M1 helmet "steel pot"

Hello everybody, Devon here again and this is for all the people that I said I wasn't going to do any World War II helmets and this really isn't a World War II helmet but it's also really pretty much a World War II helmet because they didn't freaking change them. So we'll get into it though for all you people that want to see a World War II helmet or an American helmet or anything like that we can we can get into that. Right now with this video and I'm not going to do another World War II helmet for a while probably even at people's requests unless I come up with one that has a specific provenance with it that makes it more rare or more interesting because there's millions of other videos out there on YouTube on all of these on all the World War II helmets because they're the most popular. But this one you see in front of you is an M1 and it's probably America's most iconic helmet ever. Now the one in front of you is actually an American shell and a Canadian liner. The Canadian liner is the same as the Vietnam ones all right but we'll get into the history of this helmet before we we talk about this exact helmet itself we'll get into the Now the M1 was approved for for service in 1941 to replace the M1917A1 Kelly helmet which the shell had been used since World War I so it had been in service now for little over 20 years and it was just a very very outdated design stuff was coming along very rapidly and at first the M1 helmet shared a lot of the same parts as the Kelly helmet. Now the Kelly helmet is made out of a very high chromium or manganese content steel they were initially made out of the same gauge as steel they had the same kind of chin strap in the OD number three which is actually brown and they had all brass hardware all the early ones had brass j-hooks as they're called black and brass j-hooks and buckles like this as well as brass end keepers and later they went to white metal end keepers so like steel end keepers and stuff like that and hooks and there's a couple different hook designs and everything like that and just for cost effective reasons because brass was a commodity they needed that to make ammo so but the M1 steel helmet came out in 1941 to replace the Kelly and it was a huge improvement now this shell here is just to show you what it looks like without the cover but it came out in 1941 to replace the Kelly and it didn't fully replace the Kelly until 1942 and the early M1 helmets had had a lot to be desired from them they offered good protect more coverage than the M1917A1 but they at first had a lot of problems like most of the U.S. technology military technology to come out at first they had a **** ton of problems the first liners in them were low pressure liners they were essentially paper mache so imagine you're a marine getting sent out to the south pacific to fight the Japanese wearing a paper mache helmet in the hot 120 degree humidity it essentially fell apart around you and then all you were left with was a steel shell and that was no good so they realized there's a lot of problems early on with those and they started coming out with high pressure liners the very last low pressure liners were made in November of 1942 and then after that they were all high pressure liners and those were made out of fiberglass or compressed canvas or what's known as corlon it's like canvas and resin and later later ones even like towards the 70s and 80s like the late 70s early 80s started to be made out of Kevlar and other types of ballistic fabric because it offered more uh deformation better deformation pattern if the helmet if the bullet didn't penetrate the helmet so or piece of shrapnel or whatever it offered it offered a little bit more protection it still wouldn't stop a a bullet head on now no helmet is designed to be bulletproof uh these things would not stop most handgun rounds head-on they'd go right through them right into your head i probably wouldn't go through both sides of the helmet but if one came in the side and they'd go in and not not completely out but um the weakest point of these helmets is right above the temple area right here most helmets it's right at the temple area because it's just where the most vertical wall is of the helmet or there's usually a change in direction of the pattern there as far as Kevlar ones go so but this helmet was made almost entirely round and now the first helmets uh were front seamed which means this little rim that is around it see that kind of little lip there that rim means that they were the early ones were seamed here in the front but that tended to catch and like cut people's hands when you would grab the the brim of the helmet they would cut you so they moved that to the rear of the helmet on later designs and um earlier helmets had um let's take a look at this one had fixed bales which means uh you see that kind of green thing in there oh it moves back and forth on a fixed bale helmet so the early ones was just a piece of like wire like steel wire that was bent and welded it was a pinch welded right to the right to the shell and they tended to break off so they went to a swivel bale so one that moves back and forth and that in improved the longevity a lot more and they came with tons of different liners there's tons of famous like uh most of the early liners were made by holly or holly's subcontractors so all the like paper mache low pressure liners which are really thick whereas you see i'll show you later the thin high pressure liners um a lot of them were made by like seaman paper company made them uh firestone tire company made them um msa made them uh there's just tons tons and tons of companies out there and um the helmet pretty much we made uh made most of its changes during world war ii and it served the m1 served on through the mid and end of world war ii all the way through korea and vietnam and into the the modern era right up to when um the u.s uh invaded