The Israeli Uzi submachine gun is now a recognizable brand in the global small arms market. The weapon is known to a wide circle of ordinary people, who are not even fond of this area, and absolutely in terms of recognition it can compete with the Kalashnikov assault rifle and the American M16 rifle and their derivatives. This is largely due not only to the characteristic appearance of the submachine gun, but also to its frequent appearance in various films and computer games.
The Uzi submachine gun chambered for 9x19 mm Parabellum was named after its developer, Uziel Gal. The weapon was created back in 1948 and put into service in 1954, since then this model has been produced by the Israel Military Industries concern, having gone through a lot of changes and upgrades, but retaining a world-recognizable layout - a bolt running on the barrel and a magazine located in the handle of the weapon … Today, it is the Israeli Uzi that is the reference model of such an arrangement, but even before its appearance in a number of countries, including the Soviet Union, similar models of small arms were assembled. In the USSR, these were Shuklin, Rukavishnikov and Pushkin submachine guns, which were created during the Great Patriotic War.
The prerequisites for the appearance of submachine guns appeared back in the years of the First World War, when the question of increasing the firepower of infantry units arose quite sharply. The solution was one - saturation of the troops with automatic weapons. The first way to solve the problem was the development of automatic rifles. But really working samples of such weapons appeared only in the second half of the 1930s, before that they simply could not replace magazine rifles, at best they were only partially adopted for service, while fully automatic rifles became mass weapons only in the 1940s. years. At the same time, the troops' need for light automatic weapons did not disappear anywhere. Therefore, the designers turned to the creation of automatic weapons for a pistol cartridge. The first such models were designed already during the First World War and at the same time they received the name stuck behind them - submachine guns.
Uzi submachine gun
At the same time, submachine guns were never considered as a replacement for rifles, they were complementary weapons built into the infantry's small arms system. Mainly due to the low power of the pistol bullet and the short firing range. Submachine guns enhanced the power of infantry fire at close range, were indispensable in assault operations, perfectly suited scouts, paratroopers, and also went into service with crews of various military equipment, since they had smaller dimensions compared to rifles.
The history of the appearance of "Uzi"
By the beginning of World War II, the submachine gun was finally formed as a portable automatic weapon for an infantryman, which made it possible to conduct continuous machine-gun fire with pistol cartridges. The effective firing range was low and did not exceed 200 meters, but for close combat this was more than enough. During the Second World War, various models of submachine guns were massively used by warring countries, while work continued on the creation of new models of such weapons. It was during the war years in the USSR that work was going on to create models of submachine guns, reminiscent of the layout of the world famous Uzi today.
It can be noted here that at the dawn of the formation of its own armed forces, Israel experienced problems with a variety of weapons, including small arms. The Israeli army was armed with many models of weapons from different countries, including numerous submachine guns of German, British, American and Soviet production. At a certain stage, the MP40 submachine gun was adopted as standard weapons for all branches of the armed forces. However, this weapon was technically complex and expensive, therefore, already at the end of the 1940s, work began in Israel to develop its own model of a submachine gun, which would not be inferior to the MP40 in efficiency, but was simpler, technologically advanced and adapted to the conditions of local production and available machine park.
As a result, the Israeli engineer Uziel Gal presented the military with his own vision of such a weapon. In terms of layout and appearance, the novelty was largely a repetition of the Czechoslovak Sa. 23, which was developed by the designer J. Holechek in 1948 and already in 1949 was put into mass production. The Czech model was intended primarily for paratroopers and was distinguished by an advanced scheme at that time. At the same time, it is not known whether Gal was familiar with the Czechoslovak development, and even more so with Soviet prototypes, which were tested five years earlier than the Czech submachine gun.
Czechoslovak submachine gun Sa. 25, from model Sa. 23 featured a folding shoulder rest
Soviet submachine guns
Back in 1942, the USSR began testing a submachine gun designed by Shuklin, which has a similar layout. Unfortunately, images of this model of small arms have not reached us, but the description and report of the GAU on tests have survived. The discovery of these models for the general public is largely associated with the activities of the researcher in the field of small arms and historian Andrei Ulanov. Creating a new submachine gun, Comrade Shuklin was guided by the following ideas: he hoped to create a sample of small arms that would be portable and comfortable with constant wear, would be lightweight and would replace personal self-defense weapons, which were used as revolvers and pistols, but with the preservation of all the main qualities of existing submachine guns.
