Stalin knew that large military forces would be necessary to occupy and administer this new socialist frontier, and to face down the West. These forces would need weapons. The timing was ideal for arming them. The Soviet Union had gone through an industrial transformation and remained on a war footing. It now had a labor force skilled in making weapons. Its arms and munitions factories, which had grown in size and number and worked around the clock in the war years, were producing weapons at an extraordinary rate. By one official estimate, in slightly less than four years of war, the Soviet Union managed to manufacture 12 million rifles, more than 6 million submachine guns, and almost a million machine guns—more than 13,000 weapons a day.20 But this was an average over a four-year period during which production in the first years was small. By the end of the war, at least one enterprise, the sprawling gun works at Izhevsk, claimed at peak production to be making 12,000 weapons each day by itself, consuming fifty tons of steel every twenty-four hours.21 This was the state of Stalin’s defense complex as it considered its needs for a new infantry arm, a small automatic rifle that could be issued to every man.
Stalin liked contests. The dictator believed they motivated designers of military equipment, winnowed ideas and accelerated development’s pace. Contests were central to the Red Army’s research efforts across a spectrum of design pursuits, including not just infantry arms but aircraft, too.22 He rewarded winning designers and at times summoned them before him—a terrifying prospect, considering that some designers, including the aircraft engineer Andrei N. Tupolev, worked from a sharaga, a secret NKVD research camp, where he was a prisoner living under fear of even worse.
The extremes were Sovietesque. When the Hero of Socialist Labor prize was introduced in 1939, Stalin arranged that the first of the medals be given to him—and only him. The second prize, issued in 1940 by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, was awarded to Vasily Degtyarev, the weapons designer. In 1941, the Soviet Union awarded nine more, all to designers of military equipment and arms. (The prize was meant to recognize achievements in culture, the economy, and the arts; that ten of the first eleven prizes went to arms designers says something about national priorities.) One of the recipients in the third batch was Aleksandr Yakovlev, another aircraft designer, for whom Stalin had a special fondness. After asking Yakovlev directly about the due date for an expected fighter plane, the general secretary said that if the deadline was met, “the drink would be on me.”23 Yakovlev was wary of this offer. The system had its perks, but the men who led it were mercurial, fickle, and exceptionally dangerous. Things often were not as they seemed. Another successful designer, Yakov G. Taubin, whose work gave the Red Army a reliable automatic grenade launcher, and who had also been awarded high state honors, was arrested early in the war and accused of being a supporter of Mikhail N. Tukhachevsky, a senior Red Army commander who had been arrested, tried in secret, and executed in 1937. Tukhachevsky’s liquidation had been part of the purge’s effort to remove the dictator’s potential rivals, including figures popular in the public eye. Taubin’s design successes did not save him once he was in the clutches of the state. Nor did the fact that the charges against Tukhachevksy had been contrived, and his supposed network of plotters did not exist. Taubin received no trial. His service to the Soviet Union ended in October 1941. He was summarily shot. The system often wasted men, no matter their potential and their willingness to be of service to the same system that by turns rewarded and persecuted them. Arms designers had better prospects for survival than most Soviet citizens. But even they were not fully spared. No one was immune.
Against this backdrop, the rifle project also fit within a larger pattern by which the Soviet army exploited what it could from Germany as design efforts were intensified. The Soviet Union’s war with the Nazis, its postwar occupation of German arms plants, and its interrogation of German designers and engineers had exposed the army both to its own weaknesses and to the most modern and carefully considered developments in German military designs. Throughout the 1940s, the Soviet Union had upgraded its suite of military equipment, often incorporating concepts from preexisting German systems. By the late 1940s, all of the defense sectors were at work on new weapons. The T-34 tank was being replaced with the T-54 and T-55 main battle tanks (which in time would be replaced by the T-62, the T-72, and the T-80, all of which would themselves be continually upgraded). Soviet submarines were being updated, influenced in part by German design. Aviation bureaus were experimenting with helicopter prototypes, and Stalin had browbeaten the Soviet Union’s fixed-wing aircraft designers and instructed them to hurry jet aircraft into production. The Soviet Army was also in midproduction of its first rocket-propelled grenade, the RPG-2, an antiarmor weapon based on a Nazi-era German pattern. (Further development would lead, in the 1960s, to the RPG-7—a system that, like the Kalashnikov, has lasted for decades.)
