The Gun (27 page)

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.”
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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.
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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 first Soviet step was not to make an assault rifle. It was to make a cartridge comparable to the Kurz. Exactly when the Red Army began to work on its own intermediate bullet remains an open historical question,
²⁹
though its interest predated the
sturmgewehr.
In czarist times, an armorer and inventor, Vladimir G. Fedorov, understood that overcoming the design problems inherent in automatic rifles would require developing a smaller cartridge. His experiments demonstrated the difficulties of using high-powered cartridges in smaller weapons. Little came of his ideas. His work stalled. In Soviet times, when denouncing imperial figures was welcome and safe, he blamed the lack of enthusiasm for his work on Czar Nicholas II. The czar, Fedorov said, had spoken openly against an automatic rifle at a lecture at an artillery school in 1912, and worried aloud about the amount of ammunition it would consume. The czar’s opinion, Fedorov said, was influential, and became “widespread at the time amongst the high-ranking military commanders. That was why armourers, myself included, could not obtain noteworthy assistance in work on the automatic rifle.”
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The truth was more complicated. Soviet authorities did not offer much initial support either. In the 1920s, the Red Army discontinued production of Fedorov’s rifle and stopped purchases of the slightly smaller Japanese cartridges it fired. For two more
decades the Soviet military committed itself to its own traditional rifle cartridge, the 7.62x54R—the same high-powered round that had been in service since the early 1890s.
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But at roughly the same time that the
sturmgewehr
was appearing in battle, opinions were shifting, and the Red Army was developing an intermediate cartridge of its own. Soviet officials claimed that Russian designers had begun working in earnest on this cartridge in 1939, and the project had been suspended after Germany invaded Poland that year, which was followed by the Soviet invasion of Finland and the start of the Winter War. The demands of wartime production, by this account, pushed the pursuit of an intermediate cartridge aside.
³¹
Interest intensified on July 15, 1943, when at a conference of Beria’s intelligence service, the NKVD, analysts presented two smaller cartridges used by other armies in the war—the German 7.92 Kurz and the American .30 Carbine, which was fired by a small, semiautomatic rifle issued to support troops.
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That year, two Soviet cartridge experts, Nikolai Elizarov and Boris Semin, were at work refining the idea, and soon the pair had made a cartridge satisfactory to the Main Artillery Department: the M1943, a .30-caliber round with an overall length of 56 millimeters. The cartridge looked like little else in mainstream circulation. It was more than a full inch shorter than the standard .30-06 Springfield cartridge used in American rifles. But it was not entirely new—it closely resembled the M35 round developed by the GECO firm in Nazi Germany and used in Vollmer’s rifle. The similarities between the M35 and M1943 raise the possibility that Soviet spies obtained them even before the
sturmgewehr
was fielded, or that German technicians had shared details of the round or samples during trade agreements between Germany and the Soviet Union from 1939 to 1941, when, with Hitler’s permission, Soviet military delegations extensively toured German munitions plants.
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Whatever its genesis, the M1943 fulfilled for the Red Army the niche that the 7.92 Kurz had filled for the Wehrmacht. Like the Kurz, the M1943 round flew from the muzzle at velocities closer to two thousand feet per second than the nearly three thousand feet per second traveled by the American round. In the eyes of ballisticians who favored high-velocity cartridges,
such numbers marked the M1943 as a bantamweight, a round with limited range and knockdown power. To Soviet arms designers, these numbers were academic. Results were more important. Tests had shown that at six hundred meters, the new cartridge penetrated three pine boards each 2.25 centimeters thick, nearly three inches of wood in all.
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Soviet ballisticians thought this was more than enough power and penetration to wound or kill a man at that considerable distance, which was beyond the range at which most fire from rifles found a mark. Experience had also shown that the
sturmgewehr
was not a weapon infantrymen wanted to face, at least not when armed with bolt-action arms with which to fire back. The M1943 had economic advantages, too. The army’s engineers noted that for every million rounds manufactured, the M1943 saved four tons of the alloys used for cartridge cases, a ton and a half of propellant, and more than a ton of lead. By March 1944, the M1943 was in production.
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Now weapons would have to be made to fire it.

