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AEF Service Chevron Lapel Pins


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world war I nerd

Firefighter, I can't say for sure if your pin is WW I vintage, but the Navy did wear points up service chevrons to represent service at sea during the Great War.

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Firefighter, I can't say for sure if your pin is WW I vintage, but the Navy did wear points up service chevrons to represent service at sea during the Great War.

 

Thank you.That is why I was thinking it was WW1 era.It doesn't resemble a rank.

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world war I nerd

I've only seen that style of lapel pin with one, two and three chevrons … never with four. I suspect that four chevron pins were never made because there weren't that many men in the AEF who qualified for them.

 

There was an article in either a late 1918 or early 1919 edition of the "Stars and Stripes" newspaper that stated at the time that issue was published only four members of the AEF were qualified to wear four overseas stripes. All of them just happened to be in the theater of operations (Europe) when America declared war on Germany in April of 1917. The article went on to name who they were. It also went on to say how many members of the AEF would qualify for four overseas stripes by mid 1919. I don't recall the exact figure, but I do recall that it was surprisingly low. The article also mentioned how many men were qualified to wear three chevrons at that time, and there weren't very many of those either. The vast majority of men in the AEF earned only one or two stripes.

 

Obviously, some guys in the Army of Occupation and then the Armed Forces in Germany went on to accrue four, five and six overseas service chevrons, but I also believe that those were few and far between because most of the AEF personnel in Germany rotated back to the states before qualifying for a fourth stripe.

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