THE M-50 SUBMACHINE GUN

Since the early 50s of the twentieth century, during the war with the French colonialists, Viet Minh's military forces were supported by a large number of weapons from their allies, including the Soviet Union and China. Those aids included most of the artillery used by the Viet Minh at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, where the French had failed, and in larger quantities, the legendary PPSh-41 submachine guns.

After the Geneva Accords, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam needed to prepare well for a war between them and the stronger force of the United States and its allies, in order to unify the country. It was a war that the Western media called the "Vietnam War", but the Vietnamese called it "the Resistance War against the US to save the country".

Although the Democratic Republic of Vietnam did not have an official arms industry, they did have the technical capacity to create a novel submachine gun for the upcoming war by combining elements of Soviet PPSh-41 with the French MAT-49, which Viet Minh forces captured from the French soldiers in large numbers and turned it into a new weapon with superior features to its original version.

A US soldier posing with an M-50 with drum mag

Fires the same 7.62x25mm ammunition as the original PPSh-41, the M-50 (or K-50 in Vietnamese), has a muzzle velocity of nearly 500m/s along with a rate of fire of 700 rounds/minute. The wooden stock has also been replaced with an adjustable wire stock like the MAT-50, to avoid being rotten in Vietnam's tropical environment. The gun can be loaded with a 35-round magazine or a 71-round drum magazine like the PPSh-41, to minimize reload time.

The M50 had been manufactured between 1958 and 1964, and although North Vietnam's arms industry was in its infancy, gun parts were forged or stamped with minimal machining, allowing it to be manufactured in substantial quantities. However, when the Soviet Union and China began to supply them with large quantities of SKS and AK-47 assault rifles, those weapons quickly surpassed and eclipsed the M-50 as a standards rifle of the North Vietnamese army and the Southern Liberation Front (VC).