It was only later into the war that Bf designs were re-named to “Me”, to honor Willi Messerchmitt, the designer: but these were likes of Me-210, Me-410, Me-163 or Me-262, and not 109s – and 110s for that matter. There used to be only Messerchmitt Bf-109s, as these were manufactured by the Bayerische Flugzeugwerke, hence the acronym. These were not Me-109s for the simple reason of there never being an aircraft of that designation. 50 Browning machine guns rusting in the rain in Hawaii that he picked up for scrap prices and smuggled into the Med. But there were incredible amounts of no-longer-needed weapons all over the place I remember a bit from “Forged” about a Jewish-American “scrap dealer” (i.e., Israeli procurement agent) finding a literal mountain of air-cooled.
Not just Mausers and MG-34s the Me-109 was a mainstay of the Israeli air force in the early days. And a surprising amount of Nazi weapons wound in Israeli hands, since Europe was knee-deep in them. Because of an international embargo, it was quite a smuggling operation.
I don’t remember if the lipstick casing was part of the book or not, but if you run across a 1971 paperback called “Forged in Fury” by a CBS/ Newsweek/ BBC journalist named Michael Elkins (he was also with the OSS and was involved with running guns to the Haganah in 1947) it’s a fascinating read about the soon-to-be Jewish state’s simultaneous hunt for Nazi war criminals (in 1946 several hundred SS/ Gestapo types in a POW camp in Germany died from extra-arsenic bread) and arms for the war everyone knew was coming as soon as independence was declared. The speedy action on making these conversions says a lot about the agility of a small and young military force like the IDF, when compared to the bureaucratic inertia of a force like the US Army… Here’s another Israeli Mauser (this one a German-made K98k) with an even earlier conversion date, March of 1956: German K98k converted to 7.62mm by Israel in 1956 (photo from 8x57mauser on ) The M14 was adopted in late 1957, and deliveries of the first production batch didn’t begin until July of 1959. That means the Israelis were really on the cutting edge deciding to make these conversions! The 7.62x51mm cartridge was only formally adopted by NATO in 1954, and by June of ’58, the US still didn’t have any production rifles chambered for it. I was admiring the condition (much better than the one of these I have in my own collection), when the owner suggested that I take a closer look at the date stamped on the barrel: June 1958, stamped right there on the barrel I was looking at a particularly nice FN Israeli Mauser the other day one of their rifles converted to 7.62mm NATO: Israeli FN Mauser in 7.62mm NATO
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