Different Kinds of Helmets

[MikeB]

I read an interesting post on another forum. Jareth was talking about his headgear collection. In it I believe he spoke about a helmet that was used as a suicide squadron type helmet as well as other pieces of headgear. I was wondering Jareth, if the helmet you were talking about was the "attack boat type helmet" or something else? What other type of "metal" helmets are out there other than the standard IJN, NLF, IJA, and Paratrooper. Also, there are different modifications to the standard insignia. Does anyone have any comments on the various insignia types or modifications that they have seen? Mike

[Jareth]

Mike, yes the helmet I was speaking about (also depicted in a photo from my collection) has been called a "suicide boat" helmet aka attack boat helmet. It's my opinion (untill period photos of helmet in use are discovered) that helmet is more likely a ship board exposed gunners helmet. It's also been mislabeled as a bomb disposal helmet. As for different shape helmet shells there's the early British/U.S. style Japanese helmet used in China, the early vented helmets used by both army & navy called "cherry blossom" helmets which also were made in a star hole shaped pattern vent variant, the already mentioned boat helmet, the model/type 90, the unique navy paratrooper helmet shell as well as the steel cloth covered army para helmets. You'll find numerous variations of the type 90 helmet (liners insignia etc) including numerous civil/home guard style helmets. There's even a German shaped cast aluminum civilian helmet! Regarding insignias, early helmets (vented) had unique army & navy (nickel plated with rope instead of chain etc.) variant insignias some of which were used into WW2.

[Eric Doody]

Mike et al.

Not sure if you saw this link on Army Type 90 steel helmets...

http://www.wehrmacht-awards.net/foru...ad.php?t=67984

Also, we have covered Army cherry blossom-vented steel helmets, Navy cherry blossom-vented steel helmets, plus a few other steel helmets on this forum, but for some reason a majority of the photos in these threads will no longer display.

There was also a thread where we kicked around the various types of insignia that you can find on steel helmets, but I was unable to locate this thread. (Try doing a search and you might find it as I tried to find it by looking at the thread titles.)

Eric

[MikeB]

Different Kinds of Helmets

Jareth and Eric-
No, I had not searched the threads. I will do it after posting this reply. Thanks too Jareth for the information you listed. Mike