Why Some Soldiers Carry The Ace of Spades

Good Morning, Good Afternoon and Good Evening!

I've got another post to share with you all today. This is something I honestly found quite interesting and I really wanted to share what I learnt.

As you can see from the title, "Why Some Soldiers Carry The Ace of Spades"

Well, World War II and Vietnam War troops are often depicted as having a playing card, usually the Ace of Spades, strapped onto their helmets.

But why?

One urban legend suggests that the Vietnamese feared the spade symbol.

... They didn't

The Ace of Spades is also commonly thought of as the death card and the origins of this epitaph are really quite interesting.

Some sources report that during the Vietnam War, U.S. planes would drop the Ace of Spades just before carpet bombing.!

Eventually, just the dropping of the card was enough to clear out an area.

In Apocalypse Now, soldiers threw the death card onto the bodies of their enemies to, quote, "Let charlie know who did this..."

Psychological warfare and symbology aside, there is a true reason, the 101st Airborne had spades on their helmets.

Unit ID

The practice of painting a symbol onto a helmet was originally created in England just before D-Day. If a soldier jumped into Normandy and got separated from a larger portion of their unit, the easily identifiable symbol would mark the soldier as being apart of a specific regiment.

And also a small dash at the 12, 3, 6 and 9 o'clock positions specified the battalion.

Spades were designated for the 506 Infantry Regiment.
Hearts for the 502
Diamonds for the 501
and Clubs for the 327 Glider Infantry.

The tick marks went from 12 o'clock for HQ
3 o'clock for First Battalion
6 o'clock for Second Battalion
and 9 o'clock for Third Battalion

Today, the symbols are still used as a callback to the 101st Airborne's glory days in World War II

The regiments are more commonly known as brigade combat team and the symbols are each given as such.

Clubs to the first team
Hearts to the second team
Spades to the now deactivated fourth
and Diamonds to the 101st Combat Aviation Brigade

So there is quite a lot of thought and reason behind all of this. I hope some of you learnt something new from this post.

fabianamis