American Rifleman - July 2014 - (Page 52)

FG-42 It was jet-propelled and old-fashioned at once, and it had the further fascinating enigma of a horizontal magazine system, like a Sten on steroids, requiring a box of 20 full-bore Mauser cartridges locked into the left of the receiver, invisible in many right-side photographs. But it seemingly had nothing to do with the earnest, blocky, defiantly utilitarian guns that fought World War II. By contrast, the FG-42 had panache. See it twice, and yearn to hold it. Yet I'm not sure where I could have seen it that second time. It was so rare that it never appeared in movies, a constant source of gun display in those days, or in the D.C. line of war comics, another gun showplace so all-consuming that it explains to this day why I never learned my multiplication tables. Maybe now and then it could have shown up in LIFE magazine photo essays of peasant guerillas in some jungle somewhere, Africa, South America, Indo-China. I see it gripped by a serious Designed for use by German Fallschirmjägers (above), the FG-42 fired from an open bolt in full automatic but from a closed bolt in semi-automatic (below). 52 J ULY 2014 AMERICANRIFLEMAN.ORG bare-chested guy barefoot and wearing ragged shorts, crossed bandoliers of ammo-maybe machine gun belts. How he got an FG would make quite a tale, an odyssey beginning in a moldering East German warehouse and tracking its way through shadowy ports out of Conrad with NKVD sponsorship to the ambush zone, but its 8x57 mm Mauser chambering would make it a player in the game of world revolution, with such plentitude of surplus ammo available. See it three times, and write a book about it. That's what happened to me-I saw it the third time in my mind's eye as I contemplated a book with German paratroopers as good guys (like Jack Higgins's usage of them in Eye of the Needle, later a movie with Michael Caine as a heroic 'jaeger colonel), and I knew they had to carry what Michael Bane said was "only the coolest gun in World War II." As a novelist I get to care about cool. If you're a collector, you do, too. If you're an investor you really care about cool because cool equals value. If you're designing the thing, cool probably isn't on the agenda; it's not an end product, but a byproduct. If you're facing an advancing wall of infantry called the 1st Ukrainian Front, cool again probably doesn't matter much. Still, for most of us: Cool is as cool does. And that's what explained my presence in a gun vault where Dan Shea, the CEO of Long Mountain Outfitters in Henderson, Nev., and owner of one of the largest private collections of Class III arms in America, had laid out three of the very rare German rifles for me to admire and play army with. I don't think I could have written Sniper's Honor without that experience. Better, of course, to have fired it, but the few http://www.AMERICANRIFLEMAN.ORG

American Rifleman - July 2014

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