The Gun (93 page)

E
ARLY
P
LAYERS

Richard Gatling—inventor, salesman, cunning businessman—shown late in life. He made a small fortune from the Gatling gun before it was displaced from markets. He died having borrowed money from his son. (
Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress
)

Hiram Maxim, accused trigamist, suspected draft dodger, and self-taught inventor from backwoods Maine, who decamped for London, where he invented the first true automatic weapon, the Maxim machine gun. His weapon changed war. Maxim guns were first used against men in lopsided fighting in colonial Africa and then helped turn World War I into a grisly hell. Maxim, the man, seemed untroubled by it all. He died proud. (
Photo from
My Life
by Hiram Maxim
)

. . . A
ND
B
ATTLEFIELD
S
UCCESS, AND
H
ORROR

John H. Parker, U.S. Army, one of the first officers in conventional infantry service to grasp the significance of machine gunnery. In the battle for Santiago in 1898, his hastily assembled Gatling detachment pummeled entrenched Spanish positions as the infantry advanced—a new use of rapid-fire arms that earned praise from then-colonel Theodore Roosevelt. Parker was seen as an attention-seeking radical, and mostly was ignored by the army he served. (
Photo from Parker,
History of the Gatling Gun Detachment of the Fifth Army Corps at Santiago)

The MG08. The primary German version of Maxim’s machine gun. Maxim and his partners sold his weapons and the rights to manufacturer them indiscriminately, including to nations that would become the enemies of his adopted country. The German military grasped what other Western armies did not, and the MG08 shaped the Western experience of World War I, wrecking untold lives. But it was still large—an instrument of the state, not of the individual man. (
Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress
)

A
N
E
VOLUTION, AND A
M
YTH
, T
AKE
T
HEIR
D
ECISIVE
F
ORMS

The celebrated face of a breakthrough arm. Mikhail T. Kalashnikov, the noncommissioned officer the Soviet Union credited with designing the AK-47, the descendants of which would become the world’s most abundant firearm. Shown here roughly two decades later, as a decorated Soviet hero. The rifle’s origins are more complex, and more interesting, than the Soviet fables that helped make Kalashnikov’s last name an informal global brand. (
Photo courtesy of the Ezell Collection, College of Management and Technology, UK Defence Academy
)

The guts of an AK-47. The weapon is of exceedingly simple design, and its durability is such that this early AK-47, manufactured in 1954 in Izhevsk, was still in use in 2010 in Marja, Afghanistan. Note the few parts and their intuitive relationship to one another; from top: the receiver cover, the recoil mechanism, the bolt carrier with gas piston. Note as well the external pitting, but the relative cleanliness inside. This was a fully functional rifle, made one year after Stalin died and still performing exactly as the Soviet Union intended more than half a century later in a war against the West. (
Photo by C. J. Chivers
)

T
HE
R
IFLE’S
I
NITIAL
S
PREAD

The Soviet Army shared assault rifles and the technical information to manufacture them with like-minded states. By the 1950s, the weapon was being produced in the Warsaw Pact countries, China, and North Korea. It was also shared with Egypt and other states. As its numbers grew, it became a symbol. Here, a Chinese-Albanian propaganda poster drew resolve from the rifle’s presence, an accent to the thick-necked, strong-handed optimism of the propaganda-poster genre. The caption reads: “Long live the long-lasting, unbreakable fighting friendship between the Chinese and Albanian people.”

Fuller accounts, and honest assessments, were much more complicated than the propaganda would have it. József Tibor Fejes, far right, the first known insurgent to carry an AK-47. Fejes obtained his prize after Soviet soldiers dropped their rifles during their attack on revolutionaries in Budapest in 1956. This photograph, taken after a cease-fire agreement, appeared in
Life
magazine, and drew the attention the ÁVH, the secret police, who tracked Fejes down. The Hungarian Revolution marked the AK-47’s true battlefield debut. (
Photo from the Budapest Municipal Archives
)

AN INSTRUMENT OF REPRESSION

(
Photo courtesy of AKG–ullstein bild / The Granger Collection
)