DShK

The DShK (Degtyaryova-Shpagina krupnokaliberny, "Degtyaryov-Shpagin large-calibre") is a Soviet heavy machine gun developed in response to the same requirement that produced the American M2 Browning. Work began in 1929 and Vasily Degtyaryov finalised a first design in 1931, using the gas system of his earlier machine gun with a 30-round drum magazine, but the rate of fire was inadequate. Georgi Shpagin reworked the feed into a belt system driven by a rotary cylinder, and the revised weapon entered production in 1938 as the DShK 1938. Together with the M2 Browning it is one of only two pre-war .50-calibre machine guns still in front-line use today. It is widely nicknamed Dushka ("darling") in Russian-speaking armies.

The DShK is a gas-operated, belt-fed weapon using flapper locking and firing the 12.7x108mm cartridge at around 600 rounds per minute. It is controlled with a butterfly trigger, has an effective range of about 2,000 m and can penetrate 20 mm of armour at 500 m. Two concentric "spider web" ring sights are fitted for engaging aircraft. The gun weighs 34 kg on its own and 157 kg on the two-wheeled Sokolov-type carriage with its single-sheet armour shield; it is also mounted on tripods and on vehicles, and nearly every Soviet-designed tank with a roof or cupola mount built before the T-64 carried one.

Variants include:

• The DShK-38, the original production version

• The DShK 38/46, commonly called the DShKM, introduced in 1946 with a revised muzzle device and feed mechanism and produced in over a million examples until 1980

• The Czechoslovak vz. 38/46, whose feed can be loaded from either side to allow twin and quad mounts

• The Chinese Type 54, still manufactured under Norinco licence in Pakistan and Iran

• The Iranian MGD-12.7

Some 9,000 DShKs were built during the Second World War, used mainly in the anti-aircraft role on GAZ-AA trucks, IS-2 tanks, ISU-152 assault guns and T-40 amphibious tanks. After 1945 the weapon was exported throughout the Eastern Bloc and licensed to Pakistan, Iran, Yugoslavia, Romania, Poland and Czechoslovakia. Communist forces used DShKs from Dien Bien Phu onward, and in Vietnam the gun was among the principal threats to American helicopters and low-flying aircraft. A Provisional IRA team hit a British Army Lynx fifteen times with two Libyan-supplied DShKs in June 1988, forcing it down in County Armagh. The gun was a fixture of Syrian civil war technicals, and although the NSV replaced it in Soviet service from 1971 and the Kord from 1998, it remains in use worldwide. Ukrainian units have fitted searchlight-equipped DShKs as a cheap and reliable counter to Shahed-136 loitering munitions.