Article about: The Evolution of IJA Flight Uniforms (1910-1945) Foreword Actually, I did not plan to write a story about the whole aviation uniform lineup and hoped to get away by limiting the scope just t
Actually, I did not plan to write a story about the whole aviation uniform lineup and hoped to get away by limiting the scope just to the evolution of the flight helmets. I thought it would be a light project, because I only had 35 years of history to talk about since the first flight. However, in reading all the documents in the archives, I discovered that there was really no development story to tell about flight helmets, because they were fairly no-brainer items to the Army.
Instead what obsessed the Army all those years was the trauma of freezing in the Siberian winters of 1920-1922-- freezing so severe that pilots would pass out immediately upon landing after a 1 hour flight. Against such cold, the army could only wrap more heavy clothing around the pilots until they could barely walk.
Electrically Heated Suits existed as an idea, but no country had a viable solution at that time, as they had been too busy with the War.
Heated suits were a pilot’s dream, not only a means to put Siberian nightmares to rest, but a critical item for aviation’s future, because aviation in the 1920s was starting to conquer lofty heights, and you could be reunited with the Siberian cold anywhere in the world just by going up there in the blue yonder.
After reading it all, it appeared to me that the Army consumed about 80% of its energy on developing an ultimate heated suit, and showed remarkable tenacity in pursuing that goal single-mindedly. This was a story that just couldn’t be ignored, but once I went that far, there was no more sense in limiting the scope of the story.
As in all my stories, there will be many new discoveries for you, which are being published for the first time in postwar history, so bear with me in moments I start to bore you with too much about heated wear, as it is not my passion that makes me dwell on the subject, but it was the Zeitgeist of those exciting days when there seemed to be no boundaries to where men could go, a kind of elation that must have been similar to how we all felt in 1969.
Once again, I tried to make it a story of men instead of items, and I hope you will enjoy the result.
1910, The Baron vs The Man with the “Blow-forward” Gun
Harajuku in Tokyo has long been a vibrant centre of youth culture in Japan. Not only is it where the young go for the latest in fashion, but at the same time, it is also an inviting oasis for couples and families, because there is a big park there, situated in the middle of skyscrapers, like Central Park in New York. The northern part of that great expanse of green is the Meiji Shrine and its forest, and the southern part is the open grass of Yoyogi Park.
This Yoyogi Park was where Japan’s historical first plane flight once took place. At the southwestern edge of this park, close to the South gate stands a “First flight Monument” as proof of that deed, accompanied by bronze busts of two men, who became Japan’s aviation heroes that day long ago. Click here for a 360 degree view of this spot in the park.
Back in 1909, the area was newly designated a training ground for the Army, and there the two men tried out their new planes in December of 1910. One was a 26-year old Army Engineer, Captain Yoshitoshi Tokugawa 徳川好敏 (1884-1963). He was actually from a branch of the family of former Shoguns, and despite having lost status as the ruling family of Japan, his father still managed to be a Baron. But not for long, as the decline in family fortunes eventually forced the Baron to give up his title of peerage, citing financial difficulties that kept the family from being able to afford a standard of living befitting an aristocratic title.
The other man was a 32 year old Infantry Captain, Kumazo Hino 日野熊蔵 (1878-1946), who at that time already had certain fame as an inventor genius. Back in 1903, the then 25-year old Hino had invented a really awkward automatic pistol.
The pistol employed neither a conventional “short-recoil” system nor even a “blowback” mechanism of mainstream semi-auto designs, but employed instead what is called a “blow-forward” system, in which the barrel travelled forward upon discharge. Thus you even cocked this gun by pulling the barrel forward, instead of pulling a slide backwards, as you did with normal semi-automatics. Adding further to this novel mechanism was the fact that the gun had an open-bolt system with a fixed firing pin like those of submachine guns. If this is becoming a bit too mind-boggling for comprehension, this should help clear things up (click here for video demonstration).
To our hindsight that benefits from knowledge of more than a hundred years of further developments in firearms design, the gun appears totally unconventional, but to be fair, those were still early days, and the designer’s mind was unconstrained and not in a rut like ours. So it must have been no more unconventional to contemporary minds than the toggle-joint short-recoil action of a 1908 Luger.
For the commercialization of his invention, Hino teamed up with the Komuro (小室 ) brothers, of which the elder brother, Kenjiro (健次郎) served as investor to the project and Tomojiro (友次郎), the younger brother, helped with commercial sales. They applied jointly for patents in Japan (1903), US (1904) and UK (1908), so this pistol became known internationally as the “Hino-Komuro M 1908” Semiautomatic Pistol (Please note that the video you just saw got the name quite wrong—Komuro, not Komura).
