I know you got soul: machines with that certain something (9 page)

Firstly, I was horrified by the exchange between the pilots who hadn’t heard which runway they were supposed to land on. ‘Oh, just follow the bloke in front,’ said the captain to his young apprentice in the right-hand seat. Then we hit a flock of birds. ‘Got ’em,’ said the captain, but I hardly registered because I simply couldn’t believe how much effort the co-pilot was having to make. He was bathed in sweat as he manhandled the big jet out of that sticky, sultry sky.

Nowadays no passenger is allowed on a flight deck, unless you’re away from America and in the free world, and I’m glad about that. I prefer to sit in blissful ignorance of how hard it is to land what is basically a big airborne bison.

And I don’t want to see the pilots having a row or looking at their watches and tutting. I want to believe I’m at the mercy of a machine. Because when that machine is a 747 there’s nothing to worry about. Nothing to worry about at all.

It’s the winter of 1942 and, after a thunderous trip across western Russia, the German army has arrived in the city of Stalingrad, still hopeful that they’ll be in Moscow for Christmas.

However, Stalin decided this was far enough. Maybe he made this decision for tactical reasons. Stalingrad was the key to Russia’s oil fields. Or maybe it was vanity. It was after all the city that bore his name. But whatever, he decided that, come what may, the Nazis would go no further.

As blizzards and biting cold descended on the ruined city, men, women and children from all over Russia were sent on trains to this hellhole and ordered to fight to the death. If you retreated, you were shot. If you failed to win a skirmish, you were shot. If you deserted, you were shot. If you were captured, you were not shot. But if you escaped and returned to your own lines, you were. Because you might have become a German spy.

Oh, and if you stood your ground and fought,
you were shot. And to make matters slightly worse, half the new recruits being sent into the battlefield couldn’t even shoot back because guns were in such short supply. You had to wait for a comrade who did have a gun to be shot and then nick his rifle.

As we all know, the superhuman Russian effort did eventually win the day. But the losses were simply gigantic, a point that was not lost on a young tank sergeant called Mikhail Timofeevich Kalashnikov.

At the time he was recovering in hospital from injuries sustained in another, earlier battle. And that meant he had time to reflect on the lot of his fellow soldiers. And what he decided was that in urban warfare the Germans had a massive advantage because they had machine guns. And the Soviets, largely, did not.

With a rifle you can hit a small target from many hundreds of yards away. With a machine gun you cannot. You would, in fact, have a hard job hitting a house from the front gate – the bullets go pretty much everywhere except where you’re actually aiming. So, with a rifle you can kill one man. But with a machine gun you can make a whole army keep its head down.

Kalashnikov had already distinguished himself by inventing a device that counted the shells a tank had fired and now, as he recuperated from his wounds, he set about designing something that could rival the Germans’ MP44. A hand-held sub-machine gun. Something that came to be known as the AK47.

It wasn’t actually ready, as the name implies, until 1947, two years after Hitler’s penis had been buried under the Kremlin, but that didn’t stop it becoming far and away the most successful gun in the whole of military history.

No patent was ever taken out, which meant anyone with a foundry could set up shop and make one too. And they did. AKs were produced all around the world in such vast numbers that so far 70 million have been sold. And that in turn means that one person in 90 across the whole planet has got one. And as a result of that, it is said that the AK47 has killed more people than the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Think of any conflict since 1947 and it’s a fairly safe bet that at least one of the sides has been using AK47s. The warlords in Mogadishu, the Vietcong in Vietnam, the Republican Guard in Iraq. This
half-timbered gun has been a 50-year thorn in Uncle Sam’s side.

Interestingly, however, it doesn’t actually do anything especially interesting. You get a 30-round magazine that fires normal 7.62mm ammunition at a rate of 600 bullets per minute. That gives you enough ammo for a three-second burst, which is about average. And there’s nothing unusual about its range either. Reckon on 1,100 yards or so.

In fact it even has a few design defects, like it weighs nearly 10 lbs. That doesn’t sound like much but you try carrying it around all day, in a jungle. Then there are the sights, which are too far forward on the barrel. But worse is the safety switch. To get it from ‘safe’ to ‘single shot’ you have to go through the ‘fully automatic’ setting. And as you move it, it gives away its Russian origins, and your position, by going ‘clack’.

