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After World War Two, the Red Army moved from a full power infantry rifle cartridge to an intermediate one, and the 7.62x39mm RPD became the new squad machine gun. At the same time, the heavy Maxims were replaced by the new SG-43 Goryunov. This left a gap in capability, with nothing available with full-power punch and reasonable mobility. To solve the problem, a team of three engineers (A.I. Shilin, P.P. Polyakov, and A.A. Dubinin) developed a clever adaptation to allow the DP/DPM machine gun to use belted ammunition (using standard Maxim/Goryunov/PK belts). They created a belt feed module that attached to the gun just like a magazine; simple and cheap to convert existing guns. This was adopted in 1946, and would serve until replaced by the PK in 1961. In addition to Soviet production, the design was also produced in China and North Korea.
In addition to the belt feed, the RP-46 featured a few other changes to better handle sustained belt-fed fire. The gas tube and front magazine catch were strengthened. A folding shoulder support was added to the buttstock. The bipod legs were modified to hold a 4-part segmented cleaning rod. A heavy barrel was fitted, and a much heavier gas block with three adjustable positions. The barrel release button was enlarged and fitted with a lockout lever to prevent accidental barrel release.
Information on how many RP-46s were made and how/where they were used is very difficult to find. The RP-46 is seen in very few period photos, and surplus stockpiles of them never have seemed to turn up. It’s really quite odd how little information and experience seems to exist on these guns, which does make one wonder if perhaps they were not actually made in large quantity, or if they were destroyed for some reason instead of being stockpiled like most obsolete Soviet arms.
“Problems of temper” when the barrel gets hot. Did the gun get angry?
Judging by some of the old guns seen in the Ukraine war, the Russians didn’t scrap anything, so it is perhaps fair to assume that these guns were not made in huge numbers.
Alternatively, they were all shipped off to places like Korea and China.
I would love to know if the production numbers and so forth in the archives match up with reality, as well. The Soviet system was notorious for being schizoid as all hell when it came to things like this… Sure, the records may say ten thousand of these were made, but were they really? And, what happened to them?
Based on what my friend went through during his time as a START inspector, there’s really no telling. You start getting into the records, from what he said, it’s a circus funhouse mirror affair. They had so much trouble reconciling what the central records said vs. what was actually out in the field vs. what the records at the field sites said… It was nuts, even for the strategic weapons. There were records in Moscow for multiple storage igloos that were supposedly built, then they’d go look for them, be unable to find them onsite, and have someone tell them red-faced that the concrete had gone to building someone’s dacha, while the weapons that were supposed to be in them had never actually been built. It was not what anyone expected.
RP-46s are all over Africa.
There were two very important conflicts that happened that could explain the rarity of this gun. The Chinese Civil and Korean Wars soon after this gun was perfected and the Vietnam War which “Heated-Up” after this weapon was officially replaced. If this gun was developed in decent enough numbers most likely the Soviets sent some to the Communist Chinese in their fight with the Nationalist and the North Koreans during that early ’50’s conflict and what was left was given to the North Vietnam in the ’60’s. And they were probably passed on to smaller communist rebel groups around the world in lesser conflicts. Since they were no longer being produced after ’61 they were worn down to uselessness and thrown away.
At least some of them went to Cuba. The type is reviewed in the 1980 manual for the Milicias de Tropas Territoriales when Reagan was POTUS.
I suspect others went to Africa and other National Liberation movements.
“(…)P.P. Polyakov, and A.A. Dubinin(…)”
They were working at adding belt-fed to DP much earlier than after Maxims were replaced by the new SG-43.
From https://litresp.ru/chitat/ru/%D0%9C/malimon-a-a/otechestvennie-avtomati-zapiski-ispitatelya-oruzhejnika
Немецкая практика создания единых пулеметов, применявшихся в годы второй мировой войны (МГ-34, МГ-42), также отражала идею полной унификации: производственную и эксплуатационную. Этот принцип применил Дегтярев при инициативной разработке в 1939 году первого опытного варианта Единого пулемета (ДП-39) с приемником Дубинина-Полякова под металлическую звеньевую ленту и приданием ему треножного станка типа ДС-39.
that is under influence of German unified machine gun prompted Degtyaryov to develop in 1939 first [soviet] unified machine gun dubbed ДП-39 with Dubinin-Polyakov gadget for accepting DS-39 belts.
