice went slowly. And then everyone saw, and many still experienced firsthand what it means to have a submachine gun with a large supply of ammunition in a wooded area, and it’s not surprising that all forces were immediately thrown at the “automation” of the Red Army fighters. In addition to the fact that even Fedorov’s machines were withdrawn from the warehouses and returned to service, they quickly increased the production of Degtyarev's submachine guns, and at the same time they also modernized them.
Finnish soldier in the forest in an ambush with a Suomi submachine gun in his hands.
By the way, the “winter war” has become the peak of the use of drum shops. They were immediately adopted by the Red Army and the Great Patriotic War, our machine gunners met with such high-capacity stores. And ... already in its course a truly amazing thing came to light, however, it was obvious from the very beginning. The use of such stores for the most part ... is not justified. They are more complicated and much more expensive to manufacture, and they are also less reliable than box-shaped “rozhkovy”. In addition, they weight the weapon and deprive him of maneuverability. It is not necessary to change the store for a long time, but the stock of cartridges is much more convenient to carry in pouches. And it was not without reason that in the USSR, having taken the Suomi drum shop as the basis for the late modification of PPD and PPSH-41, in the second year of the war they returned to the traditional box stores. The truth is that in the cinema (oh, this is a movie!), And also in the newsreel footage from submachine guns in the hands of our fighters, drum shops are much more likely to have.
To be continued ...
Submachine gun "Suomi" with accessories and shops.
His full name was Aimo Johannes Lahti, and he began developing his own submachine gun from 1921, as soon as the German MP-18 fell into his hands. However, maybe it was the MP-19, produced under the provisions of the Versailles Peace Treaty for the needs of the police of the Weimar Republic. And he certainly liked him, otherwise he wouldn’t do it. But having liked it, this submachine gun made Lahti think about how to make the original sample even better and more perfect in all respects. His first model, embodied in the metal, had a caliber of 7,65-mm and was called KP / -26 (konepistooli Suomi m / 26), and he immediately went into production in the same year. True, it was produced in quantities not too large. Well, the word Suomi meant the name of his country, that is, Finland.
The first sample is often very strange. So “Suomi” m / 26 also looked like a perfect “something” ...
However, he did not stop improving this model, which eventually led to the appearance of another model in the 1931 year, called Suomi-KP Model 1931. The release of this sample lasted for quite a long time - until the 1953 of the year, and about 80 thousands were made in total.
Surprisingly, the “Suomi” was considered by the military rather as an ersatz of a light machine gun than weapon assault units. It turned out that there were not enough such machine guns, but just “Suomi” arrived in time and ... the military demanded to put a replaceable trunk of a great length on it, as well as give it a large-capacity store, as well as bipods. So not only the Czechs saw in the submachine guns a version of the lightweight machine gun. And, by the way, this was the case when the same designer, still in 1926, offered the army his own machine gun for the Lahti Soloranta rifle cartridge L / S-26. Well, make it, saturate the troops, and then buy a machine gun from the Czechs, from the Germans, if Czech seemed not very suitable because of the small capacity of the store. But no - they decided to compensate for the lack of a machine gun by the presence of submachine guns. So much so that some samples of "Suomi" were produced in a version for bunkers, that is, with a pistol grip and no stock at all!
Around 500 copies of "Suomi" were intended to equip bunkers and bunkers.
But the effectiveness of this submachine gun as a light machine gun was low due to the low striking ability of the pistol bullets. Therefore, the Finns had already directly during the hostilities of the outbreak of the Winter War to revise their military doctrine and hastily increase the production of Lahti-Solorant L / S-26. Then, fortunately, the captured DP-27 turned up for them, which turned out to be much better than its Finnish counterpart. But on the other hand, they increased the number of infantry from 1 unit to 2-3 per unit, which immediately affected the increase in the firepower of the Finnish infantry. Be that as it may, it should be noted that the Suomi, as a first-generation submachine gun, went very far from the MP-18 and became a successful model, although it also had its own, with very specific flaws. On the other hand, some of them were more likely attributed to him. For example, one can read in our literature that the drawback was the lack of a fore-end under the barrel behind the magazine, which is why when shooting we had to hold it by the magazine. But the PPSh had exactly the same design. But ... for some reason, this lack of our sample is not seen. However, “Suomi” really required a good training of personnel, since the vacuum shutter retarder that stood on it was very sensitive to the slightest pollution, dust and even simple fogging. By the way, the submachine gun Aimo Lahti liked not only in his homeland. The license for its production was bought by Denmark, where it was produced under the designation m / 41, Sweden (m / 37), Switzerland (and there they understood a lot about good products!). Here he went into production under the designation MP.43 / 44, and in total there were 22 of them released. 500 copies of Suomi were purchased in Bulgaria in 1940-1942. Sweden purchased 5505 units, and produced M / 420 37 thousand units. About 35 units were purchased by Croatia and Estonia, and Germany received 500 Finnish-made Suomi submachine guns, which went into service with the Waffen-SS units in Karelia and Lapland. They also armed the 3rd Finnish battalion of the Nordland regiment, owned by the 042th tank SS division "Viking". From Denmark, the Germans received a certain number of Madsen-Suomi, which they gave the designation MP.746 (d). Somehow, an unspecified amount of Suomi fell into Spain's civil war. The captured “Suomi” fought in the Red Army both during the “Winter War” and during the Great Patriotic War.
