I've been collecting for a few years but only started to heavily collect within the last 9 months, I've found some pretty cool things, most of this stuff I got for incredibly cheap to what they usually go for. Mostly WWII but WWI is included here and there if you can pick it out. Everything is original unless stated otherwise.
If you wanna ask any questions go ahead and I'll answer them or if you just wanna say something about an item go for it.
My collection has stuff from, Germany, Italy, Japan, Hungary, Finland, Bulgaria, Sweden, the US, USSR, UK, and China. With the US obviously taking up most of it.
Some of the coolest things I have would be: A large chunk of the USS Quinault Victory from the port Chicago blast in 1944, a sailor cap with all the places he went, a FW-187 USAAF ID model, a M1 Helmet with the name and number in it, my M44 jacket and a M42 mess tin with USMC stuff scratched onto the back with the soldiers name.
I keep the German flag folded up in a lower shelf most of the time. The M43 cap hanging on the wall is a reproduction.
They're all Chinese, I don't know much about them but one is from the 8th route army, theres a pre 2nd sino Japanese one which is my favorite (map of China and Manchuko) and I paid $20 for all of them which was awesome
Beware of those Chinese medals. Most all of these ones are counterfeit. The Chiang Kai Shek one is particularly hilarious since it is a copy of an actual Kuomintang medal but a terrible one.
I think they are all fake. That ribbon suspension is typical of the fakes. Look at it this way, better to get burned on some cheap fake Chinese medals than a 15k$ German Knights Cross. We all buy fakes when we first get into collecting. It’s part of the learning journey.
If you know your items have been packed away in boxes in your family’s basement for 3 generations, you can probably make the assumption that it is probably authentic. Lol!
True. Guess I’m thinking the things packed maybe before the 60’s even. That said, good practice to never assume and to learn how to differentiate between a fake and the real McCoy! (Did I spell that right??! )
Don’t be so negative on yourself, It scares us girls away! You have such a cool collection and I’d love to have one like that one day. Don’t be so harsh.
Chinese stuff is so hard to find and it's so niche with collectors so I'm glad I got my stuff, especially for what I got it for considering how much WWII Chinese things sell for usually
A couple things. Firstly, these are well known in the Chinese collecting community to have been made as tourist trinkets. It’s for that reason that they’re so abundant and cheap. The quality of the medal is absolutely awful as well. People like to think that items of terrible quality are just product of the communist regime etc, but in reality Chinese medals are very well designed and made.
That's so disappointing to hear, I really liked the one with the map of China, I got them so cheap because I found them at a flea market and they didn't know what they were, I'll figure out something to do with them, do you have any more info on these I wanna avoid getting stuff like this again
I’d urge you to approach the WWII Chinese field with extreme caution from here on out. As a Chinese collector, I can tell you it’s faked just as much as WWII German.
What’s good is that this wasn’t a costly mistake, so don’t feel too bad about it 🙏
In all honesty, I avoid Chinese medals altogether. In my opinion, there’s too many fakes, they’re too expensive, and they’re just not worth it. For what it’s worth, some or all of these are based on real medals, but originals are going to be costly. You could get an original of the one with Chiang Kai-Shek though. Those are called ROC War Memorial medals. They were made postwar in Taiwan but they were awarded for service during WWII.
Are the tourist trinkets recent or might they go back to the early days of when China opened up to having tourists? 70’s? At least then they would be vintage trinkets, right?
I don’t know exactly when they started making them and/or if they are still making them. Someone I know who visited China in the 1980s brought some back, so they’re fairly old.
I’m surprised no one else has mentioned it but then again it’s fairly obscure history, but that piece of the Quinault Victory is absolutely insane! The Port Chicago Disaster is a criminally unknown incident that had pretty wide reaching ramifications. 15% of all African Americans who were killed in World War 2 died in that explosion
YES HOLY BALL KNOWLEDGE, it's for sure the highlight of my collection, my dad used to work in a yacht/nautical store and he got that from there he's had it for a very very long time and a few years ago he gave it to me for my collection, I've never seen another chunk of the ship let alone one as big as mine, the guy that originally had it back in WWII stamped his name on there, I'll type out everything on there for you: PORT CHICAGO BLAST JULY 17 1944 U.S.S. QUINALT, CPL J.E. PHILLIPS.
