INTERIOR AND EXTERIOR VIEWS OF THE STEEL HELMET WORN BY OUR TROOPS.
AVIATOR'S HELMET.
VISOR HELMET FOR SNIPERS AND MACHINE GUNNERS.
When America entered the war she had, naturally, no distinctive helmet; and the English type, being easiest to make, was adopted to fill the gap until we could design a more efficient one ourselves. Consequently 400,000 British helmets were bought in England and issued to the vanguard of the American Expeditionary Forces. Our men wore them, became accustomed to them, and came to feel that they were the badge of English-speaking troops. The British helmet thus became a habit with our men, one difficult to change, a fact which mitigated against the popularity of the more advanced and scientific models which we were to bring out.
Now, the British helmet possessed some notable defects. It did not afford a maximum of protective area. The center of gravity was not so placed as to keep the helmet from wobbling. The lining was uncomfortable and disregarded the anatomy of the head. It was vulnerable at the concave surface where bowl and brim joined.
It is not an astonishing circumstance that some of the earlier helmets worn by the men-at-arms of the days of knighthood possessed certain of these same defects, notably, that they were apt to be top-heavy and uncomfortable. Only by centuries of constant application and improvement were the armorers of the Middle Ages able to produce helmets which overcame these defects and which embodied all of the principles of defense and strength which science could put into them. The best medieval helmets stand at the summit of the art. It was the constant aim of the modern specialist, aided by the facilities of the twentieth century industries, to produce helmets as perfect technically as those rare models which are the pride of museums and collectors.
Certainly in one respect we had the advantage of the ancients in that we have nowadays at our disposal the modern alloy-steels of great resistance. An alloy of this kind having a thickness of 0.036 of an inch is able to stop at a distance of 10 feet a jacketed, automatic pistol ball, .45 caliber, traveling at the rate of 600 feet a second. This was important not only from the standpoint of helmet production, but from the further inference that body armor of such steel might still be profitably used. The records of the hospitals in France show that 7 or 8 of every 10 wounded soldiers were wounded by fragments of shell and other missiles which even thin armor plate would have kept out. The German troops used body armor in large numbers, each set weighing from 19 to 24 pounds. In this country we believed it possible to produce body armor which would not be difficult to carry and which would resist the impact of a machine-gun bullet at fairly close range.