AK-47: The Weapon that Changed the Face of War

by Larry Kahaner

  In a stroke of irony, the world’s most advanced and destructive weapon, the atomic bomb, led the way for the low-tech AK. Because of the A-bomb’s guarantee of mass global destruction, the two cold war superpowers declined to wage direct war. Instead, they invented the “proxy war” that employed third-world countries with poorly trained combatants to carry the superpowers’ ideologies. These countries used fighters who possessed little or no training but were armed with cheap, durable, and easy-to-obtain AKs. Hot little wars started quicker and lasted longer, fueled by these indestructible weapons that anyone—trained or untrained—could fire immediately and become as deadly as a highly trained soldier. When a specific war ended, the AKs were gathered up and sold by arms brokers to fighters in the next hot spot. This scenario has occurred over and over, especially in Africa and the Middle East. Just as the A-bomb changed the face of modern warfare, so did the AK.

  On a cultural level, the AK is a symbol of anti-Western ideology, seen daily on the front pages of our newspapers. AKs built by the Soviet Union were offered to countries that shared the dream of worldwide Communist domination. Although they were supposed to be sold, the Soviet Union ended up giving millions away free to Soviet bloc nations and allowing others to manufacture the gun on their own soil. Nowadays, in destabilized areas, owning an AK is a sign of manhood, a rite of passage. Child soldiers in Congo, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and dozens of other countries proudly display their AKs for all to see. Stock video footage of a white-robed Osama bin Laden shows him firing an AK, a message to the world that he is the true antiestablishment fighter. Saddam Hussein was captured with two AKs beside him in his hidey-hole in the ground. He too was so enamored with the weapons that he built a Baghdad mosque sporting minarets in the unique shape of AK barrels. His son Uday commissioned gold-plated AKs.

  And what of its designer? During World War II, young tank soldier Mikhail Timofeevich Kalashnikov, the son of peasants, was convalescing from a gunshot wound inflicted by Nazis pushing east. In his hospital bed, he sketched the simplest automatic weapon possible and later was given the opportunity to build it. His goal was to help the Soviet army defeat the Germans and quickly end the war.

  Now eighty-five, tiny, feeble, nearly deaf, losing control of his right hand because of tremors, Kalashnikov thinks about the terrible gift he has given the world and it often haunts him. “I wish I had invented a lawnmower.” At other times, this financially poor man, who receives no royalties for his invention, is defiant and aloof, blaming others for his progeny’s misuse. “I invented it for protection of the motherland. I have no regrets and bear no responsibility for how politicians have used it.”

  The utilitarian AK-47, which stands for Avtomat Kalashnikova 1947, the year it was adopted, came along too late to end World War II, but its creation was perfectly timed to spread death and destruction throughout the world, and it will continue to do so well into this century.

  1

  PROTECTING THE MOTHERLAND

  IN BOOKS ABOUT THE SECOND WORLD WAR, the battle of

  Bryansk is a minor conflict, barely deserving of a footnote. But this battle, so inconsequential that most historians skim over it without a second thought, has another place in history. It was here that a then unknown tank commander named Mikhail Kalashnikov decided that his Russian comrades would never again be defeated by a foreign army. In the years following the Great Patriotic War, as Soviet propagandists dubbed it, he was to conceive and fabricate a weapon so simple and yet so revolutionary, it would change the way wars were fought and won.

  When the German army invaded the Soviet Union, it employed a new and frightening style of warfare. Blitzkrieg, or “lightning war,” was a fast and open doctrine of assault that relied on pounding the enemy with massive air bombardments and long-range artillery attacks. Concentrated legions of tanks and infantrymen followed. They fired at almost point-blank range, leaving the enemy stunned, terrified, and unable to respond.

