Did Schmeisser Design the Kalashnikov?
If Kalashnikov was a real gun designer, how come in his long career he never invented anything that wasn't based on his "original" system.http://www.guns.com/2012/09/05/hugo-schmeisser-assault-rifle/After WWII, as General Designer of small arms for the Soviet Army, his design subordinates included the Germans Hugo Schmeisser, designer of the StG-44, and Werner Grüner (of MG 42 fame) who was a pioneer in sheet metal embossing technology in the 1950s.
Most Americans, to say nothing of firearms aficionados, are familiar with well-known gun makers such as John Moses Browning and Samuel Colt, yet few gun nuts know the role that Hugo Schmeisser had in firearms development. To put it in perspective, Hugo was to battle carbines and submachine guns, what John Browning was to handguns and machine guns.[snip]
The StG44
By 1942, the German Army, armed largely with bolt-action Mauser rifles, was neck deep in alligators fighting against US troops with semiautomatic M1 Garands and Soviet troops with semiautomatic SVT-40s. This led to a push to go to the next level in firearms development.
The German Army did a study in their recent combat actions and discovered that the majority of firefights they were encountering were in the 50-200 meter range. For this, 9mm submachine guns were inadequate and 8mm Mauser bolt action rifles both too slow, squandering the effectiveness of the long range round. The answer was a rapid-fire weapon that used an Ak-47 vs StG44.intermediate-sized round. Thus began development of the StG44.
If Hugo Schmeisser is thought of as an artist who, instead of paints or clay, molded his artwork from steel, wood, and plastic, then his masterpiece was the StG-44. This design, perfected over two years and numerous prototypes, used metal stampings for ease in mass production. Firing from a 16.5-inch barrel (similar in size to today’s M4), the rifle was only 37-inches long overall. Its 7.92x33mm round is ballistically similar to today’s 7.62x39mm AK round. Being fully automatic, the rifle would fire some 500 rounds per minute at a controllable rate that made short bursts possible for trained soldiers. Once adopted, it was christened the Sturmgewehr (Storm-rifle) and over 400,000 were handed out to German troops in the final days of World War II. Today it is generally thought of as the first successful assault rifle.
to be fair US, UK and German squads had roughly equivalent fire power at the start of the war.
The US squad had the firepower widely distributed, (with one BAR per squad in a fire support fire team and two Thompson SMGs in the scout team, usually attached to the assault fire team for close quarters assault) the German squad had the firepower concentrated (in the MG-34 team). The UK squad had the firepower distribution moderately concentrated.
After the M-2 Carbine or STG-44 was issued, the US and German fire teams were superior.
The Russians had few machine guns, but entire companies with Mosin Nagant rifles vulnerable to close quarters attack with high rate of fire, or companies with Ppsh-41/43s vulnerable to high rate of fire attacks at long range respectively.
Bravery against a bullet is a tough advantage to exploit. Soviets lost over a million 2nd Lieutenants in WWII.
Germans also did a study, to see what caliber and velocity round is necessary to make a man die quickly.
They took prisoners out of concentration camps and shot them, and measured the time for them to die. The results had a range, based on where the victim was shot. They determined that 7mm and 2400 fps were the smallest round that had rapid effects. The 7x33 kurz round was developed, in part based on that study.
They changed to 7.92x33 because they made their bullets out of lead wire, and changing the caliber would have slowed production in the middle of the war.
Here is a question: Can you trust people willing to commit mass murder to do good science? If they were a little ethical, they would have done the minimum murders necessary to keep their own heads off the block, and lied as much as possible in their reports.
By comparison, in America, Thompson went to the stockyards to shoot cattle to examine the effectiveness of various pistol bullets. Candidates were the .38, .30 Mauser, and .45 Colt. Again, the range of results was wide, and Thompson got tired of it within a few days. He recommended the .45 caliber round, but that didn’t seem to be justified by the experimental results.
One of the stopping power enthusiasts reported a French study the “Strasbourg Goat” test. It was widely debunked, as it did not show the wide range of results that would be expected from shooting bullets into a complex target. What it did show is the lovely straight lines and good ‘R’ values that would be expected if someone with a bias was to synthesize their data.