American Rifle - Alexander Rose [175]
For Moscow’s postwar conscript army, the AK was perfectly suited. As its users were so expendable that they didn’t even have to know how to clean it, the AK-47 didn’t require an instruction manual; brutally utilitarian in its lines and cheaply welded together, the weapon perfectly exemplified the Stalinist worldview.
The Western Europeans too took their postwar cue from the StG44. In 1948 the British were the first, with the futuristic-looking EM-2, an experimental assault rifle built on a “bullpup” design (in which the chamber and magazine are behind the trigger and grip, thereby extending barrel length relative to overall weapon length). Intended to replace their obsolete Lee-Enfield rifles, whose basic pattern had been in service since 1902, the EM-2 used a .280-caliber, intermediate-range round.12
The British optimistically sent an army team to visit Colonel Studler, to sell him on the virtues of their .280 and, not uncoincidentally, their EM-2 rifle, which they hoped might be selected as a common NATO rifle. Not a chance. Studler, being an old Ordnance hand, could pain-fully recall the time in 1932 when General Douglas MacArthur, still alive and kicking (if busy reforming Japan), had come down hard on any suggestion of downshifting to a smaller caliber. Besides, he had his own pet .30-based T25 project in motion.
Brusquely, the Ordnance chief rejected both EM-2 and .280, saying that the latter was not a “full-power” round suited to the long-range shooting tradition of the U.S. Army, and sent the British on their way.13 “There is something we British do like about you [Americans],” said a miffed Brigadier Aubrey Dixon, in charge of the visiting team. “When you state a conclusion, it is quite definite, and there can be no mis-understanding.”14 Less understatedly, one of his colleagues complained, “We’ve been Studlered again.”15
The cold reception received by the British team raised hackles in London, where Prime Minister Clement Attlee’s Labour Party was divided between a Soviet-sympathizing faction and a working-class, patriotic wing. The former suspected (correctly, as it turned out) that the arms-standardization talks and the visit to the United States were a cover for organizing an anti-Moscow alliance; the latter were determined to buy British to restore national pride and keep jobs at home.16
As the NATO talks proceeded in the late 1940s, the kerfuffle over Studler’s haughtiness disappeared—at least publicly. The British quietly developed their EM-2; the Americans, their T25. Sooner or later, both sides knew, there would be a showdown. Earle Harvey, unfortunately, was finding it difficult to proceed at anything even approaching a snail’s pace. He was continually called off to perform other tasks, and he knew Springfield’s production teams disliked the T25, for it could not be built on the existing M1 equipment. Worse, Studler had ordered him to reduce the prototype’s weight to 6.8 pounds—nearly three pounds less than the M1’s. It was a tall order, and a ridiculous one. When firing .30 ammunition on automatic, such a light gun would buck uncontrollably, and the recoil would leave soldiers’ shoulders black and blue. The problem was insoluble. American ammunition had been developed for single-shot and semiautomatic use, not for firing long bursts. Something had to give. In the end it would be the T25 itself, once Studler realized he had made a colossal mistake.
In 1949–50, as rumors filtered back to the Pentagon that the British wanted to hold a trial between their EM-2 and Springfield’s finest, Studler backed rapidly