The larger picture. People living today will never understand how much having a job and a salary meant to these people. They lived through the great depression. Depression kids never left any food, they cleaned their plate into old age. The same movement over and over, 8-10 hours a day 5-6 days a week. No whining, no trouble making, no phone calls, no gabbing. Food was rationed, scarce. Fighting at the grocery stores for scraps of meat. If you were lucky, the factory had a cafeteria where you could get a decent meal. No tires, no cars, no refrigerators, very little gas. Overcrowded trains, busses, street cars. The boss got on the squawkbox and announced the factory had met it's production goal. Now, a new production goal, make even more in the same time. In Europe, it was worse. Bombs came through the factory roof. Finally, victory, then the economy crashed as government contracts stopped and people got laid off and the economy took time to transition to peace. Could you live through it?
You need to try and find footage (if any exists) of the production and painting of the helmets. From what I can tell there is no footage anywhere of the helmets being made and then painted, would be really neat to see how the process for both was done. The only available footage regarding WW2 M1 helmets (besides this video) has to do with the creation of high pressure liners
I see video all the time of m1s being painted in the factory. Ill try and hunt it down. Its footage of them spinning and being sprayed on an assembly line.
I recall footage of 1960s M1 shells being painted in “Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam”, but I have never seen footage of WWII shells being painted.
