AK47: The Story of the People's Gun

AK47: The Story of the People's Gun

by Michael Hodges

Sceptre, HK$272

Nobody forgets the first time they saw a corpse. A quarter of a century after I stood on a sunlit beach a few metres from the demilitarised zone, staring with what I hoped was the right degree of nonchalance at the cadaver of a North Korean soldier collapsed over his AK47 assault rifle (above), the memory is as vivid as ever. Part of a suicide squad despatched to swim over the border and create havoc, he'd been killed by a hail of fire from a South Korean marine's M-16. That the inventor of the American weapon was a multimillionaire, while the brains behind the infinitely superior Russian AK47 would have to scrape by on a state pension, was an irony that escaped me at the time.

This is just one of the more entertaining facts in Michael Hodges' book, a thorough and engaging history of the most distinctive of the 20th century's small arms that works on several levels. His argument that the AK47 has become an international symbol is largely successful; the book is a convincing snapshot of the ebb and flow of global conflict and geopolitics over the past century; and - best of all - Hodges brings out the human interest with tremendous vigour.

Quite how or why Mikhail Kalashnikov got hold of a Browning automatic pistol in Soviet Russia in the 1930s is unknown, but his heroism as a tank commander in the second world war, and a long period of convalescence after being wounded, are well documented. Kalashnikov spent his time in hospital talking to other soldiers about the sort of rifle they'd like to carry in combat, and soon set to work on a prototype.

With only eight moving parts, which even the most numbskull conscript could master, it was cheap to manufacture, yet the AK47 (A for automatic, 47 for the year it was officially approved) could fire 650 rounds per minute, making it a fearsome weapon. But the real beauty of the AK was its durability: drop it in a river, leave it in the jungle, roll it in mud and sand, pull the trigger - and it works. As Hodges points out, this is the people's gun.