Shoulder Insignia (98)

Supreme Headquarters, Allied
Expeditionary Forces

     Gene or his wife, Beth, cut five pages out of a magazine (possibly Life  Magazine) with pictures of 206 Army shoulder insignia.  I've included a few of them (the 92nd Evacuation Hospital was assigned to the Sixth Army, I Corps, and the XI Corps at different times) in this post.  If a reader would like to see any others, please write a comment at the end of this post or e-mail me at mjpcurrier@gmail.com.

     Modern armies are built on each soldier's pride in his own unit.  A soldier with lukewarm feelings toward his country's armed forces has fierce pride in the outfit to which he himself is attached.  In 1918 men of the 81st Division asked permission to wear the figure of a wildcat on their shoulder sleeves to identify their division.  The insignia did so much for morale that the Army soon made shoulder insignia mandatory.
     Soldiers attached to a division wear divisional insignia.  Men working at headquarters of a corps (composed of two or more divisions) wear corps patches.  The same system is followed up through headquarters of armies (two or more corps) and army groups (two or more armies).  Army Air Forces have a patch for each air force.  Army Service Forces have insignia for each service command in addition to patches designating specialized functions.  Personnel of defence and base commands, departments, theaters of operations and other smaller units have their own patches.
     Insignia change as units are activated or inactivated and even as the course of the war itself changes.  Their design is based sometimes on fact, sometimes on whimsy.  The "A" in the First Army's insignia, for example, stands for First Army since it is also the first letter in the alphabet.  But the constellation of Orion in the 27th Division's patch is a pun on [the] name of that outfit's World War I commander, Major General J.F.O'Ryan.