Gear: Chapter 2

This is not your mumble's house. This is not some of camp. This is not overnight with a friend. This is not Burger King because you will never have it your way. You are now the property of the United States Army, what you will get. It's chopped up, too. Once upon a time, the outdoors was for the most rugged of Americans. The Teddy Roosevelts, who wanted to prove their metal in the manly arts of hunting and fishing and survival. But shopping for those outdoor activities was considered cheating, and if you shopped for gear, it was a dirty secret. Many guidebooks often told its readers don't buy anything. If you do, you're essentially showing yourself to be a beginner who doesn't know anything really about what the nature experience is supposed to be. Rachel Gross, professor of history at the University of Colorado, Denver, and author of the excellent book, Shopping All the Way to the Woods. But as previously discussed in Chapter 1, essentially, most white American men did secretly buy their outdoor clothes, which were often buckskin suits. They often turned to Native American women who were the recognized experts at sewing buckskin suits. So they would just buy them. They would just buy them. This dirty little secret started to come to light as more and more clothing became mass produced, and that included outdoor clothing. And one particular shop opened in 1892 that finally, once and for all, removed all the stigma of shopping for outdoor gear. And it was called Abercrombian Fitch. Abercrombian Fitch, based in New York City, sold outdoor clothing and equipment to New Yorkers, and taught them if you want to have the right kit to go to your hunting or camping or fishing trip, you have to stop in at our store. And don't worry fellas, this wasn't your wife's department store, no way. When David Abercrombie and Ezra Fitch opened up a new way to buy camping gear in the heart of the Big Apple, they created an environment that looked like a gentleman's clubhouse. A green respite from the hustle and bustle of the city is what they called it in their catalogs in the early 20th century, and purchased what you need from us. Taxidermian antlers filled the walls. There was a log cabin lounge on the roof which crowned the floors and floors of guns, fishing rods and tackle and coats and hats and footwear and anything you could possibly want for your gentlemanly adventure. It was masculine, it was exclusive, it was rugged, but the real draw of a place like Abercrombian Fitch was its salesmen. Often the advertisements for Abercrombian Fitch or similar companies would invoke the expertise of the shopkeepers who had tried out all this equipment on, say their own canoe trip this previous summer. Shopping is no longer a cheat, it is, in fact, the guide. Retail becomes the very source of knowledge passed on. Shopping for the right gear becomes a hallmark of expertise and experience. And so that's the first time I see a shift from the notion of the 19th century, which is don't buy, don't trust shopkeepers. If you have to go talk to them, you're probably doing something wrong to the early 20th century notion of the shop is the first place that you must go because that's where you're going to learn about the right gear. Another aspect of this widespread acceptance of shopping was that more men of more classes could access the outdoors. Before the turn of the last century, going outdoors for long stretches of time was not something that regular middle class men did for fun. In the 1890s, going to a place like a national park was very much an elite activity. It was people who had the time and money to be able to take weeks or months vacation going on grand tours of the American West via railroads. Maybe they would take a stagecoach tour through Yellowstone or Yosemite, but not necessarily go on long walks up a glacier and then came the Ford Model T in the highway and suddenly you could go get out into nature and make stops whenever you wanted. You could get away for shorter amounts of time for like a little weekend hunting trip or a day hike. As automobiles began to become more popular in the early 20th century, a lot more middle class Americans were able to access vacations in national parks for the first time. During this time, there was also a huge expansion of specially designated outdoor areas. Thanks to our Rough Rider, the fighting Republican President, Theodore Roosevelt, who in his time became known as the Conservationist President. In his administration, Theodore Roosevelt established 150 National Forests, 51 Federal Bird Reserves, 4 National Game Reserves, 5 National Parks, and 18 National Monuments including the Grand Canyon. In his appeal to Congress for it, Roosevelt said, "Arizona has a natural wonder. I want to ask you to keep this great wonder of nature as it now is. You cannot improve on it." The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it. Obviously, the Grand Canyon rules. I am so grateful that Theodore Roosevelt roped it off and protected it from becoming a pizza hut. And yet, Roosevelt's idea that man can only mar land is not exactly true. Many Americans like Roosevelt loved to romanticize nature as this pure, clean, untouched place. But people lived all over these lands before all those Indian Wars Teddy Roosevelt was such a fan of. A lot of the national parks that Teddy Roosevelt admired were once sacred sites to indigenous communities. I mean, of course they were. Look at them. They're amazing. But Roosevelt sort of roped these places off and put them under glass. This was Roosevelt's conception of nature that it was meant to be pristine, wiped away of people. Don't get me wrong. I love national parks, especially since there are some new national parks that might be created in conjunction with tribal governments. National parks are great. And fundamentally, they helped create this separation. Nature becomes a place to be visited periodically. Rather than imagining nature as just part of the world where we live. The nature of the United States became, according to Rachel Esgroce, an attraction. Something Americans drive out to go see. And so, in other words, they became a kind of consumer of nature via the automobile. And the rise of outdoor companies catered to that growing population of outdoor recreationists. More outdoor retailers in the vein of Abercrombian