Dubbed the “Rak”—Polish for “cancer” or “crayfish”—by those soldiers who carried it, the Pistoletmaszynowywzór 1963 (PM-63) was among the first true fully-automatic pistols and along with the Military Armament Corporation Model 11 (MAC-11) and Glock 18 has remained one of the smallest automatic weapons ever produced. The PM-63's development dated back to the late 1950s when the Polish government, which was then part of the Warsaw Pact, requested that a light, hand-held defensive weapon for use by rear-echelon/support troops.

The project was headed up by Piotr Wilniewczyc, a Polish engineer and arms designer who had developed the Vis-35 pistol before the outbreak of World War II, but after his death in 1960 the work fell to Tadeusz Bednarski, Grzegorz Czubak and Marian Wakalski. The PM-63’s design was completed at the state-operated Łucznik Arms Factory in the city of Radom and production began in 1965 and only ended in 1977. A total of seven hundred thousand of the compact machine pistols were produced and it was first used in the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia while some of the weapons were supplied to Communist forces in Vietnam.

It was widely exported and nations such as Syria, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq have employed the PM-63 in combat. While it was produced by the Communist Poland during the Cold War and many were used during the Vietnam War against the United States and its allies, the weapon was also used by Communist forces in Vietnam against the Communist Chinese in the Sino-Vietnamese Wars of the 1970s and 1980s—and captured stocks were locally produced by the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) as the Type 82.  

Compact Design 

The PM-63 was designed as a selective-fire straight blowback-operated, locked-breech submachine gun that utilized a rotating barrel system. As with other automatic small arms of the era, it fired from an open bolt, but unlike other weapons, it had a reciprocating external breech block or slide. The operation is thus far more similar to that of a pistol than a true submachine gun. 

As a selective-fire weapon, the PM-63 could be fired in semi-automatic mode, based on the trigger manipulation. The rearward movement to the first position resulted in semi-automatic while continued rearward movement resulted in fully automatic fire. It had an approximate rate of fire of 650 rounds per minute, which was kept at that rate by the use of a rate reducer that caused the slide to remain open for a fraction of a second during recoil. The PM-63 fired from either fifteen- or twenty-five-round box magazines.

It was determined during World War II that the 7.62x25mm Tokarev round, which was used in the Soviet TT-33 pistol as well as the PPSh-41 submachine gun was too powerful to be controllable in a such a compact submachine gun, so instead the PM-63 was initially chambered for the 9x18mm Makarov. A handful of variants of the weapon were chambered for 9x19mm Parabellum (PM-70) and .380ACP (PM-73), while the Chinese Type 82 version was in fact produced briefly for the 7.62x25mm Tokarev round.

Unlike other submachine guns of the era, the PM-63 was compact and lightweight enough to be holstered, making it ideal for gun crews and vehicle drivers—while at the same time gave more firepower than the standard sidearm. Even with fully-automatic fire the weapon could be deployed and operated like a regular pistol with one hand, but it also featured a folding stock and forward grip for better control.  

The PM-63 is still largely unknown in the West and practically forgotten even in the former Warsaw Pact nations because it wasn’t all that widely employed. It has only ever been seen in a handful of movies, most notably Rambo 3 in 1988. There is however a misconception among movie buffs that a PM-63 appeared in the 1984 film Red Dawn, but at the time it was impossible as there was a ban on Combloc weapons. Instead, the character in that film carried a similar-looking Finnish Jatimatic 9mm submachine gun. 

Without such a moment in the movies the PM-63 is likely to fade into history, even if it was among the first truly successful ultra-compact automatic weapons.

Peter Suciu is a Michigan-based writer who has contributed to more than four dozen magazines, newspapers and websites. He is the author of several books on military headgear including A Gallery of Military Headdress, which is available on Amazon.com.