Poland was the first European nation to produce the rifles, beginning work on their arms in 1956. Bulgaria, East Germany, Romania, and Hungary followed. As new assembly lines opened, they would receive state subsidies and be given priority in the delivery of the resources required for production—metals, labor, tools, fuel, and when required, security. The German experience offers a view of the process, albeit with a special set of deceptions required by the Kremlin’s public stance that Germany would not be allowed to militarize again. This posed problems. Officially, the German Democratic Republic was a peaceful nation that had forsworn armament production. It was not to be engaged in the gun trade. To hide the work, assault-rifle production was classified and compartmentalized. Rifle parts were made in sites scattered around the countryside, sometimes in small family shops, and brought to a secluded plant. There, the many secret components came together, like pieces in a puzzle, in the form of a gun. Then the rifles were shipped to their destinations, either for East German security forces or foreign customers.
The final assembly point was in Wiesa, a village in the Erz mountains away from main cities and roads. To produce rifles this way, the communists imitated the Wehrmacht, which had experience circumventing restrictions. After World War I, the Treaty of Versailles had mandated a sharp reduction in German armed forces. It also imposed limits on the types and numbers of weapons Germany could garrison. Article 180 allowed for 84,000 rifles and 18,000 carbines (it even mandated the type, down to the style of bayonet), 1,926 machine guns, 252 mortars, and 288 heavy guns. Only one factory, the Simson works in Suhl, was approved to manufacture rifles. Other arms plants were ordered to disassemble their production lines, and, in an early swords-to-plowshares clause, expected to manufacture civilian products, including precision tools. The treaty was impressive on paper. On the ground it did not work. German officers and gun manufacturers used many forms of subterfuge to dodge compliance. In 1922, the former Royal Rifle and Ammunition Factory in Erfurt, which had been shuttered under the treaty, opened a new gun works, ERMA, and surreptitiously resumed production. By 1932, the plant had one thousand employees. Another firm, Rheinmetall-Borsig, spirited away more than two thousand tons of arms-making machinery and hid them in warehouses in Holland under false declarations. Using a front company, it bought stock in a Swiss firm near Bern and began manufacturing machine guns that would have been forbidden at home. In 1926, a group of officers founded the Statistical Corporation, or Stage, which entered the arms-manufacturing business, too. And so on.84
The gun works at Wiesa followed this pattern, but added Soviet touches. One step required finding a site for a final assembly line. The army selected a formerly private textile plant that had been nationalized and declared a people’s company in 1949. The plant had been owned by the family of Kurt Schreiber, a local businessman. During World War I, its main building served as a POW camp; captured French and Russian officers were held there. After the war, it became a factory again. It was a bucolic setting, a stately building on a hillside with neatly kept fields abutting its fences. After World War II, the party seized the plant. By 1950, several Schreiber family members who had faced charges upon protesting their loss (their descendants call the basis for the seizure “a legal farce”) had fled to West Germany. This cleared title for the site’s next use. In 1956, East Germany’s military received sample AK-47s and technical specifications from the Soviet Union. In February 1957, the commandeered plant reopened as a secret arms factory. That year the government seized adjacent property, taking some of the best farmland on the slope.85 It extended fences, hired police officers, installed security lighting along the perimeter, and built a guard shack at the gate. Watchdogs appeared. They slept by day in a pen in the compound’s interior and roamed the fences at night. Their presence was a sure indication of something important within. Construction changed the place, updating it along bland Soviet lines. Dull concrete buildings and a warehouse sprouted. Rail service was extended to reach within the fences. Beneath one of the main buildings, secured behind heavy iron grates, a firing range was opened for testing the weapons before packaging and shipment.
