The FN FAL Battle Rifle Read online

  THE FN FAL

  BATTLE RIFLE

  B OB CASHNER

  © Osprey Publishing • www.ospreypublishing.com

  THE FN FAL

  BATTLE RIFLE

  BOB CASHNER

  Series Editor Martin Pegler

  © Osprey Publishing • www.ospreypublishing.com

  First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Osprey Publishing, Dedication

  Midland House, West Way, Botley, Oxford, OX2 0PH, UK

  To my wife.

  43-01 21st Street, Suite 220B, Long Island City, NY 11101

  E-mail: [email protected]

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to express my thanks to the many people who made

  Osprey Publishing is part of the Osprey Group

  this project possible, including Colonel Paul Farrar, Ian Rhodes, James Scott, David Miller, Steve Cone, Tom Moore, Steve Creamer,

  © 2013 Osprey Publishing Ltd.

  and the whole gang at the FAL Files. As well, Nick Reynolds and Tom Milner at Osprey deserve particular recognition for going

  All rights reserved. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of above and beyond their duties in publishing this work.

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  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION 4

  DEVELOPMENT 6

  The genesis of the FAL

  USE 34

  The right arm of the Free World

  IMPACT 69

  The quintessential battle rifle

  CONCLUSION 76

  BIBLIOGRAPHY 78

  INDEX 80

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  INTRODUCTION

  World War II showed that the age of the manually operated bolt-action or single-shot military rifle had come to an end. Self-loading rifles – weapons that reloaded themselves automatically with every pull of the trigger –

  were the future. Yet while the United States’ M1 Garand rifle – the world’s first standard-issue self-loading rifle – was a milestone and well liked by all who used it, its use of a limited eight-round en bloc clip rather than a detachable box magazine of higher capacity would lead to its demise. (The en bloc clip required the user to push a clip of eight rounds as a single unit down into a fixed magazine.) A new post-war self-loading rifle was obviously needed. But what form would it take?

  The German StG 44 Sturmgewehr (Assault Rifle) had made a great impression during the waning years of World War II. The StG 44 fired the 7.92×33mm kurz (short) round, an ‘intermediate’ type of ammunition, launching a 125-grain projectile at 701m/sec (2,300ft/sec). The power of this cartridge offered a perfect compromise between the weak and short-ranged pistol calibres used in submachine guns and the full-power, hard-kicking rifle cartridges.

  The Soviet Union was quick to grasp the intermediate-cartridge concept. With massed conscripted armies often receiving only rudimentary training before being rushed into battle, marksmanship and live-fire practice were given short shrift. What was needed was a simple, reliable weapon that could be operated effectively by even the most hastily trained soldier.

  The AK-47 ( Avtomat Kalashnikova 47) was that weapon, and it became the quintessential assault rifle. Using the 7.62×39mm round, the AK-47 was an utterly reliable gas-operated firearm capable of taking severe abuse in the field and remaining functional. It was also easy to mass-produce. While the AK’s short-lived immediate predecessor in Soviet service, the SKS, had an integral magazine that required reloading via ten-4

  round stripper clips or chargers, the AK-47 had a 30-round detachable

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  box magazine. Its major claim to fame, however, was having a select-fire The FN FAL was one of the most capability – the ability to fire either semi-automatic or full-automatic – iconic rifles of the Cold War, in with a cyclic rate of 600rds/min. Throughout its lifespan, the AK-47 was some ways the West’s equivalent of the Kalashnikov assault rifle.

  constantly modified and adapted, with the AKM being the most widely Here, a FAL-armed Contra fighter produced version. Tens of millions have been made all over the world for stands guard at the edge of a use by various armies, and it has become the favoured weapon of base camp in Honduras, 1983, insurgents everywhere.

  during the Nicaraguan Civil War.

  (Steven Clevenger/Getty Images)

  The West needed an answer to the AK-47. Even before the AK-47

  appeared on the world scene, Western nations were studying the concept of an assault-type rifle, but it would be a long and twisting road to travel before they arrived at one. Political considerations trumped test performance in too many instances. While
the Western nations involved arrived at various solutions, the results were technically main battle rifles rather than true assault rifles firing an intermediate cartridge.

  One of the solutions – by sheer numbers the ‘best’ solution – was the FN FAL. The weapon originated with Belgium’s famous Fabrique

  Nationale (FN) as the Fusil Automatique Léger, or Light Automatic Rifle, but it was almost universally known by its initials: FAL. To this day, many still refer to the FAL as an assault rifle. As we shall see shortly, it is not.