At NIPSMVO, one of many centers in the Red Army’s constellation of research institutes, the contest for a new class of automatic arm was to proceed in phases. In the first phase, the design bureaus were ordered to submit technical descriptions of their proposals by a deadline late in 1945. The most promising candidates would then proceed to a second step: making working prototypes for tests. The competition was not only a state secret. It was veiled in anonymity, at least at the start. Each design collective was to work separately from others, and to submit documents under a pseudonym, so the review commission’s members would not know which submission came from which bureau. There was reason for precaution. Among the participating designers were established names, and past experience had shown that favoritism was a risk. Stalin had been rumored to have liked Fedor V. Tokarev, another famous Soviet armorer, and in a previous contest, in the 1930s, the desire by officers on the commission to please the general secretary was said to have led to the selection of a Tokarev rifle design over other submissions, including a better weapon proposed by Simonov.24 Tokarev’s weapon had not been a success, though that was not entirely Tokarev’s fault—all the arms designers, in the Soviet Union and the West alike, who had tried making automatic rifles that fired the heavy rifle ammunition of the time had encountered difficulties. But the new contest drew from the lessons of the old. The use of pseudonyms was meant to prevent the taint of political interference from influencing the commission’s decisions, and to give all participants, even unknowns like Sergeant Kalashnikov, a fair chance, at least at the first cut. Kalashnikov’s team convinced him to submit his packet under the name “Mikhtim,” a shorthand for his first name and patronymic. “I was young then and felt a little awkward about it,” he said. “But my friends told me not to be shy.”25
As the collective worked, the Soviet project differed sharply from the earlier age of rapid-fire arms design, when General Origen Vandenburgh or Richard Gatling or Hiram Maxim labored with small teams in private workshops, puzzling over plans they hoped would find financial backing and a manufacturer to convert them into products for sale. The Soviet contest was wholly different. It was a state-directed pursuit, a process born of Leninist ideology and Stalin’s will, freed from the restraints of Western patents and combined with Red Army administration. It was a secret matter of state security, pursued on a large scale and according to a full set of rules, not the individual entrepreneurship and inventiveness of a Gatling or a Maxim. Moreover, the Soviet state was not merely issuing demands and timelines and serving as the evaluator. It was the primary influence in determining the nature of the weapon to be created. This influence extended beyond the contest’s guidelines. It involved a cardinal decision, without which the AK-47 would be impossible: the selection of the cartridge the rifle would fire. It was a new cartridge, the M1943, unknown in the West, but destined to be the most common rifle cartridge on earth.
The origins of the M1943 preceded the Red Army’s experiences in the war. In the 1930s the German army developed a prototype cartridge of intermediate size, the 7.92 Kurz. Until that time, the ammunition used by the riflemen of major powe
rs was almost universally of high power, both by today’s general-issue rifle standards and for the tasks that they could reasonably be expected to perform. Armies had been bewitched by the ballistic possibilities of high velocity, which could lead to long range, flat trajectory, and, with a heavy bullet, devastating wounds to victims struck. To fire heavy bullets at the great velocities then desired, bullets were seated in long cartridge cases that carried large charges of propellant. The globally used British .303 round, a mainstay from the turn of the century through the 1940s, was 78 millimeters long in all, as was the French MAS round used in World War II. The American round stretched to about 85 millimeters, and the Russian was just more than 77 millimeters long. Shifting away from these big rounds in favor of something smaller had proven difficult in Hitler’s Germany, and impossible elsewhere. Armies remained invested in them, materially and psychologically. Who, after all, would propose undertaking the substantial costs of overhauling ammunition factories to produce a cartridge that, on paper at least, was less lethal?
