Don't miss the next drop
Legible at a glance, luminous Arabic numerals from one to twelve, a waterproof steel case: that was the wristwatch Britain’s War Office spelled out for every soldier’s arm in 1944, issued as a specification called Watches, Wristlet, Waterproof, W.W.W. for short, to twelve Swiss houses at once, Longines among them. Collectors have called that group the Dirty Dozen ever since.
This Longines vintage military field watch is what the specification became once the shooting stopped. The look the War Office had demanded, spare, legible, built for use, turned out to be exactly what a generation of civilians wanted on a wrist, so the same Swiss firms kept making it for the shop counter. Off came the broad arrow and the stores number. The field aesthetic stayed. Longines carried it straight through the late 1940s and into the 1950s, in watches that owed everything to the issued piece and answered to no quartermaster.
Set this one beside the watch Longines actually issued and it inverts on nearly every count. Where the service watch wore a black dial, small seconds, and a broad arrow struck into the caseback, this one runs a cream dial, a center seconds hand crossing the full face, and a back left completely plain. Behind the dial turns the Longines caliber 12L, the civilian twelve-ligne manual the brand built into its dress and field watches from the late 1940s into the mid-1950s, its bridge stamped SEVENTEEN 17 JEWELS. The issued one carried fifteen. Two more jewels, no war to fight, and to us the more honest thing to wear.
The rest of this Longines vintage military field watch has lived the quiet civilian life its story promises, and the dial is where that shows. It left Switzerland bright white and has spent the decades since turning, evenly and without help, to a warm foxed cream no refinisher could fake. The full ring of Arabic numerals still holds its radium-era lume, oxidized now to a soft tan and long gone dark, and the cathedral hands wear the same aged compound. The case around it, 32.5mm of base metal on a stainless snap back, has worn its brightness down to a soft pewter grey at the corners, the way a watch does when it is used and never babied. Only the Longines signature interrupts the face, with nothing else on it to argue with its age.
We have serviced it in-house and back it with our two-year mechanical warranty, then fitted it to a khaki nylon strap on a plain buckle, which is where a watch shaped by a field spec wants to live anyway. It looks every inch like something a soldier carried. It simply never had to.