And describing entrants of August 1942…June 1943, which finally lead to selection of Goryunovs [plural intended] design
Ковровским заводом в представленных трех других образцах предпринята попытка создания станкового пулемета на базе налаженного производства пулеметов ДП (ДТ) с прямой и двухтактной подачей патрона. В первом случае механизм подачи смонтирован в крышке ствольной коробки, во втором — крепящийся сверху приемник Дубинина-Полякова, связанный с рукояткой затворной рамы. Патронная лента от пулемета ДС-39. Приемник был разработан еще в довоенное время с целью придать пулемету ДП кроме магазинного еще и ленточное питание.
Kovrov plants created different belt-fed derivatives of DP (DT) machine gun, with direct and two-stroke movement. First has mechanism built into roof of receiver, second was Dubinin-Polyakov gadget linked to handle. DS-39 belt was used.
For photos of ДП-39 see https://dzen.ru/a/Y-ERJbYv5F0zIszk
“(…)RP-46: The Rarely Seen Belt-Fed Degtyarev(…)”
Interestingly this is exact opposite of DShK which is descendant of magazine-feed ДК-32 see 2nd image from top
http://war-russia.info/index.php/nomenklatura-vooruzhenij/431-sukhoputnye-vojska/strelkovoe-oruzhie/strelkovoe-oruzhie-2/pulemety-stankovye/2879-12-7-mm-krupnokalibernyj-stankovyj-pulemet-degtyarjova-shpagina-dk-32-dshk-dshkm-56-p-542-542m-1932-39-45gg
Hi Ian, it seems that YT has been deleting any kind of link I’m trying to leave, so here’s the picture of RP-46 in Ukraine:
https://files.catbox.moe/w3gl39.jpg
Interesting to see it has been accessorized with an AR type stock.
Few photos of RP-46 usage in 21th century are available at
https://war-time.ru/item/rp-46
notice that they clearly show peculiarity of said fire-arm – there is no device for attaching belt container to it
For the rest, the MG is very cool, but That must be the most impractical gas regulation system ever.
Yes, that is a cludge, no doubt, but there must have been a reason for it.
Most important question:
The digital watch; Casio or Timex?
That looks like a classic Casio F-91W.
So, technically, the DP/DPM used an op rod with a gas spigot rather than a gas piston. Great engineering and truly cost effective. Not all of the command economy was that way in the Stalin era (or any in the CCCP), but I digress.
tHE WEAPON IS ILLUSTRATED IN :
WIENER Friedrich.
The Armies of the Warsaw Pact Nations. Organisation, concept of war, weapons and equipment. Carl Ueberreuter Publishers, Vienna, Second Edition, 1978.
AND
DieArmeen der Neutralen und Blockfreien Staaten Europas. J.F.Lehmanns Verlog, Munich, 1972. Illustrated card cover.
I first saw photos of it, taken by my eldest brother in Korea 1952, following trench raids on Chinese and North Korean units. It illustrated in two issues of Life Magazine (a really superb photograph journal), in 1956 during the Hungarian Revolution showing Soviet soldiers putting it down, and the 1968 occupation by the Soviets.
Apart from examples in the various museums, I have only ever seen one in the “flesh”, in the hands of a self-defence unit in Kosovo. Examination showed it to have Chinese or Korean script on it, it felt right and the remarks about using a hammer on it sounds about right.
I concur that it must have been far more widely produced than thought.
I have a quibble that hopefully the resident experts can debunk or expound on:
Mr. M’Collum stated that the DMP to RP-46 conversion may be the only example of a magazine-fed LMG being reworked to belt-fed that worked, versus an LMG design intended to use either belts or magazines, like say the SAW/Minimi or that DPRK KPA Type 73 contraption.
What about the Bren gun? The prototype of the TADEN was essentially a belt-fed Bren gun in a different cartridge… Or is it the case that that weapon remained at the prototype stage a disqualification since the RP-46 was actually issued?
I’d come down on the side of saying that there is a vast gulf between “experimental/prototype” and “type-standardized production” when it comes to weapons. You can likely make damn near anything work, with enough hand-fitting and craftsmen to hand. Getting a weapon into production, produced in sufficient quantities? That is a different order of “success”.
I think that what killed the RP-46 boils down to the same thing that killed the SKS in Soviet surface: Changing doctrine. They decided to follow that wil’-o-the-wisp ideal of “one cartridge to rule them all”, built a collection of weapons down at the squad/platoon level to make that happen, and got rid of everything that wasn’t 7.62X39. When they realized they’d made a massive mistake, they went back to a grown-up support MG cartridge, only in the PK.