Fitch hawked trail-tested goods sold by expert outdoorsmen. And many new companies were started by expert outdoorsmen, like Eddie Bauer. He is most well known for his quilted down jacket design. The story that he often told was that he had almost died on a particular trip. But it was only because of this jacket that he was able to survive. Most of these early brands were really about hunting. But it is just a hunting, hunting catalog. At the outdoor recreation archive in Logan, Utah, you can see some of the earliest catalogs from the outdoor industry. It's very cool. And all these outdoorsmen are very gentlemanly looking. They're wearing collared shirts and they're all smoking pipes. Especially if you look at the first printed super duper rugged, manly catalog for LL Bean. And in the back, it says, outside of your gun, nothing is so important to your outfit as your footwear. A hunter named Leon Leon would Bean own a specialty hunting shop in Maine. Upon returning from one of his many duck hunting trips in 1911, the legend goes, Bean was irked by his perpetually cold and wet feet, barely protected in his leather-sold shoes. He made his own boots out of soft tan leather, with a thick rubber sole. They were waterproof, warm, and efficient, and they premiered in 1912. Bean dubbed them the main hunting shoe. The main hunting shoe is designed by a hunter who has tramped Maine woods for the past 24 years. Bean promoted his boot as the height of new technology, and yet the language in his 1920s catalogs and advertisements still reference moccasins a lot. Light is a moccasin with the swinging protection of a heavy hunting boot. Although many of these early cutting-edge outdoor brands are experimenting with new kinds of rubber and material technologies, aesthetically, they cannot let go of this faux-indigenous thing. There was an interesting jacket. It was produced by a company called Blusberg-Nastinco in the 1920s through the 1940s. It is a nod to older technologies and designs, but updated to reflect new uses of materials. It was called the Buck-Skin jacket. You can hear in that name it's a nod to the historical jacket Buck-Skin, right? But Buck-Skin wasn't produced by killing a buck and then skinning the deer and then sewing that material together into a jacket. The Buck-Skin jacket was made of cotton or wool assembled in a factory and notably covered with a new waterproof coating. I can't tell you how well it worked, but that was considered one version of high-tech for the early 20th century, in part because it had a Dupont-produced waterproof coating. Dupont, the chemical company that made weapons in World War I, made the high-tech coating on this otherwise Daniel Boone-looking old-style Buck-Skin jacket. It includes not just a specific kind of coating that's going to keep water out, but also the trademark of a chemical company that signals that kind of effectiveness. Advertisements for the Buck-Skin proudly flaunt Dupont's logo. The Buck-Skin one is the first time I see the trademark appear in a clothing advertisement. This kind of collaboration will be imitated many, many times in the future, where outdoor clothing will advertise its own materials, a certain kind of rubber, a certain kind of liner, a certain kind of fleece, and many of these materials will make their way into both the outdoor industry and the military because they will be scientifically tested and proven. That's the most important outcome of the link between the military and outdoor industry is the rise of scientific testing. This is what will come to define gear if it's performance tested. It's going to change the whole aesthetic of American outdoor clothing, and it's also going to change what it means to look like an American soldier. Hey, it's Robyn here from PRX, and I want to tell you about a brand new show in the Radiotopia family, an exciting partnership with our friends at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and fellow indie network Talk House. It's called Music Makes Us, and it's hosted by Cultural Icon, the legendary Kathleen Hannah, the front woman of Bikini Kill and Latigra. She sits down with revolutionary musicians like Shaka Khan, Olivia Rodrigo, and Haley Williams of Paramore to speak about the thing's artists really want to talk about. Perfect lyrics, unforgettable shows, treasured artifacts, and even snacks. From the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Radiotopia, and Talk House, Music Makes Us, out now wherever you listen to podcasts. If you ever have the distinct pleasure of meeting Joshua Kerner, the attorney layperson expert in military to whom I spoke with for 14 hours, do not mention Major General Robert McGowan, Little John. Kerner will go off on a tear. Oh, he's just an asshole. Kerner has appointed himself General Little John's nemesis, not that Kerner ever met Major General Little John personally. No, Little John died long before Kerner was born. This is about something Little John did in 1944. There's this meme that the onion did where it's like, boyfriend is still upset about coup that the CIA did in like 1976. And for me, it's like, boyfriend is still upset about decisions to quartermaster court made in 1944, 45. And Kerner is kind of in the minority here. He warned me as we drove to Fort Lee in Virginia to go look at the cool old uniforms in the quartermaster archive that we would be confronted face to face with Kerner's enemy. You'll see in the museum near the archive when we go inside. There's a massive picture of Little John. This really makes Kerner so mad. His animosity burns bright and active. I think everybody actually down needs to know how you fucked up. And I think once you know what Little John did, you'll be upset too. Maybe not as upset as Kerner. He made a whole meme page devoted to roasting General Little John, but Little John arguably did make one of the dumbest and most dangerous fashion decisions. In US military history. So at the end of last chapter, we had reached the end of the Philippine American War. Basically, when President Theodore Roosevelt was like, this war is getting too gruesome, I'm just calling it off. That was in 1902. Meanwhile, the American Indian Wars are continuing across the American West. And there are ongoing colonization attempts in Cuban, Nicaragua, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, which