The odd design did not make it much of a commercial success, and until 1992 only 11 examples of the pistol were known to have survived in the world, making it an exceedingly rare gun for collectors. But in 1992, a sensational discovery was made, in which a hidden stash of 17 of these guns were suddenly found from a private home in Mie Prefecture, Japan , 45 years after the death of the presumed owner of the stash.
This news caused uproar in the gun-collecting community, because Japanese law unfortunately requires such unregistered firearms to be destroyed. In the end, 10 or so seem to have survived, perhaps because even the police seemed to appreciate the uniqueness of this find, as two members of the Police Forensic Sciences Lab issued a monograph in 1994 about this rare gun.
Enough about a crazy gun, let’s get back to the business of getting two planes off the ground.
It was already 6 years after the Wright brothers had first taken to the air, and the Army and Navy, having realized the potential of aviation in warfare, were eager to get their own planes flying as soon as possible. However, though Japan could already invent weird pistols, it was still far from building any planes of its own, and air balloons were about the closest they could get their men to a state of flying at the time. So it was that they chose the two Army captains, as both belonged to the Military Gas Balloon Study Group (臨時軍用気球研究会), a joint Army and Navy aviation research team established in July 1909 by Emperor Meiji’s edict.
In April of 1910, the balloon group sent the two off to France to enroll them into the Englishman, Henry Farman’s flight school to learn flying a plane, and further to acquire suitable planes to bring home with them. There, Captain Tokugawa earned his wings on 25th August as the first Japanese national to possess a pilot’s license.
Captain Hino on the other hand, did not have such smooth sailing in France, as he failed in an attempt to acquire a plane engine there, and had to switch the stage of further aviation adventures to Germany instead. In the end, he returned to Japan with a German “Grade II Libelle (meaning dragonfly in German)”, a 24 HP micro-plane, while Captain Tokugawa took possession of a two-seater 50 HP Henri Farman biplane in France. After shipping these planes off to Japan, both Captains met up in Paris and returned to Japan together in late October 1910.
An airfield for these planes was in preparation at Tokorozawa outside of Tokyo, but lack of budget and other factors had delayed completion, requiring the Yoyogi training ground to stand in for flight tests of these two planes, which arrived in Japan by ship and had been reassembled in November.
The test flight was to be held under the auspices of the Military Gas Balloon Study Group and the press were given dates of 15th and 16th of December 1910 as the flight trial dates, with the 17th and 18th being reserve dates in case of bad weather. The 19th and 20th were only slated at that time as take-down and pack up days. Thus between the 15th and 19th, a crowd of 500 thousand spectators (1/6 of Tokyo’s population at the time) assembled in Yoyogi for a glimpse of this human miracle.
As it turned out, bad weather and minor accidents caused the big day to be postponed till the 19th. Previous days were taken up with taxiing practice across the field and unexpected repairs. One overly excited reporter even declared such a run done by Hino on the 14th to be the historical first flight. The truth, however, seemed that this was merely a momentary leap and not quite any sustained state of flight, so the reporter was as “jumpy” as the plane had been.
Finally on the 19th, the two captains took turns taking off in their planes, and both succeeded in achieving sustained flight for the official records. Tokugawa was accorded the honor of piloting the first self-propelled plane flight in Japan, simply because he had the first turn. This was almost exactly 7 years to the day from the flight of the Wright brothers of 17th December 1903.
The fame Tokugawa gained through this event paved the way for his successful career in Army aviation, eventually regaining a Baron’s title for himself and position as head of the Imperial Japanese Army Air Academy during WW2, ending his Army career as an Army Lieutenant General. The general died in 1963 at the age of 78, but he had lived long enough to have the fortune of being reunited with his first-flight plane 3 years before his death.
The Americans had taken away the Farman at the end of WW2 and kept it at the museum at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, but it was returned to Japan in 1960, in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Japan and the USA. Tokugawa was overwhelmed with emotion, as he once again grabbed the joy-stick, saying it was like being reunited with a long lost son.
In contrast, Hino’s career was all downhill from this point. He continued to be active as an inventor; himself pursuing plane designs, development of a float plane, a helicopter, a ramjet powered tailless jet, a semiautomatic rifle and finally even a rocket, as well as numerous patents, but fate was unkind, and none of these endeavors could be brought to true fruition, which was also not helped by his lack of social skills typical of a geek type.
