Grenade launcher made from a water pipe and a cartridge case
In 1970, a twenty-kilogram steel wedge was discovered in the Polesie soil—the very same one used by partisans of the 125th Brigade to derail German trains in 1943. While fleeing from the punitive forces, it was buried and forgotten for nearly thirty years. Today, the wedge is housed in the Belarusian State Museum. stories The Great Patriotic War, and along with it, almost the entire "weapons school" of one man—railroad lieutenant Tengiz Shavgulidze—remained in the museum's semi-darkness. His rifle grenade launcher had a range of three hundred meters and was made of artillery cartridges and Mosin rifles and almost literally repeated the idea that the Red Army considered obsolete by 1941.
Shavgulidze's wedge
A railroad worker in a partisan detachment
Tengiz Shavgulidze was a career Red Army officer and a lieutenant in the railway troops. In 1941, he was surrounded, wounded, and captured by the Germans. He escaped and in June 1942, he rejoined the partisans in the Minsk region, wounded after weeks of wandering. His postwar biography is largely unreconstructed in open sources: neither his subsequent service, nor the year and place of his death, nor his list of awards are known. Shavgulidze remains the figure of a single episode, but an exceptionally intense one.
Tengiz Shavgulidze - a career officer of the Red Army, lieutenant of the railway troops
The first thing he did in the squad was to take up not weapons, and by rail. In the winter of 1942/1943, Shavgulidze assembled a device that partisan reports called a "wedge," essentially a disposable track switch. A section of rail of the required profile, a stop wedge—all together, it weighed about twenty kilograms. Installation took a minute. A train traveling on a normal track would rest its wheels against the wedge and derail, taking its equipment and whatever else was on board.
Shavgulidze personally carried out the first use of the wedge: he crawled to the rails to install his own design. The wedge then went into production: crews copied it, and instructions were written for it. One of the prototypes was the very one buried by the 125th P.K. Ponomarenko Brigade during its retreat and discovered a quarter of a century later.
ShG grenade: starting point
By the spring of 1943, the wedge was already in place, but the partisans were increasingly short of something else: regular hand grenades. M24s (or "knockers") captured from the Wehrmacht and the rare F-1s from the mainland were quickly snapped up. Shavgulidze proposed a solution, indecently simple: the body was a length of water pipe, with explosives inside (TOL or ammonal, from the same explosive stockpiles used for rails), a fuse made of fuse fuse and a blasting cap. Light it, count it, and throw it.
The water pipe here is no accident. It's a material that the forestry workshop in 1943 had a reliable supply of: from stations, destroyed villages, and former estates. The wall thickness was sufficient to produce splinters; the diameter was comfortable for a grip. Production was streamlined without any special equipment: a hacksaw, a vice, and a drill.
Later publications contain the statement that Shavgulidze's grenade "exceeded the standard grenades in destructive power." This is likely the partisans' own assessment: the charge in the tube may have been heavier than that of the F-1, but the fragmentation field geometry of the homemade grenade was clearly inferior to that of the factory-made "limonka." This didn't prevent the grenades from performing well: in early June 1943, according to partisan reports, they destroyed a German garrison at Falichi station.
Then we ran into the obvious: a hand-fired grenade has a range of thirty meters. The combat range in an ambush is closer to a hundred. Something in between a grenade and a mortar was needed.
PRGSh design: a rifle mortar based on partisan components
The idea Shavgulidze came up with in the summer of 1943 was not new to the Red Army. It had been in service since 1928. Dyakonov rifle grenade launcher — A 41mm mortar mounted on the barrel of a Mosin rifle, with a standard fragmentation grenade weighing approximately 360 grams and a range of 150 to 800 meters. By the beginning of the war, the system was being largely discontinued: in rifle squads, it was being replaced by 50mm company mortars. By 1942, many Dyakonov grenade launchers remained in stock, but as a service, it was considered a closed category.
As a career officer, Shavgulidze knew about Dyakonov. And he essentially assembled a partisan equivalent using the hardware available in the forest.
scheme Shavgulidze's partisan rifle grenade launcher, abbreviated as PRGS, looked like this:
- Mortar attachment made from a spent 45mm cartridge case tank or anti-tank gun is placed on the muzzle of a rifle or Mosin carbine.
