Original Item: Only One Available. This is an outstanding assembled collection of approximately 303 original U.S. military shoulder sleeve insignia, rank insignia, qualification badges, branch devices, and related wartime patches, carefully arranged across nine large display boards measuring approximately 14 x 22 inches each. The collection appears to have been organized after World War II by an American serviceman or veteran as a broad visual record of the enormous variety of insignia worn by the wartime U.S. Army and Army Air Forces.

There are nine boards total, each measuring 14 inches tall and 22 inches long. There is a chronological order for most of them, with others being placable at either end. Almost all of the patches are annotated with a name underneath. Five of the boards depict the chronological Armies, Corps, Divisions, and Armored Divisions. Another depicts all Air Forces and related groups, another depicts several distinct fronts, groups, along with all six Ranger Battalion tabs. Another depicts the different service branches, AAF pilot wing types, and coastal artillery ranks or specialties along with a bomb disposal patch, and CIBs. The last one depicts every rank from PFC to General.

Of additional interest, the reverse of each board bears markings associated with the EFLA Film Festival, giving the dates May 31 through June 23, although no year is present. EFLA was the Educational Film Library Association, an organization that founded the American Film Festival in 1959 as a national showcase for educational, documentary, and short-format motion pictures. The identical markings on all nine boards indicate that the mounting boards themselves were at some point associated with an EFLA festival or related event, although the precise circumstances and date remain unknown. The markings present an intriguing avenue for further research and may document a later stage in the display history of the collection.

The patches and insignia exhibit the expected variation in embroidery, backing materials, coloration, construction, and wear encountered among original WWII insignia. Because the group was assembled as a comprehensive visual display, the individual pieces should not be interpreted as insignia personally worn by a single serviceman. Rather, the boards appear to represent the efforts of a wartime veteran or early postwar collector to organize and preserve examples spanning the structure, branches, specialties, and ranks of the U.S. Army.

What distinguishes this collection is not simply the approximately 303 individual pieces, but the survival of the complete nine-board arrangement with its handwritten annotations and later EFLA markings intact. The boards collectively document Armies, Corps, Infantry and Armored Divisions, Army Air Forces formations, Rangers, theaters and commands, branches, specialties, qualifications, and ranks in a remarkably broad wartime survey. Preserved in their longtime display configuration, they represent both a substantial collection of original American WWII insignia and an unusually evocative example of how one early collector sought to catalog and present the visual organization of the United States Army after the war.