And yet there was still a chance for the United States to move in the direction that rifle technology was headed, and to get there years before the Soviet Union won the race. In 1941, the army recognized that in spite of its commitment to big rifles for its infantry, it needed a lighter and shorter weapon for entire categories of soldiers—those who carried and fired mortars, or were members of machine-gun crews, or drove tanks and trucks, or tended to wounded soldiers, or carried radio gear. There were any number of people on the battlefield for whom a large rifle was a burden and a pistol was too inaccurate to be of much value. For these soldiers, the army fielded a semiautomatic rifle with an intermediate round—the M1 carbine. The M1 carbine weighed slightly more than five pounds and measured less than a yard. It fired a short .30-caliber cartridge that propelled bullets from its muzzle at less than two thousand feet per second. It had a box magazine, and could hold up to thirty rounds. The rifle was popular with many soldiers and Marines. Several million were made. Like many new calibers and new weapons, the M1 carbine-cartridge combination had problems. Many veterans worried that the step down from the .30-06 cartridge had been too steep, and that the carbine’s round lacked range and knockdown power. The carbine was known to jam, especially in cold weather. But with this combination, the United States had a format in hand to improve upon in the natural step toward a general-issue lightweight automatic. The chance was lost. After World War II, when the search began for an automatic to replace the Garand, the army remained devoted to traditional cartridges. It selected the Garand format.
Allegiance to tradition informed more than the weapons the Pentagon chose to pursue. It colored how the Pentagon perceived the arrival of the assault-rifle era. When the equipment and lessons of World War II were analyzed, the Soviets recognized the value of the sturmgewehr. The Americans did not. Forgetting even the biases informed by convention, the oversight merits consideration. Immense collections of German war records were captured and read by the Allies, allowing deep insight into the Wehrmacht’s war machine. Designers involved were interrogated. The sturmgewehr represented a groundbreaking change in infantry arms, and the United States Army held the thinking behind it. It possessed captured samples. It occupied many of Germany’s arms factories. It held the German plans and the German machine tools. It had access to the workers. But the significance of the Nazis’ development was lost on the officers and technicians responsible for American weapons design. The United States understood what Hugo Schmeisser’s automatic rifle did; it did not understand what it meant.
Looked back on, the adherence to old thinking appeared startling, given the information available in the 1950s to the army and its general staff. Shortly after World War II, the army contracted with private researchers, detached from its customs and bureaucracy, who made pointed recommendations for new training and equipment. The group, called the Operations Research Office, combed classified data and literature in offices at Johns Hopkins University and secretly reached conclusions that challenged two preeminent American chestnuts: the value of the long-range rifle and the belief in the shooting skills of marksmen. Available data showed that whatever the abilities of soldiers on rifle ranges, under the stress and visibility conditions of actual war, the preponderance of combat shooting was more pedestrian than legend suggested. Casualty studies showed that most bullet hits in World War II were random, like shrapnel wounds, and most happened at short range.103 There were good reasons for this. It was not simply that riflemen were bum shots. Tactics had a hand. The United States had been late to machine gunnery, but by the end of World War I, and throughout its military operations thereafter, it usually used machine guns well. And one common element of modern infantry fighting involved a reliance not on the precision aimed fire of the individual, but on the massed area fire of the group. The means and style of conventional ground warfare had changed. Concentrated firepower was often used to pin down an enemy as much as to kill him, while friendly troops moved in close. This suppressive fire, studies showed, was frequently applied without soldiers’ putting their weapons’ sights to their eyes, unless a distinct target presented itself, which was often not the case. In firefights like this, what was the purpose of such a rifle as La Garde had championed, which could strike a standing man seven hundred yards away? Soldiers often were relying on volume of fire more than on precise plinking at great range, and creating volume of fire required carrying hundreds of bullets, which was not easy to do if those bullets were heavy and large.
These were the kinds of questions and conversations in play overseas, questions that the Red Army had settled to its own satisfaction in 1943.
The data, and the studies, were not enough for the Pentagon of the 1950s. Not even the Americans’ closest allies could dissuade the generals from their antiquated point of view. Like their Soviet counterparts, British technicians analyzed the German 7.92 Kurz round and recognized its many qualities. They developed the .280 round as a prospective replacement for the long-standing British .303, a large cartridge that had been used all the way back to the slaughter at Omdurman. The British insights were smart but ill timed. Just as it grasped the direction that military rifle design was headed, Britain was not in a position to head there itself. A young but already stultifying bureaucracy inhibited its choices: NATO. Having experienced the maddeningly complicated logistics of World War II and the problems of multiple allies using multiple cartridges for weapons that performed the same tasks, Western powers wanted standardization. No one ally could select its own cartridge, because all the allies wanted to have the same round. A consensus was needed. A bureaucratic fight ensued, the result being that the Pentagon could not be convinced to switch to a significantly smaller round. NATO had no choice but to follow the United States’ lead. In 1953, the 7.62x51-millimeter round—a traditional cartridge closely resembling the cartridge that American weapons had used for decades—became NATO’s pick. Like the .276 Pederson twenty years before, the British .280 was dropped. The choice presented familiar problems. The United States Army went to work nonetheless on a heavy automatic rifle to fire its selection. It produced the M-14, which would become, for a few years, the standard battle rifle for GIs. To handle the heat and energy of the heavy cartridge, the M-14 had to be big. And it was big in every sense: Its version that could fire automatically weighed almost twelve pounds and stretched almost four feet long. Certainly it was powerful. Lethality tests would show that it produced an awesomely destructive effect on human skulls and legs.104 But with this power came costs—not just the weight and length penalty, but punishing recoil and determined muzzle rise. Only the strongest soldiers could expect to control it on automatic, and then only briefly.