are widely known as the Banana Wars. So war is ongoing in the United States. But if you look at any big American war timeline, they'll tell you the next big significant American war is World War I, the Great War. The war that is about to be defined by these new, improved, smokeless weapons, a war defined by having to be very far away from each other, having to hide, having to be in trenches, and having to wear a very specific uniform. The heavy wool overcoat that reached almost to the knees was part of what the standard military issue was in the US during World War I. Rachel Eskeris again. World War I was the United States first time fighting abroad on a large scale in cold, soggy weather. In a long heavy wool overcoat, if you get wet, you get really wet. Heavy wool overcoats had limited flexibility. These coats were very heavy. It was like carrying around a blanket. Either they were on and they were quite warm or they were off and you were really cold. The heavy wool overcoat was just all or nothing. This was not an advanced or convenient coat for the soldiers. So after World War I might have been a good time to recoup, find a better solution for a better military jacket, but then it was the Great Depression and the size and budget of the military were slashed. So when World War II comes around, the army is sort of like, oh no. The US military had very little cold weather expertise going into World War II. The United States quartermaster corps. The department responsible for clothing the troops was like, there's got to be something in the middle. We're not going to get rid of this big wool overcoat just yet, but there has to be some sort of intermediary jacket that's not so big and warm. And the man who ultimately takes on the task of developing this military jacket is this French-American business professor named Joel Jadolio, but everyone's going to call him George Dorio. Dorio served for the French military during World War I and then immigrated to the United States. He was working as a business professor at the Harvard Business School. George Dorio is most famous for being the inventor of venture capital. Everything I'm about to tell you in this story is just a massive footnote in his life. And he knew through his work in the management field as well as his military background that he would likely be called on to serve during World War II. Knowing he was probably going to be put in charge of some large sprawling enterprise. George Dorio undertakes some work for the military planning division and sure enough in 1941, he gets a direct appointment as Lieutenant Colonel and becomes the chief of the military planning division in the office of the quartermaster general. Essentially, he's a civilian recruit into this machine because the quartermaster court needed the help of someone with Dorio's organizational skills and know how they were spinning out. The office of the quartermaster general in DC goes, what are we doing here? Colonel says the quartermaster court had gotten themselves into a real pickle with the jacket situation. Basically in trying to solve the heavy wool overcoat problem, they created an even bigger jacket problem and they brought on Dorio to clean it up. What had happened was this one general general JK Parsons was like, I've got it. I will make a better alternative to the heavy wool overcoat. Let me do it. I'll design a new jacket. General Parsons sort of took this on as a pet project. And the quartermaster court gave him a bunch of money and he bought like 300 different like golfing jackets, members only style jackets and chose the parts of each one he liked best. And he sent that to the quartermaster court and was like, this is what I want and the quartermaster court was like, okay boss. That was pretty much how clothing development worked at the time. A general wanted it so he got it. And so this jacket was commonly known as the Parsons jacket after general Parsons. It really just looked like a zip up golf jacket. So it's a member's only jackets with poly wallnuts when you use to take someone out in the sopranos. It looked really cool. And it's so popular that it's actually issued under armed guard and you have to sign off for it because it's just a rush. It's the thing to have. But the problems with the Parsons jacket were glaring. I mean it's a golf jacket. It's not for fighting. It's short. If you left up your arms it exposes your belly. It makes your kidneys cold. Soldiers in Washington state and Alaska immediately complain about its shortcomings. The warmth and length issues are fixed in something called the Arctic field jacket. So there's this new Arctic edition field jacket. Then the paratroops they want their own version, the mountain troops want their own version. You get a special jacket for tankers. You just get special jacket after special jacket. The quartermaster court could not handle all these special orders for special jackets for each special need and climate. And that just doesn't work on a global war where you're having millions of men having niche jackets just isn't that's it's insane. So this was the challenge for George Dorio. We need a universal jacket for everyone. Can you make a jacket for the military that can work all the time everywhere and Dorio instead of doing what had been done before which was looking at 300 commercially available jackets or looking at what militaries and other countries were doing. Dorio develops this jacket from first principles. He does scientific testing. George Dorio decided that taking a scientific approach to testing through consultation with climatologist physiologist geographers and others was the best way to go about determining how to equip what would eventually be a fighting force of 12 million people. And in addition to all these scientists are a bunch of consultants from the clothing industry. And they're all men who worked at say Brooks Brothers or perhaps DuPont or a woolen mill for instance. I mean everyone and all facets of industry turned to the war effort on a scale that we cannot fathom now and that included the outdoor industry. The quartermaster core turned to some of the most famous outdoorsmen who had come onto the scene. Eddie Bauer, LL Bean, Harold Hirsch who owned the company WhiteStag were among those who served as civilian consultants advising on things like tent design or