In late 1915 steel helmets were introduced on the Western Front.
The Times 8 November 1915 p7
They were not, as The Times correspondent claims, there to protect the wearer from rifle or machine-gun bullets. Indeed, as I understand it, even modern helmets are not always proof against high-velocity rounds. What they were there to do was to protect soldiers from shrapnel. Shrapnel, in case you didn’t already know, is the collective noun for steel balls being expelled from an air-bursting (or Shrapnel) shell. It was a huge killer in the First World War and the steel helmet did a great deal to save lives.
One of the good things about the Brodie helmet – as it sometimes known – is that it had an internal harness. This meant that if the helmet was dented the dent was not necessarily reproduced in the wearer’s skull.
On the shape, however, with a wide brim and no neck protection, I have always been in two minds. On the one hand, if the threat is from above you would have thought the shape was a good thing as it covers a large part of the wearer’s body. It is also easy to make. On the other hand, British helmets over the last 100 years have progressively given more neck protection which sounds like the British Army’s way of saying they got it wrong.
By the way, in my limited experience both steel and more modern Kevlar helmets are a pain in the arse to wear. You either can’t see anything from a prone position or you can’t see anything from a prone position and get a headache.
This was one of many changes to frontline equipment during the course of the war. Others included the introduction of the Mills bomb, the Lewis gun and the Stokes mortar.
If it’s a pain in the arse, you’re wearing it wrong…
I’m thinking the presence of neck protection (when upright) and the ability to see when prone might just be mutually exclusive features.
The earliest marks of the British ‘tin hat’ suffered from a drawback in that they were stamped as a single draw, with the result that the metal was somewhat-thinned at the very top by the metal-drawing process. Even when upgraded to significantly-more bullet-resistant steel, this drawback remained and the protection from directly above was reduced. The German Stahlhelm, by contrast, was formed in a multi-step, hot-stamp process which maintained a more-even material thickness throughout, and provided more-consistent protection in all directions.
llater,
llamas
The Germans were very good.
A friend of mine, ex-US Army, cursed the introduction of the Kevlar helmet. Sure, it is lighter, but you can’t use it as a bowl for cooking in the field.
Yes Patrick – the German helmets were a bit better as they offered a bit more protection to the back of the head and neck.
So were the French helmets – when they eventually turned up.
The French army (infamously) rejected advice to make helmets before the war – and rejected advice to reject brightly coloured uniforms.
Critics of the British Army of 1914 (of whom I am one) should remember that the French army of 1914 was worse – both in its equipment (brightly coloured uniforms and so on and its tactics.
The French army (including Foch) before the war had made a basic miscalculation that the increase of firepower favoured the attacking side.
It, of course, favoured the defending side – as most of the attacking side’s bullets go over the heads of people they are attacking “soldiers live in holes” as was the case even in the days of Tristam Shandy.
Lack of practical experience (no major war since 1870) may partly be to blame for the flight into fantasy of the French Army so horribly shown in 1914.
Even Haig never got his men to dress up in bright blue tops and red trousers and then walk (with sometimes brass bands playing along side – or in front) into the German fire. As the French counter attacked in the “battles of the frontiers” (the French-German frontier) after the Germans started to attack via Belgium.
The French died in heaps in 1914.
It is quite true that French tactics had massively improved by 1916 (one of the just charges against Haig is that he learned less from experience than French commanders did – although his defenders would point out that he did not start from a base of total ignorance as the French commanders seem to have done) – but dead men can not be returned to life by a change in tactics – or in equipment (steel helmets and so on).
And some of the bravest men in France had been killed or crippled – in their hundreds of thousands.
Later on French troops got a reputation for caution – and for lack of confidence in their commanders.
This was partly unfair – as French tactics (the creeping barrage and so on) were probably less bad than British tactics by 1916.
But after the blood soaked farce of 1914 (where France held on by raw courage – more in spite of its generals than because of them) the attitude of cynical contempt to be found in some French soldiers was understandable – although it did reduce the effectiveness of the French Army at some points.
There was, PERHAPS a less stoical attitude among the French troops – after the bravest had been killed early on.
Less of the “even if the Commanding General is an idiot who is going to get everyone killed – he is still the commanding general, and no one lives for ever anyway”.
The attitude of so many World War One veterans I knew as a child.
