Opinions on End Of War M44/45 Shoulder Straps

[Johnny R]

M43

Steve- Your M43 is made of Italian wool. I have an identical tunic. Is yours marked P44?

[airborne_steve]

Steve- Your M43 is made of Italian wool. I have an identical tunic. Is yours marked P44?

Yes, the tunic is made of italian wool and it is very course. The Depot is P44 as well. Humm.

I have a about a dozen mint M44 straps most came from the same wearhouse in which your shoulder straps came. The quality of manufacture is very, very good those staps. However, most of the mint M44 straps seen floting around these days all came from this same wearhouse/manufacture so we have based the M44 standard on these samples. The M44 straps that were produced by other factories like the ones posted sometimes get dismissed as fake because we have set a standard based off one manufacture.

Now I'm not justifying that the posted straps are authentic but IMHO I do believe they fall in to the ball park as authentic late war manufacture.

Steve

[djpool]

Tough call on the straps. Generally speaking the quality of construction remained fairly high even at the end. It was generally the materials that suffered. Heres my worn set. I would say the materials are not as good as the mint ones that came from the depots. But the quality of construction was pretty good. WR Jim
Full view

[djpool]

Close up of the button holes.

[Johnny R]

Tunic

As a side note here is the other P44 tunic (Warsaw Depot). Most of these seem to be marked from there. Relichunter had one or two just like ours last year.

[Johnny R]

Stamp

Warsaw marking and size

[PaulR]

What is the cypher number?

[Johnny R]

Eighth Infantry

The boards are early war field grey with late war tress and "8"s.

[Ostfries]

construction,

Yes, the button holes are pretty bad true but the straps also have a fair amount of wear which have worn the threads making them look worse. I have seen some shoulder straps issued which had un-sewn button holes alltogeather.

You have a valid point and that was my first reaction to dismiss these as fakes.

This M43 tunic I'm reffering to. it is a very late dated 44 tunic and has the very dark grey, course wool just like the 44 shoulder straps I posted (the shoulder straps on this tunic are not the ones posted). It also has very crude, factory sewing generally speaking. However, the button holes are well sewn (but worn) which does contrast my shoulder straps in that respect.

A plausible explanation but not for buttonholes I’m afraid, up until the end they still persist in some sort of quality level, I recently purchased a ’45 dated M44 tunic, and although materials used are from a lower quality the overall construction of the tunic still has a high quality level. Pleas compare the beautiful examples jhodgson and djpool provided us with the ones who eventually started this thread, unfortunately its not only the sloppy buttonholes but the whole appearance, btw beautiful tunics gentleman.