PKeating

No particular reason for posting these other than to share them as nice examples of the three types of Schnellboot-Kriegsabzeichen and a quite rarely encountered Rudolf Souval Flotten-Kriegsabzeichen. What's nice about the French-made badge is that it has not been retouched with that garish gold paint like so many of the French KM badges one sees. It is, as the French say, dans son jus.

PK

Its appearance suggests an issue made between 1860 and 1900. Just a gut feeling, looking at it.

PK

I do not doubt for one moment that it is the same as a badge sold by Weitze with an Angolia provenance attached! You have had an expensive lesson for ?2.000,00, which is about $2,500.00. You should take it back to the person who sold it to you and get a refund. It is possible that ex-Leutnant Koch acquired this badge sometime after the war as an example of the badge many balloon observers felt they should be been given and that his sister sold it to you in good faith but it is a $20.00 display item.

If you trade it, knowing that it is a fake, to someone who does not know that it is a fake, then that would not be very good. The fact is that this badge is a fake or, to be very precise, a bad rendition of a postwar fantasy piece based, so the story goes, on wartime drawings and a single, oversize studio pattern kept by the original designer after the war, whom Dr Kurt Klietmann interviewed.

PK

No proof that any badges were made before May 1945 and lots of anecdotal evidence from veterans that no member of a German balloon observation detachment ever received or wore such a badge although some people believe that nominal awards could have been made, if entries in paybooks are genuine. In any case, this badge is not suggestive of German workmanship. The eagle looks like a puffin. Certainly not one of the more convincing attempts I have seen. Some really well-made badges came out of England about twenty-five years ago and are far more 'dangerous' to inexperienced, gullible collectors than this one. How much did you pay for this badge?

PK

Kev,

You should try Leo Cooper, in the UK, or one of those imprints. There are also several publishers in the States who would be interested, I am sure. I will have a think and send you a shortlist in due course.

Regards,

PK

Thank you for posting these links and for your efforts in keeping these images available. The ECPA-D - French military archives - in Fort d'Ivry just outside Paris has a wonderful collection of WW1 colour photography. The Americans were also producing colour photographs as this shot of returning Harlem Hell Fighters in 1919 shows.

PK

When the surrendered men of the Irish Citizen Army and the Irish Volunteer Force - collectively described as the IRA - were marched away from the GPO and other strongholds like Boland's Bakery, they had to be protected by their guards from a furious mob of Dubliners, many of them wives of men serving on the Western Front. Ironically, many of the 20,000 British soldiers mobilised to put down the Rising were themselves Irishmen and had served in the IVF until their founding leader, John Redmond, the chief advocate of Home Rule, had encouraged them to enlist in the British Army. Of 150,000 Irish Volunteers in 1914, just 11,000 were left by 1916. Less than 2,000 IVF and ICA men are reckoned to have been actively involved in the Rising.

Irish public opinion in general was against any armed uprising. Even the leading Irish nationalist broadsheet, the Irish Independent called for the execution of leaders and key players in the revolution. However, British politicians like Lloyd George and Asquith were unconvinced that having the leaders tried under military law was a good idea but allowed the courts martial to go ahead anyway. It was a decision they would regret as the extent of public revulsion in Britain and Ireland at the executions became clear. The appalling circumstances of the execution on 12.5.1916 of James Connolly really tipped the scales and Asquith's government ordered a halt to the executions and further ordered that remaining cases be tried in civilian rather than military courts. Connolly had a gangrenous leg caused by neglect in prison of the wound he had sustained in the GPO and was feverish and delirious when pulled from his deathbed, dragged to the yard, tied to a chair and shot. Some say that the order to fire had to repeated to the members of the firing squad.

