Eagle on tunic material - good?

[Felix]

...

Im adding my knowledge here for what its worth....

There never did serve any regular SS soldiers in Afrika! This has been discussed before! Now we know this...

Secondly there were SS soldiers in Corsica, Italy and Greece during lets say, 1943, to start with. These troops were stationed there for some different purposes; to fight partisans and to get some training and being rebuilt as units. Its known that Reichfuhrer SS both did have the tropical uniform at Corsica 1943 along with the SS tropical sun helmet.

With the tropical arenas there are needs for tropical uniforms along with proper insignia. My guess would be a development during 1942.

Felix

- That's something I'm wondering about actually and have never seen addressed: when did the W-SS as an organisation first start ordering tropical eagles (and uniforms) for their troops?

i.e.
1. Not for the Polish campaign - surely
2. Not for the Western campaign - pretty surely
3. Probably not for the Russian campaign in '41-'43 - unless maybe for those troops involved with Army Group South?
4. For the Leibstandarte's Italian deployment in '43?
5. For Western or Russian fronts in '44?

Surely the SS didn't order special tropical uniforms or insignia for the very few SS personnel involved in Afrika during the DAK tenure, who would've numbered in their tens at the most (right? - or am I totally wrong)... expert help needed, I find it amazing that nobody has chimed in with chapter and verse on these things yet

Or was the 'tropical eagle' just the standard summer uniform version of the W-SS?

[Peter R.]

Many thanks Felix, that's filling in some gaps in my knowledge!

I saw a piece of tropical W-SS on Bill Shea's website yesterday described as '1941 model'.

Wonder if that means they started production of the tropical (well, let's be correct and call it sub-tropical if the Mediterranean area was the closest to the equator they were stationed) as early as '41 then.

[rayman]

Here's a couple of larger scans of the eagle. The right hand side wing has been detached from the backing material - maybe deliberately done by someone who wanted to have a peek at the back of the eagle itself.

Cheers,
Ray.

PS: I would make the scans larger but I can't seem to post them.

[rayman]

Hope this works.......

[rayman]

1

1

[rayman]

2

back

[Peter R.]

Damn that looks good from here! Congratulations. That's a new acquisition, right?