Československé armády lopata, Czechoslovakian Army Shovel / Entrenching Tool

Last year I tracked down a source for Czechoslovakian Army Shovels down in California............

....... as luck would have it, my Mom lives a very short distance away from the warehouse and was going to be passing by the address a very short time later.  She swung by and braved the dark and musty warehouse to search out, and hand-pick, one of these shovels for me!  Well, after a long wait, it was personally delivered a few days ago.  What a great addition to the shovel collection! (The Czech shovel is the one on the far right):

The shovel and case are in fantastic shape, and even came with a bit of Czech dirt to assure that it was authentic.  These fixed bladed shovels were used from the 1950's, through the 1980's and probably into the 1990's.  This particular shovel has a leather case that has the old 1950's textured leather, mixed with the later period smooth leather.  This would place the case in the late 1950's to 1960's time period.

There are no dates or markings on the shovel or case.............  Essentially these shovels are identical to the old WW2 shovels with the exception of the the case.  The WW2 cases had only one belt hanger and the post-war cases have two.

There is very little information about these shovels (as far as I could find after extensive research), but I did find an outstanding website that is filled with tons of post-war Czechoslovakian Army information.  It is my "go-to" site for anything Czech now........ here's the link to their site:

http://www.csla.cz/en/index.htm

Before we jump down to the photo album of this shovel and case, let's take a look at a few photos showing the shovel in use (from the website I linked to above):

Here is the photo album: