The U.S. military is currently conducting tests to replace the legacy M249 Squad Automatic Weapon (SAW) and the M4 Carbine with a single weapon. That might sound like a tall order, but in the years leading up to World War II, the Czechoslovakian Army actually developed a weapon that was a mix between a standard submachine gun and support weapons like the British Bren Gun or Soviet DP-28 light machine gun.

This was the Ceska Zbrojovka ZK-383, a weapon that was arguably a bit ahead of its time.

Development of the weapon began in the late 1930s under the direction of noted Czechoslovak arms designers Josef and František Koucký at the Zbrojvka Brno arms factory and entered service briefly with the Czechoslovakian military. While it was chambered in the 9x19-millimeter Parabellum round that was used in such weapons as the German MP40 and British Sten Gun, it had several design features that were found in rifle-caliber light machine guns including an integral bipod and a quick-change barrel.

This gave the soldier carrying the ZK-383 the option of using it in a support role with the bipod or as a standard submachine gun in forward-moving attacks.

It was a rather well-produced and engineered weapon and has features that were similar to the interwar era submachine guns that were clearly influenced by the German-made MP18, which was among the first submachine guns to enter mass production during the final months of the First World War. It bears more than a passing resemblance to such largely forgotten German small arms as the MP34, MP35 or EMP submachine guns.

Like those other firearms, the ZK-383 was a side-loading weapon that fed from a thirty-round magazine and fired from an open bolt. It had a unique featured that allowed the shooter to remove a bolt weight, which increased the cyclic rate from around five hundred to seven hundred rounds per minute up. Unlike the Sten or even the MP40, the ZK-383 also offered selective-fire for both semi-automatic and full-automatic operation. Selection was made by the use of a short or long trigger pull rather than via an actual selector switch—a feature common in other Czechoslovakian small arms designs. 

Before the German occupation of the Czech portion of Czechoslovakia, the submachine gun was also exported to Latin America, notably to Venezuela and Bolivia. While some sources suggest it saw use in the Chaco War between Bolivia and Paraguay that is unlikely as the war ended three years before this submachine gun entered production. 

However, it was used by units of Nazi Germany’s Waffen SS and was also supplied to Germany’s de facto ally Bulgaria, which kept the weapon in service in the post-war years all the way into the 1960s. The ZK-383 also remained in use with Czechoslovakia's pro-Soviet Army in the early Cold War. 

A police version was produced prior to the war and was designated the ZK-383-P, and it was virtually identical except it didn't feature a bi-pod, nor could the barrel be swapped out. A final version was also produced for the military in the early Cold War as the ZK-383-H and it featured a bottom-fed magazine well. In the decade from 1938 to 1948 only approximately thirty-five thousand of the weapons were produced including those in all the variations. 

Peter Suciu is a Michigan-based writer who has contributed to more than four dozen magazines, newspapers and websites. He is the author of several books on military headgear including A Gallery of Military Headdress, which is available on Amazon.com. 

Image: Wikimedia Commons / Springfield Armory Museum