The Gun (23 page)

By 1915, after World War I had settled into a siege on the Western Front, Germany took another path toward a portable weapon that could be rushed forward to clear trenches. The underlying concept was the same. Germany sought a weapon that would concentrate fire, but would be small enough to be wielded by a single man, who would carry all of its ammunition, too. With such a weapon, firepower would be as mobile as the infantry, able to go anywhere a man could walk, without much slowing him down. In the narrow confines of trenches, and in the
maze of barbed wire in No-Man’s-Land, large rifles were often a hassle rather than a help. German arms designers understood that rifle ammunition was too powerful for small automatics, at least if a solution was to be worked out quickly enough to influence the war. It chose to seek an automatic weapon that would fire the comparatively low-powered and lightweight 9-millimeter pistol round, a class of ammunition that was already in the German inventory and could quickly be produced in quantities necessary for war. The concept had promise for the trenches, and it suggested a style of warfare that had not yet been seen. It would also reduce the weight of a soldier’s ammunition load. The requirements for such a weapon were established by the Rifle Testing Commission in late 1915.
⁵⁸
Working from the Theodor Bergmann weapons factory in Suhl, a German designer, Hugo Schmeisser, gave the concept its shape: the Bergmann Maschinenpistole 18, or MP-18, which had a wooden rifle stock for shoulder fire, but a squat, fat barrel that gave it a blocky appearance. It weighed just over nine pounds, could be fitted with magazines that held twenty or thirty-two rounds, and fired its bullets at more than twelve hundred feet per second. In all it was just over thirty-two inches long, a foot shorter than many standard infantry rifles in the war. This was the submachine gun. It became an ideal complement to the evolving German infiltration tactics being worked out by General Oskar von Hutier and the elite
Stosstruppen,
or shock troops, who before the war’s end would master the tactics of pinpoint attacks and breaches of front lines.

The MP-18 was the first submachine gun to see combat, but similar ideas were being pursued elsewhere. By 1915, the Italian army had already fielded small quantities of the Villar Perosa, a two-barrel automatic weapon that fired 9-millimeter pistol ammunition, though the gun was fired off a bipod and was used as a lightweight machine gun for fighting in the mountains, and not as a submachine gun.
⁵⁹
A new company in the United States, the Auto-Ordnance Corporation, was at work on its own weapon for trench warfare. Led by General John T. Thompson, a retired army ordnance officer, the company’s engineers were quietly developing a submachine gun chambered to fire .45-caliber pistol ammunition. The war ended before the result, the Thompson gun, was put to a test.

The era of automatic fire was almost fully developed. Two ends of the automatic-fire spectrum had changed the way that people experienced organized violence. The Maxim gun and its offspring had altered how armies
were organized and how war was waged, and had killed men in quantities beyond counting. And the MP-18 had been considered a worrisome enough development after its brief debut that the German military was specifically prohibited from possessing them by the Treaty of Versailles. The next question was obvious. Might not there be something between the great weight and power of a true machine gun and the lightweight and ferocious MP-18? Was it not possible to design an automatic rifle that combined the traits of both? Such a weapon would allow foot soldiers to be as mobile as ever, but more lethal than before. If small-arms design was an evolutionary process, and so far it had been just that, then this class of weapon was inevitable. Only details remained. What country would first design and field such a weapon? And when?

i
Almost sixty years later, this would be the concept used to make the AK-47 an automatic rifle and usher in the assault rifle era.

ii
A Japanese unit of measure, approximately six feet. By Lieutenant Sakurai’s estimates, then, the Russians were opening fire at a distance of about thirty feet.

iii
The spelling and grammatical errors of Rixon’s shorthand are retained here.

iv
Stretcher-bearers.

Every day Svetlana Vladimirovna works a long shift at the machining factory beside the smelter at the edge of her city in central Russia. The factory makes the best beds in the Soviet Union, all of them of exceptionally fine steel. But no one in Svetlana’s city, including Svetlana, has a bed. This is an unfortunate but perfectly understandable matter of policy. The comrades who run the factory, and who have designed such magnificent and marvelous beds, better than any beds in America, have decided in the spirit of the revolution and correct socialist principles that they must give beds first to all of the hospitals, and to the army, and to the universities, and to the collective farms, and to many other important institutions necessary for the people and the government in the world’s most rapidly and inevitably advancing socialist society. To do this, the factory must work round the clock. Three shifts a day.
And only rarely stopping on holidays. It is understood that the workers need beds. But it is not yet the workers’ turn. Only recently did the cosmonauts receive beds!

And so everyone who works at the bed factory returns home after each shift and sleeps on the floor.

One summer Svetlana’s sister, Natasha, who long ago married a man in Leningrad and moved away, returned for a visit. She was appalled that after ten years Svetlana still had no bed. After all, Svetlana was strong of hand and skilled with tools and one of the best machinists at the bed factory. “My dear sister,” Natasha said. “You have not been thinking correctly. It is very easy to have a bed. Each day you must steal one piece of bed from the parts bins at the factory and smuggle it home. And after a week or two you must assemble the parts. Then you will have a bed. And you will never again sleep on the floor.”

Svetlana listened closely. “My dear sister,” she sighed. “It is you who are not thinking correctly. We have tried this many times. We have stolen the bed parts and carried them home. We have assembled them in the room. And every time, after we finish, we discover that instead of a bed we have an automatic Kalashnikov.”

—
SOVIET-ERA JOKE

So young, and he’s already pulling a fast one! He’s a good actor, make no mistake!

