FN FAL: ‘The right arm of the free world’
In the late 1940s, the Western allied countries in the NATO military pact were shopping for a new, modern battle rifle. With the Soviets and their Eastern bloc pals armed with the SKS and the select-fire AK-47, the bolt-action Enfields, Mausers, and MAS rifles of NATO were totally outclassed.
The Americans and British were rapidly testing new rifles at the time but Belgian arms giant FN—just recovering from the war and Nazi occupation of their factories themselves—turned to their master gun wonk, Dieudonne Saive to see what he could come up with.
Dieudonne Joseph Saive had been FN’s Chef de Service (chief weapons designer) for nearly two decades. When firearms genius John Moses Browning died, leaving his double-stack 9mm pistol incomplete, Saive finished it, creating the famous Browning Hi-Power. Besides that accomplishment, he had a hand in the Baby Browning pistol and the FN-49 rifle. It was this last gun, a gas-operated semi-automatic rifle that Saive used as a basis for FN’s new select-fire battle rifle.
Read the rest in my column at Guns.com
