WW2 misc. items for sale
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Guides for these pieces
- Identifying and dating a French military insigniaThe back of an insignia says more than its face: maker, fastening, approval number. How to place a striking and spot a recent restrike.
- Spotting a reproduction or a fake: the seven-point methodAn aged reproduction fools the eye, not the method. Seven concrete checks to tell a period piece from a copy before you buy.
- Inheriting military items: where to start, and in what orderPolishing, washing, taking apart: a few seconds are enough to destroy a piece's value. How to identify, preserve and sell an inheritance.
Collecting Second World War miscellaneous items
This category is the way into collecting without committing large sums, and it documents the soldier's material life best: mess tins, canteens, cups, cases, lamps, compasses, but also military papers, mail, photographs and small personal belongings. Prices stay accessible as long as the piece is anonymous; they change scale as soon as a name, a unit and a date cross-check across several objects of the same group.
Dating by the material
Field equipment is dated by its material as much as by its marking. German canteens have an aluminium body until the early 1940s, then painted or enamelled steel once aluminium was reserved for other uses. The same logic of impoverishment shows on accessories: the felt cover gives way to a substitute material of pressed fibres impregnated with resin, leather straps to woven webbing, fittings become cruder. A poorly finished late-war object is therefore not suspect because of its crudeness alone.
What deceives
Two traps dominate. The first is post-war continuity: many American models were remade identically into the 1950s and 1960s, and only the date on the piece separates wartime equipment from what followed. The second concerns papers, where adding a stamp, a note or a prestigious posting to a genuine service book takes little effort. Compare the inks, the handwriting and the consistency of the dates. Finally, excavated objects, corroded and often reassembled, do not compare with pieces from stock, and small crafts made from shell cases went on long after 1945.