AK-47: The Weapon that Changed the Face of War (5 page)

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Authors: Larry Kahaner

BOOK: AK-47: The Weapon that Changed the Face of War
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During these testing years, Kalashnikov often found himself guided by the words of arms designer Georgy Shpagin, who developed the successful PPSh41 submachine gun: “Complexity is easy; simplicity is difficult.”
 
Kalashnikov’s gun also had to be easy and inexpensive to manufacture with current technology and capabilities. Again, he learned from the mistakes of Federov’s Avtomat, which could not be built rapidly or easily, drawbacks that sank it. Although milled or forged components were generally stronger, they were also more time-consuming and expensive to make. Kalashnikov’s prototype weapon would have a stamped receiver, the gun’s main frame.
 
After scores of modifications and adjustments, the new weapon was approved for production in 1947 with the name AK-47 (Avtomat Kalashnikova 1947), but work continued for several more years to improve the weapon before it would be officially issued to the Soviet army.
 
The AK-47 underwent more than a hundred modifications between 1947 and 1949. During that time, Kalashnikov had moved to Izhevsk Motor Plant 524, partially to get out of the shadow of more prominent designers who looked down upon the lowly sergeant who had moved up too fast and had not paid his dues with the obligatory decades of work. Izhevsk Motor Plant 524 was not an automotive plant but a front for an arms factory, the name designed to keep away Western spies now that the Communist satellite countries were established. Stalin’s blockade of Berlin had begun and the cold war was in full swing.
 
By the end of 1949, arms plants had turned out about eighty thousand AK-47s, but one major modification was necessary before it could be issued to all Soviet troops and their allies. Soviet metals technology still lagged and assembly plants could not manufacture stamped receivers in large numbers. Because Kalashnikov was not versed in production techniques, the job fell to other engineers, who changed the AK assembly lines to produce forged receivers. This made the gun heavier and more expensive to produce, but there was no choice. In gearing up for the cold war, these weapons had to be made quickly.
 
The AK was the ideal weapon for the Soviet Union, and the nation’s leaders built military and political doctrine around it. In the early days of the cold war, Soviet military planners believed that large land battles would take place between East and West on Russia’s western border similar to those of World War II. Soviet authorities envisioned the so-called encounter battle in which Soviet troops would meet the enemy head-on at various pinch points. Believing that they had the more maneuverable tanks and armored vehicles, the Soviets would attack the oncoming columns from the flanks, with infantrymen delivering thousands of rounds per minute. They would penetrate into enemy lines and overwhelm them similar to the blitzkrieg strategy. This type of close-quarter, massive infantry assault was the AK’s forte, especially in the hands of a typical Soviet soldier.
 
 
This AKM (“AK Modernized”) introduced in the 1950s is a simplified, lighter version of the original AK-47, the world’s most devastating weapon. Its banana-shaped magazine gives this gun a familiar silhouette that makes it the symbol of what an assault weapon should look like. It is the undisputed firearm of choice for at least 50 legitimate standing armies, along with untold numbers of disenfranchised fighting forces ranging from international insurgents and terrorists to domestic drug dealers and street gangs. Between 75 and 100 million have been produced. The vast majority of AK-47s in service around the world are actually AKM models.
U.S. Department of Defense.
 
The Soviet Union had a huge conscript army of poorly trained soldiers, many of whom could not read or write, and those that could often spoke diverse languages from the various Soviet states. This made standardized training difficult. Again, the AK suited the Soviet army because it was easy to fire, did not require a written manual or training, and rarely broke down.
 
In contrast to the U.S. military, which prided itself on having a pool of well-trained troops taught to make every shot count through intensive training and practice, the AK allowed the Soviets to put thousands of men into service quickly and with a respectable chance of killing the enemy. Because the AK employed an intermediate round, with less recoil than larger rounds, it allowed even inexperienced soldiers to control its accuracy during multiple bursts.
 
The Soviet military worked hard to keep the existence of the AK hidden from the West. Soldiers issued AKs carried them in special pouches that hid their shape. They were also instructed to pick up spent cartridges after maneuvers to keep the new ammunition secret.
 
Military and other official accounts differ on when the West learned of this deadly new weapon. Although the Soviets supplied arms to North Korea during the Korean conflict, it is not clear if they offered any AKs. U.S. Army historians make no mention of GIs seeing the weapon, and many Soviet records from the time are unavailable. Certainly, the Chinese, who supported the North Koreans with weapons and funds, would have welcomed the gun. Stalin was pleased to see China turn Communist in 1949 under Mao Tse-tung, and Mao’s brutal vision of war was eerily made to order for the AK. The Maoist strategy called for massive numbers of citizen soldiers armed with simple weapons to engage a technologically superior army in guerrilla and large-scale attacks. Sheer numbers, Mao believed, could win against any army no matter how sophisticated its weaponry. Even though the Soviet Union and Communist China chose different military tactics, they both benefited from the AK’s characteristics. China’s tactics were put into practice in Korea when U.S. and UN-sanctioned forces faced hordes of Chinese soldiers in many battles, leaving both sides with massive casualties. In 1953, after three years of brutal fighting and millions of dead, the hostilities ceased with a shaky armistice on the 38th parallel that continues today.
 
In 1956, events in Eastern Europe forced the Soviet Union to unveil the AK in public. The tumult began on October 23 with a peaceful demonstration by students in Budapest, Hungary, who demanded an end to Soviet occupation and the implementation of “true socialism.” The police made some arrests and tried to disperse the demonstrators with tear gas, but the crowds grew larger and more vocal. When the students attempted to free people who had been arrested, the police opened fire on the crowd. Within days, soldiers, government workers, and even police officials had joined the students.
 
