Is this really Swiss, or is it...

[Greg Pickersgill]

Here's an interesting thing that turned out to be surprising and exciting. It looks like a fairly normal Swiss M18. Except for the definately not-Swiss semi-gloss dark green paint, inside and out. Even the leather lobes of the liner are painted the same green, which is *absolutely* not-Swiss.

The chinstrap is definately something different too; the original has vanished and has been replaced by something even *I* could hack out of a strip of leather, and I have no leatherworking skill at all. Peculiarly, it retains the original Swiss sliding buckle, which makes it even more odd.

I guessed, by the general feel of it (and the sewn horsehair pads in the liner) that it was an early product, but that's as far as I could go, other than being certain it wasn't Swiss issue. I'd bought it on Ebay from either France or Germany two or three years ago, cheap as no doubt the serious Swiss collectors reasonably enough ignored it.

So I had the unusual curiosity, until I contacted the very notable Swiss collector Claude Sorgius, who immediately responded with photos of its brother helmet, same colour, same painted liner pads, with the original Swiss chinstrap (painted green...) but with the Argentine roundel on the side! Gosh. Wow.

I'd be lying if I said I hadn't thought it might maybe just possibly be an Argentine M38 (Argentina was the only export customer for the Swiss M18) but it seemed so unlikely. I've seen a lot of the decades-used M38 on the Argentine Mercado auction site and some of them have quite extraordinary repairs and modifications and that provided a seed of suspicion. But I would never have claimed it was an M38 without seeing its near-twin with the roundel.

If anyone can prove this is wrong, please do so - true information is better than the tiny joy of thinking something is not just unuusal but quite exciting.