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Back in 2009 I was on The Board of Directors for The Wilson History and Research Center located in Little Rock, Arkansas. Its founder, Robert J. Wilson Jr., who has now passed away, had a lofty goal to collect as many pieces of military headgear from the 20th Century as he could. He was a great guy and accumulated a huge number of interesting pieces of headgear from all over the globe. All military headgear including spike helmets, steel helmets, visor caps, side caps, tschakos, berets etc...were to be included in this collection. All makes and models such as the German Steel M-16, M-18, M-35, M-40 and M-42 and the US M-1 helmets were to be located and purchased. It was certainly a lofty goal but Robby was very passionate and had over 3,000 pieces in the collection.
He had a staff of researchers, historians, curators, videographers and consultants who were dedicated to Robbie and his goals. In 2009, he asked me to do a training session on German steel helmets beginning with their inception right up through the end of WWII. He flew his entire staff to our headquarters and we had a two-day seminar on this topic. It was his goal to produce a series of "knowledge share" YouTube videos. There were 11 attendees in total and we covered a lot of territory.
Once the staff returned to Little Rock, they dissected my two days of talking into an edited number of YouTube videos. Ultimately, there would have been 16 sessions, each lasting around 8 minutes, but fate intervened and Robbie got really sick and passed away. As a result, only eight videos were finished and the other eight have been lost to time.
There is a total of 8 videos, and each week we'll post one, and we will keep them in order.
If you cannot wait, you can find them on YouTube entitled;
Bill Shea - The Need for the Stahlhelm
