Кустарное оружие Вьетминя и Вьетконга: дайджест
AMERICAN RIFLEMAN FEBRUARY 2018 VOLUME 166, No.2: Locally Made. The Vietnamese K-50M Submachine Gun by Tom Laemlein, p.56-58
A half-century ago, the North Vietnamese People’s Army (NVA) and Viet Cong launched the Tet Offensive across South Vietnam.
Shown here is an NVA trooper armed with a Chinese Type 50 SMG, on which the K-50M is based.
Locally Made
The Vietnamese K-50M Submachine Gun
Based on the Chinese Type 50, which was itself based on the Soviet PPSh-41, the K-50M was modified by Vietnamese communists in cottage and jungle workshops to be well-suited to the need s of Viet Cong guerillas.
BY TOM LAEMLEIN
During the Vietnam War, American troops discovered a wide range of Communist-Bloc small arms in service with the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese armies. One of the more interesting and little-known firearms used during the conflict-but well-remembered by many American veterans of the Vietnam War-is the North Vietnamese K-50M submachine gun. It represented the Vietnamese ability to modify and locally produce effective infantry arms in simple cottage work-shops. The K-50M used the Soviet PPSh-41 (produced by the Communist Chinese as the Type 50 SMG), chambered in 7.62x25 mm Tokarev, as the basis for the home-built submachine gun. North Vietnamese and Viet Cong gunsmiths shortened the barrel jacket of the Type 50 and installed a more advanced front sight. The wooden buttstock was replaced by a combination pistol grip and retractable metal wire shoulder stock. It is a handy little submachine gun, well-suited to the needs of a Viet Cong guerilla.
Technical assessments from the wartime NVA or VC are rare, but I do have an ace up my sleeve when it comes to small arms of the Vietnam War. His name is Capt. Dale Dye, USMC (Ret.), a veteran of three tours of duty in Vietnam, who is well-known as an actor and technical advisor in military-themed Hollywood movies. He once told me “I’ve either red or been red upon by almost every rearm used in the Vietnam War.” When I asked him if he had any specific memories of the Vietnamese K-50M, he shared this story, a personal encounter with a little-known submachine gun:
“The first time I saw a K-50M submachine gun was the morning after a fight we had north of Quang Tri in late 1967. Moving through relatively heavy bush, we stumbled into an enemy unit moving in the opposite direction. It was what the manuals call a ‘meeting engagement,’ but it rapidly turned into what we more commonly referred to as a ‘goat-screw.’ It was late afternoon when the shooting started, and both sides burned a lot of [ammunition] through the night trying to break contact. I found myself among a couple of other Marines out on a flank where we were facing a small unit that kept probing for a hole in our defensive perimeter. One of the bad guys out there in the dark kept ripping away with a weapon that sounded different to our ears that were attuned to the sharp crack of the bog-standard AK. It had more of a ‘pop’ or ‘zip,’ and red at a very high rate.
“The next morning when we swept the area we found a bunch of bodies and blood trails as usual, but I was interested in the guy we’d been trading rounds with during the night. He’d stopped ring a couple of hours before dawn, and I wanted to see if we’d managed to get him or he’d just decided to quit the fight. We found a dead VC trooper about 30 meters from our night position lying in a pile of expended brass. We rolled him over to discover a weapon that none of us had seen previously. I had seen enough movies to recognize that the guy’s gun had something in common with the Soviet PPSh-41. An S-2 scout with our unit identified the gun as a Vietnamese K-50M, that he said was a knock-off of the Chinese Type 50, which was based on the Soviet version. Other Marines sweeping the area found two more of them, and naturally we all got interested in this new discovery. The K-50Ms we’d faced during the fight had done a fairly good job of fire support and suppression for the VC. We couldn’t identify any of our wounded as being hit by the 7.62x25 mm, but the gunners had been highly mobile and effective in keeping us busy during the night. We detected a fair-size muzzle flash, but the K-50M gunners rarely fired twice from the same position and were hard to hit.
“The guns we recovered were relatively crude in construction, but the guts worked slickly and the 30-round magazines appeared to be reliable. Sometime later, I dropped by the ordnance section of the regimental S-2 to see what the tech-intel guys had to say about the K-50M and discovered that another unit had attacked and overrun a main force Viet Cong weapon factory in the area, which was apparently infamous for making or modifying the K-50M. One of the techs showed me some pictures of the little jungle workshop that included some surprisingly sophisticated tools.
