Posted on 12/07/2012 1:22:52 PM PST by DogByte6RER
Why US Air Corps servicemen were allowed to wear such badass bomber jackets in WWII
In honor of Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, Lisa Hix of Collectors Weekly has put together a fascinating and sobering article that both commemorates and explains why members of the US Army Air Corp were allowed to customize their bomber jackets to such outlandish and extreme degrees. The Army, not known for its lax uniform standards, allowed their air-bound servicemen to decorate their jackets with pictures of scantily clad pin-up girls, favorite comic characters, lucky charms, and any other assortment of icons. The reason, says historian John Conway, may have something to do with the age of these soliders — but also the tremendous risks they had to endure.
Indeed, most of these guys were just out of their teens, with some as young as 18 years old. And they ways in which they emblazoned their military issued leather A-2 jackets were a reflection of their age and exuberance. Hix writes:
On the bawdiest of these jackets, scantily clad babes gleefully ride phallic bombs. On others, cuddly cartoon characters charge forward, bombs in tow, driven by a testosterone-fueled determination to kill. Some jackets depict caricatures of Native Americans or Pacific Islanders, usually drawn with bones in their noses. Even rarer are those showing Hitler being humiliated-while the number of bombs designated missions flown, swastikas represented German aircrafts destroyed.
The fact that the Army would allow their servicemen to decorate their jackets with such provocative images isn't really that surprising. Army Air Corps duty was one of the most hazardous professions of World War II.
John Conway, co-author of American Flight Jackets and Art of the Flight Jacket, explained to Collectors Weekly that, "When you were up there in a plane, you'd get shot at, and you couldn't call field artillery to support you. You had no ambulance, no medic. There was no tank to come in and run over the enemy. All it took was one accurate aircraft shot, and a plane full of 10 guys was gone."
Bombing missions over Europe carried incalculable risks. Actually, it was calculable — and to a disturbing degree; at the worst of times, a crew could expect a 1 in 15 chance of being shot down. And they would have most certainly known the odds — especially considering that many servicemen were required to fly upwards of 30 missions. Conway continues:
"We don't have any concept today of what losses are like," he says. "We hear, ‘We lost six guys in Afghanistan today,' and it's horrible. But it's not the same as losing a hundred B-17s in one raid, each one with 10 guys on it. That was happening day in, day out. In the old British Army, all the guys would come out of one town for each regiment. When they went to World War I, there were several cases where in one day, every man in a town was wiped out. So they stopped that old regimental system. During World War II, the attitude of the U.S. Army was, ‘Let's do whatever we can, try to keep these guys happy, they might not be here next week.'"
Bugs Bunny and other characters from Looney Tunes and Walt Disney cartoons were particularly popular motifs with young pilots, as were the Vargas Girls from Esquire magazine. (Disney artists, for what it's worth, designed many of the squadron patches or insignias.) Conway says we have to remember that American pop culture was a lot smaller and a lot more homogenous at the time. No one had the Internet, cable, or even a TV. The A-2 and nose art imagery tended to come from radio programs, newspaper funny pages, comic books, magazines, and cartoon reels shown before movies, which served as a common language for young Americans.
"Again, you're talking about guys who were 18, 19 years old," Conway says. "And this was the first place they'd ever been besides home. They tended to cling to things that were familiar to them. A lot of those guys read comic books and the comic strips in the newspapers when they were kids, and that stuff just stayed with them. They listened to popular radio shows like ‘The Lone Ranger' and ‘The Shadow,' and then they would visualize characters from those programs and paint them on the aircraft."
Thanks for the ping. Those jackets were for parties, where the art work could be appreciated. They wouldn’t keep the wearer warm at 20,000 feet.
The Schweinfurt raid (I’d have to look up the date, don’t remember...) was supposedly the worst for losses, during which we lost 60 B-17s and 600 flyers.
Black Thursday..14 October, 1943
Wow. The sacrifice.
Not correct. That figure is just for the 8th Air Force that flew out of England during the war. There were many others.
The United States Army Air Forces incurred 12% of the Army's 936,000 battle casualties in World War II. 88,119 airmen died in service. 52,173 were battle casualty deaths: 45,520 killed in action, 1,140 died of wounds, 3,603 were missing in action and declared dead, and 1,910 were nonhostile battle deaths. Of the United States military and naval services, only the Army Ground Forces suffered more battle deaths.By comparison, the US Navy and Marine Corps combined had less than 60,000 KIA for the entire war.
