The quest for intermediate power
Most countries went back to war in 1939 still tooled up with a mixture of bolt-action rifles, submachineguns, and supporting machine guns firing full-poke rifle ammo. After handing everyone else a massive kicking in the first couple of years, however, the Germans carried out some analysis of the way things had gone while they were grinding Europe under their jackbooted heels.
The remorselessly efficient Nazis found that it was, in fact, very rare for soldiers to shoot at one another from distances much greater than 400-600 yards. The beautiful old bolt-action rifles with their powerful cartridges and thousand-yard accuracy were massively over-spec’d, and they were still far from ideal in a close-up scrap. The Germans decided to make a serious move towards an intermediate-power cartridge, lying between pistol and rifle. They designed a new weapon to go with it.
This new class of weapon would be powerful enough to make kills out to 500 yards or thereabouts, but light and handy. It held a lot of bullets and it could be fired on full auto by a standing, unsupported man. It could do nearly every job well enough, and it could be cheap to make as well.
There remained the question of what to call the new class of gun, however. The Germans initially called it a “machine carbine,” then changed their mind and filed it among the submachineguns as the Maschinen Pistole 1943, refined in 1944 to become the MP44. It’s generally thought that the designers did this because Hitler was a great believer in the mystique of the storm trooper, so much so that Nazi political thugs operated under that title at one point – which has led to the unsavoury connotations of the term “stormtrooper” in English. (Not to mention its usage in the Star Wars movies, one might suggest. There’s no surer way among Anglos to suggest that a government is menacing and evil than calling its soldiers storm troopers.) The signature weapon of the Nazi storm trooper was the machine-pistol, and a gun with an “MP” title was more likely to gain political approval.
But even Hitler could see that the new gun wasn’t really a machine-pistol. Nonetheless, it needed to evoke the legend of the storm trooper. In the end, the Nazis decided to call it a “Sturm Gewehr,” or “storm rifle” – a rifle for stormtroopers. This was translated into English as “assault rifle,” and so the new type of weapon was misnamed forever. Assault rifles don’t have any particular connection with assault operations, as we’ve seen: they’re general-purpose guns.