As for the Germans – a distinction must be drawn between the ordinary soldiers (many of whom were just as basically decent as their enemies) and so many of the elite.
Some of the German elite were indeed men of honour – disgusted by such things as the tissue-of-lies that was the German Declaration of War upon France in 1914.
Indeed the German Ambassidor to Britain reacted (on his return to Germany) by removing all pictures of the German Emperor from his house – and the wife of the former diplomant forbad any visitor to even mention the name of the Emperor (as she knew the rage and anquish this would cause her husband).
However, many of the German elite were worm-eaten by fashionable German philosophy – going back to Fichte and so on.
They were no longer gentleman (as Joffre or even Haig would have understand that term) – they were (in the First World War – not just in the Second World War) moral relativists – rejectors of basic principles of honourable conduct.
Not just hypocrites – people who did not live up to moral standard (as, it could be argued, Haig failed to live up to the principles he professed to believe in) – but must worse than hypocrites, people who formally rejected the basic moral principles themselves (not just did not live up to them when under terrible pressure – but did not even try, did not believe them).
The failure of so many historians to understand this basic cultural difference in the elite (their assumption that the Nazis just appareed fom nothing in 1933) is very distressing.
Contrary to Denis Winter (a find military historian – but someone with no real grasp of the political or cultural matters involved) someone like General Ludendorf had sold their soul to Satan (if I my use the old form of language) long before there was any such thing as a Nazi party.
The failure to OPPENLY defeat Germany in 1918 (no victory parade in Berlin and so on) led to the ideas of the German elite not really be discredited – the Germans could pretend to themselves that they had not really been defeated.
Millions of allied soldiers (mostly not British) therefore died for what Foch (a much better soldier in 1918 than he had been years before) called, in terrible despair, a 20 year truce – rather than real victory and lasting peace.
The failure to get-the-job-done in 1918-1919 made another war inevitable – and a war which would be fought with a balance of power tilted more towards the Germans.
Here the French high command can not really be faulted – they understood the need to really (openly) defeat Germany, to discredit the ideas of the German intellectual elite among ordinary Germans.
And the American commander Pershing (for all his total lack of experience as a military commander in this scale of warfare) understood this basic POLITICAL need – if another war was to be prevented.
It was the British high command (with their false assumption, still to be found in so many British writers) that “abstract principles” are not important, who can be faulted.
To the British high command what mattered was to “stop the killing” (an attitude they had rather failed to show on the Somme or in relation to Passchendaele) – the central political point (that German IDEAS must be discredited) was beyond the understanding of the British high command.
Not the Emperor (whether Germany was a monarchy or a republic was irrelevant if its leading ideas remained the same – moral relativism, denial of individual moral responsibility, and support for endless conquest) but the IDEAS of Germany.
And these ideas could only be discredited by the total (open) defeat of Germany.
They’d be pretty useless if they didn’t: the force would be transmitted directly from the steel to the skull, defeating its very purpose. It’s why construction workers and oil industry heroes wear plastic hard hats with a harness rather than a hard, plastic baseball cap.
Incidentally, the modern American army helmet is very similar in shape to that of the WWII German army helmet. Good engineers, those Germans.
Short version.
If one had gone to German university department of law and asked “who here believes in NATURAL JUSICE?” – one would have got laughter and looks of total contempt. Before 1914 – not just before 1939.
This is what the French President (a philosopher) meant in his reply to the German Declaration of War – that it was not really a Declaration of War upon France, but rather a Declaration of War upon the “universal principles of reason and justice” themselves, principles whose very existence he knew the German intellectual elite (moral relativists – historicists) had rejected long before 1914.
What the elite believes does matter – sooner or later it has very practical consequences.
And the spread of such mental (and spiritual) poison in the universities of the allies (including the United States) had (and will have – in our future) its own terrible consequences.
Even a steel helmet is no good – if the mind within has been corrupted.
Surellin wrote:
‘A friend of mine, ex-US Army, cursed the introduction of the Kevlar helmet. Sure, it is lighter, but you can’t use it as a bowl for cooking in the field.’
A very foolish habit, which the US Army tried mightily to discourage. Reason being that the ballistic steels used to make helmets are dangerously, non-reversibly embrittled by heat, as from a cooking fire. They are also metallurgically counter-intuitive – unlike most carbon steels, quenching them from high heat does not harden them, but actually anneals (softens) them.
