The domestically manufactured steel military helmets used by the Spanish Army

Metal helmets have been used by many armies from ancient times to the present day.

The Spanish ancestor of the 'boonie hat', the wide-brimmed hat worn by soldiers
Rogatywka, the origin of the peculiar four-pointed cap used by the Polish Army

During their Golden Age, the Spanish Tercios, the finest infantry of their time, made the morion famous, a type of helmet introduced in the 15th century that is still used today by the Pontifical Swiss Guard in their ceremonial uniforms. The morion became popular in the 16th and 17th centuries. It was a very sturdy steel helmet, but advances in firearms eventually rendered them obsolete. By the 18th century, armies were displacing helmets in favor of the shako and other more aesthetically pleasing headgear.

In the 19th century, the Kingdom of Prussia introduced the pickelhaube, the spike-topped helmet that the Germans would make famous in the World War I. It was this conflict, due to trench fighting, that marked the definitive reappearance of the steel helmet in the armies. However, the Spanish Army did not adopt a standard helmet until 1930. It should be noted that Spain did not participate in the First World War and that its major conflict in the first quarter of the 20th century took place in North Africa, with a hot climate more suitable for chambergos than for steel helmets.

The first steel military helmets adopted by the Spanish Army were the Trubia M-21 and M-26, the first without a brim and the second with one, both made by the Trubia Weapons Factory in Asturias, which still exists. They were rudimentary helmets but remained in service for many years in the Spanish Army. In the first photo of this article you can see a Motorcycle Section in the 1960s with the M-21 helmets.

After the Spanish Civil War, and during World War II, the Spanish Army adopted the Z-42 helmet (also known as the Zeta or M-42 helmet), a copy of the German M-35 stannhelm, but with worse workmanship than the original. You can see these in the last two photos of this article. This helmet began to be distributed in 1943 and remained in service until the 1990s, when it was completely replaced by the modern MARTE helmet, introduced in 1986 and made with ballistic fiber. If Spain was late adopting steel helmets in the 20th century, the opposite happened with the MARTE: it was the first European country to introduce helmets of this type.

If you want to know more, this Sunday the YouTube channel Tropa Guripa (which I recommend you subscribe to if you like military history) has published an excellent video reviewing the history of the nationally manufactured steel helmets used by the Spanish Army, including some more models than those mentioned in this article (the video is in Spanish, you can activate automatic English subtitles in the bottom bar of the player):

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Photos: Ejército de Tierra.