So there you are, trying to ease the safety off quietly for a nice, clean shot. But as you do so the target hears the mechanism and fires. You then fire back only to find you’re in fully automatic mode and that you’ve missed.

So why then, if it’s heavy, flawed and nothing special, has it been such a hit? Well, the simple
answer is its simplicity. In a competition to find the least-complicated machine ever made, it would tie in first place with the mousetrap.

Pull off the back and all you’ll find is the hammer and a piece of bailer twine to operate it. This is a gun, then, that’s ideal for the jungle-based freedom fighter. You can bash it, crash it and bury it for months in a swamp and it will still work. The total reliability is what made the AK such a phenomenal hit. Oh, and the fact you can buy a used one from an Albanian market trader today for $3.

I dare say some of those silver-plated AKs you see slung over the shoulders of the soldiers in West Africa are a little more. But not much. I mean, the soldiers in question are usually only five years old, which means they’ve bought their guns, and had them customised, out of their pocket money.

Once, while I was working in Switzerland, a Hell’s Angel offered me a brand-new AK47, still in its greaseproof wrapping paper, for £300. He would even have thrown in a thousand rounds of ammunition for good measure.

‘Here,’ he said, ‘try it out.’ And so I did, firing at a railway sleeper maybe 60 yards away at the
bottom of a quarry. The effect was astonishing. The bullets smashed the sleeper into two pieces that ended up ten feet from one another. So much, I remember thinking, for those Hollywood heroes who say ‘ow’ when they’re hit.

Now, I know I should have been revolted by the power of this weapon. I know I should have given it back and gone on my way. But my God, what a tool. I was filled with a fervent wish to take it home and even thought about ways it might be smuggled past customs. Then I could prowl around the house at night, hoping to find a burglar.

Imagine that. Imagine squaring up to some spotty sixteen-year-old youth who’s come for the video recorder, him with his potato peeler and you with an AK47. Oh the joy.

The strange thing is that no other gun would do really. I’ve fired the British Army’s SA80 and the American M16. I’ve even had a go with an old Sten, and a Maxim and, best of all, a Squad Automatic Weapon, which pumped so much tracer into the Arizona desert the scrub actually caught fire.

Each one struck me as being nothing more than a delivery device. You pull the trigger, there’s a
lot of noise and whatever you’re aiming at isn’t the same shape any more. They are like cookers – good at doing what they do but unless you’re planning on shooting someone in the face, no more exciting than boiling an egg.

The AK is different. There are children in the world today named Kalash, in its honour. You will find images of it in national emblems. And closer to home, the only private number plate I’ve ever even half considered buying is ‘AK47’. I think it would give my Volvo a bit more cred.

So what’s the deal then? Why does the AK rise above all the heat and pieces? Why has it got soul when, undoubtedly, the others do not?

Well, it was born amid unimaginable strife and suffering so it has genuine working-class, hard-man origins. And unlike Cilla Black, who bangs on about her harsh Scouser upbringing from the luxury of her Thames-side mansion, the AK has never sold out. You never find an AK in the pampered hands of an American soldier, boasting about how it was brought up in a cave in Saigon. It was born to help the underdog and that’s what its been doing, non-stop for nigh on 60 years.

Then we have Che Guevara, possibly the coolest man ever to have walked the planet. Yes,
his real name was Ernest, but he managed to make James Dean and Steve McQueen look like a couple of nancy boys. I loathed the man’s politics but I loved the T-shirt.

Even his beard worked because you knew it wasn’t grown for any of the usual reasons – vanity, or laziness or insecurity. It was grown because he lived in a wood and there was no water with which to shave. There are people today who spend a fortune trying to look good, but he managed to look better using only a beret and a boiler suit. I bet he had a lot of sex. I also bet he had an AK47.

It is, after all, one of the design classics. You could frame one and hang it on the wall, and no one would want to know why you had done such a thing. Except the police perhaps.

