Re: Blood and Iron

As much as Bruno spent his time developing new weapons for the Reich. Which hopefully would be adopted into service and mass produced in time for the upcoming Great War that would begin in the following decade, assuming the timeline had not shifted to the point where it would move up.

Bruno also spent a lot of his days with his wife, Heidi. While he would cook breakfast and lunch for her, because she was eight months pregnant, and he wanted her to rest as much as possible. He would often neglect lunch, as he was too busy with blueprints.

Causing the woman to voluntarily make a meal for the both of them, and bring it to her husband while he was hard at work in his home office. Despite Bruno's attempts to keep his wife off of her feet during such a crucial time. She very much enjoyed doing small things like cooking for her husband, and utterly refused to be robbed of it.

Forcing Bruno to accept her hospitality for at least one meal of the day. Which was most often lunch. Aside from spending time with Heidi after the day's work was over. Bruno continued to work on developing the next generation of equipment for the German Military.

In addition to this, he sent a letter of recommendation to his father to gain the licensing required to contract production of the Browning auto-5 shotgun within their own factories. It was a deal that would take much time to be negotiated. But frankly, Bruno knew it was the best shotgun of the era.

The Browning Auto-5 was a semi-automatic 12-gauge shotgun developed by John Moses Browning, an American gun manufacturer who was absolutely brilliant. And in my ways considered the greatest firearms manufacturer of all time. Even in the 21st century, many of his firearms designs were still employed in 21st century battlefields by modern militaries. The browning auto-5 had already been patented by John Moses Browning as early as 1898. But it would not begin production until a year from now in 1902. And because of this, Bruno intended to wait until it had begun production before sending his father a letter requesting licensing rights from the legendary firearm designer.

Instead, for the time being, he focused on more important things, as the shotgun, while having a role to play in the trenches, was not exactly a critical development needed to be adopted as soon as possible.

Bruno immediately began to work on military uniforms. The legendary field grey uniforms of the German Army had only begun experimentation within colonial units like the East Asian Expeditionary Corps, which was now disbanded. But they had seen service during the winter of 1900 within China.

However, it would still be several years before they were fully implemented across the entire German Army. For now, rather than go with the 1907/10 pattern uniform, which was already obsolete by the time the Great War began, having still made use of the old boiled leather pickelhaube helmets.

Bruno went straight to the most efficient uniform of the war. The 1915/16 pattern uniform with the matching Stahlhelm. This uniform not only got rid of superfluous designs such as the red lining on the edges of the uniform and the visible brass buttons, which made the wearer more visible while in the field.

But it also added a hardened steel helmet which would protect the user from shrapnel and fragmentation. At the start of the Great War in Bruno's past life, every nation was still equipping their soldiers with either a cloth hat or a boiled leather helmet. Neither of which really did much to protect the wearer.

However, in 1916 the Stahlhelm was introduced to the German Army, around the same time other nations began adopting similar steel helmets. When these hardened steel helmets were introduced, it was said the 75% of all head injuries caused by shrapnel and fragmentation had practically disappeared over night.