Brodie Helmet

Origins

The armies of 1914 went to war in cloth caps and, in the German case, the leather Pickelhaube. Within months trench warfare made head wounds from shell fragments and shrapnel balls one of the commonest injuries at the front. France introduced the Adrian helmet in 1915, and the British War Office sought its own. John Leopold Brodie, a London-based inventor, patented a design in August 1915 whose great virtue was that it could be pressed from a single sheet of steel, unlike the multi-part Adrian. The first helmets reached the front that autumn, issued at first as trench stores to be handed over when a unit left the line, and by the Battle of the Somme in the summer of 1916 they were general issue.

Design & Construction

The Brodie is a shallow bowl with a wide, flat brim, shaped rather like a soup plate. The early version was of mild steel, but it was quickly changed to Hadfield manganese steel, which is hard, tough and resists fragments well, and this became the Helmet, Steel, Mk I. The bowl gave good protection from above, where shrapnel balls burst over a trench, while the wide brim shielded the shoulders; the trade-off was little protection for the sides and back of the head. Inside, a leather or oilcloth liner with a netted crown sat on a rubber buffer, and a leather chinstrap held it on. From 1916 the rim was edged with a separate folded steel strip, and helmets were painted in dull khaki, often roughened with sand or sawdust against glare. A version with a lowered mail visor was tried but rarely worn.

Combat Use

British and Commonwealth soldiers wore the Brodie through the Somme, Passchendaele and the final advances of 1918, with the Lee-Enfield Rifle and, in trench raids, the Mark I Trench Knife. Medical officers reported a steep fall in fatal head wounds after it was issued. When the United States entered the war in 1917, it adopted the helmet almost unchanged as the M1917, made in the millions for the American Expeditionary Forces. Between the wars the design was refined into the Mk II of 1936, with an improved liner and a sprung chinstrap, and in World War II it was worn at Dunkirk, in North Africa, in Italy and in Burma by men carrying the Bren and the Sten Gun, until the deeper Mk III 'turtle' helmet partly replaced it from 1944.

Legacy

The Brodie outlived both wars: it was worn by British civil defense, air-raid wardens and firefighters on the home front, and it remained in service with many Commonwealth armies well into the 1950s and beyond. The American M1917A1 was replaced by the M1 Helmet in 1941 and 1942. For collectors, the WWI Mk I with its original liner and unit markings is the prize, and makers' marks and steel batch numbers under the brim date individual examples. Its silhouette is the soldier on every British war memorial.