In the polycratic jungle of the Third Reich, infighting and personal rivalry
were everyday events. This was especially true in the struggle between the
Luftwaffe and the German army. Once the Army acquired the self-loading rifle
Gewehr 41(W), Luftwaffe supremo Hermann Göring insisted that his paratroops
too would have an even better self-loading rifle. The Luftwaffe commissioned
six manufacturers to design the gun and the Rheinmetall-Borsig prototype was
accepted.
The resulting product was a remarkable and futuristic semi-automatic rifle,
designated the Fallschirmjägergewehr 42 or FG 42. The designers of the rifle
were able to pack the mechanism of automatic fire into a volume not much
larger than a conventional bolt. First models of FG 42 were of a creative
design that included a pistol grip, a strange plastic butt and a bipod on the
forestock. It also had room to house a flash eliminator on the muzzle and a
folding spike bayonet. Ammunition feed came from a side-mounsted box magazine
on the left, and the self-loading mechanism was gas-operated. These individual
features existed already in other firearms, but they were put together in
an innovative way in the FG 42.
Naturally the Luftwaffe accepted the FG 42 eagerly and ordered more. It soon
became apparent, however, that the complex design would take much time and
industrial facilities to produce in quantities. Despite the many short-cuts
used in the manufacturing process, like a simpler wooden butt and a forward
bipod, supply remained inconsistent and slow. By the end of the war, only about
7,000 had been produced, and even then there were some minor problems remained
to be fixed. Nonetheless, the FG 42 was very popular among the troops.
The FG 42 had much impact on post-war designs of many modern assault rifles.
The important gas-operated mechanism for close bolt single-shot and open bolt
automatic fire was incorporated into modern designs. The "straight line" layout
was also copied widely. An example of a modern weapon evolved from the FG 42
is the American M60.
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