Air Commando Hat Views

Clothing & Accessories

President Franklin D. Roosevelt, amidst the Quebec Conference in August 1943, was impressed by Brigadier Orde Wingate's account of what could be accomplished in Burma with proper air support.[1] To comply with Roosevelt's proposed air support for British long range penetration operations in Burma, the United States Army Air Forces created the 5318th Air Unit to support the Chindits. In March 1944, they were designated the 1st Air Commando Group by USAF Commander General Hap Arnold. Arnold chose Colonel John R. Alison and Colonel Philip Cochran as co-commanders of the unit.[2]

After a glider training accident, the Commander of the Chindits, General Orde Wingate, sent the 1st Air Commando a message: Please be assured that we will go with your boys, any place, any time, any where. It was adopted by the 1st Air Commando as their motto, and it is still used as an abbreviated form as the motto of the USAF Special Operations Command.

Jungle Jim was a code name and nickname of the original 4400th CCTS and Air Commandos. Members wore an Australian-type green fatigue slouch hat in the style Johnny Weissmuller wore in the Jungle Jim films.[9] The Air Commandos deployed to Laos and South Vietnam in October 1961, as part of Operation Farm Gate in the Vietnam War. The unit was redesignated the 1st Air Commando Wing on 1 June 1963, the 1st Special Operations Wing on 8 July 1968, the 834th Tactical Composite Wing on 1 July 1974 and the 1st Special Operations Wing on 1 July 1975.

In the early 1960s when American soldiers went to the Vietnam War, the standard headgear was a fatigue baseball or field cap that offered limited protection from the sun. Local tailors made a slouch hat in a style between a French type bush hat of the First Indochina War and an Australian type bush hat with a snap on the brim to pin one side up that was widely bought and unofficially worn by American troops in Vietnam. The local tailors usually used green fatigue cloth or leopard skin pattern military camouflage from old parachutes. The hat often had a cloth arc emblazoned with the word VIET-NAM on the brim. The U.S. 1st Air Commando Group members adopted the green slouch hat as their distinctive and practical headgear with an AIR COMMANDO arc.