He also showed me some other captured K-50Ms that were significantly less well-made. Some had flimsy wire collapsible stocks and others had crudely carved wooden buttstocks. His opinion was that, since the factory had been destroyed, we’d likely see fewer of the K-50Ms in future engagements with local VC units. That turned out to be the case.
“Through 1968 I can only recall seeing two or three other models on various battlefields from the DMZ down to the southern limits of I Corps. By that time, we were mainly facing fresh in-country NVA units, and they usually fought with more standard infantry armaments, but other veterans I’ve met who fought mostly main force VC units tell me the K-50M was a common encounter in their areas of operations.”
MILITARY SURPLUS 2016 annual: VIET CONG WEAPONRY The crude and effective guerrilla small arms of the Vietnam War. By W. Darrin Weaver, p. 102-106
VIET CONG WEAPONRY
The crude and effective guerrilla small arms of the Vietnam War.
By W. Darrin Weaver
Perhaps enough time has passed and enough wounds have healed in the last four decades to permit a scholarly summary and even a base appreciation of the simple small arms manufactured and used by the Viet Cong against our forces during the Vietnam War.
The French had been involved in Indochina as early as the 17th century and, after a brief war with China, consolidated the area as a French colony in 1883. Small groups of locals rebelled from time to time, but the French managed to hold on until World War II, when the Japanese invaded and then forced concessions from pro-Axis Vichy France. The Japanese were brutal occupiers. In response, anti-colonial Nationalists such as Ho Chi Minh and his followers consolidated the various resistance groups, Catholics, business owners, Communists and farmers into the Viet Minh.
The Vietnamese were somewhat effective in harassing the Japanese and what remained of the Vichy French, armed with a motley assortment of local crossbows, spears, muskets, shotguns and whatever arms they could steal or capture. Support and some small arms from the United States’ OSS, the USSR and theChinese Nationalists followed and the Viet Minh fought the Imperial Japanese Army until the end of the war in 1945. With the Japanese gone, Ho and the Viet Minh seized power and declared independence.
The French, still very much bruised by WWII however, wanted their colony back and the bloody First Indochina War ensued (known as the “Anti-French Resistance War” in contemporary Vietnam). By this time, the Viet Minh were better armed, having a mixture of French, U.S. and surrendered Japanese small arms, but there were still not enough to go around. Again, the Viet Minh used whatever they could manufacture locally. The French were heavily supplied with small arms from the U.S. and those it had captured from the Nazis or continued manufacturing in French-occupied Germany.
Eventually, the country was divided at the 1954 Geneva Conference into the Communist Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the north and the Republic of Vietnam in the south, as the French withdrew. Members of the Viet Minh were left behind in the south to organize an insurgency and immediately began agitating and undermining the pro-Western government.
The situation on the ground and subsequent escalation of U.S. intervention of course evolved into the Vietnam War.
PRIMITIVE WEAPONS
From a small arms standpoint, between about 1954 to 1963 the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) was fairly well equipped, with the assortment of foreign arms already discussed, as well as regular shipments of arms from China after 1949. The NVA cadre and Viet Minh in the south-which became officially known as the National Liberation Front for South Vietnam, and colloquially known as the “VC” or Viet Cong (“Viet Cong” is a contraction of sorts of the term “Vietnamese Communist”)-were cut off from their main source of supplies north of the DMZ. Once more, they had to make do with what could be bought on the black market (often paid for by the sale of opium), smuggled in on the unreliable Ho Chi Minh Trail, or made locally. Needless to say, standardization in VC units was non-existent.
Generally, the lower the unit was in the VC organization, the more primitive the weapons. Main force, HQ and regional units were better equipped. Early on, these types of units had a fair amount of French weapons, ex-German Wehrmacht (in some cases passed along from the USSR) K98s, MP40s and MG34s and, as the insurgency went on, more and more Soviet M44s, Chinese Type 53 carbines, SKSs and eventually AK-47 rifles.
