International post-war use of Italian small-arms?

[kolja]

Hello everyone, I hope this question isn't straying too far off topic for this forum.

I'm curious if Italian small-arms of the WW2 era saw much use outside Italy after 1945? We know that German WW2 arms ended up in postwar combat all over the place (Africa, Vietnam, Bangladesh, etc), so I wondered if any Italian guns saw the same fate, even on a smaller scale.

 

[jwsleser]

Many Carcano are seen in pictures in multiple places in Africa. I am not aware of any wide-scale use of these rifles outside areas that were never occupied by Italy.

The MAB38 was a very popular submachine gun so very likely its saw use outside of Africa, however I have not seen many picture of it like I have seen of Carcano.

Just some antidotal thoughts from seeing pictures over the years.

Pista! Jeff

 

[kolja]

Many Carcano are seen in pictures in multiple places in Africa. I am not aware of any wide-scale use of these rifles outside areas that were never occupied by Italy.

The MAB38 was a very popular submachine gun so very likely its saw use outside of Africa, however I have not seen many picture of it like I have seen of Carcano.

Just some antidotal thoughts from seeing pictures over the years.

Pista! Jeff

Hi Jeff, thanks for the reply. Do you have access to any of those photos you've said you saw, to share here?

 

[jwsleser]

I didn't collect them as they were of passing interest. Just use a mix of search terms and you will find them. I used 'rebels africa carcano' and found these.

 

[Frollo]

As I recall the first of the three photos was from the Libyan Civil War of 2011.

 

[kolja]

As I recall the first of the three photos was from the Libyan Civil War of 2011.

Probably, in my own digging I found a couple news articles mentioning Libyan rebels using all sorts of 70+ year old weapons during the Arab Spring. Carcanos would make sense, given that Italy colonised Libya. I'm not sure how easy it would be for them to get ammunition though after all these years... I doubt Prvi Partizan was sending crates of repro cartridges to them