![]() ![]() At the same time the ‘allied’ armies were shown the hitherto top secret Kalashnikov rifle and Makarov pistol with their respective ammunition, whose appearance was met with amazement. The Treaty allowed for a re-creation of the national façade in each member-state’s military, and loosened the up to then iron grip the Soviet Union hitherto exerted over their defense industries and armaments. De facto it changed the situation marginally – it was still the Soviet Union that commanded the ‘allied’ military forces directly from Moscow, but in theory they were now independent national military forces – if only on paper. The treaty was signed in Warsaw, Poland in May 1955, and therefore it was called the Warsaw Pact – even though it was steered solely from Moscow and served solely Moscow’s interests. ![]() One of the facets of the post-Stalinist ‘thaw’ in the Eastern Bloc was the drive towards legalization and petrification of the satellite-states dependency on the USSR, in the military terms taking shape of an alliance to counter-weigh the NATO. The Rak was a principal armament of the Polish tank crewmen. ![]() In the field, though, where obsolete tactical doctrine called for it to perform a surrealistic role of the soldier’s primary combat weapon, it was soon deemed inefficient and replaced with a folding stock AKS automatic rifle. On the other hand, it’s small size and limited level of energy allowed for creation of the compact machine pistols, like the Stechkin APS. This was reasonably accurate, and reasonably efficient at pistol distances, but way too weak to have any effect at the classical ‘front-line’ SMG fire exchange distances. Syemin, but referred to colloquially as the ‘Makarov round’ from the gun that chambered it. It was chambered for a new round, the 9×18 ‘57-M-181S’, designed by Boris V. In 1951 the Soviet military went to another extreme, adopting instead a small-sized, blowback Makarov pistol instead. The Soviet Army, having been just re-armed with it from an obsolete, 19th Century, but virtually recoilless, revolver (the M1895 Nagant) loathed the large, heavy and kicking like a mule, yet inefficient Tokarev M1933 pistol. It was even worse in it’s handgun ammunition role. At the same time, despite the awesome energetic level and penetration of this round, it was less-than-stellar terminal ballistics-wise. There was one additional problem to the East of the Iron Curtain: the wartime experience had proved beyond reasonable doubt that the 7.62 x25 Tokarev round is too powerful to have a controllable compact SMG chambered for it. It was so, because the level of technology available in 1950s did not allowed to cut down the intermediate-round assault-rifle any smaller, and the classical SMG was too large and bulky to fill the billet: something completely new was needed, and quick. More, it takes an awful load of money to train one – and so, to protect this investment, a PDW-style weapon had to be devised from the scratch. Their jobs, indispensable in the modern warfare, were much more important than wandering around in the boonies, wielding a decent rifle. A new wave of compact SMGs, or even machine pistols, were meant to be the self-protection weapons for the commanders, gunners, drivers, pilots and the like. Yet, it was this very same process of warfare modernization that brought it down to the brink of extinction, which paradoxically brought it up back again – although in a completely different guise. The re-armament of armies with automatic rifles chambered for intermediate caliber ammunition throughout the 1950s and 1960s resulted in growing marginalization of the classic pistol-caliber submachine gun. And at the time, when boxy just started to seem sexy, those classy, curving lines of the Rak pleased the eye of beholder. It was lightweight, compact, capable of serious firepower, yet could be holstered to leave the hands free for whatever job they were needed for. It was officially called the Pistolet maszynowy wzór 1963 (PM-63), but most people refer to it as the ‘Rak’ (Polish for cancer). The subject is the Polish PM-63 machine pistol… PM-63: Poland’s First PDWĪlmost twenty years before the West went PDW-crazy with advent of the micro-caliber rounds that made the concept viable at last, a machine pistol was created in Poland, showing all the features required from that seemingly so novel class of automatic weapons. Today we have another guest post, and this time Leszek has really outdone himself. ![]()
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