h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The design criteria for army boots is mighty complex because different trades have different requirements. Protection is foremost followed by foot health and comfort. There are good strong boots that protect your feet from the environment, but are murder on your feet (lesser of two evils). I had a pair of green jungle boots (c1965) which were great to wear, dried out quickly but had no protection for the top of the foot and only rubber reinforcement for the toes.

Waterlogging would be another problem. Wellies (Wellington Boots) are waterproof, but they do a lot of damage when worn for a long time. One of the reasons the British boot is unlined is to aid drying. My canadian boots were fully lined but they were well waterproofed, provided you didn't go in over the top when they took a long time to dry out. It seems like a daily application of boot polish is probably the quickest and best answer to waterproofing.

..and there lies the problem. Copious applications of boot polish will indeed render the boot water proof. But then there are the lace holes. You can have lacings that are comfortable and flexible, but not waterproof, or you can have lacings that are waterproof but are extremely uncompfortable. Its a trade off between the two.

Stuart

The Danner's Ft. Lewis boot was not insulated but used the Gore-tex bootie to 'wick away moisture'.
The boots were also waterproof up to the 13 inch top. The tongue was full-length and the lace holes were forward of the tongue.
The factory does not suggest polishing the boots because the polish will guck up the pores and make the wicking action go away.

They were $250.00 a pair, at last check.

Worth every penny of it.

There was a Haitian story among the Marines who were there in the late twenties:
A newly arrived Marine Lieutenant saw the native troops passing in review. Some were barefoot but marching along happily. Some were wearing sandals and rags and old shoes and mismatched boots and limping along painfully.
The Lt. turned to the Gunny and asked,"Why haven't we issued these people proper footwear?"
Gunny shrugged,"They don't want it. Ol' Sarge Dupree over there says he'll take anything else gladly, but boots are not needed."
The Lt. turned about purple,"You're letting that man torture his men?
Bring him here, I want to talk to him."
Sarge Dupree was brought forth, a dapper man with everything Bristol fashion and his bare feet very clean and well-trimmed.
The Lt. stopped short at that and then asked what was going on.
The ancient sergeant smiled and said they didn't need good boots for anyone. If they were forced to issue them, it would destroy morale. The country boys marched barefoot and loved it. So they made the city boys march barefoot for a week, at the end of which they were grateful to have anything between them and the ground. Eventually, their feet would become toughened, and then they, too, would march happily barefoot.
The Lt. found something else to go look at and left it at that.

Re - Lace Holes
The Boots Combat High (BCH) like most modern boots have the tongue attached to the boot by gussets along the whole length. The lace holes, therefore, have no connection with the inside of the boot. As long as the gusset leather is treated to repel water as well as the body of the boot, then they are relatively waterproof. However the gussets are a pain if you have high insteps like me, since you have to undo all the laces to get the b****rs on.

Talking of fastenings, laces are still the best item, but there is a zip insert that can be attached to the boot (by laces!) to make it easier to get on and off quickly. This is fine until something goes wrong with the zip and then it's back to laces again.

I'd love to recommend this Entry for the Guide, but before I do, is it possible you could make it pretty with GuideML and such?

Nae problem.

I've a few alterations to make too. I've had a lot of good feedback.

Thanks to all contibutors. : - )

(There's nowt like an old smiley!)

(There's nowt like an old smiley!)

Actually, the face symbol is the oldest smiley having been around since the dawn of the PC and before, being part of the extended ASCII set. The : - ) smiley arose because of the difficulties if inserting a non-standard ASCII character into a 7-bit ASCII system like Newsgroups and E-mail.

Stuart

Dear Reader
Please note, this is nothing to do with Army Boots, just Stuart showing off.

What, me, show of, never!


Stuart

There's nowt like an old boot...in the Stuart.....

One pointless point.

In the British Army the boots are traditionally worn with the lace going straight across in parallel lines up the boot. Little johny Gurkha would hang around in the odd bush during wartime and if someone walked past would run a finger up the boots. If they were not "Straight Laced"(Yes, that's where the phrase comes from) then the owner of the boots would be swiftly dispatched. German boots have always used hooks at the top, making straight lacing impossible.

Hi Ali,

Although I agree with the general gist of your posting, I think you will find that “Straight Laced” has its origins way back in Victorian times when ladies used to wear tightly laced corsets, the tighter the better. As a straight laced corset could be laced a little bit tighter, it referred to a someone upright and rigid in their ways. Do a search on Google and you will get an idea. It doesn’t actually say as much, but I doubt if Elle Macpherson ever wore Army Boots.

Also it was more likely a Japanese soldier that Johnny Gurkha would encounter rather than a German.

Regards

Stuart

It wasn't just the ladies who wore corsets! Men wore them as well to hide their paunches and this made them stiff and unbending! Vain things.

Reference - German laces

Only the paras (Fallschirmjaeger) wore laced boots, laced on the side! The rest wore jackboots until 1944. The Afrika Korps wore knee length laced canvas boots. The Gurkhas fought the Germans in Italy (the Fallschirmjaeger were part of this) so it MAY have been a German boot they felt.

The Bundeswehr (from 1958)also wore non-laced boots - except the paras.