Discussion: “A Better Fighting Garment…” - A Beginner’s Guide to the US Navy’s WWII-era and later Intermediate Flight Jackets

[Erwin]

This MIL-Spec posted above is well known and easy to find, you or ony other owner can add some early ones if you have or are capable to share here

 

[AeroLeatherBeaconNY]

INTRODUCTION

There have been various threads on VLJ which have listed the US Navy contracts from the M-422 to G-1 series of leather flying jackets. This thread is an attempt to pool the information into a beginners guide to sit alongside the A-2 contract dates thread as a resource on the Forum. This thread borrows heavily from an original thread named, “How to date US Military Clothing and G-1 jackets from the label” by our fellow members Dinomartino1 and Mr. Dave Sheeley ( @Maverickson ). It too will borrow heavily from Mr. Roger Moore’s original resource. We’d place on record our sincere appreciation and thanks to them for their time, effort, and scholarship on this subject.

This guide has been put together by MaydayWei, Mulceber and Lord Flashheart with input from B-Man2 and Jorgeenriqueaguilera. Together with our own research we have sought to identify and acknowledge references and sources as best we can. Putting together a beginners guide to this series of jackets has not been a task for the faint hearted and any errors or omissions are ours.

In compiling this guide we have sought advice and opinion from Dave Sheeley and John Chapman at various points of uncertainty or ambiguity. They have, without fail, kindly helped us to understand so much more about the design and evolution of the Navy’s intermediate flight jacket than we could or should include in a beginners guide. We also want to give our thanks to the people, some of them also writers for this project, who shared pictures with us of their gorgeous flight jackets: @Jorgeenriqueaguilera , @Stony, @bazelot, @B-Man2 , John Chapman, Dave Sheeley ( @Maverickson ), @mulceber , and @Lord Flashheart . This would be a very boring thread without these wonderful photos to illustrate it.

We’d also like to thank all of our fellow Forum members who have helped us with this work by sharing their knowledge. If you have more information please do share that here.

AN OVERVIEW

Discussion of jacket types in this hobby, among Navy jackets and beyond, frequently boils down to a discussion of hard and fast differences between jacket types: B-15 vs. B-15A, L-2A vs. L2B, etc. This impulse is understandable, but it actually doesn’t get us very far when discussing the earlier Navy jackets. We spent about a day trying to discover exactly what structural differences there were between the M-422 and the M-422a, and while we quickly found several different answers, all of them later turned out to be false, or only true of some contracts.

The reality is, prior to about 1960, manufacturers who won a contract to make an intermediate flight jacket for the Navy were provided with a sketch and a list of specifications that the jacket had to meet. As with the A-2 jacket, Navy contractors had latitude to make the garments as they saw fit. Provided the finished product met the specifications, nobody much cared if the manufacturers had used a particular type of stitch to sew on the pocket flaps, or had widened the pocket in order to make extra room for the pencil pocket. Deviations from the specification were regularly made and allowed. But whereas on the army side, the practice frequently was to change jacket designations only when they needed to make a real structural change to the jackets (nobody would ever mistake an A-2 for a B-10), changes to Navy jacket designations could come from as small a change as an edit to the wording of the contract for buttons. Sometimes there were real changes in materials or design, but just as frequently we’ll find cases like the W&G M-422A, which has much less in common with other jackets in that series than it does with W&G’s previous M-422 contract.

In short, when you’re looking at Navy Intermediate Flight Jackets, it pays to look less for differences between jacket designations and more for differences between contracts & manufacturers.

STRUCTURE

The evolution of the US Navy’s (USN) primary intermediate flight jacket can be traced through 12 iterations or specifications. This guide is therefore structured into 12 specifications split over 3 parts: WW2, the 50s, and the Vietnam era. At the end, there will be a short note on NATO stock numbers, and other useful links and resources on the VLJ. The specifications in chronological sequences are:

• [1] M-422 [1940]
• [2] M-422A [1940 - 1943]
• [3] AN-J-3 [1943]
• [4] AN 6552 [1943]
• [5] AN-J-3A [1943]
• [6] 55J14 (AER) [1947 - 1950]
• [7] MIL-J-7823 (AER) [1951 - 1960]
• [8] MIL-J-7823A (AER) [1961]
• [9] MIL-J-7823B (WEP) [1961 -1963]
• [10] MIL-J-7823C (WEP) [1964 - 1966]
• [11] MIL-J-7823D (WP) [1967 - 1970]
• [12] MIL-J-7823E (AS) [1971 - Present]

This thread is soon to be updated by the authors. There will be a Guide and a parallel discussion thread.

