Tag Archives: PPSh-41

The last shots in the foggy, frozen Kuriles, 80 years ago this week

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While the sweeping battle between the shell of the once mighty Japanese Kwantung Army in Manchuria and Korea, reduced to some 600,000 second-rate troops, and the 1.5 million strong Soviet Far East Command, had officially ended on 16 August after just nine days of fighting, the Reds nonetheless kept pushing to seize territory right up to 2 September, meeting isolated pockets of resistance.

Meanwhile, in the Kurile Islands, a line of 56 volcanic islands stretching from north of Japanese Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan’s home islands, to just off the tip of the Soviet Kamchatka peninsula, was still very much in play after 16 August.

The battle for the Japanese island of Shumshu, just six miles south of Kamchatka’s Cape Lopatka, raged for a solid week, 18 to 23 August, and cost the Soviets somewhere in the region of 1,500 casualties (exceeding Japanese casualties by a ratio of 3:2) while five of the Soviet’s 16 Lend Leased LCI(L)s used for the landings were lost along with the minesweeper T-152 and torpedo boat TK-565.

A Soviet LCI landing on Shumshu Island, August 1945

The American-made Soviet landing craft DC-5 (former USS LCI-525), hit by Japanese coastal artillery fire and sunk at the landing site at Shumshu.

DS-1 (former USS LCI-672) sunk at Shumshu

DS-43, (former USS LCI-943) sunk at Shumshu

DS-9, in the background, DS-43 ((former USS LCI-554) lying on the shore

Destroyed Japanese tanks (“Ha-Go”, type 95) of the 11th Tank Regiment on the slopes of Hill 171 on Shumshu Island (Kuril Islands).

Soviet troops, Shumshu, August 1945. Note the PTRD anti-tank rifle, which would be needed

Landing on the Kuril Islands. Artist A.I. Dense, 1948 year

Japanese Lt. Gen. Tsutsumi Fusaki arriving at the Soviet line to negotiate the surrender of his forces in the Northern Kuriles, 22 August 1945. He led 12,227 remaining men of his 91st Division into captivity. He was released to Japan in 1946 and died in his hometown of Kofu in 1959.

Likewise, starting on 11 August, 100,000 Soviet troops swept past the Karafuto line, which had divided the island of Sakhalin into a Russian north and Japanese south since 1905. This began a straight-line ground campaign– sped up by leapfrog amphibious landings, bypassing strong points– that swept up the 20,000 Japanese defenders by 25 August.

Soviet soldiers from the landing force and the minesweeper T-589 (USN type YMS, ex USS YMS-237) in the port of Maoka, Sakhalin. Late August 1945.

In the meantime, on 16 August, Stalin proposed to Truman that, in addition to seizing all of the Kurile Islands, his forces should also occupy northern Hokkaido along a line from Kushiro to Rumoi.

Truman pushed back, saying that Hokkaido would surrender to MacArthur, but that an American base in the future Russian Kuriles sounded like a good idea.

Stalin backed down on the 23rd (the day Shumshu finally fell, showing the Soviets just how hard amphibious warfare against Japanese defenders could be) and said he would stay out of Hokkaido, but that the Americans would not be welcome to a base in the Kuriles.

In the background of this, at least three small Russian Series XI/XIII-Leninist, or L class, submarines and two squadrons of torpedo-carrying Ilyushin Il-4 (DB-3T) twin-engine bombers from Petropavlovsk were running amok off the North coasts of Hokkaido and around Sakhalin.

A Soviet Leninist, or L class, submarine. Smallish (1,400 tons, 273 feet oal) minelaying boats reverse engineered from the raised HMS L55, which sank in the Baltic in 1919, 13 of the type were built and operated by the Soviet Pacific Fleet

The DB-3T, with a suspended 45-36 AV (high-altitude) or 45-36AN (low-altitude) torpedo, looked ungainly because it was ungainly, with a cruising speed hovering around 180 knots with both of its knock-off Gnome-Rhone 14K radial engines glowing. It nonetheless could be effective in the right circumstances and would remain in Soviet/Warsaw Pact use long enough into the 1950s to gain the NATO reporting name “Bob.” Alternatively, it could carry MAV-1 or AMG-type aircraft mines.

They bagged at least eight Japanese ships in the last part of August, even though the IJN Admiralty had passed word that there was a general ceasefire and the rest of the Western Allies had paused offensive operations. Notably, all were sunk outside of the general Kuriles area.