The decision had been made that bound the United States to an unwieldy automatic rifle for the next war, and bound NATO members to big rifles, too. The alternative choices made by the Soviet army were disregarded or ignored. Five years after the AK-47 became the Soviet standard infantry arm, American military manuals were silent on the weapons’ existence, even though it was a weapon American soldiers would inevitably face. The Ordnance Corps’ 1954 manual, Soviet Rifles and Carbines, Identification and Operation, made no mention of the rifle whatsoever, while noting that “the information presented herein is based upon the latest and best material available.”105 The declaration verged on the inexplicable, considering that the Soviet Union had publicly acknowledged the AK-47’s existence in 1949. By the summer of 1955, the U.S. Ordnance Technical Intelligence Service, working from the Aberdeen Proving Ground, a testing center in Maryland similar to the Soviet center in Schurovo, began to catch up. It completed translation of the 121-page Soviet technical manual for the AK-47. The manual, published in Moscow in 1952 and stamped SEKRETNO, Russian for secret, had recently come into American possession.106 The United States acquired at least one new Soviet assault rifle shortly thereafter.107 In June 1956, the U.S. Army’s Technical Intelligence Office issued a classified report detailing the results of exploitation tests of an AK-47, w
hich it labeled, incorrectly, a submachine gun. The army followed up seven months later with another classified report on what it called the SMG (submachine gun) Kalashnikov. The Americans were swift in one respect. They had obtained an AK-47 ahead of the Dutch, the Finns, and the Yugoslavs, and less than a year behind the Chinese. Those responsible for intelligence collection had done well. The analysts and ordnance officers were another story. The American army spent much of the next decade dismissing the AK-47 as a weapon of limited value—a submachine gun that was fine for bungling socialist conscripts, but beneath the far-shooting American infantry. The term submachine gun, repeated in military reports and official correspondence for years, was pejorative, as if the AK-47 did not deserve to be discussed in the same conversation with hard-hitting American battle rifles. Snickering was an accepted norm.
Then the army’s ordnance branch was shown up. On its September 1956 cover, GUNS magazine leaped ahead of official sources with a profile of the M1943 round. The article included a drawing of an AK-47, though the caption mislabeled it as the “Avtomat 54” and the “PPK-1954.” Notwithstanding these small errors, the writer, William B. Edwards, a well-known firearms correspondent of his time, understood his facts. He declared the intermediate cartridge “a bold step toward uniform ordnance supply.” He recognized the weapon’s lineage and noted its resemblance to the sturmgewehr. And he had a scoop within his scoop—he had fired the avtomat. Little was yet known in civilian circles about this weapon, but Edwards had managed to wrap his hands around one, and a selection of M1943 cartridges, too.108 He proved a good judge of the AK-47’s merits. He liked how the weapon felt and predicted its eventual trajectory, calling it “a remarkable weapon for general issue.”109 Edwards also noted that it was much easier to handle than the automatic rifles that NATO was wrestling with to fire the Pentagon’s larger round.
Firing full-auto, the gun handled very well. The straight stock and light charge produced little kick. The former Russian accent on muzzle brakes seems to have been corrected by using the new cartridge and while the gun jumped around, counter-recoil of the bolt and gas piston parts partly resisted the cumulative kick of full-auto weapons. The contrast between the Russian full-auto carbine and the FN[18] experimental rifle also tested by the U.S. for possible N.A.T.O. adoption was marked…. The light-cartridge machine carbines like the Avtomat 54 are more easily controlled.110
No matter. In 1956 it was already too late. Insularity reigned. The Pentagon and its ordnance officers had arrived at their decisions, and the United States military and NATO would proceed with bulky firearms based on old ideas. The American army continued to see itself as an outfit that ruled the battlefield with big rifles—big, powerful, flat-shooting rifles—with the knockdown power to flatten enemy soldiers beyond the limits at which enemy soldiers could be seen by the naked eye. It all made perfect sense, at least to anyone impervious to the evolving arts and sciences of tactics and rifle and cartridge design.
