The Gun

if those bullets were heavy and large.

These were the kinds of questions and conversations in play overseas, questions that the Red Army had settled to its own satisfaction in 1943.

The data, and the studies, were not enough for the Pentagon of the 1950s. Not even the Americans’ closest allies could dissuade the generals from their antiquated point of view. Like their Soviet counterparts, British technicians analyzed the German 7.92 Kurz round and recognized its many qualities. They developed the .280 round as a prospective replacement for the long-standing British .303, a large cartridge that had been used all the way back to the slaughter at Omdurman. The British insights were smart but ill timed. Just as it grasped the direction that military rifle design was headed, Britain was not in a position to head there itself. A young but already stultifying bureaucracy inhibited its choices: NATO. Having experienced the maddeningly complicated logistics of World War II and the problems of multiple allies using multiple cartridges for weapons that performed the same tasks, Western powers wanted standardization. No one ally could select its own cartridge, because all the allies wanted to have the same round. A consensus was needed. A bureaucratic fight ensued, the result being that the Pentagon could not be convinced to switch to a significantly smaller round. NATO had no choice but to follow the United States’ lead. In 1953, the 7.62x51-millimeter round—a traditional cartridge closely resembling the cartridge that American weapons had used for decades—became NATO’s pick. Like the .276 Pederson twenty years before, the British .280 was dropped. The choice presented familiar problems. The United States Army went to work nonetheless on a heavy automatic rifle to fire its selection. It produced the M-14, which would become, for a few years, the standard battle rifle for GIs. To handle the heat and energy of the heavy cartridge, the M-14 had to be big. And it was big in every sense: Its version that could fire automatically weighed almost twelve pounds and stretched almost four feet long. Certainly it was powerful. Lethality tests would show that it produced an awesomely destructive effect on human skulls and legs.¹⁰⁴ But with this power came costs—not just the weight and length penalty, but punishing recoil and determined muzzle rise. Only the strongest soldiers could expect to control it on automatic, and then only briefly.

The decision had been made that bound the United States to an unwieldy automatic rifle for the next war, and bound NATO members to big rifles, too. The alternative choices made by the Soviet army were disregarded or ignored. Five years after the AK-47 became the Soviet standard infantry arm, American military manuals were silent on the weapons’ existence, even though it was a weapon American soldiers would inevitably face. The Ordnance Corps’ 1954 manual, Soviet Rifles and Carbines, Identification and Operation, made no mention of the rifle whatsoever, while noting that “the information presented herein is based upon the latest and best material available.”¹⁰⁵ The declaration verged on the inexplicable, considering that the Soviet Union had publicly acknowledged the AK-47’s existence in 1949. By the summer of 1955, the U.S. Ordnance Technical Intelligence Service, working from the Aberdeen Proving Ground, a testing center in Maryland similar to the Soviet center in Schurovo, began to catch up. It completed translation of the 121-page Soviet technical manual for the AK-47. The manual, published in Moscow in 1952 and stamped SEKRETNO, Russian for secret, had recently come into American possession.¹⁰⁶ The United States acquired at least one new Soviet assault rifle shortly thereafter.¹⁰⁷ In June 1956, the U.S. Army’s Technical Intelligence Office issued a classified report detailing the results of exploitation tests of an AK-47, which it labeled, incorrectly, a submachine gun. The army followed up seven months later with another classified report on what it called the SMG (submachine gun) Kalashnikov. The Americans were swift in one respect. They had obtained an AK-47 ahead of the Dutch, the Finns, and the Yugoslavs, and less than a year behind the Chinese. Those responsible for intelligence collection had done well. The analysts and ordnance officers were another story. The American army spent much of the next decade dismissing the AK-47 as a weapon of limited value—a submachine gun that was fine for bungling socialist conscripts, but beneath the far-shooting American infantry. The term submachine gun, repeated in military reports and official correspondence for years, was pejorative, as if the AK-47 did not deserve to be discussed in the same conversation with hard-hitting American battle rifles. Snickering was an accepted norm.

