The Gun (41 page)

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 7.62x39 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 plunged 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.

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.