With the arrival of the PPSh-41, the Red Army was now made more ready to fight Germany. Soviet military planners reworked small unit tactics to take full advantage of the new submachine gun and the PPSh-41 went on to be a star for the Red Army for the duration of the war. Where service rifles were tactically limited and machine guns were few in number, it was not uncommon for whole platoons to be issue just these submachine guns as well as ammunition and grenades. In any case, the PPSh-41 gave a good account of itself, particularly when soldiers attempted to storm enemy pillboxes or trenches. Additionally, the weapon saw extensive use in the bloody house-to-house, building-to-building fighting that symbolized the Soviet-German campaigns of the war. By 1945, the final year of the war, the PPSh-41 has been manufactured in numbers nearing five million examples. Its readily available stock and ease of manufacture only ensured it a long and healthy life in the Cold War to follow.
While the Red Army formally discontinued use of the PPSh-41 in the 1950s after the introduction of their Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifle line, the PPSh-41 saw extended use through Soviet allied nations and satellite states where her basic qualities could really be appreciated by the budget conscious shopper. The weapon went on to see use with forces of Albania, China, Cuba, Guinea, Hungary, Iran, Laos, North Korea, Poland, North Vietnam/Vietnam and Yugoslavia. Finnish soldiers made use of captured stocks in the Continuation War (June 1941 to September 1944) as did the Germany Army. The German Army managed to capture so many examples during World War 2 that the weapon was issued to German troops in two different versions - the MP41(r) was the PPSh-41 converted to fire the German 9mm Parabellum submachine gun cartridge while the MP717(r) was the base, unmodified Soviet PPSh-41 firing the lower-powered and dimensionally similar German 7.63x25mm Mauser cartridge. Hungary reconstituted captured samples of the PPSh-41 as well.
The PPSH-41 went on to see license production in a handful of countries following the war. Iran produced a version differentiated by use of a tangent rear sight and several derivatives later appeared. Vietnam managed a copy of the PPSh-41 under the designation of "K-50M". The "M49" of Yugoslavia was outwardly identical to the Soviet design and accepted its magazines but was internally different. North Korea produced the PPSh-41 as the "Type 49" under license. While Hungary operated the weapon in its captured form during World War 2, it also went on to license-produce the type in the years following and Poland also joined in on local production of the Soviet weapon. Chinese military industry took to illegally copying and producing the type as the "Type 50".
The legacy of the PPSh-41 did not end with World War 2 for it went on to see combat in the Korean War and the Vietnam War to follow - either in the original Soviet PPSh-41 form or in the North Korean Type 49 and Chinese Type 50 forms. The weapon saw service in the Chinese Civil War, the Bay of Pigs Invasion as well as Cambodian Civil War. All told, production of the PPSh-41 ultimately totaled six million units and the type can still be found in limited use today (2012). This is driven home by the fact that examples have been confiscated as far away as Iraq within the last decade after the American invasion of 2003.
For most of the world, the PPSh-41 eventually gave way to the glut of Kalashnikov automatic weapons appearing in the 1950s and onwards.
The PPSh-41 designation comes from the words Pistolet-Pulemyot Shpagina which, when translated to Russian, becomes Shpagin Machine Pistol - named after Georgi Shpagin. The "41" designates the year of introduction - in this case "1941".
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