Weekend, February 6-7, 2021 – Before Sewing Facemasks for Covid-19, we knitted socks for soldiers

By admin

280th Edition

FEBRUARY 6 -7,  2021

SOCKS OVER THERE:
HAND KNITTING FOR THE WORLD WARS

Socks “Over There:” Handknitting for the World Wars

Rachel Maines

2 February 2021

In the summer of 1944, American forces pushed south and east from their beachhead in Normandy, forcing the Germans to retreat from an ever-larger territory in Southern France. Although it had been planned to the smallest detail many months in advance, the Normandy invasion fell behind almost at once, as German resistance prevented the capture of major ports. Without essential ports along the French coast, necessary supplies, troops, and weaponry could not be landed.

After the breakout, supply continued to be a problem. By D+100, the front lines were about 200 miles from the supply depots. Daily deliveries by truck, the famous Red Ball Express, brought necessary supplies to troops fighting at Metz, Verdun, Antwerp and Liège. These transport units carried ammunition, rations, gasoline, and one further supply item needed at the American front: dry socks.

The horseshoe-nail role of dry socks had become apparent the previous year, when forty per cent of the casualties in the Attu Islands campaign, 1,200 of 2,900 total, were due to trench foot. In November 1943, trench foot, caused by exposure to cold and wet, accounted for twenty per cent of the casualties of the winter campaign in Italy. 

The U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps made frantic efforts to acquire adequate footgear for the Normandy invasion, but they could not get delivery of critical items in time to prevent 70,000 cold-injury casualties in the European theater during the winter of 1944-45.   Most of the men affected by these injuries were trained, battle-hardened riflemen. Each spent an average of sixty days in field hospitals before returning to the front. Some were so seriously disabled that they were removed from active duty and sent home. The price exacted by wet socks from American military efforts in Europe was so impressive that it was the subject of an investigation in 1945.  Army historian Roland Ruppenthal reports that by January 1945, “loss of personnel from trench foot and frostbite already approximated the strength of three divisions in the 12^th Army Group.”

People were recruited to send comfort packs with needles, thread, stationery, buttons, chocolate bar and other necessities to the soldiers on the front.

Trenchfoot, a common trauma of battle, is an injury to the lower extremities caused by damp cold, tight and/or infrequently-changed footgear, standing for long periods, and, of course, wet socks. Military physicians Tom Whayne and Michael DeBakey (later of heart surgery fame), analyzing the nearly half a million cold injuries to American soldiers in World War II, observed that “the upper limit of temperature at which cold injury can occur has not been established.” 

In both World Wars, combatant nations, including the United States, Britain, and Germany, learned that inadequate or poorly-maintained footwear produced costly and preventable casualties from trench foot and frostbite.   While provision of shoes and boots to troops were major issues in earlier conflicts, no nation before World War I had fully appreciated the significance of warm, dry, well-fitting socks to the effectiveness of soldiers in the field.  The large numbers of trench foot casualties in World War I, especially among the French and British, convinced policymakers that this vital commodity must receive a higher priority in military production planning, but few nations in wartime could shift production to knitting mills rapidly enough to make a difference.  Thus, in Britain and the U.S, the best policy option proved to be recruiting women and children civilians to knit socks by hand for the military in the first war, and for refugees, prisoners and civilians in the second. 

When World War I began in Europe in 1914, the United States was the world’s premier manufacturer of knitting and spinning machinery.  Exports of this equipment, however, did nothing to increase the manufacturing capacity of American knitting mills, which proved to be a significant bottleneck for military textile production.  Despite the conversion of silk and cotton knitting equipment to wool, industrial knitters were unable to supply the Army with the more than 150 million pairs of heavy wool socks it required in 1917-1918.  Two strategies were employed:  the hasty construction of 1200 knitting machines, which were by the end of the war capable of producing 8 million socks a month, and home production by hand knitters.

The hand knitters may not have been as fast as the machines, but they could be mobilized much more quickly.  In the First World War, women, the elderly and children worked with such voluntary associations as the American Red Cross to make up the shortage of knitted wool socks for the Army, and to produce hospital bedding and surgical textiles from fabric and cotton lint (unspun fiber), with some work done by hand sewing and the rest by on sewing machines.  Clothing was made at home and in Red Cross workshops for both American servicemembers and allied refugees.  School children mobilized to produce socks, sweaters, wristlets, washcloths, Balaclava helmets and similar goods for the “Sammies” in France. 
 

By the last month of 1917, the reorganized Red Cross had shipped 13,336 cases containing some 13 million dressings and hospital items to Europe, 424,000 articles of hospital clothing, and a quarter of a million hand-knitted items.  Not even this monumental labor met the demand; the Red Cross had to purchase half a million commercially knitted sweaters in 1917 to clothe soldiers still not fully outfitted by the War Department.  By October 1918, the Red Cross had distributed nearly three million garments made by a membership of more than 8 million. At the end of the war, 371.5 million relief articles had been produced, about 11 million garments had been knitted for members of the U.S. armed forces, and close to two million French refugees had been fed and clothed.

World War I was in fact the last occasion on which knitting for the military had official U.S. War Department sanction:  by World War II such work was limited to production for hospitals, prisoners of war and refugees.  The former conflict accounted for the largest Red Cross membership in U.S. history; the Second World War brought half a million fewer volunteers into the organization, mainly because more women workers were employed in war industry.

War Work for Willing Hands was publicized in Star Needlework Journal

The problem of wet socks at war in World War II was ultimately resolved for the U.S. Army in late 1944 by the approval for distribution of a new type of footwear that later revolutionized civilian cold weather gear:  the M-1944 shoepac, “a moccasin-type rubber boot” with a leather upper and removable wool felt lining, the type of footwear now sold to civilians as the “L.L. Bean Boot.”  After a few false starts in the refinement of this footgear, the chief surgeon for the European theater determined in December 1944 that “the shoepac had been found to be the only mechanical aid which contributed substantially to the prevention of trench foot.”  The U.S. military establishment had finally figured out how to keep its socks dry without enlisting home knitters. 

WEEKEND PHOTO

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Text by Judith Berdy
Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS
Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website
Edited by  Deborah Dorff
Roosevelt Island Historical Society
RACHEL MAINES

FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD

Editorial
Just  about 10 months ago, people were pulling out their sewing machines and making face masks for protection from Covid-19.   Soon the mask business became big time business and home sewing was limited.  In World War I, many women followed the instructions put out in journals and by the Red Cross and provided thousands of necessities to the fighting forces abroad.

Soldiers were provided with sewing kits to keep their uniforms in good shape.

Judith Berdy

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