Origin of a Flare Pistol: Shpagin's SPSh-44
Grenade & Flare Launchers
•
6m 59s
After finishing his work on the PPSh-41 submachine gun, Georgiy Semyonovich Shpagin was tasked with creating a simplified flare or signal pistol for the Red Army. They had entered the war with a 1930 pattern type, which was quite nice, but more expensive than really necessary. Shpagin first created the OPSh in 1943, which was made in 43 and 44 and then further simplified the design to this 1944 model. This example was made at the Molot plant (factory 356) where Shpagin was based either during or shortly after the war, as evidenced by its wooden grips and lack of date stamp. Later the design would be widely licensed throughout the Warsaw Pact region, and SPSh pattern flare pistols made in Poland and Czechoslovakia are widely available in the US today.
Up Next in Grenade & Flare Launchers
-
SMLE Rifle Grenade Launcher
While rifle-launched grenades date back hundreds of years, they first came into widespread use during World War One, on all sides of the conflict. The first years of the war saw the use of rod grenades, but their downsides (mediocre accuracy, bulkiness, and a propensity to damage rifle bores) led...
-
Japanese Army 35mm Type 10 Flare Pistol
The Japanese Army and Navy of the 1920s and 30s often used quite different equipment, and had a substantial interservice rivalry. Flare guns were one example of this separation, with the services using not just different flare pistols, but totally different flare cartridges. The Navy used a 28mm ...
-
Japan's Type 90 3-Barreled Naval Flar...
The Japanese Navy used several different types of flare pistols during World War Two (and in the decades before), but the most impressive looking of the bunch was the three-barreled Type 90 (not to be confused with the two-barreled model also designated Type 90). The three barrels were not simply...