Soviet willingness to experiment with an intermediate cartridge, and the urge to field a new class of weapons around it, marked another instance of Russian ordnance officials recognizing the value of nascent military technology before many competing nations. Both imperial Russia and the Soviet system that replaced it had proven adept at this sort of intelligent mimicry. The Kremlin’s armies had not been early leaders in machine-gun design, but they had been smart borrowers of technologies and ideas from elsewhere. The results had been impressive. In the nineteenth century, czarist military officers had been among the first to see the value of Gatling and Maxim guns, and had integrated them into Russian formations and put them to effective combat use ahead of almost all the world’s other armies. Soon after the turn of the century, Russia started the work that in time put it at the vanguard of the shift to automatic rifles. Vladimir Fedorov had understood the utility of machine guns in the Russo-Japanese War, and had been intrigued with the idea of a small automatic rifle. From 1909 through 1913 he led a research program to design a suitable weapon. Working with the slightly smaller Japanese cartridges, he made a nine-and-a-half-pound automatic rifle that saw limited service in World War I. His rifle never saw mass production. Thirty-two hundred were made over roughly ten years,
³⁶
and production was cancelled after the October Revolution. But Fedorov’s program bridged the Bolshevik coup. He survived the revolution and offered his services to the new socialist
state. In 1918 he was sent to Kovrov, a center of arms production to Moscow’s east, to help open new gun works there. He supervised much of the factory’s early development, recruiting designers and workers and helping to make the plant a principal producer of machine guns and submachine guns used in the Great Patriotic War.
³⁷
During his decades as a prominent armorer, he published widely on military and ordnance topics and became a giant in the insular clique of Soviet firearms designers. Through his outsized influence, an appreciation for automatic arms became entrenched among the Red Army design teams, and informed Soviet arms development.

This institutional affinity for automatic arms took another shape in the Great Patriotic War, when the Red Army embraced submachine guns. The Soviet Union had few submachine guns at the war’s outset. As German armor and artillery neared Moscow, Stalin discovered that the Red Army had almost none of the weapons to issue to troops tasked with the city’s defense. “The enemy was threatening the capital, and we had to look for two hundred submachine guns needed for those going behind the enemy’s lines,” he said later. “We did not let anyone sleep then.”
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The shortage was in no small part his own fault—the dictator’s purges of the Red Army’s senior officer corps had sent many experts and proponents of automatic arms to their deaths.
³⁹
But the Soviet Union found that its submachine guns were easy to manufacture. State arms factories and small “victory workshops,” many of them under siege in Moscow or Leningrad, produced huge quantities of the PPSh, a stubby eight-pound weapon with a distinctive circular magazine and a vented cooling shroud. The PPSh, which fired pistol ammunition, had completed its design and trial phase only in 1940. It was compact, simple to operate, and inexpensive to manufacture, and gave Soviet infantrymen firepower at close range. Its ease of manufacture was related to its design, which envisioned its being produced in part with electric welding and cold stamping, techniques considered beneath firearms by many Western manufacturers. The Soviet choice made sense. “The technology of manufacture of the PPSh ensured a considerable saving of metal, reduced the production cycle, and did not require complicated specialized tools and equipment,” one Soviet officer noted.
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This also meant that highly skilled workers were not needed for its production, and were available for other work.

As weapons go, the PPSh was neither handsome nor refined. It was a
triumph of pragmatism, expediency, and unpretentious Soviet ideals. One reviewer said it fit a pattern: “The Russians excel in calculated crudity. In these burp guns, the plumbers have all but eliminated the gunsmiths.”
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Aesthetics matter to many gunsmiths. They mattered not at all to a nation that risked falling under Nazi control. Known among Soviet conscripts as the
pe-pe-sha,
the dumpy submachine gun was popular with Red Army troops and was regarded well enough that when German soldiers captured them, as they often did, they carried them, too. This is the highest vote of confidence an infantry arm can achieve, and this submachine gun, rushed into production to save the nation, became a familiar prop in Soviet symbols of the Great Patriotic War, appearing endlessly in murals and statuary. But the effect of the PPSh, and of other Soviet submachine guns that appeared later in the war, was deeper than its tactical or symbolic power. It helped cement in the Red Army an appreciation for automatic arms that could be wielded by a single man.