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November 13, 1947: AK-47 is unveiled.
At the peak of the Second World War, the Soviet Union had put her men against German machines. Luckily for the communist nation, she had a lot of men to be sacrificed.The Soviet troops brought home the tales of the German Sturmgewehr 44, or StG 44, the first successful and widely produced design to use a new shorter cartridge, which permitted controllable automatic fire from a weapon more compact than a battle rifle.The StG 44 was the world’s first ‘assault rifle’; in fact Adolf Hitler was the first person to use the term ("Sturmgewehr" translates to "storm rifle" or "assault rifle"). The Nazi supremacy in gun mechanics prompted the Soviet Union to invest its own resources and people into developing an automatic weapon.Utilizing the 7.62 x 39mm M1943 cartridge, Alexey Sudayev designed the AS-44 assault rifle.Tested in 1944, it was found to be too heavy for widespread use. With the failure of this design, the Soviet Red Army temporarily halted its search for an assault rifle. In 1946, it returned to the issue and opened a new design competition. Among those who entered was Mikhail Kalashnikov. Wounded at the 1941 Battle of Bryansk, he had begun designing weapons during the war and had previously entered a design for a semi-automatic carbine.Though he lost this competition to Sergei Simonov's SKS, he pushed forward with an assault weapon design that drew inspiration from the StG44 and the American M1 Garand (though Kalashnikov always maintained his was an original design). Intended to be a reliable and rugged weapon, Kalashnikov's design (AK-1 & AK-2) sufficiently impressed the judges to advance to the second round.
Encouraged by his assistant, Aleksandr Zaytsev, Kalashnikov tinkered with the design to increase reliability across a wider range of conditions. The Americans first mocked its design, then they fought it in the battlefields of Vietnam, and then they started using it.
The compact automatic rifle that Stalin’s engineers unveiled in 1947 didn’t look like much of a gun. The result of a secret design contest, its components were simple, inelegant, workman-like. Its ammunition lacked the stopping power of other rifle cartridges. Its barrel was too short to achieve the range of standard infantry rifles. When the Pentagon finally got its hands on a few of the weapons in the 1950s, officials ridiculed the concept.But from this unheralded beginning, the Soviet Union’s modest little gun — dubbed the Avtomat Kalashnikova-47 — would become one of the most recognizable artifacts of the 20th century. Mikhail Kalashnikov passed away in 2013. In 2017, a statue dedicated to the inventor of the AK-47 rifle had to be altered after it was pointed out it featured the wrong gun. The embarrassing gaffe emerged three days after the memorial to Mikhail Kalashnikov was unveiled in Moscow.
The metal bas-relief of the 23ft statue was meant to show the AK-47 and other weapons supposedly designed by the Russian engineer who died in 2013. However, sculptor Salavat Scherbaov was forced to admit the statue had the Sturmgewehr 44 (StG 44) assault rifle used by the Nazis during the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. This incident refreshed the controversy regarding the invention of the AK-47.The AK-47 was invented in 1947 but critics claimed the engineer had actually copied the assault weapons design on the German rifle. Mikhail Kalashnikov became a national hero after the AK-47 entered service in 1949 and became a standard weapon for Soviet forces.
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Encouraged by his assistant, Aleksandr Zaytsev, Kalashnikov tinkered with the design to increase reliability across a wider range of conditions. The Americans first mocked its design, then they fought it in the battlefields of Vietnam, and then they started using it.
The compact automatic rifle that Stalin’s engineers unveiled in 1947 didn’t look like much of a gun. The result of a secret design contest, its components were simple, inelegant, workman-like. Its ammunition lacked the stopping power of other rifle cartridges. Its barrel was too short to achieve the range of standard infantry rifles. When the Pentagon finally got its hands on a few of the weapons in the 1950s, officials ridiculed the concept.But from this unheralded beginning, the Soviet Union’s modest little gun — dubbed the Avtomat Kalashnikova-47 — would become one of the most recognizable artifacts of the 20th century. Mikhail Kalashnikov passed away in 2013. In 2017, a statue dedicated to the inventor of the AK-47 rifle had to be altered after it was pointed out it featured the wrong gun. The embarrassing gaffe emerged three days after the memorial to Mikhail Kalashnikov was unveiled in Moscow.
The metal bas-relief of the 23ft statue was meant to show the AK-47 and other weapons supposedly designed by the Russian engineer who died in 2013. However, sculptor Salavat Scherbaov was forced to admit the statue had the Sturmgewehr 44 (StG 44) assault rifle used by the Nazis during the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. This incident refreshed the controversy regarding the invention of the AK-47.The AK-47 was invented in 1947 but critics claimed the engineer had actually copied the assault weapons design on the German rifle. Mikhail Kalashnikov became a national hero after the AK-47 entered service in 1949 and became a standard weapon for Soviet forces.
#WritcoQuote #writco #fact #invention
© All Rights Reserved
