The Soviet Union had a huge conscript army of poorly trained soldiers, many of whom could not read or write, and those that could often spoke diverse languages from the various Soviet states. This made standardized training difficult. Again, the AK suited the Soviet army because it was easy to fire, did not require a written manual or training, and rarely broke down.
In contrast to the U.S. military, which prided itself on having a pool of well-trained troops taught to make every shot count through intensive training and practice, the AK allowed the Soviets to put thousands of men into service quickly and with a respectable chance of killing the enemy. Because the AK employed an intermediate round, with less recoil than larger rounds, it allowed even inexperienced soldiers to control its accuracy during multiple bursts.
The Soviet military worked hard to keep the existence of the AK hidden from the West. Soldiers issued AKs carried them in special pouches that hid their shape. They were also instructed to pick up spent cartridges after maneuvers to keep the new ammunition secret.
Military and other official accounts differ on when the West learned of this deadly new weapon. Although the Soviets supplied arms to North Korea during the Korean conflict, it is not clear if they offered any AKs. U.S. Army historians make no mention of GIs seeing the weapon, and many Soviet records from the time are unavailable. Certainly, the Chinese, who supported the North Koreans with weapons and funds, would have welcomed the gun. Stalin was pleased to see China turn Communist in 1949 under Mao Tse-tung, and Mao’s brutal vision of war was eerily made to order for the AK. The Maoist strategy called for massive numbers of citizen soldiers armed with simple weapons to engage a technologically superior army in guerrilla and large-scale attacks. Sheer numbers, Mao believed, could win against any army no matter how sophisticated its weaponry. Even though the Soviet Union and Communist China chose different military tactics, they both benefited from the AK’s characteristics. China’s tactics were put into practice in Korea when U.S. and UN-sanctioned forces faced hordes of Chinese soldiers in many battles, leaving both sides with massive casualties. In 1953, after three years of brutal fighting and millions of dead, the hostilities ceased with a shaky armistice on the 38th parallel that continues today.
In 1956, events in Eastern Europe forced the Soviet Union to unveil the AK in public. The tumult began on October 23 with a peaceful demonstration by students in Budapest, Hungary, who demanded an end to Soviet occupation and the implementation of “true socialism.” The police made some arrests and tried to disperse the demonstrators with tear gas, but the crowds grew larger and more vocal. When the students attempted to free people who had been arrested, the police opened fire on the crowd. Within days, soldiers, government workers, and even police officials had joined the students.
Nikita Khrushchev, now leader of the Soviet Union, grew increasingly concerned about the situation and dispatched the Red Army to Hungary. They rode in tanks and in trucks, carrying their AKs. The demonstrators fought with whatever weaponry they could find, including Russian submachine guns, carbines, single-shot rifles, and grenades, much of it taken from liberated military depots. This was the Soviets’ first large-scale use of the AK, and it performed flawlessly in an urban environment where tanks became bogged down in narrow streets against crowds wielding Molotov cocktails. The revolt was squelched, with as many as fifty thousand Hungarians and about seven thousand Soviet soldiers killed.
According to U.S. Army archives, American intelligence officers took note of the AK but appeared not to be concerned. When the Springfield Armory, the U.S. military’s weapons maker since 1794, tested the Soviet weapon that year, they too appeared indifferent. It would not be until a decade later during the Vietnam War that American GIs would face the AK in action for the first time. These soldiers would pay dearly for their government’s abject failure to recognize the far-reaching significance of Kalashnikov’s simple weapon.
2
A REPUTATION BORN IN THE RICE PADDIES
BY THE LATE 1950s, the Soviet Union was employing the AK as a key component of its strategy to spread Communism throughout the world. In these early years of the cold war, both the Soviet Union and the United States tried to curry favor with undeveloped and uncommitted countries through sales and gifts of arms. Compared to the United States’ offerings of the M1 and later the M-14, the AK proved vastly superior.
Because of the AK’s ruggedness, it was well suited to severe environmental conditions and the lack of local gun repair facilities in poorer countries. In addition, because the AK was designed with a lot of play and looser tolerances—in the piston head, for example—it could fire ammunition with wide variations, including cheap knockoff cartridges produced locally or ammunition that had deteriorated in humid, jungle-like conditions, without misfiring or jamming.
The AK quickly became the weapon of choice among ragtag Communist-inspired rebel groups, especially in Africa and East Asia, where a backdoor route often was used. These groups were supplied by Soviet bloc countries instead of the Soviet Union to avoid direct confrontation between the world’s superpowers. The weapons also were affordable enough for money-strapped third world nations who could save face by paying for the arms themselves.
To further distribute the rifle, the Soviets offered technical expertise to build the AK as a so-called Gift to Fraternal Countries. These “fraternal countries” included Soviet bloc nations such as Bulgaria and East Germany, which began producing their own AKs in 1959, and Hungary, which had begun a year earlier. China and Poland got an early start with production in 1956, North Korea started in 1958, and Yugoslavia in 1964. The Soviets allowed wholesale production of AK without payments or licensing fees. The guns were easy and cheap to produce in large numbers, further extending its distribution.
