The “Aéroclub Suisse de Bâle” Reverso

A steel Reverso engraved with a winged “ACS” emblem and the word “BASEL” beneath — a gift from the Aéroclub Suisse de Bâle (the Swiss Aero Club’s Basel chapter) to its “meritorious pilot,” Alphonse Kammacher, in 1933. Per the same Jaeger-LeCoultre heritage volume that documents it, the watch also carried the inscription “Mit Dank für die Siege” (“With thanks for the victories”), and its presentation was accompanied by the battle cry “On a gagné” (“We won”) — a piece of triumphalism the book notes “raised some eyebrows” given the tense European political climate of the early 1930s. Remarkably, the book reports that Sirio Vernati, a member of that same winning team, still wore the watch decades later, at the time of the book’s writing.