Many watches are the true inheritors of military traditions
Most Swiss watch manufacturers include in their collections today models incorporating devices that are descendants of those meeting the essential needs of land, sea, undersea and air warfare. Those basic requirements are obvious: accuracy, water resistance, shockproofing, interval timing, luminosity…
Michael Balfour*
The first modern Olympic Games took place in 1896, and after the Great War’s end in 1918 vastly expanded their scope, in terms of both events and the numbers of participating nations. The timing requirements of the military exactly suited the rigours of sporting arenas, and were quickly adopted. At the same time some early car, yachting and air races were developing their reputations, and have now matured into international annual occasions, made famous by the global reach of television. Watch models named after them find their sales among sports observers, in the sense that the earliest military timepieces were often known as observation watches. Thus the pedigrees of so many best-selling watch collections in the marketplace today have clear and legitimate lines of descent from the tumult of war.
The very first wristwatch designed for military use
Take, for example, the American watch manufacturer Hamilton (today a Swatch Group brand). During World War I it made millions of timepieces for the US government. Today, the rugged tradition is maintained by its Khaki range. Hamilton, and other early American watchmakers, such as Elgin, Illinois and Gruen, had had the fortunate experience of providing accurate pocket watches for the growing national railroad system. One of them, Ingersoll, found lasting fame with its Yankee one-dollar timepiece (“The watch that made the dollar famous”); it sold over 50 million of them between 1895 and 1918. The Yankee Radiolite version, whose numerals were coated with extra-fluorescent radium, was carried by the British army at the Battle of the Somme in September 1916. The caseback was stamped TW (tank watch) with a broad arrow above.
The very first wristwatch designed purely for military use (and also the first wristwatch in series production) was of course the Girard-Perregaux piece, 2,000 of which were delivered to Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1880 for deck officers in his navy. It was covered by a protective metal grille, an obvious idea soon to be reproduced by Waltham, Movado’s Trench or Soldier wristwatch, and Ingersoll’s Midget watch. Even Rolex produced a Trench watch in 1914, but it had a civilian look about it.
Round black dials with luminous hands
Then, and ever since, the majority of wristwatches specifically designed for armies, navies and airforces have featured round black dials with luminous hands, prominent luminous (generally arabic) numerals, sometimes interspersed with baton timemarkers between the quarter hours, with broad white arrows at 12 o’clock or skeleton arrows elsewhere on dials, subsidiary or sweep seconds, large milled winding crowns, or smaller protected ones, and ever-improving shockproof mechanical movements and water-resistance qualities. And these are just the features on new models in many a shop window today… the true inheritor of military traditions.
Panerai provided Radiomir wristwatches for the Italian navy’s incursori, sitting astride their mini-torpedoes on the night of 18/19 December 1941 as they blew up two British destroyers in the port of Alexandria, Egypt. Today’s Radiomirs look much the same. IWC’s Pilot’s Watches, the six Mark models (the first, Mark IX, was launched in 1936) have the look of the true inheritors. The latest, Mark XVI, does, though, have a white dial alternative (for female pilots?).
During World War II, the German Wehrmacht, Kriegsmarine and Luftwaffe certainly spread its orders about, but the numbers required were huge. Almost all of the timepieces looked similar… round black dials, etc. The long list of suppliers included Bulla, Cronos, Felsing, Glycine, Grana, Hanhardt, Helios, Heuer, Huber, IWC, Junghans, Laco, Lancet, A. Lange & Söhne, Revue, Schätzle & Tschudin, Schieron, Siegerin, Stowa, Tutima, Wagner, Wempe and Zentra.
A market never tired of inherited military traditions
Vollmer was founded in Pforzheim, Germany, in 1922 as a watch case and bracelet manufacturer. Today this family company is turning out German-made pilot’s watches (housing the ETA 2824 automatic movement), using titanium, with see-through stainless steel case backs. One of its current models is the Nacht Schwimmer, the whole dial of which is luminous. It has all the divers’ functions, including a unidirectional bezel. Its cushion-shaped U5 model bears a distinct resemblance to Panerai’s prototype Radiomir, but it has a date window at 3 o’clock.
British forces during World War II kept Swiss makers busy. Among their suppliers were Buren, Cyma, Eterna, Invicta, Jaeger-LeCoultre, Lemania, Longines, Omega, Record, Rolex, Rotary, Vertex, and Zenith. In the after-war years, the aeronautic forces and the French air force were issued with Breguet Type XX chronographs.
Military Observation watches most often have the 12 hour ring placed within the minutes. Elgin made a most collectable version with this layout for frogmen in the 1940s with a prominent protected crown. Seikosha (now Seiko) supplied one in large numbers to the Imperial Japanese Navy, in c.1941. Patek Philippe and Vacheron Constantin made them in the 1930s, at a time when Gaston Breitling was producing over 40 different chronographs, with the aviation industry and its followers as his target market. The famed Breitling Navitimer was to arrive in 1952, and is one of the all-time great and continuing sellers in its genre. Collectors of today’s standard-issue and inexpensive military wristwatches will know of the catalogues of Wenger (Switzerland), Cabot Watch Company (UK), and MTM (USA). They address a market that seems never to be tired of inherited military traditions, both visible and useful, along with the time of the day or the night. ■
MILITARY WATCHES
Napoleon was defeated in one of the most famous battles of all time, at Waterloo, on 18th June 1815. Hundreds of books and articles have been published about this dramatic day, but none of them has ever agreed on the exact times of the sequence of events. All we know is that it is entirely possible that both Napoleon and the Duke of Wellington (the victor, as he became, with Blücher) wore Breguet pocket watches on the day.
Precise, planned and recorded synchronisation in ground warfare only became possible as the 20th century arrived, and World War I threatened. At sea, however, accurate timekeeping was clearly imperative from the earliest days of maritime history. The exact measurement of latitude, a ship’s north/south position, was easily undertaken by astronomical observations of the sun and certain stars and then mathematical calculations. But the establishment of longitude, the east/west position, was much more difficult, being complicated by the fact that the elapsed time of the rotation of the Earth on its axis has slight variations. As early as 1598 King Philip of Spain proposed a large reward for an accurate longitudinal calculator. This was famously achieved by the English clockmaking genius, John Harrison (1693-1776), at the end of the 18th century.
Ulysse Nardin a successful early entrant
One of Harrison’s earliest supporters was George Graham, whose niece he had married, and who worked with the great Thomas Tompion. Graham’s name is once again on the dials of watches, as Swiss-made wristwatches from British Masters. Le Roy (in France, with Berthoud), Arnold (another British Masters revival), Earnshaw, Mercer, Kullberg and others brought the series manufacture of marine chronometers into being. Ulysse Nardin was a successful early entrant in this field in Switzerland, and both private and public museums throughout the country now display fine examples of early marine chronometers of amazing accuracy, produced by makers who still lead the world in mechanical watchmaking.
The year 1909 saw Blériot’s first monoplane flight across the English Channel, and the arrival in Europe of Henry Ford’s Model T motor car. In both, clocks on their dashboards were optional extras. But not for long. The Industrial Revolution, improved education, the spread of railways and fast-improving means of travel over land, across the seas and through the air had resulted in the arrival of cheap wristwatches on wrists. And they were to play a vital part in the horrendous trench warfare during the 1914-1918 war. M.B.
*Michael Balfour is the author of “CULT WATCHES: The World’s Enduring Classics”, just published by Merrell, London and New York
