PPS submachine gun

The PPS (Russian: ППС - "Пистолет-пулемёт Судаева" or "Pistolet-pulemyot Sudaeva", in English: "Sudaev's submachine-gun") was a family of Soviet submachine guns chambered in 7.62x25mm Tokarev, developed by Alexei Sudayev as a low-cost personal defense weapon for reconnaissance units, vehicle crews and support service personnel.

The PPS and its variants were used extensively by the Red Army during World War II and were later adopted by the armed forces of several countries of the former Warsaw Pact as well as its many African and Asian allies.

History
The PPS was created in response to a Red Army requirement for a compact and lightweight weapon with similar accuracy and projectile energy to the Soviet PPSh-41 submachine gun widely deployed at the time, with reduced rate of fire, produced at lower cost and requiring less manpower, particularly skilled manpower.

Sudaev's was ordered by the State Commission for Armaments to perfect for large-scale production the sub-machine gun design of lieutenant I.K. Bezruchko-Vysotsky from the Dzerzhinsky Artillery Academy, who had created two prototypes in 1942; the second of these was the basis of Sudaev's gun.

During design, emphasis was placed on simplifying production and eliminating most machining operations; most of the weapon's parts were sheet-steel stamped. These measures reduced the number of machined components to a bare minimum, cutting down machining time by more than half, to 2.7 hours of machining instead of 7.3 hours for the PPSh-41. There were also savings of over 50% in raw steel usage, down to 6.2 kg instead of 13.9 kg, and fewer workers were required to manufacture and assemble the parts. Thanks to the improvements in production efficiency, the Soviet planners estimated that the new gun would have allowed an increase in monthly submachine gun output from 135,000 units to 350,000 weapons.

Prototypes were field tested between 26 April and 12 May, 1942; the evaluation commission's report was largely favorable, but still proposed some minor improvements mostly aimed at strengthening the gun's structure. By July, Shpagin had finished his own improved model (PPSh-2), and it was pitted in field trials against the PPS, which was found superior in most respects: accuracy, reliability, maneuverability. (This was apparently a large scale contest, in which 20 designs participated. On July 28, 1942 GAU head N.D. Yakovlev and his aide Ivan Novikov presented Sudaev's gun to the State Defense Committee for approval. The firearm was accepted into service as the PPS-42 (Russian: Пистолет-пулемёт Судаева—ППС or Pistolet Pulemyot Sudayeva model of 1942). The weapon was put into small-scale production during the Siege of Leningrad; mass production did not commence until early 1943 at the Sestroretsk Arsenal (over 45,000 weapons were produced before being replaced by the improved PPS-43). The factory in charge for the pilot production starting in December 1942 was the Sestroretsk Tool Factory (Russian: Сестрорецкий инструментальный завод «Воскова».) The first series guns were presented for personal inspection to Andrei Zhdanov and Leonid Govorov in the same month. The full-scale production began in 1943, and the official count of PPS-42 guns produced was 46,572. Most were used during the military trials by the soldiers of the Leningrad Front. The military trials officially took place between January and April 1943.

Due to the massive investment already made in machinery for PPSh-41 production, which was already being produced in more than a million pieces per year, it turned out it would have been uneconomical to completely abandon its production in favor of the PPS. By end of the war some two million PPS-43 submachine guns were made. Due to the oversupply of the Soviet army with submachine guns after the war, production of the PPS in the Soviet Union ceased in 1946.

In the last two years of the war, Sudaev continued to experiment with improvements for his submachine gun. Six of his later prototype models, made in 1944 and 1945, are found in the Military Historical Museum of Artillery, Engineers and Signal Corps. These have variations in bolt shape and weight, as well as more obvious outward differences like a wooden, non-folding stock or a folding bayonet.

The PPS remained in service with some Soviet forces until the mid-1950s. Among the last to relinquish it were crews of armored vehicles and the Naval Infantry. Some WWII-era weapons found their way to the Chinese People's Liberation Army and were subsequently captured by UN forces in the Korean War.

Operating mechanism
The PPS was an automatic blowback-operated weapon that fired from an open bolt. The bolt was cylindrical in shape and contained a spring-loaded claw extractor, which pulled the empty case out of the chamber and passed it to the fixed ejector housed in the lower receiver. The charging handle was integral to the bolt and was located on the right side; it reciprocated during firing. The PPS originally had a fixed but replaceable firing pin, held in place by the extractor spring. Pulling the trigger released the bolt, which moved forward, stripping a round from the magazine, chambering it and striking the primer in one motion.

