Feldgendarmerie M40 Tropical Field Cap

[Tim O'Keefe]

Hello

Have found a few "interesting" tropical caps will post the links and ask for help ? Looking for opinions on this cap: Not sure all/any are good however....?

http://www.MyEasyPics.com/ag.php?fid=33458&mid=919

Thanks
Tim

[billbert]

Like it more than I dont...Billbert

[HIGGINS]

Seems good for me...

[Mark Gibson]

There's that cockade again and I don't really like the stamping which appears to have run. I don't like the lining material and the washers on the grommets appear to be flat (may just be a bad perspective). It also appears that colour from the soutache may have run into the cap, take a look at the left side of the soutache (left on screen).
Gee I'm being negative today, but I really wouldn't feel comfortable with this cap.

Mark

[Tim O'Keefe]

Mark,

Its always the grommet's isn't it...appreciate the comments so far

Tim

[NZMark]

Not a good one. Fake aging, ink runs due to that varied process, sandpapered twill...and I'm with Mark G. on those grommets as well...
Mark T.

[B. N. Singer]

Hello

Looking for opinions on this cap...


Thanks
Tim

"Interesting" attempt at a known makers stamp.

B. N. Singer

[Tim O'Keefe]

Hello

Thank You for your comments on this cap. At first glance this cap was hopeful but the faded or stained (not sure which) soutache and just the shape of cap itself had me wondering. Now the cockade and makers stamp look bad as well.
You guys have some keen eyes, much appreciated

[Mark Gibson]

You guys have some keen eyes, much appreciated

It comes from a love for these things and studying as many as I can find (including any posted on the net).
I also have someone to thank for really getting me started, Ralph Heinz.
Ralph taught me well.

Mark

[Tim O'Keefe]

Hi Mark

Yes, I too owe much thanks to Ralph and his generosity...He has been digging his house out of snow for a good part of Winter, and working on his Tropical Uniform book

all the best
Tim

[Ralph Heinz]

Ever wash your cap?

Do any of you guys wear a cap in a super hot and dusty environment for months on end without ever washing it? Those guys in North Africa washed theirs and sometimes they had only gasoline to wash them in -- it's one way those caps faded. I wash my baseball cap from time to time in the dishwasher and that's just from spending weeks in the hot sun felling trees and cutting and splitting fire wood.

While it's unusual to see ink that has run in a tropical cap -- we've got to remember that there were a lot of cap makers scattered all over Germany and they weren't all using the very same brand of indelible ink. This LAGO firm may have been using an ink that wasn't permanent. As an artist, today I look at colored and black inks for their permanence rating on the jar and they aren't all the same. We all know by now that trop. army caps made by Schlesische were prized because they were not color-fast and were easily bleached to white while caps by some other makers wouldn't bleach out past a lighter shade of olive green.

The cockade is original -- even though it has widely been condemned as a fake. It is embroidered and it's bad rap began in 1996 with a letter later posted on an Aussie web site because the originator of the letter had only seen the much more common BeVo woven cockades that are by far the most often found on tropical caps. This woven cockade shows up on 1940 and 1941 dated caps but it's scarce.

Clyde Davis, an advanced collector in Bellaire, Texas traveled to Germany and did a lot of research on insignia makers. A decade ago, he wrote me several lengthy letters of his findings: "Just in Wuppertal and its suburbs alone, there were 44 licensed makers of cloth insignia in 1938." (It takes a long explanation but Wuppertal is where the term BeVo originated for Beteilung Vorsteher.)

"Between 1934 and 1944, in Germany (plus Austria and the Sudentenland later on) there were at least 938 separate firms which at one time or another held RZM licenses to produce NSDAP- related cloth insignia. It was an ongoing process since many licenses were canceled and many new ones issued over the years. Also, MILITARY insignia (such as the DAK eagles) were not made under RZM license or control, so a firm could produce such items totally outside the purview of the Party but under contract with the military. As a practical matter, however, I feel confident that 99% of military insignia was produced by firms that were also RZM-licensed." ( Clyde Davis in a letter to me, dated May 13, 1997)

With that many insignia makers, we can expect that not every one of them had the same machines for weaving or embroidering cockades (two different processes). "BeVo" type weaving became prominent -- it used a lot less thread and was a faster process but it wasn't the only process. Embroidered cockades were made and used on caps by several makers at one time or another. We've got to remember too that these manufacturers were trying to fulfill contracts and got insignia from different sources when and where it was available when they needed it. The Allies were bombing Europe daily and this meant some suppliers weren't always available and others had to be contacted. I've had tropical caps by the same maker in the same year with cap eagles and cockades that had been made by different firms.

