wwii axis reenactment forum

It would also seem to me that the pocket flaps aren't reinforced with leather, just with different colored canvas.

i think it is leather they are reinforced with, certainly not canvas anyway.

As a side note, the second, green breadbag is border guards issue.

thanks for that info, i always wondered about this type!

cheers,
rich

Richk98 wrote: i think it is leather they are reinforced with, certainly not canvas anyway.

I stand corrected All the ones I have seen have had canvas ones. Shows the variety on Finnish equipment.

Here's a little comparision between a wartime and postwar, 63 dated breadbag. As far is i know, the later model was introduced along with M/60 webbing.



As you can see, the postwar one has more loops and is notably larger.



On the inside, the wartime one is divided into two compartments, while the postwar one has much more prominent leather reinforcements.



The belt loops and the shoulder strap are also fixed differently.

Notably, unlike the the wartime ones (and a lot of other finnish equiptment), the postwar breadbags seem consisted in their colours.

Kyrl wrote:What I found about the tornister:

http://2jager.com/fieldgear.htm

There is a picture at the bottom of this page. They say that the finn tornister is similar to the ww2 gebrigsjager one, but really I don't feel sure about this. Anyway the bag they show seems to match with this photo I have, dated 13th march 1940:



And here is a repro of a ww1 german one. This doesn't seem to correspond as the "pipping" on the pocket flaps is not present:

No, this is just the regular backpack that they started to produce right before the war and which became the standard issue quite cuickly (and they still issue these backpacks, my companys sniper section got these in 2008!!). Finns refer to a leather and fur german backpack as tornister (or törnisteri as it is in some old texts), so I believe it HAS to be some older german model or something.. but there's just very little info about it anywhere..

Well, alright, I googled a bit. Seems to be that atleast some units used german M36 tornisters... here's some photos.






This last photo is interesting, as the stamp says "13./J.R. 7" which means 13. komppania / Jalkaväkirykmentti 7 or 13th company / 7th infantry regiment in english. So this could have been used by finns!

All right, thank you for the infos!

I suppose this kind of tornister would be correct only for jatkosota as I imagine the Finns did not get german gear of this kind until Barbarossa?

Definately yes, for continuation war only.

I don't know too much about winter war equipment nor pre-war situation, I'm more into continuation war and modern things

The tornister was implemented into the M27 clothing/webbing system. After the five or so years the system got replaced at first by the experimentive M34 and finally by the M36 system that incorporated the "onion backpack". Note that the tornister was not the only backpack model to be manufactured for the M27 system.

http://i609.photobucket.com/albums/tt17 ... pilaat.jpg
Finnish Reserve Officer School students during military exercise. Picture from late 1920's

http://i609.photobucket.com/albums/tt17 ... ksissa.jpg
Finnish civil guard during military exercise. Notice German shovel. Date unknown.

So how close the finnish tornister is to the german one, or was it exactly the same as World War 1 models?

There's one pre-war tornister in Milform's museum and I'd say it's same model as German WW1