The Gun

models unwieldy. Their ammunition was heavy, too, meaning that it was expensive and soldiers carried fewer rifle cartridges than they otherwise might.

Between the wars, Germany was the first nation to pursue fully the concept of a smaller round, though German officers quarreled, too, about the merits of reducing a cartridge’s power. The Treaty of Versailles officially had idled most of Germany’s arms industry, but officers and their friends in industry actively circumvented the treaty and surreptitiously continued research and manufacturing. As early as 1934 the Wehrmacht’s Army Weapons Office had secretly issued a contract for a smaller round to the GECO firm, which developed the M35, a cartridge that was 55 millimeters in total length. In 1935, once the M35 rounds became available, Heinrich Vollmer, a designer from Biberach, worked out a rifle to fire them. Vollmer’s rifle was almost thirty-eight inches long and weighed a little more than nine-and-a-quarter pounds, making it shorter than a standard rifle but within the typical weight range of rifles of the time. And it had a feature that had eluded everyone who had tried to design a rifle of this size: It could fire automatically, like a machine gun. The smaller cartridge had allowed Vollmer to solve the decades-old problem of miniaturization. In a short time, he had made a rifle that hammered out rounds at a rate as high as one thousand rounds a minute but did not weigh more than its single-shot cousins. Twenty-five of Vollmer’s prototypes were made by hand for testing. The Army Weapons Office liked the weapon. The army itself did not. It was not approved, which may have been due to a pair of concerns regarding production: The M35 round would have required extensive retooling at ordnance plants to be brought into mass production, and the rifle was complex in design and tedious to manufacture, making it less than ideal for soldiers and a military economy alike.²⁶

In 1938, the Weapons Office started again from scratch, issuing a contract to a second ammunition firm, Polte, which began its own tests for an intermediate round. This led to the 7.92 Kurz. Kurz means short. The word summarizes what Polte produced. In making the new cartridge, the firm had taken the 8-millimeter Mauser, the army’s standard high-powered rifle cartridge for its rifles and machine guns, with an overall length of 82 millimeters, and trimmed it, creating a version with a shorter case and shorter bullet length. The result was a similar but lighter bullet but within a cartridge that was 49 millimeters long from end to end. The Kurz offered an industrial advantage over the M35. Because it was based on the 8- millimeter Mauser, producing it would not require as many changes to factory lines to bring it into large-scale use. The result had other favorable qualities. In the most basic sense, a shorter cartridge case meant less propellant would be put into the cartridge to drive the bullet down the barrel and out the muzzle. This reduced the power of the round to roughly midway between pistol and rifle ammunition, though the 7.92 Kurz round leaned more toward a traditional cartridge’s power. It was also lighter in weight, which meant supply chains and individual soldiers could carry a larger number of rounds of ammunition into combat without increasing their load. Manufacturing it required fewer resources and cost less money. And because the cartridge had less energy, it had less excess energy, which meant it would produce less recoil. Any rifle that would fire it, if designed well, would be easier to handle than conventional rifles of the time, and might allow recruits to be trained in marksmanship more swiftly.

On April 18, 1938, even before the Kurz round took final form, Hugo Schmeisser, who had designed the Maschinenpistole 18 on a hurried schedule during World War I, was tasked with working out plans for a new class of rifle at his shop in Suhl. The rifle was to have an effective range of eight hundred meters and be capable of automatic or semiautomatic fire. It was also to be designed for ready mass production. The initial name would be Maschinenkarabiner—or machine carbine—a small rifle that would fill the gap between submachine guns and machine guns, and create new possibilities for infantrymen to mass firepower. Though the Germans were in a hurry, it took Schmeisser two years to make a prototype, during which time Hitler launched World War II. His first effort was machined from solid steel. The Weapons Office wanted a weapon with components fashioned from stamped sheet metal, which would be cheaper and trim manufacturing time. Schmeisser had limited experience in sheet- metal processes, and as the German army was busy fighting in Europe, another firm, Merz in Frankfurt, was assigned to rework his prototype in stamped metal. At last, in summer 1942, the Merz gun works, working with Schmeisser, delivered fifty prototypes of the Maschinenkarabiner 42. By then Hitler had invaded the Soviet Union, too.