grenada was the first time we used the kevlar pasgt helmet and that was in 1986 i want to say so i could be wrong on that i'm not i'm not sure i don't have any notes right here in front of me i'm doing this all from memory but uh we'll move on here down to uh vietnam helmets were the first ones to really um make changes to it all right because in world war ii there was pretty much all the same cotton webbing in it and everything like that and in vietnam they switched to um kind of a nylon blended cotton fabric um the early earliest ones had rayon and that tended to disintegrate and uh later you'll see full nylon helmets and this helmet was actually so iconic everything had actually went on to be adopted by almost every nato country and it's actually made still nato's standard helmet they haven't adopted a single uh composite design to replace it so this is this helmet is still in use with a lot of countries and a lot of countries only recently just got rid of it like japan used the their version of the m1 until 19 no not 19 2012 i think it was uh south korea still uses the m1 turkey still uses the m1 as their standard helmet um a lot of pretty much every country in europe adopted these to some point or something very close to it even russia went um after world war ii went so far as to test it um this helmet is probably one of the most iconic shapes of any helmet out there in the world other than the stall helm obviously but this helmet is pretty much the representation of the free world so and the vietnam ones uh went to a darker color liner uh blended fabric and it had um most of them uh had high pressure liners made out of fiberglass and they were all looked like this on the inside you can see it's kind of this dark olive drab it's kind of a gray green instead of like the late world war ii ones used like a dark green you could actually see the green this is kind of like a gray green and uh all the helmet chins uh sweatbands were held in with little tension clips and this is an airborne liner you could tell by the a yolks on here and the a the a yolks just made it a lot more stable because the uh the only chin strap on it is connected to the shell but the uh airborne liners are all connected to the liner and in the world war ii uh the liner was held in place by tension if you had a cover on it it would be enough to hold it in there or there would be a leather leather chin strap that would rivet right up above your ear in the shell and it would come out and around and you hold it uh tighten it over the fill of the helmet this helmet doubles as like an original kind of multi-tool for military use because even the world war ii ones you could pull the liner out and then you had just a steel bucket essentially with the chin strap connected to the shell being like a handle so you could use this to bail your foxhole you could use it to cook out of but that's not recommended because it'll ruin the temper on the steel but people people still did it uh you can use it as a hammer to drive in tent stakes you can use it as a shovel if you really need to do like if you're being shot at and you had to dig a hole it's better than clawing your fingernails off in the dirt so this helmet has been there and back this one like i said is actually canadian this helmet liner is canadian because canada adopted the m1 helmet in the 70s to replace the the mark threes that they had been using from british service for a long time uh america being their closest ally they might as well take american stuff and the cover on it is actually it's not od uh it's brighter than that it's canadian mass green which is like their version of olive drab uh i like it better because it's a little brighter uh works better for where i live and stuff like that but other than that it's pretty much undistinguishable distinguishable from an olive drab one or the like olive drab ones used in early vietnam and later they all went to the the uh vine leaf reversible mitchell pattern helmet covers that all seen but early vietnam uh you'll see a lot of the olive drab green helmet covers or the marines had the the reversible frog skin that you see in world war ii but uh vietnam actually went on for a lot longer than people think the u.s had troops in vietnam in 1955 just after the french left because vietnam was a french was known as french indo china before it was known as vietnam and the french had been fighting a revolution trying to quell a revolution in vietnam since 1945 and in like 1954 they gave up and america came in to kind of start producing infrastructure there and protecting their own interests and stuff in that country um but vietnam went on from 1955 to 1975 fighting didn't really pick up until 1960 so we had troops there five years before any like cool stuff happened or a lot of the stuff people know about happened and um this was pretty much the standard helmet for us in vietnam we also had other countries helping us like australia actually fought the entirety of the vietnam war with us people tend to forget about that but australia were actually um our closest ally there in the that had experience um fighting in jungle uh against the japanese so they they were pretty much the jungle warfare masters as far as our close allies go to so we turned to them in early vietnam a lot for tactics to use in the jungle against the vietcong and the nba regulars now the nba had their own helmet too a lot of them were like the cork or fiber piff helmets uh copied off the french and a lot of chinese surplus you see every now and then you'll see vietnam soldiers wearing the um east german kind of big sloped m59 helmet you'll see them in some pictures wearing that a lot of times they would just wear cloth hats and stuff and everything to just blend in that was their their best best aid there in during the war was to to be able to understand be indistinguishable from the junior populace because the u.s would never go in being you