Alice Mayhew and David Rosenthal supported the too-long period of research for this book and offered patient encouragement throughout. As they waited, all manner of people helped.
Librarians, curators, collectors, historians, and independent and government researchers merit first mention. They found and offered materials I would not have turned up alone. Monique Howell at Indiana State Library and the staff at the Indiana Historical Society provided copies of Richard J. Gatling’s letters and other records related to his life and work; more records of the Gatling Gun Company were retrieved by archivists at the Connecticut State Library. Dr. Charles Bonsett of Indianapolis rendered further assistance. The staff of the Naval Historical Center at the Washington Navy Yard provided references on machine-gun design and development. Kay Livingston of the Stimson Library at the U.S. Army Medical Department Center and School located early published ballistic studies of Dr. Louis La Garde. Joseph Slade, who holds a portion of Hiram Maxim’s family papers, shared details of Maxim’s life. The Maine Historical Society and Dick Eastman helped untangle an apparent falsehood Maxim circulated about the reasons he did not risk military service with his countrymen in the American Civil War. Alan Swindale discussed a letter his grandfather had sent from the campaign in Matabeleland. The staff at the reading room of the Imperial War Museum in London assisted by copying soldiers’ diaries and reams of letters written at the Western Front in World War I. David Keough of the U.S. Army Military History Institute at the Army War College in Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, pointed me to documents related to American rifle and machine-gun training (as well as declassified intelligence reports from Vietnam).
Mary Ellen Haug, at the Marshall Center Research Library in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, located the United States government’s translation of Vladimir Zhukov’s hagiographic Cold War biography of Mikhail Kalashnikov. The librarians at the Museum of Artillery, Engineers and Signal Corps in Saint Petersburg and the Museum Complex of Small Arms of M. T. Kalashnikov in Izhevsk provided archival newspaper and magazine clippings that offered further insights into the official accounts of Kalashnikov’s life and the weapons bearing his name. The museum in Izhevsk also allowed a viewing of their video collection of many of Kalashnikov’s public appearances and statements. Max Popenker, founder of the website www.guns.ru, shared Soviet-era accounts of weapons designers and their work, including limited-edition and out-of-print references, that helped unpeel legends. Kristina Khokhlova assisted with translations. Lynne Seddon and the library staff at the College of Management and Technology College in Shrivenham, part of the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom, came in on weekends so that on visits from Moscow I could review the unsorted collection from the archives of Edward Ezell, a researcher of small arms and former curator at the Smithsonian Institution. When time ran short, they assisted with photocopying and shipped boxes of copies to my home.
Richard Jones, a curator of the Ministry of Defence’s Pattern Room at the Royal Armouries, Leeds, helped with weapons identification and referrals to written sources related to the evolution of firearms and ammunition design. A meeting with him shaped years of further reporting and reading. Lin Xu, after a chance conversation in the Pattern Room, found and translated references in Chinese that yielded fresh accounts of the assault rifle’s travels to China. He also explained technical aspects of small-arms operation and subtle shifts in Kalashnikov design in different countries over time.
Christian Ostermann, director of the Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, repeatedly referred me to historians and regional specialists in the former Eastern bloc. The center’s trove of translated records from government archives in the former Soviet Union and from Warsaw Pact nations were essential to understanding many events described in these pages. Janos Rainer at the Institute for the History of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution in Budapest searched the institute’s archive of photographs and found several that showed revolutionaries carrying captured Soviet Kalashnikovs. He then identified Jozsef Tibor Fejes and helped with gaining access to records in Budapest’s city archives related to Fejes’s trial and execution. Kati Tordas, a journalist and researcher, volunteered her time to sleuth out and translate details of Fejes’s case. Laszlo Eorsi, the indomitable researcher of the Corvinists, shared his material.
Guy Laron provided data and context on Soviet arms deals in the 1950s. Mathieu Willemsen of the Legermuseum in Delft, the Netherlands, provided copies of declassified studies of an early AK-47 that was smuggled out of the Soviet Union. His colleague at the museum, Casper van Bruggen, provided information related to one of the first known battlefield collections of an AK-47 by Western combat forces, and secured permission to reprint a photograph of one of the Dutch soldiers with one of the guns. Alexandra Hildebrandt, chairwoman of the board of the Mauermuseum in Berlin, looked into the question of weapons carried by the East German border guards. Dr. Thomas Mueller, formerly of the Waffenmuseum in Suhl and currently of the Bayerisches Armeemuseum in Ingolstadt, assisted with the research in Wiesa, including providing the names of workers and firms involved in Kalashnikov production. Daniel Oswald assisted with research and translation in the former East Germany, and interpreted interviews in Wiesa. Norbert Moczarski helped explore the question of Hugo Schmeisser’s involvement in AK-47 development in Izhevsk. Victor Homola and Stefan Pauly, in Berlin, assisted with details of East Germany’s secret production, and Stefan spent weeks of his time examining the deaths by Kalashnikov fire of German civilians trying to flee to the West.