jacket manufacturing or what sleeping bags ought to look like. And it was entirely new that this young fledgling industry was being taken seriously by the United States government. The outdoor industry was represented probably for the first time in a big way on the national stage. These outdoorsmen were asked for their ideas about what to wear and a number of explorers and alpinists were asked to join the quartermaster core on a cold weather expedition to Mount McKinley in Alaska to test out equipment. A lot of the American mountaineers were serving as either civilian consultants or actually as officers in the quartermaster core doing the testing work for the development of these kinds of jackets and other pieces of clothing. But Doria wanted testing that could get even more exact. Yeah, the army wanted a jacket that would keep soldiers warm, but how warm? Yeah, they want soldiers to be dry, but how dry? Yeah, it was valuable to know if an experienced outdoorsmen thought a particular jacket worked, but how would you know if it worked for the average soldier? The quartermaster wanted tangible measurable results that could be calibrated in degrees in Klo in percentage moisture content to ensure that you could really adjust and fine tune these jackets. So Doria looked back at the facilities they had at his old job at Harvard. I know that the Harvard fatigue lab, which is a physiology lab that had been around for a few decades, was prominent when it came to shaping what the military testing facilities would look like for the quartermaster core. The Harvard fatigue labs had chambers that could get very cold or very hot for conducting tests in physiology. It had been quite common to take, say, a Harvard undergraduate into the laboratory, but the monotried mill and understand, say, changes in skin temperature or levels of sweating. But what was new was that Doria wasn't trying to test the limits of the human body. Doria and his team were putting test subjects in various military garb to test the clothing. You could turn the temperature really low and see how long it took for people shivered uncomfortably or desert testing facilities where you could turn the temperature way up or wind tunnels where you might shoot a shock of air at a soldier who acted as a test subjects to see how much they could withstand. Doria and the quartermaster core worked with at least four different university laboratories and their own climactic research lab. But they soon realized there was a flaw in these experiments, these test subject soldiers. They were too subjective because they might say, "I feel very cold," and that's really hard to represent scientifically on a scale that is numerically universalizable. So, they developed a copper man. The quartermaster core developed a dummy. A heated mannequin made out of copper with lots of wires attached to it. And they would put the copper man in, say, a jacket to get an even more exact and accurate understanding of how clothing felt on the human body. Or rather on Chauncey's body, that was the copper man's name. His name was Chauncey. But it wasn't just one Chauncey, often the producers would create 10 or 15 and then send them to different testing facilities. With Chauncey, the facts didn't lie. He was covered with sensors. And that, the scientists of the military research laboratories believed, would deal more trustworthy and dependable data that they could then use to create the jackets that they wanted to. This was George Dorio's era of the quartermaster. A new era of clothing that was scientific and based on data. Chauncey was warmer in this jacket than that jacket. Chauncey was drier in this parker than that one. Based on this incredible, unprecedented use of garment science buttressed with input and support from outdoorsmen and consultants, Dorio and the quartermaster corps emerged with a brilliant new concept. They found the scientifically proven answer for how to dress outside. There was no one perfect jacket. The answer was layering. The laboratories had shown that wearing lots of lighter layers was going to keep soldiers warmer than wearing a smaller set of much heavier layers. And you might be like, "Yeah, layering, I could have told you that." This might seem obvious to a modern listener. Right. It's like, "This is what we all do." Yeah, you wear some things underneath and then you put other things on top and then you can take them on or off depending on what the temperature looks like outside or if you're hot. It's layering, we love it. It's a good idea. This was, in the 1940s, new. We talk about the layering principle, like everyone understands it, but the journal we're to most men do not understand the layering principle. That's Charles McFarlane, a costume historian and journalist who wrote his master's thesis in part on the development of the field jacket. But you can really see how new the layering principle was because in this field jacket that Charles has from the 1950s, there are lengthy instructions printed on the inside. This tag has instructions for how to wear this properly. Number one is wear as an outer garment in cold wet climates and intermediate garment in cold dry climates. This field jacket wasn't just a coat, it wasn't just a blazer, it wasn't just a windbreaker. It was a whole system. You could add a liner for warmth, a parka for cold, a rain cover for rain, you could tighten and cinch the drawstring depending on the layers and the weather. For cold weather, button the liner so there's a liner that goes into this and they're saying in cold dry climates like the Arctic, you're going to need like a parka over this and then wear a lone and mild weather. If you undid all the attachments and stripped it all down, at its core was just an olive green cotton satine jacket. When you close your eyes, you picture an army jacket, this is that. An army green, military jacket, cotton green jacket with four large cargo pockets. Two chest pocket and then two pockets lower down at the hip. About hip length with adjustable cuffs. As we now just think of this as like the classic army field jacket, but in its day, this was the base of a high tech modular all weather dressing system. And once it had been perfected in laboratories and in outdoor field tests, the design was further refined in actual battlefields. They send the wool over a thousand jackets