Design is rarely art because design, when all is said and done, exists purely to make money. And yet the AK was never conceived to do that. In fact Mikhail Kalashnikov lives today on nothing more than a Soviet Army pension. And that’s why his most famous creation can be called an art form. And that’s what gives it soul.

In May of 1915 the Kaiser sanctioned what was possibly the most idiotic military plan in the history of warfare. He gave the go-ahead for a fleet of Zeppelin airships to mount a series of bombing raids on London and the industrial cities of Britain.

As bombers go, the Zeppelin did have one or two shortcomings. For instance, most of the hydrogen gas that filled the balloon was used to lift the craft itself off the ground. If the captain had had a big lunch, it could tip the balance and the whole thing would simply refuse to budge. This meant it could only carry a tiny number of bombs.

Also, because it was the size of a battleship and moved at no more than 40 mph just a few hundred feet from the ground, it was a fat, juicy and highly explosive target for gunners on the ground.

Happily, for the crews on board at any rate, the British placed their guns round obvious targets,
factories and so on. But because Zeppelins were so hard to navigate they were always miles off course. After a few months the British government really did believe the Germans were deliberately bombing fields to destroy crops and livestock.

They weren’t. They were just missing. On one raid a crew bombed the bejesus out of a Scottish castle, believing it to be a Yorkshire coal mine. On another a Zeppelin commander reported back that he’d wrecked Birmingham, when in fact he’d spent the night raining fire on Arras in northern France.

In the very first raid though, on the fishing ports Great Yarmouth and King’s Lynn, there had been a modicum of success. Two people on the ground were killed, the first British civilians ever to die in an air raid. This had sent the press into a frenzy. ‘The Coming of the Aerial Baby Killers,’ screamed one headline. And this is exactly the reaction Germany was after.

The idea was that these huge monsters would strike such terror into the hearts of the Britischer pig dogs that we’d lose the stomach for a fight and give in immediately. But they didn’t even succeed in doing that.

This was shortly after Gallipoli, the First World
War was in full swing and the casualties were being measured not by the thousand but by the million. So, it’s reasonable to assume that if a nation could withstand that, the systematic destruction of every able-bodied man in the land, then it’d certainly be able to handle the attention from the most inappropriate bomber of all time.

And so it turned out to be. In the first raid over London, far from cowering in underground stations, people crowded onto the rooftops for a better view of these astonishing machines. The House of Commons abandoned its business so members could rush outside for a better look. And George Bernard Shaw wrote to a friend saying, ‘What is hardly credible, but true, is that the sound of the Zepp’s engines was so fine, and its voyage through the stars so enchanting, that I positively caught myself hoping next night that there would be another raid.’

Frightened? Terrified? Captivated more like.

And it’s not hard to see why. It wasn’t the sheer size of the things, or their majesty as they made their statesmanlike progress through the forest of searchlight beams. It wasn’t the drone of their Maybach engines either, or the whirr of their 17-foot mahogany propellers. No, we loved them
because there’s nothing we like more than the plucky chap who comes in second. The British adore a heroic failure. And the Zeppelins were more heroic and more hopeless than just about any machine ever made.

Count Ferdinand Von Zeppelin was neither an aeronaut nor an engineer. But while he was in America, during the Civil War, this German aristocrat and officer was taken up in a tethered observation balloon. And loved it. Back at home he scribbled all kinds of notes about how such a thing might be the key to flight. Steam power had been tried but it was too heavy for the gas to lift. Electric power was even worse because the batteries weighed half a ton each. It would be 25 years before a realistic form of propulsion would come along. The internal combustion engine.

Using vast chunks of his own money, the Count started work on LZ1. It was huge: 420 feet long and 38 feet in diameter, but despite the bulk it could only lift 27,000 lbs. And when you deducted the aluminium frame and the two marine engines from that you were left with a payload of just 660 lbs. Just one American, in other words.

Nevertheless, in July 1900 it did actually fly. Not well enough to impress the onlookers though.
The power output from the engines was less than you’d get from a VW Beetle and it bent like a banana once it was off the ground. The press said it had no value. The army people said they could see no use for it at all. And so, with all his money gone, the Count broke the ship up and sold the parts as scrap. He said afterwards his heart was broken.