Vikings in Lapland

A friend recently moved down south and in conjunction with that decided to donate most of his militaria collection. In this previous post I described how I passed on half of his collection to the new museum in Salla. Here are some artifacts from the other half.

These latter objects of Soviet and Swedish origin are all from the Salla area in Finnish Lapland and come from what was mainly a battleground during the Winter War of 1939-40, between the Swedish Volunteer Corps (SFK) and the Soviet 122nd and 88th Rifle Divisions.

A glass container with the word "VIKING" protruding from the glass. This was a Swedish-made shoe wax that is still today produced but now sold only in all-metal cans. In the Swedish press the SFK were also sometimes called Vikings.

A Soviet M1936 helmet from a battleground outside Salla. I believe I read somewhere that the helmet profile was similar to the German Stahlhelm´s seen from a distance, and thus caused the Red Army some problems (cases of friendly fire).

What I think must be a Madsen machine gun magazine. Thus probably used by the SFK and perhaps one can even associate it with the 727 Norwegian volunteers within the SFK, as I would think they had most (all) Madsens (Madsen being the standard Norwegian MG). Can someone verify this theory?

The above objects and some more are now in the collections of the Defence Museum in Boden, Sweden.

S-tanks in Cold War Battle

I was surprised to learn that there is a board game about my old tank outfit, Sweden´s only Arctic tank battalion. But the tank I was trained to use, the much-hyped turretless S-tank, never fired a shot in anger. So which war is "Operation Garbo" about?

Yours truly in 1989 doing an advert for a kind of "tankers spam" in front of my strv 103C, better known as the S-tank.

Well, the war is one that thankfully never took place. But the year that the game company has chosen for this war, was quite aptly chosen, I believe.

I sure look forward to getting to play myself 20 years younger, and some of the other games by Lock´ n Load Publishing. Are you reading this, Father Christmas?

Swedish American MIA Coming Home

Richard Ryrholm and his four siblings all served in the United States Armed Forces during WWII. Only he disappeared, 19 years old. At last, his remains in the jungle have been found, identified and are coming home.

Richard Ryrholm flew one of these, a P-38 Lightning. Five years ago his aircraft was found in the deep jungle of Papua New Guinea, but only now has he been positively identified so that he can be brought home. PHOTO: USAF

Second Lieutenant Richard S. Ryrholm came from a family that definately took part in WWII. His father was from the Swedish West Coast, his mother from Stockholm. Ryrholm’s twin brother, 2nd Lt. Robert W. Ryrholm, also served in the USAAF. His older brother, Arthur Ryrholm, served as a US Army captain in the Philippines and received a Bronze Star. Both of his sisters became officers too: Eleanor Ryrholm Scatchard in the Coast Guard and Ruth Marie Ryrholm in the Army Nurses Corps.

Richard Ryrholm enlisted in Boston, Massachusetts, in December, 1942. On September 4, 1943 Ryrholm was just 19 year old but had been flying P-38 Lightnings for five months when he on that fateful day crashed while on a combat mission against Japanese aircraft over Lae, Papua New Guinea.

His unit, the 432nd Fighter Squadron, searched for Ryrholm for two days but failed to locate anything. He was thus declared as missing in action. In 1949 a military review board said that his remains were unrecoverable.

At the time of writing I have no photo myself of Richard Ryrholm, but this is another Swedish American in the same type of aircraft in the same theatre of war. The pictured pilot, Richard Bong, is still today the top US air ace. PHOTO: USAF

A local paper in California, Calaveras Enterprise, has more details and reports that Ryrholm´s family was "devastated and some members continued to believe that Ryrholm might still be alive". Presumably, some family members were affected by the true stories about Pacific War soldiers surviving in the jungle years, even decades, after WWII.

Here you can see photographs of the Ryrholm possessions that were found deep in the jungle. Yes, it was only this year, after 67 years of uncertainty, that his remains and possessions were positively identified, although his aircraft was located five years ago.

Now that there is no doubt about the identity, the U.S. military has sought out Ryrholm´s family and is bringing Richard Ryrholm home. His burial will take place in Massachusetts, where he enlisted and where he has many living relatives.

