Airborne Oval 502 th Infantry Regiment 101th Airborne Division with wing and combat jump star

clutch back wing, post WW2 issue

UITVERKOCHT / SOLD
Betaalwijzes

The conceptual history of the American airborne started with thinkers ranging from Benjamin Franklin through World War I Army Air Corps General Billy Mitchell. Mitchell had wanted to load up the entire infantry strength of the 1st Division, the "Big Red One", into the back seats of biplanes, fly over the lines of trenches, then land and unload them to attack the German rear. The Soviet Union had used combat parachute assaults in Finland in the Winter War, and Germany had seized bridges and obstacles for its westbound armored units in 1940. But the real beginning was the German invasion of Crete in May 1940. This isolated rocky island in the Mediterranean was British held and heavily fortified, so rather than attempt a beach landing, the Germans dropped several parachute regiments on top of it. The terrain heavily favored the defenders, and the German Fallschirmjäger ("hunters from the sky") units took losses so heavy that Adolf Hitler never approved another large scale parachute operation again. That didn’t matter to Allied war planners. What mattered was that a key piece of terrain had been taken entirely by airborne assets. This was a revolutionary development that America couldn’t match yet. Within thirty days, the original 48-man Parachute Test Platoon was formed at Fort Benning, Georgia. Four parachute infantry battalions were planned to follow.

On 1 July 1941, the 502nd Parachute Infantry Battalion was activated at Fort Benning under the command of Major George P. Howell, under orders dated 15 April. He’d been the former executive officer of the 501st Parachute Infantry Battalion (not to be confused with the later 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment). This new unit was initially composed of two skeleton companies sliced off from the 501st. "The Deuce" lacked everything from parachutes to small arms. This kept the 502nd understrength until more men could be recruited at Fort Jackson, South Carolina and Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Plans for the next two battalions (503rd and 504th) had to be put on hold because there were no more men or equipment on hand at Benning.

One piece of "equipment" developed in this period that has accompanied the 502nd into combat ever since was the round winged-skull patch known variously as "bat wings", the "death’s head", and "The Widowmaker". Retired Colonel Glenn McGowan told the story in 1988 and it was reprinted in various "newcomers briefing" handouts afterward:

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