Avery Trufelman

It cinches at the waist.

You've seen it everywhere.

Like every company now makes a version of it.

It is so classic.

I had honestly never thought about it before.

That's Charles McFarlane, a costume historian and journalist who wrote his master's thesis in part on the development of the field jacket.

And the Manhattan Project was, obviously, a secret.

The vast majority of the United States military didn't know the atomic bomb was being developed, let alone that it was about to be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

There was a huge ramp up of supplies and clothing in preparation for an invasion of Japan, which was expected to suck up a massive amount of lives and supplies.

Not to mention all the M43 jackets and backpacks and tents and gear.

Even before the end of the war, the United States government claimed it had 16 million pounds of surplus clothing.

Not to mention 7 million tubes of toothpaste, 25 million folding chairs, and 17,000 homing pigeons.

They decided to sell it off and like as cheaply and quickly as possible.

A new agency called the War Assets Administration was put in charge of overseeing the sale of all surplus property.

To quote a 1947 article from the Quartermaster Review, imagine a warehouse capable of holding a million dollars worth of property.

It would take 34,000 such buildings to accommodate the War Assets Administration's total inventory.

Army surplus stores were rare oddities before World War II.

After World War II, they explode.

They are everywhere because it is so easy to buy up large amounts of cheap inventory.

In just one month, according to a January 1946 Newsweek article, the War Assets Administration sold off four million pairs of cotton and wool socks