A Yemeni, yes Yemeni, Beretta Contracted M1 Garand

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  • airbornetrooper

    Active Member
    Nov 9, 2017
    137
    VA
    Happy Thanksgiving to everyone. Here's one of the favorite pieces in my collection. Like its American cousin, the Yemen contract rifle is also a full-size, 30.06 version. The handful of examples that have surfaced all bear numbers with an E prefix. According to everything I've found, these specific rifles (all those with a CAI import stamp) were captured by Egypt in the 1960's during the North Yemen Civil War. This was a completely different conflict than the current Yemen Civil War (side note, Yemen has fought three civil wars in the last half-century, at least they're good at something). This particular civil war was a particularly bloody affair which saw Egypt intervene on the side of the nascent Yemen Republic, while Saudi Arabia aided the Kingdom of Yemen. Egypt suffered over 26,000 fatalities fighting there for the better part of a decade.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Yemen_Civil_War

    As for the rifle itself, it was almost certainly captured by Egypt, because all of the known Yemeni M1 Garand's in the United States were imported by Century Arms International in the 1980's. Around a dozen of them were brought in at the time and sold for the then princely sum of $400 a piece (I paid a bit more than that unfortunately). All of these rifles were built under contract by Beretta during the mid-1950's, and apparently financed by Saudi-Arabia. Contrary to popular thought, Beretta did not simply inherit and reuse the Winchester tooling after WWII. They did receive Winchester's old tooling, but it was far too worn to be of use. They rebuilt nearly all the components and subsequently produced rifles for the following contracts:

    Indonesia: 50,000
    Italian Army: 30,000 (Breda built another 30,000)
    Denmark: 10,000 (Breda built another 10,000)
    Cuba: 5,054
    Yemen: 1,152
    Libya: 180

    (source: "Il garand in Italia 1951-1996" by Ruggero F. Pettinelli)

    This particular example shows all Beretta parts on it and has a barrel date of 1957. The Italians had a pernicious habit of marking EVERY piece with the manufacturer abbreviation... I took four years of Arabic in college, but the calligraphy on the stock proved to be quite a challenge. Thankfully I found an old GCA article on this type of rifle that stated it translated as follows:

    "Property of the Mutwakil kingdom of Yemen. Prince of the believers HR. IMAM AHMED BIN YAHYA HAMID AL DEEN"

    https://www.thegca.org/pdfs/2-05_all.pdf

    This shows the rifle was built for the last king of Yemen, Imam Ahmed, who died during the fighting.

    On a side note, I am still looking for an Indonesian contract M1 Garand!
     

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    CasualObserver

    Who Observes the Observer
    Apr 27, 2012
    1,266
    Maryland Born Now in Vermont
    Pretty cool. Century imported some odd stuff over the years. I remember in the early 90s passing on some ugly Browning A5 shotguns with extended mags and forearm stocks at a gun show around Baltimore (probably at the fairgrounds). I remember telling a friend they looked like both the tent stake and the hammer they used to drive the stakes in or something to that effect. I wanted an A5 but wanted no part of them. I bought I think an Enfield No. 4 that day instead. Years later I read an article about the rare Rhodesian military A5s that century imported years ago and you guessed it, they were one and the same. Probably only a few hundred imported by Century and not many more even made. Get oddities like these when you can... sometimes they turn out like the Albanian sks and years later a pile of them hit the market, but more often then not you end up with something special.

    Very unique Garand!
     

    slsc98

    Ultimate Member
    May 24, 2012
    6,750
    Escaped MD-stan to WNC Smokies
    And here we are, 50 years later and the Saudis are still fighting a proxy-war in Yemen.

    And still widely oblivious to ideas like, oh say, toilet paper.
    (Goes without saying: wipe down any artifacts recovered, real good!)

    On a serious note, this certainly opens up a whole area of collecting a ton of militaria which I have never considered!
     

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