As a footnote, Sir Roger Casement, the Irish-born former British diplomat who had exposed Belgian excesses in the Congo and who had travelled to Germany in 1915 to try to recruit Irish POWs to a German-backed Irish Legion was hanged for high treason on 3.8.1916 in London, having organised an arms shipment to the rebels from Germany. However, Casement had made his opposition to the Easter Rising very clear, feeling that without direct German aid, it was a doomed enterprise. In the end, though, as a man of honour, he followed the shipment of 20,000 rifles with ammunition to Kerry, being landed from a U-Boot, and was quickly captured. The ship carrying the arms was intercepted by the Royal Navy and scuttled by its captain.

The Easter Rising was heroic and well-executed, in Dublin at any rate. However, it was doomed to failure and one could say of its leaders that they were criminally reckless in going ahead with it. On the other hand, the public relations catastrophe provoked by the executions of the rebel leaders and others served to polarise Irish popular sentiment, hitherto unsympathetic to armed rebellion, generating a wave of sympathy for Ireland's 'glorious martyrs' and revulsion for 'cruel Britannia'. It was the beginning of the end of the British Empire, although Ireland would not become a republic until 1948 and is still not quite 'free', depending, of course, on how one views things.

PK

To the best of my knowledge and that of people who actually spent time talking with veterans of Heer balloon observation units, no veteran of any balloon observer unit ever recalled being awarded one of these badges or seeing anyone else wearing one. Given the extremely hazardous nature of the job, the fact that these men considered themselves an ?lite and the additional consideration that being 'bounced' by enemy aircraft or having the balloon hit by enemy fire meant that one had to parachute from the balloon cage - a frightening experience, I can tell you, as one who has jumped from balloons quite a few times! - it is reasonable to conclude that such a badge would have merited an award ceremony and such a ceremony would have been recorded on film. Yet we have no photographic records nor any veteran-sourced testimony supporting the assertions by various dealers that these badges were awarded and worn by balloonists. I do not think the situation is likely to change, no matter how many attempts are made to change it with the help of Adobe Photoshop or faked-up documents.

PK

Amen to that, brother. Looking forward to the pics. Tell me, is it true that the Hartenstein is no longer a museum and has been turned into some kind of corporate conference centre? I've told the tale here before but I had a personal guided tour of the grounds by Shan Hackett...although I didn't know who the old gent was at the time! I knew he had to be a veteran but just didn't know it was Hackett. Boy, was I ribbed about that when the guys found found out!

PK

What a superb website. Well done!

PK

Don,

I would like to see your photo essay. I did the memorial jump on Arnhem a few times in the 1980s and an uncle of mine fought there, at Oosterbeek. However, without wishing to dredge up ancient history, many of the people here, including a lot of the mdoerators, either cannot or will not go to that website so could you perhaps take the time to post your shots here for us outcasts and exiles?

PK

That mark looks like the SBW cloverleaf mark applied as a spoof BSW trademark to cast but good quality copies - not intended to deceive - of all sorts of badges made around twenty-five years ago by the Londoner Sean Barry Weske, who now lives in California. The hinge and pin assembly suggest an early Sean Barry copy, before he bought in and began to use the type encountered on 1957-pattern official reissue badges. I could be wrong but that is what this badge resembles as far as I am concerned. Of course, this is not a "copy" as such, because the Seekampfabzeichen was not actually produced.

PK

Daniel,

I replied to your PM.

PK

Ah yes, forgot about Hozier. Quite a character by various accounts! His group was discussed somewhere quite recently, if memory serves me correctly. Here is another reference to Englishmen getting the Iron Cross:

Two Britons served as Hiwis in the Flak detachment of the LAH Division, both being awarded the Iron Cross, 2nd Class. Their story is told in the book, "Gefaehrten Unser Jugend; Die Flak-Abteilung Der Leibstandarte" which gives a detailed account of their experiances.

This is from an article by Jason Pipes on his Feldgrau website. I have not seen the book in question. Does anyone know if this book is regarded as a credible unit history or not? Has anyone read the book?

