100 Objects #17: M43 Field Jacket
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Why did WWI soldiers suffer from inadequate wool coats?
It's the fall of nineteen eighteen. The Great War is raging. More than a million American men have found themselves in the Musargon offensive on the Western Front. It remains to this day the deadliest campaign in our military's history, and the conditions were horrendous.
So it's rainy, it's muddy, it's freezing, and this is the beginning of trench warfare. These soldiers are hanging out in ditches in the mud. People are dying everywhere. It's miserable.
Avery Truffelman is the host of Articles of Interest, a show about fashion and design. So when she thinks about this miserable, awful war, she thinks about what the soldiers are wearing.
They are. In wool. Overcoats which You know, if you're going on a walk and it's cold outside, wool can be a really great fabric. If you're a soldier fighting and running for your life, A giant wool overcoat is horrible because it gets really wet and it gets really heavy and then you want to take it off and then suddenly you're freezing. You just have one wool. blanket that is usually wet and dirty and then they were trapped in these awful things.
The very thing that was supposed to keep these soldiers safe and warm instead caused a lot of harm. Because back then, the military didn't consider fashion a technology. They were focused on weapons, artillery, supply lines, communication. They didn't think of clothing as something to help or hurt the war effort. It was just what soldiers wore. And beyond that, the American military went into World War I totally. are totally unprepared for the climate.
We had fought a war abroad before the Spanish American War, which was like a warm weather war. And that's when we started wearing khaki. But we had never fought in like the wilds of northern Europe before. This is like extremely cold, exotic climate for the United States, and we didn't really know what we were doing yet on a large scale. So a lot of soldiers suffered.
Did the military realize they had made a mistake issuing these coats to soldiers?
Absolutely. Once the war ended, they were like, We've got to find a better jacket. But after the Great War, they were like, let's not focus on war right now. You know, we're never gonna have a big war ever again. That was really bad. Yeah,
it was the war to end all wars.
The war to end all wars. Yeah. So like that was a weird experiment. They they didn't think that they needed to revisit or redesign such a jacket for such an expansive war in Europe. But when it proved true that we did end up fighting another giant war in Europe. It was time to revisit this jacket problem.
The jacket problem. How should the American military outfit its soldiers to make them as safe and effective as possible? And how should such a jacket be developed? And underneath that, what happens when a symbol of military might gets stripped of its connection to the military and hits the streets? From 99% invisible in BBC Studios, this is a history of the United States in a hundred objects. I'm Roman Mars. Today, the incredible origin and evolution of the M43 Army Field Jacket.
The field jacket changed what it meant to be a soldier and to look like a soldier. And it changed what we all wear every day, not only Americans, but all around the world.
The United States military did not put their soldiers in wool overcoats because they thought it was the best technology. They did it because other countries put their soldiers in wool overcoats for more than a century. They had just copied the current military superpower of the moment.
You can see this very clearly in the Revolutionary War. We're basically dressing exactly like the British. It's just like they're wearing red and we're not. Теню сідес і Сивіл Вор. Where we're actually dressing French. Like that was the superpower at the time. And it's funny because when you look at it, we do kind of look like the soldiers from the Nutcracker. It's very like jaunty little tin soldiers. But that's what we're imitating. We're imitating the French. And then we had this really weird period, which is my favorite in military history, where we were imitating the Prussians and we wore like plumed hats and the and the helmets with the little sparks.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Why did WWI soldiers suffer from inadequate wool coats?
0:00–5:50
2
How did the U.S. military begin addressing the jacket problem before WWII?
5:50–11:01
3
What scientific methods did George Dorio use to design the M43 jacket?
11:01–15:10
4
What features made the M43 field jacket revolutionary for soldiers?
15:10–19:50
5
Why did General Little John try to block the M43 jacket’s adoption?
19:50–24:24
6
How did the cold‑weather crisis of 1944 expose the need for the M43 jacket?
24:24–29:57
7
How did the M43 field jacket transition from military gear to civilian fashion?
29:57–35:30
8
Why does the field jacket remain a timeless staple today?
35:30–41:12