A Call To Arms
War – what is it good for? Well, watchmaking, actually. The superb legibility and durability of an unashamedly rugged military-issue timepiece make it an essential component of your sartorial arsenal
Remember that flashback to Butch Coolidge’s childhood in Pulp Fiction? Christopher Walken’s mesmerising Captain Koons coaxes a young Butch from his TV cartoons by presenting him with a gold watch that had belonged to generations of Coolidge military men – a legacy Koons had promised Butch’s father he’d help to uphold. “The way your daddy looked at it, that watch was your birthright,” says Koons. “So he hid it in the one place he knew he could hide something: his ass.”
Other than hoping that the captain had given it a thorough clean and service, watch nerds will have noted that Quentin Tarantino’s prop master had done well. The gifted item is a genuine First World War “trench” watch, complete with
soldered, wire-loop strap attachments. It was on the Belgian front line that men’s watches migrated from the pocket to the wrist. Young Butch was probably just grateful for a watch so robust it had weathered every major 20th-century conflict since.
War has incubated myriad advances in the wristwatch, from hands-free convenience to dial luminescence and the rotating bezel. But if this year’s new recruits are anything to go by, the definitive combo of features that makes a “mil-spec” watch such a versatile addition to any man’s footlocker was achieved towards the end of the Second World War. This was when the Ministry of Defence commissioned 12 brands to create the “Watches Wristlets Waterproof” range. Just 145,000 were issued to Allied forces by the likes of Omega, Longines and Britain’s Vertex, making a complete set of all 12 models, known as “the Dirty Dozen”, a watch collector’s holy grail.
Today, almost every essential military-watch trope can be traced back to the WWW watches of 1944: no-nonsense, white-onblack styling, precision timekeeping and decent water resistance. Oh, and a rugged steel case. Bad news if you want to keep yours “safe” in a prison camp...
Lost and Found Point your watch’s hour hand at the sun – true south is halfway between the hour hand and 12 o’clock