  • Cargo ship Daito Maru No. 49 sunk by an unknown submarine on 22 August
  • Cable layer Ogasawara Maru (2,774 tons) sunk by L-12 (Capt. Shelgancev) on 22 August
  • Coaster Taito Maru (880 tons) sunk by L-12 on 22 August
  • Cargo ship Notoro Maru (1229 grt) sunk by aircraft on 22 August
  • Coaster Sapporo Maru No. 11 sunk by submarine, likely L-19 (Capt. Kononenko), on 22 August
  • Freighter Tetsugo Maru (1403 grt) sunk by L-19 on 23 August
  • Sub chaser Giso Maru No. 40 GO (273 grt) sunk in a surface action on 24 August
  • Sub chaser CHa-77 sunk by aircraft of unknown origin on 28 August

Ogasawara Maru was perhaps the saddest of these. Built for the Japanese Ministry of Communications in 1905 and capable of 10 knots, the cable layer left Wakkanai on Sakhalin Island on the afternoon of 21 August, carrying 702 evacuees– elderly people, children, and women ordered off the island by the military government– headed to Funakawa.

She never made it, with L-12 sinking her in the predawn of the 22nd while three miles off Mashike, littering the coastline for miles with bodies. Only 62 survivors were recovered.

Ogasawara Maru

Likewise, Taito Maru, on the same evacuation route, went down with another 667 souls.

A ninth ship, attacked but not sunk, was the 5,886-ton freighter turned minelayer Shinko Maru No. 2 (former Toyo Kaiun, 2577grt). Crowded with some 3,600 civilians evacuating from Otomari on Sakhalin, she left alone on the night of 20-21 August heading for Otaru Port at a speed of 9 knots. Around 0500 on 22 August, she caught a torpedo in her No. 2 hold and replied with her 12cm and 25mm guns in a surface action in the predawn against an unidentified submarine, which broke contact.

Shinko Maru No. 2, post torpedo hit

Brushing off a further attack by a torpedo-carrying plane once the sun came up that morning, she limped into Rumoi Port in Hokkaido with 298 bodies aboard and at least 100 known missing.

While Shinko Maru No. 2 was eventually repaired and, returning to commercial service, was still around as late as 1992, her likely attacker, L-19, disappeared on or around 24 August near the La Perouse Strait, thought to have either sunk from damage incurred in the battle or lost to a Japanese minefield (which ironically may have been laid by Shinko Maru No. 2). Her broken hull and the 64 crewmen were the Red fleet’s final loss of WWII.

L-12 returned to Petropavlovsk to honors, having logged two attacks and fired six torpedoes. Converted to a training hulk in 1959, the Russians only retired her fully in 1983.

Sistership L-18 (Capt. Tsvetko) was underway in late August in the area and landed 61 marines and three 45mm guns at Maoka (now Kholmsk), in the then Japanese-held south Sakhalin, the latter secured behind the fence constructed on the rear of the conning tower. She did not document any attacks on shipping. Tsvetkov was awarded the Order of the Red Banner and would later retire as an admiral.

Today, the Japanese government considers the three refugee-packed emergency evacuation ships (Ogasawara Maru, Shinko Maru No. 2, and Taito Maru) to have been attacked post-ceasefire by submarines and aircraft of “kokuseki fumei” (“unknown nationality”), and numerous memorials dot Hokkaido to those vulnerable civilians lost on the ships.

Meanwhile, no Japanese government has recognized the Russian sovereignty over four of the southernmost Kurile Islands (Kunashiri, Etorofu, Shikotan, and Habomai) occupied in 1945, and only marked the end of the state of war between the Soviet Union and Japan in 1956.

Hanoi’s Shpagin MAT-50

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The (North) Vietnamese People’s Revolutionary Army and its allied Viet Cong organization south of the DMZ, throughout the wars in Indochina, received extensive support from both Warsaw Pact countries and Communist China.

Among the military aid sent to Hanoi was the Chinese Type 50 submachine gun, which is easily recognizable to any firearm buff as a clone of the iconic PPsh-41 “pe-pe-sha” of WWII, chambered in 7.62x25mm Tokarev.

The Chinese Type 50 Via RIAC 

However, the gun was frequently modded in Vietnamese service to be more modern (for the 1960s) with a new sheet metal lower with simple telescoping wire stock and a pistol grip in place of the clunky wooden buttstock, chopping down the distinctive barrel jacket and crimping the stub of it to the barrel, then installing a new front AK-style front sight.

1967: Type K50M PPS Viet-Chinese submachine gun, captured in South Vietnam, note the modification. U.S. Marine Photo A189433 via the National Archives 

In short, they made the gun more like the French MAT-49, which they already had large stocks of post-Dien Bien Phu, and were familiar with.

