Man who invented Uzi submachine gun dies

JERUSALEM — Uzi Gal, inventor of Israel's most famous contribution to the arms industry — the Uzi submachine gun — has died.

Relatives said Mr. Gal, 79, died of cancer Saturday in Philadelphia. He will be buried Thursday in Kibbutz Yagur, a collective farm near Haifa, Israel, where he lived for many years.

The 9-mm weapon has become a mainstay of armies and secret services from Jerusalem to Washington, D.C. It has also proved popular among criminals in many countries and has appeared in many action movies.

More than 1.5 million Uzis have been manufactured, and export of the weapon has earned Israel more than $2 billion, though the modest, retiring Mr. Gal never received anything for it beyond his Israel Military Industries (IMI) salary.

Born Uziel Gal in Germany in 1923, he fled with his family to England when Adolf Hitler came to power. The family immigrated to British Mandatory Palestine in 1936, when he was 13, and settled in Kibbutz Yagur.

At 15, he developed a bow that could fire arrows automatically.

In 1943, he was caught by the British with a firearm in his possession and was sentenced to seven years in jail. But he received a pardon and was released in 1946, when he went to work in the metal workshop at Yagur, secretly producing arms for the pre-state Jewish underground.

In 1948, when the first Arab-Israeli war began, he was ordered to develop a submachine gun for the Israeli army. The Uzi was not delivered to the army until 1954, but in the 1956 Sinai campaign against Egypt, it proved its deadly effectiveness and reliability.

The gun, with its distinctive snub barrel and folding shoulder stock, features a simple loading mechanism that minimizes jams and a compact design, ideal for combat in rugged terrain. It fires 9-mm ammunition from 25-, 32- or 40-shot magazines, at a full-automatic rate of 10 rounds a second.

That means it has hefty firepower without being too heavy.

"An outstanding weapon which could be fired one-handed and almost never jammed," said Pinhas Herzog, an Israeli who fought in two Middle East wars.

Mr. Gal didn't want the gun named after him, but the management of IMI insisted.

In 1976, he retired from IMI and went to live in Philadelphia, where he continued to develop weapons, including versions of the Uzi specially adapted for the U.S. market. Among the models produced were the Uzi Pistol, slightly larger than a regular handgun; the Micro-Uzi, which is larger; and the Uzi Carbine, which has a longer barrel.

The Uzi is also the most-copied weapon in the world, Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot reported yesterday.