|
On eBay Now...
US Army Infantry embroidered patch - 5\" in diameter, wax back - Army Grunt 11B For Sale
![US Army Infantry embroidered patch - 5\](img-large/g/ARoAAOSw1EBdb-Lr/s-l1600/US-Army-Infantry-embroidered-patch-5-in-diameter-w.jpg "US Army Infantry embroidered patch - 5\")
When you click on links to various merchants on this site and make a purchase, this can result in this site earning a commission. Affiliate programs and affiliations include, but are not limited to, the eBay Partner Network.
US Army Infantry embroidered patch - 5\" in diameter, wax back - Army Grunt 11B:
$9.00
History of the Organization of tLARGE 5\" DIAMETER - FIND THEM, FIX THEM, FIGHT THEM, and FINISH THEM .. A redesign of a classic patch
History of the Organization of the Infantry
When Congress, on 14 June 1775, moved to take over the New England Army then besieging Boston as a Continental establishment, it also authorized ten companies of riflemen to be raised in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia as part of the new Continental Army. The next day, Congress appointed George Washington its Commander in Chief. Before leaving their home state, the six rifle companies from Pennsylvania were combined to form William Thompson\'s Rifle Battalion. This battalion and the other new rifle units organized rapidly and marched quickly to Boston.
The New England Army around Boston was composed of citizen soldiers. From the earliest times that type of soldier (male members of the community aged 18-45) had been required to associate in military organizations called \"militia,\" and to train to defend his own locality. The militia system amounted to universal military training for men of active ages, but it was for local defense almost entirely. What is more, its enforcement rested altogether with the colonies. At the outbreak of the Revolution, all the colonies had military organizations operating, but their effectiveness was, in many cases, slight. It was the general ineffectiveness of the militia system, coupled with the need for centralized control, that brought about the creation of the Continental Army. Even so, on account of the militia, the colonies were able to utilize the experience of many veterans of England\'s colonial wars, familiar with the British Army and with the Indian modes of fighting it. These veterans were a very valuable asset.
In addition to the rifle units and the besieging army, Congress later authorized the raising and maintaining of Continental infantry battalions in the southern states. By December 1775 there were forty-nine infantry battalions (or regiments, for the two terms were virtually synonymous) and several unattached companies in the establishment.
The Continental Congress took the bulk of the army besieging Boston in 1775 as it found it. Since most of the units were enlisted only for the calendar year, General Washington had either to attempt to re-enlist the soldiers already in service or to assemble a new army. During the fall of 1775, he strove to retain the Continental troops for the duration .of the war, but was only successful in keeping part of them, and those for just one more year. A canvass of the officers of thirtynine regiments in November showed that 751 officers were willing to continue their service for one year while 406 were not.
The legislators set the size of the army around Boston at 20,372 officers and men, to be organized into twenty-seven regiments and some separate companies. In this scheme New England, which had supplied forty-two in 1775, provided twenty-six Continental regiments in 1776. These twenty-six were numbered from the 2d through the 27th. They were designated Continental infantry in an attempt to transfer the men\'s loyalty from the states to the Congress.
The 1st Continental did not come from New England, but was built around the nine companies of riflemen then in William Thompson\'s Pennsylvania Rifle Battalion. Six of those companies were among the original units of the Continental Army, while the other three joined up later. All lost their specialization as rifle companies and the \"regiment\" became a standard element of the line.
Late in 1776 it was once again necessary to cope with the dissolution of the army, but this time Congress took a new tack. It attempted to create a force to serve \"during the present war.\" The legislators, observing the size of the army in being, set the new establishment at eighty-eight battalions, and apportioned these among all the states, so that Massachusetts had to provide the greatest number, fifteen, and Delaware and Georgia the smallest, one apiece. The eighty-eight battalions thus authorized were raised, equipped, and officered by the states. They were no longer known by Continental numbers, but carried instead numbers in the several state organizations. These state organizations were called \"lines,\" the term used then for the regular infantry or \"foot\" that made up the line of battle of an army. The state lines together comprised the Continental Line. These should not be confused with the occasional state regiments which were raised on a permanent basis for local service only.
