Hello all. I stumbled on this recently and wanted to get others' thoughts on it. Survival knives are an area not well known to me, and despite my lack of knowledge, this one felt and looked good so I picked it up. Hopefully my gut feeling was correct on it. Any input you can offer would be appreciated.

Looks to be a nice and honest Case V-44 bowie knife with original sheath. Really seems to be super clean. The streaking/unclarity in the blade that you see seems to be something along the lines of dried/drying cosmoline. I just didn't have the time to wipe it down.

Some more pix including a couple with the blade cleaned up

It appears to be a legitimate WW2 authorized clone of the Collins #18 Pequeno Machete.

When the war started, Collins was unable to keep up with the military aircraft build up, so Western, Case and Kinfolks were authorized to make clones.

Western's version had the model number Bx54 Bushman. This knife became the basis for the Western W49 Bowie knife that came out in 1964. Case and Kinfolks never had a public model number for the WW2 version, although Case did make versions of it down the road.

When Cole came out with his first book, he tagged these as V-44s, despite the fact they were never labeled with that nomenclature during the war. Whether he came up with it or just copied someone else, I don't know.

The only true V-44 was the Case fixed blade machete that replaced the #18 and its clones in the bags. The V-44 came from internal Case documents.

Here's a bad picture of the Case V44 lacking its edge protector.