French army recruitment poster during the period of the Indochina and Algerian wars, for the Colonial Airborne Troops, “My fortune is my glory, my trade is combat,” featuring the MAT-49 SMG

The NVA-modded PPsh-41, dubbed the K50M, was certainly more compact and visually much different on the outside, but internally identical to the gun that defended Stalingrad. Plus, at just 22-inches long with the stock pushed in, it was ideal for use by sappers, insurgents, and raiding parties, who no doubt appreciated the ability to use it at 700 rounds-per-minute, especially at close range as noted in the December 2011 issue of Vietnam Magazine.

Due to many of these guns being captured in the war, they exist in the West in a number of military museums, including the IWM.

End of the Kwantung Army

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Soviet Defeat of the Japanese Kwantung Army, 1945

75 years ago today, the largest Imperial Japanese military force on the planet, the fabled Kwantung Army, was instructed to surrender its remaining 500,000+ men into Soviet hands.

Formed in 1906 in the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War to police the Empire’s slice of mainland Asia, it had long been the key command in the IJA and by 1945 was in actuality a large army group composed of no less than six numbered (3rd, 4th, 5th, 30th, 34th, and 44th) armies in addition to the forces of the puppet state of Manchukuo, those of various White Russian exile units, Korean auxiliaries, and assorted Chinese warlord allies.

That is, until the Soviets crashed in and burst that bubble, showing the force to be a hollow Easter bunny of sorts. This is because the Kwantung Army had been siphoned off in 1942-45, drawing irreplaceable elite cadres away to be fed into the meat chopper that was defending the Empire against the on-rushing Allied forces island hopping from Guadalcanal to Okinawa. For reference, in June 1938, 18 months before Pear Harbor, the Imperial Japanese Army had a full 34 combat divisions tied down on the ground in Eastern China along the Yellow River, that, when coupled with a supply train that ran back to the Home Islands through Manchuria and Korea, totaled over 1.1 million men in the field.

When the Soviets marched into the Theatre, that force had been halved and most of what was left were second-rate troops.

Soviet vehicles and troops crossing the border into Manchuria, August 1945.

A Lend-Leased M4A2 Sherman with a Soviet crew making friends

Soviet Motorcyclist column on Harley-Davidson WLA-42 and Dnepr M-72 in Manchuria, August 1945.

Soviet soldiers sitting on the throne of emperor Pu Yi, leader of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo, China, September 1945

Gen. Otozō Yamada, an old horse soldier, cumulated 40 years of service in the Imperial Japanese Army on 16 August, the day after the Emperor ordered national surrender, by issuing a command to lay down the Kwantung Army’s arms and banners at the feet of the invading Soviets in Manchuria.

However, many of Yamada’s units kept fighting for several days until Field Marshal Hata Shunroku, son of a samurai of the Aizu domain, met with Soviet Field Marshal Aleksandr Vasilevsky in Harbin on the 19th, and a further cease-fire order circulated directly after.

A former Minister of War, Hata had experience with surrender, having been a member of the Japanese delegation to the Versailles Peace Treaty negotiations as a young colonel in 1919, although on the winning side.

Nonetheless, the Soviets kept advancing even after Stalin had announced the end of hostilities on 23 August. Red paratroopers hit the silk into Heijō, a Japanese colonial outpost since 1905 and known today as Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, on 24 August, the same week as the Soviet Pacific Fleet arrived in Wonsan– on American Lend-Leased LSTs.

Column of Soviet Soldiers advancing into the Korean Peninsula against the Kwaungtung Army meet U.S. personnel, September 1945. Soviet forces occupied the north of Korea with U.S. forces occupying the south, with the arbitray boundary between their zones being the 38th parallel, one that holds today. LIFE Magazine Archives – George Silk Photographer

On 9 September, a full week after the instruments of surrender were signed in Tokyo Bay, 100,000 Japanese troops in Nanking laid down their arms. Even with that, there were still isolated Japanese garrisons in China that remained intact well into November 1945.

Japanese fort surrendering to Chinese partisans, Fall 1945

Japanese surrender in Peking (Beijing), China to combined U.S./British/KMT forces, October 1945

The Soviets remained a presence in Manchuria and North Korea for several years, going so far as to keep troops in the Manchurian hubs of Mukden, Harbin, Dairen, and Port Arthur– all notably former Tsarist stomping grounds– until 1955, more than eight years after the Communist Chinese had taken over the supposed governance of such areas.

