XDA

The Walther PPK (Pistole, Polizei und Kriminale) is perhaps the most famous small gun in the World. It was the gun that James Bond was given in Dr. No to replace the "lady's gun" (an Italian .25 Beretta) he had carried up to then. It was intended for undercover or plainclothes police in Germany in the 1930s. The gun pictured here is in stainless steel and is one of 400 with the beautiful engraving on the slide (although the eagle always looks like a hummingbird to me on first glance). Click on the pictures to see details.

The PPK is just a slightly smaller version of the PP (Pistole Polizei) first produced in 1929. There are some minor differences between the two pistols, mainly under the grips, but too trivial to describe in detail.

In the movie The Cat's Meow by Peter Bogdonovitch, multimillionaire publisher William Hearst uses a PPK to put a bullet into the brain of has-been producer Thomas Ince, thinking he is Charlie Chaplain putting the moves on Hearst's mistress Marion Davies. However, that movie was set in 1924, so it couldn't have been either a Walther PP or PPK, the latter wasn't in production until late 1930. They made a big deal in the movie that it was a Walther PPK and Hearst uses it to shoot seagulls as he sails his yacht along the California coast. I see I've digressed a little.

The PPK came in various calibers, .22 Long Rifle, 6.35mm (.25 ACP), 7.65mm Browning (.32 ACP), and 9mm short (also known as .380 ACP). The .22 and 6.35 varieties are very rare; there are plenty of PPs and PPKs in .32 ACP. There was no visible difference in the different calibers of PPK. The pistol has a 7 round removable box clip (in the picture to the right). It is double action, meaning that if the round is in the chamber but the gun is not cocked, pulling the trigger will cock the hammer back and then fire the bullet. The cartridges in the picture are a 9mm parabellum (the larger) and the 9mm kurtz (.380) to the right of it. Obviously the parabellum packs a little more hitting power with a larger bullet, but only slightly. The barrel has 6 lands and grooves and is a right hand twist. The automatic loading mechanism is straight blowback. One of the neat features of the gun was a little rod with a red tip that stuck out when there was a round in the chamber so that you could either see or feel in the dark to see if the gun was ready to fire.


You have to take a little care when firing the PPK that the slide operation doesn't pinch and slice open the skin between the thumb and forefinger. There is a spur designed to keep your hand out of the way, but the gun is so small that fat hands or loose skin often overwhelms the safeguard.

The hammer has a hole in it almost surely for aesthetics and not for function. The gun is just over 6 inches long. The barrel is 3.25 inches long. This gun is made for very close in work. None of the cartridges send a bullet out faster than sound so it would be a good gun to use a suppressor on.

To break the gun down, pull the trigger guard down and then pull the slide back and up. That's pretty much it. OK, take off the spring too. The little switch 9/10ths of the way back on the slide is the safety switch. Like all modern safeties, if you can see a red dot, the gun is ready to fire and the safety is NOT on. The little button on the frame just at the top of the grips, touching the upper left corner, is the clip release. Usually the Europeans have a catch at the bottom of the gun so that it was hard to take out the empty clip. This is the better way--push the button and it drops away. The stainless PPK is made in Georgia; the German PPKs are still all blued steel. This gun has been copied all around the World, sometimes under Walther license.