A local VC militia on the other hand might have none or only a few modern weapons. To compensate, villages and hamlets were protected by a system of early-warning observers, entry and exit points booby trapped with Punji-stick-filled pits or grenades attached to tripwires, traditionally made spears and crossbows as well as crude, locally made pistols and long arms. VC cadre often set quotas, and villagers, including schoolchildren, were required to make so many Punji sticks, improvised explosives, crossbows or primitive firearms per day.
Workshops for the manufacture of firearms varied greatly. It may have been a single hut in a village or a well-camouflaged facility deep in the jungle. VC workers used simple hand tools to shape metal components and wood stocks. More sophisticated workshops with more skilled labor existed deep inside the vast array of tunnel complexes constructed by the VC in South Vietnam, especially in and around Cu Chi in the so-called “Iron Triangle.”
IMPROVISED HARDWARE
The VC used whatever materials they could scrounge-pipe, wire, old hinges, door lock mechanisms, metal bands, copper, brass, spent ordnance, scraps of steel or aluminum from downed aircraft, nails for firing pins, etc. Broken or incomplete firearms were repurposed or rechambered for whatever ammunition was most readily obtainable. Tolerances were poor and proper metallurgy non-existent on the majority of weapons produced locally, and the rifling of barrels was far beyond the skill of most VC weapons makers. Type and complexity ranged from single-shot, slam-fire pistols and rifles made from smooth water pipe, barely capable of firing a few shots before falling apart, to rather complicated and functional copies of more modern designs. Of course, whenever possible, the cruder weapon would be used to kill their enemies with the hope of obtaining a more modern weapon.
Of note, concerning even the most primitive and barely functional examples, the author has observed a seemingly concerted effort to make jungle-made weapons appear to be more formidable than they actually were. Bolt-action shotguns made from pipe for instance, housed in a stock that looked outwardly similar to the M1 Garand. Others include simple spring-action repeaters that mimic the M1 carbine, broken SKSs repurposed to look like an AK, and crude pistols made to look like the 1911A1. The list goes on and on. The probable rationale behind this was, at least from a distance, a U.S. or Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) unit might actually assess that a given VC unit might be better armed than it actually was. Or perhaps it was simply that the VC copied whatever more modern weapon they had on hand, which was most likely one of U.S. design.
From 1963 to 1965, the North was managing to sneak whole NVA regiments into the south. U.S. and ARVN forces were unable to effectively stop the flow of munitions and weapons on the Ho Chi Minh trail and traffic had picked up enough to begin equipping even the lowest-echelon VC units with more modern Soviet and Chinese weaponry. The most commonly encountered weapons were the Chinese Type 53 carbine, the SKS, the AK-47 and the North Vietnamese-produced K-50 submachine gun. This enabled the insurgents to graduate from propaganda actions, defensive or brief harassment engagements to larger coordinated offensive operations against the government of the South and U.S. forces.
In 1968, the VC left its hamlets and tunnels and mounted its most famous campaign, the Tet Offensive, which targeted over 100 urban centers in the south, to include the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. Bold but militarily unsuccessful, Tet decimated the rank and file of the VC, forcing the North to fill one-third of the Viet Cong units with NVA regulars.
By about 1970, the Viet Cong inventory was fairly standardized with CHICOM small arms down to the village level. Jungle workshop and homemade small arms were regularly encountered by U.S. forces and its allies up until the mid-1960s, and only sporadically thereafter. Captured examples were studied and sent back to facilities in the U.S. and nearly every military museum in the U.S. has an example or two in their collections. Many more were captured by servicemen and sent home as souvenirs, and these turn up from time to time on the market or at shows.
Though crude and largely unsafe to fire, they are important pieces of firearms history, representing what can be produced with scant materials and little know-how as well as the extremes that humans will go to in times of war and adversity.
Author’s Note: The author wishes to thank the staff of the United States Navy Museum, Washington Navy Yard, Washington D.C., the United States Naval Academy Museum, the United States National Archives and Records Administration, the United States Army, the U.S. Army Ordnance Museum, the United States Marine Corps Museum, the NRA’s National Firearms Museum, the over 3.4 million U.S. military veterans who fought, toiled and bled in Southeast Asia and the many service members who lost their lives in an attempt to stop Communist aggression and defend the civilians in the Republic of South Vietnam.