Although the regiments of the several states, arranged in the Continental Line, replaced the numbered regiments of 1776 (for example, the 9th Continental of 1776 became the 1st Regiment of the Rhode Island Line in 1777) , the change was mostly one of name. The relationship of regiments to states remained about as it had been, and the appointment of officers continued to be in practice a collaboration between Congress, the Commander in Chief, and the states. Some of the Continental regiments became units in the state lines, while the men and officers of others transferred to the new regiments of 1777 without carrying the lineages of their 1776 outfits with them. The reorganization of the winter of 1776 did not radically alter the way men came into the Continental service or the manner in which regiments were organized, but it did place responsibility for procurement, replacement, and supply more squarely upon the states. This stimulated an increased effort in some states: for example, Massachusetts and Connecticut (although later overruled by Congress) voted to supplement the Continental pay of their lines.
In December 1776, while the reorganization of the American. Army was taking place, the British advanced into New. Jersey. Faced with this threat, Congress authorized Washington to add sixteen purely Continental battalions .to the foot establishment. This action resulted in part from the fact that the states had been unutterably slow in supplying their quotas for the eighty-eight line battalions. The term of service of the new sixteen was the same as that of the state lines, for three years or for the duration, but the similarity ended there. Washington raised them wherever he could, and appointed all their officers himself. The new Continental regiments were usually recruited within one state and, like all other units, had a hard struggle to reach full strength.
The organization established late in 1776 and early in 1777-containing as it did the state lines coupled with the sixteen additional Continental battalions-was a compromise between two needs. The first need was to utilize the powerful authority of the states, without which the conflict could not be prosecuted; the second was to have at least some regiments subject only to the will of the Commander in Chief.
An understanding of the internal organization of the Continental infantry regiments and their components requires a short explanation of infantry tactics in the eighteenth century. To begin with, the heart of a battle as fought in western Europe was the line of infantry. It was this line which had to be broken if victory were to be won; hence the heavy fire of the artillery and the maneuvers of the cavalry were chiefly directed against it. It was common in Europe for the battle line to be formed on an open plain just outside of effective artillery range of the enemy. This meant that the two lines took their positions within 500 yards of each other, a distance at which, with modern firearms, few men would be left standing. This is the fact which makes it hardest for moderns to visualize early warfare. The effective range of the musket of the period was not over 100 yards and was often nearer 50. Fighting at such ranges, infantry organization was founded upon the need to form the line, control it in battle, renew it when decimated, and maneuver it so as to place the enemy at a disadvantage. But this was not the beginning and the end of infantry tactics, particularly in the rough, wooded terrain of North America.
In the American service, as in the British, battalions and regiments were usually one and the same. An English regiment had ten companies in it, eight of them (the \"battalion companies\") for the line, the other two for special uses. These were the elite or \"flank companies.\" One called the \"grenadier company\" was composed of men picked for their strength acrd courage. As often as not (for instance, at Bunker Hill) the grenadier companies were detached from their regiments and used together in provisional grenadier battalions. These were given the most difficult assignments, and the posts of honor (that is, of greatest danger) if used in the battle line.
The tenth company in a British battalion was called the \"light company.\" Light companies were also detached and consolidated into provisional battalions, but as often they were assigned a truly light mission, that is, to advance ahead of the line, screen it, and demoralize the enemy. This mission of light infantry in the American service was usually performed by rifle units, which fanned out in front of the army and, with their accurate fire, galled the enemy severely.
At first there was no counterpart to flank companies in the Continental infantry. Beginning in August 1777, however, General Washington directed that 108 men and 9 officers be drawn from each brigade and formed into a temporary Corps of Light Infantry. When winter came this corps was disbanded, but. it had proved so useful that Washington urged Congress to authorize one light company for each battalion to be formed into a separate corps during every campaign thereafter. It was with the Light Corps, which resulted, that Anthony Wayne stormed Stony Point on 16 July 1779 in the most celebrated night attack made by Americans during the Revolution.