So if Private Sproggins used his M1 steel pot to heat his K-rats, and left it to cool naturally, he would end up with a brittle helmet. If he dumped water on it to cool it, he would end up with a soft helmet.
The US has moved on considerably from the original PASGT helmet, which bore a passing resemblance to the Stahlhelm. The original PASGT was replaced in 2003 with the ACH (shorter, smaller rim, larger ear spaces) which is scheduled to be replaced by the ECH (even shorter, smaller rim, much-better ballistic performance). Experience in the sandbox has shown that ballistic protection for the throat, neck and the back of the head is much-better provided by separate ballistic pads and panels, which are fielded as part of the IOTV body-armor system. So many of the issues with a classical helmet that made it a compromise have been addressed by the use of conformable armour rather than a rigid helmet.
llater,
llamas
The modern British helmet seems to me the best all-round compromise between comfort and protection.
My father told me of one occasion while in France in 1939 that a fellow infantryman was extolling the virtues of his helmet. Putting his money where his mouth was, he invited another to test it; which he did by delivering a good hard blow with the edge of his entrenching shovel. This had several results: a rather attractive crease in the crown of the helmet; a case of concussion to the wearer and both protagonists on charges.
The other reason to not cook dinner in your helmet is you have a mess kit for that.
If you’re just heating food in its can, it works just as well as a helmet.
If you’re cooking directly in the vessel, it’s even better, because your food won’t taste like your head – and you don’t have to remove the harness.
“They were no longer gentleman (as Joffre or even Haig would have understand that term) – they were (in the First World War – not just in the Second World War) moral relativists – rejectors of basic principles of honourable conduct.
Not just hypocrites – people who did not live up to moral standard (as, it could be argued, Haig failed to live up to the principles he professed to believe in) – but must worse than hypocrites, people who formally rejected the basic moral principles themselves (not just did not live up to them when under terrible pressure – but did not even try, did not believe them).”
Haven’t the vaguest what you’re wittering on about there Paul. The sole aim, in any war, is to kill as many of the other bastards as necessary whilst killing the minimum of your own. Everything else is wank.
That said. Usually better to maim rather than kill the other lot. Ties them up dealing with casualties.
The evolution of the British helmet from wider and flatter to the modern deeper and rounder is not “the British Army’s way of saying they got it wrong”, it’s a reflection of the fact that war changes, and intelligent armies change with it. During WWI, most head injuries were caused by shrapnel from overhead artillery shells, so you really wanted as large an “umbrella” as possible. These days air bursting artillery is less prevalent, and RPGs and grenades detonating next to you are more prevalent.
From what I know of him Prince Lichnowsky, German ambassador to Britain was one of the sane ones. As I understand it when he tried to politely point out Germany’s folly he was vilified.
Many years ago I read Winter’s Haig’s Command. I can’t remember much of it but I can’t say I was particularly impressed. Firstly, it smacked of the writer trying to prove something. That never makes for good history. Secondly, there was a chapter in which he condemned the (alleged) doctrine of HCI or Heavy Casualties Inevitable. But heavy casualties were inevitable. No one, not even the Germans, managed to make advances without huge casualties. Such was the nature of warfare at the time.
I spent a considerable amount of time last year trying to find and answer to one question. Why was it that in 1914 the Germans found it easy to stop the French but the French found it very difficult to stop the Germans? The main reason was artillery. The Germans were much better at co-ordinating artillery with infantry. They also put their reserve formations in the front line rather than have them guarding railway stations etc. There was also the fallout from the Dreyfus affair which paralysed the French officer corps and the lack of proper training grounds. The French uniform was a minor factor.
On whether the Allies could have imposed a total defeat of Germany I don’t know. In November 1918 the British and French achieved their war aims. Germany lost its battle-fleet, most of its guns, mortars and machine guns, its air force, its submarines, its colonies and Alsace-Lorraine. And the place had descended into revolution. The allied losses in the Hundred Days campaign had been colossal. Had the war gone on into 1919 it would have been the inexperienced Americans doing the fighting.
