The Helmet

Several years back I got the bright idea of collecting helmets worn by the different Military Police Companies.

About two months after I got into this, I began to realize that this just wasn’t going to happen. I simply didn’t have the room. These are large items, and tend to take some space, and when you’re a writer, run an IT company, work full time for another, and so on, space gets to be a bit of problem.

So, my collection stopped with these six.

First, there’s the helmet liner from my old 1st MP Company. Since I was a member of that organization it’s one of crown jewels of my collection. There’s another from West Point. Then there’s one that my son brought back from Afghanistan. A fourth is an old style steel pot, and the wearer supposedly wore it in Nam. The fifth is an old Second Army MP helmet, painted white, and was a dress helmet like those worn by MPs at headquarters or important occasions.

The last helmet is the one this story is about. I saw it on ebay. The seller said it had been found in a chicken coop and boy did it look it. It was old style steel pot. It had been painted, with words MP in the front, a bit of a painted band, and some numbers that were hard to read. The paint was peeling, there were rust spots, and the simple fact the seller could tell me very little about it except where it was found tended to make me think it was the real thing.

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A lot of times, if you looking for an old helmet, you’ll see something like “Worn by our troops in Vietnam” or whereever. And the picture looks like something that came off the show room floor. I can honestly tell you, that when an MP is finished with the helmet, it’s usually pretty well trashed. And they probably won’t turn it in, but hang onto it.

The condition of this helmet and lack of a backstory convinced me it was real.

He did tell me that the former owner of the farm had been in WW II, but he knew very little beyond that.

So I bought it.

When it arrived, I unpacked it, and it was in worse condition than I thought. The condition made me wonder about its story.

The first thing I had to do, is try to figure out the unit it came from. MP helmets almost always have the company number painted on one side, In the case of my 1st MP helmet, I have the big number 1 on one side, and the unit crest on the other (not all MP companies have their own crest–the 1st did).

The numbers on this one in were in bad shape. A lot of the paint had either flaked off or worn off. Using the age old tradition of connecting dots (a bit of paint here, some there), I was able to decipher the number.

The helmet had come from the 503rd MP BN. A quick Google Search provided some back story.

First, the unit had been founded as the 303rd BN, and was what amounted to a National Guard unit back in 1922. It was deactivated as a Guard unit in 1938, and redesignated as part of the regular Army. But it didn’t resurface as an active unit until 1 Feb 1943 when it was reactivated at Camp Maxey, Texas.

It was deactivated on 13 March 1946 at Camp Kilmet NJ.

NOTE: The 503rd has been activated and inactivated a few times since. Once as a training battalion, but is now an active part of the 82nd Airborne Company.

But during it’s brief career in WW II, it saw a lot of ground to include the invasion of Normandy. One story I found from a former member concerned the Battle of the Bulge.

As any student of WW II history knows, the Battle of the Bulge was the last of the really big offensives the Germans launched. They’d found a weakness in Allied lines, and gambled they could do something to disrupt our efforts and get a seaport again. They also felt they might be able to force us into a settled peace through this operation.

It was a gamble that might have worked if it weren’t for the stubborn resistance put up troops that were there, a change in the weather that allowed allied air power to flex it’s might and cut off already strained fuel supplies, and the arrival of Patton’s Army.

A story I stumbled across, and I sure wish I could find it now, was from one MP. He and two other MPs were at a crossroads. An officer arrived telling them some tanks were coming down. These were the remains of a tank company, and to make sure they got directed in the correct direction.

So they’re waiting, and moment later, here come tanks. But as he’s out there directing them, he realizes there’s something different about these tanks. He’s looking at them and the soldiers who are riding them and all at once it clicked.

These were German tanks. He’d been waving them forward. Apparently the Germans didn’t think much about it because they let them be, and even waved back.

Realizing they were now behind enemy lines, he waved one more time, got in the jeep and he and his buddies got out of there.

Talk about God looking out for you!