Military Small Arms Of The Cold War

Bomb shelters, protests in the streets, the Berlin wall, the iron curtain, so much was changing, and about to change. It was a time of transition.

Military Weapons Of The Cold War

The same was true of military rifles. It was the personal weapons for combat use that were really making a change. That and the heavy equipment and air craft. One oddity, that hasn’t really changed to the present, was the good old “Ma Deuce” M-2 H B .50 cal. machine gun, which like a large number of Browning weapons, was way ahead of it’s time, and has incredible staying power. The powers that be have been looking for a replacement for it, almost since it’s development, but nothing has been found to match or surpass it yet. That was off my subject, but I just wanted to mention it.

The U.S. had been using the .30 cal. M1 rifle from the early days of the second world war, the soviets had developed the Tokarev Rifle 7.62X54 R, during that period, and the German military had made some substantial progress, with a shortening of their 7.92 cartridge, in the development of a fully automatic rifle, the M43. In Sweden, the AG 42 had been developed, and there were pockets of other interesting developments all over the world.

The problem with developing a self loading, or fully automatic rifle for a full sized cartridge was parts breaking.

The search for an intermediate cartridge was well under way, and the lessons of the 7.92 kurz by Germany had not been lost on the designers in the Soviet Union. They were busy developing an intermediate round which became the M-43, and designers were told to design a weapon around it.

The weapon that eventually came to be the staple of millions of troops and terrorists around the world, was developed in that way, the AK 47.

The transitional cartridge, also had a transitional weapon before the advent of the Kalashnikov. It was the Type 45, a Siminov design, semi automatic, now known her in the U.S. as the SKS. I want to focus on it for a while.

It was designed along the lines of another Siminov developed weapon, an anti tank rifle. In fact, there is little difference except size caliber and weight. It has an attached box magazine holding 10 rounds, that can be fed through the use of spring steel clips.

The Type 45 was a bulky, but efficient weapon, which was used by several Soviet “Client States”, and was reproduced extensively in China. There is one thing I like about it that made it a good weapon for conscripts, the self contained box magazine. When combatants get nervous, detachable magazines can be easily lost. This one stays put, and even without the aid of stripper clips, can be loaded fairly rapidly by pressing them into the magazine with the thumb. If you lose all magazines on a detachable magazine rifle, you have a single shot, a bayonet, and a club!