Bloody liner?

[General Patton]

Hello everyone, I was looking over my collection and realized that one of my helmets had dry, black-brown spots on the leather part of a M1 helmet. on the Canvas part of the liner, reddish, brown dry spots can be found. Do you guys know if this is blood? or just dry sweat? I took a lot of pictures of the liner. Thank you guys for the help!

[NickD]

i would have to say no its more then likely a mixture of rust & sweat & also from the condition of the sweatband compared to the liner webbing the sweatband is not original to the liner as the rest of the webbing seems to be unaffected ?

[MySonsDad]

What looks odd with this sweatband, compared to others that show darkening do to dirt/wear is that the dark is heavily localized giving indication that it is something other than the even wear that you would expect to see from use. Could it be blood? Sure, as well as a slew of other things that could have been spilled on the sweatband over the years, who's to say for sure unless you do some fancy DNA type testing. One thing is for certain, soldiers did bleed! As Nick pointed out, the sweatband does not match the webbing as even if these marks are normal wear, the webbing would show signs of the same.