As some of you may know, Stalingrad is a major component of my study and reading and I like to focus part of my collecting efforts on obtaining items from 6th Army units. I recently came across this cap and a couple things about it hooked me. It is a very early (1935 dated) visor cap with the lighter Feldgrau cap band as opposed to the later darker bottle green and it is unit stamped to Pionier-Bataillon 13 which, in August of 1940, became Panzer-Pionier-Bataillon 13 and was assigned to the 14th Panzer Division.

At some point, the first pattern insignia were swapped for the second pattern and there are extra holes witnessing this change. This was commonly done either to comply with regulations (in this case, a unit owned hat) or by desire of the wearer to have the "latest and greatest" style (although as a side note we see many opposite examples of uniform customization where soldiers modified later tunics to mimic earlier examples).

The cap has a substantial amount of moth nips. :weep: If it was a "plain Jane" cap that was not extremely early and didn’t have this unit stamp, I would have passed on it. However, it is still in solid shape and the aforementioned traits earn it a place in my collection.

Click to enlarge the picture