And there’s another point. Any German with eyes to see knew they were beaten in 1918. They were starving at home and they were starving at the front. At the same time the army was being continually pushed back. If Germans could push these memories to the back of their heads it seems plausible that they could have pushed back memories of Allied parades through the Brandenburg Gate.
This may be a forlorn cause, but is there not an argument that, contrary to the Blackadder school of history, WW1 generals were among the most technically innovative of any major conflict? The creeping barrage, air reconnaissance, gas, flame-thrower, fire-and-movement, etc etc?
Well, let’s see.
Equipment introduced by the British during the course of the war:
Lewis gun
Stokes mortar
Mills bomb
Livens projector
Gas shells
Gas masks
Smoke shells
Sound ranging
Brodie helmet
106 fuze
9.2” Howitzer
The tank
Continuous Wave (CW) wireless
Simplex engine
Leach catapult
Rifle grenade
Techniques introduced by the British during the course of the war:
Creeping barrage
Chinese barrage
Predicted barrage
New infantry assault techniques
Models of the battlefield
Airborne fall-of-shot spotting
Airborne enemy artillery spotting
Ground attack from the air
Airborne re-supply
Techniques and equipment massively expanded during the war:
Artillery “shooting off the map”
18-Pounder
60-Pounder
Shells of all kinds
Mines
Machine guns (they even got their own corps)
Paul:
To be fair to the French, in 1912 they were experimented with a khaki uniform, because they did see that the days of the red madder trouser were numbered. Unfortunately, politicians liked the pantalons rouges because they felt they engendered the offensive spirit which was going to regain Alsace-Lorraine. However, the horizon blue uniform was introduced almost immediately, and was universal by 1915.
Similarly, the French army fought World War One with the obsolete 1886 rifle, because they had the tooling in place to build it in large numbers. Again, before the war, they had been experimenting with semi-automatic rifles, and were on the verge of adopting a small calibre recoil operated rifle when the war came along, and made it impossible to change when they needed huge numbers of rifles as quickly as possible.
I must say I agree with you about the failure properly to defeat Germany in 1918. The Reich only dated from 1971, and should have been split up into its constituent parts. I have come to the conclusion that a strong Germany always poses an existential threat to Europe, and Frau Merkel’s attempts to Islamise the continent lead me to believe that nothing has changed. Mrs Thatcher was firmly against German reunification in 1989, and I think the old girl was on to something.
@Surellin “A friend of mine, ex-US Army, cursed the introduction of the Kevlar helmet. Sure, it is lighter, but you can’t use it as a bowl for cooking in the field.”
We were instructed to never, ever cook anything in our helmets. They were to be used for shaving. And of course, to sit on. And yes, I’m a 2x US Army vet.
Informative, thanks for that!
The US is changing its helmet design because of German claims of “cultural appropriation”……..
“This may be a forlorn cause, but is there not an argument that, contrary to the Blackadder school of history, WW1 generals were among the most technically innovative of any major conflict? The creeping barrage, air reconnaissance, gas, flame-thrower, fire-and-movement, etc.”
To the contrary, I think. The innovations did not come from the generals, except much later in the war, when the idiots had been replaced from below, by those who *were* imaginative enough to see the need for certain capabilities and recognize who those capabilities could be realized. They were the ones who were promoted because they were capable and alive. And some technical innovations were realized far from the front. From historywiz.com
“A Colonel in the British army developed the idea when he noticed that the only vehicles that could navigate the rough terrain were caterpillar tractors with moving treads. He realized that if such a vehicle were covered with armor, it might be just the very thing to get into and over the other side’s trenches.
He passed the idea along to the government and Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, got it. He was intrigued by the idea and started a project to develop the idea.”
First Lord of the Admiralty….. not Chief of the Imperial Stafff you will note.
The First World War tank was an idea that was ahead of its time. However, at the time it was expensive, slow, unreliable, vulnerable and tough on the crews.
Here’s an intriguing argument- would our soldiers fight better with helmets, or without them? People often make the case that we have too many laws in ordinary life, and that people don’t need them, as witnessed when the traffic lights didn’t work in a major city, and people negotiated their own way around (Beohme?). If people are given safety equipment, does that make them more foolhardy?
After all, people in accidents often claim that they were within the speed limit, as though the outside authority that set that limit meant they didn’t need to think about it. So helmets might save lives in some cases, but make soldiers more reckless in attacks.