Infantrymen tend to know things that senior officers do not, and a clearer view of what soldiers wanted, once they saw their choices, emerged when Western units encountered the AK-47 in the field. By the early 1960s, had the American officers responsible for arming the troops been watching closely as war evolved, they might have noticed the reaction of Dutch soldiers on colonial duty in Asia. In 1961, in preparation for the escalating dispute between Indonesia and the Netherlands over the Dutch holdings in Western New Guinea, Abdul Haris Nasution, Indonesia’s defense minister, traveled to Moscow and purchased AK-47s for the army’s parachute commandos. Later that year, Indonesia invaded Western New Guinea, beginning a brief jungle war. On April 26, 1962, an Indonesian Special Forces team jumped into Dutch-administered territory, carrying the new rifles. In late July or early August, while in a patrol base near Kampung Wermera, the Indonesian team was discovered by B Company of the Forty-first Infantry, a Dutch unit led by First Lieutenant A. W. van der Steur. Caught off guard, the Indonesian commandos withdrew with such haste that some of them left their assault rifles behind. Lieutenant van der Steur’s soldiers took them, becoming perhaps the first Western forces to confiscate Kalashnikov rifles on the battlefield. The Dutch soldiers liked their captured arms. Until that day, B Company carried a mix of American M1 carbines, British Sten submachine guns, and Bren light machine guns, along with 9-millimeter pistols. They immediately recognized the Kalashnikov for what it was—a well-adapted hybrid, a weapon that blended the qualities of the weapons they already had and fulfilled many roles very well. They carried their AK-47s for the remainder of the campaign, during which they noticed something else: Even in the jungle, the weapon resisted rust.111
These observations were all to be resonant very soon. The United States was returning to Asia for another war. Backed by the world’s premier economy and fortified by the belief that its sense of innovation was unrivaled throughout the world, the Pentagon had allowed the Soviet Union better than a fifteen-year head start on designing and organizing the production of a nation’s most basic fighting tool. The Pentagon faced a gun gap. Its unlucky soldiers and Marines would soon pay for it in blood.
III. AFTERMATH THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE AK-47’S GLOBAL SPREAD
CHAPTER 7
The Accidental Rifle
So carry your rifle (they don’t give a damn),
just pray you won’t need it
while you’re in Vietnam.
—From the poem “Rifle, 5.56MM,XM16E1,” by First Lieutenant Larry Rottmann, U.S. Army, a public affairs officer in Vietnam in 1967 and 1968 who said the army forbade all discussion about malfunctioning American M-16s
THE MARINES OF HOTEL COMPANY’S FIRST PLATOON SPREAD OUT as they walked through the shin-high grass. They were gripped by unease. In front of them was their next destination: the village of Ap Sieu Quan, a narrow cluster of buildings surrounded by paddies and dikes just south of the demilitarized zone in the Quang Tri province of Vietnam. From out in the field, the village looked deserted in the rising late-morning heat. The Marines sensed menace awaiting. At least three North Vietnamese Army battalions had infiltrated the area, an agricultural belt in the coastal lowlands where the jungles and mountains drained into the South China Sea. Many of the NVA units were patrolling. Others were dug in and concealed. Hotel Company’s Second Platoon had been hit by a North Vietnamese unit in Ap Sieu Quan a short while before. Now the company was converging. The Marines were exposed as they moved. They saw the low-slung buildings ahead. The only approach passed over open ground. We’re walking across the savannah, Private First Class Alfred J. Nickelson thought, cradling his M-16 rifle and scanning as he kept pace. They can see us for miles.1
Hotel Company was one of the bloodied outfits in Second Battalion, Third Marine Regiment, which in 1967 served as a mobile reaction force for much of Vietnam. It was July 21. Early the previous morning, several CH-46 helicopters had landed a few miles to the northwest, left the company behind, and roared back into the air and banked toward the USS Tripoli, their ship, off the coast. The insertion had marked the opening of Operation Bear Chain, a mission to interdict their enemies’ food and ammunition caches along the road running from the Communist-controlled north toward Hue City, Da Nang, and Saigon. The navy and Marine Corps had given the battalion a label: Special Landing Force Bravo. In theory, the battalion resided on amphibious ships as a theater reserve. In practice, its units were constantly ashore, shuttled from fight to fight.2 Upon departing the ships, the Marines would remain in the bush for several days to several weeks, then return for a rest and refit, and quickly be sent to the next fight. This had been the rhythm for months. Mission by mission, firefight by firefight, booby trap by booby trap, mortar blast by mortar blast, the rhythm had exacted its toll. The battalion’s ranks had been thinned. The survivors were tired. Even after absorbing the replacements that showed up between operations, the platoons fought at one-half to two-thirds strength, including men who had been wounded but were judged fit enough to send back out.
For the
United States military, which had defeated the Japanese army in the early 1940s and repelled communist divisions from South Korea a decade later, the enemy in Vietnam presented a confounding foe. The Viet Cong guerrillas and North Vietnamese regulars were marginally educated, lightly equipped, minimally trained. More than half of the NVA soldiers in late 1966 had six years or less of education, and three-quarters of them had less than eighteen months in their army.3 They were peasants, agrarian villagers indoctrinated in Marxist-Leninist ideology and fighting according to tactics articulated by Mao. Some of their deficiencies were striking. American intelligence officials marveled that few of them had undergone significant training with live ammunition before being sent on missions against South Vietnamese and American forces. Many captured enemy fighters said they fired their weapons for the first time only in combat.4 And yet by summer 1967, as Hotel Company rushed toward Ap Sieu Quan, the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army were killing nearly eight hundred American servicemen each month.
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