  Blitzkrieg’s success hinged on concentrating forces at a single point in an enemy’s defensive line, breaking a hole in that line, then thrusting deep into enemy territory, catching the opposition off guard and subjecting them to wave after wave of well-organized and brutally efficient invaders. It would all happen so quickly and on such a massive scale that armies were decisively beaten almost before they knew what hit them. The effects were psychologically devastating.

  The Nazi regime employed blitzkrieg brilliantly in its swift and fierce defeat of Poland in September 1939. The tactic served Germany the following year when it invaded the so-called Low Countries—the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg—each victory allowing the Germans to build momentum and confidence. Soon after, Germany invaded France. In one instance, small and determined groups of Panzer tanks broke through French lines and reached the coast before a counterattack could even be launched.

  In many ways, blitzkrieg was a logical reaction to the way war had previously been waged. During most of World War I, armies hunkered down in trenches, sometimes for months at time. Nations spread defensive lines thinly along national borders and around crucial cities. Troops armed with stationary machine guns in bunkers could repel enemy advances. Snipers poked their heads above trench tops in the hopes of picking off an opposing soldier barely visible in the distance. It was largely static warfare.

  Hitler’s army employed tanks and trucks—an outgrowth of the greater reliability of the internal combustion engine—and two-way radios in a concerted effort to strike the enemy at one specific point on the ground with a fast and furious show of power. Field officers were given greater responsibility in advancing their troops as fast as they could without specific orders from central command. In its simplest form, this method of waging war relied on a centrally coordinated strategy, well-trained soldiers, and a large quantity of technologically advanced matériel and the logistical infrastructure to support it. The army with these ingredients was almost guaranteed success.

  So it was no surprise that blitzkrieg became Germany’s main strategy during its invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, and soldiers, including Kalashnikov, suffered its brutal effects.

  Because the two countries were supposedly allies, and had even carved up Poland between themselves several years earlier, the unexpected nature of the attack and its lightning force crushed Soviet ground forces immediately. Through city after city, town after town, superbly trained and highly disciplined German units advanced, quickly annihilating Soviet armies and civilians in their path. German infantrymen killed hundreds of thousands with fire from their automatic Maschinenpistoles (MPs), or submachine guns, spewing hundreds of rounds into knots of Soviet defenders a few yards away. They cut down soldiers and civilians en masse.

  The Germans were unstoppable as they pressed on to the ultimate prize, Moscow, destroying everything in their way.

  In late September 1941 the German juggernaut reached the outskirts of Bryansk, located deep in the forest and hard against the Desna River southwest of Moscow. The Luftwaffe had bombed Bryansk and its surrounding area in July in preparation for a ground attack. Thousands of Soviets evacuated the area. Factories were moved to more secure eastern locations. The inhabitants dug antitank trenches around the town.

  All of these preparations proved useless. The Nazis destroyed about 90 percent of the town’s housing and killed more than eighty thousand people. About two hundred thousand were forced into slave camps where most of them later died from starvation or torture.

  During the battle of Bryansk, Kalashnikov’s tank was maneuvering around an enemy flank when it was hit by artillery. His ears rang; a fragment of the tank’s armor pierced his left shoulder and knocked him unconscious. Shell-shocked and bleeding, he and twelve others, including an attending physician, were transported to a hospital. As they entered a nearby village, Kalashnikov and the driver left the truck to check for enemy soldiers. The town was empty and dark. As they made their way through deserted streets, German soldiers armed with submachine guns overtook the truc
k, riddling it with bullets. When Kalashnikov and the driver heard the automatic fire they ducked into some bushes, then crawled back to the men they had left behind. When they arrived, they saw German motorcycles with sidecars just disappearing around a turn.

  The scene was horrifying. Soldiers were lying zigzagged in the truck bed where they had been shot. Others, who had tried to escape, lay in the dirt road. Some of them, seconds from death, screamed in agony as they expired. Kalashnikov vomited at the sight of the mutilated men.