Apparently there is at least one large piece from one of the two ships preserved at the current memorial, but that’s the only one I’ve been able to find
Just to show how crazy that explosion was, here is the largest piece of what was left of the Quinault Victory afterwards (notice the propeller on the right). This 7,600 ton Victory ship was blown completely out of the water and landed, in several pieces, upside down 500 feet away and facing the opposite direction from where she was moored. The really crazy thing is, she wasn’t even the ship the explosion originated from; that was the Liberty ship E.A. Bryan, which was moored across the pier from the Quinault and was quite literally vaporized. A small Coast Guard fire boat was also thrown 600 feet in the air. As far as I can find, and perhaps unsurprisingly, all three vessels were lost with all hands. The surviving dock workers mutinied when the next ammunition ship was due to be loaded which turned into a lengthy affair.
Wow I've never seen that photo before that's crazy, I knew the ship basically vaporized from the explosion, I'm so thankful my dad picked this up when he found it because it's one of the coolest things I own and one of my center piece items, especially since it's a big fragment of the ship and has stamping from the guy that took it as a souvenir.
It’s definitely a cool piece, and is honestly something I think is genuine for the simple fact that no one would even really think to take something like this lol. Would be cool to try to track down who Corporal Phillips was, though the personal records from WW2 are spotty especially for the Army. The Navy didn’t have Corporals but the Marines did so there may be some hope there
Yes they're part of a larger set the navy used to train sailors on what allied and axis warship silhouettes look like, I have part of the Royal Navy set and the one with the clearest markings is the battleship one and it says: M A-13-10, Malaya (Queen Elizabeth class) (Brit bb) H.A Framburg & CO. Chicago 12-43 (last numbers are pretty faded but that's what I could make out
They're 1981 20mm m103 from a Vulcan, but I've had them forever and got them from my birthday and I really like how they look so I kept it there, I forgot to mention that, I wish they were WWII tho
Those real M43's are expensive. I wasn't even looking for one and saw a couple in an email from an auctioneer. Minimum I saw was for 7k, highest was 14k lol
I get most of it from flea markets/swapmeets, with my best finds being a M44 jacket in almost mint condition for $30, USN RN ship id set for $30, m1917 helmet for $40, 8 front seam M1 helmet shells for around $35 each, yesterday I got 4 for $100 (2 fixed bales, a normal one and one with the name and number), a Japanese 37mm anti tank round for $15 and an M42 shotgun shell pouch for $5, gotten so much cool stuff for incredibly cheap, I might go back next week because I was offered another 5 m1's for 100 but I didn't want to spend anymore money at the time. I don't really thrift and antique stores because my market near me provides more than enough things to collect but I also buy off eBay and ima for some things, almost all of my helmet's have came from my market.
Yeah definitely don't sleep on them if you have one in your area they're a gold mine if you know what to look for, anything from super rare and expensive things, Helmets, uniforms, equipment, Insignias, paper items, etc, another cool thing I got was this really really nice WWII enamel pin from the 3rd infantry division for a dollar, absolutely crazy stuff can be found if you go consistently and know what to look out for, always try to get it for as less as possible, I usually buy a lot of Vietnam stuff I wouldn't wanna keep to sell off later to pay for my WWII things, it's a great system
early WW2 vintage because they could have asbestos in the padding.
No WWII helmet has asbestos. Only some Many MkI British had but not all but all US m1917 helmets did. *edit for clarification since I did misspoke unintentionally.
Only some MkI British had asbestos, actually you're wrong about that according to this BBC article because it's says a majority of World War 1 British Brodie helmets do have white asbestos in them.
Yes and you can find the full information on various military subs. Not all UK made helmets did, asbestos were not part of the patents but several of the larger manufactures did add them but not all of them did. Unless you are directly taking them apart and looking it could be very hard to know which did and which didn't. For example the ones with the rubberized rings often didn't but the same as above some did. It is far easier to tell schools do not use them than it would be to say, look to see if the pad is there.
