From the Tromsø War Museum

Tromsø War Museum

 

Capitaine Chasseurs Alpins 6me Bataillon

Italian Soviet Style Berets

These days the Italian military wear berets like most other militaries around the world, but during WWII, the typical Soviet style berets were common. 

These beret were not knitted from one thread and then felted, but were made of various pieces of woven wool sewn together. 

They were even fitted with a cabillou-like piece of material at the center of the beret. The top photo is a M29 model of a paratrooper.

The remaining photos are of a medical doctor parachutist.

Nowadays, these type of berets are still manufactured in Poland and make for excellent headwear. 

Crows

 

Billy Childish's Crow Berets are among the Best of the Best; berets that have come to life in a collaboration between Billy Childish, the L-13 Light Industrial Workshop, Flamingo Berets from Japan and Boneteria Aotearoa.

Introduced in 2022, and there are a small number still available. 

Better still, these come with a signed large postcard of the Crow woodcut Print! Get yours here.

José "Cha Cha" Jiménez

José Jiménez (1948 –2025), nicknamed Cha Cha, was a Puerto Rican political activist and the founder of the Young Lords, a Chicago-based street gang that became a civil and human rights organization.

Started on September 23, 1968, it was most active in the late 1960s and 1970s.

Born in Caguas, Puerto Rico, Jiménez was taken as an infant by his mother to the United States in 1949. They lived for a time with his father near Boston, Massachusetts, but within two years the family moved to Chicago to join relatives. As a youth, he ran with a street gang but made a turn-around in 1968 and devoted himself to reviving the Young Lords to work on issues of human rights, beginning in Chicago. 

Issues included redlining, displacement of the poor, welfare rights and dignity, police relations, and community needs. In addition to establishing breakfast, education and health programs, they organized politically to negotiate with city officials. They also set up chapters in other cities with Puerto Rican and Latino populations, to work on social justice.

Chasseurs Alpins Fanfare

 From a time that music was carried on long play records...

All The Presidents Men

 

Jose "Pepe" Mujica, Uruguay

Emmanuel Macron, France

Saddam Hussain, Iraq

Muammar Muhammad Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi, Libya

Omar al-Bashir, Sudan

Fidel Castro, Cuba

Chechen Dictator Ramzan Kadyrov

Hugo Chavez, Venezuela

Vytautas Landsbergis, Lituania

Fernando Lugo, Paraguay

Website Issues

Ongoing issues with the South Pacific Berets website require big maintenance and the site is presently offline. 
A temp alternative has been set up under the name The Beret Company (www.theberetcompany.com). 

I hope to have the original address live again soon. 

Heshel Teitelbaum

 

Heshel Teitelbaum studies the non-equilibrium kinetics of unimolecular and bimolecular reactions, the relationship of thermal rate coefficients to energy transfer and the state-to-state reaction rate constants. He does experimental and numerical studies of the rates and mechanisms of the vibrational relaxation of simple molecules and radicals.

Vytautas Landsbergis

Vytautas Landsbergis (1932) is a Lithuanian politician and former Member of the European Parliament. He was the first Speaker of Reconstituent Seimas of Lithuania after its independence declaration from the Soviet Union.

He has written 20 books on a variety of topics, including a biography of Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, as well as works on politics and music. He is a founding signatory of the Prague Declaration, and a member of the international advisory council of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.

Landsbergis entered politics, in 1988, as one of the founders of Sąjūdis, the Lithuanian pro-independence political movement. In 1989 elections to the Congress of People's Deputies of the Soviet Union, Landsbergis was elected as one of the People's Deputies from Lithuanian SSR. After Sąjūdis' victory in the 1990 elections, he became the Chairman of the Supreme Council of Lithuania.

On 11 March 1990, he headed the Parliamentary session during which the restoration of Lithuanian independence from the Soviet Union was declared. Lithuania became the first Soviet Republic to do so.

In 1993, Landsbergis led much of Sąjūdis into a new political party, the Homeland Union (Tėvynės Sąjunga). It gained a landslide victory in the 1996 parliamentary elections. Landsbergis served as Speaker of the Seimas from 1996 until 2000. In 2004, Landsbergis was elected by Lithuanian voters to the European Parliament in Brussels (the total number of MEPs from Lithuania in Brussels was 13), and has been returned at every election until 2014.

Helmut Junker

Helmut Junker (1934) is a German psychoanalyst and writer. Junker studied law and medicine in Bonn. He headed the Psychotherapy Research and Counseling Center for Students at the University of Kassel and later held a professorship specializing in the history of psychoanalysis at the same university. Junker now lives in Hamburg and works as a private medical psychotherapist.

