Nationality Patches for Navy & Army Flight Uniforms
In March 1945, mainland Japan was inundated by B-29 bombing raids, and one tragically tall fighter pilot, who flew up to intercept the bombers took a hit and had to bail out in his parachute.
He touched down safely in the suburbs south of Yokohama city, but because of his exceptional height and feature-concealing flight uniform, villagers tragically mistook him for a bailing B-29 crew member and clobbered him to death with farming hoes, etc.
This accident prompted the navy to introduce emblems that readily identified flyers as Japanese to their own countrymen.
This came out as an ordinance issued by the Minister of the navy on April 30th, which I show below.
This required military and Gunzoku alike in primary and secondary crew positions to wear nationality emblems on their flight helmet, parachute harness and float vest.
The emblem for the right arm was to be 10 square centimeters, and for the top (slightly toward the rear) of the flight helmet, 8 square centimeters. On the back padding of the parachute harness, it was to be 12 square centimeters. The emblem for the left chest of the floating vest was to be 4 cm high and 7 cm wide, and as an exception, was to feature the rising sun naval ensign, instead of the Hinomaru.
As a rule, these emblems were to be in cloth patches, but for the flight helmet and float vest, paint application was allowed. Those patch sizes expressed in square centimeters can be pretty small in actual size, so the ordinance allowed the sizes to be scaled up or down at the discretion of the unit.
The army also followed the navy’s initiative at this time, and started with Hinomaru patches on the arm of their flight suits.
If you have flight gear with such patches, they are last-ditch items from the last 3 months of the war, not for anything like rescue at sea, earlier in the war.
But calling preventing yourself from being killed by your own countrymen as "last ditch" probably is a gross understatement.
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