PPS-43 armed Soviet tankers in Mukden, 1946. Note the officer with an upcycled Japanese Army tanker winter suit that he has installed shoulder boards on. Also, note the bronze plaque behind them with T-34s on it.

Soviet Naval Infantry raising their flag on the famous 203 Meter Hill in Port Arthur– now known as Lüshun in Liaoning province– 22 August 1945. The Baiyu Tower, constructed by the Japanese in the 1930s to commemorate 1904-1905 war dead, is visible in the distance. The Japanese Army used 203 Meter Hill in late 1904 to destroy the besieged Imperial Russian Navy’s Pacific Squadron below. RIAN Archive Photo 834147

Manchukuo

Standing with the Japanese– briefly– was the “Manchukuo Imperial Army” of puppet Manchurian Emperor Pu Yi. Originally formed around the roughly corps-sized Chinese National Revolutionary Army of the “Young Marshal” (Zhang Xueliang) in 1932, it grew to a nominal peak of 300,000 men in the field, under Japanese tutelage, in seven provincial armies. While capable of pushing into Inner Mongolia and fighting roaming bands of warlords, the occasional Chinese Communist insurgent group, and bandit gangs, it was no match for the battle-hardened Soviets and, once the Russkis crossed the border, melted away into the countryside, with the conscripts often turning on their officers, killing their Japanese advisers, and vanishing into the towns and villages, taking their weapons but leaving their uniforms behind. Tellingly, the Soviets only captured about 30,000 non-Japanese Manchukuo Army soldiers– of whom half were ethnic Koreans and were too far from home to self-demobilize– and killed about 10,000 in very one-sided combat. In less than two weeks, the force had ceased to exist.

Chinese troops train under Japanese instructors. More than 300,000 soldiers from China fought for Hirohito against their own countrymen between 1932 and 1945.

Much as the Russkis dismantled the Kwangtung Army and its puppet Manchukuoan allies, they also took apart the Egami-gun, the Manchukuo Imperial Navy. Established in 1932 with donated Japanese destroyers and gunboats and drawing half of its officers (the senior half) from the IJN’s retired list, the force concentrated largely on coastal defense and river operations on the Sungari, Amur, and Ussuri rivers against bandits, pirates and anti-Manchu Communist partisans. Consisting of about 20 small gunboats and a force of armored cars to drive around on the ice every winter once the rivers froze over, the Egami-gun quickly lowered its flags as the Russians came in and took over their vessels. Some of these warships would be retained by the Soviet’s Amur flotilla for years as working trophies.

Manchurian gunboat Chin Jen in Soviet fleet as KL-56 captured in August 1945 from the Manchukuo Navy.

At 290-tons, Chin Jen and Ting Pien were built in the 1930s by the Japanese for the Manchukuo Imperial Navy as seen here and operated on the Sungari River as a part of the 1st Patrol Division until 1945. Armed with a pair of 120mm/45 DP mounts, two 170mm mortars, and some machine guns, they were both captured without a fight by the Soviets in August 1945. Refitted with Russian armament, they served on the Amur river as patrol boats until 1951, as training ships until at least 1953.

Throw away the key

As for Yamada, the former Japanese general was taken as a prisoner of war to Siberia and sentenced to 25 years in the Soviet gulag for war crimes, primarily related to the heinous activities of Unit 731, but was repatriated to Japan in the mid-1950s after Stalin’s death along with the remnants of his surrendered Army.

Ironically, most of those crimes had occurred under Hata’s period as commander of the Kwantung Army from 1941 through 1944, rather than Yamada’s. Sentenced to life imprisonment after a war crimes trial by the Americans, Hata was paroled in 1954.

On 10 May 1962, Field Marshal Hata Shunroku, the last surviving Field Marshal of the Imperial Japanese Army, died while attending a ceremony honoring Imperial war dead, age 82.

The Soviets said they ended up with 594,000 Japanese EPWs by October 1945, but Japanese authorities contend it was well over 700,000 when other, non-military, subjects of the Emperor under Stalin’s control were counted. Although 60,000, mostly the ill and elderly or females with children, were quickly paroled, some the same day, the Soviets hauled the rest back to Siberia.

Repatriated Japanese soldiers returning from Siberia wait to disembark from a ship at Maizuru, Kyoto Prefecture, Japan, in 1946. The Kwantung Army would trickle back over the next decade. 

Over the next decade, many of the Siberian prisoners perished, with estimates running at a minimum of 50,000 and some as much as six times that amount. Meanwhile, many ethnic Koreans in the Japanese ranks would be “re-educated” by the Soviets to become the bedrock of the North Korean People’s Army.