STRZAŁpl, maj 2018: Samodziałowa broń Vietcongu, tekst Michael Heidler, str. 52-58 (статья переводная)
Распознанная статья
A half-century ago, the North Vietnamese People’s Army (NVA) and Viet Cong launched the Tet Offensive across South Vietnam.
Shown here is an NVA trooper armed with a Chinese Type 50 SMG, on which the K-50M is based.
Locally Made
The Vietnamese K-50M Submachine Gun
Based on the Chinese Type 50, which was itself based on the Soviet PPSh-41, the K-50M was modified by Vietnamese communists in cottage and jungle workshops to be well-suited to the need s of Viet Cong guerillas.
BY TOM LAEMLEIN
During the Vietnam War, American troops discovered a wide range of Communist-Bloc small arms in service with the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese armies. One of the more interesting and little-known firearms used during the conflict-but well-remembered by many American veterans of the Vietnam War-is the North Vietnamese K-50M submachine gun. It represented the Vietnamese ability to modify and locally produce effective infantry arms in simple cottage work-shops. The K-50M used the Soviet PPSh-41 (produced by the Communist Chinese as the Type 50 SMG), chambered in 7.62x25 mm Tokarev, as the basis for the home-built submachine gun. North Vietnamese and Viet Cong gunsmiths shortened the barrel jacket of the Type 50 and installed a more advanced front sight. The wooden buttstock was replaced by a combination pistol grip and retractable metal wire shoulder stock. It is a handy little submachine gun, well-suited to the needs of a Viet Cong guerilla.
Technical assessments from the wartime NVA or VC are rare, but I do have an ace up my sleeve when it comes to small arms of the Vietnam War. His name is Capt. Dale Dye, USMC (Ret.), a veteran of three tours of duty in Vietnam, who is well-known as an actor and technical advisor in military-themed Hollywood movies. He once told me “I’ve either red or been red upon by almost every rearm used in the Vietnam War.” When I asked him if he had any specific memories of the Vietnamese K-50M, he shared this story, a personal encounter with a little-known submachine gun:
“The first time I saw a K-50M submachine gun was the morning after a fight we had north of Quang Tri in late 1967. Moving through relatively heavy bush, we stumbled into an enemy unit moving in the opposite direction. It was what the manuals call a ‘meeting engagement,’ but it rapidly turned into what we more commonly referred to as a ‘goat-screw.’ It was late afternoon when the shooting started, and both sides burned a lot of [ammunition] through the night trying to break contact. I found myself among a couple of other Marines out on a flank where we were facing a small unit that kept probing for a hole in our defensive perimeter. One of the bad guys out there in the dark kept ripping away with a weapon that sounded different to our ears that were attuned to the sharp crack of the bog-standard AK. It had more of a ‘pop’ or ‘zip,’ and red at a very high rate.
“The next morning when we swept the area we found a bunch of bodies and blood trails as usual, but I was interested in the guy we’d been trading rounds with during the night. He’d stopped ring a couple of hours before dawn, and I wanted to see if we’d managed to get him or he’d just decided to quit the fight. We found a dead VC trooper about 30 meters from our night position lying in a pile of expended brass. We rolled him over to discover a weapon that none of us had seen previously. I had seen enough movies to recognize that the guy’s gun had something in common with the Soviet PPSh-41. An S-2 scout with our unit identified the gun as a Vietnamese K-50M, that he said was a knock-off of the Chinese Type 50, which was based on the Soviet version. Other Marines sweeping the area found two more of them, and naturally we all got interested in this new discovery. The K-50Ms we’d faced during the fight had done a fairly good job of fire support and suppression for the VC. We couldn’t identify any of our wounded as being hit by the 7.62x25 mm, but the gunners had been highly mobile and effective in keeping us busy during the night. We detected a fair-size muzzle flash, but the K-50M gunners rarely fired twice from the same position and were hard to hit.
“The guns we recovered were relatively crude in construction, but the guts worked slickly and the 30-round magazines appeared to be reliable. Sometime later, I dropped by the ordnance section of the regimental S-2 to see what the tech-intel guys had to say about the K-50M and discovered that another unit had attacked and overrun a main force Viet Cong weapon factory in the area, which was apparently infamous for making or modifying the K-50M. One of the techs showed me some pictures of the little jungle workshop that included some surprisingly sophisticated tools.