The news has been received with great interest also among Ryrholm family members in Sweden. One of them being the first source of this post, Professor Nils Ryrholm, who for several years was the curator of i.a. the Leonard Gyllenhaal collection at Uppsala University. Incidentally, some of Leonard Gyllenhaal´s descendants also served in the Pacific during WWII, one of them, Charles Gyllenhaal, even on Papua New Guinea!

For more on Ryrholm see this other California newspaper.

P.S.
Not only the top US air ace flew the same aircraft type in the same area as Ryrholm, so did the world famous Swedish American pilot Charles Lindbergh. Many presume his flying career ended prior to WWII, but here is just one of several articles about Lindbergh´s war service in the Pacific. For more Swedish American wartime fates see my book Swedes at War (with Lennart Westberg).

Sweden´s Only Flying Ace

Someone (not me!) has just created a Wikipedia page in English about William Yngve Anderson. Anderson is the P-51 Mustang pilot from Sweden on the cover of Swedes at War.

Coincidentally, or not, this week an article I wrote about Anderson was published, including an interview with him and his wife Lois. It was published in the Swedish monthly Militär Historia ("Military History").

According to my research William Anderson is the only person from Sweden to have attained flying ace status, which requires an official score of at least five victories. Anderson´s is seven.

All three P-51s flown by Anderson were called "Swede´s Steed".

In 2011 Mr. Anderson will turn 90. He has had a stroke and has difficulties to speak, but his wife Lois says that he has retained his sense of humour.

Evolution of Norwegian SS Posters

I think I have indentified the most extreme SS posters that were produced in Norway. They mirror the evolution of the recruiting pitch for the SS in Norway.

This 1941 poster for the Norwegian Legion, which became a part of the Waffen-SS, has zero SS symbols. The soldiers do not even wear German helmets. In fact, aside from the Finnish flag, the poster might well have been used by the Allies. This one is on display in the Narvik War Museum.

This 1943 poster for the Norwegian Germanic SS is the absolute opposite, the most black, SS- and viking-filled poster imagineable. This one is on display in the Troms Defence Museum in Setermoen.

This Norwegian page in English has virtually all Norwegian SS posters in a row, with some comments.

SS-Division "Schwarze Sonne"

Thanks to "Iron Sky" cinematographer Mika Orasmaa I can now provide a photo of the coming film´s stormtroopers. Magnifying the photo I discovered the name of their fictional unit.

Please don´t get me wrong now. I have a license to blog not only about serious books and films. In this case I am writing about a science fiction comedy. Well, if - and that is one huge if - SS-Obergruppenführer Hans Kammler (who was a real person) had somehow managed to secretly set up a SS-base on the moon - which is a major ingredient of "Iron Sky" - what would those national socialist astronauts, or nazinauts, have called their lunar base and its Waffen-SS unit? Well, I must say I totally agree with the filmmakers about their choice.

SS-troopers on the Moon sporting "Schwarze Sonne" cuff titles. PHOTO: Mika Orasmaa

"Schwarze Sonne", i.e. "Black Sun", was the logical choice. The black sun being both the most cosmic and hyped SS-variant of the swastika.

The SS-eagle on the upper left arm of the lunar stormtroopers is not quite WWII-style, but hey, this movie is taking place in 2018! On the other hand the MP 40s look totally unimproved. What, no small-arms development in 73 years!? And those steel helmets look more WWI than WWII... But those Haunebu spaceships look utterly correct, much better than anything I´ve seen before.

Seriously speaking, it will be great to see some more trailers and finally the whole thing. I suspect it will be a treat to watch and at the very least quite entertaining. Could it even have some serious message as well?

Yes, I do have a special interest in the esoteric side of the SS. I have not yet written much about this but I have collected books on the subject for years and thus was given the opportunity to write the preface for the Swedish version of The Master Plan, Heather Pringle´s groundbreaking book on the Ahnenerbe and related themes. This is the Swedish cover:

"Härskarplanen" is the Swedish version of "The Master Plan" by Heather Pringle. Unlike the English-language cover, the Swedish one features the rock carvings in Tanum, Sweden. These carvings attracted great attention by the "Ahnenerbe" and a chapter of the book is about them.

Now, if you want to learn more specifically about the black sun symbol, I want to recommend a book and documentary by German author & filmmaker Rüdiger Sünner. Both are called Schwarze Sonne. The book has unfortunately not yet been translated but the documentary is available on DVD with subtitles in English. You can check out all of Sünner´s books and film productions on his website.