35,946 non-battle deaths included 25,844 in aircraft accidents, more than half of which occurred within the Continental United States.[72] 63,209 members of the USAAF were other battle casualties. 18,364 were wounded in action and required medical evacuation, and 41,057 became prisoners-of-war.[72]
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Army_Air_Forces
Being in the USAAF during WWII was a damn dangerous place to be. Just getting into those aircraft back then was dangerous even if no one was shooting at you. But it did have its perks like really cool jackets. ;~))
The Army losses fighting in the Pacific, were almost exactly equal to the combined Marine and Navy total.
Because of the media and Hollywood, almost no one knows that.
In my career as a design engineer (1967 to 2002) I have been employed by several corporations with manufacturing facilities built for the federal government before or during WWII. In most cases they were still using the original machine tools and inspection equipment well into the 70's.
At the end of the war, Europe and Japan were reduced to rubble. We stepped in with the "Marshal Plan" and provided massive aid to our former enemies, a rather unlikely "urban renewal" operation which provided them with brand spanking new infrastructure. Meanwhile we were still making steel in 50-75-100 year old plants. The result? You'd be hard pressed to find a large, functioning steel mill as we used during WWII. Today we buy steel from Japan, titanium from Russia, vanadium, chromium, manganese, cobalt, nickel are all imported and necessary ingredients in high performance steels. For better or worse, we are "globalized" today and if we were ever to put in a situation of fighting a WWII again, we'd be screwed.
Regards,
GtG
Not that we have any appreciable economically viable titanium ore that I know of . . .if we were ever to put in a situation of fighting a WWII again, we'd be screwed.It was frustrating to read in Forge about the shipment of American trucks and other materiel to the USSR. We needed the Russians in the war, and they needed that stuff to hang in with the Wehrmact, true - but it would have been to the good if we’d had an actual American administration in Washington to negotiate some quid pro quo. We should’ve at least gotten some titanium from Stalin in return . . .
Maybe someone would have made an axial flow gas turbine with it, to make a competitor to the Me-262 with. The Germans had the right idea that axial flow was the wave of the future but - as British inventor Whittle saw - materials limitation was a worse constraint on the turbine inlet temperature, and thus on the efficiency and power, of an axial flow turbine than of the centrifugal design. The Germans had trouble getting specialty metal, and the consequence was that an axial flow Me-262 engine was only good for 30 hours of operation. The British Gloster Meteor, with centrifugal flow, was so much better in that regard that there is even a workable WWII Meteor still extant.
True. But WWII was one of a kind. The US was peculiar in its adaptability to mass production. And that is no longer true. What was ironic about it was that America had the production technology, but it was the Germans who were continually experimenting, and the Americans basically fixed on a few models and went hog-wild on production on them. There was no thought of phasing out production of Sherman tanks with a model change, even when the Army had every reason to know that they were obsolescent, and were only effective if you could overwhelm the opposition with numbers.
Cool stuff!
I’ve had a lot of leather jackets. One of my favorites is a reproduction of a German WWII “Messerschmitt” jacket. Not very warm, but very cool.
No, it doesn’t. It is more like a per/month figure.
Regardless, the number is huge. It is nearly double the entire Marine Corps deaths during WWII (24,500+).
Wow. Excellent article - thank you. My late dad was one of those young men, joining the Bloody 100th at ~24. He was the old man of the squadron. 32 missions, got him home safely...
On the 17th of August, a large force of 376 bombers raided Schweinfurt and Regensburg. Sixty bombers, with six hundred aircrew, didn’t come back. 16 percent losses. At that rate, the Eighth Air Force could not continue. When B-17G’s began to arrive in August and September, the forward machine guns in their chin turrets helped a little. The appalling wastage continued:
September 6 - Over 400 bombers attacked the Stuttgart ball-bearing plant; 45 were lost.
October 14 - Schweinfurt again. 291 B-17’s went out; 60 went down.
January 11, 1944 - German aircraft industry targets. 600 Flying Fortresses were sent out. Because of bad weather, only 238 reached Germany; 60 were shot down.
http://acepilots.com/planes/b17.html
I’d say the guy was exaggerating, but the reality was quite harsh enough. It is also possible he was including ALL bomber losses - American & British, both theaters and including training losses.
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