to a battle in Italy. The Anzeo beach head was in a stalemate phase. In late March of 1944, a battalion of men is given these new jackets to try out. And then they collect them at the end of a two week period and conduct interviews, really asking these guys what stuff they like and what stuff they don't. On the whole, the guys really like this new jacket. As one soldier said in the report, this uniform makes us feel like soldiers, the old one didn't. Still, some soldiers give feedback like they can't fit their meal rations, their K rations in the front pocket of these new field jackets. They enlarge the pocket ever so slightly to allow it to be buttoned closed while the K rations inside. The pockets are really important because in World War II, soldiers are living out of their pockets. They are loaded down with stuff. These men in World War II are, you know, living outdoors for weeks at a time. They sleep in holes that they dig, and they don't change their clothes, and they have to carry everything on their backs that they need for their livelihood. And all these demands fell upon the jacket. It depended on the gear. There are quarter master observers being sent into the field looking to see how men are wearing their stuff. They're really thinking about the well-being of the average soldier. So this is the first time American military dress is looking towards its own soldiers for feedback. This uniform is not about what some general wants. It's not about emulating some foreign military power. This is the sartorial embodiment of a democratic army. It is designing in the name of pure science, pure pragmatism. This jacket is really revolutionary. Every other military in the world is still fighting in heavy wool overcoats. They're not doing scientific testing. They're not practicing the layering principle. And the United States is going all in. They're deploying this completely new-looking thing at mass scale. It's really bold. And this resulting jacket was called the M1943, M standing for model, 1943 was the year it came out. And the M43 was unlike anything most Americans had ever experienced outside of avid hunters and mountaineers. In May of 1944, the New York Times reported how well that test in Anzio, Italy had gone, and how the M43 had, quote, "asplended effect on the morale of the men who wore it." George Dorio and the quartermaster corps really did it. They created the perfect, scientifically proven, warm, flexible, movable jacket for all environments. And now all they had to do was get these M43 jackets over to the brave boys in the European theatre of operations quickly before the winter came. But this is where Colonel's nemesis, General Little John, comes in. He was an annoying dick that made more suffering than needed to really exist. General Little John is like, "No, I don't like the M43 jackets." Because Little John is just a fucking idiot. This is why Colonel will never forgive Little John for what he did in 1944. It's actually quite bad. I'll tell you about it, after the break. This is ongoing fallacy that outdoorsy people don't care about how they look, but it's getting preposterous. Last May, I snapped a picture of a Patagonia storefront where it said, "In big, serif font, fashion is none of our business." As though that company's design team didn't have to submit a color trend report that quarter, please. One of the ethos of the outdoor world, Ben, we're not about looking good. It's all about what works. That is, of course, racial escrow. And one would think that in wartime, while marching for days on end, killing, surviving, that one would think nothing at all of style. However, the quartermaster core representatives would be the first to say that how a particular item looked was really important to acceptance and therefore important to function. Because it will determine if a given garment will actually be worn. Because if soldiers didn't accept the look and feel of a particular piece, they might undermine the entire system that had been so carefully proven to be effective in research laboratories. So style, the look of the goods is crucial. And a certain kind of aesthetics were very important for General Robert McGowan, Little John. General Little John was the core master chief of the ETA, or the European theater of operations. That's journalist Charles McFarland again. Little John had been in uniform since basically he was in his twenties. General Little John was a career soldier. He went to West Point. He had risen through the ranks. He was friends with Dwight Eisenhower. He had friends in high places. He worked his way up to quartermaster general of the European theater. At that point, that's really just England is before the invasion of France. Little John was in charge of what soldiers stationed in the European theater would use and eat and wear. So even before Dorio was recruited to help the quartermaster with their uniform problem, Little John does not like where uniform development is trending. He did not like that golf jacket, members only look in Parsons jacket. He did not like all those other field jackets. He did not like this trend. He did not think a uniform was something that was supposed to be tossed on easily. He really thought that the aim of uniform should be to look crisp and soldierly. To Little John, the crisp and suit like appearance of the uniform was vitally important. This was, to him, a career soldier, though way to deal with an army of draftees. To Little John, the uniform was one of the most important tools to take this kind of unformed rabble of civilians and turn them into a fighting force. You need to look like a soldier to be a soldier. And part of that was the right creases was the right polished buttons and a very trim look. Even before Dorio gets on the scene, before the M43 is invented, back in the era where the quartermaster core is like, "Ah, there are too many specialty jackets for all these specialized needs." General Little John is like, "I will solve the problem of the perfect general use jacket." And he also doesn't like that there's a different field jacket and a different dress coat. That's Colonel again. Little John's self-proclaimed generation's removed nemesis. Little John's like, "I have my own design. We should adopt my jacket." Little John was like, "We have to go back to basics." And Little John designs a