Spanish Used Italian M33
I found this helmet just recently at a local militaria fair. It was obviously an M33 - and Spanish due to the badge bracket that had been added to the front. It was cheap for what it is (well, I thought it was - £35), so I bought it. I've not seen one in the flesh before. It's a size 61, rusty on the inside and the rear leg of the liner armature is broken - a common fault I believe in M33s. The inside of the shell is grey-green original Italian paint. The leather liner seems original, too, albeit a bit brittle at the back. The chin strap is original grey-green leather. There's a batch number at the rear of the shell - 'F4'. The rivets are the earlier flatter, two pronged, small holed type. The exterior paint is very close to the interior colour but matter and hand applied - suspicious, I think - not recent....done for film use...maybe? Beneath is a shiny dark brown which, for the moment, I don't believe is the poor quality brown applied by the Italian volunteers in the Nationalist army but rather the brown I have seen on post civil war M26s. If I could be sure the matt grey-green was post service use applied, I'd attempt stripping back to the brown (which, if I'm right, was applied after putting the bracket on the front. However, you can see in some of the pics that there's quite an archaeological strata of previously applied finishes. Anyway, any comments gratefully received as usual:
Apparently, these helmets were favoured post war by the Spanish paras (presumably not as jump helmets, some artillery regiments and the airforce (although theirs was painted grey with an airforce badge painted on the front. No prizes for guessing the source of this info: translate.google.co.uk/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cascoscoleccion.com%2Fportada.h tm&edit-text=
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