The Gun (73 page)

36.
Jenó Györkei and Miklós Horváth,
Soviet Military Intervention in Hungary
(Central European University Press, 1956), pp. 54–61. The order of battle is published on p. 59.

37.
László Eörsi,
The Hungarian Revolution of 1956: Myths and Realities
(New York: East European Monographs, 2006), p. 14, with further notes on p. 28.

38.
Ibid., p. 11.

39.
Testimony of József Tibor Fejes, at closed-court hearing on January 20, 1959. From the Fejes file at Budapest Municipal Archives. Translated by Kati Tordas.

40.
Paul Lendvai,
One Day That Shook the Communist World: The 1956 Hungarian Uprising and its Legacy
trans. Ann Major (Princeton University Press, 2008), pp. 58–62.

41.
Eörsi,
The Hungarian Revolution of 1956.

42.
Transcript of conversations between the Soviet Leadership and a Hungarian Workers’ Party delegation in Moscow, June 13 and 16, 1953, appearing in
Uprising in East Germany, 1953,
Christian F. Ostermann, ed. (Central European University Press; republished in 2001 by the National Security Archive), pp. 145–46.

43.
Ibid., p. 147.

44.
Ibid., p. 149.

45.
Erwin A. Schmidl and László Ritter,
The Hungarian Revolution, 1956
(Oxford: Osprey Publishing Ltd., 2006), p. 7.

46.
Ibid.

47.
From the “Working Notes from the Session of the CPSU CC Presidium, October 23, 1956,” an electronic briefing book prepared by the National Security Archive, Washington, 2002, and in
The 1956 Hungarian Revolution: A History in Documents,
eds. Csaba Békés, Malcolm Byrne, and János Rainer (New York: Central European University Press, 2002), pp. 217–18.

48.
Eörsi,
The Hungarian Revolution,
p. 8.

49.
The first translation is from Eörsi,
The Hungarian Revolution,
p. 191. The second is from
The 1956 Hungarian Revolution: A History in Documents.
The sources excerpt from the same document.

50.
Györkei and Horváth,
Soviet Military Intervention,
pp. 54–61.

51.
Schmidl and Ritter,
The Hungarian Revolution, 1956,
p. 57.

52.
Court record Nb. XI. 8083/1958. szam. In the Budapest Municipal Archive, hereinafter referred to as the Fejes Court File. Fejes admitted to shouting “Russkies Go Home” but said he shouted no other demands.

53.
Fejes Court File.

54.
Fejes Court File, in this case, testimony by Fejes in response to a question from the presiding judge on January 20, 1959.

55.
Fejes Court File. Prosecutors accused Fejes of stealing the watch from a Russian officer; he denied this in court and said he had taken it from a civilian.

56.
The background on Fejes was from the court file. Further details were provided by László Eörsi, the Hungarian historian, who has spent years studying the Hungarian fighting groups and their members. The material from Eörsi was translated from Hungarian by András B. VágvÖlgyi, director of the film
Kolorado Kid,
which chronicles part of the revolution.

57.
Götz,
German Military Rifles,
p. 223. The MP-18 was too well regarded to disappear outright; a license was issued by the German firm that made them to the Swiss Industrial Company, SIG, which manufactured them for export in the 1920s.

58.
Appointment letter of Captain John T. Thompson to the board of officers tasked with conducting the test. U.S. War Department. October 6, 1903.

59.
La Garde,
Gunshot Injuries,
p. 135.

60.
Report of the Surgeon General of the Army to the Secretary of War for the Fiscal Year ending June 30, 1893, pp. 73–96.

61.
The quotations and descriptions of the Thompson–La Garde tests are from the officers’ account of the tests, in the forty-three-page “Preliminary Report of a Board of Officers Convened in Pursuance of the Following Order, War Department, Office of the Adjutant General, Washington, Oct. 6, 1903,” which was submitted to the War Department on March 18, 1904.

62.
Ibid.

63.
The cadaver-livestock tests did confirm that bullets encased in metal—so-called full-metal jackets—tended to cause less serious injuries than bullets that had lead exposed. The latter expanded on impact, often causing larger wounds.

64.
William J. Helmer,
The Gun That Made the Twenties Roar
(Highland Park, N.J.: Gun Room Press, 1969), p. 77.

65.
Ibid., p. 53.

66.
Ibid., pp. 78–79.

67.
From Memorandum of Discussion at the 302nd Meeting of the National Security Council, Washington, November 1, 1956, 9–10:55
A.M.
, in
The 1956 Hungarian Revolution: A History in Documents,
p. 324.

68.
Györkei and Horváth,
Soviet Military Intervention,
p. 257.

69.
The chronology here is drawn from the fuller timeline published in
The 1956 Hungarian Revolution: A History in Documents
.

70.
Report of Georgy Zhukov to the CPSU, November 4, 1956, in
The 1956 Hungarian Revolution: A History in Documents,
p. 384.

71.
Y. I. Malashenko, “The Special Corps Under Fire in Budapest. Memoirs of an Eyewitness,” in Györkei and Horváth,
Soviet Military Intervention.
Malashenko led the operations section of the Special Corps.

72.
The casualty estimates come from various sources, which all acknowledge the uncertainty of their numbers due to complicating factors: closed Russian archives, secret burials, wounded people who sought treatment in homes and not in hospitals, where they might be discovered, and so on.

