Which is great when the base metal is silver, but unless we are only discussing Type 1 Navy Purple hearts, no other Purple Hearts would be made of silver and thus would not tarnish as you suppose.   I am with Dave on this one. The blackening has to have been done through a chemical process as opposed to paint. If the lettering was done with paint, we would find lots of examples where the paint has flaked out from the crevices where the medal was engraved.   Allan

I am going to bet that the field jacket is more likely a relic from the Korean War era or slightly later rather than a strictly WWII issued item. Name tags like the one sewn to the field jacket are more often seen in the 1950's than in WWII. Additionally, the last name is far too common to try to identify the original owner as being from a specific unit.   My two cents,   Allan

Brought to you by the folks who brought you the SS Honor Dagger....

Sure, of course, the early A-14 mask is slightly different from the mid and late war A-14. Straps are a little bit different and hose coupling is different. 

Enjoy! 16 years talking about USN/USMC pilots from WW2 on this forum... if you have any questions feel free to ask in this thread ⤴️

Hi everyone, I don't quite fit the usual mould of the B2K USMC owner, being across the pond and all, but I got my hands on a few of these here in Solingen in a dusty storage facility (traceable straight back to Eickhorn) not too long ago :) I greatly appreciate the breadth and depth of information presented in this thread. To be frank, I don't think anybody at Eickhorn is as "informed" on the topic as this, given the tremendous churn the business has experienced (with the Eickhorn Family exiting during the 2004 insolvency, mostly due to the [financial misconduct related] jailing of Rolf Eickhorn). To my knowledge, only one current Eickhorn employee was at the business in 2001.   5 marked as "Made in USA", the other with a different style engraving and "Made in Germany", likely an even earlier model.   Greetings from the City of Blades! Edit: Just a quick addon, based on someone here trying to track down where these actually are. As far as I know, Eickhorn has more of the Made in USA models in their warehouse, somewhere in the single digits, I think it was 7 pcs, but it might have been slightly more.  

Hi everyone, I don't quite fit the usual mould of the B2K USMC owner, being across the pond and all, but I got my hands on a few of these here in Solingen in a dusty storage facility (traceable straight back to Eickhorn) not too long ago :) I greatly appreciate the breadth and depth of information presented in this thread. To be frank, I don't think anybody at Eickhorn is as "informed" on the topic as this, given the tremendous churn the business has experienced (with the Eickhorn Family exiting during the 2004 insolvency, mostly due to the [financial misconduct related] jailing of Rolf Eickhorn)   5 marked as "Made in USA", the other with a different style engraving and "Made in Germany", likely an even earlier model.   Greetings from the City of Blades!  

Hi mate As in full colour insignia, white name tapes and black and gold US Army tapes like this on a first pattern jacket? yes, for sure, you'll see similar set ups , from memory all the first patterns I've had/still have or have seen, have been a mix of white on tan jump wings with full colour insignia and a few subdued jump wings and name tapes with full colour insignia.