Does this look like an authentic Korean War winter cammo helmet to you guys? It is a fixed bail front seam helmet.
Does this look like an authentic Korean War winter cammo helmet to you guys? It is a fixed bail front seam helmet.
Any heat stamp on shell, or maker's mark inside crown of liner?
I'm no expert but I don't see anything at first glance that would make me doubt this is a good early WW2/Korea lid.
Pat
Looks like ww2 to me to, with my limited knowledge.
Nape strap one piece ww2
Fixed bail front seam ww2
Colour of strap and liner webbing looks ww2
As Patgore above says liner maker and heat stamp will probably give it away.
Also when the white paint was added could be anyone’s guess .Was their white camo helmets in the Korean conflict? hopefully someone else will know more about it.
Looks like a nice ww2 helmet to me. well done.
Rod
White camo was common in the winter in Korea, and earlier in the Ardennes, and, for all I know , in the Appenines in Italy.
Mostly applied by slapping on whatever white paint the QM had in stock, or even local purchase/acquisition. As plumbob says, pretty hard to date the paint job, and this does have an authentic look. If not, it's well faked. But I like this helmet. Anyone disagree?
Pat
Have you seen it in hand? Is there any corking left on it? Everything appears to be early WWII except for the paint. It appears to have a sand texture and I have seen white paint like this over Vietnam-War era repainted M1's before. I suppose it could have been done for a variety of reasons, but I would never try to view any painted M1 as a winter camo helmet unless it had rock solid provenance.
By virtue of front seam and sewn on chin strap the lid is no doubt a WWII era lid, no heat stamp required. The liner looks the part as well. As to if it was repainted for Korea (Winter Camo), I'm no expert but I think it would be hard to tell but I see no reason it could not be and it would liley always be able to be argued what its actual origins were. The Navy painted a bunch of these helmets white in WWII as well, hospital and shipyard use (Safety or Quality Assurance Officers I think) so it gets a but fuzzy in my mind. Most of the navy used look pretty salty, the liners don't seem to like that old salt air much, but who's to day this is the original liner?
I just found this line in a thread from another forum:
"Being that the helmet is painted white, it would have primarily been used on a replenishment station or with cranes and booms for cargo handeling or loading/off loading of boats."
Certainly some of these old white painted M-1's have to be Winter Camo, I think it's going to be darn hard to acertain one way or the other. The navy had tons of these white helmets floating around.
Last edited by MySonsDad; 12-04-2011 at 03:38 PM.
The helmet went for over $400 on ebay. I also found out that the chinstraps are likley repros. Way too much money for something we can not prove province. The repro chinstraps harldy help with that.
So how do I tell the difference between a real winter combat helmet and some USN logistics item if both are front seam, fixed bale, with early McCord heat stamp numbers? Frankly a Battle of the Bulge or Korea lid would interest me a few hundred $$$$ more than an M-1 hard hat that never left a Navy dockyard.
I suppose it all comes down to provenance and who can tell the most plausible lies.
Pat
I don't see how anyone can really hang their hat on any story unless the lid is named or service number marked and you can trace the soldiers tracks. Of course even fake named and numbers helmets pop up all over the place and with such a small number of servemens records still existing on the National Archives, it's getting pretty difficult to prove anything. It seem far easire to disprove or at least raise reasonable doubt, and that should be enough to chase most peope away from throwing away good money ..... you would think anyway.
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