Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here down in Florida at Inter Ordnance today
taking a look at this, which is a post-World War Two
Czech Mauser manufactured specifically for ... sale to Ethiopia.
Inter Ordnance has brought in a whole slew of very interesting
firearms from Africa, and this is one that we're taking a look at today.
So let's start by talking about the Czechs.
What were they doing still making Mausers after the war?
Well, of course the Brno factory had been ... set up to
manufacture Kar98ks, as well as some other firearms,
under German occupation during World War Two.
And when that occupation ended, well, when the war ended,
the Brno factory just kept on making these guns for commercial export.
This was a good way to ... quickly get hard cash into the country,
you know, help a struggling post-war economy.
Now Ethiopia. Like, Czechoslovakia, Ethiopia, seems like a weird connection to make.
And ... I think there's a really interesting backstory to it.
So before World War Two, Ethiopia had been more connected to France and Belgium for its arms supply.
In fact way, way back they're actually connected to Russia because they were an Orthodox
Christian country much like Russia, and that formed a bond between the two.
At any rate, they had always traditionally had fairly poor relations with the British and the Italians,
both of whom were very interested in having Ethiopia as a colonial possession.
The ... Italians occupied Ethiopia in the late 1930s,
The British kicked them out during World War Two and then interestingly, this is a little sneaky and maybe a little underhanded,
after liberating Ethiopia the British rounded up as much war materiel as they could find.
Every bit of Italian military equipment, and took it with them
under the ostensible reason that they needed it for their own war effort.
In reality, they didn't want Ethiopia to maintain a strong military,
they didn't want to Ethiopia to get all this free stuff left by the Italian occupying army.
The British didn't actually use most of the stuff, most of it they destroyed, threw in the ocean, that sort of thing.
This, not surprisingly, left a bit of a sour taste in the Ethiopian Emperor,
Emperor Haile Selassie, in his mouth after the war. So
post-World War Two he's reinstated into power, he comes back out of exile, and he wants to set up
a position in the international community that reduces British influence over Ethiopian affairs.
He doesn't like the British. He thinks they have designs on his country, and frankly he's probably right.
What he really wanted was to work with the United States. See, back in the '30s when Italy invaded Ethiopia,
... like Ethiopia was part of the League of Nations, and they went to the League of Nations and they said,
"Hey, this is exactly why you formed. We have been blatantly invaded by a neighbour,
you know, by another country in the League of Nations. You should do something."
The problem is the League of Nations wasn't willing to do anything. They all had their own conflicting
single national ... interests that influenced what they thought ought to happen.
The British didn't want to antagonise the Italians by siding with Ethiopia.
The whole premise of the League of Nations was thrown out the window in favour of everyone's individual political desires.
And this really is one of the the main factors that led to the League of Nations being abandoned.
Italy walked out and just left after this.
However, there were a few countries that actually did something, and the United States was one of them.
When Italy invaded Ethiopia, the US put ... trade sanctions on Italy because of their actions.
And Haile Selassie remembered that,
he also ... had the experience that the US didn't have these colonial interests in Africa.
And what he wanted was a reliable defence partner that he could trust not to try and,
basically, steal his country from him at the first opportunity.
And he thought the US was perfect, especially in the aftermath of World War Two.
European powers are on the decline, the two major superpowers that have appeared are the United States and Russia.
And between the two he wants to side with the United States.
So he actually does get a little bit of Lend-Lease aid during World War Two.
The British hold it up, the British again really want to keep Ethiopia unarmed and basically ripe for possession.
So he gets a little bit, the British delay it, it takes like two years to get a couple thousand rifles
and like 50 machine guns over to Ethiopia as Lend-Lease.
In 1950, ... Selassie offers to send Ethiopian troops to help fight in the Korean War to curry favour with the US.
But the US's position is twofold. First off, it really doesn't care. And secondly, it doesn't want to piss off the British.
So the US didn't really want Ethiopia, it didn't really care what happened to Ethiopia, so
really for the US it was a balancing act of,
"We get nothing, but we piss off the British if we start supplying Ethiopia with arms."
So this left Haile Selassie looking for some other partner, and he found Czechoslovakia.
The Czechs were eager to have a partner to buy stuff from them,
and the relationship that they developed with Ethiopia actually went far beyond military assistance
or military arms. It expanded into pharmaceuticals and agricultural equipment and industry.