jacket that looks almost formal. It's a thick wool with two breast pockets, with waist adjusters to cinch it in. A spiffy wool suit that cuts high right at the waist. Admittedly, it is very smart looking and cuts a very dashing profile, especially if your upper body is naturally shaped like a triangle. It was closely aligned with the English military uniforms that Little John was seeing when he was stationed there. These wool jackets were tight-fitting and trim because, of course, you didn't have to layer much under them. Like, the collar is designed for a tie, not for keeping rain out. But that's his idea, right? This is the field jacket we need. The jacket is officially known as the ETO jacket, as in the European theater of operations. These ETO jackets are being made in pretty much the same factories that are making British battle-jash jackets. The ETO jacket was the precursor to what was known as the "Ike jacket." Because General Little John's buddy, General Eisenhower, took on a version of the cut, trim, ETO jacket as his signature. So he's testing that in parallel with the 43 jacket being developed. And then, when Major General Little John, finally, actually catches sight of some M43 jackets for the very first time, he just hates them. Comes in and is like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. You're adopting this thing." Little John is determined to stop the M43 field jacket. It seems to create this unreasonable hatred of the 43 jacket that is just truly deranged. Little John refuses to let representatives of the office of the quartermaster general into his theater of operations. He's like, "Don't bring these M43 things in here." For sure, many generals had opinions about the jackets the people around them ought to be wearing. While some generals, mostly the career soldiers who had come out of West Point, might prefer Little John's more formal, proper, fitted ETO jacket, the majority of soldiers probably preferred the more comfortable, scientifically proven M43 jacket. And they basically found growing divide between two factions within the US Army. Teams were developing. ETO jacket versus M43. Little John versus Dorio. Style versus function. Okay. That last face-off is a bit reductive, because Dorio and a lot of soldiers would argue that there's a lot of style in the M43. A 43 jacket that's cleaning good was oftentimes used as a casual sports coat. And Little John in his generals would argue that there's a particular kind of function in the ETO jacket. I could just use this jacket for both combat and dress. It's more efficient. It's great. Out in the field, in the European theater, Little John is offered shipments of the new M43 field jackets, with their windproof and waterproof layers. And he's like, no, no thank you. General Little John, basically at every turn is refusing shipments of 1943 field jackets. Little John is the quartermaster general in the region, so it's not anyone's place to question him, but in letters written to Little John in 1944, when it's clear the war is about to last through the winter, you can read letters from quartermasters under Little John who are clearly starting to panic. They don't have the right supplies. And the quartermaster of the third army is like, I know you think that it's not that cold, but actually if you look at it, it is maybe cold. So please don't get mad at me, which in the way it's written is so deferential and like roundabout, you can kind of tell like what sort of office personality Little John is. And it's like, oh, he's just, he's just an asshole. Dorio is begging Little John to just please swallow his pride and just take the M43 jackets. Little John, he's getting these letters from Dorio and like, you need to start ordering 43 field jackets and other cold weather uniform items like now, because it takes three to four months for it to get on a boat and to get to you at the quickest. You should have been doing it yesterday and Little John is dawdling and he's requesting crazy stuff. So like there are 43 jackets into the New York port of embarkation, ready to be sent to the ETO. And Little John still is like, no, I don't want those, those are tacky. He actually asked for in gets instead of 43 field jackets, dress coats and issues them out to the 80th Infantry Division. This is to fight Nazis in the winter and it's on till mid to late October, 44 that he starts ordering the 43 jacket, which means November, December, January that most of these are not going to be arriving until the end of January, just like too late. Little John procrastinated because he was obstinate and angry and didn't really prepare right. So you have this natural experiment of was Dorio correct or was Little John correct, who ultimately wins? I can tell you who ultimately loses and that would be the individual US soldiers whose bodies are the site of these high level battles about the correct equipping of the military and different notions of what scientific testing or decision making about uniforms ought to look like. These poor soldiers who did not necessarily want to be in Europe in the dead of winter were shivering in their wet wool suits and leather boots that got bogged down with water catching pneumonia and frostbite and there were some truly disgusting consequences to not clothing soldiers properly. This is a little content warning, Charles McFarlane is about to talk about a nasty consequence of Little John's negligence men are losing toes skin is coming off with the sock. And when you look at the rates of trench foot frost by all these things are being reported at a much higher level in the units in Little John's perfume and Americans at home were getting wind of this because soldiers were writing letters to their families. Ma pa I'm fighting in combat there's snow on the ground I don't have this I don't have that the parent then write their congressman then the congressman's writing Dorio going what the hell is going on. So even though Dorio's scientifically proven layering principle was absolutely correct Little John's ego prevented its implementation. And so a lot of people had to suffer before it actually worked. This was a catastrophe and it was known in the press as the cold weather crisis. It's becoming a massive news thing with front-paced stories of the New York Times. This was a legitimately massive scandal. This is the