How was this rather original submachine gun set up, which set a kind of trend, in modern terms, to the designers of many countries of the world. In general, “Suomi” was a typical first-generation software that started its “pedigree” starting with MP-18. So, the shutter resembled German from MP-19, (ancestor of the Austro-Swiss “Steyr-Solothurn S1-100), but at the same time it had its original design highlights. However, about this a little later, but for now it is important to note that this sample was made according to very high quality standards, very soundly, but ... with the use of a large number of machine tools. The bolt carrier had to be milled from solid steel forgings, converting whole kilograms of metal into chips! The strength was high, but the weight (in the curb state more than 7 kg) was not small, and there’s nothing to say about the cost. By the way, this is one of the reasons why this software was released in relatively small quantities.
The submachine gun had the simplest automatics, operating at the expense of the recoil of the free shutter, and fired from the open shutter. That is, the hammer on the gate was fixed motionless, and the barrel itself was not locked when fired! Such a design to slow down the rate of fire or requires a large mass of the shutter, or some devices. And on “Suomi” such a “adaptation”, or rather “highlight” of its design, was the vacuum shutter brake, arranged in a very original way. The barrel box of a cylindrical shape and the bolt, also in the form of a cylinder, were so tightly fitted to each other that the air breakthrough between them during the movement of the bolt inside the receiver was completely excluded. There was a valve in the back cover of the receiver, which allowed the air that was there to go outside, but on the contrary did not let it through. When the bolt went back after a shot, he squeezed air from the back of the receiver to the outside through this valve. At the same time, there was an overpressure, and here it slowed down the shutter. When, under the action of a return spring, the valve began to move forward, the valve closed, and a vacuum appeared behind the valve, which also slowed its movement. Such a device made it possible to solve several important tasks at once: to achieve slowing down of the movement of the shutter when moving both ways at once, and hence, reducing the rate of fire, and also to improve its smoothness, which most favorably affected the accuracy of fire.
To prevent dust and dirt from entering through the slit for the bolt handle, and, of course, in order to increase the tightness of the receiver, the designer placed the L-shaped shutter handle separately from it, right under the back plate of the receiver, and firing she remained motionless.
Submachine gun "Suomi". Appearance and view with cuts. The L-shaped reloading handle, which is located behind the left, is clearly visible.
Another feature of “Suomi” was the design of the barrel casing and the barrel itself, which were easily removed together, which made it possible to replace overheated barrels and maintain a high rate of fire. Although the sector sight was calibrated over a distance of 500 m, the real range when firing bursts did not exceed 200 m.
Shops for "Suomi" were of several types. One of them is box-shaped for 20 cartridges, then a disc for 40 cartridges, the design of Lahti itself, and finally, another drum magazine for 70 cartridges developed by engineer Koskinen in 1936 and weighed as much as 40-charging. In Sweden, four-row box magazines with a capacity of 50 cartridges were designed. In 1950-e, a box-based store on 36 cartridges from the Swedish Karl Gustov M / 45 submachine gun began to be used. The soldiers of the Finnish army, as, incidentally, the soldiers of all other countries of the world, were strictly forbidden to keep a submachine gun when firing at the store, so as not to loosen its latches and the mouth of the receiver. But this prohibition in combat almost always violated.
Drum shop machine gun "Suomi".
Despite the fact that the production of Suomi was generally small, the Finns demonstrated their skillful use in battles during the Soviet-Finnish war of 1939-1940. Then these submachine guns made a strong impression on both the private and the commanders Red Army. In fact, this is what forced our military to speed up the production and mass production for the army of this new type of weapon. Moreover, plans for the deployment of PP production in the USSR were adopted even before the Finnish War, but their implementation in practice went slowly. And then everyone saw, and many still experienced firsthand what it means to have a submachine gun with a large supply of ammunition in a wooded area, and it’s not surprising that all forces were immediately thrown at the “automation” of the Red Army fighters. In addition to the fact that even Fedorov’s machines were withdrawn from the warehouses and returned to service, they quickly increased the production of Degtyarev's submachine guns, and at the same time they also modernized them.
Finnish soldier in the forest in an ambush with a Suomi submachine gun in his hands.
By the way, the “winter war” has become the peak of the use of drum shops. They were immediately adopted by the Red Army and the Great Patriotic War, our machine gunners met with such high-capacity stores. And ... already in its course a truly amazing thing came to light, however, it was obvious from the very beginning. The use of such stores for the most part ... is not justified. They are more complicated and much more expensive to manufacture, and they are also less reliable than box-shaped “rozhkovy”. In addition, they weight the weapon and deprive him of maneuverability. It is not necessary to change the store for a long time, but the stock of cartridges is much more convenient to carry in pouches. And it was not without reason that in the USSR, having taken the Suomi drum shop as the basis for the late modification of PPD and PPSH-41, in the second year of the war they returned to the traditional box stores. The truth is that in the cinema (oh, this is a movie!), And also in the newsreel footage from submachine guns in the hands of our fighters, drum shops are much more likely to have.
To be continued ...
Information