PKeating

Side by side...

PK

Here is an indisputable original.

PK

http://gmic.co.uk/index.php?showtopic=30703

PK

Cut straps suggest a helmet removed from a swollen body prior to burial. They had to slice through the straps as they were trapped in the swollen flesh and skin and the buckles were inaccessible. Missing liner fingers perhaps due to blood and brain tissue soiling. I had a mint Heer SD "M40" reissue with cut straps and the liner pulled out of the band because of, according to the farmer who took it from a pile of helmets as a 12 year old in 1944, the smell of putrifaction from the leather, to which his mother strongly objected.

PK

The blue line marks the approximate position of the front line when the 369th moved in. I was standing on the west bank of the Aisne looking along this line when I snapped the shot with the motorbike. S?chault, captured by the 369th in September 1918, is to the north. The monument is on the corner of the D982 and D6, to the west of the former and the north of the latter.

PK

The German Friedhof just outside S?chault. 6,454 German soldiers are buried here.

PK

A snapshot probably taken in the 1940s, just before the end of or after WW2.

PK

The Black Rattlers/Harlem Hellfighters monument at S?chault.

PK

Looking west from the river bank towards Ville-sur-Tourbe, along the little road that more or less marks where the front line was in the Spring and Summer of 1918.

PK

I spent the afternoon visiting the Harlem Hellfighters' area of operations. They began by holding 5 km of the front line between the village of Ville-sur-Tourbe and the Aisne river. I expected the Aisne to be a serious river. I suppose many readers would make the same assumption. This is the Aisne, as it is on the eastern end of the line held by the 369th RIUS (15th New York Infantry (NG) aka Black Rattlers aka Harlem Hellfighters). It's quite swift-flowing but it's not very big, is it?

PK

Well,

Back from Verdun.

No great finds, but lotsa nice beer and good conversation. Order of Arrival.... Moi, Dave Danner, Ken, David Gregory, two German collectors and Prosper Keating.

Varied conversation, all the the way from the Harlem Hellfighters to the titties on the pancake restaurant waitress...

And beer, beer, beer... kebabs... beer, beer..... burp.

Can only recommend it as a form of relaxation..

Plus Laphroaig...and Bushmills... I can only say that you guys looked rather like I felt this morning. Wrestled bike all the way back in an East-West direction against 80-100 kph North-South gusts. But it was a great evening!

I think you might have a hard time selling this one to a serious collector because none of the BeVo or, rather, BeVo-style Italian SS arm eagles that have cropped up on the market from time to time are accepted as period pieces. That said, the Italien cuff title of which only a handful of examples with provenance are known was of BeVo-style construction and made in Italy so it is not beyond belief that an Italian firm tendering for the contract to supply these insignia might have tooled up and produced a roll for evaluation purposes. However, the Italian SS Legion wore embroidered arm eagles, made in the Italian style. both on red and black backing. There are no period photographs showing anything like this in wear.

PK

Is there an echo in here?

PK

Do any of you remember a dealership operating through the www.ss-armory.net website and did any of you have any dealings with them? The website disappeared about a year ago and was reportedly active for about three years.

PK

Fallschirmsch?tzenabzeichen des Heeres

Fertigung aus echt Silber, Der Kranz vergoldet. Deutlich getragenes St?ck, die Nadel fehlt, r?ckseitig gestempelt "800".

Das St?ck wurde vom T?ger in der Kriegsgefangenschaft entnazifiziert.

Dabei Foto-Expertise von D.Niemann

Bestellnr.: 46492

Einzelpreis: 2.500,00 EUR

Don't worry about the Niemann Certificate of Authenticity. It's battered, broken and denazified but it is an absolutely genuine solid silver Type 2 Fallschirmsch?tzenabzeichen (Heer) by C E Juncker and, for ?2,500.00, would make a serious FJ collector a good collection filler until a better example comes along. It's on the Claus Phillip Militaria website: http://www.philipp-militaria.de

Go to the "Bis 1945" German awards section and click on Heer. The blurb states that the wearer denazified the badge when he was a POW. Perhaps the wearer's name is known. Unfortunately, his name and unit details have also been removed from the reverse of the wreath but, still, as I said, it's genuine and a good opportunity for someone without $12k or so to invest in one of these to have a representative example beside the aluminium and zinc versions.

PK

PK

Do you have more documents from this man? Do you have the soldbuch? The Sonnenburg breakout was quite an interesting action. There was an Concentration Camp there, to which people were still being deported as late as March 1944.

P

The thirteen condemned men were members of the 24th Infantry Regiment, which was one of the US Army's two all-black infantry regiments. They were hanged one minute after sunrise, at 07:17 hrs on 11.12.1917, at Camp Travis, near the Texan town of San Antonio. According to some accounts, the gallows was a simple affair and the men were stood on folding chairs. They reportedly sang the negro spiritual I'm coming home before the hangmen kicked the chairs away. Other accounts describe a more modern hanging, with a short drop, breaking their necks. These and other executions related to the so-called Houston Riot were carried out with a degree of secrecy before the event that caused a lot of ill-feeling.