One of the distinctive features about the Revolutionary War was the use of rifles and rifle units in it. The rifle was virtually unknown in the New England Army that opened the war. Indeed, throughout the conflict, muskets were the armament of the troops of the line. At 100 yards, the best musketeers could hit a man-sized target only four shots out of every ten. In contrast, expert riflemen could kill a man with every shot at 100 yards and do good execution at twice that range. The chief limitations on the use of riflemen were the scarcity of expert shots and the fact that the rifle could not carry a bayonet. Although the latter deficiency was somewhat overcome through the use of tomahawks and knives, riflemen remained vulnerable to a determined bayonet attack. Accordingly, riflemen were not useful in the line, but both sides made extensive use of them as sharpshooters ahead of and around the main fighting force.
As already mentioned, the rifle companies from Pennsylvania in William Thompson\'s Battalion soon lost their specialization and became an element of the line, armed with muskets. Nearly as short-lived as a rifle unit was the Maryland and Virginia Rifle Regiment, composed of the original Continental rifle companies from Maryland and Virginia plus some later ones from the same states. This unit was captured at Fort Washington on 16 November 1776 and was never re-formed. Just at the time of its capture, Daniel Morgan received a commission as Colonel of the 11th Virginia. He recruited 118 riflemen and joined the Continental Army with them at Morristown, New Jersey, early in April 1777. Very soon Washington drew 500 picked riflemen from the regiments of his Army and put them under Morgan\'s command. Thus began the most famous of the rifle corps which persisted intermittently throughout the Revolution.
Sometimes Washington referred to Morgan\'s unit as a rifle corps, sometimes as \"rangers.\" The latter term requires a little elaboration. Rangers were a species of infantry that the British had developed to cope with the methods of the French and Indians in North America. They were scouts who ranged the forests spying upon the enemy, gathering intelligence on his strength and intentions, and harassing him when they could. Units of rangers had to be made up of men who understood woodcraft and who could match the Indians in stealth. Also, they had to be trained shots. Actually, corps like Daniel Morgan\'s were rangers a good deal of the time. In addition, there were certain units, such as Thomas Knowlton\'s Connecticut Rangers, which regularly bore the title.
From time to time the size of Continental units was fixed by resolve of the Congress. Thus during the reorganization which took place at the end of 1775, regiments were authorized to contain 728 officers and men, companies 78 enlisted men. These strengths were much larger than the British counterparts which were 477 and 38, respectively. Although Continental units always exceeded equivalent British units in strength, they varied widely from authorized size. For example, nine months after the first directive appeared, some companies had 67 men in them, others 88. This was, of course, the result of the unequal fall of casualties upon different outfits and the variation in the effectiveness of the recruiting systems of the several states. The Delaware Regiment illustrates a typical case of shrinkage. It was so decimated after the battle of Camden in 1780 that it had to be combined with Maryland companies to form a regiment. Later still, with the Maryland remnants, it was reorganized as a light company, commanded by Robert Kirkwood.
In closing this section on the organization of Continental infantry during the Revolutionary War, nothing should be stressed more heavily than the confusion which chronically prevailed in it. At all times Washington and his staff were obliged to improvise new organizations from the remnants. of those that had been cut up in battle or had served out their short terms and gone home. Moreover, at all times it was also necessary to assimilate thousands of citizen soldiers for brief periods into some sort of working team with the Continentals. This had to be repeated over and over again with new increments because militia terms of service were very short. The attempt to utilize the militia, and put it into good enough order to be effective for at least one campaign, was perhaps the hardest of the Commander in Chief\'s almost insupportable duties.
In spite of its burdensomeness the effort was well placed. Indeed, John W. Fortescue, historian of the British Army, declared that the militia was the decisive factor. Be that as it may, the militia formed around the Continental Army as a nucleus, and would not have turned out had that often ragtag force not been in the field. Most of the estimated 164,000 militiamen who took up arms for terms from a day up to three months were infantry. In addition to them were other infantrymen, raised and maintained on a relatively permanent basis by the several states, who, with the militia, rallied on the Continentals and abetted the cause.
