Good morning guys. Something a bit different today.

This is the German 50mm PaK 38 anti-tank gun. As its name suggests, it’s a pre-war design (developed between 1937 and 1939, fielded since April 1940). They were built until the autumn of 1943, around 9.5 thousand were made in total. Nothing too uncommon. Except for the fact that the photo is from 1948 and the troopers on it are Israeli. During the Independence War, Israeli forces were equipped with practically anything they could get their hands on, from pre-WW1 vintage rifles to a vast assortment of surplus WW2 weaponry – including German stuff.

When the Afrikakorps surrendered, they left behind a massive amount of various gear, from tanks to anti-tank rifles. Additional WW2 German gear was shipped to Africa after the war from Europe – all in all, really exotic stuff kept appearing in the Middle East since the end of the war for many years – hell, it still does (during the recent Syrian war, there were documented uses of German LeFH 18 WW2 howitzer or the famous StG44 assault rifles). Of course, old Allied stuff was used as well, including for example this Egyptian Archer in 1956:

This trend continues until today. These days, the place to see truly obsolete tech in battle is Yement. This includes for example the 57mm ZIS-2 Soviet anti-tank gun (this could knock out a Panzer IV – Leclerc, not so much).

Or how about a T-34? Yeah, it’s a Czechoslovak one, we exported a whole bunch of them to Yemen in the 1970s. By then they were completely obsolete of course (in other words, perfectly suitable for our Arabian socialist comrades). The photo is from 2016. In this case, it’s used for simple fire support.

Silly Yemen you say? Not to worry, the Syrians are using them too. Yes, another Czechoslovak export for Arabian comrades from the 1970s (120 vehicles or so).

Or a SD-100 (Czechoslovak SU-100 copy) – again, contemporary Yemen (50 vehicles were sold to Yemen in the 1960s I believe).

Iraq was using some really obsolete stuff during the Iraq war as well – such as the ISU-152 in the role of artillery. Needless to say, it didn’t go very well.

There’s a lot of post-war super interesting stuff appearing in Syria lately, but that’s a story for another post.