Original Item. Only One Available. Not often seen among M1917 helmets are the 3 small holes drilled into the right and left side of the brim, and this was something that puzzled collectors for many years due to the rarity of its corresponding attachment - The Wilmer Eye Shield.

This is a very nice example of an M1917 steel helmet painted in a three-tone camouflage that mimics the German camouflage style used on helmets from July to November 1918. The colors used on this example include a very light blue, pink, and brown. The shell is missing some of the paint toward the top as shown, with about 75% of the camo pattern remaining. The helmet retains its original liner, but the chinstrap is absent. There is a piece of period cloth tied to one chinstrap bale. The helmet is very rough overall.

The rarest part of this helmet is absolutely the 3 holes cut into the left and right side, which allowed for the attachment of the unbelievably rare Wilmer Eye Shield, which attached via rings to one of the 3 holes. This eyeshield didn’t provide much actual protection to the wearer, but was said to give the soldier a false sense of protection which allowed them to more confidently charge the enemy.

The shell is maker marked with a stamping on the underside of the rim that reads ZB 49. This maker marking indicates that this is a U.S. produced shell, which is further indicated by the solid rivets used to retain the chin strap bales.

Wilmer Eye Shields

Even though helmets, body armor, and face shields did little to protect the wearer from high-velocity projectiles from rifles and machine guns, their use provided a sense of defense, even if minimal. Much like the columnar and row formations of pre-modern battle tactics, which served the purpose of structure and organization and a false sense of security to each participant, psychologically; personal body armor also provided a sense of security to the wearer. Several personal memoirs and accounts of battle make a note of soldiers lowering their head while rushing towards enemy trenches. The writers recollect later that by lowering the head was rather futile against a hail of rifle fire, but it did provide a small sense of protection.
 
The call to protect soldier’s vision came early in the war from two French oculist experts who published a study on eye wounds in the Bulletin de la Societe d’Ophtalmologie, a French ophthalmology journal. In the article, both armorers studied seven hundred eye wounds and determined that half of those could have been prevented with a type of eye protection. Out of the nearly 700 cases studied, 51.8% of ocular wounds were caused by either artillery or grenade fragments. Some of the superficial eye wounds were caused by either splinter from trees after being struck by an artillery round or other debris from explosions. Since artillery was the leading cause of combat fatalities and injuries in WWI, helmets were explicitly developed to address head wounds caused by overhead explosions and not intended to stop a high-velocity round shot from a rifle. While the study focused solely on non-fatal eye wounds, it failed to account for the fatal eye wounds, which would have significantly decreased the need to address the small number of preventable eye wounds. From this article and others like it, all other major combatant nations scrambled to develop a type of face protection for the frontline soldiers, frequently sacrificing comfort and combat effectiveness for safety.
 
To address the number of ocular injuries from small fragments, as suggested by Morax and Moreau, other oculists partnered with armorers to develop several different types of eye protection to reduce casualties. Among those was leading American oculist Colonel W. Holland Wilmer of John Hopkins University. To address the need for eye protection, Wilmer developed an eye shield that showed promise. Starting in January 1918, the Equipment Division of the War Department requested 75,000 face shields to be produced by Worchester Pressed Steel Company that were then to be delivered to Ford Motor Company for painting and assembling. Out of the contract, only half were fulfilled and shipped to France for field testing. Showing obvious merit for ocular protection, American Expeditionary Force Headquarters (HAEF) rejected the eye shield stating the face shield did not remain in position. Due to the HAEF rejection, the Wilmer Eye Shield never saw combat experience, leaving many unused and sitting in boxing in France. Out of the 30,000 produced and shipped overseas, a mystery surrounds the whereabouts of the experimental eye shields due to the absence of survivors, with roughly half a dozen known to exist.
 
From the elongated slits for a limited range of sight, the Wilmer Eye Shield has a very sorrowful and tired look. Protruding from the eye shield are two bulbous shaped forms allowing the wearer more space between the shield and the eyes but, when viewed from the profile, gives a frog-like appearance. By the two springs, the face shield was attached to one of three holes on each side of the helmet giving three different positions based on the preference of the wearer. On the back of the eye shield was a tubular rubber sponge seating the shield comfortably on the face. Through the tension in the springs, the eye shield rested on the wearer’s face, but in a combat/field environment, the eye shield would not remain in position. Under the two horizontal slits are two holes near to the nose. These two holes were punched out to give the wearer the ability to look at the ground without lowering his head. As effective as the eye shield was, unfortunately, it was not adopted but remains one of the most challenging pieces of experimental gear to collect.