13th Airborne Division Patch with Airborne Tab

The 13th Airborne Division was activated at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, on Friday, 13 August 1943, about as fitting a start as a division numbered 13 could get. Its shoulder patch had been approved that June: a gold winged unicorn on a blue shield, with an AIRBORNE tab above it. The blue tied the division to the air arm that would carry it and to the infantry, its basic branch. Paratroopers and glider troops trained under that unicorn for well over a year. Then the division crossed the Atlantic in the last winter of the war in Europe.

Maj. Gen. George W. Griner Jr. activated the division, and Maj. Gen. Elbridge G. Chapman took command a few months later and led it for the rest of the war. Its first regiments were the 515th Parachute Infantry Regiment and the 88th and 326th Glider Infantry Regiments. The 13th went overseas in late January 1945 and arrived in France that February under the First Allied Airborne Army. In March the 517th Parachute Infantry Regiment joined, and the 88th was merged into the 326th, which became the division's only glider regiment. The 13th was taken out of Operation Varsity, the airborne assault over the Rhine, because there were not enough transport aircraft for three divisions. Operation Arena near Kassel, Operation Choker II near Worms and Operation Effective south of Stuttgart were all planned around it and called off, Choker II only hours before takeoff when ground forces overran the landing zones.

This is the World War II pattern, a shield 2.25 inches wide and 3.62 inches tall with the AIRBORNE tab stitched in as part of the patch. The tab carries gold letters on black. Below it the unicorn rears on a deep blue field, all gold, with a blue eye, its horn angled up and back and its wings swept out to the right in long feathers. An olive drab border runs around the tab and the shield, and the edge is cut close to it. The patch has a sew-on backing.

The division never got its combat jump. Four operations were drawn up around it in a few weeks of spring 1945, and it jumped on none of them. The 13th returned to the United States on 23 August 1945 and was inactivated at Fort Bragg in February 1946. Its soldiers were transferred to the 82nd Airborne Division, so many of the men who wore the unicorn finished their service under the All American patch. Staying trained and ready for a mission that keeps changing is its own kind of service.

Put it in a shadow box with a grandfather's jump wings, his discharge papers and a photo from Fort Bragg. Sew it on a vest for an airborne reunion, or give it to a family piecing together where a relative trained and served in 1945. A gold unicorn, a black tab, and a division that started on Friday the 13th.