Across the region, skilled workers were hired and trained, and a bus line was created to carry them back and forth to work. There was no bus service for anyone else. The arms-plant jobs, which paid more than what was generally available elsewhere and came with access to a workers’ cafeteria that served hearty meals, were coveted and hard to land. Each applicant had to pass a background check. Those from families with a history of private business ownership or who had relatives in the West were turned away. Those offered positions were required by the Staasi, the secret police, to sign an oath pledging never to reveal what took place in the plant. “You were not allowed to tell your own wife what you did,” said one former employee. Such measures were nonsensical, he added. Like most everyone else, “she already knew.”86 The plant was given a cover: It manufactured tools and home appliances. Over time the villagers coined a knowing joke. That strange plant on the hill, they said, makes a wonderful coffee filter.87
By 1958, rifle production had begun. A bustling gun works grew. Under police escort on the country roads, truck drivers brought in components that had been forged and machined elsewhere.88 The barrels came from Suhl, from a plant said to manufacture bicycles.89 Smaller gun works contributed other parts. A few were machined within the Wiesa compound. The first result was the Maschinen Pistole Kalashnikov, or MPiK, a copy of the original design. Soon more than one thousand people were employed by the works, and the plant became the engine of the local economy in a time when German citizens were still suffering postwar shortages of everything from fresh fruit to building supplies to schnapps. Some townspeople were pleased, and welcomed the good fortune of having a large employer near their homes. Others were afraid. They thought that by choosing Wiesa for a rifle plant, the party had made their village a target. “We always knew, and we were told,” one local man said, “that in case of war Wiesa would be one of the first places to disappear from the planet.”90
Production was slow in the first years. But output rose under harsh quality-control measures, and enough rifles were made to equip the Nationale Volksarmee, the Staasi, and a list of foreign customers, including Iraq, Algiers, Yemen, India, and the Republic of Congo. Rail cars would arrive. They departed filled with green wooden crates containing ten assault rifles each. If the estimates of production levels are accurate, as many as three hundred thousand crates left the grounds. Many were trucked to Dresden. Others went to Rostock, a port on the southern coast of the Baltic Sea, on their way to export. The secrecy of the gun works in Wiesa was short-lived. Virtually everyone in Wiesa knew. Much of East Germany did, too. The covers—the bicycle plant in Suhl, the appliance plant in Wiesa, the idea that East Germany did not manufacture rifles—grew to be absurd. Assault rifles peddled by East German front companies in Berlin turned up in wars in Africa and the Middle East. And yet over the years, day by day, the unstated rules of totalitarianism demanded that the people of Wiesa feign indifference, even ignorance, as the muffled crack of gunfire rose from the basement firing range each night. “I decided that up to the edge of the fence was mine,” said one of the plant’s neighbors. “After that it was a foreign country, and I couldn’t care about it.”91
Others did care. Little attracts more attention among armies than word that another military force has a new weapon and is investing heavily in its production. Whispers about new weapons can be an emotionally and intellectually powerful variety of intelligence; they inspire curiosity and often worry. Such was the case in many foreign capitals when the AK-47 began to be seen. As the Kremlin hardened its foreign policy, outside interest in the weapon grew. Foreign intelligence services and arms technicians collected specimen rifles. One of the earliest collections was made in 1956 by Erkki Maristo, of the Finnish military’s ordnance department, who was at the center of a minor Cold War intelligence caper. In the mid-1950s, the Finnish Defense Forces were exploring
available options for a new service rifle and wanted to test existing designs. Intelligence sources had brought news of the M1943 cartridge and the AK-47. In May 1956, Lieutenant General Sakari Simelius, chairman of the Finnish Small Arms Committee, saw the AK-47 on a visit to the Soviet Union. Like the Soviet army, the Finns had experience with submachine guns and had no bias against lighter-powered automatic arms. They had studied the sturmgewehr closely and battle experience had taught them that weapons built around traditional European rifle cartridges were not necessarily the best choice for defending their thickly forested nation, where many engagements were fought at close range. The Soviet weapon might fit Finnish needs. How to obtain a sample? Direct sale from Moscow seemed impossible. No defector had carried an AK-47 across the Soviet-Finnish border. The defense forces found another means—a businessman with connections in Poland who agreed to arrange a clandestine purchase. As part of Warsaw Pact standardization efforts, Poland was beginning to manufacture its version of the AK-47. After the businessman’s inquiries, an early rifle was offered for sale. In fall 1956, Maristo sailed by ferry across the Baltic Sea as a private citizen and landed in Poland. In Warsaw, he was shown one of Poland’s prototype Kalashnikovs. He purchased it for an undisclosed price. The rifle was disassembled and the parts smuggled home on a Polish commercial vessel sailing from Gdansk to the Finnish port of Kotka, where it was picked up by the Ministry of Defense and reassembled for analysis.92