BTW there is a Swedish connection to Sünner aside from the Tanum rock carvings, Sunner has also examined the late Swedish UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, whom I recently mentioned.

Stahlhelms in Space

As I wrote some months ago, Darth Vader´s helmet was not as inspired by the classic German Stahlhelm (steel helmet) as one might think. But next year a movie will appear featuring totally WWII-style Stahlhelms in space. On planet earth the Stahlhelm is still serving in at least one country.

This post about the lasting influence of the most classic steel helmet is a sequel to "From Dürer To Darth". If you have not read that one you might want to do so before reading what follows.

Without any inspiration from yours truly my wife recently purchased something for our son that proves just how universal Darth Vader´s helmet has become:

Yes, Darth Vader´s reach now extends to the the socks of our children.

Now I must correct myself, in my previous Stahlhelm-post I wrote "During the final years of East Germany the basic Stahlhelm design was adopted by the US Armed Forces. The result was the PASGT". As an American reader kindly has pointed out to me, that sentence made it sound almost as if the US Armed Forces developed the PASGT-helmet from the Stahlhelm. I was expressing myself carelessly - sorry about that. I think the resemblance of the PASGT-helmet with Stahlhelms was unintentional. The resemblance did, however, lead to the PASGT-helmet being called the "Fritz-helmet".

A helmet similar to the "Fritz" was adopted by the Swedish Armed Forces in 1990, the m/90 helmet. Here is a photo of a guy training for United Nations service wearing a m/90 with a blue helmet cover.

The "Swedish Fritz", the m/90 helmet. I reckon this photo is from 1999.

Swedish firefighters had adopted an even more German-style helmet long before the m/90, but I am not sure when they started using these:

Old Swedish firefighter helmet, in the Piteå Museum. Does someone know when it was intoduced?

But the PASGT-helmet and m/90 can hardly compare with Finnish postwar helmets. For one thing, original German WWII-issued Stahlhelms continued to see service in the Finnish Armed Forces well after WWII and the "new" steel helmet introduced in 1955, the M55 (or m/55), was a copy of the the German WWII M40.

In the field the Finnish Armed Forces used the M55 well into the 1980s and I believe they retained it for ceremonial use a bit longer, does someone know exactly when they stopped using them?

I am not sure which year the armed forces of Afghanistan stopped using original German M16/18 helmets. But there is a photograph from US President Eisenhower's visit to Afghanistan in 1959 where they are still being worn.

There is at least one country that still to this day is using Stahlhelms, Chile:

Chilean military guards of honour still use a Chilean variant of the German M35 helmet. This photo was taken in 2009 in Santiago, Chile. PHOTO: Master Sgt. Adam M. Stump, USAF

From Peter Suciu´s really amazing helmet site I also understand that these Chilean helmets were introduced in the 1930s. The shape is closest to the German M35 helmet. The last (?) batch was produced in the 1980s.

A final question to you, dear reader, exactly which helmet model is featured in the coming movie "Iron Sky"? In the trailer for this dark science-fiction comedy you can see both Stahlhelms and MP 40s on the moon:



So, which is it? Are the storm troopers on the moon wearing repro/original M35s, M40s, M42s or perhaps Finnish M55s? The latter would be most suitable considering it is mainly a Finnish production. Interestingly, the cast of "Iron Sky" includes some internationally rather well-known actors such as Götz Otto, who played Otto Günsche in "The Downfall". The premiere of "Iron Sky" is now more or less exactly one year away (December 2011).

Will "Iron Sky" cement the Stahlhelm as a symbol of Nazism and evil? Possibly, but I find it quite interesting that not only in Finland and Chile the Stahlhelm is not automatically associated with Nazism, and not even with German soldiers. Where do you think the below hero monument stands?

The Warsaw insurgents monument. PHOTO: Cezary Piwowarski

Yes, in Warsaw. The soldiers are Polish guerrillas, resistance fighters. They often wore German helmets as can be seen in numerous wartime photographs.

Well, that was my concluding take on the influence and significance of the Stahlhelm, from sock icon to "Iron Sky".

P.S.
Thanks to a blog reader and helmet collector I am now aware of this almost-too-good-to-be-true Iraqi helmet actually inspired by Darth Vader´s helmet. No kidding!