FN FAL: ‘The right arm of the free world’

During the Cold War, the world was divided into NATO, the Warsaw Pact and a few neutrals. While the US went with the M14/M16 and the Soviets chose the humble AK, the rest of the world went another way—the FN FAL. FN FAL armed most of the Western world and their allies during the Cold War era. Why 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. MAS-36 rifle being shot by a German soldier at the tail end of WWII. 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. Design FAL rifle inventor Diedonne Saive. 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.



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