About the only scheme that did not “backfire” on him was his pistol, though he still managed to get shot with it two times by mistake, due to its poor safety features. All this just brought him only pain and demotion, ending his Army career as a lieutenant major. Forgotten by all, and impoverished, he died of malnutrition in 1946.
When Tokugawa’s bust was erected at Yoyogi Park in 1964, it was not accompanied by any bust of Hino. His contributions to aviation history was only appreciated belatedly, when the “first flight” monument was built in 1974 at the park, at which time his bust finally joined that of his long ago colleague.
Flying remained an Army-Navy joint endeavor under the umbrella of the Military Gas Balloon Study Group. Thus the airfield in Tokorozawa, which missed hosting Japan’s first plane flight, also belonged to this study group. It was finally ready the following year in April 1911, and the two planes brought back by the two pilots made this their home, joined by 2 further planes, one of which was a Blériot XI, a French model, which became famous for the first flight across the English Channel in July 1909. This was a plane that Tokugawa had ordered and was just learning to fly, when he was ordered back to Japan from France the previous year. The other addition was a Wright biplane, which Hino had ordered while still in Germany, which arrived in Japan in March 1911 and got assembled at Tokorozawa.
Tokugawa was given the task of establishing a cadre of airmen, starting with this fleet of only 4 planes. He was helped by two other Army officers, who were also trained to fly in France, and together they trained 5 Army pilots in 1913, the first year of training operations in Tokorozawa. Then in 1914, 9 officers became pilots, 13 officers in 1915.
Immediately he faced the problem of plane shortages, which he intended solving by building Japan’s own planes. Thus Tokugawa himself was the designer of the first four domestically built planes, based upon the Farman design and built one after the other, between 1911 and 1913.
This plane-building operation in Tokorozawa continued to produce further 5 generations of planes, the final version being an ambitiously modern tractor configuration (propeller pulls plane forward, instead of the classic pusher configuration), which also employed an engine built in Japan. But a fatal crash of this model in 1918, caused the Army to decide it was still premature to become self-sufficient in plane production and halted further builds, adopting a conservative policy of only employing imported Maurice Farman biplanes for operational use.
1913, Pilots, Multiply and Prosper, the Army Pilot’s Badge
Until WWI ended and countries like France and England happily sold their war surplus planes to Japan, there simply weren’t enough planes to go around, so while they tried to build some planes of their own, they did the best with the few planes they had to train as many pilots as possible. And in order to bait infantry, artillery, cavalry and engineer officers to become pilots, the Army instituted its pilot’s badge 陸軍飛行機操縦術修得徽章( literally “Army airplane maneuvering skills proficiency badge”) on 23rd June 1913, even before they introduced a special uniform for pilots.
Until 1917, there will be no NCO pilots yet, but the badge came in 2 grades for officers and NCOs, The officer’s version had the eagle wings in silver and the propeller in gold, while the NCO version had bronze wings and a silver propeller. The badge was to be worn on the right chest.
This badge was worn with pride by the pilots and earned itself the nickname of “Tokoroten”, which is a jelly-like Japanese dish, typical for summer. The reason for this odd naming was because the Army War College graduates wore a silver badge, which reminded people of a coin, called a Tenpou-sen that used to be in circulation up till 1891. Thus the Army college badge was nicknamed “Tenpou-sen” and the pilot’s badge was Tokorozawa’s Tenpou-sen, finally shortened to “Tokoroten”.
Last edited by Nick Komiya; 12-08-2016 at 07:20 PM.
1914 August, First Generation Army Aviator Uniform Established
There was nothing special uniform-wise in the first flight at Yoyogi. Tokugawa’s and Hino’s first flight was in standard Army uniform. Although Tokugawa’s bust at the park shows him in flight wear, that was a later likeness of him and not how he flew that day. He flew wearing a white cloth hood on his head with goggles, and Hino simply wore his Army visor cap backwards to allow himself goggles and to prevent the wind from catching the visor and flipping it off. After all, they were not reaching any kind of altitude that required special clothing.
Even after settling down at Tokorozawa, the flyers did not have any special uniforms, only a pilot’s badge, and each pilot basically wore what he wanted, sporting imported aviation wear or also having customized clothing. After all they were all officers, so they all managed to get by with just a clothing allowance.
Finally, on 28th August 1914, just 5 days after declaring war on Germany, the Army launched its first official flight uniforms. At that time they were only flying French planes for operational use, so it was quite natural that everything looked quite French in design. Besides, they were about to fight on the side of the French against the Germans, so they were also dressed for the right team as well.