  For the next few days, the two survivors traveled on foot, desperate to avoid the deadly German patrols. Tired, fearful, and wounded, they finally reached a hospital. Though Kalashnikov was now safe in his hospital bed, receiving treatment for his infected wounds, he couldn’t relax, especially at night.

  He endured nightmares about the truck and the Germans with their superior submachine guns slaughtering his comrades. In great pain, he lay in bed and thought about his life, about the peril of his homeland, about his parents and the little town where he lived.

  MIKHAIL TIMOFEEVICH KALASHNIKOV was born on November 10, 1919, into a world that had just seen the end of World War I—“The War to End All Wars”—and hoped for a lasting peace. His family had been exiled to the cold, desolate Altai village of Kurya during political purges, something that the sickly boy did not comprehend. In this harsh environment, only eight of the family’s nineteen children survived.

  Always one to tinker—Mikhail had taken apart every lock in his village—he and his friend obtained a U.S.-made Browning pistol. Mikhail cleaned it, shined it, took it apart and reassembled it over and over again. He burned with desire to fire it, to watch it work. He was frightened yet fascinated by the firearm and hid it in a pile of junk from the authorities, because it was illegal to possess such a weapon.

  Somehow, the militia learned of the gun, and the teen was arrested but later released. He had vehemently insisted he did not own a pistol, and the authorities were unable to find it.

  Fearing that he would be found out eventually, Kalashnikov and his friend fled, scattering pieces of the Browning in the snow along the way. He later wrote of this prophetic experience, “That was it. The perpetrator of my hardships, my first acquaintance with arms.”

  After making his way to Kazakhstan and finding a job with the railroad, Kalashnikov was drafted in 1938. Because of his mechanical acumen, he was assigned to a tank company, where he invented several improvements to gauges that checked engine operating hours. He was never able to fully test his inventions, however, because Germany attacked in June 1941, and he was sent to the front. Before he left, he heard stories of the Germans’ superior tactics and savagery, but he had no idea he would be a victim or how it would change his life.

  Only a few weeks after shipping out, Sergeant Kalashnikov was out of the war for good. His injuries were substantial enough to keep him from serving again. Convalescing in the hospital, he naively promised himself to build a weapon that would drive the Germans out of his homeland. This promise turned into obsession. “I thought about it when I woke up at night, and tried to imagine what kind of submachine gun I would make. In the morning, I took a notebook from the night table and made various drawings. Later, I redid them many times.”

  In an effort to keep his mind diverted from pain, he read everything he could find at the hospital library about submachine guns—which many military planners saw as the ultimate infantry weapon and the key to winning land battles. Combatant nations had quickly put into production their own submachine guns, but the Soviet Union was late to the game and few soldiers had access to these rapid-fire weapons.

  What frightened Kalashnikov and other Soviet soldiers was the German Maschinenpistole (MP40), also known as the Schmeisser after weapons designer Hugo Schmeisser. Hugo Schmeisser did not actually design the MP40, but he worked on the MP41, which was an MP40 outfitted with an old-fashioned wooden rifle stock. Like all submachine guns, it fired pistol-sized bullets—nine millimeters in diameter, the familiar 9mm of many contemporary pistols—instead of the larger, more powerful ammunition used in rifles. (Sometimes the distinctions between pistol and rifle rounds are not always clear cut because pistols can use large-sized rounds and rifles sometimes can use small-sized rounds. With some exceptions, however, rifle rounds are generally longer and heavier and contain more propellant, thus offering more “killing power.”) This necessitated firing at close range to be effective, but the MP40 made up for this drawback by being lightweight, easy to handle, and able to stream bullets at an astonishing rate of 500 rounds per minute. The magazine, a device that automatically feeds ammunition into the gun, carried thirty-two bullets, or rounds in military parlance. The MP40 (with most small weapons, the number designates the year it was introduced or produced, 1940 in this case) also was shorter than a rifle and could be easily carried by airborne and tank soldiers. It was the first firearm of its kind to be made entirely of metal, with no wooden stock or handle grips, which made it almost indestructible. By 1945, the Germans had produced over a million of these, and it became so popular that even Allied soldiers preferred using these captured weapons instead of their own submachine guns, which were variations of the Thompson submachine gun, or “Tommy Gun,” of 1920s gangster fame.

