Today we are taking a look at three different pieces of kit developed to carry Degtyarev DP pan magazines. These mags are really inconveniently shaped, and traditional magazine pouches just don’t work for them. Instead, the Soviets initially fielded a stamped steel can that held three pans. This was durable, but had to be carried by hand, and basically limited a solider to carrying 6 pans (just 282 rounds) at the expense of having anything else in hand. An improved World War Two system was the cloth 3-pan carrying bag, which included a shoulder strap.
Today, the Degtyarev remains in use with Ukrainian Territorials, and there is domestic Ukrainian production of DP-specific web gear. Specifically, I have an Akinak 2-pan Multicam pouch to show you (they also make a gunner’s backpack based around a 4-pan storage pouch).
I have a Chauchat magazine canvas carrying bag and it looks a lot like the second DP version. Straight top and a round bottom. Simple and effective.
Here is, I think, the manufacturers’ web listing for the modern pouch (in this case shown in OD not camo): https://akinak.com.ua/ua/p1567353653-podsumok-dlya-pulemetnyh.html
Would anyone by chance be able to help me answer this question: When reassembling the magazine for the DP27/DP28/DPM (47 round magazine style), how many revolutions do you make to correctly “wind” that spring? Any insight would help greatly, thanks!
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: You have to evaluate machineguns and other weapons on a systems basis, including everything it takes to make them “go”.
An abysmal weapon can be salvaged by way of having better support equipment, and a great weapon can be ruined because the support equipment is horrible.
If you’re reduced to carrying the magazines loosely in a gunnysack, then that weapon is going to give you worse effects in combat than the one that maybe has reliability issues, but which is well-supported in terms of accessory gear.
It’s the support systems and the matrix of training/tactics surrounding it all that are the most interesting to me. WWII is an excellent example; the German MG systems were very well thought-out, supported lavishly, and they produced tactical results far in excess of other nations. Contrast the tactical effect of the German weapons going against the equivalent Soviet ones… The DP was a good gun, mechanically, but as a light machinegun, it was nowhere near as capable as the MG34/42 in the LMG role. On top of that, the MG34/42 family could be easily transitioned up the food chain to outright heavy machinegun (using the WWII definition based on sustained fire), and you start to see the issues inherent with the DP/Maxim/Goryunov Soviet MG complex. The MG34/42 was just way more versatile and destructive, superior in nearly every way. The casualty figures tell the story, for any disbelievers out there.
One of these days, I’d like to see Ian get his hands on a complete MG34/42 “outfit”, as you’d find in a German HMG unit, and do a compare/contrast with the Allied systems. I think that would be enlightening; I’ve seen something like that done at a reenactment, and it really made it clear to me who’d gotten machineguns more “right” in WWII.
look here
https://www.did.co/portfolio/e60066/
One of the smartest things was the simplest. The handles on top of the ammunition cans. Instead of being ones that folded dead-center on top of the lid as with ours, they were hinged offset, nearer the edge. Which meant a soldier could carry two at a time in one hand.
https://www.ima-usa.com/cdn/shop/files/ONSV23CSR78__19.jpg?v=1717184035
They even had leather sleeves so they wouldn’t file a groove in your fingers when they were full.
I still wonder WTH we don’t do it that way even today.
(Yes, I’ve carried full cans of 7.62 x 51mm, and it’s a pain- literally.)
clear ether
eon
Soviet Union attempted to develop machine gun which would be both lighter than Maxim machine gun and provide greater volume of fire than DP, result was DS-39
http://modernfirearms.net/en/machineguns/russia-machineguns/ds-39-eng/
adopted (as you might guess) in 1939, which despite years of refining and testing failed to work properly in real combat. Would it work as intended, this would result in having 2 mechanically similar weapon full-filing 2 roles (hand-held and mount), thus making training easier.
>>The DP was a good gun, mechanically, but as a light machinegun, it was nowhere near as capable as the MG34/42 in the LMG role<<
You are slightly wrong, by a way of your own argumentation. As you say, what matters is the whole context the gun is used at, broadly speaking – a gun 'environment'.
So is a particular DP or a bit of its kit failing? Fine (khoroszho…), there comes another DP. And another. And another. Skolko ugodno.
Aaaaand… The reason Soviet casualties were exponentially higher than German self-demonstrates, here.
What you’re suggesting is that inferior equipment requires you to trade more of that inferior equipment, along with the lives of the men using it, in order to compensate for that inferiority.
Which is the typical Soviet calculus. Over the long haul, this attitude leads to self-genocide, something we’re witnessing in the demographics of today. Soviet procurement decisions ringing down the decades, resulting in the modern situation we observe today.
You waste lives? You’re wasting what really matters, the actual lifeblood of your nation. Both Stalin and Hitler spent that currency with gay abandon, as did the French and British in WWI. Final outcome of all that has yet to be determined, but I’m pretty sure that the more profligate the waste, the harder it is to recover from.
A major consideration for any military designer or procurement officer ought to be “How many lives will this system cost, in order to make it effective on the battlefield we’re going to put it on?”
There you run into the culture factor. Western Judeo-Christian culture puts a higher value on the life of the individual; all are considered to be created in the image of G-d.
Thus, conserving the lives of the soldiers is considered a virtue.