The last remnants of the Kwantung Army went home in 1956 although some elected to stay behind and “go native” in the Worker’s Paradise.

“A Japanese mother is reunited with her son after he is released from a Soviet POW camp in Siberia, 31 December 1956. He and his fellow prisoners are arriving at Maizuru port in Japan, having been captured at the end of World War II and held for another 11 years.” (Photo by Keystone/Hulton Archive via History Forum)

Japanese artist Nobuo Kiuchi, who during WWII was a Japanese paratrooper, spent years in Siberia after the Kwantung Army laid down its arms, and chronicled what he saw.

His art reflects those experiences and is on exhibit at the Maizuru Repatriation Memorial Museum located in the principal port where some 660,000 Japanese POWs and civilians were sent back home from China, Russia, and North Korea in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Echos into new wars

The wealth of equipment used by the Kwantung Army, unwanted and typically seen as obsolete when captured by the Allies, was quickly inherited by the Chinese and Koreans who soon put it into use against themselves and others. The boon of materiel picked up in large part by Mao’s Red Army gave it a huge shot in the arm in the final act of the Chinese Civil War and subsequently was recycled into the Korean War in the 1950s.

US soldier, Chinese soldier, and Chinese guerrilla fighters displaying captured Japanese flags, aircraft machine guns, and MP 34 submachine gun, China, 1945

Japanese Type 97 Chi-Ha medium tank in use with the Chicoms. Some 300 of these tanks became Mao’s iron fist through the late 1940s.

Shanghai Police Department monitor a political protest in 1948. Equipment includes a stahlhelm M35 helmet and captured Japanese Arisaka Type 38 rifle.

Red Chinese soldier late 1940s with captured Japanese Arisaka

Red Chinese captured Japanese Arisaka Type 38 rifles Type 30 bayonets M30-32 Tetsu-bo helmets 1949

Chinese soldier carrying captured Arisaka Type 38 rifles and a Type 11 light machine gun, date unknown.

Berlin Wall, now gone for 30 years

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As the “Iron Curtain” descended across Europe, the tensions along the border between the two new Germanys escalated until 1961 when construction began on a wall surrounding West Berlin from East Berlin. Dubbed a means to keep fascism out of the People’s Republic (antifaschistischer), the Berlin Wall was more of a mechanism to keep East Germans from escaping the soul-crushing misery that was Communism by fleeing to the West. It is estimated that more than 3 million Germans fled from East to West between 1949 and 1961. If they weren’t stopped, eventually all the workers would have fled the worker’s paradise and the country would be empty!

The guns of those two forces, with the DDR’s heavily indoctrinated Grenztruppen on the East, and the FGR’s Bundesgrenzschutz to the West, were interesting.

In 1975-76, Walther produced a limited run of 5,200 P38 P4 pistols, a shortened version of the P1, specifically for use by the West German Border Patrol and Customs agencies. The above, in the author’s personal collection, is one of those former BMI guns. (Photo: Chris Eger/Guns.com)

More in my column at Guns.com

Happy New Year, guys!

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I hope your 2018 is finding its way out in acceptable fashion. Thank you for reading and following.

Here’s to a great 2019!

Oh, and of course, Victory will be Ours!

Soviet New Year Red partisan propaganda card (S Novym godom), 1942, after all, the Communists couldn’t celebrate Christmas, but everyone loves New Years. Good symbolism with the grizzled “old” year leaving followed by the new, fresh-faced young new year arriving. And yes, I’m loving the PPSH-41 and MP40 combo

Of mustaches and PPSh-41s

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Click to big up 1133x1705

Click to big up 1133×1705

Portrait of Soviet Guards Sgt. Alexey G. Frolchenko, late of the 325th “Dvina” Rifle Division, carrying his PPSh-41 submachine gun. I say late because the 325th, formed in August 1941, had been largely bled white by the Spring of 1943 and, merging with two similarly decimated brigades, was fleshed out to become the newly reformed 90th Guards Rifle Division just before Kursk (and survived until disbanded in 2001 as the 90th Guards Vitebsko-Novgorodskaya twice Red Banner Tank Division).

As for Frolchenko, he was awarded the Order of the Red Star for bravery at the Battle of Kursk while leading a scout detachment. Receiving a battlefield promotion to Lieutenant, Alexey finished the war as a Captain leading a company in East Prussia and died in his sleep at age 62 in 1967.

(Image taken by Anatoly Arkhipov near Belgorod, Belgorod Oblast, Russia, Soviet Union. August 1943.)