  Indeed, the Soviet Union had a submachine gun, the PPD34/38, but it was poorly designed. Although it fired 800 rounds per minute, it was heavy and unreliable in combat. It was also too difficult to mass-produce. A much simpler weapon followed, the PPSh41, which was put into limited production in 1941 but not approved until the following year. The gun was popular with troops. However, it was not as well made as its German counterpart, because the Soviet Union’s riveting and welding technology lagged far behind that of the Germans.

  Upon his release from the hospital, Kalashnikov convinced friends at the railroad to allow him to work in their metal shop. With his left arm stiff and not fully recovered, he set about improving his motherland’s submachine gun, because the war on the eastern front was still raging with no end in sight.

  Hitler had made a strategic error that offered the Soviets some breathing room to develop weapons. Instead of sending all his troops directly to Moscow, an overconfident Führer rejected the advice of his generals and diverted one of his three armies south to occupy the Ukraine, which was rich in oil and gas resources. After more than a month on this distraction, Hitler was running out of time; the harsh Soviet winter was coming fast. Mud roads were becoming frozen slabs and his troops were not prepared for the frigid weather. By November, the Germans had reached within seventeen miles of the Kremlin, but could advance no further due to a Soviet counterattack aided by temperatures dropping to minus twenty-nine degrees Fahrenheit. German soldiers were not acclimated or dressed for the cold; many froze to death, and the survivors were exhausted. The Germans found themselves on the defensive for the first time.

  With neither side able to extract a clear victory, the war continued, and so did Kalashnikov’s work. Along with several others, he toiled for several months in the railroad shop, producing a submachine gun that he hoped would level the battlefield. His single goal was to protect the motherland. With the prototype under his arm, he made his way to Alma-Ata, where he attracted the attention of Communist Party and military officials who saw promise in this self-taught designer. Although they rejected his submachine gun, Kalashnikov garnered some important lessons. He learned that his weapon was too complex to perform under rigorous combat conditions. For example, the firing mechanism employed too many moving parts. The gun overall had many small parts, increasing the chance that if any single piece were to fail, the gun would be rendered inoperable. However, seeing a spark of genius in this young man, the authorities offered Kalashnikov the opportunity to hone his skills at a technical school, where he invented a carbine, a weapon that was popular because of its versatility.

  A CARBINE IS SIMILAR to an ordinary rifle but with a shorter barrel and stock. It was originally developed for cavalry soldiers because they co
uld not fire a full-sized rifle from horseback. Later, carbines were the logical choice for paratroopers and tank soldiers, because they were light and fit in tight quarters. Unlike submachine guns, which use pistol-sized rounds, carbines employ larger, rifle-type ammunition.

  Many regular rifles, like the M1 Garand, the mainstay of U.S. troops during World War II, came in both full-length and carbine versions. In fact, Kalashnikov borrowed and modified for his own carbine the M1’s method of feeding bullets from the magazine into the chamber for firing as well as the spent cartridge ejection system.

  By this time, however, it was becoming clear to the German military, the Wehrmacht, that warfare was changing again and neither the submachine gun nor the carbine were the best infantry weapons. Submachine-gun ranges were too short and their bullets too light for combat that was now being fought at ranges between three hundred and one thousand feet, the result of battles taking place mainly in urban environments. Machine guns had the range and the killing power of larger bullets but were too heavy to carry in fast-moving combat situations. In addition, the massive recoil from machine guns jerked the weapon around, which made them difficult to keep on target. A new kind of weapon was needed that combined the light weight of the submachine gun with the range and killing power of a machine gun.