Dual-caliber is the “desire path” for combat at this level. You can’t pack enough “oomph” into something you can still fire effectively out of an individual weapon, and inevitably, you’re going to wind up doing precisely that which the Germans, the Soviets, and then the United States had to do: Issue something big enough to do the job. Usually, this has meant repurposing a much bigger gun meant for other purposes, but it still happens. You can’t do combat with the individual weapon-scaled cartridges alone.
The US Army has backed itself out of the solution to its woes through sheer stubborn stupidity, and I’ll lay money on the individual weapon version of NGSW going the way of all things flesh about as soon as it first sees combat. Stupidest shit I’ve ever seen… Handled a civilian version of the thing that they chose, and whatever the hell that weapon is, it’s not something that the infantry is going to want to carry on light infantry ops in a combat zone. Too big, too unwieldly, and too damn heavy. Especially if they issue that full-power cartridge.
Also, magazine’s too small, along with the load-out for an individual rifleman. This is not the weapon you want for most “rifleman actions”.
Kirk:
It’s as if the Ordnance Board want to prove they were right about the M14 after all. They need to get over it.
Primary advocate for NGSW was Milley. Take that for what you will. Observe his post-military employment, and what boards he gets to sit on.
The thing here is that it’s not really even Ordnance’s fault, this time. They provided exactly that which the idiots in charge asked for…
The original goals of the program that went before and became NGSW were noble, and if they’d held to them, we’d be in a pretty nice place: One I fear is contradictory to the laws of nature as understood by most, but still a nice place. I don’t think that anyone would have ever managed to square that circle. Then, they set the parameters for NGSW, and it’s almost as if someone was trying to sabotage things. The sheer hubris here is amazing; nobody has ever managed to make one of these high-velocity rocketship rounds work for general issue, and the inherent problems of propellant heat and barrel erosion are going to be there, just like they were for the old British high velocity round that was supposed to replace .303, or the Ross attempt. I don’t think that the materials technology is there, even today: You need something better than what we can currently mass-produce in steel, and that’s nonexistent at production scale for a really major war. No matter what, we’re going to see the NGSW program fall flat on its face, if we ever go to a real war that’s not a boutique-scale counter-insurgency wannabe. Imagine trying to juggle the materials inputs for all of this, on a WWII-scale affair. Good luck.
Procurement should be the “art of the possible”, not blue-sky wishful thinking. The US military has been doing this bullshit since the Hall breechloaders, and the level of stupidity just goes ever onward, up and up.
What you need is some critical thought about what it is you’re actually doing in combat: Ain’t nobody using their individual weapons to pick off the enemy at over 300m, really. It’s not possible, due to the inability to acquire and identify targets over that range. Unless you’re in a damn desert, it’s not on. And, even then, given the limitations of the mounting platform, namely the human shoulder, you’re not getting consistently effective target kills at those ranges. Those targets are the proper business of the MG and mortar, anyway… If you know what you’re doing.
And, we don’t.
Kirk:
Milley’s involvement makes it start to make sense. Napoleon he isn’t.
“(…)built a collection of weapons down at the squad/platoon level to make that happen, and got rid of everything that wasn’t 7.62X39. When they realized they’d made a massive mistake, they went back to a grown-up support MG cartridge, only in the PK.(…)”
False.
Consider Численный состав и вооружение стрелкового отделения, взвода и роты мотострелковых войск Советской армии 1946—1960 гг. including Пулеметный взвод consisting of 11 people
– 3 x RP-46
– 8 x so-called AK-47
and Численный состав и вооружение стрелкового отделения, взвода и роты мотострелковых войск Советской армии в 1962 г. including Пулеметное отделение consisting of 6 people
– 1 x dual-wielding RP-46 + PM (Makarov’s pistol)
– 1 x RP-46
– 4 x so-called AK-47
Therefore Soviet Army did intend to intermix 7,62x54R RP-46 and 7,62×39 at lowest level at least until 1962, which is after PK was adopted.
Addendum: I forgot to add link for above https://milita.jofo.me/778762.html
My understanding, which is limited by my utter lack of fluency in Russian, was that those were experimental formations, and the ones they actually fielded used the RPD and RPK as the squad support weapon…
The Soviets were so opaque with this stuff that I seriously doubt that even a lot of the people who were involved really knew what the hell was going on across the board. You get differing stories from different sources, all insisting on their accuracy…
Daweo, after reviewing the link you posted, I see that all the RP-46 were held at company level… Not squad. The squads were all based around 7.62X39 weapons, like the AK and RPD.
