The 1939 pattern webbing was an item of military load-carrying equipment used in the Second World War.
[1] In 1939, at the beginning of the Second World War, the number of troops in the British Army stood at roughly 200,000.
Manufacturers of the webbing product—at the time a treated cotton variant, pattern 37—could not keep up with demand.
The British army had faced the same problem in the First World War, when troops were deployed with the 1908 pattern webbing.
The government placed an initial order of one million sets of leather infantry equipment pattern 39.