Item

A private-purchase officer style khaki service shirt, tailor made in eastern Turkey and marked to the American serviceman who owned it. The satin lined collar carries a woven maker's label reading "Pak Mağazası, Tel: 126, ERZURUM," the name of a tailor's shop in the Turkish city of Erzurum. Inside the front placket the shirt is hand marked with a U.S. style laundry number, G-1816-G, and stamped initials, FW, the personal identification of the man it was made for.

The shirt is a high quality tailored garment in a smooth khaki gabardine, cut in the American officer pattern with a spread collar, shoulder loops (epaulettes), a front button placket, two pleated flap chest pockets closed by both a snap and a button, button cuffs, and a long shirttail. The upper body and collar are lined in a coppery satin, a private tailoring touch you do not see on issue shirts. It shows honest age and wear, with toning and some staining to the fabric and lining, and a little fraying at the collar and a cuff buttonhole, but it remains sound and displays very well. Measured flat across the chest it runs about 20 to 21 inches, which should be treated as a close approximation.

Design

American officers and servicemen stationed overseas very commonly had uniforms run up by local tailors, who could copy the regulation cut in better cloth, with a better fit, and at a fraction of the cost of buying through the exchange back home. This shirt is a textbook example. The pattern is unmistakably the U.S. service shirt, with its shoulder loops and twin flap pockets, but the gabardine, the satin lining, and the Turkish shop label all mark it as bespoke local work. The U.S. style laundry number inked inside is the giveaway that the customer was an American in service, since that lettering and numbering system is exactly how G.I.s tracked clothing through military and base laundries.

History

To understand this shirt you have to understand where Erzurum sat during the Cold War. Turkey joined NATO in 1952 and instantly became the alliance's critical southeastern frontier, sharing a long land border with the Soviet Union. Eastern Turkey, with Erzurum as its principal city, looked straight across at Soviet territory, and the United States operated a network of installations across the country under the umbrella of its logistics and intelligence presence. From bases and listening posts in Turkey, American personnel monitored Soviet military activity, tracked missile tests deep inside the USSR, and stood watch on the most sensitive border in the alliance.

An American serviceman posted to that remote and strategically vital corner of the Cold War world walked into a tailor's shop in Erzurum and had this shirt made. It is a small, personal object that carries the whole weight of that era with it, the years when a divided world balanced on the edge and young Americans found themselves far from home on the NATO frontier, keeping watch on the Soviet Union. Tailor made overseas uniforms with a legible foreign shop label and a soldier's own markings are exactly the kind of thing that turns a piece of clothing into a story, and this one is a strong and unusual addition to a Cold War or U.S. overseas service collection.

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