#WarsawPact

It’s 1968, the Cold War has gone hot and you’re a British soldier somewhere in northwest Germany. The 3rd Shock Army is coming straight at you and you’re trying to decide if the Soviet motor rifle regiment infantry attacking your defensive position is bringing up a DShK or an SGM. You reach for your trusty copy of Recognition Handbook Foreign Weapons and Equipment (USSR) Group III Infantry Weapons.

After World War II, the nations of the world retired to lick their wounds and rebuild, but their arms engineers also began thinking about the next war. The war have brought forth a storm of new technologies and inventions, and one of the most significant in the field of small arms was the finally mature assault rifle in the form of the Nazi-developed “Sturmgewehr”, and its intermediate 7.92x33mm Kurzpatrone cartridge. One nation that took notice of this new weapon and its ammunition was the newly reconstituted Czechoslovakia. That nations engineers quickly took to copying and improving the 7.92 Kurz caliber, producing by the early 1950s a short-lived but unique round called the 7.62x45mm Kr.52, or more popularly the 7.62×45 Czech. The 7.62×45’s projectile was a near copy of the Kurzpatrone’s stubby, steel-cored one, but its case was much longer, while being slightly thinner, and having a greater internal volume. This gave the Czech round an additional 250 ft/s muzzle velocity versus the German 7.92×33 when fired from the barrel of the rifle that was designed alongside it, the strange but wonderful vz. 52.