I am VERY INTERESTED in learning more about your project regarding A2 jackets particularly relating to Aero Leather Beacon NY ( or its spinoff companies) I would love to connect and discuss more. many thanks for your time!

In addition to the history of Aero leather I am also trying to learn more about how to differentiate an original A2 jacket from the reproductions.

I am located here inBeacon NY and would love to help!

 

[mulceber]

Update: @33-1729 has been digging around in the National Archives for information about Navy Flight jackets and together we've been gearing up to revise the BFG (again). It's too soon to say whether it will justify a whole new thread, but he's found some really cool information that's overturned a number of our previous conclusions.

 

[CK90]

Update: @33-1729 has been digging around in the National Archives for information about Navy Flight jackets and together we've been gearing up to revise the BFG (again). It's too soon to say whether it will justify a whole new thread, but he's found some really cool information that's overturned a number of our previous conclusions.

Version 3.0!!!

 

[mulceber]

It would be fun to shoot for having pictures of every contract, like we did with the A-2.

 

[CK90]

That would be amazing, and in all seriousness I'm already looking forward to this updated version. Navy jackets are king!

 

[mulceber]

We might just make some edits, and add a couple posts summarizing the changes, but I'll take this under advisement.

 

[mulceber]

I just posted the introduction to 3.0. It's going to be a while before we can post any more of it, but I thought it was important to get the introduction up to let people know better information is imminent. Ever since finishing the Mighty A-2 thread (I know, I know - that was only like 2 months ago), I'd been thinking it would be nice if the Navy Jacket guide could be written to the same standard. I think @33-1729 had similar thoughts, because he, pretty much on his own, began digging into what the National Archives had on the G-1.

The prospect of tightening up the BFG became more urgent, however, when some of the documents @33-1729 dug up directly contradicted the dates in the books we'd been using for 2.0, and we began to realize that those "guessed fiscal years" really were just guesses.

So while 2.0 is still available, and the discussions of fit and identifying features are still helpful, definitely treat the narrative and the dates with a grain of salt.

 

[Sideslip]

Thank you so much for all the time, attention and care you and others are investing in this. Priceless!

 

[Brettafett]

Thank you Jan, Phil, Wei & @33-1729 and all involved in these flight jacket tomes, they really are incredible resources.
Very much appreciated, and looked forward too.

 

[33-1729]

With USN 3.0 being posted I wanted people to know this is a major update with Jan completely reworking each jacket photo contract section, so it will take some time to post it all, but well worth the wait. And I want to thank Jan, Phil, Wei et al for their help making this possible. Before I go on, Jan thinks everyone ought to read the upcoming AN-J-3 and AN-J-3A sections, maybe twice, and I concur. We were both surprised on what was found. And ...

For those researching any topic, like flight jackets, it's best to go to the original documents, for in-depth and precisely detailed research. An excellent example of this is Mr Eastman's well-known book on the A-2. He traveled to the U.S. National Archives to find the original documents to write his book. And when he did something new, like the DNA tests, he inserted the complete set of findings into his book as a reference for others. Excellent. (He interpreted the "inconclusive" DNA test incorrectly, but he wasn't a geneticist and didn't likely know the right questions to ask. An honest mistake.) In short, for the A-2 most of our time was spent adding what were [verifiably] new learnings.

When researching US Navy jackets we found much of we have heard was unsubstantiated. To be fair, Aota-san in his book Full Gear used the words "probably" and "guess" frequently when trying to fill in the gaps, but instead of being taken as the intended speculation it was repeated as Gospel (thanks to Jan for the translations). Going through the books we also found a number of inconsistencies when compared with the original government documents, but when sources rely upon other sources [that rely upon other sources ...] it's easy, pretty much expected, to get things all mixed up. So, with version 3.0 the jacket histories were largely rewritten using the original source documents. The intent was to make a stable foundation we can build on, as we had from Mr Eastman on the A-2.

Hope you like it.

 

[mulceber]

Agreed - the AN-J-3 section contains a nice 2-3 paragraph summary of specification and drawing by @33-1729 that, IMO, should be required reading in this hobby.