American Rifle - Alexander Rose [174]
Kalashnikov turned his sketch into a rough prototype and brought it to the Dzerzhinsky Ordnance Academy, where A. A. Blagonravov, a leading designer, had a look. He turned it down as too complex, but just as Harvey and Garand had been talent-spotted despite their initial failures, Blagonravov secured Kalashnikov a place at the Red Army’s Small Arms Range directorate. There, having laid aside his submachine gun prototype, Kalashnikov worked on a fresh idea: an automatic carbine. Carbines are short-barreled, lightweight rifles that fire rifle ammunition and that are ideally used when portability and close-range lethality are essential. At the time paratroopers, commandos, and guerrillas alike swore by them. They also tended, at least in their automatic mode, to be a German specialty.
German tacticians had found that while submachine gun pistol ammunition was too underpowered for anything but short-range fighting, rifle ammunition was too powerful and heavy for really anything but long-range shooting. In urban combat, they discovered, the distance between opposing forces was usually anywhere between 100 and 330 yards and most often within 200 yards. Hitler’s ballisticians began working on a compromise type of ammunition that would perform satisfactorily at these “intermediate” ranges. Their solution was called the PP Kurz (or “short”), otherwise known as a 7.92×33mm.
The figure “7.92” referred to the bullet’s diameter, basically making it a .323-caliber, while “33” was the length of the casing. Until the Kurz’s development, German rifle ammunition had measured 7.92×57mm—an altogether longer cartridge, in other words, and one with a higher recoil. By way of contrast, the submachine gun/pistol round was 9×19mm.
Thanks to the weight savings, the Kurz ammunition could be carried in great quantity and fired rapidly without overtaxing soldiers. The prototype gun that went with it was named the Maschinenkarabiner (“machine carbine”) 1942 and was designed by Hugo Schmeisser, a master gun-maker with strong and enthusiastic connections to the Nazis. The following year the thirty-round MKb 42 was renamed the Maschinen-pistole 43 (MP43) and then the MP44: Hitler’s quirky dislike of carbines (a corporal in World War I, he would have been issued a regular Mauser rifle) had prompted his staff to obsequiously christen it a “machine pistol” to disguise its carbine characteristics. Hitler himself finally tried one out in the summer of 1944 and was so impressed that he dubbed it a Sturmgewehr, or “assault rifle,” a name satisfying his demented dream of eternally attacking the world.
Hitler’s Sturmgewehr 44, precursor of the Kalashnikov AK-47.
Nearly half a million Sturmgewehr 44s (StG44) were issued to the soldiers who were desperately trying, like King Canute, to rebuff the advancing Red tide on the Eastern Front between July 1944 and May 1945. During the war enormous numbers of weapons fell into the hands of the Russians—as would Schmeisser himself, their inventor, at the end of it. Schmeisser would go on to work in Kalashnikov’s design-engineering department, returning to Germany in 1952.
The debt the AK-47 owes to Schmeisser’s StG44 is an obvious one—it even looks like it: Kalashnikov adapted his automatic carbine to fit the Soviet version of the Kurz intermediate cartridge, the 7.62×39mm, approved directly by Stalin. Not quite an innovator, Kalashnikov was more a magpie inventor, borrowing bits and pieces from other weapons, simplifying them, and then combining them to forge something new. The AK-47’s trigger mechanism and double-locking lugs, for instance, are actually based on those of Garand’s M1.
In 1947, following years of modification and gradual improvements, Kalashnikov’s masterpiece was approved