And there was actually a remarkable partnership between the two countries.
Ethiopia was basically the only country that Czechoslovakia had this sort of trading relationship with
outside of the Communist Soviet Bloc in the years after 1948.
So that is a tremendous amount of long-winded introduction. Let's take a look at what this rifle actually is.
When we look at this rifle it is effectively a K98k, the Czechs didn't change the tooling,
they didn't change the parts, they in many cases didn't change the markings,
they just kept on making these rifles that they were already set up to do. And so
the quality is every bit as good as it was when the Germans were in charge, same program.
The one distinctive feature that you might notice is the trigger guard.
It's actually not just the trigger guard, it's the trigger guard and the magazine floorplate.
So the problem is when ... Brno was making these for the Germans they actually didn't make these parts.
They received these from, I believe, Mauser and Gustloff to incorporate into their finished guns.
And so when the war ended they didn't have a whole lot of these, and they didn't have the capacity
to make more, well, not this exact style, but the original German pattern.
So what they did instead was tool up to make their own floorplate and trigger guard assemblies.
And they actually took the US 1903A3 as inspiration for the style of the magazine floorplate there.
And then they gave it this distinctively bulged trigger guard to allow the use of gloves in cold weather when firing the rifle.
So you'll find this, this is very distinctive, and this is always post-war. These were never used on
German military World War Two production guns. ... For the basic reason they didn't exist during World War Two.
It was only when German parts ran out that these were put into production.
The receiver markings here are very much German.
So they still have Model 98 and they continued to use German ordnance codes. ...
Like, that's what they had as receiver markings and they just kept on using them.
We have a serial number here on the side of the receiver, just like you would expect from German production.
However, we have two little teeny, there's one and there's one, Czech rampant lion proof marks.
So you'll notice there are no Waffenamts on this rifle at all, that's because it was post-war production
and not made during German occupation.
The rest of the parts are typical of late war German design.
So we've got Kriegsmodell parts, like the cupped butt plate with the hole here in lieu of a disassembly disk.
We'll come back to this guy in a moment.
We have a stamped front barrel band.
We have a stamped and rather crudely welded together nose cap.
Under the bayonet lug we do have the capacity for a cleaning rod which the Kriegsmodell had left out.
And these are grooved for front sight hoods, although this particular example doesn't have one.
During late war German production these would have been held in place by a pair of screws, hence the holes.
The Czechs did go back to using spring bands to hold them in place, which really is a much better system.
One thing that's really cool on these is we have a very distinctive Ethiopian feature,
and that is this disk inlaid into the stock showing a representation of Saint George slaying the dragon,
the biblical Saint George. Saint George is the patron saint of Ethiopia,
there's like some stories Saint George himself was actually Ethiopian.
And so in lieu of a special receiver marking, they inlaid these disks into all of the rifles for this contract batch.
Probably the most recognisable iteration of these post- war Czech guns are the ones that were made for Israel.
Israel, of course, was gaining its own independence from ... Great Britain in the late 1940s,
and they needed small arms, and Czechoslovakia was quite happy to provide them.
However, there was an international embargo in effect. And so Czechoslovakia had to kind of hide
the trail of the guns to get them to Israel. And what's interesting is Ethiopia was the way that they did that.
So Ethiopia acted as the way station for guns that were ultimately destined for Israel, which is pretty cool.
It's interesting to look back historically on how Ethiopia really kind of did its best to play all options.
They continued to work closely with the Czechs after the Czech communist takeover.
And they would slowly actually gain the ability to get some US ... support
as the US started to see Ethiopia more as a potential ally against expanding communist influence in central Africa.
So that would all develop, but to my mind one of the really interesting early points of this are
these early, well, early post-war Czech Mausers sold to Ethiopia.
So we're used to seeing these for Israel and with Czech crests on them, but the Ethiopian connection,
and especially some of these specific Ethiopian markings, I think are really interesting.
So this, of course, is as I said one of the guns that was imported by Inter Ordnance out of Africa.
They brought in a whole slew of stuff, ranging from the very standard to the very unusual and interesting.
And they're going to be selling the most interesting and the cream of the crop,
so to speak, directly through their own website at Inter Ordnance.
I can't post a link, but if you do a little bit of Google searching they're not hard to find,
and there's all sorts of cool stuff there to take a look at.
Thanks for watching.