Original Egyptian Arab-Israeli War of 1973 Czechoslovakian Vz53 Helmet With Arabic Writing and Liner – Yom Kippur War Original Items

Original Item: Only One Available. This is a fantastic example of a service used helmet recovered from the battlefield some time in 2000. This is a Czechoslovakian Vz53 helmet, most likely used by a soldier in the Egyptian Third Army. During the 1960s and 1970s, the Czech government supplied tens of thousands of these Vz53 helmets to Egypt.

The Czechoslovakian M53 helmet was used by the Czechoslovak Army from the early 1950s onward. In western European countries and the United States, it is sometimes referred to as the Czech M53 helmet. These helmets are commonly mistaken for, and sometimes marketed as, Soviet SSh-40 helmets, and various other very similar Eastern Bloc helmets. The Vz. 53 incorporates designs from a variety of different countries, specifically Germany and the USSR. The shape of the shell is an exact copy of the Soviet SSh-39 and SSh-40 shell, and a very small percentage of helmets are actually SSh-40’s refitted with the Vz. 53’s leather liner. These are the original helmets sent to Czechoslovakia by the USSR in the early 1950s as a way to support their renewed military. The leather liner is a copy of the German Stahlhelm’s, which is a good way to tell it apart from other similar Eastern Bloc helmets.

The helmet is in wonderful condition considering the fact that it sat in the desert for nearly 30 years. The paint is mostly worn away and has been replaced by surface rust, but there are what appears to be lines of Arabic on the front. The liner is still present and dried out with cracking/stitching loss, but it is still complete as is the chinstrap.

A rare example of an Egyptian used Vz 53 ready for further research and display.