PK

Thanks Gerd! I don't think he was the first Englishman to receive the EK, as this account states. I believe that the EK was awarded to at least one other Englishman, in the war of 1870, a military surgeon attached to the Prussian Army.

Regarding Chapman:

He deserted from the Coldstream Guards in the 1930s to become a safecracker with West End London gangs, a spent a number of stretches in jail for the crime. He had affairs with a number of women on the fringe of London high society and then blackmailed them with photographs taken by an accomplice.

In one case he gave a young woman VD and blackmailed her by threatening to tell her parents that she had given it to him.

Nasty!

PK

Oh, no problem. On another tack, wasn't the double-agent Eddy Chapman supposed to have been awarded a KVK2 or something?

Anyone?

PK

Ah, no, I didn't say that any British Free Corps men were killed in action. Brady and Stringer were Irishmen who served with SS-J?ger-Btl 502, which became SS-Jagdverband "Mitte". This unit was part of Otto Skorzeny's Friedenthal organisation and had nothing to do with the BFC. Stringer was reported KIA on the Oder Front.

PK

i know that the germans did help arm the irsih rebellion in 1916 etc and that i think they also helped the ira in ww2 to start a bombing campigian on the british mainland but intrestling when the germans tryed to recruit/start a irish ss division the recruiter were beatin up and thrown out of the camps!! i saw that british programme on the free korps and it was very intresting as they were pretty much kept away from any fighting and they were more of a burdin then anytthing else! one guy did partisapated(?) in the battle of berlin but was killed! i read a great book called jackels of the reich again all about the brit free corps!!

My fellow Dubliner Paddywhack is referring to James Brady, who took part in the Battle of Berlin but survived to be court-martialled, as a former British soldier, and jailed. His mate, Frank Stringer, was indeed killed in action but in the Schwedt bridgehead on the Oder Front.

Brady and Stringer were Royal Irish Fusilier soldiers. Born in Roscommon in 1920, Brady (Army Number 7043207) joined up in 1938. Their battalion was posted to Guernsey in May 1939 and he and his mate Stringer got into serious trouble the following month when they got drunk and beat up a policeman. Brady got eighteen months and Stringer twenty-one months. They must have nearly killed the copper. When war broke out, they petitioned to be allowed to rejoin their regiment but appear to have been ignored so they were obviously considered to be "a right pair".

The Germans landed and Brady and Stringer became POWs. They were recruited in 1941 by the Germans to work against the British. To cut the story short, they ended up enlisting in the Waffen-SS in the late summer of 1943, according to Brady's pre-trial statement. Following training, they were sent to J?gerbataillon 502, which became SS-Jagdverband "Mitte". After three weeks in Romania in August 1944 blowing up bridges, their initial training with the Germans having been demolitions-oriented, they took part in the arrest of Admiral Horthy by Skorzeny in Budapest.

Both men went with "Miite" to the Oder Front in January 1945. Stringer doesn't appear to have made it out of the Schwedt Bridgehead, according to James Brady's account. Brady and Stringer served in SS-Jagdverband "Mitte" and fought in the Schwedt Bridgehead on the Oder Front. Brady then fought at Oderberg, where he was wounded and evacuated to Grunau, just outside Berlin. As the Soviets moved on Grunau, Brady and other walking wounded were taken into the city. Brady was again wounded. After the capitulation, Brady got out of hospital and made for for the American Zone, reaching it on 26.6.1945. He eventually turned himself into the British in Berlin in September 1946.

There was also an attempt by Sir Roger Casement to form an Irish Legion in Germany during WW1. Casement had gone to Germany late in 1915 to organise both the arms shipments for the planned Easter Week uprising and the recruitment of this Irish Legion. In the end, the Irish Legion came to nothing as the handful of recruits were of a very low order indeed. In fact, many of them were consumptive. Casement tried to advise the rebels in Dublin to call off the uprising but was ignored and the rest, as they say, is history.