The uniform ensemble shown below was worn over the normal Army uniform, and standard leg wraps were worn above the ankle boots.
The crash helmet was called a “Koukuu Kabuto (aviation head armor)”, borrowing the name from Samurai armor. Later this would change to “Koukuu-Bo (aviation hat)” which could easily be confused with what in English is called a flight helmet. Because of this unfortunate choice of words in English, which calls a soft cap a helmet, we need to clarify terminology to distinguish between a real helmet, being the crash helmet and a flight helmet which is actually no helmet.
So what in English is normally called a “flight helmet”, I will be calling a “flight hood” instead, as it is closer to the Japanese word of “Koukuu Zukin 航空頭巾” and also clearly separates it from a crash helmet. “Zukin” literally means “head cloth”, so for instance, “Little Red Riding Hood (Rotkäpchen)” is “Aka Zukin-chan” literally “Little Red Head Cloth” and the padded air-raid hood women wore to shelters during WW2 was called a Boukuu Zukin.
From this early stage there was a leather flight hood in addition to the crash helmet. Later on, after the crash helmet was discontinued, it was this hood that became the primary headwear for a pilot, but at this stage the crash helmet was the primary item and the hood was an auxiliary item. As proof, regulations stated that a star emblem was to be on the crash helmet, but there was no such stipulation for the hood. Nakata’s book shows such a crash helmet, should you like to see a photo.
In the meanwhile, by the time Japan declared war against Germany on 23rd August 1914, the fleet held by the Balloon Study Group had grown to 16 planes. Making use of these resources, an Expeditionary Air Unit was formed out of the Balloon group on 23rd August 1914, consisting of 538 members from Tokorozawa, including 8 officers in the role of pilots, Tokugawa naturally among them.
They employed 5 planes, carrying Rising Sun emblems on their tail wings. These planes were employed against the German fortress in Tsingtao, where they were involved in dogfights and bombing. Overall, they flew 86 missions and 15 bombing raids. By December, the war was won and the Expeditionary Unit was welcomed home as victors on New Year’s Day 1915. The Navy also had sent its Seaplane Carrier, Wakamiya loaded with Maurice Farmans to assist in the Siege of Tsingtao.
Despite winning the war, the Army and Navy’s Aviation Honeymoon was coming to an end. During the plane-building phase before the war, it was becoming increasingly evident that the Navy’s needs were not going to get enough attention within the Balloon Study Group, dominated by the Army, so the Navy created a 21-man splinter research team of its own in Oppama Yokosuka in June 1912 to pursue its own agenda. By 1916, the rift was big enough for the Navy to stay mostly clear of the Balloon Group, and it was at that time that the Navy finally launched its own flight uniforms.
As the Army decided to dedicate more effort in aviation by setting up its Aviation Headquarters in 1919, the Military Gas Balloon Study Group was finally disbanded in May of 1920, ending the Army and Navy joint effort that had lasted 11 years.
By the way, though the Navy was close behind the Army in setting up its own aviation uniforms, it failed to honor its pilots with a pilot's badge until June 1927, a full 14 years after the Army’s badge of 1913. I said “failed”, because they did try to introduce one in spring of 1915, along with a submariner’s badge. As proof I will show you the design drawings for these two badges that got aborted. The Navy was bothered by the fact that the Army badge, once given, was for keeps, while the Navy’s tradition of qualification badges was that you lost the badge if your performance in the competitive test dropped. Thus a badge given out like a pilot’s license was difficult to bring into the Navy.
Army pilots will be wearing the 1914 style uniforms for the next 15 years, which included 4 years of activities in the freezing cold of Siberia, during the air unit’s involvement in the “Siberian Intervention” of 1918-1922.
After WWI, on 10th December 1915, the Army established an Air Battalion (航空大隊) at the Tokorozawa Airfield, composed of 2 Squadrons (one flight and one balloon) with a total of 375 men and 8 horses. Their unit designation further changed to the First Air Battalion as of 1st December 1917.
From this unit, expeditionary air units for Siberia were organized and based in the port city of Vladivostok, Russia. The 1st and 2nd Vladivostok Expeditionary Squadrons were thus organized and engaged in operations in Siberia. The 1st Squadron, however, was returned to Tokorozawa in February of 1919 to be trained by a French Training Mission hosted by the French government, which was hoping to sell many war surplus planes to Japan. Thus it was the 2nd Squadron that had to endure the ravages of Siberian weather until 1922.
