SUMMARY:
A super rare WW1 WW1 Miniature Vacheron SIS Trench  Officers  Wrist Watch 1918, The watch is in full ticking order, recently cleaned and serviced and keeping good time. The watch movement sits inside a nickel water and  airtight military type case with glass front and rear covers to check the watch is working.

The design of these simple watches can be traced back to the late 19th century, as keywound watches gave way to crown set watches, which ensured a high degree of protection for the movement and would lead to the rise of hermetically sealed watches, and these can be traced   to World War l, where the precision of timing instruments literally decided between life and death duting the great war.

Hitting a target with accuracy from different heights and at different flying speeds could no longer be left to the feel of the pilot. This led to the development of bomb stopwatches with countdown/retrogress function. Rare historical timepiece for collectors only

One use of these early stop watches was to help determine when the early Handley Page bombers had to drop their bombs to hit their targets accurately.  During the First World War, Handley Page produced a series of heavy bombers for the Royal Navy to bomb the German Zeppelin yards, with the ultimate intent of bombing Berlin in revenge for the Zeppelin attacks on London. Handley Page had been asked by the Admiralty to produce a bloody paralyser of an aeroplane. These aircraft included the O/100 of 1915, the O/400 of 1918 and the four-engined V/1500 with the range to reach Berlin. The V/1500 had only just entered operational service as the war ended in 1918.

These early minuature wrist watches with super high quality jewelled movements, were either held in pouch on a wrist band or to avoid detection hiddne inside a shoe, where the jewelling to the balance staff and train protected it from damage, by early SIS agents in occuped Europe.