know one of the geneva convention countries one of the countries to sign the geneva convention they wouldn't go in and just start killing women and children and everyone else like that and that's how they knew they would win because eventually like now everyone has found out how to beat the u.s in a long-term war instead of having a large war you know based on gaining ground or losing ground vietnam was the first war based on body count so you can't trace on a map body count you can't tell if you're winning by body count especially against an enemy where you don't know his true fighting force you don't know how many people there actually are and the vietnamese are really good at hiding this after battles they drag bodies off so we couldn't get accurate counts of casualties and stuff like that but enough about the vietnam war we'll get into this helmet this is the vietnam era same style so it's got the a washers in it riveted directly to the shell you can't pull this out without uh popping out that little rivet there's special tools to do that i recommend you take it somewhere professional if you have one and you want to change everything take it somewhere professional because uh you can easily easily **** one of these up if you i don't know what you're doing uh because the liners were meant to be just junked if you if something went wrong on them and you would get a new one now you can tell this is different from the world war ii ones because the world war ii ones uh most of the a washes were painted so these ones are just blackened so and by this nape strap here these were on only mid vietnam mid-war vietnam and later uh or otherwise than that they had the the u.s uh like world war ii type where it would just be here in the back of the helmet the head strap set much higher up the the suspension sat much higher up and there was a piece of cloth that went back here and you would snap in a nape protector whereas this is just routed through a slider buckle in the back and on the sides under where the outer shell chin strap connects the inner shell chin strap and that was pretty much the same on all all the helmets after that and another way you could tell the difference between the early ones and the later ones is the early ones uh didn't have this overlapping stripe type they had triangle like v-shaped pieces of webbing that would tie with a a loop of string here at the top and that's how you would adjust it whereas these ones all have slider buckles way there in the back kind of hidden by the chin strap you can kind of see it there piece of black right above the gray strap there that's the easiest way to tell an early one from a late one uh also that there's no liner chin strap there's no leather liner chin strap and this helmet is great because it doubles as a construction helmet if you don't want to wear the full steel helmet because this is heavy you could take the liner out and wear just the liner and a lot of soldiers did that when they were on duty like working and stuff where you still in felling trees for landing zones and things they would wear just the the liner because it's a lot lighter and it offered like blunt protection against tree branches falling on you and stuff and it wasn't bulletproof but it was better than carrying the full steel helmet on you that would wear you out and fatigue you a lot faster than wearing just the liner so you see a lot of generals and stuff in world war ii wearing just the liner and it would have their stars and stuff on it their insignias painted on the side it's not uncommon to find them with insignias and stuff painted on the side now these were all painted in the same color olive drab number seven okay which is kind of a darker olive drab so it's kind of like this kin strap color here so you saw the other one is kind of a green uh what you would think of as green whereas um the webbing in like the early ones wasn't green it was tan or as od number three as they call it and this is a pretty much gonna wrap it up here as far as it goes this helmet's been around for forever you can you could spend a lifetime collecting just m1 helmets and variances of m1 helmets i know of at least 100 different designs and i'll probably do a video on a west german version later which is my favorite version of the m1 it's the most comfortable and everything you you really can't go wrong whereas i i tend to shy away from the american ones as much because they're so common there's already so much prominence behind them a it overshadows the other ones a lot more so but i hope this satisfied all you people uh that are looking to see a world war ii helmet or a korean helmet or a vietnam helmet because this is this is it the shell was unchanged the only thing that changed was the liner all right they pretty much all the shells that you see for m1s that was used from 1942 to 1986 or whatever all those m1 shells were made pre-1953 okay they they remained unchanged the chin straps changed the colors changed a little bit but other than that it's the same helmet and that's why it's so iconic it was around for three wars so so we'll wrap it up here and uh leave a like leave a comment to show interest in this hopefully this satisfied all your people this kind of a longer video because i had to go in a lot of history and a lot of changes uh this helmet because its lifespan was literally so long and it's still used by tons of other countries um so suggest topics for future videos and everything else or if you want to see anything else uh leave a comment if you have any additional information uh to help other people in the comments try to identify theirs feel free to drop that in the comments i'll try to kind of navigate stuff and see answer questions as best i can if you have any purposes as far as like stamps and markings go feel free to ask me and i'll do my best to to figure it out for you um till then i'll let you go and i'll see you in the next video bye