In addition to scientific works on psychotherapy, Junker published several books for young people on topics from the Third World in the 1960s, as well as psychological novels and short stories from the end of the 1970s.

Gordon Marino

Gordon Marino is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. Professor Marino took his doctorate from the Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago. Before coming to St. Olaf in 1995, he taught at Harvard, Yale, and Virginia Military Institute.

Gordon Marino has a long history of public commentary on the issues of the day. In particular, he is looking at a range of contemporary public policy issues including the cult of the expert in America, self-deception and ethics education, the use of psychotropic drugs in children too young to be able to discuss side effects, and problems with Just War Theory in an era of asymmetric wars. His project is an example of just how philosophers can be citizens and public commentators.

A former boxer, Dr. Marino has been a USA Boxing coach since 1995. He was the head coach of boxing at Virginia Military Institute and currently trains both amateurs and professionals in Minnesota. He is also an award-winning boxing writer for among other venues.

Martí Boada i Juncà (#3)

Martí Boada i Juncà (1949) is an environmental scientist, geographer, and president of the Board of Trustees of the La Rectoria Art Center Foundation, in Sant Pere de Vilamajor.

Martí Boada's pedagogical work in the field of environmental education began in 1978, with the launch of "Natura de Can Lleonart", in the Montseny Natural Park, one of the first experiences in environmental education in Catalonia.

Later he joined the Autonomous University of Barcelona as a professor and researcher. He is the co-author of more than forty books on thought and popularization. 

In 2014, he participated as an advisor in a research campaign in the Yasuní National Park (in the Amazon rainforest of Ecuador), in which more than two hundred scientists from twenty-six countries participated. Boada has been very critical of environmental policies, which do not devote enough effort to preventing natural disasters that climate change can cause, either from the territory itself or from international organizations.

Pétur Mikkel Jónasson

Dr. Pétur Mikkel Jónasson was an aquatic ecologist and professor emeritus at the University of Copenhagen.

Pétur was born in Reykjavík (Iceland) on June 18, 1920. His parents were Jónas Halldór Guðmundsson, a shipbuilder, and Margrét Guðmundsdóttir Ottesen, a housewife.

He graduated from the University of Iceland in 1939 and studied biology at Hafnarfjörður University. Pétur became a teacher at Hafnarháskóli in 1956, was appointed director of the school's Institute of Aquatic Biology in 1977, and professor of aquatic biology in 1979. He held that position until 1990, but worked as professor emeritus until 2017.

The Naturalist, which was published summer 2020, was published in honor of Pétur on the occasion of his 100th birthday.

Santiago Castro-Gómez

Santiago Castro-Gómez (1958) is a Colombian philosopher, a professor at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana and the former director of the Pensar Institute in Bogotá.

Castro-Gómez began studying philosophy at Santo Tomás University in Bogotá, Colombia with members of the "Bogotá Group." He received his M.A. in Philosophy at the University of Tübingen and his Ph.D at the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main in Germany. In addition to his academic positions in Colombia, he has served as visiting professor at Duke University, Pittsburgh University and the Goethe University of Frankfurt.

The work of Castro-Gómez explores the "frontiers" between sociology, anthropology, literary studies and cultural studies, while also reflecting on methodological and epistemological problems within the social sciences. In Zero-Point Hubris, Castro-Gómez characterizes Rene Descartes' 1637 famous statement of "I think, therefore I am" as "the moment white Europeans installed themselves above God as the sole arbiters of knowledge and truth. With this turning point, they began to think of themselves as observers whose scientific methods, morals and ethics overrode those of other cultures.

Günter Zumpe

Günter Zumpe (1929 - 2024) was a German civil engineer and a professor of statics at the Technical University of Dresden.

Zumpe was the son of a small village building contractor. He studied at the Technical University of Dresden and initially wanted to set up his own business as a structural engineer and structural planner (or rather, to work for his father's construction company, which was finally nationalised in 1972). However, due to limited job opportunities, he returned to the Technical University of Dresden as an assistant. In 1962, he became a building expert for statics and construction, but was restricted in his part-time job as a university lecturer in the GDR. In Dresden, his last position was as a professor of structural mechanics and construction informatics.

Enrique Gaztanaga

Enrique Gaztanaga is a professor at Portsmouth University, UK.

Gaztanaga’s expertise is in the area of Cosmological models and the Large Scale Structure (LSS): the distribution of galaxies, radiation and matter on the largest observable scales. In particular:  i) how light from galaxies traces the underlaying mass: theory, measurements and simulations ii) comparison of perturbation theory to data and simulations: development of novel tools,  iii)  measurement and modelling of  Galaxy-CMB cross-correlation techniques iv) measurements and modelling of higher order correlation function and Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAO), v) interpretation of cosmological models and the laws of Physics.