Which was the point I was making… Everybody has found that the squad needs the firepower of a full-size support MG, and gone to integrating back into the squad after the discovery that it wasn’t enough to hand out belt-fed individual weapon-caliber support MGs… Every attempt at making this work has really failed (even the M249) when you get down to it. Everybody winds up putting things like the PKM and the M240 back into the squads when they hit “real combat”.
It is always wise to analyze the “desire path” of things… That’s how the M4 carbine wound up being the primary infantry individual weapon, when it was supposed to be a weapon for support troops. There was a reason for that, and that reason was that there wasn’t anyone coming out of Vietnam and saying “Y’know… The M16 would be great, if we only made it longer, heavier, and put an exponentially more complicated rear sight on it that hardly anyone will ever use in combat…”
Same thing has been going on with dual-caliber solutions. Read the room; ain’t nobody actually managed to make “one cartridge to rule them all” actually work. Ever.
I can add that the East German Army called what is here named RP-46 the “Kompanie-Maschinengewehr” (company machine gun).
Although not adopted, the BSA X16, a BREN derivate, came very close to adoption. It competed with the FN-MAG, AA-52, M60, Madsen-Saetter… in the 1957 British GPMG trials, and lost only to the FN MAG.
As for prototypes, there are those two mysterious objects: https://www.reddit.com/r/ForgottenWeapons/comments/17i3cpk/comment/lses0a8/
On one side, they seems similar to the Enfield X11, and BSA X16. On the other, they are so different to doubt they are early prototypes of those (se for example the use of WWII German belts, the gas tubes, the grip and stock…).
They had been sold, on The Firearm Blog, as prototypes made by Breda in the ’50s. Breda made a batch of BREN in 30-06 for the Italian Police (and the 30-06 fits in WWII German belts), but it would have been weird for Breda to make not one, but two different BREN-derivate prototypes.
“(…)conversion may be the only example of a magazine-fed LMG being reworked to belt-fed that worked(…)”
No. Madsen. Originally was LMG AND magazine-fed, spawned aircraft belt-fed weapon already discussed https://www.forgottenweapons.com/beltfed-madsen-lmg-when-the-weird-gets-weirder/ whose status is production for Hungary when German forces occupied Denmark
Ah! Thank you. I might have known… I’d seen that when it “first aired” but then promptly forgot about it, I guess.
The EM-2 was briefly adopted, recall, by the Attlee gov’t. MoD as the “No. 9 Mk.I” rifle, so I’m not sure if the TADEn was also briefly adopted and then swiftly rejected? It is certainly the case that the Bren gun was a highly expensive proposition, and that the factory was vulnerable to Luftwaffe attacks. This in turn led to the so-called BESAL, which was to make use of the spare Bren gun barrels and permit dispersed production of the parts, with final assembly at other plants. In the end, the BESAL was never made and the Germans never destroyed the factory that made the Bren gun.
Another example is the Fiat/Revelli M14/35. It had been issued and used in combat.
“(…)Fiat/Revelli M14/35.(…)”
Wait… is that LMG at all?
I must say I am impressed by the simple way the DP was converted to belt fee here. I had vaguely thought the two hooks were just there to attach a belt box on to. Using the charging handle to move them to feed the belt through was inspired thinking. It is not the first conversion of a magazine fed gun to belt feeding, but it must be one of the simplest and best.
The DShK series was similarly converted from magazine feed to a very similar belt-feed mechanism driven by a extension arm using the operating handle as a means of providing the necessary power.
I do think that the one on the DShK is somewhat more elegant than the one on the RP-46, however.
Kirk:
I did not know the DShK had been magazine fed, I thought it had had an unsatisfactory belt feed which was changed post war. Nonetheless, using the charging handle to actuate the belt feed seems like a simple solution to the problem, and somehow typically Russian. You would not see Keckler & Koch do it.
“(…)DShK had been magazine fed(…)”
It was, but was spawned by ДК-32 which used drum magazine, see http://war-russia.info/index.php/nomenklatura-vooruzhenij/431-sukhoputnye-vojska/strelkovoe-oruzhie/strelkovoe-oruzhie-2/pulemety-stankovye/2879-12-7-mm-krupnokalibernyj-stankovyj-pulemet-degtyarjova-shpagina-dk-32-dshk-dshkm-56-p-542-542m-1932-39-45gg
is: “(…)It was(…)”
should be: “(…)It was not(…)”