What ONE piece in your collection do you wish could talk?

[Irish1965]

Ahead of it's time. Should have been at Gallipolli and turned the tide.

Cheers Paul

[toot]

Irish, thank you for the reply. an enemy soldier sure put 3 shots in the kids engine room. a fatal area, but the little bugger survived! the armor being the best thing that happened to him , it saved his life. also being captured by the FINN'S, there is a good chance that he may have survived? I don't think that they abused prisoners? it is odd that WW1 items were still being used into WW2.

[Finngaill]

Irish, thank you for the reply. an enemy soldier sure put 3 shots in the kids engine room. a fatal area, but the little bugger survived! the armor being the best thing that happened to him , it saved his life. also being captured by the FINN'S, there is a good chance that he may have survived? I don't think that they abused prisoners? it is odd that WW1 items were still being used into WW2.

It is higly possibility that this kid survived and maybe he was working at some farm while he was war prisoner. Here was lots of captured Russian soldiers who work at some farms, of course not all. Even some of those farmers and prisoners come friends of a life time.

It even came as complete surprise to many prisoners at how well the Finns treated them.

[Irish1965]

Hi Toot,

The armor that I own was found on the battlefield of Charkov. It is WW2 Russian armor called the SN-42 (in Russian CH-42) It was developed for the combat engineers but found very useful in urban combat and often used in Stalingrad. I think that if the soldier wearing this vest was captured in the third battle of Kharkov he would have survived because the battle was won by the II SS Panzer Corps and two panzer armies. The German offensive cost the Red Army an estimated 90,000 casualties. The house-to-house fighting in Kharkov was also particularly bloody for the German SS Panzer Corps, which had suffered approximately 4,300 men killed and wounded by the time operations ended in mid-March 1943.

There was another Russian body armor set used most in the Leningrad area. It is called the SN-38 (CH-38) The concept was tough out in 1938 after the example of the German WW1 grabenpanzer.

IMG_3980.jpg

This hangs on my wall and was found in Estonia left on the battlefield at the river Narva in 1944.
Also here: becoming POW was not advisable for both sides.


It should look like this

IMG_E3983.jpg

Cheers Paul