After World War I, however, groups of ordnance officials and infantry officers had been asking whether such cartridges were necessary, and whether fidelity to ideas of maximum velocity and stopping power was a handicap forced on the ranks by tradition rather than sound analysis. What was the point of a rifle bullet that could strike a man two kilometers away now that soldiers wore camouflage and moved by infiltration? There were few targets at ranges beyond a few hundred yards, and when targets did present themselves out farther, not many marksmen could be expected to hit them. Rifles seemed to have been designed for tasks that did not exist, at least not for the typical foot soldier in the situations he was most likely to face. (Snipers, as specialists at long-range marksmanship, were another matter, but not every conscript needed a rifle capable of fulfilling sniper duty.) To those willing to question the status quo, the drawbacks of traditional rifle cartridges were obvious. To fire effectively out to this excess range, rifles had to be made heavier, which consumed more resources, drove up their costs, and made many models unwieldy. Their ammunition was heavy, too, meaning that it was expensive and soldiers carried fewer rifle cartridges than they otherwise might.
Between the wars, Germany was the first nation to pursue fully the concept of a smaller round, though German officers quarreled, too, about the merits of reducing a cartridge’s power. The Treaty of Versailles officially had idled most of Germany’s arms industry, but officers and their friends in industry actively circumvented the treaty and surreptitiously continued research and manufacturing. As early as 1934 the Wehrmacht’s Army Weapons Office had secretly issued a contract for a smaller round to the GECO firm, which developed the M35, a cartridge that was 55 millimeters in total length. In 1935, once the M35 rounds became available, Heinrich Vollmer, a designer from Biberach, worked out a rifle to fire them. Vollmer’s rifle was almost thirty-eight inches long and weighed a little more than nine-and-a-quarter pounds, making it shorter than a standard rifle but within the typical weight range of rifles of the time. And it had a feature that had eluded everyone who had tried to design a rifle of this size: It could fire automatically, like a machine gun. The smaller cartridge had allowed Vollmer to solve the decades-old problem of miniaturization. In a short time, he had made a rifle that hammered out rounds at a rate as high as one thousand rounds a minute but did not weigh more than its single-shot cousins. Twenty-five of Vollmer’s prototypes were made by hand for testing. The Army Weapons Office liked the weapon. The army itself did not. It was not approved, which may have been due to a pair of concerns regarding production: The M35 round would have required extensive retooling at ordnance plants to be brought into mass production, and the rifle was complex in design and tedious to manufacture, making it less than ideal for soldiers and a military economy alike.26
In 1938, the Weapons Office started again from scratch, issuing a contract to a second ammunition firm, Polte, which began its own tests for an intermediate round. This led to the 7.92 Kurz. Kurz means short. The word summarizes what Polte produced. In making the new cartridge, the firm had taken the 8-millimeter Mauser, the army’s standard high-powered rifle cartridge for its rifles and machine guns, with an overall length of 82 millimeters, and trimmed it, creating a version with a shorter case and shorter bullet length. The result was a similar but lighter bullet but within a cartridge that was 49 millimeters long from end to end. The Kurz offered an industrial advantage over the M35. Because it was based on the 8-millimeter Mauser, producing it would not require as many changes to factory lines to bring it into large-scale use. The result had other favorable qualities. In the most basic sense, a shorter cartridge case meant less propellant would be put into the cartridge to drive the bullet down the barrel and out the muzzle. This reduced the power of the round to roughly midway between pistol and rifle ammunition, though the 7.92 Kurz round leaned more toward a traditional cartridge’s power. It was also lighter in weight, which meant supply chains and individual soldiers could carry a larger number of rounds of ammunition into combat without increasing their load. Manufacturing it required fewer resources and cost less money. And because the cartridge had less energy, it had less excess energy, which meant it would produce less recoil. Any rifle that would fire it, if designed well, would be easier to handle than conventional rifles of the time, and might allow recruits to be trained in marksmanship more swiftly.