For the most part, the Soviet Union and Soviet bloc countries were now producing an improved version of the AK called the AKM, which stood for AK Modernized. This rifle and subsequent improvements continued to be known by many people by the original AK-47 moniker. Most firearms experts today call the rifle and its many iterations the AK no matter what model they’re talking about.
The Soviet Union had finally geared itself for up-to-date sheet metal production technology, and the AKM was able to shed almost three pounds from the earlier milled version. This weight loss gave the gun an even greater cachet. Kalashnikov and his team also added a new trigger assembly component that increased the “cyclic rate” during automatic fire, meaning that less time elapsed between rounds, offering greater accuracy to inexperienced shooters.
Unlike the Germans and the Soviets, U.S. ordnance experts did not embrace the superiority of the intermediate round for modern combat. The bureaucracy was still wedded to the larger round, in this case the standard .30-06 cartridge (usually pronounced “thirty-aught-six”) that was used in the M1 Garand, the army’s standard issue. This view was not universally accepted, and there were intermediate-round boosters within the military establishment, but these voices were crushed by those with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, partially because of inertia and partly because of a cozy relationship between the government and the Springfield Armory, which had held a near-monopoly position on production of the M1 since the 1930s.
Historians looking back on this often are struck by the irony that the Soviet system, so bogged down in bureaucracy, was able to move ahead in the weapons area while the United States, with its history of technological innovation, lagged behind because of entrenched financial arrangements.
The M1, or Garand, as it was known for its designer John Garand, performed flawlessly during World War II, prompting General George Patton to call it “the greatest battle implement ever devised.” The M1 was simple and reliable and the first self-loading rifle to be adopted by any army as standard issue. Warfare was changing, however, and the M1 was falling behind. The rifle was heavy, clunky, and held only eight rounds in its magazine. Most important, it was not an automatic weapon.
Despite the growin
g evidence against the .30-caliber round, the Springfield Armory’s position and that of the army remained steadfast. This was seen most dramatically during the waning years of World War II when the army had begun working, albeit halfheartedly, on an automatic weapon. But the project was doomed before it got off the ground, because instead of seeking new designs and new ammunition as the Germans had done with the Sturmgewehr or the Soviets with their AK, the Ordnance Department insisted that it employ .30-caliber ammunition, which was too heavy for automatic firing by a lightweight gun. They insisted on a design criteria that disregarded the laws of mechanics. Other resistance to an automatic weapon came from military corners that saw automatic weapons as a waste of ammunition, insisting that U.S. soldiers firing large-caliber single shots carefully from long distances was in the best tradition of the U.S. military. Still others refused a radical new design because they wanted a weapon that could be built using M1 machinery. In reality, they wanted an improved and automatic version of the M1, an impossible task.
One of the champions of the .30 caliber was Colonel Rene Studler, who had worked his way up the military ladder to chief of the Small Arms Research and Development Division of the U.S. Ordnance Department. Studler had enjoyed an exemplary career, with a string of successes including the M1 steel helmet, the M3 submachine gun, and the Williams M1 Carbine. If anyone could get the bureaucracy moving on an automatic weapon, Studler was the man.
While work was under way, international politics entered. With the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) after World War II, there was a desire for a uniform weapon and ammunition that could be used by all signatories, including the United States. The European NATO nations believed that the day of intermediate rounds had come, and their struggle with the United States for a smaller standardized round left the world of reason and entered the realm of nationalism. With the United States being the most powerful nation in the world, and the force that had defeated the Axis powers, the Europeans faced an uphill fight. The large round became the cause célebrè for the Americans and a point upon which they seemed unwilling to yield.
British thinking on the subject of cartridge design, however, was very advanced. British designers had been experimenting with a still smaller round, the .276 caliber, as far back as 1924. Because of their light weight, small bullets like the .276 and even the .22 caliber—the kind used by weekend critter hunters—could be propelled at such high speeds that they extensively destroyed body tissue through a process known as hydrostatic shock. The argument seemed counterintuitive to many who just assumed that a larger bullet would do more damage, but in fact a smaller, higher-velocity bullet contains so much kinetic energy—because less energy is spent propelling its small weight through the air—that once stopped inside an enemy’s body, all its pent-up energy is immediately discharged to destroy surrounding tissue and vital organs. These were not just ballistic theories. So-called Pig Boards, tests in which pigs, whose anatomy resembles that of humans, were shot with small-caliber bullets propelled by high-powered cartridges, proved the devastating power of small-caliber weapons.
If the U.S. military was unwilling to budge from the .30-caliber cartridge, the chances of accepting an even smaller round, let alone an intermediate round, were nil. The fight that followed almost split NATO apart only a year after the pact was signed. After witnessing comparative test firings of a Belgian FAL rifle, their own EM-2—both using a .280 cartridge—and the T-25, a modified M1 firing half-inch-shorter .30-caliber bullets, the British contingent returned home from the United States and announced they were going with a .280 round and their EM-2. To hell with the Americans and their .30-caliber weapon. To hell with NATO. The United States held fast to the obsolete .30-caliber round and, in effect, offered no concessions to its European counterparts as far as ammunition was concerned. Purists noted that although the caliber was called .30, it was not a .30-06 but a 7.62 × 51mm, also known as the .308 Winchester round. The .30-06 was in actuality 7.62 × 63mm.
