The Kalashnikov assault rifle and the M-16 are the brightest and most famous representatives of the automatic rifle family. At the same time, the AK was born in 1949, and the Americans were able to release their M-16 only in 1964. How did it happen that one of the leading military industries in the world lagged behind the USSR and even Germany in this matter by more than ten years?
It is not so easy to say who was actually the first in the matter of creating an automatic rifle for the army. Since in reality neither the Soviet AK, nor the German StG were pioneers here. The idea of an automatic rifle appeared in the second half of the 19th century. It was then that the first prototypes of magazine rifles appeared with the ability to conduct automatic fire. However, due to the overall complexity of the imperfection of the design and the insufficient development of production, there was no question of any serial production of such weapons. Nevertheless, experiments to create an automatic rifle were actively carried out until the First World War in all leading industrial countries.
In 1917, the American designer John Moses Browning creates an experimental automatic rifle "Browning Automatic Rifle". However, after a number of improvements, the American BAR will occupy an intermediate position in the classification between an automatic rifle and a light machine gun. Around the same time, an experimental Fedorov automatic rifle was created in the Russian Empire - one of the most successful full-fledged representatives of the family of automatic rifles. More attention will be paid to the development of this family of weapons in the USSR. So in 1936 an experienced ABC-36 was born. There were many examples of such weapons in the pre-war period. However, all these automatic rifles were very different from those that modern people are used to seeing. Therefore, today it is customary to refer them to the conditional "first generation".
The development of the design idea continued into the Second World War. However, due to the imperfection of automatic rifles, most countries still used old magazine rifles. The so-called self-loading rifles became some compromise between them and the weapon of the future: SVT-40 in the USSR from 1938, M1 "Garand" in the USA from 1936, Gever-43 in Germany from 1943. At the same time, at the beginning of World War II, the USSR was the country with the largest share of self-loading rifles in army operation. The apotheosis of the first generation automatic weapons was the German StG-44, which was born in 1943.
The main difficulty in the development of an automatic rifle from the 19th to the end of the first half of the 20th century was the adaptation of old cartridge calibers to a fundamentally new design. The development of automatic fire systems was directly tied to the development of a unitary cartridge. Engineers of all countries did not immediately come to the idea that automatic weapons should not use large calibers. It took almost 50 years for the automation to go from trying to use 7.9-9 mm cartridges to using 7.62 and 5.45-5.56 mm cartridges. Thus, they thought of this engineer only by the end of World War II.
The 1949 Kalashnikov assault rifle marked the beginning of the second generation of automatic rifles. However, all this does not mean that their automatic weapons were not made in the United States. The only difference was that up to 1964 in America they created samples of the first generation or samples at the junction of two generations. Back in 1944, the T20 automatic rifle based on the M1 Garand self-loading rifle appeared in the United States, and the AR-10 was created in 1954, and the M14 automatic rifle in 1957. Thus, it cannot be said that all this time (until 1964) the United States did not have its own submachine guns.
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Continuing the topic, read about why did german soldiers carry a pistol on the left side, and the Russians on the right.
A source: https://novate.ru/blogs/280621/59564/
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