Bryant Ridge Military Gun Of The Week - Waffen Werke Brünn G33/40 Mountain Carbine 8mm Blue 19" *SCARCE MAUSER*

Bryant Ridge Auction Company is pleased to present this scarce bolt action rifle today as the Bryant Ridge Military Gun Of The Week, this is the Waffen Werke Brünn G33/40 Mountain Carbine!

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While German (J.P Sauer, Mauser Werke, Erma, BSW, Lubeck) and Belgian-made (FN) Mauserswere the norm in the 1930s, hardworking engineers and craftsmen in Czechoslovakia were producing their own Mauser-pattern guns in Brno. While the Czech-made Brno Vz.24 rifle is legendary in its own right, the shorter Vz.33 carbine was something just a little different.
Using a 19.4-inch barrel, the overall length of the Vz.33 was just 39.4 inches long. By comparison, this is about the same length as the Ruger Mini-14. This yielded a handy carbine that, with lightening cuts, tipped the scales at just over 7 pounds while keeping the same 7.92mm Mauser round, internals, nomenclature, and manual of arms as the Czech military's standard infantry rifles.

Following the annexation of Czechoslovakia as a result of an ill-fated appeasement campaign by Britain and France, the rifle works at Brno came under new management. Dubbed Waffen Werke Brünn, or Weapons Works Brno, the factory was soon making gently modified Vz.24s and Vz.33s for the German war effort as the Vz.24(t) and G33/40, respectively, while preparing to make K98k series guns as well.
Seeing the shorter carbine as perfect for Gebirgsjäger alpine troops, for whom longer rifles were awkward while moving around the mountains, the G33/40 kept the same length and layout as the Vz.33 with some minor modifications. The changes made to the Vz.33 to convert it to the G33/40 included German-style sling hardware, a large steel buttplate, different sights, and a different bayonet lug.
While something like 11 million Mauser 98s of all stripes has been produced, numbers of G33/40s account for just a fraction of that. In all, estimates are that fewer than 120,000 of these guns were made between 1940 and 1942, when Brno was converted to the manufacture of K98ks. Issued to not only mountain troops but also to space-conscious paratrooper units, many of these carbines were lost on battlefields from Tunisia to Lapland.

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