You might think that the public would not have cared about these seemingly small differences, but the argument captured the attention and ire of the British public, who, somewhat remarkably, understood enough of the fine points of the ammunition fiasco to be peeved. Passionate arguments in Parliament split the country. One side wanted Britain to go it alone without the United States or NATO and produce their rifle with the small round. The other side believed that a unified NATO was the country’s best defense against a growing Soviet threat and that giving in to U.S. demands was the best course.
The fight lingered for years with neither the Americans nor the British giving way. Finally, further tests in 1952 showed that the T-44, the latest incarnation of the M1, and the FAL were both viable NATO weapons, a conclusion that satisfied both parties’ egos. With the Canadians as intermediaries, an agreement in 1953 between Prime Minster Winston Churchill and President Truman meant that the British would accept the U.S. 30-caliber cartridge (7.62 × 51mm) if the United States would accept the Belgian FAL as the NATO standard. U.S. bullets and Belgian guns. Even the popular press noted this important moment, as Newsweek declared in its July 20, 1953, edition that that FN-FAL (the full name was Fabrique Nationale-Fusil Automatique Léger, or Light Automatic Rifle) would be the new NATO assault rifle and therefore the one to be used by U.S. troops.
But the Americans did not keep their promise. Colonel Studler, who was willing to admit defeat of the American-made weapon, retired from the army. He was replaced by his subordinate, Fred Carten, a former major in the Ordnance Corps, who was unwilling to allow the non-U.S. entry to become the rifle of the American army. Under his watch, a last-ditch effort to discredit the FAL took place. With little notice, both weapons were sent to Alaska for testing under frigid conditions. Carten and others hoped that the FAL would fail, and they did everything to move results in that direction.
The Springfield Armory staffers went into overdrive, winterizing T44 components to survive the cold conditions. They even developed a winter trigger that could be pulled by soldiers wearing army-issued mittens. In early tests, the T-44 beat the FN-FAL in subzero temperatures, but neither performed as well as the AK. During sand and mud trials, where the AK shone, the FAL failed miserably because of its tight tolerances. The T-44 performed marginally better. By this time, however, pressure from Britain, West Germany, and, of course, Belgium, was mounting for the United States to keep its agreement and make the FAL the chosen NATO weapon. Arms makers in these countries had already modified the rifle to accept the outmoded .30-caliber round as agreed, and they wanted closure.
Officially, further tests showed that both weapons performed equally well, although the Europeans claimed that the tests were skewed in favor of the American rifle. They could not prove it, and accusations were lodged by both sides. A final decision was delayed several more times as it was passed around like a hot potato by various U.S. military departments. Finally, Chief of Staff General Matthew B. Ridgway reneged on the agreement with NATO allies and gave the order that the T-44, soon to be renamed the M-14, would be the official rifle of the U.S. Army. Considering Ridgway’s past actions, this should not have come as a surprise to anyone, especially the Europeans.
Ridgway was a World War II hero who had helped to plan the airborne operation of D-Day, even jumping with his troops of the 82nd Airborne. In 1952, he had replaced General Dwight D. Eisenhower as the Supreme Allied Commander of Europe, but instead of building relationships with other NATO nations, he had decided to surround himself with American staff instead of a mix of European and U.S. personnel. This upset European military leaders, and Ridgway was called back to the States to replace General Joe L. Collins as chief of staff of the U.S. Army.
The final decision was based on money, nationalism, and the belief that the government’s relationship with the Springfield Armory, which dated back to 1795 when it first produced flintlock muskets, should be maintained despite its detrimental effect on America’s credibility with its European
allies.
The FAL and its successors went on to be adopted by Britain, Belgium, Canada, and other NATO nations—all except the United States—which added an unnecessary layer of difficulty to joint maneuvers. The rifle had been adopted by the armies of more than ninety non-Communist nations, more countries than even the AK, although only about three million FALs have been produced compared to almost one hundred million Kalashnikovs. Because of its widespread use among democracies, the FAL is often dubbed the “free world’s rifle” or “free world’s right arm.”
After more than twenty years and $100 million, the army in 1957 ended up with a rifle vastly inferior to the AK and one that was just only incrementally better than the M1. Although the goal was to produce an automatic rifle, the M-14 and its large cartridge were uncontrollable in automatic mode. It could only be used in the semiautomatic position. In fact, some opponents complained that the army used ringers to fire the M-14 during testing. These specially trained marksmen could keep the gun on target although ordinary soldiers could not.
During this protracted battle, another was taking place on the other side of the world, setting the stage for the first confrontation between the AK and the M-14, a showdown that would pit against each other the best infantry weapons of the world’s superpowers.
AK-47: The Weapon that Changed the Face of War Page 4