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 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-mounted 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.
References:
- Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FG_42
- http://www.geocities.com/pentagon/2833/heer/
infantry/fg42/fg42.html
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