Ant ideas?
Given that helmets were there to protect from shrapnel it is difficult to see how they could have made people more reckless. I suppose it’s possible that soldiers might have been more willing to venture outside the safety of a dugout during a bombardment but they would have had to have been pretty sure that it was shrapnel being fired at them and not HE.
During the American War Between The States, artillery observers were going up in balloons. Much grief in WWI might have been avoided had various European militaries paid attention to their observers reports from the Union and Confederacy.
Good book here: http://cwmemory.com/2010/03/31/did-the-civil-war-affect-european-military-culture/
http://www.sonofthesouth.net/civil-war-pictures/strategy/foreign-observers.htm
“Foolproof”, Greg Ip. Helmets have not actually reduced the number of accidents, because players feel more confident, and become more aggressive. Some head injuries are down, but spinal injuries are up.
Antilock braking systems have also not reduced the number of accidents- it takes a while to learn how to use them, and cars get hit in the boot by other cars that don’t have enough time to brake from the over-confident drivers ahead.
And didn’t the non-helmet-wearing Vietcong fight just as well as their helmeted opponents?
XIV Army infantry were the lightest equipped in WWII. They went in for bush hats and kukris.
In April, 2003, British troops gave up their helmets for berets. They also stopped wearing sunglasses.
In Umm Qasr, the forces of 42 Royal Marine Commando who have adopted the approach, which also involves discarding body armour, say they are working in a very different way to their US counterparts in Iraq.
One Marine described the US approach as “like cracking a nut with a sledgehammer”.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-174655/Helmets-berets-British-troops.html
How did that work out you ask? Not very well.
“You might expect the mood in Basra to be one of rejoicing, given that an occupying army is pulling out. It is exactly the opposite, finds the BBC’s John Simpson.
The British themselves tend to think of their time in Basra as a failure. The Americans told them bluntly that they were much too soft.
They patrolled in berets instead of helmets, and were not allowed to wear sunglasses; they did not want to seem menacing.
That worked well, until neighbouring Iran decided to stir up the militias to attack the British.
There was the famous scene in September 2005, shown on television sets around the world, when a crowd of Iraqis attacked a British armoured vehicle and set it, and its crew, on fire.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8027797.stm
Regarding that Daily Mail story posted by Vinegar Joe above, I remember that coming out in the paper version because the story was illustrated by a picture of one of the 42cdo troop commanders walking on patrol wearing his beret, and he happened to be a good mate of mine. He later got posted to Afghanistan and if anyone could make a film out of his experiences raiding a Taliban stronghold there, it would outsell Star Wars.
“If you’re cooking directly in the vessel, it’s even better, because your food won’t taste like your head – and you don’t have to remove the harness.” – Sigivald
The old American ‘steel pot’ had a plastic liner. The liner had the harness, the only straps on the metal helmet were the chin straps. The strap and harness wouldn’t keep the helmet from wobbling on the head, especially if you had a small head. This resulted in many having head AND neck pains. Also, I found the helmet a real hindrance when shooting from the prone position.
Fascinating.
Special Forces and other ‘non-traditional’ forces often don’t wear helmets, even when otherwise in uniforms. That’s because the benefits of the helmet outweigh its disadvantages in their sorts of combat, where the chance of artillery barrages and heavy small-arms fire are very slim and what matters are concealment, fire-and-maneouvre, and smooth and rapid action.
By contrast, troops in the urban and occupation parts of the sandbox learned to love their helmets and IOTVs above all else – not because of artillery barrages or small-arms threats, although the PASGT / ACH / ECH series and the IOTV system offer very-impressive protections against both things – but because of the new threats that these places offered. IEDs killed so many, not by blast, but by shrapnel injuries from other-than-above. And the hajiis developed skills of firing on buildings, rather that onto the troops, so as to collapse buildings or create internal threats from eg spalled masonry, metal and debris. They learned that there wasn’t much point in firing directly onto US troops except for manouevre suppression – the US kit is so good now that you have to be very good, or very lucky, to immobilise a US troop with an AK 47 bullet. Better to try and drop a thousand of brick on him. So the US armour now acts as much like safety equipment on a building site as it does bullet protection on a battlefield.
And this will change again, and then the armour system will change again.
llater,
llamas