An original World War Two US Marine Corps officer’s green service cap, the wicker frame pattern adopted in 1937 and carried through the war and into the 1950s. The quatrefoil worked across the crown identifies it as an officer’s cover. The plain visor, without gold oak leaf embroidery, places it with a company grade officer: a second lieutenant, first lieutenant or captain. Marked size 7.

That braided cross carries the best known story in the Marine Corps, and it is one that does not survive contact with the record. Tradition holds that officers laid knotted rope across their covers so Marine sharpshooters up in the rigging would not fire on them from above. The National Museum of the Marine Corps rejects it. The officer’s hat of the age of sail was a fore and aft design with no flat crown to lay rope on, a marksman sixty or seventy feet up in powder smoke could never have picked out an emblem that small, and firing from the tops stopped during boarding, which is exactly when such a marking would have mattered. The quatrefoil was prescribed in Marine uniform regulations in the late 1850s, following a French fashion that spread through European armies around the Italian campaign of 1859. It was ornament, and Marine officers have worn it ever since.

The man who wore this cap belonged to a small slice of a very large force. The Corps went from roughly 18,000 men in the mid 1930s to about 475,000 by 1945, and its company grade officers led the rifle platoons and companies that went ashore at Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Saipan, Peleliu and Iwo Jima. Platoon leaders and company commanders took casualties out of all proportion to their numbers. Officers’ covers are correspondingly scarcer on the market than the enlisted equivalent.

Marine officers bought their own uniforms rather than drawing them from stores, which is why caps like this came from commercial hatters and why the workmanship runs high. The body is a woven cane frame, plainly visible inside the cap, light and ventilated. Over it sits the forest green wool cover with the quatrefoil across the top and a corded khaki band at the base. Visor and chin strap are black leather, the strap secured by two small Marine Corps eagle and anchor buttons. Inside, a vegetable tanned leather sweatband is punched for ventilation and finished at the rear with a small woven bow, a civilian millinery detail carried straight into military work.

The Eagle, Globe and Anchor on the front has been the emblem of the Corps since 1868. This one is a black finished device, the subdued treatment worn on the service cover rather than the bright metal of the dress uniform.

CONDITION AND DETAILS

Marked size 7, approximately 22 inch / 55.9 cm head circumference
Forest green wool cover, even color, light nap wear, no significant moth damage
Quatrefoil complete and secure across the crown
Corded khaki band sound, with a small green mark on the left side
Black leather visor and chin strap, supple and glossy, no cracking or flaking
Black finished Eagle, Globe and Anchor cap device, secure, with light high point wear on the globe
Both eagle and anchor chin strap buttons present
Cane frame intact, cap holds its shape
Leather sweatband complete and supple, rear bow present

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