Look at pages 158 and 159 in Schiffer's book showing two LW trop. billed field caps. David Bunch loaned me the one on page 158 to photograph years ago and both are good caps but if anyone had posted a closeup of just those flat embroidered cockades ten years ago on a Forum like this, we'd have all said they were no good!

How many hundred thousand tropical caps do you think were produced between 1940 and 1944? They were widely worn in parts of Russia, Italy, Southern France and Greece. We are lucky today as collectors if we each get to see and handle a tiny fraction of 1% of that total and we base our opinions on that tiny fraction. What could we learn if we could magically go back to the early 1940s and see a couple hundred thousand original tropical caps and their insignia? Think of how many thousands of them ended up at the bottom of the Mediterranean.

The best thing about Forums like this and the Internet is that we keep seeing new things and learning more. There's a lot more out there for us to learn from.

[NZMark]

Ralph,
I do not know 2% of what you do about tropical caps, but isn't it a coincidence that the same seller has the same 'obscure' cockade on his caps applied in the same manner? I'm not saying the cockade is a repro - I'm interested in the basic cap and wear/tear to it. I have done a lot of experimentation, too, and the abrasion on the twill just does not sit well with me at all...
Always looking to learn
Mark
PS - I'll be happy to admit I'm wrong!

[Mark Gibson]

I still wouldn't feel comfortable with this cap.
My loss if it's good but I just don't feel that this one is legit.

Mark

[Ralph Heinz]

Cockades

NZ Mark,

Your concern is logical -- why would three of these caps have a questionable cockade (the Pz. sidecap's cockade doesn't look exactly like the other two but it may just be a poor closeup photo). The answer lies in the ill feeling others have expressed: i.e. that the cockade is no good.

You have to go back a number of years to find the answer. I have a copy of a letter your esteemed countryman wrote to another collector in Sept. 1996. In it he stated that a US collector had bought three tropical caps from a dealer and sent them all back saying they were fakes. Your countryman didn't actually see or handle the caps -- he took the US collector at his word and then added his own comments stating that "The cloth is very close to the original and might even be from an original bolt of cloth. The orangery(SP)-red lining is pretty close to original too. The eagles are originals but the cockades are not. Original cockades were always woven, but cockades on these caps are all embroidered. This is a dead give away to anybody who knows what an original DAK cap should look like. And there is another thing wrong with the cockades, look at the red center and you will see the same imperfection "blip" a 'spot' rigth at the edge of the circumference of the red. The soutache braid apparently looks good and may be original wartime material. The silver cording on the "officer" cap is not orignal, and is postwar."

He then went on to describe how fakers were removing grommets from original sidecaps and putting them in fake field caps. Something I think I've demonstrated just isn't so. Maybe that's where this paranoia got its start. (Heaven help us if someone with bad intentions actually discovers a cache of original grommets and grommet setters hidden away in some old warehouse in Europe and puts them to use. They'll need original soutache to go with it though and thankfully soutache is another of the major stumbling blocks for fakers.)

We owe this man an awful lot -- I hold him in very high respect for his books were among the very first well researched ones on the DAK that got a lot of us more deeply interested in the field. I still refer to them often as I'm sure all of you do as well.

But his letter and opinion was before the Internet and the instantaneous transmission of photos across the globe among collectors who will never meet in person. In one of his books, he stated definatively that the LW never had an issue tropical billed field cap and that all the ones you see in wartime photos are army caps with LW insignia added. With the Internet and this Forum, we now know for certain that he was mistaken on this fact -- though rare, the LW did indeed have contracted tropical billed field caps. His book didn't show any LW field caps and its my guess he just hadn't ever seen one. Most of us hadn't until the Internet came along and stuff started coming on line that you couldnt' have seen in a dozen lifetimes before that.

A well-meaning Pz. collector published the letter and a couple photos of two of the caps on his web site from Australia as a warning to all of us and -- Bingo -- no one would touch a cap with an "embroidered cockade."

In 1995, I had visited Dick Lafayette in Seattle (if you look in the acknowledgements to your countryman's second book you'll see Dick Lafayette named as a godparent to his two children). In Dick's collecion, I photograhed a super rare LW tropical Mountain Troops cap he had just gotten. He and his best buddy often advertised for war souvenirs and this cap was his latest prize having come from an American vet who picked it up in Italy. Dick hasn't been back to NZ and your countryman hasn't been back to Seattle so he hasn't seen the CW LW Mtn. Troops cap with the rare four line ink stamp.