The Finns were enthused. They wanted more samples. On March 15, 1957, working through a company called Ankertex OY, the defense forces purchased one hundred more Polish Kalashnikovs, making Poland an early commercial exporter of assault rifles and equipping the Finns with the samples they needed for reverse engineering.93 In the 1960s the Finns began production of an exceptionally well-made Kalashnikov knock-off, the RK-60, which was updated in 1962 and became the Finnish Defense Forces’ standard arm. (The Finns’ selection raised questions of which nation had pulled off a masterful bit of small-arms intrigue. Was Maristo’s collection trip to Warsaw a Finnish intelligence coup? Or had the Finns been lured into a well-orchestrated KGB double game? The Finns’ decision to adopt the 7.62×39 round and a Soviet-pattern could be seen as serving Soviet interests. Finland and Russia shared a long northern border, and as an unaligned state Finland was not a NATO member. There is ample evidence that the Soviet Union gladly aided the Finns’ choice. In 1960, it sold 20,000 AK-47s to the Finnish Defense Force, and in 1962 sold another, smaller quantity. The weapons were to expedite assault-rifle training. Once the RK-62 was adopted in Finnish small-arms munitions stores were incompatible with NATO’s weapons, but compatible with the Soviet Union’s. The Finnish decision gave the Soviet military a logistical edge along its northwestern frontier.)
As the Finns tested their Polish guns, AK-47s kept reaching foreign hands. A confidential 1958 report to the Netherlands General Staff, prepared by intelligence officials and the Dutch inspector of armaments, detailed the exploitation of a folding-stock Kalashnikov that had been manufactured in 1952. The Dutch intelligence service sensed the weapon’s production momentum and deduced part of the Soviet army’s intentions. It noted that the AK-47s seen in intelligence photographs through 1956 had been assigned to the infantry, whereas more recent images showed them with artillery, signals, and antiaircraft soldiers. The analysts ventured that “it is very likely that this weapon will become the only Soviet shoulder weapon.”94 The report was both prescient and understated; the weapon was moving well beyond Soviet possession.
Arms specialists in Yugoslavia also pursued Kalashnikov technology. Josip Broz Tito, Yugoslavia’s prime minister, headed a socialist nation that might have been a candidate for early standardization, had relations with the Kremlin not been strained.95 When the Soviet army transferred technical specifications elsewhere, Yugoslavia was left out. It obtained neither sample rifles nor the aid needed to manufacture them. Engineers at the Zastava arms plant in Kragujevac, however, had been experimenting with automatic-rifle designs since 1952, working with captured specimens of the sturmgewehr. In 1959, they got their break. First, two AK-47s came into their possession, apparently after a pair of Albanian border guards passed them off upon defecting to Yugoslav soil.96 Engineers at Zastava made metal castings from the rifles but did not glean enough data to copy them. Tito then came through personally. On a foreign visit to a nation that had received Soviet military aid, he retrieved more AK-47s. These were passed to the engineers to finish their work. (During this time, Tito traveled to Egypt, Indonesia, and India, any one of which might have provided him the sample arms; which country did so has remained a state secret.)97 By the end of 1959, the Zastava plant was developing an AK-47 variant.98 The work was done by industry. Unlike the Finns, the Yugolav military was not interested in issuing the AK-47, fearing its soldiers would consume too much ammunition.99 The factory pushed on alone. Its assault rifles would in time become widely exported, and would be present in many wars.100
One nation alone had the most puzzling reaction to the AK-47 and its creeping movement across the globe: the United States. Throughout the crucial period of the AK-47’s design, development, and mass distribution, American military officers did not foresee or understand the significance of what was happening at its enemy’s test ranges and arms plants. The American intelligence and arms-design failures were almost total. On the level of anticipating security threats, the Pentagon did not recognize the risks to its forces or its allies from the AK-47’s capabilities and global production. And as for designing infantry firearms, it remained obstinately committed to high-powered cartridges and rifles that fired them. Part of the bedrock belief was tradition. As with the European affection for bayonet and cavalry charges at the turn of the century, America was the victim of romance—with old-fashioned rifles and the sharpshooting riflemen who carried them. These were integral to national frontier legend. An unshakable devotion to these legends, and to technical and tactical choices that adhered to them, showed itself repeatedly. At the late date of 1916, after legions of men had died miserably in Europe, wasted in the trenches before the machine guns and artillery of the industrial age, the United States Army continued to operate a School of Musketry at Fort Sill. Names matter. This name spoke to a mentality that handicapped American ground officers through the twentieth century’s first six decades, and left the services unprepared for shifts in technology that were putting lightweight automatic rifles into its enemies’ hands.
