Posts: 252 Location: Vermont. USA
Wed 21 Jun, 2017 6:34 am
Dan Howard you keep editing your posts to say different things, I keep having to adjust and delete my responses. This is getting really annoying. First you argued it was thick enough for a musket ball, but not thick enough for a WWI rifle round, then changed it to saying it looks heavy enough, and now you have edited it to asking about construction.
I keep spending time writing a post/response then having to delete it because you have edited yours for content.
I am not going to edit this post again --so if yours now says something different, I may look silly, but my feeling is this.
If the breastplate is indeed modified just before/during WWI, I have to wonder the relevance of its thickness/weight at all. It is probable that the Germans would have re-worked it for trench warfare, particularly for use by sappers or those who might be in line for heavy artillery fire. The breastplate could indeed be unlikely to have any real protective quality against rifle rounds, but this is irrelevant when considering the protective quality required agains fragmentation grenades and other shrapnel, i.e. an early flak jacket. This is similar to the British leather jerkins in principal, but offering slightly more protection, including against pistol rounds and clubs.
I suggest sapper use though, as there are a number of breastplates (some with quite similar appearance) that come up at auction described as such. In WWII the Russians were using
Steel Bibs, here is a later
Red Army soldier in one in 1944.
This book has quite a bit about the symbolic and functional use of breastplates, and arguments, in Germany after 1870 where it was discussed in Parliament so might be quite relevant:
The Kaiser's Army: The Politics of Military Technology in Germany during the Machine Age 1870-1918
Given the greater german affinity towards breastplates, up to and through the second world war.. I think it most likely they would be fielding older models, and re-outfiting them!
Z