In a democracy (more properly a republic), there’s also the factor that leaders who violate this cultural more tend to be turned out of power in the next election. So there’s self-interest involved.
Most of the “sacrificing the soldiers” mentality can be traced to supposedly enlightened leaders overly enamored of Eastern philosophies. The Nazis were after all an outgrowth of the German Romantic movement, which was pretty much “all Persian all the time”; post-Zoroastrianism and heavily Islamically-influenced.
China? The Emperor (or at least the eunuchs and mandarins who really ran everything) was/were all that mattered. Japan? The same redoubled.
Fascism was an importation of pre-Christian paganism into Europe, and the results were about what you’d expect.
Socialism, the “purer” form, was simply an attempt to create a “rational” justification for paganism. Plato, the first true socialist (see The Republic) didn’t even bother trying; he had nothing but contempt for the “masses” and made no secret of it. Hence Russia.
It all comes down to “culture”, every time. And when the leaders decide that some ancient “foreign” culture is better than that of their own peasantry…well, that’s when you need to watch out.
clear ether
eon
I think there’s a clear demographic effect to be observed, totally unrelated to either culture or morals, however you conceive either one.
The vast majority of our current leadership around the world live in a delusional fantasy world that a.) never really existed, and b.) sure as hell no longer obtains.
Look at the long trail of death through France, going back to the Napoleonic Wars. The leadership classes of France behaved as though there were an infinite supply of healthy peasants to conscript and fling at their opponents… Where’d that end? Look at France today; they still haven’t fully recovered from the demographic damage done in WWI, and can arguably be said to have lost what they did in WWII because of the distrust and ennui generated by the waste of that war. Same-same with the British; you can observe definite effects on the relationship between subjects and Crown, right down to this day.
The problem with the arseholes we’ve been in the habit of elevating to leadership positions since the advent of such things is that they’re all extremely prone to “Doing a Napoleon”, to coin a phrase, and confuse their personal glory with the health and well-being of their followers. Alexander took the flower of Macedon off to conquer the world, and what did the average Macedonian household get? Squat; the generals all got countries, but average Joe Macedon, the sucker holding the sarissa…? He died in job lots on foreign fields, and never came home.
Macedon never really recovered from Alexander. The Romans later hollowed out their yeoman class, turning their rural strongholds into slave-run latifundia, owned by the men that sent those yeomen off to war, and got the most benefit out of it. The Republican Roman legion was a thing of wonder; its successors? Not quite the same thing, and Rome as a nation suffered for that.
Today’s idjit class is doing the exact same thing, around the world. You don’t piss away entire generations of manpower, when your fertility rate is under replacement. You sure as hell don’t do that when it’s like 1.3 or the like; just the side-effects from all that are going to kill your nation. Observe the difficulty Russia is having, just running its railroads. They can see literally thousands of idled railcars and engines throughout the system, sitting on sidetracks because they lack the engineers to run them, and the men to do the basic maintenance work on the cars.
Nicholas II started the process; Lenin and Stalin took it to new heights, slaughtering the recovered generation that came out of the Revolution. After WWII, with the profligate expenditure of life in all the myriad stupidities…? Soviet Russia staggered into the post-WWII era barely keeping the ethnic Russian head above water. Didn’t help that they made abortion their number-one birth control measure, either… The number of women whose fertility got ruined that way was legion. The latest insult, the war in Ukraine? Abominable.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: The number-one lesson of the early 21st Century is going to be that you cannot, as a leader, casually waste the human resources you’re entrusted with. People are, in the end, the whole of your wealth; waste their lives? Discourage them from reproducing? You’ll be lording it over a vast wasteland, eventually.
Even the idjits running the West are going to have to come to grips with this set of facts: The immiseration of their peoples is already showing the symptoms, with the effects soon to follow. What, precisely, is Italy or Germany going to do when the native ethnicities finally drop below “enough to run the place”? The aboriginal replacements they’ve blithely invited in are not going to serve as dedicated factory workers; look at the numbers still living on the dole after ten years. You put out free food, what do you get? Parasites.
The leadership we’ve thrown up and followed has been entirely incompetent, self-centered and selfish. They’re about to learn the lessons of their folly, and all I can do is laugh.
The Soviet Union sent men to war armed with the DP-27. If they’d faced men armed with lesser weapons, that wouldn’t have mattered. Because they were going up against the Germans they’d subsidized to invade Western Europe, who’d done so with superior weapons…? They had to stack the bodies of their countrymen like cordwood, in order to compensate.
Thus, demonstrating the folly of their decisions and understanding of “how to make war”. Frankly, based on the exchange ratios demonstrated in the war? There should have been tribunals held, and a lot of the Artillery Directorate responsible for the procurement decisions that led into those ridiculous exchange rates should have been put up against a wall somewhere and shot.
Just like we should have taken the arseholes responsible for the 7.62 NATO round and the M14 and put them up against it. How many lives were lost in Vietnam due to people like Rene Studler getting their little ego-boos? What about the guys who deliberately sabotaged the M16 fielding and adoption process? Good Christ above, I was still dealing with the side-effects of that BS when I enlisted in 1981, and the ramifications didn’t quite damp out until well into the 2000s…