Classic Walther Burp Gun Spotted in the Wild
The Portuguese Navy’s Marine Corps has deployed a 170-strong reinforced company (about a quarter of the service’s strength) to the Baltics. Dubbed the Força de Fuzileiros Lituânia (FFZ LTU) it is on a roughly three-month mission under the auspices of NATO and is the largest deployment of the Corpo de Fuzileiros since Portugal evacuated its African colonies more than 50 years ago. Notably, it includes two UAV elements.
The Portuguese Marines are also sort of old-school, in many ways being stuck in the 1960s-70s when it comes to small arms, still using HK G3 battle rifles, and Walther MP subguns. They only recently retired the P-1 (P-38) pistol in favor of the Glock 17.
Everyone knows the Walther brand, and for good reason. The company makes great guns that are often extremely innovative. The PP/PPK, P-38, P-99, PPQ, PDP, the OSP, and Olympia – the list goes on. However, Walther only made one production submachine gun: the Maschinenpistole, or MP.
Designed in the late 1950s and entering production around 1963, the MP is a blowback action 9mm select-fire SMG with a tubular receiver that fires from an open bolt. It beat the much better-known Heckler & Koch MP5 to production by a few years and was made in two different variations: the MP Lang (Long), or MPL, and the MP Kurz (Short), or MPK.
The difference in size between the two was negligible. The more full-sized MPL ran a 10.2-inch barrel for an overall length of 29.4 inches with the side-folding wire stock extended, whereas the MPK went about 3.5 inches shorter with a 6.8-inch barrel.
Seen at Walther’s in-house museum in Ulm last year…
Although well-made, the MP never really caught on. Its only European customer, besides some German police units as the MP4 (they made several on-camera appearances during the Munich Olympics in 1972), was the Portuguese Navy as seen above
Overseas, it was bought by a few third-world users and the U.S. Army, picked for use by the elite Delta Force commandos in the 1970s and the secretive Detachment A “stay behind” Special Forces unit in West Berlin.
Whereas the MP5 is a bit of a race car that needs special tools for in-depth maintenance, the MP is made simply of metal stampings. For instance, the barrel on the Walther can be swapped out by a user in the field with no tools. Plus, its 550-round cyclic rate, slower than that of the HK, was closer to that used by the M3 Grease Gun and earlier MP38/40, allowing a more familiar learning curve to those already used to those platforms. Little wonder it was adopted by the early U.S. Tier 1 counter-terror operators when Delta Force was first stood up. (Photos: U.S. Army, National Archives, Springfield Armory National Historic Site)
We recently got to shoot one earlier this year and can see why Delta dug it.
Behold, the MPK
It is ambi and is set up kind of funny. The safety (Sicher=safe) is to the rear of the grip, full-auto (Dauerfeuer= continuous fire) straight down, and semi-auto (Einzelfeuer=single fire ) with the switch rotated forward toward the magazine well. The HK MP5 has a similar S/E/F marked switch for Sicher-Einzelfeuer-Feuerstoss