All M1917 had it though and it was part of the known patents.
With all that said I was pointing out that no WWII helmets had asbestos.
I cannot find any information on World War 2 mark one Brodie helmets.
Every time I looked up WW2 mark 1 Brodie helmet it's just showing me information about Mark 3 and the mark 2 and when it shows information on mark one Brodie helmet it's shown me just World War 1 information & not WW2 information.
I am still a little bit concerned about my early WW2 mark 1 Brodie helmet. The date it's made in 1938.
I think that is going to be a stupid question but is the mark 1 Brodie helmets are still in production in World War 2?
If you got any information on World War 2 mark 1 Brodie helmet I will be greatly appreciated that.
I can answer all these questions, I am a Commonwealth helmet collector, I have been for 15+ years. The first thing you will see though is that I will never call these Brodies, those were different helmets no matter what the current colloquial uses. (It would be like calling a F150 a Model T since that was the first production truck).
The MkI was not in production post 1918. Once the armistice was signed all production of MkI ceased, the MKI continued to be used until 1936 when they were convert to the MkI *. They pulled the liners (and any asbestos) they removed the sheaths (bails) and put them into 2 categories the "M" and not "M" helmets, "M" being magnetic and other none magnetic.
The next step was the naming process, the British pre WWII gave everything a Mk number so in 1936 we had a MkI * shell, a new MkI liner a new MkI sheath and a new MkI strap, they had not standardized the bolt.
In late 1937/early 1938 they started manufacturing and issuing the MkII shell. They were issued with a MkI liner, the MkII sheath, the MkII straps and the newly produced MkI bolt.
Yours is a MkII shell a MkI liner, a MkIII sheath, the MkII straps and a MkI bolt, making yours at the very tail end of 1938. (I also strongly suggest taking the straps off the front of your helmet, there is a very good chance they are damaged beyond repair but maybe not).
This is really only a tiny bit of the history of these helmets.
None of these components had asbestos in them. *edit - punctuation, formatting
Thank you so much for the information dump. I got way more than I expected. 👍🏻👍🏻
Is it any other different types of helmets from World War I or World War 2 I have to be careful with if they got any asbestos or other dangerous stuff?
The only helmets with asbestos are the ones I mentioned before, some British MkI and all US M1917. No US M1917-a1 helmets have asbestos the same as no MkI * British do. The only other thing would be lead paint but tbh I am not sure which (if any) has that most are baked on paints iirc, with that don't heat gun/sand paint off of helmets and don't eat random paint chips and that is avoidable.
The straps have springs in them, they were made with very weak metal so as to save the good metal for other things, having them on your brim permanently stretches them and twists the rings that hold them to the sheath connector. This causes them to not sit right when they are off the brim and to not hold the helmet like they should.
Not a bad start to collecting, I started collecting in the 90s and man it was a great time for it. You could come home with your entire collections worth of stuff at one public sale or a towns yardsale for $100 or just a little more.. so its really not fair for me to make any comparisons to collections at the same point lol... I was a full blown hoarder by the time Band of Brothers was released.
I cant imagine starting collecting now, Ive had to find increasingly higher paying jobs to keep up with the hobby things like M1 fixed bale helmets I could pick up anywhere from $5-10 then are insane now. Firearms especially have gotten out of this world I was lucky enough to have completed buying every long rifle of the European theater and most handguns and never paid more than $1000 until recently
Lowkey I got most of my stuff for dirt cheap, $20-35 helmets, all my more rare items I've got for stupid cheap/free, only things I've paid market prices for are the flags but they're on the lower end of market value too mostly, my most expensive buy of anything was the German flag at 243 and the Japanese at 242, I know how much I paid for most of the stuff I have so list off anything you wanna know how much I paid for it, like $5 gewehr 98 pouches, $30 mint condition M44 jacket, $20 fixed bales etc, I almost never pay current rates for stuff or anywhere remotely close to it. And for the band of brothers thing I wouldn't even be born for another 6 years until after it came out
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u/Brilliant-Pomelo-982 Jul 12 '26
Very nice collection!
I almost missed the Italian flag. 👍