Washington Post February 18th 1945 a full page story. Yeah it's unbelievable like giant pictures of boots and stuff. This is page four and not the style section either. With illustrations talking about the pluses and minuses the ideal outfit. This was a big explosive expose very much pointed out Little John and all this widespread anger and these investigations from the New York Times and the Washington Post led to a military investigation looking into who was responsible for the cold weather crisis. And the resulting report revealed nothing. No one at all was responsible for this. Who was to say who's at fault. It doesn't get pinned on Little John at all. Little John gets off the hook entirely. And the only logical explanation for this is that it's very nice to have a friend like General Eisenhower. What happens is, is Eisenhower and I have the memo for this puts a press freeze on any stories dealing with the cold weather uniform crisis in January of '45 saying. Bad morale. Bad morale. It makes it look bad back home and stuff like that. It's like nobody could file stories on this. What it looks like is he ran policy interference for a friend of his. Little John continues to spend the rest of his life trying to clean his own record and deny any wrongdoing. He's writing to historians like in the 60s and 70s asking him to do a new edit of the official history of quartermaster operations because he thinks they're not nice enough to him and they make him look bad. Just real like everybody knows the type of guy that does this. The thing that makes this story so enjoyable is he's so unlikable. And yet, Little John's efforts to clear his name eventually paid off because he played the long game at the alumni dinners essentially. Little John stuck around. He showed up to all the quartermaster officer graduations, all the ceremonies, all the parties. He became a beloved elder. And that's why there's a massive picture of Little John you'll see in the museum near the archive when we go inside. It's so funny. There's a huge picture of him and he was just wrong. And Colonel doesn't want anyone to forget it. You lost. You were wrong. Your side of history was wrong. You are his nightmare and the reason there's not a giant portrait of George Dorio in the quartermaster archive is because Dorio didn't care about a military legacy. He got out of there. And it's like fuck all you guys. I'm going back to business. This is terrible. I hate all of it. Again, this man invented venture capital. Don't worry. He was fine. But there was a lot of people that were kind of brought up under him and appreciated that sort of research and dedication. Ultimately, Dorio's approach won because everyone is operating under his ideology that comfort and protection is more important to the soldier than formality and perfection. And yes, all of us, including the military, now take the layering system entirely for granted. But that is, in part, because of the absolute ubiquity and cultural dominance of the M43 jacket. The M43 field jacket starts the template for design that continues to evolve. There's a version of something that looks like the field jacket in almost every war that follows. We can see different versions of the M43 jacket through the 1950s and 1960s in Cree and Vietnam. And this style of jacket, something that looked like the M43, seeped out into the civilian market through the outdoor industry. Rachel S. Gross saw many of the outdoor industry professionals who had advised on the M43. Like Harold Hirsch, the owner of Whitestag, start to incorporate elements of the design into his products. We do know that there was a direct line between what he was seeing in the research laboratories at the quartermaster core and then what kinds of civilian jackets appeared in his catalogs immediately thereafter. In other words, I can see the military style jackets that Hirsch was selling by 1944 and 1945. A look that's really similar to the M43 jacket. A lot of the outdoor companies who had consulted with the military started to sell their own civilian spins on the M43. All different versions of cotton, satin, hip-length jackets with drawstrings and four pockets. It was just objectively a great design. You can still see it as a template on jackets all around you. But the biggest legacy of the M43 and all its accompanying layers was how it was developed. It also shows that having like true rigorous scientific testing is oftentimes better than having some random outdoor guiding things. Testing, testing, testing, opinion testing, field testing, lab testing. This has become the guiding principle in gear, which is why the military's clothing testing facility to this day bears Dorio's name. We're going right to Dorio. And what is Dorio? Dorio is our climatic chambers. Here at the Army Laboratories at NADIC Massachusetts, which the quartermaster core first established in 1953, there's a heat chamber, a cold chamber, and various testing sites. And it is a very novel and unique research facility. There are very few like it in the world. That's my guide, Chief Public Affairs Officer, David Asetta. We can control, we can see the monitor there. The temperature, the wind speed, and the relative humidity. We have snow-making capability in here. Does it actually look like snow? Yeah, it's a snow machine. The military, as it did in the 1940s, continues to not solely rely on humans. We're going to go up and see Maddie now. She leads our mannequin work. They still use mannequins to test clothes, just like they did with Chauncey the Copper Man. It's just that mannequin technology has gotten so much more elaborate, the mannequin does a lot more work. This is an environmental chamber where we house one of our mannequins. Maddie Polybogen, Biomedical Research Fellow at the United States Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine, introduced me to the life-size doll she spends all day dressing and undressing. Then if you want to take a look. Of course. His name is Andy. Is Andy a mannequin? Terrifying. Yes. Andy looks like he's being tortured. He's hanging from a pole in a gray, like-ra-hood that has only a hole for his mouth. He's got a riot of tube guts spilling out of his stomach. It's quite macabre. Why does he have a hood on? This is actually for. It's called evaporative resistance testing or wet testing, and it mimics sweat. Like