Brady Dolim at the National Ground Intelligence Center in Charlottesville, Virginia, helped release records offering details of the first American exploitations of Soviet small arms and M1943 ammunition. Branko Bogdanovic, of Serbia, assisted with information related to the copying in Tito’s Yugoslavia of the Kalashnikov design. Markku Palokangas of the Military Museum of Finland met me in Helsinki and discussed his research into the Finnish acquisition of an early Polish AK-47 in the 1950s; Robie Kulokivi of WERETCO and Tapio Saarelainen, of the Finnish army, helped me further understand Finnish arming decisions and the origins of the Finnish Kalashnikov. Andreas Heineman-Gruder at the Bonn International Center for Conversion helped with information and contacts in Ukraine, which led to an understanding of small-arms stockpiles there; I was further assisted in Ukraine, with reports and pictures of the cache within Artemovsk salt mines, by people who asked not to be named. Hwaida Saad, in Lebanon, helped with research into Kalashnikov production in the Arab world.
William Stolz of the University of Missouri culled and copied reams of material from the records of Representative Richard H. Ichord. Among those records were copies of letters written to Congress and newspapers by First Lieutenant Michael Chervenak, and related correspondence and clippings. James Ginther, an archivist at the Special Collections Branch at the Library of the Marine Corps, provided digital copies of the 1967 and 1968 command records from Second Battalion, Third Marines, Chervenak’s unit in Vietnam. Richard Verrone, formerly of the Vietnam Archive at Texas Tech University, helped with early clippings and with oral histories. The Marine Corps records, when set against the Vietnam-era military maps assembled by the university, made it possible to trace the location of the firefight in which forty American rifles jammed, prompting Chervenak to write. The current chief executive at Colt Defense, retired General William Keys, discussed in an interview the core aspects of the infantry’s complaints about early M-16 performance in Vietnam. Keys was a Marine company commander in Vietnam; his Marines suffered from the problems documented in this book. Jeffrey Gould, with whom I served in a platoon in the First Marine Regiment in the 1980s and 1990s, and who is now an engineer at Picatinny Arsenal, in New Jersey, retrieved a reliability study of infantry arms conducted by the army in 1968, and arranged its public release. Gus Funcasta, also of Picatinny, offered smart insights and suggested smart questions. The staff at the National Archives assisted by providing access to records of the early M-16 program, which included the brief mention of the comparative study, using human body parts from India, of the lethality of the M-14, the AR-15, and the Kalashnikov. Thomas Blanton, of the National Security Archive, provided advice on how to obtain a copy of the report of those tests, which had been withheld from public view for more than forty years.
Veterans of Second Battalion, Third Marines in 1967 and 1968 spent long hours recalling their tours, and often providing records, photographs, and phone numbers or email addresses to other veterans of the same operations: Al Nickelson, Ed Elrod, Mike Chervenak, Chuck Chritton, Tom Givvin, Ray Madonna, Chuck Woodard, Dick Culver, Tom Tomakowski, Jack Beavers, Rod Radich, Dave Smith, Ord Elliott, Cornelio Ybarra Jr., Roy DeMille, David Hiley, Bill Snodgrass, Don Aaker, and Stan Maszstak. Larry Rottmann, once forbidden by the army of speaking publicly about the M-16’s failures, granted permission to reprint one of his poems.
Dr. Martin Fackler, the former army trauma surgeon and terminal-ballistics researcher, provided copies of many of his studies of wound ballistics, and patiently answered questions. Michael Rhode, an archivist at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, D.C., shared many referrals, opening a world of researchers and records explaining the changing ways that people have been wounded in war. Sanders Marble, senior historian at the Surgeon-General’s Office of Medical History, dug up references and introduced me to several doctors familiar with wounds and wounding. These include Dr. Dave Edmond Lounsberry, a coauthor of “War Surgery in Afghanistan and Iraq,” an invaluable public document for understanding the two most recent American