President Woodrow Wilson subsequently commuted a number of death sentences and the US Army General, Ruckman, who handled the executions was found to have acted legally, according to the Articles of War, and cleared of any wrong-doing. There was a feeling that Ruckman took undue pleasure in hanging blacks but that could just be subjective reporting. Many of the 24th IR (US) men who took part in the "march on Houston" and the skirmishing with local civilians and law enforcement officers were veterans of Pershing's Mexican expedition and various border actions against Mexican irregulars. Some were veterans of the Spanish-American War and the Philippines campaign.

PK

http://www.kansaspress.ku.edu/righitpix.html

Oh dear! That's like the RZM stamps one finds on otherwise genuine war badges. Sheer vandalism.

PK

One sees M40s like this from time to time, without the liners and with just the ends of the chinstraps in place. This usually suggests a helmet removed from a rotting corpse, the chinstraps being cut by the burial detail because they were trapped in the swollen flesh and skin, covering the buckle. The liners were then ripped out by souvenir hunters because of the smell. I've had a few otherwise near-mint examples. One example was given to me my a farmer who remembered his mother telling him to get rid of the helmet because the liner stank. So he ripped the liner out, leaving just the band in place. The helmet was as-new. Still is as-new. I'd be inclined to believe that yours came from Normandy, where a lot of reserve units with nice, new kit, hardly used during their occupation duties, found themselves confronted by Allied forces.

PK

Garbage. Sorry to be blunt, but there you are. Perhaps the old boy from whose house you retrieved them did silkscreening as part of his occupational therapy. Maybe he was involved in amateur dramatics. Perhaps he wore them on his pyjamas ? la Max Mosley. But one thing is sure: these are not from the early 1940s. If I were you, I'd invest in a new keyboard with a non-sticking caps lock key instead.

PK

Thanks, Brendan. I always thought the Republic, as such, didn't come into being until 1949 and that ireland remained a Commonwealth member until that point. That clarifies things for me.

PK

There we go! Looking at it again, it's not the KM200 but actually the NZ500. As anyone who has ever ridden a two-stroke single of more than 250cc can confirm, the NZ500 was a fast machine, although the carb, apparently, had a governor fitted. This was simply a bolt screwed into the top, limiting the upward movement of the throttle slide. Enterprising soldiers removed it but it was a chargeable offence if caught.

PK

Trying again.

No dice. It's telling me that 52MB is greater than the available space.

Thanks for the comments, gents. I've ordered a 'serious' scanner that can handle A4-plus page sizes as most of the mags for which I have written are large format. So there'll be less excuse to put off following the trend and sticking a website up there. A large part of a writer's life, you see, is spent finding pretexts to avoid getting on with the job. These forums are brilliant in that respect. I was thinking of a whole Fast Classics section with the best bits of the first four issues because there were so many wonderful examples of writing and photography in them, even from contributors who usually turned out 'filler' for the established motorcycle magazines.

Inasmuch as the iconic Mark Williams' Performance Bike broke new ground in 1971, giving greaser-era bikers an alternative to The Green 'Un and The Blue 'Un, FC gave guys who were into riding older machinery for various reasons an alternative to EMAP's Classic Bike, which was aimed more at the kind of people in leisurewear and Cornish Pasty shoes who transport their old bikes about on trailers. Mind you, I always enjoyed The Classic Motorcycle when dear old Bob Currie was at the helm. Sure, it was for coffin-dodgers but the kind of coffin-dodgers who could tell us a thing or two over a few beers before climbing into their rubber coats and blatting off home in a cloud of Castrol R to feed the cat. Then Bob popped his clogs and the whiny-voiced cringeworthy executives at EMAP screwed the CMC up too.

I enjoy leafing through Classic Bike in WH Smiths here in Paris and looking at all the ads for copper bracelets, piles cushions and home equity loans. Mark Williams, who gave me my break and my grounding in publishing, always said their readership was dying. They've been a long time about it but the ads say it all. And the mag is now full of Jap Cr@p. Still, musn't grumble: EMAP went bust recently. Oh well, I'm off out to change the oil in the HRD and tighten up a few nuts and bolts. Natch...there's a good reason for not getting on with the articles I have to write.

In the meantime, coming back to the topic of German motorcycles, here's a rather nice photograph - a present from my friend Eric Queen - of a Luftwaffe officer cadet getting to know a slightly later, military version of the DKW KM 200. Note details like the bashplate, for off-roading. As I said, there's a fellow who rides one of these about, just like this one, in Paris. He doesn't dress the part, though. That might be taking it a bit far.

PK

[Note: this website isn't accepting a 53MB image and my remote host is down for maintenance so I'll have to put the image up later - PK]