Sturmgewehr! From Firepower to Striking Power (Book Collector Grade Pubns, 2004)

The author, an award-winning military historian, has produced an exceptional and exhaustive study, containing the most comprehensive and authoritative account ever published of the intermediate-caliber assault rifle and the revolutionary Kurtz 7.92x33 mm cartridge.

Adolph Hitler has been called the Allies' greatest general of the Second World War, and many of his misguided tactical decisions are examined.

Perhaps none is more important than his refusal, on three occasions, to approve the development and adoption of the intermediate-caliber assault rifle as the Wehrmacht's general weapon.

The acceptance and introduction of this weapon proved to be a long, tortuous and never fully completed process and, to measure the complexity of the story, in the entire history of German small arms, no weapon has been renamed so often in such a short space of time. 

The Sturmgewehr 44 (assault rifle 44), to give it its definitive name, was belatedly approved by Hitler in October 1944, after his earlier rejections had delayed the program by a full year, and by the time he changed his mind, general rearmament was out of the question.

Nevertheless, the Sturmgewehr was by far the most important and influential small arms and cartridge development of the war.