What does this military patch mean

[Metallica1983]

ok I have an old pic of my grandfather from WWII I did an amateur recoloring of it in photoshop I want to know what the red lightning bolt patch on his shoulder above the private patch means does anyone know

[Jaykub]

Just found this Infantry Divisions - 044 78th Infantry Division - World War II Archives of Wartime Publications
(http://www.wartimepress.com/archives.asp?TID=044%2078th%20Infantry%20Division&MID=Infantry%20Divisions&q=373&FID=89)

[Metallica1983]

thanks man

[Jokersvirus]

Im going to go out on a limb and say its a infantry patch, im most likely wrong, but look at 20 pages of army patches it what i can make a guess at

edit: I guess jaykub beat me :P to the punch

[jango]

They normally denoted the division of the infantry a person was in .. for example the 25th Infantry Division (known as 'Tropic Lightning') had a similar version featuring lightening. If you do some research on which infantry unit he was in you'd probably track down the nickname that was given to the division he served in, which is likely to explain the patch itself and where it originally came from.

Yeah looks like the 78th infantry division. This might be worth reading through (http://www.78thdivision.org/).

http://images.military.com/ImageLibrary/78IDINS.GIF

http://www.lonesentry.com/gi_stories_booklets/78thinfantry/pics/front_cover_78th_Inf_Lightning.jpg

[Linx_is_me]

This is a very interesting post . please do share with us what you find out from Jango and jokers info . I am also kinda interested