Time and again, senior officers upheld tradition and missed signs. The American army watched events in Europe as its involvement in World War I drew near. When it entered the war in 1917, in spite of the nation’s industrial might and its role as the incubator of machine guns, the army contributed little to the rapidly expanding tactical field. It had more than fifty years of association with machine guns. But it had not yet developed a sound machine-gun doctrine. The record spoke of indifference and neglect. In 1904, during the Russo-Japanese War, an American military attaché reported observing a Russian machine-gun battery fire 6,000 rounds in a minute and a half, and 26,000 rounds in two days of battle. When the army experimented with machine-gun platoons in 1907, it issued each platoon 1,000 rounds to fire—for an entire year.101 An allotment of that size provided small chance to develop marksmanship, and smaller chance still to experiment thoughtfully with tactics. It also made everything lucidly clear. No matter Omdurman, never mind the army’s own experience outside Santiago and in the Philippines, forget the horrifying effectiveness of machine guns in the battle for Port Arthur. Machine guns and machine gunnery were not a prominent part of army thought. By 1909, the army had 282 Maxims for its entire force. Then it replaced them—after minimal testing—with the Benet-Marcie, a French design that, soldiers discovered after procurement, broke down under heavy use.
Louis La Garde, the army surgeon who had organized the cadaver and livestock firing tests, summarized a persistent ideal, which was common to American infantry thinking before the United States plun
ged into the war. “With a high muzzle velocity and a flat trajectory, little remains to be desired in the present rifle,” he wrote in 1916. The present rifle, in 1916, was the M1903 Springfield—a high-powered, bolt-action rifle almost forty-five inches long. La Garde saw value only in making the round more powerful, so a bullet fired over level ground would fly so flat and so far that as it traveled across more than a half-dozen football fields, it would neither rise above nor fall below the height of a standing man. This was the weirdly disconnected domain of ballistics theory. A round that flies in this fashion would remain a hazard for a man standing upright on perfectly flat ground from any point from the rifle’s muzzle out to more than a third of a mile. Such theories appeared sensible on chalkboards, as long as one looked past certain facts. First among them was that in combat such terrain does not exist. The second fact was every bit as important: People under fire tend not to remain exposed and standing up. La Garde had a busy mind. He liked to think about bullets. He examined gunshot injuries like no other officer of his time. But he was no tactician. The most positive development he could foretell would be fielding a bullet-and-rifle combination such that “the continuous danger space for a height of 68 inches extended from the present range of 730 yards to a range of 1,000 yards.”102
After the war, the army studied the possibility of a semiautomatic rifle. Tests showed the value of a lower-pressure round—the .276 Pederson—as a replacement for the .30-06 cartridge fired by the M1903. The .276 might have pushed the United States ahead of everyone else in developing semiautomatic and automatic shoulder arms. But the opportunity was lost. General Douglas MacArthur, the army chief of staff, rejected the study after being told that it was still feasible to design a semiautomatic rifle that fired the heavier, faster round. It was in fact feasible. A better question might have been whether it was preferable. The old round remained the standard; the lighter round was shelved. Because no other nation fielded an intermediate round quickly, and the German sturmgewehr was not distributed in the quantities necessary to influence the fighting against American soldiers in late World War II, the United States did not suffer directly from MacArthur’s decision, at least not immediately. In the short term the opposite occurred. The army developed a semiautomatic rifle, the M1 Garand, which fired its big cartridge. The Garand was powerful and reliable, if somewhat unwieldy in the old-school ways. But American soldiers fought World War II with one of the most successful semiautomatic rifles ever made. Over the longer term MacArthur’s decision had an insidious effect. The Garand was a perfect dinosaur—a highly developed and successful weapon of a type that was soon to die. Its success hardened the bias against smaller rounds.
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