He also showed me some other captured K-50Ms that were significantly less well-made. Some had flimsy wire collapsible stocks and others had crudely carved wooden buttstocks. His opinion was that, since the factory had been destroyed, we’d likely see fewer of the K-50Ms in future engagements with local VC units. That turned out to be the case.
“Through 1968 I can only recall seeing two or three other models on various battlefields from the DMZ down to the southern limits of I Corps. By that time, we were mainly facing fresh in-country NVA units, and they usually fought with more standard infantry armaments, but other veterans I’ve met who fought mostly main force VC units tell me the K-50M was a common encounter in their areas of operations.”
MILITARY SURPLUS 2016 annual: VIET CONG WEAPONRY The crude and effective guerrilla small arms of the Vietnam War. By W. Darrin Weaver, p. 102-106
VIET CONG WEAPONRY
The crude and effective guerrilla small arms of the Vietnam War.
By W. Darrin Weaver
Perhaps enough time has passed and enough wounds have healed in the last four decades to permit a scholarly summary and even a base appreciation of the simple small arms manufactured and used by the Viet Cong against our forces during the Vietnam War.
The French had been involved in Indochina as early as the 17th century and, after a brief war with China, consolidated the area as a French colony in 1883. Small groups of locals rebelled from time to time, but the French managed to hold on until World War II, when the Japanese invaded and then forced concessions from pro-Axis Vichy France. The Japanese were brutal occupiers. In response, anti-colonial Nationalists such as Ho Chi Minh and his followers consolidated the various resistance groups, Catholics, business owners, Communists and farmers into the Viet Minh.
The Vietnamese were somewhat effective in harassing the Japanese and what remained of the Vichy French, armed with a motley assortment of local crossbows, spears, muskets, shotguns and whatever arms they could steal or capture. Support and some small arms from the United States’ OSS, the USSR and theChinese Nationalists followed and the Viet Minh fought the Imperial Japanese Army until the end of the war in 1945. With the Japanese gone, Ho and the Viet Minh seized power and declared independence.
The French, still very much bruised by WWII however, wanted their colony back and the bloody First Indochina War ensued (known as the “Anti-French Resistance War” in contemporary Vietnam). By this time, the Viet Minh were better armed, having a mixture of French, U.S. and surrendered Japanese small arms, but there were still not enough to go around. Again, the Viet Minh used whatever they could manufacture locally. The French were heavily supplied with small arms from the U.S. and those it had captured from the Nazis or continued manufacturing in French-occupied Germany.
Eventually, the country was divided at the 1954 Geneva Conference into the Communist Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the north and the Republic of Vietnam in the south, as the French withdrew. Members of the Viet Minh were left behind in the south to organize an insurgency and immediately began agitating and undermining the pro-Western government.
The situation on the ground and subsequent escalation of U.S. intervention of course evolved into the Vietnam War.
PRIMITIVE WEAPONS
From a small arms standpoint, between about 1954 to 1963 the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) was fairly well equipped, with the assortment of foreign arms already discussed, as well as regular shipments of arms from China after 1949. The NVA cadre and Viet Minh in the south-which became officially known as the National Liberation Front for South Vietnam, and colloquially known as the “VC” or Viet Cong (“Viet Cong” is a contraction of sorts of the term “Vietnamese Communist”)-were cut off from their main source of supplies north of the DMZ. Once more, they had to make do with what could be bought on the black market (often paid for by the sale of opium), smuggled in on the unreliable Ho Chi Minh Trail, or made locally. Needless to say, standardization in VC units was non-existent.
Generally, the lower the unit was in the VC organization, the more primitive the weapons. Main force, HQ and regional units were better equipped. Early on, these types of units had a fair amount of French weapons, ex-German Wehrmacht (in some cases passed along from the USSR) K98s, MP40s and MG34s and, as the insurgency went on, more and more Soviet M44s, Chinese Type 53 carbines, SKSs and eventually AK-47 rifles.
A local VC militia on the other hand might have none or only a few modern weapons. To compensate, villages and hamlets were protected by a system of early-warning observers, entry and exit points booby trapped with Punji-stick-filled pits or grenades attached to tripwires, traditionally made spears and crossbows as well as crude, locally made pistols and long arms. VC cadre often set quotas, and villagers, including schoolchildren, were required to make so many Punji sticks, improvised explosives, crossbows or primitive firearms per day.