Features
The PPS had a trigger mechanism that allowed only fully automatic fire and a manual safety that secured them against accidental discharges. When in the "safe" position (engaged by sliding a metal bar forward of the trigger guard), both the bolt and trigger were disabled.

The weapon was fed from curved 35-round box magazines. They were not interchangeable with magazines used in the PPSh-41, nor could the gun use drum magazines. It was chambered for the 7.62x25mm Tokarev M1930 pistol cartridge.

The submachine gun's rifled barrel (with 4 right-hand grooves) was mounted in a perforated sheet metal heat guard and was equipped with a crude muzzle brake, consisting of a strip of steel bent into a U-shape that deflected exiting muzzle gases to the sides and backwards, thus compensating for recoil.

A folding stock was attached to the receiver with a spring-loaded catch button on the left side. The stock folded up and over the receiver top cover and the weapon could be fired in this arrangement. The submachine gun also had a pistol grip but was not provided with a forward grip as the magazine well was intended to fulfil this role. The PPS was usually supplied with two magazine pouches, an oil bottle, bore brush and sling.

Sights
The PPS was fitted with a set of open-type iron sights consisting of a fixed front post protected from impact by two sheet metal plates and a flip rear sight with two pivoting notches, for firing at 100 and 200 m.

Variants


Towards the middle of 1943 the modernized PPS-43 entered production; efforts were made to improve manufacturing and safety. The ventilated heat shield was integrated with the upper receiver cover, both the barrel and shoulder stock were shortened, the stock's locking mechanism was simplified, the casing ejector was moved to the rear of the recoil spring guide rod, the magazine well angle was increased in the receiver in order to enhance feeding reliability and the safety was improved to block the trigger and lock the bolt in either the open or closed positions.

Outside of the Soviet Union, the PPS was license-produced in Poland (from 1948) and the People's Republic of China (Type 54). Several variants were made based on the PPS-43, including a training version built in Poland, chambered for the .22 Long Rifle rimfire cartridge (fed using standard PPS-43 magazines but modified with an aluminum reduction insert) and the Finnish M/44 submachine gun. The M/44 was a modified copy with minor differences to the original PPS-43. It fired the 9x19mm Parabellum pistol round and accepted box magazines from the Carl Gustav SMG or drum magazines from the Suomi M/31.

In the early 1950s Poland developed a modified version of the PPS-43, known as the '''PPS wz. 1943/1952''' that replaced the folding metal stock with a fixed wooden buttstock. This was mounted to the receiver end plate using two inserts and the receiver take-down hook was bent downwards to accommodate the change. The buttstock has a compartment carved inside of it that contains a standard cleaning kit; the side of the butt has a sling loop. This modification was meant to increase the accuracy of the PPS submachine gun, but minimal gains in accuracy were offset by the increase in weight and size of the PPS wz. 43/52 in comparison to the original PPS-43. Between 1952–1955, the Łucznik Arms Factory in Radom built approximately 111,000 PPS submachine guns.

In 1953, the West German border guards (Bundesgrenzschutz) adopted the Spanish-made DUX-53 and DUX-59 submachine guns, copied from the PPS-43 by way of the Finnish M/44. The Vietnamese K-50M also borrowed elements from the PPS design, while in the 1950s, Hungary combined basic features of the PPS-43 with the bolt safety of the PPSh-41 in the unsuccessful M53.

In 2010, Pioneer Arms, of Radom, Poland, began producing a semi-auto only version of the PPS design, called the PPS-43c. The gun, sold with its stock fixed in the closed position, is legally considered a pistol in the United States. The gun is of a closed bolt, hammer fired, blow back operated design as opposed to the open-bolt design of the PPSh-43. According to a report in the July 20, 2012 edition of Shotgun News, the PPS-43C utilizes many parts from unissued PPS-43 submachine guns mounted on new PPS-43C receivers.

Users

 * 🇦🇱 Albania
 * 🇰🇭 Cambodia: Used by Khmer Rouge in the Vietnam War.
 * 🇨🇳 China: Used Chinese Type 54s.
 * Guinea Bissau: Used by PAIGC in the Guinea-Bissau War of Independence
 * 🇧🇬 Bulgaria
 * 🇮🇩 Indonesia
 * 🇱🇷 Liberia
 * 🇲🇳 Mongolia
 * 🇰🇵 North Korea: Used both Soviet PPS submachine guns and Chinese Type 54s.
 * 🇵🇱 Poland: Used domestically produced model.
 * São Tomé and Príncipe
 * Soviet Union: Built PPS-42, and PPS-43
 * Flag of South-West Africa People's Organisation.svg SWAPO: Used Polish made PPS wz. 1943/1952
 * North Vietnam: Used by North Vietnamese soldiers in the Vietnam War.