Friday, 30 August 2024

Japanese Airfields, Equipment & more #38 - revised

IJAAF ground crew uniforms pt.3
In this post, I will present the tropical and summer uniform of the IJAAF and the clothes the maintenance crews generally wore outside Japan's mainland.
Above is the official uniform worn by the Japanese Army in South East Asia and South Pacific. The trousers were either long or short. In these official illustrations puttees are shown but as we saw before these were very very rarely (if at all) worn by the maintenance crews.

Two versions of the long-sleeve IJA summer shirt. The shirt has lapels and two pockets but no buttons on the sleeves.

Two versions of the short-sleeve version of the IJA summer shirt.

The long summer trousers of the IJA.

The short summer trousers of the IJA. The short trousers were also of various types, some looser, some tighter, some with cloth straps at the end of the trousers and some without.

Two samples of the summer uniform.

And another complete original summer uniform at some guy's private collection. 

Attached are three photos of maintenance crews on airfields in Japan wearing summer uniforms.

And a collection of sample photos of maintenance crews outside Japan, such as in Malaysia, Burma, and China. Note the variety of the caps and the trousers.

The top photo featuring a Mitsubishi Ki-21 "Sally" of the 14th Sentai, is a good example of the variety of clothes worn by IJAAF ground crews in Papua/New Guinea.

As you can see in the previous photos, the ground crews usually wore their two types of field caps we saw in the previous post, but IJA pith helmets like these shown here were not unusual especially if the units were based in Vietnam, Thailand or Burma.

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