In 1918, a seventeen-year-old Walt Disney was desperate to serve in the Great War. He attempted to enlist in the United States military but was rejected for being underage. The war, which America had entered in April 1917, was consuming millions of young men. By the summer of 1918, two million American servicemen were fighting on the Western Front, with ten thousand new arrivals landing each day.
Over 116,000 Americans would ultimately die before the conflict ended. Rejected by the military, Disney found another route to France. The American Red Cross was recruiting thousands of volunteers to serve near the front lines, caring for the wounded and driving ambulances. Using his considerable artistic skill, Disney altered the birth date on his birth certificate, and in September 1918 he was accepted.
After training as an ambulance driver on the standard Ford ambulance, he was shipped overseas, arriving in France in November 1918, just after the armistice. With the fighting over, the need for ambulances quickly diminished. But Disney remained in France for months, ferrying the injured and sick across the old battlefields. He served in the same unit as Ray Kroc, a fellow underage volunteer who would later purchase McDonald’s.
After his ambulance duties wound down, Disney was reassigned to a Red Cross canteen in the town of Neufchâteau near Nancy. For a young man who had come expecting adventure, it was a boring assignment. Disney passed his time drawing cartoons. He sent them to publications back home, but none were published.
He drew posters for the Red Cross and caricatures for American soldiers, who sent them home as souvenirs. He even borrowed a Croix de Guerre, the French gallantry medal, and painted a replica of it on the back of his jacket. Other soldiers soon paid him to do the same on theirs. During this time, Disney befriended a fellow volunteer from Georgia known only by his nickname, Cracker.
Cracker was also trying to make money, and he shared a discovery with Disney: he had found a stash of abandoned German steel helmets. After the armistice and the German pullout, enormous quantities of German equipment lay in dumps across the American sector, stripped from prisoners or simply left behind in trenches and bunkers. Cracker was already selling these helmets as souvenirs to American doughboys, many of whom had arrived too late to see any combat. Troops would pay well for a German helmet, the ultimate symbol of the Kaiser’s defeated army.
But some helmets sold better than others. The ones the soldiers called “sniper helmets” fetched the highest prices. These were stahlhelms painted in gaudy, angular camouflage patterns. American troops believed these helmets had belonged to German snipers, the most feared enemy of the trenches.
Snipers picked off any man foolish enough to expose his head above the parapet, and killing one was considered a great feat. Naturally, a dead sniper’s equipment became a prized trophy. There is a thorny issue among collectors concerning the authenticity of these painted German helmets. Contemporary photographs of front-line German soldiers from 1918 rarely show painted helmets.
The German Chief of Staff, General Erich Ludendorff, had in 1918 officially authorized a field and factory camouflage pattern for steel helmets called buntfarbenanstrich. The style used angular segmented patches of ochre yellow, rust brown, and olive green, each outlined by a finger-wide black stripe, designed to break up the helmet’s shape. Soldiers were told to mix fine sand into the paint for a dull, non-reflective finish. Since much of this was done in the field, variations in color and style were common.
Cracker realized that painted helmets were far more valuable to souvenir-hungry doughboys. He knew of Disney’s artistic talents. One day he asked Disney if he could paint a German helmet in the same manner as the standard German pattern. Disney ended up painting dozens of helmets for Cracker’s stock.
Cracker was not stupid. He understood the importance of authenticity. Each helmet had to look worn in. He would take a finished helmet, rub dirt into it, kick it around, and shoot holes in it with his pistol until it looked suitably beaten up and aged.
Troop trains changed locomotives at Neufchâteau station, and the two men would walk down the carriages selling their “genuine German sniper helmets” to very eager American soldiers. Disney was paid five French francs for each helmet he painted, about one dollar in 1918 currency, the equivalent of roughly twenty-two dollars today. His monthly Red Cross salary was fifty-two dollars, half of which he sent home to his mother each month, along with his helmet earnings. No one has ever confirmed which of these helmets Disney painted, as he never signed them.
But it is almost certain that many of his creations are still floating around the collector’s market, or perhaps even displayed in museums. The irony is that a German helmet painted by Walt Disney would now be worth a small fortune compared to a genuine combat helmet. Disney returned home in October 1919 with a fair sum of money saved through his mother. His Red Cross service had given him time to perfect his artistic skills and run a profitable side business.
The helmets Cracker sold were genuine German helmets, only augmented by Disney into what the doughboys truly wanted. Those helmets likely became the basis for many tall tales told by American veterans, stories of battling and defeating deadly German snipers. Disney had scammed trophy-hungry soldiers without harming anyone.
He had returned home with extra cash and improved skills, ready to go into business for himself as a commercial artist and animator.