Japanese Soldiers and Sailors in Pictures
Napoleon Bonaparte is credited with saying" A picture is worth a thousand words" and it is as true today as it was then. Photographs are a valuable resource and much can be learned from a single picture about how things appeared or were actually worn, sometimes with greater accuracy then the written records. Whether a picture was taken by a professional photographer in a studio or by an individual soldier in the field, the opportunity to examine these "snapshots in time" should never be wasted. Sometimes a single picture may be all we have to document an item's existence. Here is this week's photograph....
Army & Navy Flight Helmets
Photograph of an army enlisted man wearing a flight helmet with early "tear drop" style goggles and a fur lined cover-all suit. While this soldier appears to be an airman, he is actually assigned to the tank corps where the use of flight helmets during training and later in the field was common place. The use of flight helmets by the army and navy in their tank corps, paratrooper units and other units is well documented. Flight helmets were an inexpensive alternative to creating a completely new piece of headgear and were readily available as a replacement for standard rigid style helmets particularly the cold weather tank helmet.
The flight helmets size and fit allowed greater freedom of movement in the tank’s cramped interior and the fur lining offered a small amount of cushion against impact and insulation from the cold. The flight helmet’s built in ear cups also permitted the use of multiple types of communications headsets and devices for the different types of armored vehicles. The soldier’s cover-all are similar in appearance to a flight suit but have a slightly different cut. Tank crewmen wore leather waist belts and gauntlet style gloves which are very different than standard flight gloves. Some naval tankers wore an even greater mixture of flight helmets, goggles, gloves and clothing than the army.
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