Then the army’s ordnance branch was shown up. On its September 1956 cover, GUNS magazine leaped ahead of official sources with a profile of the M1943 round. The article included a drawing of an AK-47, though the caption mislabeled it as the “Avtomat 54” and the “PPK-1954.” Notwithstanding these small errors, the writer, William B. Edwards, a well-known firearms correspondent of his time, understood his facts. He declared the intermediate cartridge “a bold step toward uniform ordnance supply.” He recognized the weapon’s lineage and noted its resemblance to the sturmgewehr. And he had a scoop within his scoop—he had fired the avtomat. Little was yet known in civilian circles about this weapon, but Edwards had managed to wrap his hands around one, and a selection of M1943 cartridges, too.¹⁰⁸ He proved a good judge of the AK-47’s merits. He liked how the weapon felt and predicted its eventual trajectory, calling it “a remarkable weapon for general issue.”¹⁰⁹ Edwards also noted that it was much easier to handle than the automatic rifles that NATO was wrestling with to fire the Pentagon’s larger round.

Firing full-auto, the gun handled very well. The straight stock and light charge produced little kick. The former Russian accent on muzzle brakes seems to have been corrected by using the new cartridge and while the gun jumped around, counter-recoil of the bolt and gas piston parts partly resisted the cumulative kick of full-auto weapons. The contrast between the Russian full-auto carbine and the FN[18] experimental rifle also tested by the U.S. for possible N.A.T.O. adoption was marked…. The light-cartridge machine carbines like the Avtomat 54 are more easily controlled.¹¹⁰

No matter. In 1956 it was already too late. Insularity reigned. The Pentagon and its ordnance officers had arrived at their decisions, and the United States military and NATO would proceed with bulky firearms based on old ideas. The American army continued to see itself as an outfit that ruled the battlefield with big rifles—big, powerful, flat-shooting rifles—with the knockdown power to flatten enemy soldiers beyond the limits at which enemy soldiers could be seen by the naked eye. It all made perfect sense, at least to anyone impervious to the evolving arts and sciences of tactics and rifle and cartridge design.

Infantrymen tend to know things that senior officers do not, and a clearer view of what soldiers wanted, once they saw their choices, emerged when Western units encountered the AK-47 in the field. By the early 1960s, had the American officers responsible for arming the troops been watching closely as war evolved, they might have noticed the reaction of Dutch soldiers on colonial duty in Asia. In 1961, in preparation for the escalating dispute between Indonesia and the Netherlands over the Dutch holdings in Western New Guinea, Abdul Haris Nasution, Indonesia’s defense minister, traveled to Moscow and purchased AK-47s for the army’s parachute commandos. Later that year, Indonesia invaded Western New Guinea, beginning a brief jungle war. On April 26, 1962, an Indonesian Special Forces team jumped into Dutch-administered territory, carrying the new rifles. In late July or early August, while in a patrol base near Kampung Wermera, the Indonesian team was discovered by B Company of the Forty-first Infantry, a Dutch unit led by First Lieutenant A. W. van der Steur. Caught off guard, the Indonesian commandos withdrew with such haste that some of them left their assault rifles behind. Lieutenant van der Steur’s soldiers took them, becoming perhaps the first Western forces to confiscate Kalashnikov rifles on the battlefield. The Dutch soldiers liked their captured arms. Until that day, B Company carried a mix of American M1 carbines, British Sten submachine guns, and Bren light machine guns, along with 9-millimeter pistols. They immediately recognized the Kalashnikov for what it was—a well-adapted hybrid, a weapon that blended the qualities of the weapons they already had and fulfilled many roles very well. They carried their AK-47s for the remainder of the campaign, during which they noticed something else: Even in the jungle, the weapon resisted rust.¹¹¹

These observations were all to be resonant very soon. The United States was returning to Asia for another war. Backed by the world’s premier economy and fortified by the belief that its sense of innovation was unrivaled throughout the world, the Pentagon had allowed the Soviet Union better than a fifteen-year head start on designing and organizing the production of a nation’s most basic fighting tool. The Pentagon faced a gun gap. Its unlucky soldiers and Marines would soon pay for it in blood.