Workshops for the manufacture of firearms varied greatly. It may have been a single hut in a village or a well-camouflaged facility deep in the jungle. VC workers used simple hand tools to shape metal components and wood stocks. More sophisticated workshops with more skilled labor existed deep inside the vast array of tunnel complexes constructed by the VC in South Vietnam, especially in and around Cu Chi in the so-called “Iron Triangle.”
IMPROVISED HARDWARE
The VC used whatever materials they could scrounge-pipe, wire, old hinges, door lock mechanisms, metal bands, copper, brass, spent ordnance, scraps of steel or aluminum from downed aircraft, nails for firing pins, etc. Broken or incomplete firearms were repurposed or rechambered for whatever ammunition was most readily obtainable. Tolerances were poor and proper metallurgy non-existent on the majority of weapons produced locally, and the rifling of barrels was far beyond the skill of most VC weapons makers. Type and complexity ranged from single-shot, slam-fire pistols and rifles made from smooth water pipe, barely capable of firing a few shots before falling apart, to rather complicated and functional copies of more modern designs. Of course, whenever possible, the cruder weapon would be used to kill their enemies with the hope of obtaining a more modern weapon.
Of note, concerning even the most primitive and barely functional examples, the author has observed a seemingly concerted effort to make jungle-made weapons appear to be more formidable than they actually were. Bolt-action shotguns made from pipe for instance, housed in a stock that looked outwardly similar to the M1 Garand. Others include simple spring-action repeaters that mimic the M1 carbine, broken SKSs repurposed to look like an AK, and crude pistols made to look like the 1911A1. The list goes on and on. The probable rationale behind this was, at least from a distance, a U.S. or Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) unit might actually assess that a given VC unit might be better armed than it actually was. Or perhaps it was simply that the VC copied whatever more modern weapon they had on hand, which was most likely one of U.S. design.
From 1963 to 1965, the North was managing to sneak whole NVA regiments into the south. U.S. and ARVN forces were unable to effectively stop the flow of munitions and weapons on the Ho Chi Minh trail and traffic had picked up enough to begin equipping even the lowest-echelon VC units with more modern Soviet and Chinese weaponry. The most commonly encountered weapons were the Chinese Type 53 carbine, the SKS, the AK-47 and the North Vietnamese-produced K-50 submachine gun. This enabled the insurgents to graduate from propaganda actions, defensive or brief harassment engagements to larger coordinated offensive operations against the government of the South and U.S. forces.
In 1968, the VC left its hamlets and tunnels and mounted its most famous campaign, the Tet Offensive, which targeted over 100 urban centers in the south, to include the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. Bold but militarily unsuccessful, Tet decimated the rank and file of the VC, forcing the North to fill one-third of the Viet Cong units with NVA regulars.
By about 1970, the Viet Cong inventory was fairly standardized with CHICOM small arms down to the village level. Jungle workshop and homemade small arms were regularly encountered by U.S. forces and its allies up until the mid-1960s, and only sporadically thereafter. Captured examples were studied and sent back to facilities in the U.S. and nearly every military museum in the U.S. has an example or two in their collections. Many more were captured by servicemen and sent home as souvenirs, and these turn up from time to time on the market or at shows.
Though crude and largely unsafe to fire, they are important pieces of firearms history, representing what can be produced with scant materials and little know-how as well as the extremes that humans will go to in times of war and adversity.
Author’s Note: The author wishes to thank the staff of the United States Navy Museum, Washington Navy Yard, Washington D.C., the United States Naval Academy Museum, the United States National Archives and Records Administration, the United States Army, the U.S. Army Ordnance Museum, the United States Marine Corps Museum, the NRA’s National Firearms Museum, the over 3.4 million U.S. military veterans who fought, toiled and bled in Southeast Asia and the many service members who lost their lives in an attempt to stop Communist aggression and defend the civilians in the Republic of South Vietnam.
STRZAŁpl, maj 2018: Samodziałowa broń Vietcongu, tekst Michael Heidler, str. 52-58 (статья переводная)
Распознанная статья