Original Item: Only One Available. This is an excellent textbook example of the Chinese Type 50 style summer cap as used by Chinese forces during the Korean War. This particular cap came from a very small lot of items we obtained which were brought back to the United States from the Korean War as souvenirs by an American GI.
 
The cap is of a non-rigid style and khaki in color. The cap shows signs of honest use from hard campaigning. There are no maker's marks or stamps present. The Cap is roughly a size 6⅞.
 
This was the field cap of the type worn by the PVA (The People’s Volunteer Army) during the Korean War (1950-1953). PVA troops were lightly armed and clothed, but their strength was primarily inspired from their Soviet ideology. They were trained well by Soviet officers and full access to an arsenal of Soviet heavy weapons; when PVA units were used offensively, under the same principles taught by their mentors, they initially proved a most formidable force.
Comes ready to research and display!
 
China in the Korean War
The People's Volunteer Army (PVA) was the armed forces deployed by the People's Republic of China during the Korean War. Although all units in the PVA were actually transferred from the People's Liberation Army under the orders of Chairman Mao Zedong, the PVA was separately constituted
 
in order to prevent an official war with the United States. The PVA entered Korea on 19 October 1950, and completely withdrew by October 1958. The nominal commander and political commissar of the PVA was Peng Dehuai before the ceasefire agreement in 1953, although both Chen Geng and Deng Hua served as the acting commander and commissar after April 1952 due to Peng's illness. The initial (25 October – 5 November 1950) units in the PVA included 38th, 39th, 40th, 42nd, 50th, 66th Corps totalling 250,000 men, and eventually about 3 million Chinese civilian and military personnel served in Korea by July 1953.
Although the United Nations Command (UN) forces were under United States command, this army was officially a UN "police" force. In order to avoid an open war with the US and other UN members, the People's Republic of China deployed the People's Liberation Army (PLA) under the name "volunteer army".
 
About the name, there were various opinions. According to some scholars during the mid 1990s, after the PRC made the strategic decision to send soldiers to Korea, the very first name of this army was "support army." But Huang Yanpei, the vice premier of the Government Administration Council of the Central People's Government at that time, suggested that the name "support army" might cause the international community to assume that China was sending soldiers as an act of direct aggression against the United States. Therefore, the army's name was modified to "volunteer army" while different unit designations and footings were used instead, to give the impression that China did not intend to declare war against the US, but rather that Chinese soldiers were only present on Korean battlefields as individual volunteers. On the other hand, some recent studies show that the change was not only due to Huang's advice. Because much earlier on July 7, 1950, the name had already been changed to "volunteer army" by Chinese premier Zhou Enlai on his manuscript about the decision of the army's clothing and flags.
 
Despite arguments on the changing from "People's Support Army" to "People's Volunteer Army", the name was also a homage to the Korean Volunteer Army that had helped the Chinese communists during the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Chinese Civil War. It also managed to deceive the US intelligence and the UN about the size and nature of the Chinese forces that entered Korea. They later realized that the PVA was the PLA's North East Frontier Force (NEFF), with other PLA formations transferred under NEFF's command as the Korean War dragged on. But the result was that they still adopted the name, "People's Volunteer Army", in order to minimize the war within the Korean Peninsula and prevent escalation of the war.
 
The PVA soldier was reasonably well clothed, in keeping with the PLA's guerrilla origin and egalitarian attitudes. All ranks wore a cotton or woolen green or khaki shirt and trousers combination with leaders' uniforms being different in cut.