The Šokac is just one of more than a dozen different submachine guns developed and produced domestically in Croatia during the Yugoslavian civil war of the early 1990s. It is a mechanical copy of the Soviet PPSh-41 made in 9x19mm and a folding stock modeled after the vz25 family of submachine gun...

Phillip A. Luty was a Briton who took a hard philosophical line against gun control legislation in the UK in the 1990s. In response to more restrictive gun control laws, he set out to prove that all such laws were ultimately futile by showing that one could manufacture a functional firearm from h...

A bit of shooting with an MP40 at an indoor range, courtesy of Hill & Mac Gunworks.

Aimo Lahti was the premier firearms designer, and the m/26 was his first significant design. Lahti was a Civil Guard armorer, and upon seeing the Lindelof copy of the Bergmann SMG in 1921 he thought he could make something better and cheaper. He took on three partners and formed Konepistooli Osak...

The SITES Spectre was originally developed by the SITES company (Societa Italiana a Technologie Speciali SPA) of Torino to be the best police and counterterrorist submachine gun on the market. To this end, they studied the other guns on the market and what made a good SMG. The results were rolle...

The "Korsu" is a special version of the Suomi made for use in the bunkers of the Mannerheim Line. When construction on the Line really kicked into high gear in the summer of 1939, is was discovered that the vision slits in the bunkers were too small to fit the muzzle of a standard m/31 Suomi. In ...

The Soviet PPSh-41 submachine gun is most distinctive for its very high rate of fire - approximately 1250 rounds/minute - and large drum magazine. What may come as a surprise to those who have not tried it is how this very high rate of fire does not actually make the weapon difficult to control o...

For several decades, the Beretta company’s handguns and submachine guns were nearly all designed by the very talented Tulio Marengoni…but nothing can last forever. After World War 2, Beretta engineer Domenico Salza began working on a new SMG design, one which would be more compact and more contro...

The US began looking for a cost-effective replacement for the Thompson submachine gun in 1942, and the “Grease Gun” was the result. Designed by George Hyde (a noted firearms designer at the time) and Frederick Sampson (GM/Inland chief engineer), it was a very simple and almost entirely stamped fi...

Degtyarev’s PPD-40 was the first submachine gun adopted in a large scale by the Soviet Union. Its development began in 1929 with a locked breech gun modeled after Degtyarev’s DP light machine gun, but evolved into a much simpler blowback system. It was accepted as the best performing gun of 14 di...

The PPS-43, designed by Alexei Sudayev based on a previous submachine gun design by I.K. Bezruchko-Vysotsky, was the Soviet replacement for the PPSh-41. The Shpagin submachine gun was a very effective combat weapon, but was time-consuming to produce and required specialized manufacturing tools. T...

The MAS-38 was France’s first officially adopted submachine gun, rushed into service in 1940. It was basically too late to help with the defense of France, with less than a thousand delivered by June 1940. The Germans kept the gun in production, making 20-30 thousand under the designation MP722(f...

The Star Z-63 is a 9x19mm version of the Star Z-62, which was made in both 9x19 and 9x23. Together, these represent the company’s effort to produce a more modern submachine gun than their Z-45, which was basically a copy of the German MP-40. The Z-63 is, contrary to its external appearance, a wel...

The Uru, named for a tropical bird, is a Brazilian 9mm submachine gun made from 1977 until 1985 and used by Brazilian military and police forces. What makes it interesting is the designer’s focus on simplicity - the gun has just 17 parts, and basically no screws or pins (except the bolt holding t...

The M-56 is a Yugoslav take on the MP-40 design, produced starting in 1956 to replace its previously issued M49 submachine gun (which was a copy of the Soviet PPSh-41). The M56 is simpler than the MP40, however, and chambered for the 7.62x25mm Tokarev cartridge. It is a simple gun to make, but qu...

The Spanish-made MP41/44 is a licensed copy of the Erma EMP submachine gun. The development begins with Heinrich Vollmer in 1925, designing a submachine gun for German military testing. The military trials showed a number of flaws in the gun, and Vollmer updated the design to fix them - but by th...

The Lanchester MkI was the first British effort to produce a domestic submachine gun during World War II. The British military had rejected these types of arms as "gangster guns" prior to the war, and did not see them as useful in a military context. Well, that opinion changed rather quickly as t...

When Germany began looking in late 1915 for a new weapon ideally suited for the “last 200 meters” of a combat advance, Hugo Schmeisser’s blowback submachine gun would prove to be the weapon that would set the standard for virtually all submachine guns to come. It was a fully automatic only weapon...

The MP35 submachine gun was designed by Theodore Emil Bergmann, the son of the Theodore Bergmann who had manufactured the turn of the century line of Bergmann pistols. Unlike his father, Emil was a firearms designer, and not just a manufacturer. This design was submitted for German military testi...

Most people think that the MP41 is simply an MP40 in a wooden stock, but this is actually not the case - and unlike the MP40, the MP41 can be accurately called a Schmeisser - because it was Hugo Schmeisser who designed it.

The MP41 is actually a combination of the upper assembly of an MP40 wi...

The MAT-49 was developed by France after World War Two to satisfy the need for a more modern submachine gun to replace the MAS-38. The military had come around to standardizing on the 9x19mm cartridge for its pistols and subguns, and the 7.65mm MAS-38 was not feasible to convert. All three state ...

The PM9 was an interesting an unique submachine gun designed by Louis Debuit for the French firm Merlin and Gerin (hence the MGD name – Merlin, Gerin, Debuit) in the late 1940s and early 50s. The design was intended to provide a very compact package, which it did with a very short action, folding...

The MP40 is an iconic piece of World War 2 weaponry, and it's about time we took a closer look at its development...

Thanks to the Institute of Military Technology for allowing me to have access to these three examples so I can bring them to you! Check out the IMT at:

http://www.instmiltech...

The MP40/I was an experimental modification of the MP-40 submachine gun developed by the Erma company (we think) in late 1942. It was presumably developed in response to complaints of Soviet fire superiority with SMGs because of their large drum magazines (and also the larger number of SMGs used ...