Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at Inter Ordnance
taking a look at an Ethiopian FN contract Mauser rifle and carbine.
And these are one of the really cool pre-World War Two
contracts that FN got for its small arms.
So first off, a little bit of background on FN.
They were of course put together as a conglomerate to manufacture
rifles for the Belgian military in the late 1880s.
... Well, during World War One they got all of their
machinery basically confiscated by the Germans, who
occupied Belgium and occupied Liège where FN was located.
And so FN kind of spent the first couple of years after World War One
recuperating, putting its tooling back together.
It had been a while since they manufactured Mausers,
there was a lot of new technology coming out.
So that the original Belgian Mausers had been very early pattern, Mauser Model of 1889
with single stack magazines. And well by the early 1920s new things have developed, we have the Model 98.
Of course Mauser ... was manufacturing much upgraded versions throughout the years before World War One.
And if FN wanted to compete on the world market they had to match that, so it took them a couple years to do it.
By 1922 they had a rifle, and then in 1924 they got their first major contract.
And that was the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, which a few years later would be renamed Yugoslavia.
Yugoslavia, well the Kingdom, ordered something like 100,000 Mauser rifles from FN,
also contracted with them to help build their own domestic rifle factory which would operate for decades.
And this really put FN back into business, and it gave them
all the expenses that they needed to really set up tooling for these new patterns of rifles.
So that takes us to Ethiopia. Now Ethiopia has this impressive history of being pretty much the only
(I probably shouldn't say the only, but virtually, if not the only) major African country to avoid becoming
a subservient colony of one of the European powers during the late 1800s through early 1900s.
At this time it was being ruled by an emperor by the name of Haile Selassie. He was coronated in 1930,
although he'd actually kind of basically run the country as regent since 1917.
And he maintained Ethiopia's militarily-based independence.
So the Italians and the British both had greedy eyes on Ethiopia,
Ethiopia holds a relatively strategically important position just off the Red Sea,
it's near by the Suez Canal, it's actually the headwaters of the Nile River and the Nile Valley.
And Italy in particular had wanted it as a colony for a long time. In fact, the Ethiopians had beaten back
a substantial Italian invasion in the 1890s very impressively.
At any rate, by 1930 when Selassie took power
Ethiopia was planning to spend between 12 and 16 percent of its GDP on ... arms, on military support.
And this kind of split their support in Europe, their diplomatic relations.
The British and the Italians were not happy with this. They wanted a weakened Ethiopia that they could take over,
and they were always fighting each other over who would get to take it over.
The French and the Belgians, however, were much more supportive of Ethiopia, largely because they didn't look at it
specifically for their own colonial empires. And they liked the idea of it maintaining independence
to prevent it from falling into the hands of ... their rivals in Europe.
So when Selassie was coronated Emperor he took some time and travelled around Europe,
met a bunch of people, visited a lot of places. And FN was one of them,
and he developed a good working relationship with FN. Between 1933 and 1936
he would buy a significant amount of arms for a smaller, not particularly wealthy African country.
And those included 17,500 of these rifles, and 7,500 of these carbines, as well as FN BARs and some other equipment.
So in fact he even had Belgian military advisors come down to help train the Ethiopian Army.
He had some Swiss advisors as well, they set up military academies.
This really was ... one of the better organised government structures in Africa at the time.
So let's take a closer look at these rifles, because they're extremely rare and you almost never seen them here in the US.
We have a rifle and a carbine to take a look at here.
I'm gonna go ahead and start with the carbine because, well, it's shorter and it's easier for me to show you.
As far as mechanical variations go, there's really not that much that distinguishes the
Ethiopian guns from FN's other 1924 1930 type Mauser rifles and carbines.
However, a few little distinctions on the carbines. There are no side sling swivels either on the front band
or back on the butt stock. That was a fairly common thing at the time.
You'll see sling swivels either in the side of the stock or in the side of the grip area,
and that was intended for guys who wanted to carry the rifle flat across the back instead of over the shoulder.
And for whatever reason Selassie ... wasn't interested in that specific capacity.
... For one, I think it's a good thing because, for me as a left- hander, that side sling swivel on the stock always gets in the way.
I do want to briefly point out the sling arrangement here. This thing of having the sling tied up into the stock is an interesting,
distinctively Ethiopian thing that I've seen on a number of these rifles that I was looking through.
This is an original Ethiopian pattern sling, a little worse for wear, but neat to see it still there.
The markings are really the coolest part here. So starting with the most boring, we have FN's
manufacturer mark here on the receiver wall. Manufacturer Nationale D'Armes de Guerre, Herstal, Belgique.
Now on most military Mausers you would expect a serial number right here.
