American Rifle - Alexander Rose [173]
Here the Western Cartridge Company enters the story. That December it acquired Winchester with all “its properties, assets, business and good will” for $8,122,837.67. It was a seemingly strange and risky purchase, but in taking over the tarnished, bankrupt firm, Western had bought control of the country’s largest owner of patents covering firearms and ammunition for pennies on the dollar. Western Cartridge traced its roots to Franklin Olin, an engineer who had been born in Vermont and founded a blasting-powder company in 1892 in East Alton, Illinois. Six years later Olin had expanded into making small-arms ammunition and formed the Western Cartridge Company. The Winchester fire sale brought an influx of investment but on a limited, cautious basis. Until the brand could be revived, the company could afford few extravagances... such as hiring too many green designers like Earle Harvey.8
Harold Brown, a friend of Pugsley’s at Remington, offered Harvey an apprenticeship, and the young man, having realized that lecturing undergraduates on the delights of Chaucer and Dickens was never going to be in his future, quickly accepted it. His first day at work was on February 15, 1937, and he finished his apprenticeship eighty-two weeks later, soon after joining Savage Arms Company as an engineer. By this time, owing to Hitler’s belligerence and the waning of the Depression, the arms business was emerging from its decades-long doldrums. In January 1940 Harvey was detailed to the team making the tools, gauges, and fixtures required for the Thompson submachine gun. It was a living, but Harvey soon became bored with working with other people’s designs and longed to join a research department that would allow him to innovate.
Finally on October 12, 1941, after myriad imprecations and back-channel maneuverings, Harvey secured a position at Springfield. Still a junior man, he was no Garand, not yet, and had certainly not been awarded his own workshop and staff. Instead, until March 1945 he punched his ticket sketching schematics for improving the M1’s gas cylinder operation. In that month he received his reward, bestowed on him by an appreciative Studler: he was to be transferred to the latter’s R&D office at the Pentagon. Harvey’s timing was fortunate. Within the year Garand’s T20 had been kiboshed, and Studler wanted a man who could take command of his secret new T25 rifle project.9
Studler intended to make the best gun in the world. It had to be, for the ambitious small-arms chief knew he was facing unexpected competition from the NATO allies, specifically Britain and Belgium. What he didn’t know was that in 1947 in the Soviet Union a former army sergeant named Mikhail Timofeevich Kalashnikov was finishing work on the prototype of a new weapon called the AK-47.10
Kalashnikov had been born in November 1919, the son of Siberian peasants. Mechanically minded, he was a keen lock-picker, and coming into illegal possession of an American-made Browning pistol, he spent hours dismantling and refitting its intricate, solid parts. Drafted into the Red Army, he was assigned to a tank company and severely wounded in September 1941. While recuperating in hospital, Kalashnikov sketched his vision of an ideal instrument of revenge against the Nazi hordes.
It would be a rapid-fire submachine gun firing pistol-sized cartridges that was simple enough for an untrained, conscripted peasant to just pick up and use. It would also be cheaply produced out of machine-stamped steel and then riveted or welded together by the Soviet Union’s beleaguered factories. Unlike the American Ordnance Department with its luxurious, hand-engineered