Polish Flash Light
The hand flashlight that many collectors today call the Polish army wartime flashlight is a simple utility lamp from the Second World War era that is remembered mainly because soldiers wore it on the front of their uniform jackets and because it had two small slide-in filters, usually one red and one green. It is often confused today on auction sites with modern reproductions from Mil-Tec or Sturm, but those companies did not produce the original wartime ones. Sturm / Mil-Tec is a German surplus wholesaler and maker of post-war copies. They took inspiration from the old design, but their versions are post-1990s and are not Polish wartime manufacture.
The original wartime pattern seems to originate from Polish pre-war industry, most likely late 1930s. The standard accepted production origin is Poland between 1938 and the fall of 1939. Poland had several small metal and electrical workshops contracted by the army to produce small equipment, including lamps. The exact factory names are unfortunately not well documented because most records were destroyed, but it was domestic Polish manufacture, not German and not Soviet. There is no reliable documentation of exact production totals and any number you see online is mostly guess speculation. Considering scale of the Polish army and the fact that it was not standardised to every soldier, the safest estimate is that production volume was in the tens of thousands, not hundreds of thousands.
The two colour filters had a specific practical purpose. Red light allowed the soldier to use the lamp at night without destroying night vision and without making a bright white flash that could be seen from far away. Green light was used for signalling and map reading. They were small thin sheet filters that slid into a little slot in front of the bulb. The lamp could be carried in hand like any normal torch, or it could be clipped onto the soldier’s uniform tunic. On the Polish wzór 36 uniform there were metal hooks for equipment and these lamps had a built-in clip exactly sized to those hooks. In photographs from 1939 you can see this torch worn on the left upper chest area, slightly angled. It was basically a pocket-mounted or chest-mounted light, in the same philosophy that later inspired the American TL-122 and the Bundeswehr square shape torches.
After the defeat of Poland in 1939 the design as a national item stopped, because the country was occupied. Some survived in soldier backpacks and after the war some exiled Polish forces carried pre-war equipment with them, but those flashlights were never again mass produced by the Polish communist state in the exact same pattern. The modern surplus versions you find now in military shops with Sturm or Mil-Tec catalogue numbers are modern after-the-fact recreations. They are built to look retro, but they are not authentic 1939 manufacture and not proof of Polish wartime output scale.