When the British surrendered at Yorktown on 19 October 1781, there were sixty battalions of infantry in the Continental establishment. Afterwards, as time passed and it appeared that the British intended no new attack, that number was steadily reduced. Finally, in November 1783, after a peace had been formally ratified, only one foot regiment remained, commanded by Henry Jackson. Then, on 2 June 1784, the end came even for that unit, leaving as the only authorized vestige of the Continental Army still in service fewer than a hundred men to guard military stores at West Point and at Fort Pitt.
Two gold color crossed muskets, vintage 1795 Springfield musket (Model 1795 Musket), 3/4 inch in height.
Crossed muskets were first introduced into the Army as the insignia of officers and enlisted men of the Infantry on 19 November 1875 (War Department General Order No. 96 dtd 19 Nov 1875) to take effect on or before 1 June 1876. Numerous attempts in the earlier years were made to keep the insignia current with the ever changing styles of rifles being introduced into the Army. However, in 1924 the branch insignia was standardized by the adoption of crossed muskets and the 1795 model Springfield Arsenal musket was adopted as the standard musket to be used. This was the first official United States shoulder arm, made in a government arsenal, with interchangeable parts, caliber .69, flint lock, smooth bore, muzzle loader. The standardized musket now in use was first suggested by Major General Charles S. Farnsworth, U.S. Army, while he was the first Chief of Infantry, in July 1921, and approved by General Pershing, Chief of Staff, in 1922. The device adopted in 1922 has been in continual use since 1924. There have been slight modifications in the size of the insignia over the years; however, the basic design has remained unchanged.
Branch plaque
The plaque design has the branch insignia, letters and border in gold. The background is light blue.
Regimental insignia
Personnel assigned to the Infantry branch affiliate with a specific regiment and wear the insignia of the affiliated regiment.
Regimental coat of arms
There is no standard infantry regimental flag to represent all of the infantry regiments. Each regiment of infantry has its own coat of arms which appears on the breast of a displayed eagle. The background of all the infantry regimental flags is flag blue with yellow fringe.
Branch colors
Light blue – 65014 cloth; 67120 yarn; PMS 5415.
The Infantry has made two complete cycles between white and light blue. During the Revolutionary War, white facings were prescribed for the Infantry. White was the color used for Infantry until 1851 at which time light or Saxony blue was prescribed for the pompon and for the trimming on Infantry horse furniture. In 1857, the color was prescribed as light or sky blue. In 1886, the linings of capes and trouser stripes were prescribed to be white. However, in 1902, the light blue was prescribed again. In 1917, the cape was still lined with light blue but the Infantry trouser stripes were of white as were the chevrons for enlisted men. The infantry color is light blue; however, infantry regimental flags and guidons have been National Flag blue since 1835. White is used as a secondary color on the guidons for letters, numbers, and insignia.
Birthday
14 June 1775. The Infantry is the oldest branch in the Army. Ten companies of riflemen were authorized by the Continental Congress Resolve of 14 June 1775. However, the oldest Regular Army Infantry Regiment, the 3d Infantry, was constituted on 3 June 1784 as the First American Regiment.
US Army 1 QT General Purpose Canteen Pouch Molle II Multicam OCP Woodland $18.95
US ARMY SURPLUS ACU ASSAULT PACK 30L 3 DAY MOLLE II BACKPACK . $20.00
US ARMY BDU WOODLAND CAMO MOLLIE II 6 MAG BANDOLIER POUCH UNUUSED UNISSUED NEW $11.99
US Army Rifleman Kit 18 Pieces Minimum Assault Pack, Vest, Dump Pouch & More $40.00
US ARMY ACU ASSAULT PACK 3 DAY MOLLE II BACKPACK Made in USA with Stiffiner $34.90
7pc Fighting Load Carrier w/ 6 MOLLE II Pouches ACU UCP US ARMY $19.99
US Army MOLLE II 3 Day Assault Pack Includes Stiffener & FoamCore Backing ACU $19.50
US Military Army ACU Poncho Liner Woobie Blanket - New $35.75
|