this fabric mimics sweat. This mannequin, Andy, evaluates heat and moisture content and really almost anything. He's way more advanced than Chauncey ever was. Maddie puts Andy in jacket after jacket, glove after glove, boot after boot. And then we'll input those resistance values into thermoregulatory models. So I asked what exactly thermoregulatory models meant. And I thought I'd be shown a series of numbers and charts. And instead, I was shown a software that looked like a dress-up doll. There was an image of a soldier, and you could scroll through images of different military issue clothes, and put a little outfit on him. Yeah, so you can see here we have all of these. Oh my god. Yeah, so you can dress him on whatever closet I know. It really was like the military's version of the closet from Clueless. If Cher was heading out to sub-40 Arctic Tundra. But this is not like a public thing. Like this is not anything but anyone can play with it. It's not. The public affairs officer, David Asetta, chimed in here. So this is a tool for commanders to figure out what uniforms their troops should be wearing for a given operation or mission to provide them with the best protection but optimal performance. And this Clueless closet simulator helps avoid anything remotely similar to the cold weather crisis from ever happening again. You model exactly what you'll need on this little avatar. So you, the commander, can be sure to order it in time. So it's head, upper body, hands, legs, feet, and all the different options. Yep. This is fun. I know, isn't it? This software is the ultimate triumph of the layering principle. It fundamentally relies on it. Wait, it's wearing like multiple things on top of each other. Yeah. Like it's wearing two gloves. Yeah. Okay. You can see there's three-- Three pants. Yeah, three pants. I think four shirts and then two-- Three layers. Yep. And then with whatever combination of clothes you choose, you see the resulting numbers. And then you press results and it will give you times for cold injury. So frostbite, hypothermia. So these boots are not the best for frostbite is what this is saying. Probably not. Although this felt kind of fun and abstract in the moment, when I stepped back for a second, I was like, wait, what? Cold weather war is all of this anticipating. Sort of like, oh, every year, here's the new upgraded edition. Or is it like, oh, there's a new conflict. Yeah, how do you-- It depends on operational needs. Okay. So we have renewed focus on the Arctic. So we're looking at new gloves. And we're evaluating new technologies. That's about as much information as I got. Whatever may happen in the Arctic, we're preparing for it. Testing, testing, testing. That's the law of gear. That's what makes gear, gear. Not only for soldiers, for civilians too. And we have a field testing team that comes and grabs their samples here to actually take them out into the field and test. This is Scott Mosher, creative brand director at REI. Other than the fact that REI HQ is decorated with like canoes and backpacks and stuff, it really looks like all the other high fashion clothing companies I've visited. Even have the massive vision boards with photos of last season's Paris Fashion Week. Scott, this is crazy, this is REI. I didn't know you were this fashion minded. Yeah, and you know, we love it. I think oftentimes people are surprised when I tell them that we look at all the runway shows. Really? Yeah, for sure. See, fashion is none of our business get out of here. But the thing that was absolutely unlike a fashion company was that at REI, there is a laboratory. We have tons of lab testing and they're including a cold room and we have a rain room. We have a mannequin that's fitted with sensors. Exactly. Testing has become the ultimate mark of quality. An outdoor brand's promise that they've thoroughly pushed their wares to the absolute limit. Sometimes this is true, sometimes this is not. Like I talked to companies that contract out the testing at the manufacturing level. But at a place like REI, testing is a point of pride. Companies like REI aimed to prove scientifically the lengths their gear can go. How warm, how dry, how UV resistant. We're really focused on quality and we've done enough testing to know there's a difference. It is, perhaps, a natural extension of the expertise Abercrombian Fitch's flagship store once guaranteed in its salesman. But now, baked directly into the design of a product itself. And in the aftermath of the Second World War, companies like REI weren't just selling gear with military level testing. They were selling actual military gear. As early as 1944, REI offered Army steel frame packs like literally Army packs, Army pup tents, Army crampons, and Army overmits. So we actually sold those in the store. Two civilians though. Not two the Army. Exactly, two civilians. The literal Army stuff that we were selling. It was surplus Army stuff. Yes, exactly, surplus Army. We weren't having the manufacturer, but it was surplus stuff. Selling off military surplus helped REI and many other young post-war outdoor companies stock their shelves. It was a direct line from George Dorio to companies we know and love today. But how did these outdoor companies get this military gear? I'll tell you next chapter. Articles of Interest is by Avery Truffleman. But the first person to hear my messy first edit and read my scripts is my editor on this project, Alice Embaranger. And right after her comes my guardrail, the costume historian Charles McFarland, who is currently flying off to do a World War II reenactment. My fact checker is the mighty Yasmin Al Sayad. The music is by Ray Royal, Lollatone, and theme songs are always by Sasami. Engineering, mixing mastering, and finessing by the patient and kind Jocelyn Gonzalez and her team at PRX. Huge thank you to Chase Anderson, Clint Pumphrey, and the outdoor recreation archive at Utah State University, along with the Portermaster archive at Fort Lee and to the author Rahawa Highly. Thank you to Radio Topia for being my podcasting partners and thank you to Drew Halp to for being my life partner. And thank you for listening. Thank you very much. Would you like to see images of Andy the mannequin? Do you have any questions? There's a place to reach out and to learn more and it is articles of interest that'substack.com.