- The grenade is over-caliber, meaning it is thicker than the barrel, with a tail rod; the rod is inserted into the bore of the rifle barrel.
- A blank rifle cartridge (a live cartridge from which the bullet has been removed and the powder charge left) is inserted into the chamber.
- Shot: the powder gases press on the tail and accelerate the grenade in an arc to a distance of about three hundred meters.
The PRGSh was assembled from whatever was literally lying underfoot. The Mosin-Nagant rifle was the primary small arms of both the partisans and the troops they encountered; the problem of "where to get a Mosin-Nagant" was nonexistent in Belarus in 1943. 45mm shell casings were a common consumable: the 1937 model "forty-five" was one of the most common guns of the first half of the war, and shell casings were left behind wherever the battlefield was.
And here the difference between Dyakonov and Shavgulidze becomes apparent; the difference isn't in the idea, but in the execution. Dyakonov had a precision-machined, factory-made mortar, a standardized grenade, and calculated ballistics. Shavgulidze had a 45mm casing, a homemade casing, and a range of "around 300 meters." By 1943, the rifle mortar as a type was already fading in the large army; in the partisan forest, it returned because there were no factories nearby, and a German column was still 300 meters away. The idea of a rifle grenade launcher was perfected by the French during World War I (the Vivien-Bessières rifle mortar). Lebel, 1916); Shavgulidze, regardless of whether he knew about it or not, followed the same route.
Shavgulidze's partisan rifle grenade launcher
Production and the "partisan Katyusha"
By January 1, 1944, according to partisan reports, partisan formations in the Minsk region had produced 120 PRGSh grenade launchers and more than 3000 grenades for themThis is no longer a one-off, homemade product, but a series—albeit a home-made one, but produced in several brigade workshops. For scale: 120 barrels is the full complement of weapons for several companies.
The most famous episode dates back to the winter of 1944: a forest road between Lyuban and Urechye. Six partisans from a PRGSH were lying in ambush for a platoon of policemen; their positions had to be drawn up along the track, as is customary in a winter forest, where a marching company wouldn't leave the road in the snow. A company of punitive forces in Soviet uniforms passed along the road, five times larger than expected. Six barrels fired in a salvo, six grenades exploding simultaneously in the battle formations, and the punitive forces retreated, leaving behind the dead and wounded. Among partisans, this salvo earned the nickname "partisan Katyusha"—an exaggeration, of course, but one that conveys the feeling: a single grenade launcher by itself wasn't particularly effective, but six in a salvo certainly was.
Weapon repair in a partisan's makeshift weapons workshop
The number six here is the number of a regular reconnaissance group or ambush sabotage party, not a standard "grenade launcher crew": specialized units for the PRGSh were not formed in the brigades. It's just that by 1944, every other soldier in the group carried a Mosin-Nagant rifle with a mortar attachment. This was the essence of the entire system: not a new branch of the military, but an upgrade for the regular partisan unit.
The "six at a time" tactic itself indirectly describes the limitations of the PRGSh. The accuracy of a high-caliber grenade, propelled by a blank cartridge from a homemade mortar using a cartridge case, was low; such a system did not allow for accurate firing at a point target at 300 meters. The PRGSh functioned as a salvo and area weapon: against a column, a group, or a garrison. It could not be used against a single target.
The system never enjoyed a post-war career. The rifle mortars of the Dyakonov era were finally phased out in the infantry, replaced by company mortars and later by the next-generation underbarrel grenade launchers. But partisan weapons operate by a completely different logic than military weapons. Military weapons proceed from design to material: the design bureau sets a task, and steel, gunpowder, and technology are selected to meet it. Partisan weapons proceed in the opposite direction—from what's lying underfoot to what will come of it. A water pipe, a 45mm shell casing, a Mosin rifle—these aren't the choices of an engineer, but rather the lumber inventory of 1943; the design is assembled from it, not the other way around.
Therefore, the PRGSh remains in the same category as the Finnish submachine guns assembled clandestinely in the 1940s or the Yugoslav mortars of the 1990s. The same set of conditions apply everywhere: no industrial base, a local war, and only the remnants of someone else's farms at hand. And the answer is always the same: weapons that no one specifically designs. They reappear every time the factories are gone, but the enemy is still three hundred meters away.
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