Hitler was never very interested in proposals for an Irish Waffen-SS unit. While he and his henchmen considered the Irish, and Celts in general, to be highly suitable for interbreeding purposes from an Aryan viewpoint, he throught the IRA was a bit of a joke by then and not as much cooperation occurred between hardline Republicans and the Nazi government as Pinewood, Hollywood and authors like Jack Higgins would have people believe. In any case, the Nazis' plans for the island of Ireland would have precluded the Irish nation remaining there: they planned, I believe, to 'absorb' those Irish deemed racially valuable into the Germanic Nation and to turn the whole place into one massive 'reception centre' for Europe's flotsam and jetsam.

That madness aside, it wasn't lost on Hitler, on a more prosaic level, that German aircrew downed in the Irish Free State were interned while Allied aircrew tended to turn up in Ulster, thereby escaping internment. Contrary to what some people like to say about Ireland and the Nazis in WW2, the Dublin government was by no means pro-Nazi. Nor were Irish people: roughly a third of combat personnel in the British armed forces during WW2 were volunteers from neutral Ireland, which rather puts the SS-Jagdverband Mitte's two delinquents in their proper perspective...

PK

A better view of the Type 1 "extended talon" FSA (Heer) by C E Juncker, the only known factory-engraved aluminium version. Clearly Obergefreiter Sell couldn't or wouldn't extend to an engraved 800 silver private purchase badge. This is the badge that illustrates the cover of Eric Queen's book on the Heer FJ, Red Shines The Sun, published by Roger Bender. The FIK/FIB became part of the Luftwaffe as II./Fallschirmj?ger-Regiment 1 on 1.1.1939 and former Fallschirm-Infanterie Kompanie/Bataillon men wore their Heer badges throughout the war, despite being issued with LW versions in 1943.

PK

Not strictly Luftwaffe although the prewar ones were worn by former Heer paras in the Luftwaffe. The three basic types of issue Heer FSA: (L-R) Type 1 and Type 2b (1937/38) in aluminium and Type 3 (1943/44) in feinzink.

PK

Nice photo. Note the field stand attached the the top rail of the rear sub-frame, a feature of military-spec M20s. Here are members of I./Fallschirmj?ger-Rgt 2 with a captured BSA M20 after their victory on Leros on 17.11.1943.

PK

His EK1 document is signed by Hans Geisler, who commanded X. Fliegerkorps from October 1939 to August 1942. The Black Wound Badge document signature looks like ?von Benda?. Franz von Benda was CO from June to December 1942., taking over from Friedrich Karl Knust, who commanded LG1 from October 1940 to June 1942. The Frontflug Spange in Gold mit Anhanger document is signed by Hans-Werner Freiherr von Buchholtz, who took over from von Benda, commanding LG1 until 2.8.1943.

PK

I understand your point entirely. We've had things nicked or lifted or plagiarised and it is annoying! However, I do not think that anyone here has been out of line in the manner in which they have discussed this object. Moreover, the image is in the public domain. If it is a fake or typical of a series of fakes, it is surely a good thing if people are appraised of this so that they do not buy something like this, isn't it? Why would the owner wish to keep it quiet? He will surely be able to get his money back. It is not as if he wishes to hide the fact that it has been condemned as questionable by some people in order to sell it on, is it?

IP? I don't think that is a problem, Rick. Once something like that is posted on any public or commercial forum, old chap, it can be reproduced on another forum as long as its publication falls within the parameters of "fair usage". In fact, even if it has not previously been published anywhere, "fair usage" applies so there is no need for you to worry about the feelings of the owner of this piece.

PK

There will be NO inter-website "squabbling" here.

If whoever the owner of this "treasure" is doesn't want it discussed, this thread will be deleted.

Plain, simple, and FAIR. The ITEM is all that matters.

This is GMIC, not WAF. The item has been proposed for discussion and it has been discussed in a civilised manner so why delete the thread? That's pretty disrespectful to the people who have taken the trouble to explore possibilities, Rick.

Ground Hog Day...

PK