Nikita Khrushchev, now leader of the Soviet Union, grew increasingly concerned about the situation and dispatched the Red Army to Hungary. They rode in tanks and in trucks, carrying their AKs. The demonstrators fought with whatever weaponry they could find, including Russian submachine guns, carbines, single-shot rifles, and grenades, much of it taken from liberated military depots. This was the Soviets’ first large-scale use of the AK, and it performed flawlessly in an urban environment where tanks became bogged down in narrow streets against crowds wielding Molotov cocktails. The revolt was squelched, with as many as fifty thousand Hungarians and about seven thousand Soviet soldiers killed.
 
According to U.S. Army archives, American intelligence officers took note of the AK but appeared not to be concerned. When the Springfield Armory, the U.S. military’s weapons maker since 1794, tested the Soviet weapon that year, they too appeared indifferent. It would not be until a decade later during the Vietnam War that American GIs would face the AK in action for the first time. These soldiers would pay dearly for their government’s abject failure to recognize the far-reaching significance of Kalashnikov’s simple weapon.
 
2
 
A REPUTATION BORN IN THE RICE PADDIES
 
BY THE LATE 1950s, the Soviet Union was employing the AK as a key component of its strategy to spread Communism throughout the world. In these early years of the cold war, both the Soviet Union and the United States tried to curry favor with undeveloped and uncommitted countries through sales and gifts of arms. Compared to the United States’ offerings of the M1 and later the M-14, the AK proved vastly superior.
 
Because of the AK’s ruggedness, it was well suited to severe environmental conditions and the lack of local gun repair facilities in poorer countries. In addition, because the AK was designed with a lot of play and looser tolerances—in the piston head, for example—it could fire ammunition with wide variations, including cheap knockoff cartridges produced locally or ammunition that had deteriorated in humid, jungle-like conditions, without misfiring or jamming.
 
The AK quickly became the weapon of choice among ragtag Communist-inspired rebel groups, especially in Africa and East Asia, where a backdoor route often was used. These groups were supplied by Soviet bloc countries instead of the Soviet Union to avoid direct confrontation between the world’s superpowers. The weapons also were affordable enough for money-strapped third world nations who could save face by paying for the arms themselves.
 
To further distribute the rifle, the Soviets offered technical expertise to build the AK as a so-called Gift to Fraternal Countries. These “fraternal countries” included Soviet bloc nations such as Bulgaria and East Germany, which began producing their own AKs in 1959, and Hungary, which had begun a year earlier. China and Poland got an early start with production in 1956, North Korea started in 1958, and Yugoslavia in 1964. The Soviets allowed wholesale production of AK without payments or licensing fees. The guns were easy and cheap to produce in large numbers, further extending its distribution.
 
For the most part, the Soviet Union and Soviet bloc countries were now producing an improved version of the AK called the AKM, which stood for AK Modernized. This rifle and subsequent improvements continued to be known by many people by the original AK-47 moniker. Most firearms experts today call the rifle and its many iterations the AK no matter what model they’re talking about.
 
The Soviet Union had finally geared itself for up-to-date sheet metal production technology, and the AKM was able to shed almost three pounds from the earlier milled version. This weight loss gave the gun an even greater cachet. Kalashnikov and his team also added a new trigger assembly component that increased the “cyclic rate” during automatic fire, meaning that less time elapsed between rounds, offering greater accuracy to inexperienced shooters.
 
Unlike the Germans and the Soviets, U.S. ordnance experts did not embrace the superiority of the intermediate round for modern combat. The bureaucracy was still wedded to the larger round, in this case the standard .30-06 cartridge (usually pronounced “thirty-aught-six”) that was used in the M1 Garand, the army’s standard issue. This view was not universally accepted, and there were intermediate-round boosters within the military establishment, but these voices were crushed by those with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, partially because of inertia and partly because of a cozy relationship between the government and the Springfield Armory, which had held a near-monopoly position on production of the M1 since the 1930s.
 
Historians looking back on this often are struck by the irony that the Soviet system, so bogged down in bureaucracy, was able to move ahead in the weapons area while the United States, with its history of technological innovation, lagged behind because of entrenched financial arrangements.
 
The M1, or Garand, as it was known for its designer John Garand, performed flawlessly during World War II, prompting General George Patton to call it “the greatest battle implement ever devised.” The M1 was simple and reliable and the first self-loading rifle to be adopted by any army as standard issue. Warfare was changing, however, and the M1 was falling behind. The rifle was heavy, clunky, and held only eight rounds in its magazine. Most important, it was not an automatic weapon.
 
Despite the growing evidence against the .30-caliber round, the Springfield Armory’s position and that of the army remained steadfast. This was seen most dramatically during the waning years of World War II when the army had begun working, albeit halfheartedly, on an automatic weapon. But the project was doomed before it got off the ground, because instead of seeking new designs and new ammunition as the Germans had done with the Sturmgewehr or the Soviets with their AK, the Ordnance Department insisted that it employ .30-caliber ammunition, which was too heavy for automatic firing by a lightweight gun. They insisted on a design criteria that disregarded the laws of mechanics. Other resistance to an automatic weapon came from military corners that saw automatic weapons as a waste of ammunition, insisting that U.S. soldiers firing large-caliber single shots carefully from long distances was in the best tradition of the U.S. military. Still others refused a radical new design because they wanted a weapon that could be built using M1 machinery. In reality, they wanted an improved and automatic version of the M1, an impossible task.

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