The Soviet designer-gunsmith embodied his idea in the form of a model with a free breechblock, while to ensure the declared qualities of portability and lightness and bring the weapon closer to pistols, Shuklin used a bolt that slid over the barrel, and he also reduced the bolt travel as much as possible (up to 40 mm). Using this scheme, the designer received a fairly massive bolt - 0.6 kg, but the total length of the weapon was only 345 mm, and the barrel length was 260 mm. Neither the general view of this submachine gun nor the drawings of the model have survived to this day. But according to the surviving description, it can be stated that the submachine gun, in addition to the bolt running on the barrel, also had a magazine that was inserted into the handle of the weapon. The model was, of course, interesting, but not for 1942, when the situation at the front was extremely tense, and GAU was simply not up to the implementation of experimental projects and their refinement to mass production.
In the GAU's response to the Shuklin submachine gun, the following identified shortcomings were listed: 1) The complex manufacturing technology, the shutter and the barrel, due to their configuration, required a large number of turning and milling (especially) work from the workers; 2) difficulties in obtaining the necessary accuracy of the battle with a small weight of the weapon; 3) the high sensitivity of the presented submachine gun to pollution, since the ingress of sand and dust between the barrel and the bolt led to delays in firing, this was also confirmed for the sample of the submachine gun designed by Rukavishnikov. Taking into account the identified shortcomings in the GAU, it was considered inappropriate to further develop the presented model.
Rukavishnikov submachine gun
In the folded position, the butt plate could act as an additional handle for holding the weapon
In the same 1942, a sample of a submachine gun designed by Rukavishnikov was tested at GAU. Apparently, the model has survived to our time and today is located in St. Petersburg in the funds of the famous Military-Historical Museum of Artillery, Engineers and Signal Corps. The submachine gun stood out for its rounded receiver and a forward-sliding shoulder rest. As in the Shuklin model, the magazine was also inserted into the grip, which made the models look like ordinary pistols. The retention handle, intended for the second hand, and the forend on the Rukavishnikov model were absent. The fate of this sample was the same as that of the Shuklin submachine gun. The commission considered the weapon difficult to manufacture, noted the low manufacturability of the model. The submachine gun's sensitivity to contamination was also noted, resulting in delays in firing.
Already in 1945, the USSR returned to promising ideas from 1942. The result of the rethinking of previous works was a new submachine gun designed by Pushkin. The GAU report for this model noted a short breech (45 mm) and a magazine inserted into the handle. The submachine gun itself was distinguished by the presence of a ventilated barrel casing and a muzzle brake. The buttstock is made in the form of a shoulder rest, it was foldable. The new submachine gun was more compact and lightweight than the PPS serially produced by the Soviet industry. However, the weight gain of the Sudaev submachine gun was not so clear-cut. As Andrei Ulanov notes, in many respects this gain was achieved by reducing the mass of the bolt, which has lost 165 grams in comparison with the bolt of the famous PPS. With the reduced mass of the bolt, Pushkin's submachine gun stood out for its rate of fire - up to 1040 rounds per minute against 650 for the Sudaev model. And here the high rate of fire combined with the light bolt was a bad combination. Measurements showed that he came to the extreme rear position at once four times faster than on Sudaev's submachine gun, while the shutter speed was 7, 9 m / s.
It was difficult to talk about any reliability, survivability and durability of a system with such indicators. Doubts among the testers appeared immediately and were only confirmed during firing tests. There were no complaints about the submachine gun when firing single shots, but automatic fire immediately revealed all the problems of the weapon. The prohibitive rate of fire did not allow more than 2-3 shots to be fired, there were delays, skew and skipping of cartridges were recorded. Another problem arose, the shutter could not withstand such loads and began to break down, small cracks were noted on it even before the tests, after the crack only became even larger. Based on the totality of characteristics, it was decided to suspend work on this project, the GAU report noted that obtaining a workable weapon model and ensuring the necessary survivability of the shutter with such a design is unlikely.
Pushkin's submachine gun
Although the Soviet submachine guns of Shuklin and Rukavishnikov did not pass the GAU tests and received negative conclusions, the very fact of the appearance of such models of small arms and the layout chosen by the designers cannot be ignored. Bringing submachine guns in wartime was a difficult task, but the layout itself was one hundred percent correct, which was then confirmed by life itself. The bolt running on the barrel, the magazine located in the control handle, the folding stock - all this after the war will be embodied in the Czech Sa. 23 and its derivatives, and a little later in the most famous representative of this layout scheme today - the Israeli Uzi.