  Rather, correctly it is a main battle rifle, or MBR. It was indeed intended to be an assault rifle in its own right, but a variety of circumstances prevented it from becoming one.

  As a main battle rifle, it was superb for its day, with many considering it the quintessential Cold War-era battle rifle. Perhaps it no longer seems so high-tech. It is an air-cooled, magazine-fed, gas-operated and (originally) select-fire rifle. Yet the FAL was rugged and reliable and offered greater range and accuracy than its Soviet- and Chinese-made assault-rifle opponents. It essentially did everything required by the men who carried it. Eventually, it would serve more than 90 different nations around the world and be given the nickname of ‘The Right Arm of the Free World’.

  5

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  DEVELOPMENT

  The genesis of the FAL

  THE WEST SEEKS AN ASSAULT RIFLE

  A new calibre?

  In the West, the utility and performance of smaller rifle calibres had been examined before 1945. Prior to World War I, Britain had been developing the .276in Enfield cartridge, which made it as far as troop trials. With war clouds gathering in Europe, however, it was the wrong time to attempt to switch to a new calibre and new weapons. In the 1930s, the Americans worked on the .276in Pederson, firing a 125-grain bullet at 823m/sec (2,700ft/sec). A Canadian-born American firearms designer named John Cantius Garand (1888–1974) had designed a then-revolutionary semiautomatic battle rifle, the T3E2, around the proposed new .276in cartridge and a ten-round clip. Pressure on US military budgets during the Depression era resulted in its quick demise, despite its performance. Yet Garand was able to redesign his rifle successfully to use the standard

  .30-calibre US cartridge in an eight-round clip, and it went on to be the pre-eminent self-loading rifle of World War II.

  After 1945 the nations of the fledgling North Atlantic Treaty

  Organization (NATO), looking back on the endless variety of different ammunition types and weapons used during World War II, decided that a universal calibre amongst the member states was necessary. Once such a calibre was standardized, it was hoped that perhaps a universal infantry rifle could be adopted as well. The British again threw their efforts into truly innovative new intermediate cartridges: a .270in (6.8mm) round, firing a 6

  130-grain bullet; and the .280in (7×43mm) round, firing a 140-grain bullet

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  at a muzzle velocity of 747m/sec (2,450ft/sec). Of the two, the latter was Colonel Studler’s backing for the deemed the better prospect. Loaded with recently improved Winchester full-power T65 rifle cartridge smokeless powder, it went on to achieve muzzle velocities of 792m/sec resulted in the adoption of the 7.62mm NATO, and the United

  (2,600ft/sec). The heavier bullet also served as a sop towards the Americans States ordering the M14.

  and their insistence on larger calibres. The American military establishment Photographed in Vietnam in clung to the belief that every American boy was a natural-born marksman 1965, these Marines are still who would need the ability to hit individual targets at long ranges. armed with M14s, but already the intermediate-cartridge M16 was

  The Korean War would soon prove otherwise, for a variety of reasons.

  starting to replace the M14.

  The third and final version of the experimental cartridge was the (US Marine Corps)

  .280/30. This cartridge case’s base and rim were even given dimensions identical to those of the US .30-06 calibre, to make conversion of American weapons to the new calibre easier and also help ammunition manufacturers to switch over. It was hoped this would make the new round more acceptable to American politicians and military decision-makers.

  The .280in was a true intermediate assault-rifle calibre, offering excellent performance out to 594m (650yd) – on a par with the heavier 7.62×51mm NATO round that was to be adopted instead, but with less weight, muzzle blast and considerably less recoil than the NATO round.

  Like the AK-47’s 7.62×39mm round, the .280in could be better controlled than the 7.62×51mm round in full-automatic fire at close ranges in the assault, yet it far outranged and outperformed the Soviet round. It was also greatly superior in performance in terms of range and stopping power compared to the later 5.56×45mm NATO round. Indeed, to open-minded military officials, the .280in seemed to offer the best of both worlds.

  Despite the enthusiastic support of military men in Britain, Canada and Belgium to adopt the .280in as the new universal NATO calibre, the US military balked. The stumbling block to several nations and the fledgling NATO alliance came down to one man, Colonel René Studler (1895–1980), chief of the US Small Arms Development Branch.