—A peasant carpenter in the Altai krai, circa 1925, commenting on young Mikhail T. Kalashnikov, as told by Kalashnikov to a writer who collaborated with him on an autobiography

S
ENIOR SERGEANT MIKHAIL T. KALASHNIKOV STARED OUT FROM
the window of his office, his back turned to the door. He was tense with suspense. It was early 1946, the first winter in Russia since the defeat of Nazi Germany, and there was activity on this day at the Research Proving Grounds for Firearms and Mortars, or NIPSMVO, a Soviet weapons-testing center near the village of Schurovo, about sixty miles southeast of Moscow. The proving ground, or polygon, as the Russians called it, was a secluded military garrison, bustling with officials and frequently shaken by the sounds of small-arms fire and explosions. Officially the polygon was encased in a hush. NIPSMVO was a garrison that did not exist, a secret post with a mix of arms design and technical intelligence responsibilities that the USSR wanted to keep hidden from the West. Nestled into the thick forests that ringed the capital, it had been built early in the 1900s, in czarist times, to be a self-contained military town for testing and evaluating Russian and foreign arms. Over the years,
as the nation had militarized under Leon Trotsky’s and then Stalin’s commands, arms development had become a pressing matter of state security. The proving ground had grown. By the 1940s, it had barracks, offices, communal apartments for families, a canteen, a store selling basic goods, a modern metal shop for refining and repairing prototype arms, a ballistics laboratory, and environmental chambers to submit weapons to grueling simulations of Russian and Asian field conditions. The design offices provided workspace for staff for teasing out new ideas, and a hotel hosted visiting officers and specialists, who were ever rotating through.
¹
Around the main buildings were several small-arms firing ranges, each a kilometer long, that had been cut through stands of trees. An old bus shuttled designers and testers between the ranges and the main post. Sergeant Kalashnikov, a wounded veteran of the war, had worked here intermittently since 1942, after, by dint of what seemed an innate mechanical sense, he had been transferred while on convalescent leave from the Soviet tank forces to an environment where his talents and drive might be harnessed. Already he had been at work on new weapons and had made prototypes of a submachine gun and a self-loading carbine. Both designs had been rejected. Since fall 1945 he had become excited again. He had been consumed by the most significant project he had participated in yet: a submission to a secret Soviet contest to design an automatic rifle.

The war against Nazi Germany had ended in May, but a new arms race had been joined. The workers at NIPSMVO had learned in August that the United States had dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Sergeant Kalashnikov and his colleagues listened over the polygon’s public address system to the announcement that the Pentagon had developed and used the most terrible weapon yet. Two cities had been left smoldering. In the war against German fascism, the citizens of the Soviet Union had suffered invasion and partial occupation. The Communist Party had feared its own destruction. Now it faced something worse: the prospect of atomic war. The mind-set that had gripped the arms specialists during the war— a mood that combined anger, fear, resolve, and a sense of duty—was invoked once more. The staff at the polygon was driven to conceive of weapons that would ensure the safety of the
rodina,
the great Russian homeland, and equip fraternal socialist forces in the expanding Kremlin sphere. “Again designers were urged to hurry and implement their projects,” Kalashnikov wrote. “The quality requirements were noticeably tightened.”
²

The world had yet to develop a reliable and lightweight automatic rifle, a firearm that could fire at the rate of a Maxim gun out to typical combat ranges and yet be managed by a single man. Throughout fall 1945, Sergeant Kalashnikov and a larger design collective had worked on a submission for the contest’s first phase, which required competitors to submit a packet of technical specifications. The Main Artillery Department wanted a weapon that fired like a submachine gun but out to greater range. It issued the guidelines. The weapon must be compact, lightweight, highly reliable, simple to manufacture, easily operated, and composed of a small number of independent parts. And it must fire a new cartridge, only recently designed by Soviet ammunition experts. Sergeant Kalashnikov’s team made hundreds of sketches, detailing each of the proposed weapon’s main parts, trying to put a practical form to the commission’s request.
³

Kalashnikov was not an engineer, armorer, or metallurgist; he had little formal design or technical-drawing training, and had not attended school beyond his midteens. But a group of specialists was assigned to work with him, giving his ideas shape on the drafting table. The sergeant had a reputation for working almost ceaselessly, taking only a few hours for sleep. Often his collective remained at the shop until midnight. Gradually the paperwork began to show the proposed design. A lieutenant colonel, Boris L. Kanel, conducted the barrel-strength analyses. A draftswoman, Yekaterina Viktorovna Moiseyeva, rendered the drawings. Her papers showed a weapon that hinted at what would in time become the AK-47: an automatic rifle in which the excess gas of each shot was vented via a port into a tube above the barrel, and this energy was captured by a piston and then used to eject the spent shell casing and begin the next cycle of fire. The idea of a gas-operated weapon, conceived by Hiram Maxim seventy years before and given shape in the late nineteenth century by John M. Browning and the Colt Model 1895, was being put into a miniaturized form inside the Soviet Union, at least on paper.

Kalashnikov was not the first. Many had tried a similar design elsewhere. And other Soviet designers had been working on similar systems during the late war and postwar period. But this particular Soviet push for a gas-operated automatic rifle was different. The Red Army’s designers were cogs in a much larger machine, working within a government that was hungry for a new weapon, and willing to expend deep human and
material resources on finding a satisfactory result. The only hurdle, once a design was worked out, would be the judges’ review.