Helmets of the Word: Czechoslovakian Vz. 30 Steel Helmet

Hey everyone and welcome to another episode of Helmets of the World. I am Mike B, and today we're going to be taking a look at a pretty rare one, the Czechoslovakian VZ30 or Model 1930 steel helmet. There's not a lot of information out there about these because they weren't really used that long. You know the continuation of Czechoslovakian designs. Nevertheless, they were used and are very historically significant and you might not know about them. So we'll get into it. Basically in the First World War, you know, people started to basically, in a sense, get old school designs from the medieval times and adapt them to modern warfare and start wearing helmets in place of hats to offer protection and stuff. And trench warfare was kind of the new normal after the First World War. Everybody thought that's how wars were going to be fought from that point on. So in the interwar years between the First and Second World Wars, people were experimenting with different types of helmets. Now the Czechoslovakian military was no exception. The newly formed, I guess, country at that point was kind of saying, okay, well right now we're using the Adrian helmet and leftover Austrian helmets, but let's try to come up with one of our own. So they kind of put a bunch of brains, you know, into the mix and got people working together and trying to figure out which design of the First World War was the better one. Well, what they came up with was the ones that they had in their inventory were the Adrian helmet and the Austrian M1917. So what they did is they kind of combined the two designs, if you can see that from the side, you'll see kind of what I mean, and came up with this weird looking thing that kind of resembles a medieval kettle helmet, but not as defined in the brim and stuff. And then they have these lugs right here, the horns that people call them. Those are actually, they serve a practical purpose. They're actually the air vents, but they don't serve any other purpose than that. Like the First World War, it was designed to be able to attach an armored plate under the front of the helmets on the Austrian M17 and the German variants. With this, it's purely aesthetic and it's got one little functional thing, but they could have just made that flush and still had an air vent and not made it look like that. But I guess somebody said it looked cool and they went with that design. So it was a pretty erratic process that this kind of came to fruition and became this helmet. And, and it was very interesting because only a couple of years later, it was replaced by the VZ 32 or 34, VZ 32, 34, somewhere in there, the egg helmet, right? And that was more widely used. So why didn't they use this? Well, because it was big, bulky, expensive to produce. And it just, it looked too much like the German helmets. It resembled it with the lug and everything. And they kind of wanted to get away from that. So they came out with the egg helmet in 1932. Now there were several thousand of these, if not a couple hundred thousand of these produced. Where did they, where did they do? Where did they, where did they go? Where did they end up? Well, they were used by Czechoslovakian forces. They weren't just, you know, canned. They were used in conjunction with the VZ 32 all the way up until right before the Second World War. But then the Spanish Civil War, Czechoslovakian military said, oh, this is a great way to offload these helmets. So they did send a ton of these helmets to Spain. I don't know exactly which sides or which factions they supplied. All factions can be seen wearing these. I don't know if they captured them off the ground or whatnot. These were originally kind of a khaki or gray color and finish. And we'll get to that when I show you a little bit closer view of this particular example. The original liner, which I don't think this is, and we'll get to that in a second, was kind of this triangular tongue shaped or tongue style liner that was reminiscent of like an M31 or some other liners that were going, you know, being produced at that time or Bulgarian liners. But it was, it was a weird looking one. I don't have any photographs of that. And then you'll see that this liner is actually not like that. So we'll take this off. And what I can tell from this is it's been repainted, of course. And I don't know if that was done in Spain, and this was originally gray, which you can see right there, or if it was just that the gray is the primer and then they had the khaki paint over it. All I can tell you is due to the liner and looking at this, the German World War I M16 style, or, you know, pretty common around that time, and the chin strap, it looks like a Spanish Civil War replacement liner. So this liner probably either got chewed up during the Spanish Civil War or before, and they modified it and put in this M16 three pad style liner that was also used on Spanish helmets. So I think this is actually a Spanish liner, because it's not, you know, oops, sorry, I hit the thing. It's just got kind of this wool pad behind it instead of a little pouch to put gauze or something, you know, another little thing in there is not a pouch. So this is probably a Spanish liner, which adds to the absolute insane history of this helmet. So it started out as kind of a reject, you know, a country that designed it didn't really want it. And it was designed for trench warfare, which they could tell in the Spanish Civil War wasn't really going to be totally how wars were being fought. And then of course, by the Second World War, it was too late, and they'd already kind of been done with this for a bit. But, you know, it's, you can see in the front, right, so this is the front, the visor is a little bit longer, and the back, it's a little bit more or less defined. That looks like an Adrian helmet, and you combine that with the overall flair of the design. It's a really unique helmet. I'm pretty glad I actually have two of these. One of these at an auction a few years ago, they were advertised as I don't know what the hell they were advertised as, but not not Czechoslovakian easy 30 helmets that were using the Spanish Civil War. But I figured I'd make a video on this because a lot of you have probably seen these floating around. I don't know where they came from, and just might not know what they are. But yeah, a lot of these were using the Spanish Civil War and were surplused out with a So that's kind of all I've got on this one. I wish I had one with the original liner, but this is actually a lot more cool. This has some probably some combat history to it or just, you know, being involved in an actual armed conflict besides World War Two is pretty interesting. So you can see you can actually Google Spanish Civil War Czech helmet or Czechoslovakian helmets, and it'll pop up with a bunch of people, soldiers or paramilitary forces laying down. There was one picture that I remember they were laying down kind of on the side of a So very interesting helmet design. All right. Again, if you got any questions, I'll try to answer them. I'm not an expert just to do this. I've been collecting for about 20 years and as obsessed with these damn things. I'm a jack of all trades, master of none, we'll put it that way. And if you enjoyed this video and want to support my work and enable me to keep making really cool content like this, you can do so in a couple different ways. The first way is to become a Patreon supporter, the link to which is in the description. 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