  7

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  After World War II and the great drawdown of the American military, the ambitious Colonel Studler saw his career plateau with no more great advances before his retirement. With the push for a standardization of calibre for NATO countries, Studler foresaw one last chance at a great coup. If he could develop the new NATO standard cartridge, it would probably mean a star on his shoulder. Furthermore, if he could develop an American rifle around the new calibre, which other NATO countries could be persuaded to adopt, he could perhaps crown his career as

  ‘armourer to the Free World’ and as a major player at NATO headquarters until his retirement.

  Studler placed all his bets on the T65 cartridge, which would

  eventually become the 7.62×51mm NATO. The new Winchester ball

  propellants delivered the same performance as the old .30-06 with a considerably smaller amount of powder, enabling the cartridge case to be shortened significantly.

  In no way could the T65 be considered to offer an intermediate or assault-rifle calibre, or even a great leap forward in cartridge design. It was still a full-power .30 round, essentially a .30-06 with a cartridge case 51mm long rather than 63mm. Since this small difference led to so much disagreement between NATO nations, some referred to it as ‘the longest fifth of an inch in the world’ (Rose 2008: 233). But the shorter T65 cartridge did enable rifles designed to fire it to have a shorter, and thus lighter, receiver than those employing the .30-06. Even so, the T65 was much too powerful for shoulder-fired full-automatic use and could not be built into a true assault rifle. It may have become an excellent round, but it was most certainly not intermediate. (As an indication of how profoundly those in American military circles misunderstood the assault rifle, for many years official US Army documents referred to the AK-47 as a ‘submachine gun’.) Colonel Studler also set his designers at Springfield Arsenal, Massachusetts, to create the ‘perfect’ weapon to fire his pet cartridge. It had to be able to replace and perform the roles of those weapons used at that time by the US military – the .30-06 M1 Garand rifle, the .30 M1

  Carbine, the .45 Thompson and M3 submachine guns, and the .30-06

  Browning Automatic Rifle – in one fell swoop. At the same time, the new weapon must reduce the infantryman’s burden to less than 4kg (9lb). It would be possible to slim down the 4.3kg (9.5lb) Garand, but replacing the 10kg (22lb) BAR would be another story altogether. As the final hurdle, the new rifle had to be able to use 85 per cent of the existing M1

  Garand’s industrial tooling and equipment for production. All in all, it was a tall – and rather ridiculous – order.

  On the other side of the Atlantic, the British had been wor
king hard not only on the genuinely intermediate .280in round, but also on a revolutionary new infantry rifle, the EM-2, with which to use it. What made this rifle truly innovative was its ‘bullpup’ design. The breech mechanism and magazine were contained within the stock rather than in front of it; thus it could retain a normal-length barrel while still reducing overall length. The EM-2 came a great deal closer to the pie-in-the-sky requirements of Studler’s new weapon than any of his own projects. As 8

  noted by the British Ministry of Defence (MoD) in 1950:

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  The general characteristics of the weapon are its versatility and its The EM-2 was an advanced British

  power of delivering either rapid single round [semi-automatic] fire or bullpup assault rifle, chambered

  a volume of fire with the employment of a single man. The weapon can for the intermediate .280

  cartridge. It was never adopted,

  be fired as a self-loading rifle, a sub machine gun or (with the addition as the .280 round was rejected by

  of a bipod) a light machine gun. Its effective range as a self-loading rifle NATO in favour of 7.62mm, and

  is 500-yards. When fired from the bipod its effective range can be Britain instead adopted the L1A1

  increased to 800-yards. With the addition of a grenade launcher, it can SLR. (Neil Grant)

  project a 1-¼ pound grenade to a maximum range of 250 yards. It can also be fitted with a bayonet. (British Army 1950: 1)

  No matter how well the .280in cartridge – or the weapons designed to shoot it – performed, the British project was doomed, as we shall see.

  Enter the Belgians

  The Belgians had also long been working on a new semi-automatic infantry rifle. Designers at Fabrique Nationale de Herstal in Liège began working on a gas-operated self-loading rifle in 1936, the same year the Americans adopted the M1 Garand rifle. Chief among the designers of the rifle was Dieudonné Joseph Saive (1889–1973), a Belgian native.

  Saive was an employee of Fabrique Nationale, where his ideas and skills attracted attention, and he eventually became chief design assistant to the legendary American firearms designer John Moses Browning