1st Battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment was constituted 24 February 1942 as Company A, 504th Parachute Infantry, activated later that year and assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division. Strike Hold.

First combat came in July 1943 — Operation Husky II, the airborne invasion of Sicily, under LTC Warren R. Williams. Allied ships and shore batteries mistakenly opened fire on the flight as it crossed the coast. The men who got down landed scattered and far from their drop zones, and caused enough havoc that German reports put their numbers at ten times what they were.

Then Salerno. Naples-Foggia. The long grind up the peninsula.

Anzio. Eight weeks on the beachhead holding a line along the Mussolini Canal — trench warfare, wire and minefields, under observation from German artillery spotters in the hills. Not the fight paratroopers are built for. They held it anyway. A German officer was killed there and a diary was recovered from his body, describing the American parachutists in the loose-fitting uniforms less than a hundred meters from his outpost line — how he couldn't sleep, how they came from nowhere, how the black-hearted devils seemed to be everywhere. Devils in Baggy Pants.

The Waal. September 1944, Nijmegen. The only way to the north bank was across open water in daylight, in canvas assault boats, into machine gun and mortar fire. The battalion commander crossed with his men. The bridge held.

Cheneux, Belgium. 20 December 1944.

Peiper's SS panzergrenadiers had taken the bridges and crossed the Ambleve. The 504th got the job of throwing them back, and 1st Battalion got Cheneux.

At 1400 the battalion moved out, less A Company. Four hundred yards of open field between them and the town, strung with barbed wire every fifteen yards. On the far side: heavy machine guns, a Luftwaffe flak battalion with 20mm guns mounted on half-tracks, and German armor. The paratroopers had no artillery and no armor of their own. Nothing heavier than a bazooka. No winter gear. They'd been on the ground two days.

They crossed it anyway. It was the heaviest fire the 504th had ever faced. At 1700 they were pulled back two hundred yards to the treeline. At 1930 they went again, in the dark, and took half the town by morning. Third Battalion came up the next day and finished it.

Company B came out with eighteen men still able to fight.

Peiper abandoned his only bridgehead across the Ambleve and fell back to La Gleize, where his kampfgruppe was surrounded and destroyed.

For Cheneux, 1st Battalion was awarded the Presidential Unit Citation.

The battalion drove on across Belgium, hit the Siegfried Line, threw back every counterattack, staged out of Köln, and made its last attacks of the war across the Rhine.

Battle streamers: Sicily (with arrowhead) · Naples-Foggia · Anzio (with arrowhead) · Rhineland (with arrowhead) · Ardennes-Alsace · Central Europe

1965 — Operation Power Pack, the Dominican Republic. March 1988 — Operation Golden Pheasant, Honduras, a show of force that sent Nicaragua's invasion force back across the border.

Since then: Grenada. Panama. Desert Shield and Desert Storm. Iraq. Afghanistan.

Today 1-504 stands with 1st Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division. First Battalion. Red Devils.

The maroon beret came later. What it stands for didn't.

WHY I MAKE THIS

I served four years in the 82nd Airborne — 1st Brigade, 1st Battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment. D Company first, then B Company. Came in as a dismount, then a driver, ended up carrying an M240, and was my company's CBRN rep along the way before I ended my career during a practice combat airborne operation with a back injury.

Most 504th gear you'll find online was made by someone who was never in it. A unit crest pulled off Google, dropped onto a blank, listed for $45. It's not wrong exactly. It's just made by somebody who doesn't know what the red devil means to the men who wore it.

That's the whole reason I draw these.

Every design on this page is original work. Not a recreated PT shirt. Not clip art. Drawn by a Devil, for Devils, and for the people who love them — the wives and mothers and fathers who kept the maroon beret on the shelf by the door.

If your company isn't here, or your battalion, tell me. I'll draw it.

Airborne. All the way.