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Wahey,
I couldn?t find the Knirim ... (if anyone has a source for it in the UK please let me know).
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Without a PC I have spent Xmas with these 2 beauties (it?s funny to think that before the Internet we had to use books...).
1.
Military Timepieces, Marvin E. Whitney (66 UKP)
This book is mainly about US military timepieces and various other balance-based mechanisms. The wristwatch sections are quite small - although it has a separate section for Diver?s watches.
2.
Military Timepieces 1880-1990, Z. M. Wesolowski (25 UKP)
At the price this is a brilliant book. The pictures are all black and white. It?s more of a coffee-table book than a reference tome. But well worth having.
I have decided that the first military watches per se were issued to artillery.
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HIGHLIGHTS from the Wesolowski:
pp65
Timor was a prolific supplier of the Army Time Piece, circa 1939 ...
... it seems almost incredible, but there is widespread evidence that of the many thousands of these watches that were produced, a high proportion were deliberately destroyed at the end of the war. One eyewitness in Italy watched in amazement as prisoners of war were given hammers and an anvil and set to methodically smashing watches one after another. When he questioned this astonishing waste, he was told that the Swiss watch companies contracted to supply the military sold their watches at reduced cost (achieved at times by the use of less expensive materials), on the condition that the Army contract watches were destroyed at the end of hostilities. This was in order to maintain the high reputation of their normal products and, more importantly, to avoid flooding of the post-war commercial market with inexpensive Army surplus ...
Of note here ... the Timor in the pic is fitted with an issue ?Bonklip? bracelet ... not much has been said of this bracelet (http://www.allwatches.co.uk/Wrist_A-M_2 ... aw834.html)
pp31
In reference to RAF 8 day pocket watches used as aircraft timers, circa 1914 ...
... in fact even following an airplane crash the pilot (if he survived?) was expected to remove the watch and return it for future issue; failure to do so could result in a court of enquiry ...
pp142
In reference to the scarcity of chronograph wristwatches, circa 1940 ?
... the complexities of such a watch, which not only has time-keeping abilities but also includes a mechanism to operate the integral interval timer, created added expense ? always anathema to the British procuring authorities. Often it was considered more economical to supply two timepieces: an ordinary wrist-watch, plus an additional stop watch ...
pp144
On telemetry dials ... starting the chrono on muzzle-flash and stopping it on sound to read the distance ... so it says.
pp162
Several days after the outbreak of the Gulf War*, a group of news reporters was holed up in a Tehran hotel. A soldier unexpectedly hurried into the foyer, and made an excited announcement then he produced a bag of watches and began to distribute them among the amazed foreigners ? the idea seems to have been that the Iranians were claiming to have taken them from downed Iraqi pilots. In fact some 130 Iraqi aircraft fled into Iran, preferring internment to facing the Coalition airforces; these watches (quartz Breitling Navitimers) were presumably taken from their pilots ...
* The first Gulf War
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I must say that in conjunction to the above I have also been watching DVDs of the first and second world wars IN COLOUR. It?s freaky.
JD