I photographed the cap including the ink stamp which I'd never seen before. When I saw the letter and photos of two of the caps that had been condemned as fakes, I recognized that same four line Clemens Wagner ink stamp. Since then, I've been back and compared three tropical caps all with the same rare four line CW ink stamp and they are identical to the fraction of an inch.

In May 2001, the cap that your countryman had "poisoned the well" on -- the Feldgendarm Officer's cap -- came up on eBay just before they shut the door on anything with a Swastika. No one was bidding on it and I contacted the seller and bought it myself. In talking with David Bunch on the phone, he said he'd been all set to buy it at the just concluded SOS until someone told him about that letter. I told him about the ink stamp I'd seen at Dick's (whom he knew of) and David's comment to me was "You'll love the cap."

To begin with the cockade is BeVo woven in the red and white centers sections -- only the outer black ring is embroidered. Remember my post about the huge number of insignia makers -- I spent hours this morning going through hundreds of photos of tropical items I have on CD's and found two more good caps with that same cockade on them: one a 1940 dated Robert Lubstein cap and the other -- get this -- a "Landes-Lief. Genossenschaft / Kurchner and Mutzenmacher / Mitteldeutschland" cap with a golden yellow Recon soutache. That's the same make as the FG cap on the post which many of you condemned because of the cockade.

There's nothing postwar at all about the silver officer piping on the FG officer's cap I bought and it is dated 1940 -- a very early cap. The piping is the same as used on continental wool officer sidecaps and LW officer visors. How your countryman decided it was postwar from a little photo is beyond me. I just wish you could be here in person to see what I'm talking about. This cap and another by the same maker are heavily soiled and sweat stained -- something that means they were both worn for months. You can see where goggles around the brim wore into the silver piping and the top of the soutache. The nap of the fabric shows a lot of smooth wear -- not something you could fake with sandpaper which would leave a roughen surface. Both of these caps were worn for a long period of time in a hot dusty area. The two caps I wore in hot filthy Viet Nam don't show anywhere near the kind of wear and soiling these two tropical caps do.

Only two of the disputed caps were shown in the 1996 letter posted on the Pz. web site so I can't comment on the other one which your countryman said should have had zig zag stitching for the insignia. It may well be that it had been a cap stripped of it's insignia and some collector sewed replacements on and that may have been obvious. That may have convinced the US collector that they were all fakes.

If all you've ever seen were the common cockades that are entirely BeVo woven I can see how someone would conclude that anything different is somehow a fake. It happens all the time with us collectors -- we expect things to be all alike and anything that isn't just like the one we have ourselves becomes suspect. That's a shame but it's human nature -- particularly where a lot of money is involved.

So why does this dealer now have three caps (or at least two) with this cockade - you've answered your own question: because those are the ones that no one would buy over the years because invariably someone would say, those are fakes just look at that cockade and you had the ultimate authority testifying to that in his 1996 letter that shut the door on any cap that didn't have the much more common entirely BeVo woven cockade.

I'll include some photos of cockades and the rare ink stamps in additional posts to this subject. The top photo shows the cockade on the 1940 dated FG officer's cap and the lower shows the cockade and soutache of a 1941 dated Rifle Regt. officer's cap.

[Ralph Heinz]

LW tropical Mtn. Troops cap

This is the cap that Dick Lafayette had just gotten in 1995. It came from a US vet who picked it up in Italy. Yes - the LW did have Mountain Troops. These were men who worked in high elevations in Italy with radio equipment. The cap has fully functional ear flaps lined with blue/gray wool. It got cold at night in the mountains of Italy but warm in the daytime. The front buttons with one Edelweiss button and there's an Edelweiss on the side. It's dated 1942.

Now look in Rommel's Army in Africa on page 11 and you'll see GFM Kesselring wearing this same model cap in 1942 on a trip to N. Africa to meet with Rommel and he's seen talking with his staff. There are a number of photos of GFM Kesselring in N. Africa wearing this cap in 1942.

Need another example? Look in Schiffer's book on page 161 and you'll see a LW Sonderfuhrer wearing this same style cap although his looks like it has a tropical eagle.

This cap is dated 1942 and so are the photos of Kesselring. It has fully functional ear flaps -- something we collectors have always called an "M43 cap."