Well, instead we have a Lion of Judah military property mark there.
And the serial number is actually written in big ol' letters here on the back, on the receiver bridge.
And this was done so that the serial numbers could be easily read when the rifles were stacked in storage racks.
Which is actually a really practical thing, and it's a little surprising that more countries didn't do that. ...
It's a little hard to read there, but the bolts were originally matched to the rifles, so 3766 again.
The rest of the parts, like the floor plates and trigger guards, are not serialised.
So really the only numbers to look for to match are the bolt and the receiver.
We then have this really pretty darn cool national crest here on the top of the receiver.
So we've got laurels, we've got - I don't even know what that is, a shield, some Amharic writing there,
and then the face of the Lion of Judah. So we have that lion here on the side as well.
And you'll see this mark on a lot of Ethiopian arms from this era.
In fact if you go back and look at my video on the KE-7 light machine gun,
you'll find that it has that marketing as well because it was an Ethiopian contract gun.
The rifles have the same crest. I should point out that the receivers
for both the rifles and carbines were originally ... manufactured in the white.
These have had a long and hard service life in Ethiopia and beyond.
We have the same style of serial number on the back of the receiver bridge
and duplicated on the bolt.
As is relatively typical for this sort of thing, the carbines had bent bolts and the rifles had straight bolts.
The last set of markings we have are proof marks on the right side of the receiver
and these are worth taking a look at for a moment, because they sometimes confuse people.
These are Belgian proof marks, sort of, but they're not commercial proof marks. This did not go through the standard Liège proof house.
Now the process was normally if you placed a big order at FN you would send a military delegation to
do the acceptance work, to confirm whether rifles were up to your standards.
Well, Ethiopia, and some other countries that FN was selling to, simply didn't have the domestic technical expertise to do that.
They didn't have a group of officers they could send to perform this.
So instead they were able to hire the Belgian military to do so on their behalf.
FN is a private company. It is closely associated with the Belgian military, but FN is not a government run arsenal.
And so the Belgian military had a good enough reputation, scrupulously maintained,
that ... you could hire their officers to proof rifles for you.
And while the ... Belgian military arsenals were not legally allowed to produce guns for foreign powers,
Belgian officers could be hired to proof guns and approve guns and accept them
from private manufacturers, like FN, on behalf of other nations.
So you'll see we have an A with a star which is a pretty typical Belgian proof mark,
and we have a couple other proof marks here that are indicative of the Belgian Foreign Inspection Service,
which is what it was called. Ethiopia was not the only client of FNs to use that Foreign Inspection Service,
but they were one of them. So there are some people who see those Belgian proof marks and assume that
"Well, maybe these guns got manufactured, but then diverted to the Belgian military for World War Two." Not the case.
So the rest of the features of these guns are pretty standard Mauser.
These were all manufactured in 8x57mm, or 8mm Mauser, that was the standard cartridge used by the Ethiopian military at the time.
No grooves for front sight protector hoods, bayonet lugs.
These are cut for cleaning rods, although these two don't have them.
And ... that pretty much is a good overview I think of the Ethiopian Mausers.
Unfortunately for Ethiopia and Emperor Haile Selassie, in 1935 the Italians under Mussolini
got a little more serious about wanting to expand or rebuild their colonial empire, starting with Ethiopia
or (by the way I should have mentioned this earlier), as it was often referred to at the time, Abyssinia.
So in 1935 the Italian army invaded, and Ethiopia may have had a particularly strong military
for its time and place, but it was not able to compete with the Italians.
Especially the Italian Air Force, armoured vehicle support.
And the Italians ended up capturing the country and occupying it until 1941,
when, well as part of World War Two the British liberated Ethiopia.
So ... these were good modern arms for the early 1930s,
but they weren't enough to hold back a full-scale ... Italian invasion.
So Selassie would spend a couple of years in exile,
and he would come back to his country ... during World War Two, and actually stay in power until 1974.
So ... typically we think of Africa as having these dictators that kind of come and go quickly.
Well, Selassie was a very long- lived Emperor of the country.
Anyway, we'll get into some of what happened after World War Two in a separate video
when we talk about some of the arms that Ethiopia had later on. For now, these are very, very cool.
I'd like to give a big thanks to Inter Ordnance for giving me the chance to pull these out and take a look at them.
What they have done is actually import a substantial number of very interesting firearms
of all types out of Africa, including some of these Ethiopian ones.
So if you're interested in seeing more, they're going to be selling the cream of the crop
I think directly through Inter Ordnance.
So I can't put a link to their website in the comments because of YouTube's rules,
but if you check out Inter Ordnance's website, you can find all sorts of good stuff.
Thanks for watching.