As I’ve been crawling through the 1st Engineer Combat Battalion archives, I discovered that the combat engineers were issued with Trousers, Combat, Winter (aka “the tanker bib”) during the 1943 Tunisian Campaign. By all accounts, the campaign was frightfully cold, and soldiers tried to acquire everything they could find—overcoats, scarves, hats, long underwear—just to keep warm in the desert. In February 1943, they even experienced a snow storm!
The Smiley GI 