With the only important difference being the Americans were using their tank helmets, when their British colleagues stayed loyal to their berets. For example, during fighting in northern France in 1944 British tankers suffered much more losses due to head wounds, than their American counterparts, while using almost exactly the same Sherman tanks. That makes having a head protection even more vital. Not only for most of the time you cannot see anything outside, because you have to hold on to something, you are also constantly subjected to forces of unknown vector, strength and time. A ride inside a tank, especially when buttoned up, is a completely different experience. And all of this happens, when you’re stationary. It is very easy to bruise yourself, while entering or leaving, not to mention operating the main gun. Tanks – especially those of that era – are usually very cramped and full of hard, metal bits with sharp edges. I’m not talking about the fact, that a tank might accidentally run you over, or you can fall off of it and break every bone in your body. Especially when you are new to these things, you’ll find, that a lot of stuff, probably deliberately wants to harm you.

Not only for the enemy forces, but also to the accompanying infantry and most importantly for us – to their crews.

Most of them didn’t have any radios, and World War II very soon proved, that they were mostly useless on the modern battlefield.

T-26, BT-2 and BT-5 were the most numerous Soviet tanks of that era. Most of them weren’t any good and were pretty obsolete, even during then, but the need for head protection for the crews emerged. In this decade, the Soviets have build literally tens of thousands of tanks. The first model appeared in the early 1930s, when the freshly industrialized Soviet Union started to mass produce tanks.

American tank crew goggles modern