The 1914 uniforms could not cope with temperatures that fell to minus 50 degrees centigrade in the open cockpits of the Maurice Farman and British Sopwith 1 ½ Strutter biplanes the Army had to fly in Siberia. On 12th July 1920, headquarters of the air unit in Vladivostok wrote that they had heard rumors that the Army had been studying electrically heated flight suits designs and they would like to receive 20 of them urgently, as the Siberian cold was totally unbearable just with the standard flight uniforms. Tokyo replied that heated suits needed much longer to develop and they still had none. The Army tried to cope by supplying them with lighter fluid hand warmers and bulky protective wear, but these efforts were largely unsuccessful as the following prototype test report from Siberia dated 23 June, 1921 suggests.
The report provided field feedback on prototype flight clothing tests conducted during 3 recon missions in January 1921. The first flight by a captain lasted 1 hour 23 minutes in minus 35 degree temperature, in which virtually no facial protection was possible ending in bad frostbite and severe pain in the limbs. The second flight was 1 hour and 3 minutes in duration in minus 30 degrees. It said “The cap was too small for the 1st Lt, and he ended up passing out immediately upon landing.”. The third flight had to endure temperatures between minus 40 and 50 degrees and they simply had to use other alternatives for a cap.
A constant and serious problem was bad frostbites in the face, as the goggles kept fogging up and required regular removal, leaving the face totally exposed. The thick uniforms did provide good protection, but was judged as “far lacking in functionality in comparison to an electric heated suit”. The bulky cold weather prototype made it even an ordeal to walk the 200 meters to the field from the office, and though one could still barely make it into the seat of the plane, the bulk hindered smooth operations, and long flights caused excessive fatigue and horribly stiff shoulders. As for improvement requests, they could only say, make it lighter, thinner and warmer. It was the same situation as will be repeated some 40 years later when the NASA astronauts initially could hardly walk in their moon walk spacesuit prototypes.
The report ended by saying that, “Though we have tried various measures, nothing has worked against the fogging up of the goggles, and our only hope is to find a chemical solution as a coating.”
4 years of flying in the grueling Siberian weather finally ended as the Japanese Army pulled out of Siberia in October 1922 and peace returned.
Though the electrically heated flight suits never made it in time to Siberia, the hand warmers were commercialized in 1923 and used widely in the Army in WW2 as well. They were exported also to the USA in the 50s to be sold by Zippo.
1923, Heated Flight Suits, an IJA Obsession for the next 15 Years
For the flyers who suffered in Siberia, electrically heated flightgear they could never receive remained an obsession, a score that had to be settled, if military aviation was to have any future. Because, now, you didn’t have to go to Siberia in order to experience the same freezing cold. The British Sopwith was already having a ceiling of over 5000 meters, and at that altitude, fur-lined suits simply did not keep pilots warm enough for long in winter even over Japan. Every 100 meters in altitude gain translates approximately into a 0.65-degree drop in temperature, so at 5000 meters, you got minus 32.5, when it was 0 on the ground.
The First In-flight Test
It was 2 PM, 11th of October, 1923. In Tokorozawa, only some puffs of cloud could be seen far in the western sky. Otherwise a serene blue reined in all directions, typical of the Japanese autumn, which poems describe as, “An autumn of endlessly high heavens, when the grazing horses grow plump”.
That day, the temperature was still a warm 26 degrees centigrade on the ground, as a French Salmson 2 reconnaissance biplane took off with two occupants. This plane was a successor model to the Sopwith, and the Army had bought 29 of them in a package deal with the training mission the French sent to Japan. In 1921, another 51 of these were imported and soon they were being built in Japan under license by Kawasaki. It had a ceiling of slightly over 6000 meters.
The pilot in the front seat was wearing the 1914 style flightgear over his standard Army uniform. In the rear seat sat a man, wearing an electrically heated suit. They were taking the prototype suit into the air for the first time. The suit had been undergoing tests on the ground since June of that year, and now it was time to test the whole system in situ. It was an overalls style suit with heated hood, gloves and footwear, weighing a total of 5.25 kgs.
They were not going to risk the pilot yet in such tests, so the first two tests were done in the rear passenger seat of the two-seater until it was certified as safe.
A propeller operated generator was fixed to a leg strut to provide the power. They could be finicky affairs in these early days, and a plane dive could easily spike the voltage high enough to burn the wearer. So they had to carefully control the voltage to stay within a range of 23 to 24 volts. Between the generator and the suit, was a rheostat heat control unit that varied electrical resistance to control the heat intensity of the heated suit.
Last edited by Nick Komiya; 12-09-2016 at 11:18 AM.
The Evolution of IJA Flight Uniforms (1910-1945)
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