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Post by Kenneth on Jan 21, 2019 16:20:35 GMT -5
In some photos of soldiers wearing khaki drill clothing, it looks like a few here and there appear to be wearing civilian pattern leather waist belts. They are black as far as I can tell. They do not appear to be the normal issue web waist belt in either khaki or olive drab color. They are likewise narrow and definitely not the wider equipment belts (M1945) worn into the 1960s and later. This question applies to both Vietnam and Algeria. Such photos I am referring to are not in formation or on parade, but the soldiers would normally be wearing sashes on those occasions anyway.
Given that soldiers everywhere freely interpret regulations, which they have probably never read, or ignore them altogether, is it possible that I am actually seeing leather waist belts worn with khaki uniforms? |
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Post by lew on Jan 30, 2019 13:24:23 GMT -5
A trouser belt? The issue trouser belt was a copy of the US WW2-era canvas web belt with the open, toothed buckle. Officers typically had a brass roller buckle. As for the leather belt, I can't recall seeing that in Algeria, but I would not be surprised, especially in SE Asia. I would guess they were local fabrications, probably of water buffalo leather.
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Post by Kenneth on Oct 17, 2021 4:50:29 GMT -5
I happened to run across a reference that should explain the presence of ordinary looking leather waist belts (trouser belts) in some photographs.
In the Men-at-arms series No. 315, The French Army 1939-45 (1), in the caption for plate G1, it mentions the introduction of a summer uniform for hot weather areas in 1937. It consisted of khaki shorts and a short sleeve shirt, which was fairly progressive for the tie. It included a special-pattern belt of natural leather 30-mm wide. It doesn't follow that the belts I've noticed in photos, most of which were post-war, were that particular belt. However, one photo I ran across, captioned '2rei-1939-montee-ksar-es-souk' (that's the way the photo was saved as a JPEG file), shows several legionnaires wearing plain leather belts. They're all wearing the 1935 pattern shirt, the one with the button-down collar, worn with necktie, white trousers, bloused but into what isn't clear. The white trousers seem to be the old style fatigue trousers with no belt loops. The shirts appear to have been produced in varying shades of khaki and the shirts in the photo are on the dark side. The kepis have white covers. The men are armed with Berthier rifles but are not wearing any pouches or other gear.
So there was an official issue of leather waist belts but it's surprising that there would be any still in use 15 or 20 years after their introduction, given that American-style web belts had been in use since before the end of the war.
The photo, by the way, has a sort of watermark in the corner, "Foreign Legion Info," which is an on-line Foreign Legion information website, so I guess that's where the photo is from.
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