Original Items: Only One Available. The Adrian helmet (French: Casque Adrian) was an influential design of combat helmet originally produced for the French Army during World War I. Its original version, the M15, was the first standard helmet of the French Army and was designed when millions of French troops were engaged in trench warfare, and head wounds from the falling shrapnel generated by indirect fire became a frequent cause of battlefield casualties. Introduced in 1915, it was the first modern steel helmet and it served as the basic helmet of many armies well into the 1930s. Initially issued to infantry soldiers, in modified form they were also issued to cavalry and tank crews. A subsequent version, the M26, was used during World War II.

The helmet proved to be fairly effective against shrapnel and it was cheap and easy to manufacture. As a consequence, more than twenty million Adrian helmets were produced. They were widely adopted by other countries including Albania, Belgium, Brazil, China, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Italy (including license-built versions), Japan, Latvia, Luxembourg, Mexico, Morocco, Peru, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Spain, Siam, Turkey, the United States, U.S.S.R., and Yugoslavia, each of these states adding its own insignia to the front of the helmet. Helmets made for export did not have the slots on the front for badges, hence why a lot of them were painted or drawn on like this example.

The front of this example has a rare original Spanish Civil War yugo y flechas (bow and arrow) insignia of the Spanish Nationalist group the "Black Arrows". Helmet features its original paint and leather chinstrap with a lovely worn liner.

This is a wonderful helmet and comes more than ready for further research and display.

The Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) Was a brutal, repressive, and for this Americano, difficult to follow struggle which pitted several not particularly sympathetic groups - some quite repugnant- against each other.

When it was over strongman Francisco Franco was left standing, the Spanish Republicans were on the run and in tatters, and the Communists were just as looney as ever. The three guys who may have benefited most were Ernest Hemingway who got a great book and movie deal out of it all, Picasso who left us with an incredible painting, and Adolf AH who profited from what was a great opportunity to road test much of NSDAP Germany's new war making hardware.

Today over a half century later we are left with a modern Spain that may be the leading
exporter of irrelevance and ambivalence. At least that struggle gave the helmet collecting world some very interesting steel lids.

During that war the various factions used a variety of helmets, foreign and domestic, interchangeably with each other while they bled their country white.