Any of this military insignia interesting to you?

Nevermind.

That’s a Flying Tigers patch on the bottom.

you should wear them and steal a little valor

If anyone says you look too young to have won those stripes, just tell them you use carrot top's plastic surgeon

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Yes — these are predominantly World War II U.S. Army Air Forces insignia, and there are some particularly interesting pieces here. This looks much more like one serviceman’s group than a random assortment.

From the photo, I can identify several with good confidence:
* Circular blue patch with gold wings + white star/red center — the classic U.S. Army Air Forces shoulder sleeve insignia, commonly called the “Hap Arnold” emblem. It was approved in 1942.
* Circular blue patch with the globe/grid and “20” — Twentieth Air Force. This is a WWII patch associated heavily with the B-29 Superfortress campaign against Japan. The 20th Air Force was activated in April 1944, with elements operating initially from India/China and later the Marianas.
* Blue circular patch with the eagle — this one needs a closer look, but it’s almost certainly another WWII USAAF unit/command insignia.
* Blue patch with the tiger — particularly interesting. The tiger motif strongly suggests an Asia/China-Burma-India-related USAAF organization, but I don’t want to give you a bogus unit ID from this view.
* Black circular patch with gold bird/eagle — another unit-level insignia that I’d want to inspect more closely.
* Silver wing-and-propeller metal insignia — that’s classic Army Air Forces/Air Corps branch insignia. The Smithsonian has nearly identical examples from the period.
* The metal crosses look like rank/qualification/unit devices, but I need front-and-back closeups before I’d call them.
* The paper at bottom right is a U.S. Army “War Ration Book One,” which dates the grouping squarely to the WWII home-front/war period.

The combination of the 20th Air Force patch with the other aviation insignia is the biggest clue. The 20th Air Force’s early B-29 operations were conducted from India and China in 1944–45, before the main force shifted to the Marianas. That means there’s a decent possibility you’re looking at memorabilia from somebody who served in the China-Burma-India theater / B-29 organization.

One thing I’d really like to identify is that tiger patch. CBI insignia can be fascinating because a lot of theater-made patches were hand embroidered in India/China and have substantial variations. The official CBI shoulder insignia itself used Chinese and Indian symbols and was officially approved in November 1944.

Don’t clean, wash, polish, or remove anything from the backing. Original WWII theater-made insignia can be worth considerably more untouched.

If you can take one straight-down close photo of each patch and the front/back of every metal pin, I can try to identify every piece individually, the unit it belonged to, approximate dates, whether it looks theater-made, and rough collector value. The 20th Air Force connection may also let us reconstruct where this serviceman was stationed.

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Was he in for a long time? the NCO rank progression of what you have in the bottom picture doesn't just happen in a few years. Assuming they are his. It goes from a corporal all the way to either first Sergeant or sergeant major. I'm too lazy to look it up

My Grandad was on BB43 Battleship Tennessee in WW2 and he said a big thing was trading and collecting patches. This was his collection.

Paging WWII Collector

Why did you take it down. Some of us veterans like seeing this stuff

Your grandad has a bunch of Army patches in that bundle.

My grandfather was an officer on the USS Santee. It was an escort carrier in the Pacific theater. It was in the Battle of Leyte Gulf and Okinawa. It was hit by a Kamikaze off of Okinawa.

During an extended resupply shortage, they were down to ice cream and Coke in the Mess Hall. Turns out, he was diabetic. He went into insulin shock after three days of eating ice cream. He went to Sea Island Naval Hospital in recovery. While there, he met a nurse from Coal City, AL. They married and spent the rest of there lives in Ouachita Parish. She was a nurse at Glenwood Hospital and he worked for LA Power & Light.

I've got a lot of pearls of wisdom in my brain from my granddad even though he died when I was only 7. I went out to the pasture one day to see him and his tractor was doing circles. I'll never forget that.

He served on the boat with Wellington Mara. We have correspondence between the two of them and pictures of them after the war in their uniforms at the Polo Grounds.

Thank you for sharing your WW2 memorabilia with us. As an history teacher, I am fighting a losing battle. It is unfortunate that we live in an era that teaches our kids to hate their own country. Keep your grandad's legacy. Tell your grandkids all about him. I intend to tell mine.