Flak Jacket

Origins

Body armor almost vanished from European armies after the seventeenth century, when heavier musket balls made plate too heavy to be worth wearing, and the First World War produced only limited experiments with steel breastplates. It was the air war that brought it back. In 1942 and 1943 the US Eighth Air Force found that most wounds to its bomber crews over Germany were caused by low-velocity fragments of anti-aircraft shells — "flak" — and Colonel Malcolm Grow, the Eighth's surgeon, worked with the British firm Wilkinson Sword to produce flak suits of overlapping manganese steel plates sewn into canvas. They were issued from late 1943 and sharply reduced wounds, and the name stayed with every fragmentation vest that followed.

Design & Construction

The flak suits were too heavy for infantry, and the breakthrough for ground troops came in Korea. The US Marine Corps issued the M1951 vest, which combined layers of ballistic nylon with overlapping plates of Doron, a laminate of fiberglass cloth and resin developed during the war and named after Colonel Georges Doriot of the Army's Quartermaster research branch. The Army's M1952 vest used only layers of ballistic nylon, making it more flexible. In Vietnam the Marines wore the improved M1955 vest, and the Army the M69, which added a protective collar. These vests weighed around eight to ten pounds and were designed to stop fragments from grenades, mortars and artillery, and pistol bullets, but not rifle rounds at normal ranges. They were hot, and soldiers often wore them open in the jungle heat.

Combat Use

Flak jackets arrived in Korean War in 1951 and 1952, and medical studies of the war showed a clear reduction in fatal chest and abdominal wounds among men who wore them. In Vietnam War they were standard issue for Marines and common in Army units, and photographs of Marines at Battle of Khe Sanh and Hue show the vest with the M1 Helmet as the essential outfit of the war, often with slogans written on the back. Helicopter crews added ceramic chest plates, the first true rifle-resistant armor, known as "chicken plates." The vest's value was never in doubt among the men who wore it: mortar and rocket fire caused a large share of American casualties in both wars, and a vest that turned a fatal fragment into a bruise was worth its weight in the heat.

Legacy

The flak jacket brought armor back to the infantryman, and its success led directly to the Kevlar PASGT vest of the early 1980s and then to modern plate carriers that stop rifle bullets. The term is still used loosely for any military vest, and for reporters' protective gear. Korean and Vietnam War vests with correct labels and markings, especially Marine M1955s with period graffiti, are popular with collectors of American militaria. For earlier forms of protection, see Body Armor and Gothic Plate Armor.