Schmeisser’s automatic rifle was the world’s first intermediate-power automatic rifle to be approved for mass production and general issue to the infantry—a medium-range weapon firing at rates that rivaled machine guns and could be managed by a single soldier. The rifle was compact and had modest recoil and limited muzzle rise. And it was versatile. It could be fired one shot at a time or on automatic, as each soldier and situation required. A concept with scintillating military promise had been given shape. Schmeisser had won a race; another firm, Carl Walther, also tried to offer a prototype, but it did not produce as many by the deadline. Schmeisser’s model went into action. Most of the prototypes were sent to the Russian Front for combat trials, and several were used against the Red Army in early 1943 by a battle group under the command of Major General Theodor Scherer. The group survived a months-long encirclement after Russian ski troops severed its supply lines in Cholm. One account credited the new weapon’s firepower with helping the Germans to keep the Russians back. “It was this circumstance that made it possible for them to hold out,” the account read, “until they were relieved.”²⁷ Germany tooled up for production, though critics in the military complained about integrating a new class of ammunition and the risk of complicating supply. The next version of the gun mixed subterfuge with refinement. Hitler had discovered that the army was experimenting with an intermediate weapon and was firmly opposed to it. As a veteran of World War I, including the Battle of the Somme, he retained a commitment to powerful cartridges. To avoid the Fuhrer’s scrutiny, the weapon’s proponents relabeled the modified arm as a Maschinenpistole, and dubbed it the MP-43. This version merged elements of the Schmeisser and Walther prototypes, and slowly went into production under its misleading label. By early 1944 production had reached 5,000 pieces a month, and 9,000 of the rifles were made in April. The Wehrmacht was clearly satisfied. Production was projected to reach 80,000 rifles a month by 1945—a pace nearing a million a year—signaling that the Wehrmacht planned to distribute its invention widely.²⁸ By then Hitler had swung round and become a strong supporter. He renamed Schmeisser’s automatic yet again: the sturmgewehr, or storm rifle, which in translation became assault rifle, the designation that stuck. A new class of firearm had been named.

Schmeisser’s weapon was short-lived in battle; Germany’s defeat ensured that. But in the long competition among nations for perfected infantry arms, it marked a critical moment: the arrival of the reduced-power automatic rifle. The sturmgewehr was only an inch beyond three feet. Like a submachine gun, it cycled out blistering automatic fire, not with short-range pistol ammunition, but with bullets that traveled at more than twenty-two hundred feet per second and had the power to incapacitate a man beyond the ranges ordinary to modern combat. It was not a full machine gun; it had no large-capacity feeding device, no tripod or sled or traversing equipment that would enable it to be firmly emplaced and used for fixed fire—the sort of accurate, long- range menace that allowed the Maxim gun and its descendants to rule the open ground of Omdurman and the Somme. But it was an exceptionally versatile firearm, well suited for all single-shot shooting at a rifleman’s typical combat ranges, and its automatic fire made it ferocious for close combat and effective for suppression fire to cover an infantry unit’s movement. As German units fell back late in the war, the sturmgewehr was picked up by Soviet troops. The Red Army grasped the significance of the weapon falling from its enemies’ hands. A shift in rifle capabilities had occurred. The Red Army set out to replicate it, but with a more fully considered gun.

The first Soviet step was not to make an assault rifle. It was to make a cartridge comparable to the Kurz. Exactly when the Red Army began to work on its own intermediate bullet remains an open historical question,²⁹ though its interest predated the sturmgewehr. In czarist times, an armorer and inventor, Vladimir G. Fedorov, understood that overcoming the design problems inherent in automatic rifles would require developing a smaller cartridge. His experiments demonstrated the difficulties of using high-powered cartridges in smaller weapons. Little came of his ideas. His work stalled. In Soviet times, when denouncing imperial figures was welcome and safe, he blamed the lack of enthusiasm for his work on Czar Nicholas II. The czar, Fedorov said, had spoken openly against an automatic rifle at a lecture at an artillery school in 1912, and worried aloud about the amount of ammunition it would consume. The czar’s opinion, Fedorov said, was influential, and became “widespread at the time amongst the high-ranking military commanders. That was why armourers, myself included, could not obtain noteworthy assistance in work on the automatic rifle.”³⁰ The truth was more complicated. Soviet authorities did not offer much initial support either. In the 1920s, the Red Army discontinued production of Fedorov’s rifle and stopped purchases of the slightly smaller Japanese cartridges it fired. For two more decades the Soviet military committed itself to its own traditional rifle cartridge, the