73.
Fejes court file.

74.
Fejes court file, from the minutes of his police hearing on March 31, 1958.

75.
Production of the solid-steel-receiver AK-47 was ceased in the Soviet Union, though its replicas would be made in other places—including China, North Korea, and Europe—for many years, and a few of these early style AK-47s are still made in the United States by Arsenal Inc. of Las Vegas, primarily for collectors. Mikhail Miller’s work on the Soviet AKM is briefly discussed in Shilin and Cutshaw,
Legends and Reality of the AK.
Different sources give different weights for AK-47 and AKM. The weights used here are from Maksim Popenker.

76.
Kalashnikov with Joly,
The Gun that Changed the World,
p. 87.

77.
Kalashnikov,
From a Stranger’s Doorstep,
p. 278.

78.
Ibid., p. 275.

79.
Bolotin,
Soviet Small Arms and Ammunition,
pp. 175–77.

80.
The myriad knockoffs of the Kalashnikov would come with changes in barrel lengths, stocks, sights, muzzle brakes, flash suppressors, and other components, giving each weapon its distinctive differences. In later years some variants would change the caliber, often to the NATO-standard .223 round. None fundamentally altered the main Soviet design. All are often referred to as Kalashnikovs, some even (erroneously but almost universally) as AK-47s.

81.
Design of the SVD began in earnest in 1958, when Evgeny F. Dragunov, a former army gunsmith who had become a designer in Izhevsk, competed against another
konstruktor,
Aleksandr Konstantinov, to make a prototype. As with the PK, longer range was necessary, and the prototypes were chambered to fire the Russian 7.62x54R cartridge. The competition lasted five years, and gradually, as Soviet officials demanded modifications, the two weapons—like Bulkin’s and Kalashnikov’s prototypes—began to grow similar. Dragunov’s version remained more accurate, and in July 1963 it was selected as the new Soviet sniper rifle. A special solid-steel bullet was designed concurrently, which gave the rifle the ability to penetrate body armor and helmets, and to be a greater threat to vehicles, helicopters, and other heavy equipment.

82.
This Soviet-era manifestation of rancor would resurface later, when Kalashnikov’s colleagues would claim he had not given adequate credit to the people whose work had made the AK-47 possible.

83.
Kalashnikov,
From a Stranger’s Doorstep,
pp. 285–88.

84.
Götz,
German Military Rifles,
pp. 154–58. Götz offers a plant-by-plant description of end runs on the treaty by German industrialists and military officers. Many German people considered the treaty an insult and did not betray work that should not have been hard to detect.

85.
From Christa and Erika Schreiber, descendants of Kurt Schreiber. Interview with author in Wiesa, February 2005.

86.
From Heinz Muhler, former employee, in interview with author, February 2005.

87.
Interview with Dietrich Thieme, local historian, January 2005.

88.
Details of the hiring procedures, the work conditions, and the oath were provided to the author by former employees of the gun works, and other residents of Wiesa, during the author’s visits to the plant and the town in January and February 2005.

89.
Personal communication to author from Dr. Thomas Mueller, former curator of Waffenmuseum in Suhl.

90.
Interview with Peter, a former worker who asked that his surname be withheld. February 2005.

91.
Schreiber interview, February 2005.

92.
Personnel communication to author from Markku Palokangas, of the Finnish War Museum in Helsinki.

93.
Personal communication from Markku Palokangas and Robie Kulokivi, a Finnish arms researcher.

94.
Trial Report, Soviet Machine Carbine 7.62mm Kalashnikov (AK). Submitted to the Netherlands General Staff, August 1958. Copy provided to author by the Legermuseum, Delft, The Netherlands.

95.
Yugoslavia had fought off the Axis without the Red Army’s direct support, and it emerged from World War II without Soviet troops on its soil and with pride in the success of its partisans. Relations were further strained by the Soviet crackdown in Hungary in 1956 and the Soviet Union’s deception during the arrest of Imre Nagy.

96.
Personal communication from Branko Bogdanovic, a historian at the Zastava plant.

97.
Ibid. The Yugoslavs had no Soviet license and were on tricky diplomatic trade grounds as they manufactured weapons based on Soviet patterns. After Yugoslavia
was dissolved and the archives were assumed by Serbia, the identity of the nation that leaked its AK-47s did not become publicly known.

98.
The Zastava team hoped to make an entire family of arms based on the Kalashnikov system and experimented with means to modify the line, changing barrel lengths and adding features.

99.
Personal communication to author from Branko Bogdanovic.

100.
In time, Zastava would become a major Kalashnikov supplier and exporter, including export to the Pentagon’s proxies in Afghanistan and Iraq, where Yugoslav Kalashnikovs are abundant.

101.
Armstrong,
Bullets and Bureaucrats
, p. 152.

102.
La Garde,
Gunshot Injuries,
p. 33.

103.
At least two studies challenged the old guard: “Rifle Accuracies and Hit Probabilities in Combat” by Leon Feldman, William C. Pettijohn, and J. D. Reed, November 1960; “An Estimate of the Military Value and Desirable Characteristics of Armor Helmets for Ground Forces,” a report published in 1950.

104.
Those tests are covered in detail in the next chapter.

105.
ORDI 7-101,
Soviet Rifles and Carbines, Identification and Operation
(published by the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps, May 1954), p. 1.

106.
Report No. OTIO-471. The available documents accompanying the translation suggested that the United States military did not yet have possession of the new Soviet automatics and that technical intelligence officials had not yet tested and evaluated them. One line on the cover letter when the translation was submitted to the Army’s chief of ordnance noted that “the technical accuracy of the source data has not been verified,” indicating the military had not yet handled a specimen arm.