If we’ve said it once, we’ve said it a thousand times — the vintage American field watch is one of the best entrées into the world of military watches. However, when we first said this a few years ago, prices on these watches were roughly $200-$300. Such pricing, like that of the rest of the watch industry, has of course inflated since then, and you’re looking at well over $500 for a vintage Benrus, Hamilton or Marathon.
But the landscape has changed: Resurrected brands such as Timor, Airain, and, more recently, Benrus, are reissuing the classic military watches of yesteryear at prices that make us stuffy horological antiquarians think twice about going the vintage route. Take the new Benrus DTU, for example: Based on the DTU-2A/P from the 1960s that was issued to American infantryman, it’s nearly a note-for-note aesthetic recreation, but with a slightly upsized case, a modern automatic movement and Super-LumiNova in place of tritium.
Introduced in 1964, original DTU-2A/Ps are still available on eBay, but they’re becoming more expensive and hard to come by. (I sold mine a few years ago and sort of regret it, frankly.) They’re sort of the genesis of the modern American field watch, and looking at slightly later Hamilton models, you can see the solidification of the design language that crystallized here: a matte black dial with white minute hashmarks in an outer track; dart indices at the hour points; white Arabic numerals; modified sword hands; a hand-wound movement. These were utilitarian watches meant to take a beating, and they looked damn good doing it, too.
Featuring a 39.5mm, bead-blasted steel case and a double-domed acrylic crystal, the new DTU is powered by an automatic Sellita SW200 movement with a 38-hour power reserve. Some may balk at the 50m of water resistance, but the truth is that the original watches would’ve fared about the same — they certainly weren’t meant for diving the way the Benrus Type I and Type II paramilitary watches were.
Shipping on a single-pass nylon strap — much as the originals did — the DTU also comes with a removable compass, which is a thoughtful touch and speaks to the detail with which modern Benrus approached this project. (In fact, they even retained the case back markings on the original.)
