A Knowledge Quickie with Massif
I found this article over at Massif and thought it’s well written and informative if you are into history and worth a share. So, get to know some facts about military field watches. Enjoy the read!
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Military field watch aesthetics have inspired generations of horology buffs, and for good reason, in our humble opinion! However, where did the clean lines and no-nonsense functionality come from?
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Early on, across the board on both sides, military and political leadership predicted a brief, heroic war dominated by Napoleonic cavalry charges. This failed to take into account a “small” detail: the invention of the machine gun. WWI quickly devolved from dynamic battles to static trench warfare. Conditions were universally awful, with soldiers living in a maze of trenches filled with ice-cold ankle-deep mud. (Did someone say “Trench-Foot?”)
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In this harsh modern battlescape, timing was suddenly everything, and the seconds counted. If a commander ordered his unit over the top 20 or 30 seconds too early during an infantry assault, the outcome was often a swift demise, with enemy machine-gunners fixing and eliminating isolated units.
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It was really the “creeping barrage” that proved the absolute necessity of a quickly accessible, faithful timepiece. This new tactic was designed to “walk” artillery rounds through no-man’s land, through enemy perimeter defenses, and ultimately deep into the opposing trench system. By precisely timing infantry advances in coordination with a creeping barrage, soldiers would theoretically avoid the deadly machine gun fire that otherwise cut units to pieces in no man’s land.
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In the lead-up to WWII’s battle for air superiority, more timepiece innovation was ushered in, like the Weems Second-Setting watch for celestial navigation. In order to synch the watch with a signal emitted via radio that gave a pilot a precise time reference, Weems developed a movable bezel controlled via a secondary crown.