On April 18, 1938, even before the Kurz round took final form, Hugo Schmeisser, who had designed the Maschinenpistole 18 on a hurried schedule during World War I, was tasked with working out plans for a new class of rifle at his shop in Suhl. The rifle was to have an effective range of eight hundred meters and be capable of automatic or semiautomatic fire. It was also to be designed for ready mass production. The initial name would be Maschinenkarabiner—or machine carbine—a small rifle that would fill the gap between submachine guns and machine guns, and create new possibilities for infantrymen to mass firepower. Though the Germans were in a hurry, it took Schmeisser two years to make a prototype, during which time Hitler launched World War II. His first effort was machined from solid steel. The Weapons Office wanted a weapon with components fashioned from stamped sheet metal, which would be cheaper and trim manufacturing time. Schmeisser had limited experience in sheet-metal processes, and as the German army was busy fighting in Europe, another firm, Merz in Frankfurt, was assigned to rework his prototype in stamped metal. At last, in summer 1942, the Merz gun works, working with Schmeisser, delivered fifty prototypes of the Maschinenkarabiner 42. By then Hitler had invaded the Soviet Union, too.
Schmeisser’s automatic rifle was the world’s first intermediate-power automatic rifle to be approved for mass production and general issue to the infantry—a medium-range weapon firing at rates that rivaled machine guns and could be managed by a single soldier. The rifle was compact and had modest recoil and limited muzzle rise. And it was versatile. It could be fired one shot at a time or on automatic, as each soldier and situation required. A concept with scintillating military promise had been given shape. Schmeisser had won a race; another firm, Carl Walther, also tried to offer a prototype, but it did not produce as many by the deadline. Schmeisser’s model went into action. Most of the prototypes were sent to the Russian Front for combat trials, and several were used against the Red Army in early 1943 by a battle group under the command of Major General Theodor Scherer. The group survived a months-long encirclement after Russian ski troops severed its supply lines in Cholm. One account credited the new weapon’s firepower with helping the Germans to keep the Russians back. “It was this circumstance that made it possible for them to hold out,” the account read, “until they were relieved.”27 Germany tooled up for production, though critics in the military complained about integrating a new class of ammunition and the risk of complicating supply. The next version of the gun mixed subterfuge with refinement. Hitler had discovered that the army was experimenting with an intermediate weapon and was firmly opposed to it. As a veteran of World War
I, including the Battle of the Somme, he retained a commitment to powerful cartridges. To avoid the Führer’s scrutiny, the weapon’s proponents relabeled the modified arm as a Maschinenpistole, and dubbed it the MP-43. This version merged elements of the Schmeisser and Walther prototypes, and slowly went into production under its misleading label. By early 1944 production had reached 5,000 pieces a month, and 9,000 of the rifles were made in April. The Wehrmacht was clearly satisfied. Production was projected to reach 80,000 rifles a month by 1945—a pace nearing a million a year—signaling that the Wehrmacht planned to distribute its invention widely.28 By then Hitler had swung round and become a strong supporter. He renamed Schmeisser’s automatic yet again: the sturmgewehr, or storm rifle, which in translation became assault rifle, the designation that stuck. A new class of firearm had been named.
Schmeisser’s weapon was short-lived in battle; Germany’s defeat ensured that. But in the long competition among nations for perfected infantry arms, it marked a critical moment: the arrival of the reduced-power automatic rifle. The sturmgewehr was only an inch beyond three feet. Like a submachine gun, it cycled out blistering automatic fire, not with short-range pistol ammunition, but with bullets that traveled at more than twenty-two hundred feet per second and had the power to incapacitate a man beyond the ranges ordinary to modern combat. It was not a full machine gun; it had no large-capacity feeding device, no tripod or sled or traversing equipment that would enable it to be firmly emplaced and used for fixed fire—the sort of accurate, long-range menace that allowed the Maxim gun and its descendants to rule the open ground of Omdurman and the Somme. But it was an exceptionally versatile firearm, well suited for all single-shot shooting at a rifleman’s typical combat ranges, and its automatic fire made it ferocious for close combat and effective for suppression fire to cover an infantry unit’s movement. As German units fell back late in the war, the sturmgewehr was picked up by Soviet troops. The Red Army grasped the significance of the weapon falling from its enemies’ hands. A shift in rifle capabilities had occurred. The Red Army set out to replicate it, but with a more fully considered gun.
The Gun Page 20